At the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities, which we attended in San Jose, California, two weeks ago, I had the good fortune to attend a session with Joshua Wolf Shenk, author of Lincoln’s Meloncholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness. He is currently finishing another book entitled The Power of Two: Creative Chemistry, and at the conference he talked about this work in progress.

According to Shenk, the traditional paradigm of the lone genius has recently been countered by a more nuanced story of the complex network out of which genius emerges. While he doesn’t deny the existence of either the loner or the network, he asserts that a very specific electricity arises from creative pairs: think John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Georges Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. He also argues that there are several predictable acts in the stage life of a creative pair, the first of which is often an attraction of the familiar to the unfamiliar.

And while the two partners must in some way merge, each partner losing his or her particular identity to the other as in the confluence of rivers, “creativity proceeds from dichotomous exchange,” as Shenk says. Roles that become fixed or static signal a dying fire. This dichotomous exchange often involves an asymmetry of power in the partnership and consequent tension and unraveling. Those generative sparks can be extinguished without moments of what Shenk calls repair, moments of returning to the pure joy and delight of the original sparking.

To illustrate one of these moments, he played a clip of the Beatles’ famous 1969 rooftop concert, their last live performance together. During their rendition of the song “Don’t Let Me Down,” John forgets the words to the beginning of the second verse and improvises several syllables of gobbeldegook instead, exchanging bemused smiles with Paul. Shenk identifies this as a moment of repair in a torn relationship—by the time of this performance the friendship between John and Paul had nearly frayed to the breaking point—a recapturing of delight.

While Shenk didn’t use the word “marriage,” marriage easily qualifies as a locus for creative energy, although not necessarily marriage as it’s envisioned today, with its focus on equal rights and equal work loads, of two people completing each other’s deficits into some measurable whole. I hasten to add that fairness and equality, in some form, are necessary to any fruitful marriage; however, the asymmetries and tensions and inequalities that also occur within marriage are often the source of a relationship’s generative genius. Shenk’s taxonomy of creativity between pairs appealed to me instantly because I found immediate evidence to support his structure, not in the pairing of people but in the sparks that fly when unexpected disciplines are rubbed together.

One of the keynote speakers at the conference was Teri Rofkar, a native of Alaska and a member of the Tlingit people. She began her career as a traditional weaver making baskets from such materials as the roots of spruce trees, maidenhair ferns, and native grasses, an art taught to her by her grandmother and which she is now teaching her grand-daughter. These baskets, aside from being beautiful, can last for hundreds of years and are woven so tightly they can be used as water vessels. When she took a class at a local community college on traditional methods of textile weaving, she realized that she already had most of the skills she needed to make the leap from weaving plants into baskets to weaving goat hair into traditional robes, a skill that had almost disappeared.

To practice her new craft, she needed mountain goat wool, and lots of it, so she befriended local park rangers who worked with a herd that had been introduced in 1923. The rangers informed her when they found spots where the animals had shed or when they found one dead. She became aware of a study of the genetics of the mountain goats, which discovered a herd genetically unrelated to the introduced herd and dated it to the last ice age, indicating that the species had not been “introduced” but was, in fact, native.

This genetic drama was unfolding as she was beginning work on a new robe. In addition to the traditional patterning, she added mathematically correct renderings of the distinctive DNA strands of the two herds. Although in some ways the addition was a design innovation, she knew from her many years of basket weaving that her ancestors had always transmitted a deep knowledge of the natural world through their art. On her website she writes:

Decades of weaving have opened my eyes to the pure science that is embedded in Tlingit art. The arts and our oral history together bring knowledge of ten thousand years of research to life. My goal is to continue that research, broadening awareness for the generations to come.

She wore the robe as she presented her keynote speech, dipping each shoulder and spinning so the robe rose up like smoke around her. “Who knew science could dance?” she laughed. Her delight communicated itself to the audience as we witnessed a moment of repair between ancient art and modern science.

