Sandy Hill

A Novel, by Ed Putnam

Authorhouse 2004

148 pages $15.00

"I am in this book, but Dan Perkins is not me. He resembles me and thinks like me sometimes, but he is not me, I didn't even know him at the beginning of writing this book, but I came to know him well and like him a lot by the time I had finished." Ed Putnam wrote in the introduction to his novel Sandy Hill

"It's hard to forget a place that molds you, shapes you, and casts you like a pot is baked in a kiln." Dan Perkins thinks while sitting on a park bench in the middle of his hometown of Sandy Hill. He has returned for his 45th high school reunion. He asks himself the question everyone asks, when they come back to the place of their childhood "God, what happened to this place?"

When one asks that question, are we asking what happen to ourselves? We no longer recognize or can identify who we were. We have memories, askew and somewhat obtuse at best from our youthful interpretations, but not an accurate representation. Putnam tries to answer this question by flashing back to the last vestiges of Dan's emotional innocence, to where he had been known as Danny during August 1950, a less than idyllic time where young Danny discovers a deep running sorrow that leaves a lifetime gulf between his family members. Putnam handles this short scene and the other coming of age scenes set in the 1950's with aplomb and skill like Bob Greene's memoir Be True To Your School and Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life. For example, "Danny climbed up on the front porch and sat for a few minutes in the wooden swing suspended from the ceiling. He loved to swing. Sometimes on hot summer evenings he and Aunt Martha would sit there together while she stripped peas or snipped the ends off string beans...Danny would help himself to a bean now and then, but mostly he just liked the feeling of sitting there swinging gently..."

Putnam claims that Sandy Hill is a work of fiction not a memoir. Sandy Hill shows some similarities to James Agee magnificent novel A Death in the Family and Stephen King's mastery in his novella The Body from his book of novellas Different Seasons. Putnam is able to capture seemingly authentic observations and realistically portrayed confusion within the youthful eyes of Danny and show a revelation through present day Dan. The next few lines that completes the above quoted passage demonstrates these mature observations, "...Aunt Martha had lived briefly in Louisiana before her husband had left her, and she liked to talk about her life there. They had a maid by the name of Lizzie, who did all the cooking and cleaning for them. It made Danny sad to think that Aunt Martha was now doing the same thing for his family, and he wondered if she ever though about that."

However, Putnam is not consistent with his writing specifically when he goes on an expositional tangent and tries to squeeze in thirty years of back story in only a few pages. He makes the mistake of "telling" the story instead of "showing". Sandy Hill would have been a better novel if Putnam had allowed himself the space and time to make it longer than its curt 148 pages. Also, some of the dialogue is unrealistic. The major problem with Sandy Hill is that the reader becomes frustrated with Putnam because there are parts that are so good that one cannot help but to devour the book. He writes with such passion and insight in sections, specifically two scenes that parallels and complements each other very well. One scene takes place during Dan's High School career that endangers his reputation and might follow him for life, and the other scene occurs in the present where his career as a School Administrator and his place as a citizen in his community is in jeopardy. Sandy Hill is written so well in parts that the bad writing stands out in areas and detracts, distracts and disappoints the reader. Putnam has written a decent novel that could have been a great novel

One can't help but look forward to Mr. Putnam's next book and wish that Sandy Hill will be revisited in the future

Ed Putnam lives with his wife of 38 years, Doreen, in Skaneateles in the Finger Lakes district of upstate New York. Putnam is a retired Episcopal Priest who has written for numerous journals and magazines and has a book on preaching which is in the process of being edited for publication and a new novel coming out.



Lee Gooden 11-24-2004

The Wrath of Grapes: A Complete Hangover Cookbook & Guide to the Art of Creative Suffering

By Patrick Meanor

XOXOX PRESS 2004

$10.00 127 pages

With the holidays upon us and the stress and tension they bring many of us will imbibe of alcoholic spirits to celebrate and take the edge off. Too much imbibing, though, could lead to a hangover. The hangover is a word that fills the heart with angst, dread and guilt, while the brain moans over and over like a mantra, "Oh God, never again, never again, never again..."

