The Best Cure For Fear? Maybe, A Little More Trust:

The Best Cure For Fear? Maybe, A Little More Trust

In the wake of terrorist acts, or school shootings, or other horrific acts of violence, we feel duped. How could we have missed the signs? Or have been susceptible? We remind ourselves to be vigilant. Be suspicious. If you see something, say something. In other words, mistrust thy neighbor. We look at people differently. Everyone becomes a potential enemy. We ask ourselves, how well do we know the people who live next door? What do we really think of our children’s teachers or day care workers?

I admit that after the Boston Marathon bombings, even I began to look at my neighbors with more apprehension. I didn’t like this fact. But there it was.

Perhaps at no other time in American history — at least since the Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism — have we been more skeptical of our fellow citizens. While our inclination might be to circle the wagons and become more suspicious than ever, there is another way to combat this proclivity towards wariness.

But how?

With more openness, not less.

It may seem counterintuitive — but it’s actually quite logical. After all, many of these deplorable acts of violence arise because perpetrators feel disconnected. Their social networks decay. They develop anti-social and extremist views. When people detach, bad things are more likely to happen.

I’ve been thinking of some simple steps that, at least for me, help me feel more confident and connected. Call it intentional faith. Or, radical trust.

My five-step plan:

Read the rest of my essay for NPR's/WBUR's Cognoscenti

A travel guide to imaginary realms

Time traveling adventurers in Time BanditsA travel guide to imaginary realms

How do you get to Narnia, Neverland, Oz, or Hogwarts? The way to these parallel other worlds that sometimes intersect with ours is not always obvious. All you need to know is the secret. Here is a brief guide to common tropes and modes of transportation. When in doubt, try a dash of fairy dust.

Natural (or Unnatural) Phenomena

In “Epic,” it’s a magic flower bud, or “pod,” as well as the spirit of a dying queen, that transports M.K. to the land of the Leafmen. Tornadoes also do the trick, as in “The Wizard of Oz.” Or a whack to the head works, too, like the one the kid in “The Pagemaster” suffers before the fantasy world of the library comes to life.

Tunnels, Caves, and Dark Spaces

Slither into a tunnel or cavern (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), fall down a hole (“Alice in Wonderland”), or explore the back of your closet (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”). By means of this reverse birth-womb experience through the darkness — paging Dr. Freud — you’ll reach that hidden world.

Portals and Hidden Places

Magic or hidden doors work well enough (“The Secret Garden”). But if you’re trying to protect the location of, say, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, you might devise a special train which departs only from Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station on certain days during the year. Or, your secret world could be accessible through a time tunnel, like the one “Time Bandits” uses.

Books and Stories

“Tome-travel” gets us there and back again. Books equal bedtime stories, sleepy-time, dreamtime, and serve as our literary portal into the imagination. In movies ranging from “The Neverending Story” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles” to “Where the Wild Things Are,” books may contain secret instructions or actually draw the reader into their pages.

Miscellaneous Devices

Don’t touch that button! Don’t play that game! In “Jumanji,” kids playing a mysterious board game unleash all kinds of trouble; in “The Last Starfighter,” it’s an arcade game that opens a portal to a distant world that needs the help of a young video gamer. In “Last Action Hero,” it’s a magic movie ticket that’s the ticket to paradise.

ETHAN GILSDORF

Originally appeared in the Boston Globe

What's down that rabbit hole or in that wardrobe? ‘Epic’ follows tradition of children’s fictions bridging earthly, fantasy realms

What's down that rabbit hole or in that wardrobe?: ‘Epic’ follows tradition of children’s fictions bridging earthly, fantasy realms 

In the just-opened animated adventure film, “Epic,” a teenage girl named Mary Katherine (voiced by Amanda Seyfried) has effectively been abandoned. She arrives in the country to reconnect with her harebrained dad (Jason Sudeikis), a nerdy scientist obsessed with finding a woodland kingdom of miniature creatures. Grieving the loss of her mother, Mary Katherine, or “M.K.,” needs her father more than ever. But her dad’s belief in a secret world makes him all the more distant. “I’ll be right here,” M.K. huffs. “In reality.”

Naturally, M.K.’s ideas about magical realms are about to change. Stumbling into the woods, she snatches what looks like a glimmering leaf as it drifts down from the trees. The “pod” glows brighter in her hands, and then, KA-POW! our heroine is transported (and shrunk) to the hidden land of the Leafmen. There, she finds her purpose among a race of tiny people who, armed with bows and swords and mounted on sparrows and hummingbirds, protect the forest from the baddies in, yes, an ongoing battle between the forces of good and evil.

Movies about worlds disconnected from our own are commonplace. Think of the many science fiction and fantasy narratives that lie along the “Star Wars” to “The Lord of the Rings” continuum. These separate realities are filled with orcs and wizards, siths and spaceships. Humans may live there, but we Earthlings can’t visit them. No magic door leads from Boston to Tatooine, no trip down a rabbit hole or along the Red Line arrives in Middle-earth.

“Epic” belongs to a different but equally longstanding tradition of fiction that bridges our world to other realms. Via some gateway, a journey is made to a kind of Neverland or Narnia. The trope is as old and dark as the burrow in “Alice in Wonderland” and Dorothy’s twister in “The Wizard of Oz.” You can follow these tunnels from “Labyrinth” to “Pan’s Labyrinth,” through “Harry Potter” and “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” and beyond to every story that maps that liminal space between us and some parallel place.

As sophisticated and tech-savvy as we’ve become in the 21st century, apparently we still need to believe in hidden worlds that coexist with the real world. In fact, we might need them more than ever. As we get more attached to our digital devices, our traditional spells don’t work anymore. Satellites have mapped every square inch of the planet; Google conjures an explanation for everything. We’re disconnected from witchcraft, nature, and the mysterious. Myth and fairy story gain no purchase on our daily lives.

Consequently, as we’ve galloped from industrialism to post-industrialism to digitalism, we’ve seen an explosion of fantasy and adventure movies in the last 30 years — from “The Goonies” (1985) to “The Golden Compass” (2007) — which reconnect us to these concealed worlds. We cling to old stories, newly enhanced by advances in special effects whose verisimilitude makes these worlds feel more convincing than ever.

Read the rest of my story at Boston Sunday Globe

Writing Our Way Through The Terror

A woman carries a girl from their home as a SWAT team searching for a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings enters the building in Watertown, Mass., Friday, April 19, 2013. (Charles Krupa/AP)An author friend writes a tribute to his country on his Facebook page. A stay-at-home mom, guarding her bevy of children, becomes a citizen reporter on the scene in Watertown, tweeting about the view from her backyard of snipers staking out a position on the roof of her garden shed. An otherwise non-aspiring writer is inspired to try his hand at capturing his version of this past week’s dreamy miasma of exhausting, hand-wringing events.

As we Boston-area residents have been recovering from the Boston Marathon bombings, the lockdown, and from our media hangovers, out gushed the words, like a fresh wound. Not spoken words, which can evaporate as soon as they are voiced. But stories, written down.

Sure, we’ve all experienced the flurry of hastily dashed-off texts, sent to loved ones to check in, to say, “We are safe.” But even before the dust settled on Boylston Street, I’d noticed a burst of blog posts, Facebook posts, and other personal accounts popping up on the Internet. Those longer stories that cannot be contained in a mere tweet.

All these written words prove our need to find our place within the events. To be part of the story, to insert our own heart and mind into this larger narrative. Who doesn’t want to comment, to communicate, to reflect, to engage in some way? Or, as Neil Diamond himself belted out at Fenway Park, to use words as, “Hands, touching hands / Reaching out, touching me, touching you”?

This urge to participate and to tell one’s individual story humanizes pain and makes big, sweeping events human-scaled. The tradition is as old as Homer and the Icelandic Sagas. We cope with trauma by injecting ourselves into the wider story. The gesture says, “I, too, was there.” The gesture also says, “This is how I process grief.” Story helps transform chaos, crisis, and helplessness into something we can retell, and therefore transcend.

Read the rest of my commentary "Writing Our Way Through The Terror" for NPR affiliate WBUR

Dungeons & Dragons Is Evil Again

Yes! D&D is Evil Again! Pat Robertson scares us like it's 1982

Save vs. disbelief.

Pat Robertson, former Southern Baptist minister, Chairman of the Christian Broadcasting Network and erstwhile presidential candidate, had this to say last week about the latest blight on America: Dungeons & Dragons.

Wait — Dungeons & Dragons? Yes, D&D is back. And it’s more evil than before.

This would be amusing, if it wasn’t so scary.

Once again, from the front lines or bowels of pop culture, we find another freak out by those who are clueless. No, it’s not violent video games that are poisoning the minds (or loins) of America’s youth. Nor is it the Internet, or texting, or sexting, or Facebook or Twitter. Nor is it rap, or hip hop, or raves, or Oxycontin, or punk, or comic books, or Pixie Stix, or Pop Rocks.

Worse: D&D. That old-fashioned game of dice and graph paper and demonic possession.

