Bonnie Jo Campbell - The Letter Parade

The Letter Parade
For the family and friends of Bonnie Jo
April 2006

Planet Ass
As we enter the fourth year of the Iraq war, death, torture, mutilation and the prospect of terrorist acts on American soil are not the only dark forces eclipsing the usual sunny atmosphere of my small town. The distress of the ongoing conflict has increased my consumption of variety snack cakes and pot roasts, and this has caused my ass to expand to such proportions that it now casts a shadow over a good number of my close neighbors.
My initial growth began, along with the war on terror, on that eleventh day of September. Until then I had been maintaining my slender figure through rigorous exercise and healthful diet, a lifestyle inspired by democratic American principles. Until that time I also gave generously to the fight against hunger around the world. As the mighty framework of the trade towers collapsed, however, so did the tone of my glutei maximi, as I relaxed into my couch for a long bout of watching. "Why do they hate us?" I moaned, focusing my attention alternately on the T.V. and on my lap, which supported a half-thawed Boston Cream pie that I was eating with a big wooden spoon.
When I finally got up from the couch a week later, I tried to resume my regimen of jumping, running and charitable donations, but the muscles at my backside would not regain their former integrity. In the months and years following, through the casting away and re-donning of burqas in Afghanistan, through uncountable warrant-less wire-taps, through the mysterious detainments at Guantanamo Bay, my butt bulged and sagged, paralleling the decline of due process. Still, by adopting a style of long draping shirt, I was able to go about my business, calling little attention to myself, continuing to give the twenty dollars a month to a poor family in the Philippines, so the mother wouldn't have to work as a prostitute.
My enlargement continued at this modest pace until the evening of March 19, 2003. I was in the shower when I first heard news of the bombs, the trucks, the troupes, the plans for marching into Baghdad. With my initial lathering, I rallied my patriotism, but during my rigorous body-scrubbing, I came upon a deep dimple in the middle of my eastern-facing butt cheek. As I fingered the new blemish, I wept for those first war dead. Soldiers would fall, I knew, some as a result of ordinary mishaps in the desert, and some soldiers would shoot the wrong people, as they do in the heat of any battle. The initial supportive words about the war, issued by not only Tony Blair, but also by the Latvian and Slovakian representatives, soothed my American soul and made me crave their unique national dishes: the following day I filled my plate with bryndzove halusky, those great dumplings of Slovakia, and then I ate an entire Baltic-braised pork leg off a chafing dish.
A few weeks later, when Bush declared the mission accomplished, I purchased up a package of celery and considered light meals of salads and clear soups for the first time in a long time; after I paid my power bill, I made out a check to an organization that provides birth control and medical services to poor women in Bangladesh. Now, three years later, as the arguments continue over weapons of mass destruction, prisoner abuse by Iraqis and Americans, and the definition of civil war, my rear end has become a mountainous battleground of flesh craters, and it is only with difficulty that I am able to squeeze into the largest stretch pants made available by Kalamazoo Tent and Awning. Charity is out of the question, because I need all my money to pay for my own food.
For a late night snack this evening, I fry a slab of breaded cheese and think fondly back to better days. In 2000, when I received my Heifer International animal donations catalogue, my stock portfolio had done well enough that I put in an order for two dozen farm animals: rabbits for Tibetan children, cows for Guatemalans, chickens for Rwandans. Though it was December, I put on my bikini to celebrate my generosity and turned up the furnace, powered by inexpensive fuel oil, and when I caught sight of myself in any of the many mirrors that used to hang in my home, I was pleased. My body was at peace, as was the world, it seemed, and we enjoyed an abundance of sunlight during that winter.
This winter, however, the skies have remained gloomy and the temperatures have been bitter. Our nation has plunged into record deficit spending, tens of thousands of people are dead or maimed, and my husband's turbo-diesel Volkswagen Golf has become too tight a fit for me, necessitating my purchase of a specially-equipped war-themed sports utility vehicle. Driving requires a whole new sensibility. Just today another S.U.V. was close behind me. At one time, I would have rolled down my window and yelled, Get off my ass, you idiot. Today, however, my rear end was not only filling up my vehicle but spilling out the driver's side window behind me, blocking my view. I could not very well expect the other driver to get off my ass, as the whole world was quickly becoming my ass. Instead I fumbled in my Little Debbie carton for another twin-pack of banana creme rolls and sniffed, Why can't we all just get along?
