The next person to press their forehead to my shoulder and weep over the fate of the printed word will be fined (standard practice) and then made to sit in a comfortable chair with a copy of the emerging writers issue of Urbanite. In it, there is a down right inspiring interview with the husband and wife team (writer Matthew Swanson and illustrator Robbi Behr) who run a tiny press called Idiots’ Books. They are purveyors of “odd, commercially non-viable illustrated books” distributed through a subscription service. As long as there are relentlessly innovative storytellers like these two around, words will find their way to the page and the page will find its way to a reader (who will pay for it, I assure you).

Lately, Swanson and Behr have been creating short stories they call One-Page Wonders, which Urbanite describes as “circular confections of words and images whose elements can be cut, folded, and manipulated by enterprising readers.” One of these delightful creations is included in the magazine, and you can watch how it works in the video at the bottom of this post.

Swanson and Behr are also teachers, and Urbanite  asked them about the advice they give to aspiring writers:

Urbanite:  When you’re teaching student writers, do you give them the brutal truth about their dim prospects for actually making a living with this skill? How do you prepare young people for a career in 
this business?

Matthew: Our bottom line is to try to teach them to be thinking people. Even though we are helping them with their craft, we care far more about the evolution of thought and the development of concept and the ability to draft an idea and articulate it. That is paramount to us.

Robbi: For the writing to work, it’s not just about spinning an interesting narrative; it’s about getting an idea across in a thoughtful way. In terms of preparing them to be writers, mostly we just tell them it’s work. No matter what you do, if you’re going to be successful at it, you have to work. If you’re not willing to just do the hard work, it’s not going to happen.

Matthew: We also tell them that both of us had to spend a decade mucking through the professional world while developing other skills and creating salaries for ourselves so that we could go off the grid. This myth of just sitting in your apartment and creating art and having it become your career might work for a few really lucky people, but in general making art is kind of a deliberate byproduct of a life plan that includes some other things that you have to do along the way. Hopefully, they are things that you enjoy and have relevance.

 Here's the (very charming) video demonstration of a One-Page Wonder:

And hey! Visit our new homepage for great writing, curated by Utne Reader editors and always changing.

Source: Urbanite

Image courtesy of Robbi Behr.

Finally: Garden guidance for those of us who don’t have big, sunny, plant-friendly backyards. The Baltimore-based magazine Urbanite offers gardening tips for difficult city lots (scroll down a bit for the article), suggesting what to grow in each of four funky urban yards: the shady yard, the all-concrete yard (a.k.a. the “no-yard yard”), the hilly yard, and the “rowhouse strip.” With handy illustrations! It's a nice reminder of how flexible urban gardening can be.

The image at left is a typical Baltimore rowhouse strip: "It's long, thin, and hotter than hell in the summertime," Urbanite writes, but there's still plenty of potential.

(And while you're at it, consider turning your old bike wheel rims into a support for climbing plants.)

Source: Urbanite

Image courtesy of Kimberly Battista.

With money getting tight across the country, people are dusting off their bicycles for a cheap alternative to cars. That’s not entirely a good thing for people who were biking all along. Bike lanes get crowded and police officers become more likely to crack down on bicyclists who flout the law, according to former Utne Reader editor Craig Cox writing for the Minneapolis Observer Quarterly. At times, bicyclists elevate “reckless cycling habits to a form of political/cultural protest.” That works, if it’s a small number of bicyclists on the road, but if the streets are filled with surly bikers going the wrong way down one-way streets, the law breaking becomes a problem. 

Even before the police start making arrests, the cultural divide between car drivers and bikers has already grown from a crack into a chasm. The Urbanite magazine is hosting a road rage roundtable, where spandex-clad bicyclists can hurl insults at car drivers, while enraged motorists can scream about the need to ban bicycles from public roads.

The United States has become “a nation which recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people’s actions,” George Monbiot wrote back in 2005. Our reliance on driving cars is his example of this anti-social behavior, but bicyclists can be just as bad. “When you drive,” he writes, “society becomes an obstacle,” rather than something you are a part of.

Image by Foxtongue, licensed under Creative Commons.

Sources: Minneapolis Observer Quarterly (article not available online), The Urbanite, Monbiot.com

Most people don’t want to turn to check cashers and payday lenders to do their banking, but for some people in West Baltimore, there are no legitimate bank branches within walking distance.

The Urbanite cited a 2008 Brookings Institution report on the “non-bank basic financial services industry,” which found that one neighborhood convenience store providing check cashing services for a fee is “at the epicenter of a west-side financial services desert—approximately four square miles with no convenient access to basic services such as checking and savings accounts.” No wonder we have yet to stunt the growth (out of necessity) of fringe banking practices—for many, it’s the only convenient and feasible option for paying their bills on time.

Thankfully, a new coalition has formed to help residents. The Baltimore Cash Campaign aims to help low-and moderate-income families become financially literate. The group organizes free tax preparation services at trusted community locations and helps educate and provide resources to residents on checking accounts, certificates of deposit, and savings options, with the goal of turning those initial sessions into long-term practices—an important first step toward a larger financial conversion that’s desperately needed, especially when you consider some general findings from the Brookings Institution report: Households collectively pay more than $8 billion in annual fees to these non-bank establishments, and a full-time employee can lose upwards of $40,000 of earnings by using these fringe banking services instead of traditional banks. Yow!

 Source: Urbanite

The Urbanite was nominated for an Utne Independent Press Award this year for its social/cultural coverage.

