‘What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.’
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield

Words can be toys.  Children’s books bank on the likes of those who thrive on words like mugwump and quoz.

‘The idea that language is beautiful and strange and that you can play with it is very appealing for children, and also very important.
Catherine Bohne

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events.

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political fault lines. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Cleveland (November 10, 2009) Inspired by the entrepreneurial and community spirit of brothers Abrahem and Sameh Malkieh in starting up a new import grocery in her diverse neighborhood, writer and teaching artist Susan Weber decided to try her hand as a citizen journalist.  

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.  

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

I used to think imagination preceded art. If dreams run rampant, haunting the day with their memories, that’s inspiration, right? If feelings are ripe, it’s time to create something. Yes? 

Then there was that time I stepped out of my comfort zone into an acting class taught by Scott Plate. Asking his students to journal about their experiences, he promised to read every word. I soon began to richly dream, and freely add the findings to my journal. 

The dreams were vivid and complex, my sense and sensitivity at full tilt. A gift, I thought, that just when assigned the task of introspection, dreams should surface, ripe with illustration.  

Bill Moyers recently aired an interview from 2004. He asked Maurice Sendak, author illustrator of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ how he calmed his own demons.

'Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain. I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me.'
Maurice Sendak, Bill Moyers Journal

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks in play.  Thanks to Revolution Pie, mine was a happy duty.  As for the visuals, well, what better excuse than classic McCartney-Lennon to delve for the best in humanity?

Beethoven composed elegance, vast and beautiful.  Listeners of the day had to warm to his passionate scores.  Because they did, his masterpieces live on.

With songwriting, brevity is key.  Gone are the days when the bards preserved whole histories through song.  People don’t stick around for that sort of thing.  We have books now, and Google.

Having just read such a book, filled with storied minutia about how print and broadcast media (dying life forms?) came to be, I’m charmed by the author’s élan.  The LA Times, CBS and Time, Inc. are the protagonists of David Halberstam’s gripping saga, The Powers That Be.  Power, politics and greed disregard justice or conscience and repeatedly give short shrift to a citizen’s need to know.  It’s the old story of democracy dashed on the rocks of the bottom line.  But the details, like notes in a Beethoven sonata, make the story live.

The book is a worthy, time consuming read.  Mr. Halberstam melds a composer’s lush ethos with a songwriter’s cut to the chase in segments like this:

Reporters and editors were at their best when motivated by instincts of social conscience, and belief in justice.  But those very instincts, given the curious value system in America, often made them stars.  It was heady stuff, this new touch of the bitch goddess.
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Our best instinct leading to our worst inclination: hardly a new phenomenon.  Ironically, it was the ever increasing reach of the media that magnified celebrity, goading even its best reporters and editors to follow fame’s fancy, to the detriment of honest reportage.

The Powers That Be predates Facebook, Youtube and the like.  Today’s web media give the impression that all of us have a shot at the spotlight, robbing the bitch goddess of her six inch nails.  Surely the saintly blogger can be trusted to honor truth?

Maybe someday, when we, the new journalist-citizenry, yearn to ride herd on our own rude hubris.

Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well has been ‘treated like the ugly stepchild of the Bard’s canon,’ according to dramaturg Jeffrey Ullom, who says the term ‘problem play‘ is often employed ‘when directors and dramaturges find a play too complicated or challenging for their own individual talents.’


Modern life is often a problem play of sorts.  Evidence of this includes the information glutosphere, the complicated health care debate or the nebulous personal career path.  You might expect Shakespeare’s problem plays to be runaway smash hits, channeling the zeitgeist head on.

The problem with problems, though, is that they’re so very problematic.  Problems beget problems.  Complexity can overwhelm. 

A good play, or comparable art production, may indeed be a way to purge the art goer’s inner doubts about his/her preparedness to slay the beast.  Or, citizenry of the denial class may just as soon float off into lesser dramas, where heros and heroines try to convince us decisions are cool and easy for the pure of heart.

I’m not pure of heart.  Are you?  Kudos to you who truthfully say you are.  The rest of us turn to art, making it or seeking it, just to hold our heads above the fray of problem plays, ubiquitous and draining.