March 2002

We’re back!

We were blessed with a mild and fast-paced February, this year, so I was personally sort of startled to wake up and find it already over. I expect I will spend this March as I usually do, telling Rachel and the other southern-born folks, “no, really, spring will come eventually… but not yet.”

As usual, there’s plenty going on here in our offices at 63 Main Street. Sixty-three? you ask. Last month it was fifty-nine! We didn’t move down the street; we’re still in the old 59 Main Street hotel building. But we learned early on that several businesses were claiming the same mailing address; in a small city, this happens. All of us on the block agreed to renumber the mailboxes so that each of us now has a unique address — which was accomplished with a startling lack of fuss. Viva North Adams!

Our office looks great, by the way, mainly thanks to your donations — come by and see us! We’re open from Wednesday to Saturday, 1-5 p.m., and our resource center library is growing daily. If you’re preparing for your spring tag sale, we still have a teeny, tiny wishlist of things we need — chief among them a dorm-sized refrigerator. Check out our wish list at our website: http://www.inkberry.org/stuff.html — you call, we’ll haul.

Novelist Elinor Lipman gave a reading here last weekend, and we had a good-sized crowd for a cold Friday evening in February. Her writing is fun and witty; it’s often been compared to that of Jane Austen, and the comparison holds up well — her selections from The Ladies’ Man, in particular, had me chortling, and her discussion of where her stories come from was almost as much fun as the stories themselves.

This month our reader is singer/songwriter Bernice Lewis, who’s agreed to indulge us with a rare evening of poems and essays. Bernice is not only one of my favorite people — she’s also an established fixture on the national folk music circuit, with smart, incisive lyrics that hold up on their own as poetry. I’m looking forward to our evening with Bernice, and hope you’ll come see her at the office on March 13, at 7:30 p.m. — I know she’s been looking forward to the event and telling all of her fans!

As for the rest of our programming, I’m teaching our “Art of the Journal” class; it’s a great group of people. We’ve reached a stage I’m beginning to recognize (and love) in our ten-week workshops — everyone looking at each week’s student piece has helpful comments and could probably lead the discussion. Meanwhile, our shorter classes have been getting rave reviews: Daniel Wallace’s “Books Make the Best Eating” book group had students reeking of garlic a couple weeks ago after a cooking session at Benchmark Kitchens, and Alix Ohlin’s Flash Fiction class is, well, zipping along nicely. Rachel teaches her “How to Get Published” class this Saturday, March 2, from 1-4 p.m., and could probably squeeze in another student or two if you pick up the phone right now.

We’re about to announce our spring session, which includes a fabulous master-class weekend with poet, critic, and midrashist Alicia Ostriker in April and a reading by Berkshirites Frank Tempone and Alix Ohlin in May; Latino poet Martín Espada is coming in June, when we’ll also be having a special birthday event. You can read about all this, plus our fabulous class offerings, in our next calendar — keep an eye open, or come take a look at the website.

Not all our news is good; Rachel’s asked for the microphone in order to say goodbye to a true friend and a writer whose work, I hope, will continue to inspire all of us. Until next month, take care of yourselves and each other.

— Sandy

By the time I’d read three or four of his books, I knew that John, like me, had grown up in South Texas, become a freelance writer, and settled in Western Massachusetts. I knew he wrote beautifully about the New England landscape, the seasons, the nature of work, the writing life. I worked up the courage to send him a note. To my surprise, he wrote back. We became correspondents, then friends.

John was one of the first writers to hear about Inkberry, back when the idea was barely-formed, and he supported it from the start. He was the first writer to agree to participate in our reading series, and was scheduled to read in February of 2002.

A year or so into our correspondence, I drove to Northampton to hear John read. I’m not sure what he thought when we met in person. I suspect he was surprised at my age. (I hadn’t mentioned that I’m almost young enough to be his granddaughter.) We didn’t have long to talk, anyway; a line of well-wishers waited behind me. We promised each other we’d get around to our long-promised lunch date. Maybe when he came to read at Inkberry.

Last summer, John wrote to tell me he’d been diagnosed with cancer. He withdrew himself from the reading series slate. Our correspondence followed the ups and downs of his convalescence. For a while the cancer was in remission. Hopes were high.

But high hopes weren’t enough; they never are. John Jerome died this week. He leaves behind him some dozen books, including The Writing Trade (the chronicle of a year of freelance life), Blue Rooms (about a lifelong love affair with water), On Turning Sixty-Five (meditations on aging), the aforementioned Truck, and Stone Work (my perennial favorite, which explores work through the literal and metaphoric lens of a season spent repairing a crumbling stone wall). These latter two seem to me to capture John at his best: erudite, funny, poignant, crabby, above all the kind of narrator you could settle down and have a long conversation with. I know, because I was blessed with the chance to do just that.

If you haven’t read him before, now is a great time to start. If you have, you can always re-read. We can’t write to him now, but we can read his words, and underline things we love, and weep, and laugh. After a time, it’s the only kind of literary dialogue we get. It’s how we engage with Chaucer and Robert Frost and Shakespeare. Now it’s how we interact with John.

— Rachel