In the old pre-war days, when I used to help the poor of other nations with my excessive annual income, when I ate sensible meals, I might say something like, That guy chaps my ass. Now, however, everything chaps my ass—there are not enough emollients on the planet to keep my ass smooth.
I have explained to my husband that he must be patient while I search for the right protein-carbohydrate balance, but after numerous couch and bed mishaps he has moved to a cot in the garage, which he warms with a kerosene heater. He spends a lot of time tinkering with his Ford tractor with the front-end loader, and I expect that he will need it soon as a way of transporting me to and fro.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict used to cause me physical pain—it was a railroad spike in the ass, I used to say. But now that my bulk has numbed most of my physical sensations, that distant conflict feels more like a dried pea. The last time I felt a great pain in my back end, I had, in fact, sat on a railroad spike. It was a shock because I had thought I was standing near the tracks—my ass extends out so far in all directions that there is little difference now between my standing and sitting.
Our government whisks the slim and elegantly dressed Condaleeza Rice all over the world in its attempts to convince various dictators to join us in the war on terror and promote peaceful capitalism. Perhaps they should instead fly to my ass and search for world peace in the nooks and crannies of the expanding adipose tissue there, for I am built as much of falafel as of matzo; my flesh is a reconciliation of kidney pie and creme brulee. Here in my pimpled folds, even the diverse cultures of America and Iraq have mingled, in an alliance of hamburgers and masgouf, tuna casserole and quzi, in which a very young lamb is, deliciously, stuffed with more lamb.
While I watch television, I invite Donald Rumsfeld and all the evil terrorists to kiss my giant ass, but my heart is not in it. I would switch to the food channel, but I must be sitting on the remote control. Similarly, I haven't seen my husband for days. My only visitors are the teenage grocery delivery boys who keep their distance from me as I pay them. Later, I tell myself, I should sit down to a dinner plate of broccoli spears, steamed tofu, and a little pile of brown rice and then I should send a goat to a Kurdish kid. As I cook up the evening's first box of deluxe mac-and-cheese, I really do try to focus beyond myself, try to think of women in African villages taking control of their economic and reproductive lives, but there seems to be little beyond my physical borders any more, and the voice in my giant American ass says, you need this, you deserve this, and I fill my plate.
Chihuahua racing: sport of kings
Monica Friedman writes from Tucson, Arizona:
First of all, this is not a joke, and it's not fiction. My boyfriend, Sparky and I really went to the dog track and witnessed the noble pastime of Chihuahua racing, a tradition that stretches back at least 2 years, possibly even 3. Official records have been lost to the vagaries of history.
Through amazing persuasive efforts on my part, we arrive at the track on time, but the line stretches out the building and through the parking lot. Non-racing spectator Chihuahuas are everywhere: curled up in the arms of huge, thuggish men, decked out in leopard-print jackets to match their owners' stiletto heels, straining their leashes as little kids reel them in. over the loudspeaker, the announcer introduces the racers in the first heat. "Number 1, Pico, loves to eat. Number 2, Paco, thinks he's a cat. Number 3, Chiquita, likes to chase cats. That should be interesting combination, folks. Number 4, Pepe, is shy. We won't expect much from him tonight." He speaks in irony-tinged deadpan, well aware of the ridiculousness of the event, amused despite himself. "Let’s put these puppies in the box and see what they can do!"
"We’re going to miss everything," I mutter as the line creeps closer to the building.
Just then, an extremely sketchy little man approaches us with the manner of a ticket scalper: shoulders hunched, head inclined forward, chin down. "Don’t say anything," he says in a low voice, and presses bright pink general admission tickets into our hands before disappearing.
Yes. We were miracled into the dog track (price of admission: $1.25). However, this gets us inside ahead of the line, and we catch the second heat from the clubhouse.
To avoid even the slightest confusion, it should be noted that these are not professional racing dogs. These are tiny little yark-yark rat-puppies in knitted sweaters with shivering, pointy tails. Contestants are selected by randomly drawing names from a hat. The racecourse is about 100 feet long. Dogs require two handlers: one (usually a woman) at the finish line to call her baby, the second (often a man or little kid) to carry the dog to the start line and deposit it in the box.
