London Calling: Writers Salon Sept. 5

I will be doing my first event related to The World According to Joan Didion, and it’s virtual so all can attend. I’ll discuss “The Art of Cultural Commentary, Biographies and Journalism” with the London Writers Salon Tuesday, September 5, from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Eastern time. Use the code LWSFRIEND50 for 50 percent off. I will send a code for free admission to the first five readers to post their favorite Didion quote in the comments. Here’s one of mine, which I found in her notes at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley: “Whenever I feel troubled, I think about the sea.” Register at https://lu.ma/mcdonnell.

Muleskinner Variations

The Porcupine Mountains ski hill slopes through woods to the chalet below. If you go high enough, you can see the endless blue of Lake Superior just a skip and a jump behind the chalet. It’s a great place for a concert, and I was happy to finally be able to attend the annual Porcupine Mountains Music Festival. Even though I’m here every summer, I usually have to be home for school by late August. But this year, its 17th, thanks to sabbatical #happiness, I got to check out the folk and roots music on a beautiful Saturday.

You have to love a festival where there’s easy parking and you can bring your own cooler, food, and chairs, with not a bad view on the lawn. The setting was sylvan and sunny for the headlining acts on the main stage. The chalet’s A frame offered good acoustics for solo performers. But my favorite stage was in the Busking Barn, where buskers played blues and bluegrass for tips – ie, they had to earn their money.

“Music is too important to be left to the professionals,” read a sign behind the stage. The sign attributed the quote to Dale Venema, a local, ie Ontonagon, Michigan, musician who founded the barn; online, it is credited to both Michelle Shocked and Robert Fulghum. Whoever first said it, it summarizes both the barn and Venema. Dale was not there. The Muleskinner – as my husband introduced me to him decades ago due to his practice of farming with mules – has not been seen since July 14. His kayak was found floating upside down in Lake Superior. He was not.

Kenny Langlois and Eric Hopper. Photo by Jackie McMullen.

Venema was … is … how do we talk about the missing? There was a tribute to the Muleskinner Saturday, and, unfortunately, tributes are given more often to the dead than to the living. Venema was a character. Not only did he farm with mules, he wore clogs while doing so. One of the last times I saw him, he was delivering mail. Singer Yvonne Blake talked about leaving messages for Dale in her mailbox; that was how you communicated with him.

He was also a talented musician and songwriter. The last time I saw Dale he was performing at the Silver City restaurant Paul’s, with Eric Hopper on bass. Eric is now running the barn, and, with Venema’s friend Kenny Langlois, led a singalong to “Carbon Credits,” Muleskinner’s spot-on takedown of greenwashing: “…my footprint is small despite all that I’ve got/ I used carbon credits when I bought my new yacht.”

Later that evening in the barn, we were charmed by a low-fi set by Wailing Loons. The Minneapolis band outperforms their name, creating a ruckus with homespun instruments, including a rhythm section of cajon and clogs, fiddle, acoustic guitar, ukulele, and great vocals by Emilie Hitch and Dan Wilder. No amps necessary. The tip jar filled.

Wailing Loons.

Happy birthday Dad

Today would have been Dad’s 88th birthday. On July 21 we held a celebration of his life on the Upper Peninsula Michigan property where my family spent so many summers with our extended family of Beloit College professors and their families and friends. These “lake people” were the family John Hamilton McDonnell never had. In a nod to his famous speeches at special occasions, we offered toasts to my father. Below is what I said, more or less. And here are photos from that special day, taken by Kelly von Eschen, one of the dear members of that alternative kin group.

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One of the things that happens when someone dies is we discover all the things we didn’t know about them, and can no longer ask about. For instance, according to a newspaper clipping I found in Dad’s boxes:

Who wrote this? What paper was it in? What happened to Happy?

Other questions raised by the boxes:

Did you know that Dad had an uncle who died in World War II?

That he served in the army in the 1950s?

That he applied to John Hopkins?

That Dad was sent to a military academy when he was 7 years old?

That giving birth to him at age 40 almost killed his mother?

John and that girly Shirley, perhaps the first photo of them together.

That his father remarried less than three months after his mother died, when Dad was 12 years old?

That he was quite a ladies man until he met “that girly Shirley” at Occidental College?

That Mom and Dad eloped and got married in Santa Barbara?

I knew pieces of this story, or rather the broad arc: The tragic loss of the only child’s mother at a tender age, followed by the too-quick remarriage to a despised interloper. It was the central tragedy of Dad’s life that he never completely got over, despite the saving power of another woman’s love, and then another – and the embrace of their large families, the brothers and sisters he never had. Parts of the story inevitably came up, along with tears, at meaningful moments like holidays and graduations and weddings, in sodden toasts. As my English colleagues would say, it was such an overdetermined narrative that it lost its resonance, its ability to mean.

But in going through old photos, letters, newspaper clippings, writings, etc., I discovered details that gave granularity to the oft-told tale, and brought to life for me the little boy longing for love and happiness who became the man who was my father.

Gladys and John

Gladys Hamilton was a music teacher from Iowa who, in her third marriage to my grandfather, finally gave birth to a child, an event that had eluded her for four decades. One thing I didn’t understand, until I read the powerful, well-written autobiography that Dad wrote for a graduate school class, was that the experience nearly killed her. Even as a newborn, Dad’s relationship to his beloved mother was tenuous and fraught.