Whether one is down on their luck quaffing boiler-makers in some back alley seedy dive, or playing quarters and having ice cube tray races while dressed in bed sheets at a ‘come as your favorite ancient decadent Roman’ dorm party, or sipping champagne while rubbing shoulders and hobnobbing with the paparazzi in the lofty spires of the Trump Tower; or just partaking in a fifth or sixth (who can keep count?) Perfect Manhattans while watching an I Love Lucy Marathon in the comfort of one’s own home; the hangover is a great global-socioeconomic equalizer.

Patrick Meanor’s book the Wrath of Grapes is a wonderful foil for the literary and artistic person’s hangover. Calling Wrath a cookbook is misleading as well as limiting, because it is so much more. Meanor writes: "We use the term "cookbook" as it applies not only to an activity that takes place in the kitchen of your home but, more importantly, as a psychological, mental, and spiritual "kitchen" in which the imagination does the cooking...Since the imagination is, obviously, a kitchen in which we "cook up" ideas, schemes, plans, and remedies for both "physical and metaphysical" hangovers, we are employing the word "cookbook"...And since present day "consumption" comprises not just food and drink but also media of diverse kinds, we offer gentle guidance in choices of music, literature and televised spectacle---imaginative "food"--to ameliorate the effects of overindulgence of other substances."

Wraths compact but packed 127 pages, begin with a cleverly annotated Table of contents of the books seven humorously titled chapters. The seven chapters are: Chapter 1: The Wrath of Grapes--Morning Dread and what NOT to do, Chapter 2: More Wrath—What TO Do, Chapter 3: The Media—Distracted from Distraction by Distraction, Chapter 4: From Muse—Sick to Music, Chapter 5: The Reading Readiness Test, Chapter 6: Exorcise with Exercise—Imaginative Calisthenics and Chapter 7: The Saint Lawrence Memorial Recipe—Stations of the Course. Meanor creates amusing plays on words and book titles, for example The Wrath of Grapes is obviously a play on the title of John Steinbeck’s famous novel The Grapes of Wrath. Some of his other "plays on words" are not so obvious and would escape most non-literary people. For example, a subtitle in chapter one called: Caring for the Mind: Don’t Speak Memory! Or, Looking for Mr. Lobotomy. This title is hilarious, but what makes it even funnier is that it is a play on the memoir Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, which is also full of word play and puns.

Meanor uses The Wrath of Grapes as a subtle platform to share his knowledge and express his opinions about the arts and includes some mouth-watering recipes and suggested foods to soothe the hangover divided up into the following categories, B&S-Beverages and Soups, MP&E-Meats Poultry and Eggs, F&S-Fish and Shellfish, V&S-Vegetables and Salads, F-Fruits, and D-Desserts. An example in the D category, "Peach cobbler or peach pie with plenty of sugar. You might pour some rich cream over it and a dash of cinnamon." Wrath instructs on how to combine the culinary with a film, some excellent music or a good book to create a kind of homeostasis for the hangover afflicted. Meanor states in Chapter 7., "Those of you familiar with traditional cookbooks will notice that ours includes limited number of offerings and few specific directions or measurements. We truly believe that the simpler the directions the better, because most victims are in no shape to choose from among the many offerings or engage in measuring activities...Or selective recipes require minimum of action, thought, analysis, or measurements. Just do it!"

PatricK Meanor, Ph.D is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of English at the State University of New York, College of Oneonta where he has taught for thirty years. Dr. Meanor has edited or co-edited five volumes of the Dictionary of Literary of Literary Biography Series: American Short Story Writers Since WWll (Gale Press). He has written two books: John Cheever Revisited (1995:Twane—Macmillian) and Bruce Chatwin (1997: Twane—Simon&Schuster). He is presently writing a book on British satirist, Will Self.



Lee Gooden 12-27-2004

Here is the original copy of a review before it was hacked exstensively by an editor. I rolled with the punches and received monetary compensation.