And they're off! The box opens. For a moment, nothing happens. Nothing happens for a short while. Then a few bewildered dogs step out, blinking into the air as if opening their eyes for the first time. Their bodies twitch. Most notice their owners standing behind the box and dash back around to the other side. Wiggling dogs are in constant motion, jogging the wrong way, nudging the dogs beside them, sniffing the side of the track. It’s time to play!
Eventually, one dog hears his mommy calling from the finish line. He turns and prances leisurely down the track. The audience cheers, howls with laughter. He tosses his head, proud with the attention. The announcer says, "And it's the three, the three with a clear lead," calling the race as if an actual race were happening. Just as it appears this lone dog will finally cross the finish line, a tinier dog hears its mommy calling. It dashes out from the little knot of dogs still milling around the box as their owners try to push them in the right direction, and jets down the track, coming up on the oblivious number three. The latecomer passes the lead dog just before the finish line and the crowd screams with delight. An upset! "And it's the one! The one by a nose!" the announcer tells us. But the one is on a roll. He dodges the humans' legs at the finish line and takes off past the boundaries of the event. His handler goes after him; the one doubles back and slips in between a crack in the barrier that divides the lanes from the center of the track.
All the while, I am laughing literally until tears stream down my face and Sparky is actually holding me up. We slip down to the track and watch the third heat from the rail (not a great view) and then get into the bleachers.
The fourth heat starts like the others, but just as I whisper to Sparky, "you'd think one of these dogs would start humping another," little number seven tries to jump up on big(ger) number six. All the other dogs have run behind the box or started sniffing the starting gate. Number six hears her mommy and starts to strut down the track, with number seven dancing around her, leaping over her. "And it's the six! No, the seven! No, the six! The seven!" When they approach the finish line, they swing around like figure skaters and dance back in the opposite direction. Their owners shoo them around and they repeat the steps as if the dance has been professionally choreographed. "It’s the six! No, the seven! No, the six! No, the seven! I think these dogs are going to get married after the race!" this goes on for a while, the two dogs sashaying back and forth in flirtatious fun. Finally the announcer decides Chihuahua racing needs a new rule: time limits. He instructs the owners to hold their dogs aloft and lets the audience decide the winner: spunky little number seven.
"Who thinks we should do this event twice a year?" the announcer asks. The audience cheers. "Who thinks we should have more than four heats?" The audience screams. "Who thinks we should increase the prize from one hundred to two hundred dollars?" The audience goes wild. "We’re going to do that in June, OK?" Delirious mayhem ensues. The final race, featuring the winners of each heat, will not be held until later, after the real (greyhound) races. But that is all we need to see.
"Was it as good as you thought it would be?" Sparky asks.
Still wiping tears from my eyes and hanging on Sparky to keep myself upright, I answer, "It was so much better than I imagined." We agree to return in June, with his daughter. All that remains is to report that, in the bleachers, we met the cousin of that dog that repeatedly won the ugliest dog in the world contest. This baby, his owner informed us, was half Chihuahua, half Chinese crested. He essentially looked like a miniature goat with a feather coming out of his head.
And that, my friends, is Chihuahua racing, an event that needs no embellishment.
Christopher Magson returns from Florence
and writes about his brief time in France:
As one examines a map of Charles DeGaulle airport it becomes increasingly apparent that this transportation center resembles nothing so much as a series of dilapidated concrete vaginas. Recently, after spending two weeks in Italy, I was forced to spend twenty-two hours encapsulated within the organically inspired terminals awaiting a flight to Detroit. The trip itself was great, if somewhat damp, and really the only low point, aside of course from the damnable omnipresence of tomatoes, was the connecting flight in Paris, or rather outside of Paris in some unpronounceable suburb where this abominable structure was plopped down like a fat unwieldy whore on a greasy couch. On the way to Italy, we met our connecting flight with a minute or two to spare, but it was not to be so easy on the way back, although we had left a trail of breadcrumbs the first time which the janitors had somehow missed.
Our turbulent flight from Pisa to Charles DeGaulle was aboard a small aircraft which snaked through the Pyrenees, approached Paris and then landed in the vicinity of Belgium, necessitating a journey by bus back to the actual airport which lay hazily in the distance, lit in the stubborn fog by the warming glow of burning Renaults and Peugeots.