It’s as if Robertson was encased in carbonite back in 1980, only to be thawed out by a benevolent Boba Fett three decades later. As if Roberston’s never even heard of Call of Duty, let alone Harry Potter or Pac-Man. And magically, still dripping wet from the dry ice and experiencing the brain freeze of a lifetime, he keeps jabbering away on his show The 700 Club, about magic and evil and the occult, and D&D which, in his words, “it was, like, demonic.” (Yes, he actually, like, said, “like.”) “Stay away from it,” is his advice, in 2013.

Read the rest of my post on GeekDad.

Jack Chick’s infamous 1984 anti-D&D comic book, “Dark Dungeons.” Ooh. Scary. (Image: Chick Publications) 

The Cell Phone At 40: What Have Our Devices Wrought?

The Cell Phone Turns 40: My skeptical commentary by Ethan Gilsdorf

[originally appeared in NPR/WBUR's Cognoscenti Tue, Apr 09, 2013]

The cell phone hit middle age last week.

Forty years ago, on April 3, 1973, a Motorola inventor named Martin Cooper made the first-ever call on a handheld cellular phone (curiously, to a rival employee at AT&T). When the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X finally became commercially available a decade later, the two pound device cost about $4,000. Known as “the brick,” the phone was about as smart as one, too. Then, the BlackBerry and its ilk arrived in the early 2000s, ushering in a new age of instant, on-the-go communication.

After the iPhone hit the marketplace in 2007, the smart phone soon became as indispensable as a wallet and keys, and a commonplace accessory to everyday life.

But what changes — for good or for evil — have cell phones wrought? At what cost have we invited these tools into our lives? Like with other technological innovations, from the automobile to the nuclear weapon, we embrace cell phones without much reflection or question. We embrace them because they are new and because they seem to solve problems.

To be sure, these devices come in handy, especially in emergencies. But remember, our smart phones are more than phones: They’re actually communicators, a la “Star Trek,” cross-bred with small computers. They know all. They cut across time and space. They have turned us into roving reporters and documentarians of our every move and thought and location. They give us the ability to talk and text with anyone on the planet. No longer must we wait and wonder the answer to a question or risk being wrong. With a few quick finger pecks in the Google Search app, mysteries are solvable. Evidence is found. Friends who said they can’t make the baby shower because they are “out of town” can be busted, on Facebook, anywhere, anytime. Smart phones have also ruined trivia nights in Irish bars across our fair city.

Yet, as we step off the cliff of another science fictional precipice — the possible widespread adoption of wearable devices like “smartwatches” and the Google glass head-mounted computer — it’s worth considering what questions cell phones already raise. What does it mean to be in public? What social and interpersonal obligations do we have in our interactions with each other? What does it mean to be “here” — to truly inhabit a physical space — and how do these devices blur the boundaries between presence and absence? MIT professor Sherry Turkle has documented many of these issues in her book, “Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.” Her research looks at how online behavior, such as posting on Facebook and tweeting, creates an illusion of closeness and connectedness that, paradoxically, leads to the very solitude from which our technologies supposedly save us. Personally, my heart drops every time I see parents with their child on the bike path, or in the playground, not interacting, not holding their kid’s hand, but punching or jabbering into whatever device they are holding. Not to mention the endless beeps and interruptions and distractions. Or how my iPhone plays into my already challenged ability to focus. Or how I sometimes feel a phantom buzzing in my pocket. Nope, no one called. But my body has developed an almost Pavlovian response to my iPhone. Studies even suggest our cell phone buzzing activates the same part of the brain connected to feelings of love and compassion. When I’ve left my cell phone behind, I experience what can only be described as small pangs of separation anxiety. What am I missing? Who might be texting or emailing? I have taken to making rules for myself. I try not to check email or text while I walk from one neighborhood to the next. If I must take a call or write a text while I am already talking with a friend, I will acknowledge the interruption and say, “Excuse me” and leave the room. I try to “be there” when I am there. Wherever I am. I am not always successful. And yet, as a self-employed person, who works primarily from cafes and other remote locations, I enjoy the freedom my iPhone provides, liberating me from my desk and 9-to-5 environments, even if that freedom comes with a price. A recent episode helped focused these matters like a laser beam — and made me feel more profoundly how our world has been changed by cell phones. The other night, I walked to my corner bar to watch the Red Sox game. Settling in, I ordered a drink and then began my usual routine of checking email, social media feeds or texting a friend. A moment later I looked up. The bar was empty, except for the bartender, one other patron and me. All three of us were checking our phones, adopting that all-too-familiar hunched over posture, and hypnotized by our respective little windows. “Well, isn’t this funny,” I blurted out. “We’re all looking at our iPhones at the same time.” The bartender laughed, and the other guy laughed. Then, after a moment of awkwardness, we put down our phones and something miraculous happened: We had a conversation.

Exploring the origins of D&D for Wisconsin Public Radio

Dungeons and Dragons is the single most famous roleplaying game in the world. Writer Ethan Gilsdorf didn’t grow up in Wisconsin, but his love of D&D led him to fantasize about visiting the game’s hometown: Lake Geneva, hometown to Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax. In this cool radio piece, Ethan explores the origins of D&D for Wisconsin Public Radio. 

Or you can listen to the mp3 here.

What's up with all those movies based on fairy tales?

PERSPECTIVE

Hollywood’s Grimm obsession:

Why grown-ups embrace the promise of happily ever after, now more than ever.

[originally appeared in the Boston Sunday Globe, MARCH 24, 2013]

Angelina Jolie in "Maleficent," due in theaters next year. (PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER KRAMER/AP/NBC)

FEE-FI-FO-FUM,I SMELL THE BLOOD OF A HOLLYWOOD TREND.

After nearly a century of fairy-tale films targeted in large part at kids — starting with Walt Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — there’s another, edgier treatment on the rise. Last year, moviegoers saw two versions of the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White story in Mirror Mirror with Julia Roberts and Snow White and the Huntsman with Kristen Stewart. Next year, Angelina Jolie will star as Sleeping Beauty’s nemesis in Malificent, and Disney is looking to release a live-action version of Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branagh. We’ve recently seen movies like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Jack the Giant Slayer in theaters and Grimm and Once Upon a Time on TV. The list goes on and on. What accounts for this boom in adult-sized fairy tales?

Part of the answer is that the stories and themes of the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen never really left cineplexes — they’ve just been in better disguises. Working Girl, Pretty Woman, and Maid in Manhattan all borrowed heavily from the rags-to-riches Cinderella story. Snow White, so concerned with beauty and aging and jealousy, can be seen in countless mother/daughter rivalry plots. “We use bits and pieces of fairy tales all the time to fashion new stories, but often in ways so subtle that they escape our attention,” says Maria Tatar, chairwoman of the Program in Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University. Even Quentin Tarantino’s bloody Django Unchained, Tatar points out, draws from theSleeping Beauty tale.

The trend can be partly explained by practical concerns. After years of fantasy-themed bombs in the ’80s and ’90s (remember Legend with Tom Cruise?), the wildly successful Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies — which both started appearing in 2001 — convinced Hollywood that audiences were once again willing to suspend disbelief and embrace worlds of wizards and goblins. But with cash cows like The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien already spoken for, studios began looking to mine gold in older stories. (And since fairy tales tend to be in the public domain, they offer a bonus: no pesky author estates with which to negotiate film and toy rights.)

But I also think something deeper is going on. Maybe it’s that these sexier action-packed tales — with epic plots and gloomy themes — are finally returning to their roots.

Once thoroughly dire and dark, fairy tales were re-imagined as entertainment for kids in the 19th century. “They were moved like old furniture from the parlor into the nursery — that’s how Tolkien put it,” Tatar explains. With the arrival of the movies, the yarns became “cartoon versions of what adults once told around the fireside.” Disney, in particular, made a point of leaving out the nastiest  stuff — the child abandonment, the cannibalism, the incest. “Today,” Tatar says, “we are back in touch with the darker elements in the tales.”

And yet those terrible stories projected up on the screen can also be comforting, if only because we know their endings in our bones. The land of Real Life, located just outside the darkened theater’s doors, remains a fairly bleak place of taxes, political gridlock, and climate change. A realm of chain mail, swords, and magic spells will always be more enchanting than that.

“Fairy tales give us a burst of melodrama,” Tatar says, “confronting us with worst-case scenarios and reassuring us that there will be a happily ever after.”

In fairy tales, the evil and greedy get true punishment, not just a slap on the wrist from Congress, and the hero always overcomes his or her travails to emerge victorious, albeit a little traumatized, from the experience. With the help of his sister, Hansel managed to escape getting eaten by a witch. Compared with that, doesn’t digging out from under a mountain of credit card debt or dodging a looming foreclosure seem like child’s play?

Ethan Gilsdorf, a frequent contributor to the Globe Magazine, is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.

