(View entire post here)

As I've been visiting various cities and promoting the book, people have been asking how I managed to get Art Williams to open up and tell his story. This is a natural question, given that he not only shared some very valuable criminal secrets, but also bared many of the emotional wounds that helped mold his criminality in the first place.

What can I say? I'm a journalistic ninja with the ability to get sources to instantly pour out their stories. Seriously, at the risk of sounding reductive, there are only two ways a journalist can get a source to talk honestly: because the source wants to, or because he is forced to. And Art definitely wanted to talk.

Why? The answer he first told me was that he was sick of his life. He wanted to put crime behind him, and telling our stories-whether we're criminals or congressmen-is a well-worn path towards exercising our demons. Confession must be as old as language. But as I got to know Art better, I saw other motives as well. He was proud of his counterfeiting accomplishments-not because he had "beat the system" or anything so vainglorious-but because buried within him was that 12-year-old kid who had skipped two grades before winding up in the projects. Even though poverty and crime had been determining factors with him, in his heart he wanted inclusion into a bigger world where he'd still be considered part of the smart set.

(View entire post here)

Last night I read to a nice crowd at Shakespeare and Co. Then a bunch of writers and I (Jonathan Safran Foer, the poets Joshua Beckman and Matthew Roher) had dinner at a bistro near Notre Dame with Sylvia, owner of Shakespeare and Co and the daughter of its founder, a guy who used to hang with all the famous Beats. The night felt very Parisian - public reading, bistro, famous writers -- and was the first time I can say that I felt at all like Hemingway. (Not that I'm claining - are you listening crazy blog people? - not that I'm claiming to be anywhere near as good as Hemingway.... Though I do have a certain macho appeal, especially when my back isn't hurting and if I've avoided dairy, which can make me gassy.)

Anyway, I've been reading Updike a lot since he died, and am reading him now. (Of The Farm.) It's weird to feel the need to defend a guy whose career saw the abundant successes and lotto-size returns that Updike's did. But it's weird, too, what's happened to our bard of suburbia; why is it that so many younger writers don't groove on Updike?

 

 

 

 

» Jennifer Kolari, MSW, RSW, discusses and reads her guide to forming bonds with and understanding challenging children.

» Read more about Connected Parenting

» Read Jennifer Kolari's posts on the Penguin Blog

Jennifer Kolari, Connected Parenting, Podcast