After lurching to a halt and stumbling into the facility under the surly glare of angry French infants wearing crisp uniforms and carrying submachine guns (which seemed to chafe their soft pudding-like shoulders), we were left to find our next flight in Terminal 2D. On the map it would seem to be directly across our point of entry but it was not so easy to find. We needed to traverse a labyrinthian series of hallways and tunnels and submit our passports to subway conductors in tollbooths and be irradiated several dozen times before we were allowed to ask directions (To be fair, the place is a great feat of French engineering when the walls aren’t collapsing and crushing passers-by, and the way that space is saved by the dual utilization of stairwells as urinals is really quite marvelous and a real time-saver).
It was only after my valuable camera bag was searched the fourteenth time that we found the gate from which our homeward flight would depart. Alas, it took too long to explain once again that my flexible shutter release cable was not, in fact, a screwdriver or other terrifying implement and we were delayed in reaching our departure gate. The gleaming aircraft was still attached to the building, and though we watched our bags travel up the conveyor into the open belly of the jet, we were not allowed to board. A hurried and muffled phone call was made to some unknown panjandrum, but no. We were vermin and would have to go elsewhere, even as our duffle bags were to be treated as the duffle bags of kings. We would have to go downstairs to the Air France complaint department. After waiting a half hour in line to reach our complaint toady we were politely informed that we were in the line for business-class complaints and had to wait to be ignored in the coach-class line. Finally, it was confirmed by a smiling apparatchik—we were officially fucked. Air France routinely schedules connecting flights too close together—they are aware that a certain percentage of the unwary passengers will not be able to get their flight. My friend Jan's countenance had a more indignant glower than my own, so he was able to get on a flight to New York (Boston was his destination) that night if he could find the bus that would take him to the place where the possibility existed that an airplane could be found, and, perhaps, boarded. We shook hands resolutely and parted, each to face our separate, dire fates alone. I had missed the last flight of the day to Detroit and would have to wait until the following morning, and so had only to find a way to spend the interval. I was offered a coupon for dinner and breakfast, alcohol excluded (Oh, France, have the terrorists already won?) and I was wearily offered a voucher for some facility called a Zero-tel which lay an incomprehensible distance away, reachable only by a grueling series of bus rides through smoldering gypsy shanty towns and cement barricades peopled by right-wing fascist beret-wearing vigilantes in long-sleeved striped jerseys festooned with yellow bandanas and angrily brandishing broken wine bottles as we would have passed by on our weary way to cockroach- infested shacks littered with seeping greasy bidets and violent soccer games on TVs played loudly by Serbo-Dalmatian room-mates who would keep us awake all night shouting Slavic obscenities into huge green crank-up cell phones that worked only intermittently, while all the time blearily eyeing my valuable camera bag, fearing that I would fall asleep and miss my flight, and thus having then to live forever there, huddling in a greasy Mittel-Europan tenement where the only people would could afford gasoline and cheese were those smarmily manning the omnipresent armored vehicles, men who would douse the unhappy inhabitants with water-cannons and thick yellow tear-gas.
Years ago, I was stuck at Amsterdam's Schipol airport and had a great time staying overnight in the terminal. In those happier days you could place your valuable camera bag in a sturdy locker, pocket the key and take a speedy, economical train downtown for a chicken sate and a couple of beers, pop into a café for a quick toke and a table-dance, then head back to the airport and catch a nap in a cheery place where everyone speaks English and your flight is never delayed.
Hooray for the Dutch!
A happy folk who legalize prostitution and shake their fists only at the sea! Charles DeGaulle is not Schipol, however. The times have changed as well and you can't leave anything in an airport anymore. Well, you can, but they'll blow it up and charge you for the expense and then beat the bottom of your feet with bamboo rods on Fox News Live.
It was while searching for a bus for terminal 2E and looking at a map of the place that the unfortunate resemblance to a lady's swimsuit area became obvious. The curves, the carpeted arrival areas, even the glass side panels glistening with moisture—I was going to spend the night in a giant French cooter.