Gladys clearly doted on John – I can tell from the multiple photo books she made for and of him. As he wrote, “He was always a mother’s boy. If Freud had not been active a half century too soon, John would have been fertile soil in developing the Oedipus theory.” From the day he was born, his mother shared with him her love of dogs. In his first year of life the family moved into a brand-new house in Glendale whose modern design was featured in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. Dad was a Boy Scout who saved baby birds. He was a batboy for his father’s company baseball team. He brought friends to his family’s cabin on Lake Arrowhead for boating and play.

Thanks to Lake Arrowhead, John had some fun.

But then there were the separations, perhaps driven by Gladys’s poor health, or what was clearly a troubled marriage, or maybe because being in their 40s, neither parent could quite handle a small child. The sadness is palpable in the 7-year-old’s letter to his parents, asking them to please come see him in a play at Page Military Academy, a boarding school. It’s there in the letters to himself sent from Christian summer camps, clearly assignments, in which he reminds his one-month future self to follow the teachings of the Bible when he gets back home: obey his parents, avoid the sin of gluttony. These are the words of a lonely only child in an unstable home, being fat shamed during summer vacation.

Dad did not overdramatize the impact of his mother’s death from heart failure, and his father’s too-quick marriage to Sugar – who, as Dad wrote, “was even more egocentric than John.” He was a broken-hearted, angry pubescent – so traumatized that he fought with his father, tried to run away from home, and was hospitalized. I didn’t know those details until I read his autobiography. But maybe that’s my fault: Maybe I rolled my eyes at the too-often told tale of young tragedy. One thing I’ve realized after losing both my parents is that I did not listen sufficiently. I shrugged off family stories as genetic and environmental burdens I didn’t want to shoulder. Now, I wish I had asked more questions, nailed down the details, been the historian I have been for people I didn’t even know. Of course it is too late.

John Hamilton, John Louis, Sugar, Dad’s half-brother Hank, Hank’s wife Helen, and Shirley (clockwise from left).

Dad did transcend his tragic childhood, even if it regularly resurfaced. Mom helped with that, and so did going away to college: making friends, escaping his home, being appreciated for his intelligence and humor and generosity. One other thing I discovered is that Dad was an excellent writer and researcher. A high school teacher helped push him in this direction: “I hope he continues his history work; he has a rare interest and talent for it,” CH Gibson wrote on a 1953 report card. The importance of education as a portal out of poverty, racism, disability, and difficult beginnings was the central theme of Dad’s working life, and that’s because he lived it himself.

As a daughter, I benefited from the difficult lessons Dad learned. He worked hard to make sure Brett and I had the kind of childhood that he glimpsed but had taken away from him. He and Mom gave us an incredible foundation, from a strong education based in appreciation of learning, literature, and the arts to a beautiful home filled with wandering poodles and cats, to summers spent traveling and of course, camping in the Upper Peninsula.

Classic Dad: with poodle and trailer.

We all remember the way Dad organized canoeing trips. Our Beloit house was on a hill overlooking Turtle Creek, and of course here, Lake Superior was a stone’s throw from the trailer. But one other thing I never realized until recently is that both of my parents were afraid to go in the water. They made sure Brett and I had swim lessons and a summer membership to a local pool. But the reason they stayed on shore reading books and serving gin and tonics was because they didn’t swim. That seems shocking for people who grew up in Los Angeles, but is also a byproduct of traumatic life-starts, the true depths of which I’m still learning. I’m amazed at how well they kept their aquaphobia hidden from me, so much so that love of the water became central to my being.

Here’s to Dad, a man who had his demons and his drama, but who still taught his children and his students to dive in.

Hua Hsu on TWATJD

Stay True is a disarmingly simple book. Hua Hsu tells the story of college friendship, of one comrade in particular. His prose, as in his articles for The New Yorker, is direct, detailed, conversational, intimate. It doesn’t strive for drama or greatness; modest, Hsu told journalism students at Loyola Marymount University a few years ago that his primary skill was meeting deadlines (Prof. McDonnell appreciated that tip). The beauty of his writing is in that measured affect, the quiet accumulation of emotional information, until suddenly, Stay True pours right into your gently opened heart. No wonder this memoir of love, loss, and coming of age won a Pulitzer.

As a longtime fan of Hua’s music journalism, I was honored that he took the time to read The World According to Joan Didion and say nice things about it. Then again, he and Joan are both University of California, Berkeley, alum.

TWATJD in Random Lengths

It’s always nice to be written about in the hometown paper — especially when that paper is one of the few free, independently owned, alternative newspapers left in the country. Thank you Random Lengths News and writer Melina Paris for the plug! Preorder your copy of The World According to Joan Didion now.

A plug for, and from, Alex Segura

What’s not to love about a book where pivotal plot points take place at Patti Smith’s CBGBs debut and a Celia Cruz concert at the Beacon Theatre? Alex Segura’s novel Secret Identity follows a Cuban-American comic book writer who has to hide who she is to get published. It’s a love letter to comics and to 1970s NYC. A highlight are the actual strips that punctuate the plot, featuring super heroine the Legendary Lynx; I love that she’s getting her own series from Zestworld. I’m honored that my former Miami Herald colleague Segura, also author of the Pete Fernandez mystery series and a forthcoming Daredevil, had nice things to say about my book, The World According to Joan Didion.