THIS IS WHERE I’VE BEEN…AND WHERE I WAS BORN

 Hopefully, some of you will have noticed that I’ve been missing in action for a while.  There’s a good reason for it. I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a new anthology of non-fiction stories (some people would call them memoir essays, but in the end, memoirs are just stories you don’t make up).

For anybody who’s not a regular reader of this blog, let me tell you what to the regular readers is already obvious. I’m from a small town in the US Midwest called Wapakoneta. Despite having been an expatriate former journalist living in South America for the past fifty years, I’ve written a great deal about the people, idiosyncrasies and history of Midwestern smalltown life. The stories I tell appeal (I’m told) to anyone brought up in smalltown America, and most especially to people of my own generation and the generation after. In other words, boomers and Gen Xers. But they are also apparently appealing to anyone interested in how folks lived before the Internet, before cellphones, before social media and even before television. Those are quite often the memories I relive and share with anyone willing to listen.

You needn’t remind me that, as I mention in one of the stories in this new book, I can write authoritatively about all of this because I am “older than dirt.” I cop to it and have even embraced it in my latest writing. Although I do recall what it felt like when I was one of the youngest foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires back in the seventies, and when I was the youngest general news editor in any newspaper in that city (which boasted a dozen daily and evening papers back then, plus a number of weeklies).

I guess nearly everyone would like to be young again. But as a writer, I’d only like to be young again if I were to know everything I know now. It’s not that I don’t still wrestle with doubts the way I always have. But my doubts now are experienced and educated doubts, not the scary existential and ignorance-based doubts of my youth as a guy who didn’t know nearly enough in jobs where you really had to know a lot.  

Anyway, mine, in general, is literature of broad appeal. But I also have specifically written a great deal about my town as sharing these common qualities of the Midwest, but also as being its unique Midwestern self. To start with, a town with a name no one will confuse with any other. Not a Springfield (there are thirty-five towns with that name in the US, plus the one on The Simpsons), a Lebanon (thirty-five), an Arlington (thirty-eight), a Centerville (thirty-eight), a Clinton (thirty-nine), a Franklin (forty-five), or a Washington (ninety-one), but Wapakoneta.

If you say you’re from Wapakoneta, some people might not know the name—"Wapaka-whosis?”—but surely no one will ask you “Which one?” And a lot more people know the name now than did when I was a kid growing up—even my ophthalmologist (a private pilot and aerospace buff) in Patagonia knows it—because Wapakoneta native son Neil Armstrong put us on the map. You would practically have to be a hermit, or never have opened a history book, not to know that Neil was the first person to ever set foot on the surface of the moon back in July of 1969. So, Moon Town is my town. Still, he’s not the only local boy (or girl) of certain widespread renown, even if he is indeed, and by far, the most famous.

But that’s not all that makes Wapakoneta unique. Like each person, each town has a story all its own. A story that usually includes beauty marks and ugly warts, proud moments and others you’d like to forget, moments of outright joy and contented happiness, and moments of tears and tragedy. 

In my latest book, A Place Called Wapakoneta, I strive to capture this essence. Sometimes the task is a little like trying to bottle lightning, but you go at it little by little, memory by memory, quirk by wonderful quirk in order to paint a portrait of a town and a story that you’ve never stopped loving, beauty marks, warts and all.

 This book could be loosely described as “a sequel” to my first two—The Rock Garden and Other Stories, and, Visions of What Used To Be—but is, by far, the biggest anthology yet. It contains a total of twenty-five non-fiction stories in a two hundred-fifty-page-plus book. And each story is accompanied by a related photo depicting the town and its history. The book also includes related portraits of other towns, specifically, Lima and Saint Marys, Ohio.

 The e-book and hard-cover editions are already on Amazon for pre-ordering (with deliveries scheduled for the first week of August). The paperback will go live on Amazon as of Sunday, July 28, the official launch date for this new book. 

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B003ZWKVEK

From a Place Called Wapakoneta will also be available for purchase at the Riverside Art Center in downtown Wapakoneta as of the first week of August. And I will be holding a book-signing event there in September. Check with the RAC for details.

I only hope all of you enjoy reading this book as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and that you too will feel the emotions and identification with it that I have in attempting, from my own point of view, to set part of my home town’s story down in order to share it with others, and to keep these memories alive after I’m gone. Because the only true history we have is the one those who lived it can share with us. The rest is pure revisionism.