Vaginas aside, the place reminds one of a vast semi-abandoned Olympic site used once briefly and despairingly in a bankrupted third-world debtor nation years ago and now serving as a parking lot for airplanes and as a training area for bus drivers and their harlots. The structure itself gets in the way of what it is actually supposed to do, which is to get people onto airplanes. It is instead a giant bus-port with some aircraft parked nearby. There are some planes which can be boarded at the terminal—you can see them from your bus as they suckle at the building, but most flights are reachable only by bus. The terminals themselves cannot be walked to. I got on a bus to get to terminal 2E to await my flight, but the terminal was closed until 6am. The bus driver was very nice and let me off at terminal B which stays marginally occupied at night and is the favorite of all the bus drivers. I could get to my terminal by bus when it opened. Staying all night in a public area waiting for a bus is boring and makes you feel like a refugee even if you have cash and a boarding pass in your pocket. I found a cafeteria where I could trade my tattered coupon for a baguette smeared with a semi-organic material and ingested it stoically while the well-dressed German at the next table stared bitterly at his lap-top. At one end of the terminal there was a bathroom where I shaved and tried to ignore the Spanish midgets wrestling eels in the closed stall at the end of the row. I walked around the terminal and looked at the duty-free shops and found an internet terminal which cost 10 euros for 20 minutes. They turned off the heat (to save fuel for the buses, perhaps) and the lights were dimmed. We were occasionally prodded awake by gun-toting teenagers with epaulets protecting their soft quivering shoulders so they could snort derisively at our passport photos. I sank into a pre-mammalian torpor next to a shivering African in a thin suit and was dimly aware of hyperactive Korean kids playing at soccer with what may well have been a human head wrapped in a sack until they were quashed by the authorities. I tried to use my valuable camera bag as a pillow but it was too full of valuable clunky stuff.
So the night passed with the wet drizzle of the plate-glass reflecting dimly the flaming Citroens in the distance. Occasionally a well-dressed young woman in a blue uniform would prance by and briskly ignore us, obviously a bus driver’s harlot. Some turbaned janitors drove a squeegee device around for a bit and then finally it was morning and I took a twenty minute bus ride to a huge unfinished warehouse. Although DeGaulle is decades old by now, it is still under construction. There was a vast waiting area and a small place to buy a coffee-thing and a croissant-thing smeared with red stuff. There was a series of kiosks with televisions embedded in them, each projecting the same looped images of stick insects and mountain climbers.
Finally we were lined up. Our boarding passes were haughtily ignored and we were all allowed to go to the next bus and wait, standing on board until our bus driver arrived after having serviced his harlot and had breakfast. Then amidst the queasy diesel fumes the bus started and took us on our final 15-minute bus ride to a winged thing looming forsaken above the more valued buses. From the top of the rickety ladder that hooked onto the paint-chipped entranceway I could see the wet cement pile of DeGaulle airport shimmering wanly beyond the bus fumes.
Adieu! Au revoir, le vagin de Charles DeGaulle!
I was on my way to Detroit at last, with only a semi-retarded Bangladeshi man-boy coughing up phlegm loudly and continually for eight hours in the seat directly behind me to distract me from my grim and morbid reveries, and only three half-bottles of free Air France merlot to assuage my own internal remonstrances as I was wafted smoothly over the cloud-tops and bus lanes far below toward that place on Earth which resembled most my disjointed and increasingly mawkish memories of home.
Goulash News:
Don “Smitty” Smith (1993) writes: I am living in Chicago with my wife Valerie after retiring from Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois. Our daughter and son-in-law, also living in Chicago, purchased (with help from her parents) a lake house in Three Rivers, Michigan. I will station one of my bicycles there and plan to spend this summer touring along the Great Lakes.
The Russia trip opened many doors for me at Caterpillar. With the experience on my resume I was offered a job in the Product Source Planning Department that allowed me the opportunity to travel often to Russia and Eastern Europe. I also investigated sourcing of Caterpillar product in China, leading to my being assigned to establish a Hydraulic Excavator facility in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, PRC.
I lived in this small farming community of 1 million people for 4 1/2 years beginning in 1996. I rode my bike everyday in a tangle of Chinese three wheelers, dilapidated trucks and vegetable carts. I was also fortunate to travel throughout Asia on my time off. The experience there was the highlight of my career and I owe that opportunity to Goulash Tours.
After my return to the States I continued my love affair with the bicycle and toured the Scottish Highlands with a German friend I met in China. Ricardo and I were riding through Kenmore, Scotland on September 11, 2001, and other than this interruption enjoyed a three-week adventure in this beautiful land of heather and Scottish whiskey.