Spring Events with Ethan

On the road! Here are some events -- talks and teaching, writers conferences and writing festivals -- I'm doing this spring in the Boston area, plus the North Shore, and Philadelphia

Tues, April 16, 4:30pm
Bryn Mawr College, Phildelphia/Bryn Mawr, PA

Gilsdorf reads from the book and shows images from his adventures in a slide/lecture talk entitled: "HOBBITS HEROES GAMERS GEEKS: What Explains the Rise of Fantasy, Gaming and Role-Playing Subcultures?" on TUESDAY, APRIL 16 at 4:30 pm in THOMAS 224, Bryn Mawr College. Gilsdorf will also read an excerpt from Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks, and the event will end with a Q&A and book signing. The event is free, and sponsored by the Provost's Office and the Departments of History & English at Bryn Mawr College. More info. I'll also be visiting classes 4/15 and running a private D&D sessions 4/16.

Sat, April 27, 2:30pm
Newburyport Book Festival, Unitarian Universalist Church

"What's Wrong with the Real World? A Fantastic Conversation About Fantasy"

Fantasy is hot. So what explains the rise of this genre -- be it pure swords and sorcery epics about hobbits and quests, or some fantasy/science fictional/dystopian/steampunk hybrid? What elements go into a believable, make-believe universe? And what's so wrong with the real world, anyway? Join Ethan Gilsdorf author of the award-winning travel memoir pop culture investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms, and Max Gladstone author of the magical-urban-fantasy-legal-thriller Three Parts Dead, in conversation to discuss the ascendancy of all things fantasy -- from Tolkien to Harry Potter, along with associated topics such as gaming, balrogs, the genre divide, and dice collections. Discussion, reading and Q&A. More info

May 3-5: Muse and the Marketplace Conference
Grub Street, Park Plaza Hotel, Boston

I'll be part of three events. Sign up in advance if you want to attend:

Session 2B: Charting the Non-Fiction Writing Career
2:30pm-3:45pm on Friday, May 3rd

If you want to write nonfiction -- memoir, literary nonfiction, creative nonfiction, journalism -- what is the best way to break in? How do you pitch ideas to editors and agents? What is a book proposal? What is the difference between a promising but vague topic and true story with a hook? How can you build a platform in a unique area of expertise to gain an audience and legitimacy and make yourself attractive to agents and editors? What is a scene, a character, a compelling lede, a coherent theme? In this session based on the success of Grub's Nonfiction Career Lab Program and led by one of its instructors, we'll look at nitty-gritty advice as well as general strategies to map out a career as a nonfiction writer. We'll discuss how to see beyond the one memoir or book idea and how to you turn yourself into a lean, mean, versatile, nonfiction writing machine, capable of churning out essays, op-eds, feature stories, blogs, book proposals and marketable book ideas, all skills that will serve you well in charting a nonfiction writing career.

Shop Talk Lunch Tables
12:45pm-2:00pm on Saturday, May 4th, 2013

These tables are an opportunity to network and/or socialize with invited authors, agents, editors, and presenters. Shop Talk tables are smaller, set further apart from other tables, in a separate part of the Imperial Ballroom, and reserved in advance so you’ll know exactly with whom you’ll be sitting. Participants will be asked to rotate chairs once or twice during the course of the lunch to maximize the number of personal connections to be made at the table. To reserve a spot, you must request a first and second choice of table and pay an additional $75 tax-deductible fee as you register for the conference online.

Session 6L: Non-Fiction Idea Clinic
9:45am-11:00am on Sunday, May 5th

Presenter(s): Ethan Gilsdorf (Author); Eve Bridburg (Literary Agent); Amy Gash (Editor); Joanne Wyckoff (Literary Agent); Hannah Elnan (Editor)

Important: Please read this description carefully before signing up, and bring all necessary materials to the session if you wish to share your non-fiction book idea.

In this session, the moderator (an established writer) will offer a brief preamble of the art of the non-fiction idea. Then, you will get two minutes to share your own idea for a non-fiction book for the audience, the moderator, and a panel of experts. The experts are agents and/or editors with years of experience working with non-fiction writers to turn their book proposals into reality. After you read your idea (preferably from a prepared text), the agents and editors will ask you follow-up questions and troubleshoot your idea. You will discuss issues of platform, expertise, the viability of the idea itself, and other elements of the non-fiction market. Please note that presenters will be chosen at random from names submitted in a hat at the start of the session. (Unfortunately, given the volume of submissions, we can not guarantee that your name will be called). This is a fun event that aims to be respectful of your idea and illuminate the process a writer goes through when she is developing an idea with an agent and/or editor. The point is not to get through as many writers as possible, but to thoughtfully evaluate your ideas and offer concrete suggestions from which all could benefit. Though most people will be reading ideas for full-length books, you may also read an idea for a feature story or article to assess its viability with the panel of experts. 

Sun, June 16th, 2pm
Bestseller's Cafe, Medford Square, Medford Mass.

Happy Father's Day! I'll be reading and doing a book signing with Lizzie Stark, author of Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games, and Peter Bebergal, author of Too Much To Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood. More info

Free Teen Creative Writing Program at Somerville Public Library

February 21, 2013--For Immediate Release

For more information, contact Marita Coombs, Somerville Public Library,

617-623-5000 x 2942, mcoombs@minlib.net

More info here: http://www.somervillepubliclibrary.org/blog/?p=1563

"Teens have something important to say":

Free Teen Creative Writing Program at Somerville Public Library

Are you a teen who likes to write stories about aliens, blogs, flash fiction, or poems? Are you interested in becoming a novelist, short story writer or poet?

Somerville Public Library's Teen Creative Writing Program will offer teens writing exercises to flex their writing muscles in a fun, low-pressure, supportive environment.

The Somerville Public Library is pleased to announce the start of a free Teen Creative Writing Program, designed for any teen aged 13-17. The program will be offered once per month on Sundays, beginning Sunday, March 24, from 1pm to 4pm. Seven three-hour, stand-alone sessions will be offered.

The sessions will be run by Somerville writers Ethan Gilsdorf and Becky Tuch, who will lead writing exercises in a variety of genres, from fantasy fiction to lyric poetry.

No previous writing experience is needed. Students are encouraged to come as they are and need not attend all seven sessions. Materials and lunch will be provided.

Advance sign-up is requested. To register, please contact Marita Coombs, Somerville Public Library, 617-623-5000 x 2942, mcoombs@minlib.net. Additional program dates are Sunday, April 14, Sunday May 19, and Sunday, June 9. The final three session dates will be announced at a future time.

More info here: http://www.somervillepubliclibrary.org/blog/?p=1563

"We'll provide unexpected writing prompts to get teens to generate as much new work in as short a time as possible," said Gilsdorf, an essayist, journalist and author of the book "Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks." "Teens have something important to say."

Both Gilsdorf and Tuch are published writers, and teach at Grub Street Writers, Boston's independent creative writing center. Both have extensive experience teaching teens creative writing.

"Nothing inspires me more than my students, at all ages and all stages of their writing careers," said Becky Tuch, a fiction writer whose work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and has taught fiction to kids, teens, and adults throughout Boston. "As a Somerville resident myself, I can't wait to teach and learn from the young writers in the area."

The Teen Creative Writing Program is funded by the Somerville Arts Council, a local agency supported by the Mass Cultural Council, as well as the Friends of the Library.

More information about the instructors:

Becky Tuch has received literature fellowships from The MacDowell Colony and The Somerville Arts Council, awards from Briar Cliff Review, Byline Magazine, and The Tennessee Writers Alliance, and her fiction has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and Glimmer Train's Very Short Fiction Award. Other stories and essays have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Hobart, Quarter After Eight, and elsewhere. She is the founding editor of The Review Review, a website which has twice been listed by Writer's Digest as "Best of the Best" among 101 Best Websites for Writers. She is also one of the founders of the writing and publishing blog, Beyond the Margins. 

Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek. He wrote the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, wired.com, PsychologyToday.com, and WBUR's Cognescenti blog. He is a book and film critic for the Boston Globe and is the film columnist for Art New England. An award-winning poet, he has published poems in Poetry, The Southern Review, and The North American Review, and several anthologies. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP) and teaches creative writing workshops at Grub Street, where he also serves on the Board of Directors.

--end--

Get out of yourself: "Joan Didion and Bob Seger Meet in a Bar" & "Where I'm From" Exercise

Exercises for the nonfiction workshop to overcome the problems of the "I" and "me" 

Ethan Gilsdorf | www.ethangilsdorf.com | Grub Street, Inc., Boston

1) "Joan Didion and Bob Seger Meet in a Bar" Exercise

Goal: What didn't happen is as fruitful a road to travel as what did. But, too frequently, writers of nonfiction tend to write only about the actual details of their lives, and neglect the goldmine of regrets and "what if" musings that (to me, anyway) seem as "real" as real life. This exercise forces nonfiction writers to reflect about possible/probable outcomes in their lives, had they made different choices. The goal also is to get writers to include imaginary "what if" scenes and passages of musing and specialization about their choices and actions.

Method: Make a short list of key moments/choices/actions/conversations /turning points in your life. Now, choose one and begin to imagine how things might have been different had you made a different choice or had (or did not have) information at the time you made the choice or took action. Ideas for topics include: that you married a different person; that you spoke up when you remained quiet; that you took back something you said; that you had been courageous instead of fearful.