Martin and I returned to Austin just in time to attend the last day of the Texas Book Festival, a spectacular intersection of people who love to read and write. We attended a session facilitated by one of Madroño Ranch’s first residents, Juli Berwald. She interviewed Alan Weisman, an environmental journalist and the author of Countdown: Our Last Best Hope for a Future on Earth? Fiercely researched and beautifully written, Countdown follows Weisman’s travels through more than twenty countries asking four very loaded questions: how many people can the land carry? How robust must the Earth’s ecosystems be to ensure our continued existence? What species are essential to our survival? What kind of economy would serve a stable human population, rather than the current exploding one? Despite the complexities of the questions—which Weisman addresses with sensitivity and intelligence—a uniform answer presented itself in virtually every context: education of girls, which almost inevitably leads to lower birth rates and to fewer ecological pressures on the planet.

He tells a story about Esmail Kahrom, an Iranian ecologist whose interest in biology had its roots in the Persian carpets he saw in the museum his father took him to as a child, one in particular, dating back to 1416. It depicted a Tree of Life, and among its branches the boy found an extravagance of intricately woven birds, animals, and even insects:

The depictions were so detailed that zoologists could determine each species. He was looking, Kahrom understood, at creatures now extinct in his land. The eyes of ancient carpet weavers are how Iranian biologists know today what once lived there.

One of the animals that has almost disappeared is the Asiatic cheetah, which exists now only in Iran. Visiting the United States for the first time, Kahrom found himself in a sixth-grade classroom in San Diego, invited by the teacher, who was married to one of Kahrom’s cousins. She showed her students the Iranian flag and Iranian coins and then unrolled a Persian rug, one that Kahrom could tell immediately was ancient and expensive. She introduced him to the class as an ecologist, someone who studies the ways in which all life is connected.

Then the classroom door opened, and in walked a curator from the San Diego Zoo with a muzzled cheetah on a leash.

The teacher asked her astonished class what would happen if the endangered cheetahs disappeared altogether. Would the students suffer from the loss? Would they still be able to live their lives? The class agreed that they would, even though they thought the cheetahs should live. The teacher pointed to the beautiful rug she had brought in, noting that it was years in the making, with its more than one and a half million knots. What if someone came in and cut out one, or even two hundred, of the knots? Would you be able to tell? No, she said. You wouldn’t even notice.

But what if you keep cutting, she asked, as her students and the cheetah watched her. Opening her arms to include the space beyond the classroom walls, she said:

All this is the carpet of life. You are sitting on it. Each of those knots represents one plant or animal. They, and the air we breathe, the water we drink, and our groceries are not manufactured. They are produced by what we call nature. This rug represents that nature. If something happens in Asia or Africa and a cheetah disappears, that is one knot from the carpet. If you realize that, you’ll understand that we are living on a very limited number of species and resources, on which our life depends.

These stories weave together many things, but what struck me was the union of the textile arts with modern science. So often the realm of women and household, textiles claim a lower rung on any cultural-status ladder than the hard sciences, but their marriage can strike all sorts of generative sparks. Jewish mystical theology identifies the work of the chosen people as the restoration of God’s shining shattered dwelling place, associated with the feminine principal, with God’s exiled self: tikkun olam, or repair of the world, whose signal marker is delight. In a culture that so often measures itself by efficiencies of scale and measurable, predictable outcomes, I wonder if we wouldn’t be well served to seek out irregular marriages between powerful and humble enterprises, between unlikely partners like science or technology and the arts, rather than seeking to separate them, as so often happens in times of economic stress. In these unlikely partnerings perhaps we’ll see some repair of our moth-eaten world.

What we’re reading
Heather: Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening
Martin: Russell Shorto, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

The Windy City. Hog Butcher for the World. City of the Big Shoulders. The Second City. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and Harry Caray’s “Holy cow!” Richard Daley and Mike Ditka. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Frank Lloyd Wright and Al Capone. “Let’s play two!” and the Chicago Seven. Grain elevators and packing houses and railroad yards and skyscrapers.

