Mickelsson's Ghosts Reissued

2008-09-06T14:25:00.004-04:00

A week from today, Cate Camp and I board a train to New York to do what we can to get our 16' work-sample of SUNLIGHT MAN, our personal documentary on John Gardner, before a slew of industry professionals from around the world at IFP Film Week. I expect it will be a grueling, yet rewarding experience, though we have not yet finalized arrangements for where we'll stay and who we'll get time to see.

But those trials and tribulations seem almost a vague and doable dream just now, as in today's mail, I received a copy of New Direction's reissue of Mickelsson's Ghosts, complete with the illustrations (photographs) from the original Knopf edition. The fourth of their reissues of his novels – the others are October Light, Nickel Mountain, and The Sunlight Dialogues – this is the first of their publications to incorporate the illustrations he loved (and insisted on having) accompany his text.

And since I took the pictures, working closely with my father to make them spooky enough to be worthy of this novel and its environs, it's almost like a trip back in time, for me. (And to be fair, in the case of ND's other reissues, it may have been impossible to track down and secure rights for the illustrations they may have wished to include with the other novels.)

At 590 pages of small type, Mickelsson's is still a fat book in reprint, rich in wonder, plot and character.

I was living with my dad the fall he started this book. Its inception arose from one of my jobs, staying with my dad when I was taking a semester off from college. He wanted to turn a back room of the house he was living in outside of Susquehanna, PA, into a formal diningroom, so I was given a crowbar to strip the lath and plaster from the walls of that room.

When I discovered them, I took a handful of wallpaper scraps – five or seven layers – to him in his study where he was working, and from that palmful of history, he read the story of how the room had been used over the course of the history of that wing of the house. (That scene, fictionalized, is in the novel.)

When Dad had the first draft of the book done, he sent it to me. By that time, I was back in school, living in Burlington, VT. I read it and sent him my comments. The main thing I remember is that he used the word "childhood" too often; he changed the text accordingly, but that's not any credit to my great critical insight, I think it just got him to bury that theme in the early draft in order to use it more effectively when he finished the novel.

Here I have to credit Stuart Vyse, a Carbondale student of my father, for alerting me that he'd gotten the book in the mail, and I also have to credit him for encouraging its selection as the fourth of my father's books they chose to republish.

My sense is that there are Gardner fans everywherere. As Stuart – and others – said, his spirit, indeed his ghost, lives on.

Sunlight Man Redux

2008-07-26T11:22:00.005-04:00

This is the first post in the new and improved SUNLIGHT MAN blog, now focused entirely on the personal experimental documentary feature film Camp Gardner is producing under that title.

We learned at the end of last week that we were selected to participate in IFP Film Week, a major opportunity to get SUNLIGHT MAN before industry professionals in New York City, and a chance to get John Gardner's name out there.

We have been working on SUNLIGHT MAN for over six years, and finally the story is coming together. Stay tuned for more updates as we rebuild this blog spot; this feels like a new beginning, and we want to keep you up to date with our news.

Here's a two-minute sampler:

The SUNLIGHT MAN Blog

Mickelsson's Ghosts Reissued

Sunlight Man Redux