Now, begin to free-write for minimum of 15-20 minutes using one (or more than one, if you want) of the following lines as the first line for an extended passage of writing. The passages you write should include real details from your life but also speculate and imagine a possibly different turn of events and life you might have had. In addition to exposition and musing, you are encouraged to include imaginary scenes with imaginary dialogue in this exercise.

1) If I only knew then what I know now ...

2) If I had only X (done something, made a different choice, etc ) instead of Y ...

3) Begin with this line by Joan Didion (from her essay "Goodbye to All That”) and see where it takes you: "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."

4) Here's another Didion line: "Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different..." Think of a "city" from your personal experience, or substitute "city" for some other noun: person, summer camp, car, father, college, wife, etc.

5) And because I could not resist: Use this line from the Bob Seger song "Against the Wind" as a way to reflect on your own life. "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then ..." (it's a double negative, so take a sec to figure it out.)

2) Where I'm From
(adapted from http://georgeellalyon.com/where.html and http://www.swva.net/fred1st/wif.htm)

Goal: Often nonfiction writers worry that they need to make their personal experience "universal," and in that worry, they can sap all the specific, local and personal details from their prose. This exercise gets nonfiction writers to include specific concrete detail from their lives into their writing: actual names, phrases, local information, family secrets and stories, period products, species of plants, etc. This exercise teaches the power of a simple list in creating a rhythm and lyric quality in prose. On its own, this exercise also makes a lovely, stand-alone self-portrait.

Method: "If you don't know where you're from, you'll have a hard time saying where you're going," said Wendell Berry, voicing the idea that we need to understand our roots to know our place in the world. This prompt has a way of drawing out memories of the smells of attics and bottom-drawer keepsakes; the faces of long-departed kin, the sound of their voices you still hold some deep place in memory. You'll be surprised that, when you're done, you will have said things about the sources of your unique you-ness that you'd never considered before. If you remember the silly fill-in-the-blank word game Mad Libs, then you'll love this exercise. It's completely foolproof. Follow this template, but feel free to improvise or stray from the categories once you get the hang of the voice and rhythm -- just be sure to make your examples specific and concrete.

The Where I'm From Template

I am from ________________________ (specific ordinary household item), from ________________________ (product name), ________________________ (another household item), and ________________________ (common household odor from your childhood).

I am from the ________________________ (home description: adjective, adjective, sensory detail).

I am from the ________________________ (plant, flower, natural item), the ________________________ (plant, flower, natural detail)

I am from ________________________ (family tradition) and ________________________ (family trait), from ________________________ (name of family member) and ________________________ (another family name) and ________________________ (family name).

I am from the ________________________ (description of family tendency/trait/habit) and ________________________ (another example).

From ________________________ (something you were told as a child) and ________________________ (another example).

I am from ________________________ (representation of religion, or lack of it). From ________________________ (further description).

I'm from ________________________ (actual place of birth and/or family ancestry), ________________________ (two food items representing your family).

From the ________________________ (specific family story about a specific person and detail), the ________________________ (another detail or anecdote), and the ________________________ (another detail about another family member).

I am from ________________________ (location of family pictures, mementos, archives and several more lines indicating their worth).

Sample: Where I’m From, by Ethan Gilsdorf

I am from plungers and wood bins, from the Downy bottle that scared me from across the kitchen, straw brooms and the smell of cat urine. I am from the rotted floorboards of a house built in 1803. I am from the lilac hedge, and chives, and garden tomatoes. I am from going to the movies on Thanksgiving, from the land of avoidance, from Florences, Briggs and Normans, from a triumvirate of mothers: Alice, Sara and Susan. I am from keeping your options open. I have climbed from deep trenches of passive-aggression. I am from keeping your expectations low and having a Plan B (better yet, Plan B and Plan C). I am from the church of the forest, the cathedral of sandpits and swift rivers. From the Teachings of Yoda and Gandalf. I'm from Lee, New Hampshire, and from surviving pot roasts and meatloaf made from your bare hands. From the cousin who robbed a bank, they say, the mother who learned to smoke in her high school play, and the father who finally got away. I am from the round box that might have housed an elaborate hat, or perhaps a drum, which I keep in my office, under a pile of books, and look at only when I dare.

Where to Go with "Where I'm From"

While you can revise (edit, extend, rearrange) your “Where I'm From” list into a poem, you can also see it as a corridor of doors opening onto further knowledge and other kinds of writing. The key is to let yourself explore these rooms. Don't rush to decide what kind of writing you're going to do or to revise or finish a piece. Let your goal be the writing itself. Learn to let it lead you. This will help you lead students, both in their own writing and in their response as readers. Look for these elements in your WIF poem and see where else they might take you:

• a place could open into a piece of descriptive writing or a scene from memory.

• your parents' work could open into a memory of going with them, helping, being in the way. Could be a remembered dialogue between your parents about work. Could be a poem made from a litany of tools they used.

• an important event could open into freewriting all the memories of that experience, then writing it as a scene, with description and dialogue. It's also possible to let the description become setting and directions and let the dialogue turn into a play.

• food could open into a scene at the table, a character sketch of the person who prepared the food, a litany of different experiences with it, a process essay of how to make it.

• music could take you to a scene where the music is playing; could provide you the chance to interleave the words of the song and words you might have said (or a narrative of what you were thinking and feeling at the time the song was first important to you (“Where I'm Singing From”).

• something someone said to you could open into a scene or a poem which captures that moment; could be what you wanted to say back but never did.

• a significant object could open into a sensory exploration of the object-what it felt, sounded, smelled, looked, and tasted like; then where it came from, what happened to it, a memory of your connection with it. Is there a secret or a longing connected with this object? A message? If you could go back to yourself when this object was important to you, what would you ask, tell, or give yourself?

Remember, you are the expert on you. No one else sees the world as you do; no one else has your material to draw on. You don't have to know where to begin. Just start. Let it flow. Trust the work to find its own form.

Funny or Disgusting? A Review of "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie"

TIM AND ERIC”S BILLION DOLLAR MOVIE

Directed by: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim

Written by: Heidecker, Wareheim, Jonathan Krisel, Doug Lussenhop, Jon Mugar

Starring: Heidecker, Wareheim, Robert Loggia, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Zach Galifianakis

Running time: 93 minutes

At: Kendall Square

Rated: R (nearly every bodily and sexual function and dismemberment possible)

by Ethan Gilsdorf

[originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

If you enjoy the off-kilter, sketch-based humor of “Kentucky Fried Movie,’’ Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life,’’ and anything that cranks up the Farrelly brothers’ raunch factor to 11, then “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie’’ should please you.

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, co-creators of the TV series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!,’’ wrote and directed this celebration of bad taste. The movie has Heidecker and Wareheim playing Hollywood newbie filmmaker morons, who have squandered a billion of the Schlaaang Corporation’s dollars on a rom-com dud. Tommy Schlaaang Jr. (played by cantankerous Robert Loggia) wants his money back. Tim and Eric shave their soul patches, toss their designer jeans, and fire their spiritual guru, a pony-tailed Zach Galifianakis (uncredited), who pops up in Obi Wan-like visions to say, “I’ve got some poetry about regret I’d like to share with you.’’

Eric and Tim, our wholly unlikable and clueless protagonists (think “Dumb and Dumber’’), skip town, determined to make back that billion dollars they owe by resurrecting the Swallow Valley Mall, deep in the middle of somewhere. Our heroes, remade now as the Dobis PR company, literally jog across the country, as Aimee Mann’s “Two Horses’’ plays and their journey is intercut with slow-motion footage of stallions.

They arrive at the decrepit, squatter-filled mall to find stubborn entrepreneurs selling swords and recycled toilet paper. The mall is run by creepy Damien Weebs (Will Ferrell, also uncredited), who occupies himself in a back room endlessly watching “Top Gun’’ on VHS. Among the best performers is John C. Reilly (yes, uncredited) as the sickly, sore-covered Taquito, Damien’s henchman, abandoned by his family at the mall decades ago. “Also,’’ Damien warns, before handing over the operation to Tim and Eric, “You’re going to have to look out for the wolf.’’ A wolf stalks the mall. And the “Yogurt Man’’ haunts the defunct frozen yogurt kiosk.

You could view all of this as a bold, thinly veiled critique of the current economic depression. Or an exegesis of a nation driven by cable access infomercials and self-help shams. Or you could simply enjoy - if enjoy is the right sentiment - this gross-out comedy that graphically depicts masturbation, defecation, body piercing (you can guess which parts), grannies getting their fingers chopped off, and every smooshy and farty sound-effect possible. See it in the right sick frame of mind, and “Tim and Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie’’ can be shockingly and terribly hilarious. Or not.