That’s right, Heather and I are in windy, chilly (well, at least by Texas standards) Chicago, where we’re attending the annual conference of the Alliance of Artists Communities. The Alliance, based in Providence, Rhode Island, is a membership association of more than a thousand residency programs across the country and internationally, ranging from well-established giants of the field like the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo to tiny, brand-new programs like, uh, Madroño Ranch.

Chicago is an iconic and quintessentially American city, despite (or perhaps because of) its myriad immigrant communities. Lacking the coastal location (though that is one big frickin’ lake!) and consequent internationalist perspective of, say, New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, it is perhaps the most quintessentially American of all our great cities; famously, it was the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a celebration of the 400th anniversary of the accidental arrival in the Bahamas of a crackpot Italian mariner in the service of the Spanish monarchy who thought he had found southeastern Asia.

We’ve been looking forward to this conference for months, for several reasons: first, having attended several previous Alliance conferences, we knew it would be a fruitful and inspiring gathering, one that would leave us charged up and full of new ideas for Madroño Ranch; second, our younger daughter is flying up from Kenyon College in Ohio to spend a couple of nights with us in the city; and third, despite its undeniable greatness, neither Heather nor I had ever been to Chicago, unless you count the many hours I spent stuck at O’Hare Airport during my college years trying to travel from Albany to San Francisco or vice versa over the Christmas holiday break. Now that we’re finally here, we’re enjoying being in a real big city (sorry, Austin), at least for a little while, though we’re trying hard not to look like country bumpkins while we’re here.

The conference has also afforded us the chance to reconnect with other members of our peculiar little tribe who have quickly become dear and trusted friends: Caitlin Strokosch, the apparently inexhaustible executive director of the Alliance; Meredith Winer, a printmaker whose TRANSIT Residency is part of a rich cultural mix in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood; Liz Engelman, who divides her time between directing the Tofte Lake Center at Norm’s Fish Camp in Minnesota and working as the alumnae relations coordinator for Hedgebrook, on Washington’s Whidbey Island, when she’s not working as a freelance dramaturg; and Brad and Amanda Kik, founders and directors of the extremely cool Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design (ISLAND) in rural Michigan, whose mission (“connecting people with nature, art, and community”) obviously resonates strongly with what we hope to achieve at Madroño Ranch. (At Brad’s request, I brought him a bottle of Balcones Distilling’s Baby Blue corn whisky, which is apparently unavailable in Bellaire, Michigan; we’re returning to Austin with two handsome blaze-orange ISLAND caps in return.)

The conference itself is an irresistible (to us, at least; maybe you have to be an art-residency nerd to appreciate it fully) combination of practicality and pleasure. The schedule is packed—packed, I tell you—with fun and thought-provoking stuff. Austin’s own delightful Sara Hickman performed at the opening reception on Wednesday night. (The proceeds from her new compilation CD, The Best of Times, benefit the Theatre Action Project, where both of our daughters have worked.) The keynote speakers include Alex Kotlowitz, author of the bestselling There Are No Children Here and coproducer of the new documentary The Interrupters; Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway; and Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and author of The Time Traveler’s Wife. The breakout sessions to which we particularly looked forward included “Engaging Local Communities: Artist Residencies and the Relevance of Place”; “Earned Revenue and Artist Residencies”; “Supporting a Creative Practice: Solitude, Solidarity, and Social Engagement”; “Taking Stock: Outcome, Assessment, and Measuring the Unmeasurable”; and “Where Art Meets Earth: Integrating Arts, Ecology, and Communities,” led by our buddy Brad.

During the past couple of weeks we sometimes wondered whether we could really afford the time to come to Chicago, especially since it meant missing the Texas Book Festival, one of our favorite annual events in Austin, and since, after flying back to Austin Sunday night, we’re going to have to be on the road at 5 a.m. on Monday morning to make it out to the ranch in time for our second bison harvest. But we’re glad we came. We couldn’t pass up the chance to visit with and learn from old friends and new—not to mention the chance to see Thea, and to explore a new and fascinating city.