In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic

By Howard Norman

North Point Press

(c) 2005 by Howard Norman

166 pages $21.00

Non-fiction/memoir

Currently available as of February 28th 2005



"What good is intelligence if you cannot discover a useful melancholy?"

-Ryunosuke Akutagawa





Howard Norman writes, in his new book, In Fond Remembrance of Me: A Memoir of Myth and Uncommon Friendship in the Arctic. "Memory is more a séance than anything replete with desire to resurrect original presences and attendant emotions."

How many of us wish they can go back and have a second chance to explain to a departed loved one just how much they mean to us and the impact they have had on our lives? The opportunity to tell them with a clarity, wisdom and hindsight that comes with the passage of time their importance without a sense of immediacy or choking loss and maintain a bitter-sweet perspective even while nursing a pang of their memory within our chests. Howard Norman has accomplished this and more.

In 1977 Norman was hired by a museum to travel to Churchill Manitoba in the Canadian Arctic to translate into English Inuit "Noah stories" told by an Inuit elder named Mark Nuqac in which the biblical Noah and his family somehow became lost and stuck in the ice on an arc full of animals the Inuit had never seen but thought they might be edible. While in Churchill, Norman met Helen Tanizaki who was translating the "Noah Stories" into Japanese. As their friendship progressed he learned she was dying from cancer. ..."linguist, translator, diarist, prodigious writer of letters...I knew Helen in Churchill, Manitoba, in 1977 during September and October, the first week of November in Halifax, and in letters sent from Japan until her death in the summer of 1978...perhaps the most introspective person I've know...born in London and raised in Japan..."

While Norman was gathering together his various writings to be placed in a "Special Collections at Boston University he, "...discovered the loose leaf journals I kept during my stay in Churchill. I was surprised and pleased to find out how dedicated I was to these journals...the journals served as the basic for In Fond Remembrance of Me."

Seemingly a short and light book Remembrance is deceptively complex. It is a love story without the usual psycho sexual babble that complicates relationships between men and women and a coming of age story where Norman learns an unconditional love.

In Fond Remembrance of Me is a lyrical tapestry that Norman has woven together by looking back at his journals, memories, his translations of "Noah Stories" and his relationship with Helen Tanizaki through the eyes of acquired life experience. The "Noah Stories" somehow compliment and enhance his writing. A refined sadness and humor is balanced with wisdom, wit and intelligence that only hindsight could bring and create a "useful melancholy".

Howard Norman is the author of five novels, including The Haunting of L, The Bird Artist and Northern Lights. He lives with his family in Vermont and Washington, D.C.

Here is a review before it was edited for a newspaper.


Steve Anderson’s first novel, Dark Sighted, is the story of Mole, a male Wampanoag Native American coming of age as a shaman in the 1620’s. Anderson writes, “Behind his back in whispers, they called him Dark Sighted. To his face they called him Mole “It seemed he could see better in the dark ‘without eyes’ than most people could see with eyes in the daylight…Mole had known...that he was going to journey that night; he always knew before hand. His body would stay where it was; it was his spirit that would travel.”

Mole’s spirit guides tell him that he shouldn’t kill another human being if he wants to continue to receive ‘Other-Worldly’ guidance. He learns to listen, understand and act upon his visions and astute powers of perception through a series of trials and adventures his wisdom and powers increase. He realizes that the ‘White People’ from across the ocean are not to be trusted and are about to descend upon his people in droves. He helps a fellow Wampanoag whom considers Mole his enemy exorcise a vengeful ghost and is given the new name Medicine Knife. He becomes a vital component in the leadership of his Wampanoag community.

Anderson has written a vivid account of a Wampanoag’s life during pressure from inevitable change that came to all Native American cultures. He writes in a description and dialogue between Wampanoag council member Samoset and the leader Tisquantum, “Samoset’s voice, without any flourishes, expressed genuine, quieting dread. ““Nothing will ever be the same again…”” ““Great changes are coming”” Mole heard the Antlered Warrior’s words echoed in that lodge… Samoset continued. ““This time the English are not here only for a short time to trade or fish or steal a few people. This time, they are here to stay. This time they…”” ““They have brought their women and children.”” Tisquantum finished Samoset’s statement… ““Yes, they have brought their women and children.”” Samoset said this as though he were pronouncing a death sentence.”