A Review of Death Row Narrative "Anatomy of Injustice"

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

‘Anatomy of Injustice’ by Raymond Bonner

BOOK REVIEW

UPDATE TO THIS REVIEW: Edward Lee Elmore -- a black man who faced execution after he was wrongly convicted of killing a white woman in South Carolina -- was released from prison today after serving nearly thirty years. His release comes after numerous appeals and as the direct result of a plea deal negotiated by his attorney. Elmore's story is the subject of Raymond Bonner's new book ANATOMY OF INJUSTICE. Bonner, who was present at the Greenwood SC courthouse at the time of the announcement, said “It can hardly be called justice when, in order to obtain his freedom, a man had to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit.”

BOOK REVIEW

For those seeking more ammunition for their battery of anti-death-penalty arguments, look no further. “Anatomy of Injustice: A Murder Case Gone Wrong’’ is Raymond Bonner’s accomplished and meticulously researched investigation into a murder case that, as the clumsy title suggests, was egregiously bungled.

In 1982, in Greenwood, S.C., Edward Lee Elmore, 23, is accused of killing an elderly widow.

Elmore had occasionally done odd jobs for the victim. When her body is found in her closet, stabbed dozens of times and possibly raped, Elmore is fingered as the prime suspect, despite a notable lack of physical evidence linking him to the crime.

The small-town police officers, prosecutors, and medical examiners work together and cram his arrest, trial, conviction and eventual sentencing to death into three months - astonishingly rushed, given that most capital cases drag out for years. Elmore’s legal team is described as, at best, dispassionate, and at worst, incompetent. Bonner complains they did “virtually nothing.’’

Thickening the plot and heartbreak: The accused is poor, African-American, and mentally disabled, facts that seem never to bother the judges and juries over Elmore’s 27-year trail of legal appeals. He could not “tell time or draw a clock. He didn’t understand the concept of north, south, east, and west or of summer, fall, winter, and spring.’’ He could not do the elementary math to keep a bank account. Cross-examined on the stand, he simply replies, “I didn’t - ’’ “I couldn’t . . .’’ “No, sir, I wasn’t there.’’

A longtime reporter for The New York Times, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize, and a former New Yorker magazine staff writer, Bonner writes prose best described as workaday. It’s only in part two, when he introduces his narrative’s plucky heroine, Diana Holt, an idealistic lawyer with a sketchy criminal past who becomes Elmore’s guardian angel, does Bonner risk literary flourishes. “What the hell am I doing?’’ he has Holt thinking as she leaves Texas and her children behind to work at the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center. “Am I a horrible mother?’’

Holt makes a compelling protagonist. We invest in how, and if, she will get Elmore off death row. True-crime junkies also will be entertained by prurient details, from descriptions of the victim’s bludgeoned body to baggies of hair samples and blood-spattered jeans. We read transcriptions of courtroom proceedings, and we delight as witnesses are caught in lies. Neophytes to criminal law (this reviewer included) learn that despite new evidence proving a person’s innocence, fresh trials are rare. In this case, lawyers must prove not that Elmore was not the killer, but that his “constitutional rights had been violated.’’

If, voice-wise, “Anatomy of Injustice’’ can at times fall flat, as a piece of reporting, the book is masterful. Bonner builds the story, and his argument, carefully, rarely editorializing, mixing in a précis of capital punishment in the United States, and letting readers draw their own conclusions. And while Bonner’s investigation does not prove Greenwood’s law enforcement officials framed Elmore, he does make a convincing case that justice was not served. “Elmore’s story raises nearly all the issues that mark the debate about capital punishment: race, mental retardation, bad trial lawyers, prosecutorial misconduct, ‘snitch’ testimony, DNA testing, a claim of innocence.’’

Bonner’s book is an important addition to the body of evidence against the death penalty. As he argues, our system of justice thrives on conflict. In any trial, among the cast of conviction-seeking prosecutors and appellate lawyers hoping for a break, there must be winners and losers. “[T]he adversarial nature of it outweighs justice,’’ Bonner writes. “Justice often gets lost.’’

And while it would be unfair to reveal here whether Holt and Elmore win, beyond a shadow of a doubt it is worth reading “Anatomy of Injustice’’ to find out.

Got Heroes? Viggo Mortensen Lists His Top 230

[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

by Ethan Gilsdorf

Who are Viggo Mortensen’s heroes? Ask him, and he doesn’t hold back. That’s what we learned when, after a recent interview, we sent the actor some follow-up questions via e-mail. Here are his responses.

1) Who were your heroes growing up as a child, and who are they today?

Okay, you asked for it...

As a child — say, before age eleven — I suppose they were my father, my mother, various horses and dogs, soccer players for San Lorenzo de Almagro (a club founded in Boedo, Argentina, in 1908 by Salesian priest Lorenzo Massa) like “Lobo” Fischer, “Loco” Doval, “Bambino” Veira, “Sapo” Villar and too many other legendary players from that club to mention — Viking Leif Eriksson, fictional gaucho cowboy Martin Fierro, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Odin, Thor, Jesus of Nazareth, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, the character Don Quijote, his horse Rosinante and his trusty servant Sancho Panza, Achilles, Odysseus, Theseus, Joan of Arc, explorer Roald Amundsen, Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary, Thor Heyerdahl, Roger Bannister (the first man to break the four-minute mile barrier), marathon champion Abebe Bikila, Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), long jumper Bob Beamon, Jesse Owens, Bob Hayes, Emil Zátopek, Wilt Chamberlain, Cassius Clay, swimmers Don Schollander and Dawn Fraser, Peter O’Toole’s impersonation of T. E. Lawrence, the crew of Apollo 11, the recently-deceased rock legend Luis Alberto “El Flaco” Spinetta, Carlos Gardel, Bela Lugosi, Greta Garbo, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Louis Armstrong, Edith Piaf, Beethoven, Mozart ... I could probably name more, but surely that gives an idea of how and where I dreamed back then.

Although as an adult I have come to see that no human being is perfect, I now would place at the top of the list the many unheralded people whose small acts of selfless kindness and courtesy, of grace under pressure that we come across every single day are there to be noticed and emulated if we simply pay attention. In terms of individuals who are relatively well-known, I would single out Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Helen Caldicott, Dennis Kucinich, Baltasar Garzón, Aung San Suu Kyi, Julian Assange and anyone who speaks truth to power, stands up against injustice and cruelty regardless of any consequential risk of ostracism or personal physical danger. Of course, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Mark Twain, my father, my mother, and some of the others previously mentioned, are still heroes to me. I can also add, among other diverse sorts of heroes, my son Henry, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein, Heraclitus, Kierkegaard, Lao Tzu, Epictetus, writers Marguerite Duras, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Albert Camus, Jonathan Swift, E. E. Cummings, Julio Cortázar, Mario Benedetti, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Juan Carlos Onetti, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Francisco Quevedo, Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Haroldo Conti, Oscar Wilde, Knut Hamsun, Saxo Grammaticus, Schopenhauer, Ludvig Holberg, Anton Chekhov, Anna Akhmatova, Johannes Ewald, Euripides, Stanley Kunitz, Theodore Roethke, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Conrad, Osip Mandelstam, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Seamus Heaney, Oscar Wilde, Cormac McCarthy, Edgar Allan Poe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, William Burroughs, Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Campbell, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, directors Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, David Cronenberg, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Luis Buñuel and Yasujirō Ozu, actors Richard Jenkins, Sandy Dennis, Geraldine Page, Meryl Streep, Maria Falconetti, Ghita Nørby, Ariadna Gil, Jessica Lange, Paco Rabal, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Dirk Bogarde, Christopher Walken, Dennis Hopper, Federico Luppi, Montgomery Clift, and Robert Duvall, stuntman Mike Watson, sculptors Bertel Thorvaldsen, Auguste Rodin, Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti, painters Giotto, da Vinci, Juan Gris, Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Andrei Rublev, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Edvard Munch, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Utagawa Hiroshige, Minerva Chapman, Franz Kline, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Diebenkorn, Per Kirkeby, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue, Jacob Riis, André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Julia Margaret Cameron, Martin Munkácsi, August Sander, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand and Dennis Hopper, tennis champions Rafael Nadal, Björn Borg and Guillermo Vilas, skiers Bill Koch, Juha Mieto, Jean-Claude Killy and Bjørn Dæhlie, newer San Lorenzo players like “Beto” Acosta, “Ratón” Ayala, the heroic 1982 San Lorenzo team that came back from the club’s only descent to Argentina’s second division breaking national attendance records along the way, Guy Lafleur and the great Montréal Canadiens teams from the 1970s, the 1969 and and 1986 New York Mets, Tom Seaver, “Doc” Gooden, New York Knick stars Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, Bernard King, Oscar Reed, Patrick Ewing, Larry Bird, “Magic” Johnson, the U.S.A. 1980 Olympic hockey team, the ’87, ’91, 2008 and 2012 New York Giants teams, Danish soccer stars Allan Simonsen, Michael Laudrup, Peter Schmeichel and Denmark’s 1992’s soccer cinderella-story European Champion team, Johan Cruyff, Mario Kempes, Diego Maradona, Real Madrid’s/Schalke’s Raúl González Blanco, Leo Messi, Gonzalo Higuaín, Zinedine Zidane, Bob Dylan, Ada Falcón, Leonard Cohen, Chet Baker, Gustav Mahler, Arvo Pärt, Carl Nielsen and so on...