What we’re reading
Heather: Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education
Martin: Denise Markonish (ed.), Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

Some of you may not know that I am officially a Published Author and therefore—let’s face it—kind of a big deal, but it’s true. And I have to confess that I’ve never really gotten over the thrill of seeing my name on a book cover, which is highly, even dangerously, addictive.

I was reminded of my own importance recently when I was asked to moderate a session at this weekend’s Texas Book Festival. The session is called “A Level Playing Field: Texas Baseball in Black and White,” and features two books about race and Our National Pastime: Our White Boy, by Jerry Craft, and Playing in Shadows: Texas and Negro League Baseball, by Rob Fink. Apparently my friend Dick Holland, the former head of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, suggested me as a moderator because he recalled that, many years ago, I had written a book about baseball.

What Dick, and the organizers of the book festival, probably didn’t know is that I was quite possibly the most naïve first-time author in the history of the publishing industry. If there was a mistake to be made in the course of writing and selling a manuscript, I probably made it; heck, I probably made some mistakes that hadn’t even existed before. Even today, the full extent of my ignorance fills me with awe.

Now, I’ve been a baseball fan since childhood, but this particular misadventure started about twenty years ago. After that tirelessly self-promoting cretin Pete Rose was busted for gambling, I became obsessed with an early twentieth century major league star named Hal Chase, for reasons that remain obscure; perhaps I read something comparing Rose and Chase, though I honestly can’t recall. Chase was phenomenally talented, handsome, charismatic, and also, apparently, an incorrigible cheat; in fact, he was accused (though never convicted) of helping to arrange the infamous Black Sox scandal. I decided to write an article about him for The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, the annual journal of the Society for American Baseball Research. In the course of researching and writing the article, I began to think that somebody should write a book about Chase, and I couldn’t think of a single reason why that somebody shouldn’t be me.

In reality, of course, there were plenty of reasons why that somebody shouldn’t be me, including the fact that I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry. Did I need an agent, or should I try to sell the manuscript myself? Should I write it on spec, or should I hold off until I found a publisher willing to pony up an advance? In retrospect, the story of how I became a genuine published author is filled with missteps, ineptitude, and, ultimately, blind luck. I offer it up here as a cautionary tale to other would-be authors.

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me almost a decade to produce an actual finished book. In my defense, I was working on it mostly on weekends, since I had a full-time job, a wife, and two young children. In truth, though, the research and writing was the fun part; the hard part was trying to figure out what to do if I ever actually finished the thing. Early on, a dear college friend suggested I seek advice from her sister, a big-time literary agent in New York (she represented A. S. Byatt, among others). I had no illusions that she would want to represent me herself—I was a nobody, and besides, she specialized in fiction—but she said she’d be glad to offer some suggestions if I sent her a sample of my writing. I sent her a draft chapter or two, and she wrote me back to say she really liked them and would like to take me on as her client.

Well, heck, I thought, this writin’ business is easy! I had found myself a real agent right out of the box. Piece of cake.

Meanwhile, I was grinding away on my research. On weekends, I’d head to the Library of Congress, where I spent countless hours cranking through film of daily newspapers. I traveled, at my own expense, to Cooperstown and San Jose and Tucson to conduct research and interviews. In 1994 I even wangled an introduction to Ken Burns, hoping to convince him that Chase should feature prominently in his forthcoming documentary Baseball; he listened patiently, and later very graciously put me in touch with Chase’s granddaughter, who was estranged from the rest of the family.

Probably the best thing I did in the course of my research was put one of those “author seeking information” notices in the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Soon thereafter I received a letter from the director of the University of Illinois Press, who said that he had seen my notice and thought my book sounded like one in which they’d be interested; I thanked him and smugly referred him to my big-shot New York agent.

Some time later I got another note from him saying that he had never gotten a response from my agent. Then I realized that she wasn’t responding to my letters and phone calls either.