Teaching on a Navajo reservation for sixteen years Anderson’s knowledge of Native American culture and lore is unmistakable. He has the ability to make the reader think they were transported back in time to the 1620’s and given the opportunity to eavesdrop and in some cases interact with Mole and his people. Dark Sighted begins as a good yarn that is entertaining and informative that one could easily develop empathy for the characters and get caught in their story, all good traits for a first novel (in fact, all good traits for any novel). Unfortunately, the narrative is uneven. The first 150 pages or so, one is captivated by a well written story of a young shaman’s rite-of-passage and self-discovery during turbulent times of a changing world. The last 48 pages are written more like play-by play commentary full of unnecessary expositional material that doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of the novel. Anderson seems to run out of steam, as if completing the history of his main protagonist and exploring his thoughts and continue to place the reader in a fictional narrative is too daunting of a task. In the beginning of Dark Sighted the reader is immersed in a story with such well developed characters that one forgets one is learning history. In contrast, Anderson attempts to sum up another 50 -75 years in two short chapters. He bombards the reader with facts and personal opinions until his author intrusion is as blatant, abrupt and unforgivable as having a door slammed in one’s face. The flow of the narrative is disrupted and the character’s voices are stifled with what might be called ‘Storious Interruptus’

This reviewer hopes Anderson avoids this condition in his next novel.



Steve Anderson was born and raised in the Chicago area. His lifelong emotional involvement with Native American issues led him to become a teacher on the Navajo reservation for sixteen years. He now resides in upstate New York. Dark Sighted is his first novel.



-Lee Gooden 6-3-2005

Here is a book review and interview that should have been published by one of my editors, but wasn't due to budget cuts and time restraints. So I'm blogging it.


Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
-excerpt from The Tyger, by William Blake


North, published by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc is Frederick Busch’s new novel that continues with Jack, a character first introduced in Busch’s 1997 best-seller Girls. In Girls Jack is a Viet Nam veteran and ex-lawman working as a security officer on an upstate New York College campus. He is enlisted by a local family to find their missing teenage daughter whose disappearance may be related to a series of missing girls.
North begins almost eight years after Girls. Jack is now working as security in a resort in North Carolina. Protecting the honor of a woman lawyer from New York City Jack has an altercation with Jason Arnold a gigolo that … “seems drunk or amped on coke or amphetamine. Someone that highly cranked is all energy and no mind…I swiveled my hips and drove my fist maybe six inches into the meat below where the ribs met above the stomach…all his motion stopped and then his mouth opened while his face went white. Then he caved in over his gut and went down into a ball on the floor…I noticed the lawyer was looking at me and not Jason Arnold. I noticed I was looking at her instead of him.”
The lawyer hires Jack to find her nephew, notorious for his gambling debt and unhealthy relations with unsavory characters, his last whereabouts known to be in upstate New York. Suddenly Jack finds himself back in upstate New York, full circle. Unresolved ghosts and demons of the past linger and keep him from attempting a thorough search. In true Jack fashion he bodily lumber and plods on with trying to solve the case and come to terms with his failure in finding Janice Tanner’s body, the missing girl from Girls, the dissolution of his marriage and his ex- wife’s suicide. Hardest of all Jack faces the Sisyphean boulder of the truth that crashes down onto him from the heights of denial about the real cause of his baby daughter’s death
Busch wrote the narrative of both Girls and North in the first person, a literary device used in noir detective and crime fiction by authors like Robert B. Parker, the creator of the Spencer series and Lawrence Block, writer of the Mathew Scudder novels. Busch’s writing transcends noir with both Girls and North because there is such an undercurrent of dread and hopelessness that affects and interferes with Jack’s natural inclination to do ‘good’. Busch’s skill makes North a heroic quest with the heavy psychology of Greek drama, the sparse and poetic prose of Hemingway and the relentless pace of a Koontz thriller. Jack’s voice is unique in that as a man of action he confesses he “struggles with words”. Even though his narration and inner dialogue are replete with insight and a lyricism describing the straight forward and colloquial, for example “The heat was heavy and full of diesel hanging like invisible grease on the lighter stink of burnt up leaded gasoline.” He seems unaware of the beauty of the language. Busch best shows Jack’s search for words when the character Sarah says to Jack, ““…I was in the library. Up in the stacks…It was when you were taking courses. You were improving yourself…you were standing in front of the shelves and you were looking. Just looking. You were taking books down and reading in them and putting them back on the shelf…You were…grazing. You were working the range. You were reading maybe just because there is so much there you could read at if you wanted to.””.
Jack is his own mystery, not only does he investigate and stake–out the surface of farm country in upstate New York, but reluctantly he becomes a spelunker, exploring the subterranean darkened depths of his haunted psyche. He mines and sifts pieces of memory and Strindberg-like dreamscapes. His angst is so palpable that Busch tries to ritually clean Jack within a pond, “I recalled how I had hung between the surface and the bottom of the pond the evening before and how long I might have stayed there if I didn’t need to breathe.” Jack is rooted in guilt and so grounded that he believes he must continue to dwell in his muck and mire and the spiritual cleansing is vitiated.
Busch has expertly crafted and re-crafted North is such smooth and seamless prose that readers forget they are reading so there isn’t a sense of the artist/writer/creator’s giddy hand manipulating his characters behind the scenes through thin rehashed plotlines. All 302 pages sing and shine with power, beauty and a cinematic driving story that it is book more worthy than the $24.95 listed price.