Sorry to give you such long lists. Could have been even longer...

2) What are your favorite films, or films influential on your career, and/or what actors do you admire, and why?

Movies, to name a few: The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Godfather I & II, A Separation, The Fog of War, The Conformist, Los Santos Inocentes, The Deer Hunter, Casino, Lawrence of Arabia, Tokyo Story, Autumn Sonata, Sunrise, Andrei Rublev, Citizen Kane, A Place in the Sun, City Lights, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Greed, The Night of the Hunter, The Third Man, Gallipoli, Mother and Son, Stalker, Ivan’s Childhood, Red River, Taxi Driver, Frances, Network, Grand Illusion, L’Atalante, Throne of Blood, The Seven Samurai, The Sword of Doom, Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy, Carnival of Souls, Solaris (Tarkovsky’s original)...

Actors, to name a few: Montgomery Clift, Maria Falconetti, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Richard Jenkins, Sandy Dennis, Ellen Burstyn, Geraldine Page, Robert Duvall, Anna Magnani, Peter O’Toole, Toshiro Mifune, Dennis Hopper, Jessica Lange, James Dean, John Hurt, Dirk Bogarde, Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Glenda Jackson, Vanessa Redgrave, Barbara Stanwyck, Mary Pickford, Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Bergman, Gérard Depardieu, Jean Gabin, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Ulrich Thomsen, Max von Sydow, Bruno Ganz...

3) Did you read much fantasy or science fiction as a kid? Did you ever play Dungeons & Dragons or know anyone who did?

Never have played “Dungeons and Dragons.” As a kid I read Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and a few others. As an adult have admired Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and notebooks.

4) We talked a little about your work as an actor, painter, poet and musician. They all seem linked by story. So I’m wondering what you think is the significance or power of stories? Why are they so important?

We are the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell about others, the stories we read about everyone and every thing.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com

Viggo sees through the eyes of an outsider

[this originally appeared in the Boston Globe]

He’s best known for inhabiting a haunted and reluctant hero-king. But he’s also been a trailblazing thinker, a vigilante family man with a dark past, a Russian mobster, a swoon-worthy traveling salesman, and one of the last men alive on earth, determined to make sure he and a boy survive.

Starring in these movies - the “Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, “A Dangerous Method,’’ “A History of Violence,’’ “Eastern Promises,’’ “A Walk on the Moon,’’ and “The Road’’ - actor Viggo Mortensen assumes the shape of outsiders. His characters drift, wander, and resist the status quo. They eschew the spotlight. They forsake the obvious path to their fates.

That the actor is attracted to these roles - quiet, contemplative, often loners, men who conceal secret doubts, identities, and rages - “probably has something to do with who I am,’’ Mortensen says on the phone from Madrid. “I suppose I am conscious of being drawn to people who are a little different. Or who think for themselves.’’

On Monday, Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre will honor Mortensen for his independent outlook. Its Coolidge Award annually recognizes a film artist who “advances the spirit of original and challenging cinema.’’

Mortensen, 53, says he simply craves “connections’’ and “experiences’’ - two words that frequently punctuate his drawly, meditative speech (as do ruminations on art and mortality). Guided by a thirst for off-kilter adventures, he seeks projects that make him feel alive.

“I just try to choose things that are interesting, that are going to challenge me, that are going to make me a little nervous,’’ says the soft-spoken, gravelly voiced actor. “Because I know what makes you nervous, what makes you afraid. It’s usually things you don’t know anything about.’’

Example: Mortensen recently relocated to Madrid to perform in a Spanish-language play called “Purgatorio.’’ “[I was] afraid I wasn’t up to the task as an actor,’’ he says. Yet he discovered, “as usual,’’ that the work with the most emotional challenges ended up being the most enjoyable.

That kind of risk-taking is what the Coolidge is rewarding. Denise Kasell, executive director of the Coolidge, cited the eclectic, courageous choices of the actor, who also paints, writes poems, shoots photos, sings, plays piano, and runs his own small publishing house. “He’s a very accessible gentleman. He’s an artist himself,’’ Kasell says. “He really understands and gets what we are all about.’’

“And he said yes,’’ Kasell adds. “It’s that simple.’’

This week, the Coolidge has been mounting a retrospective of Mortensen’s films, which continues through Sunday with a rare marathon of the extended editions of “The Lord of the Rings’’ trilogy, followed by a Monday afternoon screening of “Eastern Promises’’ - the David Cronenberg film that earned Mortensen a 2007 best actor Oscar nomination - and a post-screening Q&A with the actor. Then comes a sold-out award presentation Monday night.

Asking Mortensen about his ideals can elicit passionate responses. When questioned in a follow-up e-mail, “Who were your heroes growing up as a child, and who are they today?’’ the actor sends an astounding 800-plus word answer, listing childhood heroes that range from “my father, my mother, various horses and dogs’’ to Mahatma Gandhi, Thor, Jesus of Nazareth, Odysseus, Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé), Jesse Owens, the crew of Apollo 11, Greta Garbo, Louis Armstrong, and Mozart, plus adult heroes including Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Anna Akhmatova, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, Luis Bunuel, Matisse, Margaret Bourke-White, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Leonard Cohen, and Gustav Mahler.

Mortensen’s passion extends to his commitment to his roles. To get under Aragorn’s skin for “The Lord of the Rings,’’ he wore his costume even while not shooting, and kept his practice sword always close at hand.

But fans who know the actor only from his Middle-earth orc-slaying may be surprised to learn that he’s been acting for nearly three decades. He made his film debut with a small part in 1985’s “Witness.’’ In those days, he would do “anything, something, anything’’ for acting experience, and to pay the rent. Which explains his journeyman gigs in TV’s “Miami Vice’’ and a couple of ABC “Afterschool Specials,’’ as well as in horror films such as “Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.’’

Whenever possible - “anytime it was really up to me and not the landlord,’’ he says - he chose parts that pushed him as an actor. Through the late 1980s and 1990s, he had supporting roles with indie directors such as Jane Campion (“The Portrait of a Lady’’), Sean Penn (“The Indian Runner’’), and Gus Van Sant (“Psycho’’), as well as a few mainstream films such as “Young Guns II,’’ “Crimson Tide,’’ and “G.I. Jane.’’

Directed by a relative-unknown at the time, Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings’’ felt like a gamble. “While we were making it, no one had any idea it was going to be a huge smash hit,’’ Mortensen says. The success quickly cemented his status as a leading man and introduced him to the fun-house world of celebrity life. “Walking down the street in any town or city in the world and having people look at you and start talking to you, convinced that they know you as well or better than they do members of their own family, that’s just an odd phenomenon,’’ he says. “I wouldn’t say it was a bad thing. It’s interesting.’’

Mortensen could have leveraged his “Lord of the Rings’’ fame into a parade of action-adventure paychecks. Instead, he’s largely championed diverse roles in smaller movies. How many fantasy heroes would go on to play a Russian mobster in “Eastern Promises,’’ and dare to let it all hang out, buck-naked, in a steam-room fight scene? Next up for Mortensen: playing the William S. Burroughs character in an adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road.’’

The idea of a career trajectory hasn’t crossed his mind. “Maybe I would have been smarter to have written down in a notebook, ‘Well, I’m going to play this part and this part before I’m too old to play this part,’ ’’ he says.

He views acting as “an extension of childhood play,’’ Mortensen says. “You have to just go for it. Just let yourself go and let yourself believe.’’

And each role is a chance to learn something new: “Each time I’m looking at the world or a part of the world from a point of view different than my own. Sometimes radically different. Sometimes from a point of view I would never care to have or identify with. But that’s the job.’’

Such a job has its own internal rewards, Mortensen emphasizes. “You can wake up feeling so-so about the world, and then because of what happens as soon as you get out of bed, something happens. You connect with someone, something, a book, and something happens that’s bigger than just you. It’s a connection with nature, a connection with people, a connection with a story that you are part of telling. . . . That’s what’s great about it.’’

But loyalty to indie cinema is a double-edged sword. Mortensen has at times grown frustrated with “irritating, dishonest, disappointing’’ people in the business, he says. He’s even contemplated quitting, but never has.

He harbors strong feelings about the Hollywood movie-making machine - its “frenetic quality,’’ the “money at stake,’’ the “hyping of the product,’’ the “award shows and prizes.’’ He complains that Cronenberg has never won an Academy Award or Golden Globe. “He deserves it way more than many who have won and more than half of those who get nominated every year,’’ Mortensen says. “I know he’s in the pantheon of greatest living directors, unquestionably, and he’s never been nominated.’’

Yet isn’t that the fate of those who take the road less traveled? They want recognition, they shun recognition. Yet they still hold out hope.

“Every once in a while, every couple of years, there’s one or two movies that really surprise you, because there is innovation,’’ Mortensen says. “Or people just do such honest work. Or such pure work or such interesting, original work every once in a while that it is the real thing. And it makes you hopeful.’’

Mitt Romney as a D&D Character?