After a year or so it became clear even to me that she wasn’t actually doing anything on my behalf; I suspect now that she had agreed to take me on as sort of a favor, given the connection with her sister, but (perhaps understandably) I had ended up at the bottom of her list. I finally sent her a polite letter saying that I had decided to end our relationship. (She never answered it.)

So I was back at square one. Illinois was no longer interested, and neither, after an initial flirtation, was Oxford University Press, but I finally found my own way to McFarland and Company, an outfit in North Carolina that published a number of baseball history books. I imagined battling with their editorial staff over word choice and the overall structure of the manuscript, like Tom Wolfe and Maxwell Perkins; instead, they ran exactly what I sent them. They told me that they would publish my book in paperback only, which was mildly disappointing, but I was in no position to argue.

Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball’s Biggest Crook finally appeared in 2001, and as of this writing ranks 1,655,584th in sales on Amazon.com. (Woo hoo!) The nice people at McFarland send me annual royalty checks (typically for about thirty-seven dollars), which allow me to call myself a professional writer. With any luck, I’ll never actually sit down and calculate the amount of money I’ve earned from my book versus the amount of money I spent producing it.

The really scary thing, though, is that I’m sometimes tempted to try it all again. Just this week, while we were having lunch, my son asked me when I was going to write another book, and it got me thinking again about that idea I had several years ago, for a biography of the old R&B singer Chuck Willis….

See? This writing business is just like crack.

What we’re reading
Heather: Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow: The Life Story of Jayber Crow, Barber, of the Port William Membership, as Written by Himself (again!)
Martin: Ingrid D. Rowland, Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (still!)

Last weekend was the fourteenth annual Texas Book Festival, one of my favorite events of the year. The TBF, held in and around the State Capitol, is sort of the literary equivalent of the ACL Music Festival in Zilker Park, without the dirt, pot smoke, and bleeding from the ears.

The TBF offers the public a chance to see favorite authors in the flesh (and discover new favorites) via readings, signings, panel discussions, award programs, etc. This year, my favorite session featured Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns’ collaborator on the PBS documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and the author of the beautiful companion volume of the same name.

Duncan spoke eloquently and emotionally (he actually wept a couple of times) about the importance and beauty of these treasures. I had sworn that I wasn’t going to buy any books at this year’s festival—the stack of unread books on my bedside table had long since reached life-threatening heights—but I couldn’t resist buying Duncan’s book… along with Brenda Wineapple’s White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for Heather. Still, I think I showed admirable restraint; two books, by my standards, is nothing—nothing!

Among the other notables appearing at this year’s festival were Woody Tasch (An Inquiry into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered), Douglas Brinkley (Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America), and Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America), as well as Richard Russo, Corby Kummer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Taylor Branch, Jeannette Walls, Jonathan Lethem, David Liss, and (an old family favorite) Rosemary Wells.

In previous years, the smorgasbord of scribblers has included heavyweights like Robert Caro, William Least Heat-Moon, Richard Price, ZZ Packer, Rick Bragg, Bud Shrake, Sherman Alexie, Roy Blount Jr., and Christopher Buckley. Local literary luminaries like Sarah Bird, Bill Wittliff, H. W. Brands, Kinky Friedman, Amanda Eyre Ward, Jim Magnuson, John Burnett, and Dick Holland usually put in an appearance as well. In fact, as used to be the case when I was young and foolish and still insisted on attending the ACL Festival, my main problem is always that so many people I want to see are scheduled to go on at the same time.

Basically, it’s just a big ol’ literary theme park, with great food (this year’s vendors included Ruby’s BBQ and Torchy’s Tacos), live music, cooking demonstrations, entertainment for the kiddies, and just about everything else a bibliophile could ask for. Plus it’s at the State Capitol, which is a totally cool building, and when the weather’s gorgeous, as it was last weekend, there’s just no better way to spend a weekend. Best of all, and unlike the ACL Festival, admission is free!

What we’re reading
Heather: Jeffrey Greene, Water from Stone: The Story of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve
Martin: Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life