Lee Gooden 5-20-2005


AN INTERVIEW WITH FREDERICK BUSCH

I-First of all I want to say how much of an honor and a privilege it is to speak with you.

F.B.-Thank you

I- You’re welcome. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

F.B-I’ve always wrote. I remember even at 7 and 8 years old writing poems and stories. But what I remember best was that my fourth grade teacher hated me…until I wrote a poem that made her and other people look at me differently. I liked that…I still do.

I-What are your influences, who do you like and read, classic and contemporary?

F.B-I love Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and many others in the classics. Contemporary, I enjoy Alice Munro, Leslie Epstine, Howard Norman, especially his book, the Bird Artist, Reginald Mcknight, Adam Thorpe and many others.

I-Why did you write North? What made you go back to Jack as a subject of a book?

F.B-I wrote North because I missed writing in Jack’s voice and admired the hell out of him because he is a good man that tries to take responsibility for his actions and the actions of others regardless of the consequences. Through his Jack’s voice I made a good story. Jack is a good story.


I-Do you have a routine you follow as a writer or a specific place you write?

F.B.-I’ve been luck enough that I could quit working as a teacher and write full time. I write mostly in the mornings and my study is on the second floor of our renovated barn.

I-How do you start a novel?

F.B.-I start with a character first. A strong character is the core of my books, Jack, for example is man that works hard at being a good person. If I hadn’t fleshed him out and made him real to me and just started out with an idea and threw him in there in a ‘what-if’ situation he would be like a cardboard cut-out that I moved around on a board to suit my purpose. If he isn’t real to me, then he won’t be real to the reader.

I-When you write do you do a lot of drafts or does your prose easily flow?

F.B.-I don’t always get it right the first time around, but that’s all right because the art of writing is a craft that I practice full time and there is always revision, revision and revision. When I think I’ve got it down right, then I go through my work and look for connections and ongoing themes. I polish my writing and keep polishing it until I’m positive that it is my best. Of course, nobody is perfect.

I-Do you do a lot of research or do you just wing it?

F.B.-I research and research extensively.

I-Will there be anymore books about Jack?

F.B.-I don’t think so, right now I have a rough draft of a book of short stories ready to go and I’m writing a novel that takes place in Maine, which funny enough is where Jack was heading at the end of North.

I-Thank you Mr. Busch.

F.B.-You’re welcome.