Now that Presidential candidate Mitt Romney is wailing on his opponents Newt, Rick, and Paul, perhaps it's time for his deeds to be enshrined as a D&D character.

Artist Casey Jex Smith has been working on a series of works that depict people as D&D characters. Here, Mitt Romney, although unnamed, is shown as Lord Spelldyal, a 21st level warlord with 152 hit points, Boots of Speed and a Helmet of Authority.

The drawing was one of the works in the Dungeons and Dragons On & Ever Onward art show at the Soho Gallery of Digital Art in New York City. The show, which closed Jan 11, 2012, was curated by Timothy Hutchings, and featured works by Casey Jex Smith, Ryan Browning, Sean McCarthy, Rebecca Schiffman, Josh Jordan, Jeffrey Brown, Giovanni Garcia-Fenech, Chris Bors, Owen Rundquist, Andrew Guenther Jason Phillips, Ketta Ioannidou, Fiona MacNeill, Kitty Clark, Erol Otus, Steve Zeiser, Matt Brinkman, Chris Coy, and others.

And it featured historical selections from the Play-Generated Maps and Documents Archive.

More from Casey Jex Smith's D&D characters series here.

Image courtesy Allegra LaViola Gallery

[a version of this post originally appeared on wired.com's GeekDad]

Stunning Stormtrooper Cake Hits the Spot

Unable to shoot straight. Weak in the knees. Apt to fall for Jedi mind tricks, and fall over at the weakest of laser blasts.

In the Lucas universe, the typical stormtrooper is portrayed as a hapless soldier in service of the Empire.

Stormtroopers don’t tend to be very yummy, either … we assume.

But this footsoldier (pictured at left) was solidly-built, very tasty, and served not only Darth Vader. He also served several hundred hungry science fiction fans.

A crew from Boston-based Amanda Oakleaf Cakes worked like crazed jawas for two weeks to complete this 6-foot, 4-inch high, edible Imperial stormtrooper.

Constructed of white cake, Rice Krispies Treats and fondant (an icing made from sugar used to decorate and sculpt pastries), it weighed 300 pounds — and was devoured this weekend at the Arisia science fiction and fantasy convention by some 600 conventioneers in just two hours.

“Everyone assumes that because it’s such a crazy cake we must be ‘cheating’ in some way, but this isn’t the case,” said head baker Amanda Oakleaf. ”All sculpted and tiered cakes you see, be they ours or others, have some type of inner structure as cake simply collapses if staked over eight inches high.”

Creating the stormtrooper wasn’t easy as cake. Much like in sculpting with clay, making this massive dessert required an interior armature to support the cake. Oakleaf and her team made one from iron pipe, wrapped in plastic for food safety purposes. Every four inches (vertically), they inserted a cardboard divider to separate layers of cake, and every eight inches they attached a masonite board, secured to the iron pipe with pipe clamps.

“This does a number of things, including making the cake incredibly sturdy, but also making it easy to slice and serve,” said Oakleaf. The arms were made of solid sugar “because they were too narrow to use cake.” The lower legs below the knees and the bottom of the head were made of Rice Krispies Treats. She said the overall percentage of Krispie was 15 percent or less; the majority of the cake was, well, cake.

“The main reason that we used Krispie at all wasn’t because we couldn’t have used cake, but rather we just wanted to get a head start and Krispies stay fresher a lot longer than the cake does. Cake is a very time sensitive medium, and that is always our biggest challenge. Once it comes out of the oven the clock is running on freshness.”

Amanda Oakleaf started her cake business with her husband Tyler Oakleaf out of their bedroom apartment in 2008. Now they’ve expanded into a storefront in Winthrop, MA (just outside Boston) and currently employ ten cake artists.

Their previous best was a 5-foot tall Dora the Explorer cake for a Food Network Challenge a few years back. “Her head was massive (3 feet wide),” Oakleaf remembered. “It ended up crashing to the ground when we moved it to the judging table when the inner support slipped out of its socket.”

For now there are no plans for other geek-themed cakes. But, there’s always the possibility of a special request.

“We are a completely custom bakery so we take the orders as they come in,” Oakleaf said. “It’s always fun, and always a challenge.”

See a photo gallery of the entire construction process here at the website for Amanda Oakleaf Cakes.

And may the fondant be with you, always.

(photos courtesy of Amanda Oakleaf)

[This post originally appeared on GeekDad/wired.com]

Make-A-Wish Makes a Castle

So what if the expression is a cliché? For one small-town kid suffering from a disease, dreams — even medieval-themed dreams of knighthood, chivalry and adventure — do come true.

As reported by WMUR, a New Hampshire TV station, a 12-year-old boy with a rare disease called desmoid fibromatosis was made king of his domain this week.

The back yard of his house in a small N.H. town called Epping now includes a castle.

For some five years, David Morasco has been fighting the disease, which causes abdominal tumors that can grow into and even destroy adjacent tissue, organs and  bones, and are often treated with chemotherapy.

The Make-A-Wish Foundation of New Hampshire made his day — and possibly his life — when it pulled out all the stops to create this impressive and possibly impenetrable gift.

As it turns out, the project happened to be the foundation’s 1,000th wish granted to a N.H. kid. Not bad.

“It’s mind-blowing,” the 7th grader was quoted as saying. “It’s more than I could have imagined.”

The 24 foot by 24 foot formidable fortress, which took several months to build, has many of the features you’d want your real or fantasy castle to include: heavy double doors; crenelations, or battlements, at the top of a curtain wall (made of wood); four towers; staircases; a courtyard; two rooms; and a great hall. A catwalk behind the merlons winds around the structure. It’s even made of stone (stone facing, anyway).

The unveiling was a big enough deal to attract N.H. Gov. John Lynch, who showed up, took a tour and stayed around for castle-shaped cake. (Coincidentally, young Morasco lived in the town adjacent to where I grew up, Lee.)

“The anticipation of all this when he’s been through the dark periods, this is just something that’s really raised his spirits so much,” said David’s father, Mike Morasco.

As for King David, he told the TV cameras, “I’ve already started planning wars and parties and stuff.”

Go David. And get out there and slay that dragon.

More information and a video and slideshow here.

[Post originally appeared on wired.com/GeekDad]

Memoir Recounts Youthful Quest for Meaning in D&D, Comics, Zeppelin

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, and raised on secular Judaism, Cocoa Puffs and Gilligan’s Island, Peter Bebergal found himself on a quest. A spiritual quest that, as a teen, led him through comic books, Dungeons & Dragons and Carlos Castaneda, with stops in the world of hallucinogens, rock ‘n’ roll, and occultism. All were attempts to find a deeper, more meaningful path to personal illumination.

Bebergal’s new coming of age memoir, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood (Soft Skull Press) recounts that journey, using his own story and extensive research to explore the connections among popular culture, drugs, religion, and the craving for spirituality that America’s youth seeks, but rarely finds.

Bebergal is the also co-author of The Faith Between Us. He studied religion at Brandeis and Harvard Divinity School and writes frequently on the intersection of popular culture, religion, and science as well as reviews on science fiction and fantasy. Some of his essays and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Times Literary Supplement, Tablet Magazine, The Revealer, and The Believer. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife and son.

I had a chance to ask Peter Bebergal some questions — as well as happily geek-out on ’70s pop culture, D&D, Led Zeppelin and … wait for it … Freakies cereal.

Ethan Gilsdorf: Peter, why did you decide to write the book?

Peter Bebergal: At the age of 40, sober for many years, I found myself collecting psychedelic music again and reading counterculture/fringe spiritual texts, digging through the bins of underground comics at Million Year Picnic in Harvard Square. I realized that all these years later I was still drawn to this world. At the same time I started investigating and writing on the recent upsurge of psychedelic drug research and the burgeoning psychedelic subculture. I started to ask myself why my experiences led to where they had and despite them, why I still loved these ideas, this music, and these stories. I decided to investigate my own life and try to get beyond the traditional memoir by looking at myself as part of a particular cultural moment, the post ’60s generation who grew up in the shadow of that time.

Gilsdorf: What was so unique about the era of your coming-of-age?

Bebergal: The mid to late ’70s was a time of incredibly weird and wonderful fringe pop culture. You could buy ESP cards at any bookstore, Creepy and Eerie Magazine were part of a revival of horror and supernatural comics, In Search Of and books on UFOs were commonplace, but the undercurrent was a kind of spiritual dissociation. The Aquarian age never happened, but the doors of altered consciousness had been opened. There was no looking back. I began to understand how my own story was part of a much larger cultural moment. I was symptomatic of a kind of Phillip-K-Dickian-post ’60s spiritual schizophrenia.

Gilsdorf: As a kid also growing up in the same era, I remember being haunted by Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of TV series, as well as devouring books about the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot. There are tons of examples of the weird and occult breaking through in the ’70s to the mainstream, aren’t there? Think of the X-Ray Vision glasses you could order from the back of a comic book, or plans to build your own hovercraft, or spy cameras, ventriloquist dummies, all kinds of tricks and magic. Remember Freakies breakfast cereal? All about a post-hippie commune of misfit toys who lived in a tree. What was that about?

