A bookstore-sponsored reading! Two small independents, Macs Backs and Apple Tree, combined for a session with cider and ginger snaps at the Coventry branch of the public library, a wonderful old-and-strong place of dark wood shelves and big windows. With its books, it’s been there for longer than I’ve been alive and could stay just as long into the future. There was a “discussant,” Joyce Kessler (a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art), who teaches a course on novels of the sixties.
Had no one else shown up, Joyce and I could have talked for a long time, but people came – including a contingent of Cleveland Movement people who remember the historical events in my book. The conversation veered into what had been accomplished by the Movement, lasting contributions such as a Food Co-op, a Free Clinic, and the Welfare Rights Handbook published and used well into the seventies(in Riders on the Storm, Jane is working on it). In comparison to the work of these people, which continues, anything I may have done was small.
The next morning I woke at 5:00, remembering questions I should have asked, comments I should have made. A reason to write the book was the deeply disturbing SDS split of '68 and '69. The organization imploded with the Weatherman expulsion of Progressive Labor in July '69, but in Cleveland we saw the beginning with a paper named after a Bob Dylan song shortly after Chicago. Distrust built, along with the sense of violence as both seductive and terrifying. Decades later I was still in anguish as violence encroached from within as well as outside, but even more as language increasingly corrupted thought. So I wrote about the Movement with mixed feelings, and was very glad to see good folks keeping up the struggle uncorrupted.
Next reading Thursday, at the University of Findlay. Who knows what new concerns will rise?
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