I retired from Caterpillar, after 35 years, on March 1 2005, purchased a new Waterford touring bike and made plans for another bicycle adventure. Last summer I took the train to San Francisco, rode up the Pacific coast to Washington and then returned to Chicago on the newly established Lewis and Clark bicycle trail.
My wife of 34 years, Valerie, left China after two years as she was not able to work and became bored living in a guarded compound. She came to Chicago to be with our children and found lucrative employment. Since 1998 we have had an apartment in the city. After my retirement I sold our house in Peoria and moved north. During my extended ride last summer she purchased a small condo in the city where we now live.
I have kept all of the papers related to the 1993 Russian tour and discovered that the address listed for Mary Szpur at that time is only one block from where we now reside. I ride my "city bike" through the neighborhoods and cook and keep house for my generous provider. Val continues to work in the Loop and pays my beer tabs.
Aileen Phillips-Schloerb, of Chicago, offers her assistance with Yellow Lentil Soup. I'm so glad you didn't ask me for a recipe because I don't know how to put those together. I cook with the right side of my brain so the best thing to do is come here and let me cook you some more. if you are having an immediate craving for the stuff however, I don't really want you to suffer. In French the lentils I use are called "Lentilles corrail" but that won't help you find them unless you are in France. I don't know what they are called here but before you cook them up they look orange. I would think you could find them. Our local Hyde Park Co-op has them. Because I don't cook with much of the left side of my brain I don't have many words to help you locate ingredients or do things with them very precisely but here's a rough sketch of the gestures:

get a chicken and put it in a pot with lots of water to cover it.
boil, boil, boil until your house is nice and warm (2 or 3 hours?)
in the meantime, you've rinsed your lentils in water and left them to soak
then take the chicken out and dump the lentils in and boil boil boil some more until they lose their shape.
saute a big bunch of onion in an iron skillet add curry powder and add after the lentils have been boiling for a while
add salt near the end to taste

the Kurds of Turkey make this soup with a bit of chopped up spicy peppers and fresh mint added in at the end. it is a good wintery meal. if you have old baguette you don't know what to do with you can break it into bits and pour the soup over it for added substance. let me know if it works and please do come visit us again soon!
News: Bonnie is teaching at Kalamazoo College until June, replacing fiction guy Andy Mozina while he’s on sabbatical. Darling Christopher has started roasting his own coffee beans on the stove. He has photos from his Florence trip, a few of which you can see online at: http://www.photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=588951. Mike Campbell has returned from his six-month love junket to Midland Michigan (on which topic he waxes poetic) and is currently working the night shift in a plastics factory that doesn't stink of melted plastic at all, he says. Email him and he'll send you an amazing photo of the Dow Chemical. Premie baby Kennedy Campbell is still doing very well, though her parents are still puzzling things out. Sheila Campbell goes to Ann Arbor for complicated medical tests. Most of the Lipsons went on a two-week trip to Mexico, six adults and twelve kids. Sam Lipson writes, "Once there are more than a certain number of kids you just stop trying to figure out where they are and what they're doing. Gennine and I took a 3-day side-trip to Havana. It was like Bucharest in old days. I HIGHLY recommend the trip." Meanwhile, in another part of Mexico, Janie Boer died. Her gentleman friend Steve Gnehm writes: "Our dear friend Yani died of a heart attack while doing something she loved, in a place she loved. She was on a friend's boat sailing out for a race in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. She couldn't have been in a better place to end her journey." Perhaps the next LP will contain some memorials to this cultural icon of Comstock, Michigan. On the up-side, on that same day, January 20th, Rachael Perry, my webmaster, gave birth to Ella Francine Showerman. If this is some kind of reincarnation, Rachael and her husband Steve Showerman have just brought themselves home a wild girl.
Writing News: Melissa Fraterrigo’s book is out from Livingston Press, The Longest Pregnancy. Go to http://www.melissafraterrigo.com and order your copy today. Bonnie's novel about losing a farm is a finalist in the Bellwether contest---that's Barbara Kingsolver's contest. Andy Mozina is a finalist in the Mary McCarthy Fiction Contest (that's Sarabande). Heidi Bell won an Illinois Arts grant so she can work less and write more for a few months. Carla Vissers is in charge of the prestigious Hope College writing series for a year, so expect some fabulous writers to show up around here. Tim Gatreaux, perhaps?
Send news, notes, letters to bonniejo@iserv.net or PO Box 52, Comstock MI 49048.
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