Bebergal: Freakies cereal is an amazing example of the fringe making it into the mainstream. But it was so giddily counterculture, almost like a hippie practical joke, and yet it seemed to have this deep mythology, replete with individual characters with their own personalities, and even the great mythic trope, a world tree where all the Freakies gathered. I had to have it! I recall it was hard to find though, and that it actually tasted kind of horrible, but they came with a terrific prize, a magnet in the likeness of one of the characters.

Gilsdorf: Yes, even to be a “freak” was celebrated, and money was to be made from that. I saved up whatever it was, 17 proofs of purchase from Freakies cereal boxes, to get my own “Snorkeldorf” T-shirt. There was a kind of vast commercialization of the unknown, of the weird and the unexplained. Big change from the 1960s, huh?

Bebergal: The end of the 1960s was the end of a grand narrative, one that was both political and spiritual, and that spoke to a young person’s rebellious instincts. By the 1970s all the ideas of the ’60s were now part of the popular imagination, and lost their edge, could no longer inspire the next generation in the same way, and church/temple hadn’t changed since the hippies showed the emperor had no clothes.

Gilsdorf: So where did one go from there, in the wake of this disillusionment?

Begergal: Many like myself turned to more fantastical narratives to fill the void. Marvel Comics, for example, contained an entire fully imagined universe. Characters from one comic appeared as guest stars in others, and their lives were linked by not only common cause, but by familial relationships, and strange genetic connections and mystical connections. The complex and cosmic Marvel Universe was all about the connections between one hero and another. I was obsessed with the Magneto/Wanda/Quicksilver family tree that also, inexplicably, involved the High Evolutionary [Editor's note: I didn't know who High Evolutionary was; turns out he's a superhero with extrasensory powers of clairvoyance, cosmic awareness and astral projection, among others. -- E.G.]

Gilsdorf: Somehow I missed drinking the superhero comic Kool-Aid. But I discovered D&D big-time. In Too Much to Dream, you talk about the connection between D&D and fantasy fiction and then the occult and psychedelics in your life. Can you explain it here?

Bebergal: I think D&D was the perfect early antidote to what had been an entire childhood filled with magical thinking and a kind of spiritual unease. D&D gave me a healthy channel to express these abstract feelings. It was a concrete manifestation of the imagination, but it had rules and structure. When I started reading the books about psychedelic experiences written in the ’60s, they were as wondrous and exciting as any D&D game or Silver Surfer comic, but they spoke to that deeper existential need. I put down my maps and rule books and picked up sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Gilsdorf: Being a huge Led Zeppelin fan, I have to ask: Where does Tolkien and Zeppelin fit into all this?

Bebergal: In the ’60s and ’70s there was a resurgent interest in Tolkien. Publishers put out encyclopedias of his world, linking the books to this vast mythology that by the sheer immensity of detail felt somehow real and maybe even a little “true.” This is what happens to the richest kinds myths, how they take on a quality of truth. Even Led Zeppelin sang about Mordor as if it was place they had visited and returned from. And for all of this, the new phenomena of role-playing gave you the tools to act out these stories, to create new worlds drawing from Tolkien, comics, even rock ‘n’ roll music.

Gilsdorf: I love that idea that, in their music, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were essentially role-playing characters who had gone on an adventure in Middle-earth, interacting with Black Riders and Gollum. Great concept. Any other musicians that did this? Styx? Kansas? Blue Oyster Cult?

Bebergal: That era was a wonderland of rock as hero quest. Styx sang about a great voyage by sea that turns into a journey into space, Kansas wrote about sky gods, prophecy and mystical insight, and my personal favorite Rush’s Farewell to Kings was an entire fantasy epic that ends with a journey into a black hole. And then of course there is the great 1970s science fiction band Hawkwind, who collaborated with and were inspired by Michael Moorcock.

Gilsdorf: What do you think makes some people look for meaning so desperately they are driven to the point of madness?

Bebergal: It starts with what is a fundamental part of the human experience. Religion and myth are attempts to contain this pursuit, to give it some symbols and ritual, to give it language. But for some people, the more structure you try to impose, the more they see it as an empty gesture, that God or whatever you want to call it cannot be contained by any hierarchy or imposed regulations. Occult or esoteric traditions are attempts to get beyond conventional wisdom to something more experiential, but in the modern world, they have become bound up with every kind of paranormal and fringe idea. Go into any New Age bookstore and conspiracy theories about Freemasons are on the shelf below Aleister Crowley, right next to the books on UFOs. Of course it can weigh you down. I have come to love this stuff with a bit more critical distance these days.

Gilsdorf: Have you ever thought, OK, all this spiritual stuff makes some sense, but maybe I just liked getting high?

Bebergal: This is, in many ways, the central question. There is no doubt that at the bottom of all this is my drug addiction. It ruled me for sure. But like all things, it too did not exist in a vacuum. All the expectations I had for what these substances would do for me were intimately tied into all things that drove my psychology; Fantastic Four comic books, the writings of Timothy Leary, the music of Pink Floyd. My expectations could never be met. I would always be let down, and therefore always be looking for the next high. At some point, though, that is all there was.

Gilsdorf: To me it seems geek culture — sci-fi, fantasy, gaming, etc. – is increasingly replacing traditional culture (church, parents, government, community) as a source of  moral or spiritual guidance to a whole generation of folks. Think of the wisdom received not from priests but Yoda and Gandalf. Can you comment as to why this phenomenon exists?

Bebergal: I think that there is this amazing intersection between geek culture and Wiccan/pagan communities. Even geeks need spirituality, but continue to turn to non-traditional places to find it. These traditions also speak, of course, to an interest in the fictional worlds of magic and old gods, etc.

Gilsdorf: What lessons do we learn from geek culture?

Bebergal: I seek the divine now in more mundane places; playing Legos and Minecraft with my son, watching a heron take flight from an inlet on the Charles River, looking at Saturn’s rings and moons through a telescope, listening to John Coltrane.

Gilsdorf: What about gaming. Have you returned to the fold?

Bebegal: The truth is, I am playing D&D again these days, another attempt to recapture some of that adolescent adventure without the drugs. But never, I must say, without the rock ‘n’ roll!

Gilsdorf: Yes, and rocking out to Zeppelin, I hope. “So I’ve decided what I’m gonna do now | So I’m packing my bags for the Misty Mountains | Where the spirits go now, | Over the hills where the spirits fly | I really don’t know.” I’ll pack my bags too, and see you in Middle-earth.

For more information about Bebergal and his book Too Much To Dream, visit  toomuchtodream.net.

Bebergal: I think the best recent example of this is the comic Hellboy, a devil spawn struggling to maintain his humanity and his goodness. His is the great lesson that we are more than our genes, more than our destiny even, be it familial, cultural, political. Most recently he had to sacrifice himself to save the earth. Pro sports and American Idol cannot tell this story. Only a comic book on cheap newsprint somehow has access to the deepest layers of myth and can make them modern and relevant.

Gilsdorf: Do you still crave mystical experiences? How do you access them?

Bebergal: At first I was worried any mystical search would lead me back to the self-destruction, but despite myself, in the years past I have had deep spiritual experiences. They did not singe the hair off my head, but they were profound and have been a reminder that our normal waking consciousness is capable of experiencing so much more. Whether or not psychedelic drugs are a positive catalyst for this, I cannot say. Some people, particularly those ingrained in traditions that use them as part of their religious rituals (the Native American Church for example), have found deep spiritual significance with them. All I know for sure is that they are not meant for me.

Gilsdorf: So where do you seek safer transcendental moments?

[this post originally appeared on GeekDad/wired.com]

Unknown Tolkien Letter Falls Out of Book

As reported on TheOneRing.net and elsewhere, a handwritten note written by J.R.R. Tolkien that he’d addressed to a couple he and his wife Edith had met on an unfortunate holiday just sold to an anonymous internet bidder for £1,700, or about $2,700.

“It’s a complete mystery how it turned up,” said Adrian Rathbone, an associate at Richard Winterton’s, the UK auction house where it was sold. In another report, Rathbone said the person who sold the letter had unexpectedly found it in the most unlikely place — tucked into a book the seller owned. One day, the letter fell out.

“It dropped out of a book they had,” Rathbone, said. “It wasn’t even a Tolkien book. We’ve brought in several experts who say it is real.

The letter, written in Tolkien’s script recognizable to anyone who has pored over maps in The Hobbit, dates to 1963.

“Rather a disgusting and costly holiday, but for us it was at any rate made memorable by your company and kindness,” Tolkien writes to the couple. “We thought of you yesterday, and hoped your journey home would be less unpleasant than our icy winds and snow have foreboded.”

Included with the letter was a Christmas card and a photograph of Tolkien and the couple the Tolkiens met on the trip (who are named Wilfrid and Nora). The couple the letter was addressed to wasn’t related to the seller, apparently, and the seller was also unnamed. So how that letter ended up in the seller’s hands is a mystery only a few people know — the seller and the auction house, perhaps. And the ghost of Tolkien himself.

[This post originally appeared on GeekDad/wired.com]