The story of the death and burial and 15-year-old Delvon Reshad Butts, published in Baltimore’s Urbanite, ought to be read aloud in every journalism school classroom in America. Reporter Martha Thomas begins her piece with Delvon’s murder on the sidewalk around the corner from his house and somehow, without ever loosening her grip on that unspeakable tragedy, she writes of the conflicting theologies of a mourning mother and a preachy pastor; the brutal economics of burial for poor people; and African-American mourning rituals. Stories like Delvon’s are often exploited by ratings-crazy television news crews or quick hit newspaper coverage. Martha Thomas spent months with this story and it shows. You’ll have a hard time convincing me of the imminent demise of journalism so long as reporters and storytellers like Martha Thomas walk the streets.

Source: Urbanite

Image by Christopher Myers. 

Most dollhouses scenes don’t feature miniature corpses hanging from ropes or life-like blood spatters evoking a crime-scene feel in each room. Most probably aren’t used by police officers, either.

            The latest issue of Baltimore’s Urbanite features a handful of hidden secrets lurking in the Charm City, which includes a 60-some-year-old collection known as the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Michael Yockel writes, “In naming her creations [Frances Glessner] Lee invokes a police dictum: ‘Convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.’”

            All told there are 18 tiny, gruesome dioramas, which are used in seminars to school police in forensics and solving murder cases. Too bad Jimmy McNulty and crew didn’t have these.

The Urbanite is nominated for a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award for its social/cultural coverage.

Source: Urbanite

If you’re in Baltimore and you see a small group of prisoners wearing green jumpsuits and swinging two-foot machetes, thank them—they’re saving history. Baltimore’s Urbanite magazine reports on the effort to clean up the city's oldest African American burial ground—originally dedicated as the “City of the Dead for Colored People” and later called the Mount Auburn Cemetery—which it describes as “a botanical nightmare, its tombstones enveloped in a wild morass of timber, trash, rampant overgrowth, and tangled vines as thick as a hawser line.”

Now joined by university students with sonar instruments for aligning markers to their proper graves, the prisoners have been hacking through the “wild morass” for months, occasionally encountering coffins pushed close to the sod by roots and even the occasionally human bone emerging from the earth.

The cemetery is home to freed slaves, Afro-American newspaper founder John Henry Murphy, and boxing legend Joe Gans. And it is home to countless men like Anthony L. Brown, who was buried in 1972 at the age of nineteen:

Tony Brown was one of the great Dunbar High School basketball players and a member of the Poets’ 1971-72 team, which went undefeated in his senior year. He received offers from most of the major basketball colleges in the country, only to be stabbed to death by a girlfriend before choosing a school. He is buried beneath a couple of short two-by-fours nailed into a cross, painted white and inscribed in black marker: Anthony L. Brown, 11.18.53-03.28.72—Better Known as ‘Tony the Tiger.’ Dunbar Basketball Star.

Want to see this incredible place? We rustled around a bit and turned up gallery on the Preservation Alliance, Inc. website and a Flickr set of photographs from Mount Auburn Cemetery:

Source: Urbanite 

Images by Patty Boh.

In the January issue of Urbanite, a magazine that is something of a love letter to the city of Baltimore, Richard O'Mara profiles a local newspaperman who is slowly unearthing the history of his father--a Czech actor and singer who was killed by the Nazis in an Austrian concentration camp. The story covers just one page and begins like this:

Imagine, if you can, a frigid December night in 1941 at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. German soldiers haul an inmate outside. They strip him naked. They tie his hands. They douse him with cold water and leave him to die.

This is how Tom Hasler imagines his father’s death. The Gestapo’s minions at Mauthausen entertained themselves by making such “ice statues” out of human beings. The practice was a new form of torture introduced in the fall of 1941, and while accounts of Karel Hasler’s death vary, most say he froze to death. Soon after, Hasler’s wife received from the Germans notice of his death—of pneumonia. A month before he died, his son, Tom, had been born in Prague.

Hasler's father was not one of the Nazi's millions of Jewish victims. "One of Tom’s goals," O'Mara writes, "is to stimulate interest in an aspect of the Holocaust that he believes has not received sufficient attention: the murders during the war of millions of non-Jews—gypsies, Poles, Slavs, union leaders, homosexuals, Communists, the aged, the physically and mentally disabled, and others who deviated from Nazi ideas of who should live and who should die. Karel Hasler was one of these victims, and in a way, so was his son."

You can read the rest here. And you can watch an arresting eight-minute video about Tom Hasler and his father right here:

Baltimore’s Urbanite is a favorite here in the Utne Reader library. It’s a local/regional magazine, yes, but the sheer spunk and variety of its coverage propels its relevance right across the Mississippi. (If anyone further west cares to weigh in, please do so!)

Over the past year or so, I’ve come to think of its reader-submitted “What You’re Writing” section in the same breath as the beloved “Readers Write” section published by the Sun, winner of a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for best writing. We’ve culled short pieces from both of them for reprint in our magazine—Denise Herrera’s “The Purloined Library,” and Terri Solomon’s “I Just Started Smoking. Again.”

This month, I’m particularly taken with Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson’s mini-essay for Urbanite. She begins:

“Turn off the lights,” he’d say—leaving me in the dark.

“Keep the heat at 62,” he’d say—turning the thermostat to the left.

“Don’t flush the toilet every time.” I’d ignore that edict, even if he did not.

My father was not a conservationist. He was cheap.

Read the rest of it on Urbanite’s website.