Crown Me!

Peggy Fleming and I met approximately two and a half lifetimes ago when I was still in the DC metro area. The Arena Stage had a production of the play which also featured a back stage workshop after the performance. This was years ago and the title of the production fails me (actually I think it was Radio Mambo), but the experience has stayed with me.  It was in this experiential workshop where the audience was transformed into active participants in the act of creating dialogue from the varied voices we shared. Peggy was there along with her husband Pat, and at some point or another throughout the group building exercises, we were linked together. -- and linked we were. There was instant connection between us and needless to say, a friendship was born right there.
 Along the years we have stayed in touch and I have always admired her work. I Loved her In Her Place and always seemed to give my copy away as gifts { read a critical review on The Critical Eye }. I also think Peggy has been a hero, of sorts, for me because she is Always reinventing herself. The most dynamic people in life do this and she is no exception, even in her very soft-spoken and quiet manner. I had the good fortune of a very brief visit with Peggy and Pat a few weeks back and there she was inventing another aspect of herself - a film maker. This borne from the Crown Me! project and her desire to capture more story in another media.
Needless to say, Peggy is a fantastic photographer and she provides exquisite narrative photography which tells much of the stories of these men taking part in this great game of the mind. As the men share their stories of their involvement of checkers, we learn that they are from all walks of life - from taxi cab driver to physicist.
Over and again I continue to enjoy the personal narratives of this great book. I am partial to the imagery of the photographic storytelling, and even more so to the prose that I call, oral memoir.
I guess this piece resonates with me in a particular space because being a young adult who was educated at Howard University and raised in Atlanta,  I see in these faces my professors, mentors, uncles, fathers, cousins ...all of whom shaped and inspired me along the way.

Read more:  Just Crown Me! in the Washington Post
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Guest Blog: Bodwells Bakers Dozen

Bodwell’s Baker’s Dozen: My Favorite 13 Books of 2009

By Joshua Bodwell

If you’re anything like me, when those ubiquitous lists of “The Year’s Notable Books” arrive every December, you read them with a mixture of excitement and guilt. The lists are rarely short, and often stretch as long as the “Top 100 Book.”

“Oh, god,” I find myself thinking, “look at all these great books I didn’t have time to read this year!”

So why, you might ask, did I find myself adding to this madness by creating my own list of notable books this year? Well, the answer is simple: connection.

I am the sort of person who distractedly steals glances at the bookshelves in the homes of people I’ve just met. I believe I can get a sense of the person by surveying the spines of their books, and with that sense make a potentially deeper connection. Books offer us, perfect strangers, some sense of a shared history, a common ground. So, it felt appropriate to me to share my imperfect little list of books on my bookshelf.

I hope there’s something here of interest.

LINK: CLICK HERE

PS: Here’s a tease for a book already sure to appear on my 2010 Baker’s Dozen: for Christmas I received Carol Sklenicka's fine biography Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life and plowed right through it. The book, of course, has its faults and does, as the Christian Science Monitor pointed out, focus “more closely on his self-destructive nature than on his talents.” Yet, I found the narrative style compelling. Though, during the last quarter of the book I found the information lacking at times. It was, I suppose, because many of Carver’s closest friends from that time period (including Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and his editor, Gary Fisketjon) had opted not to be interviewed for or take part in the biography. I can’t say I blame them. But the contextualization they’d have likely added is sorely missing. Yet, in the end, this is a biography of one of the most important writers of his generation. That alone is cause for celebration.