THE LATEST NEWS FROM CLYDE
October 2017
Calvert's Crack Literary Team of Ritchie and Farnsworth New books by each open a Bay Weekly conversation By Sandra Olivetti Martin. "Together, Elisavietta Ritchie and husband Clyde Farnsworth have written an encyclopedia of words, with more spilling out every day. Poet, storyist, translator and mentor Ritchie has just published her 22nd (or so) book, the poetry volume Harbingers. Retired New York Times foreign correspondent Farnsworth has just published his fourth, the father-and-son biography and autobiography Tangled Bylines."
To read the article, click here!
October 2017
The BAY WEEKLY this month contains editor Sandra Martin's big interview with Clyde Farnsworth and Elisavietta Ritchie.
Local Authors: They Wrote Their Books
What about yours?
By Sandra Olivetti Martin
Everybody's got a book in them?
Maybe so. Certainly we've all got stories. But the difference between a story and a book is getting it done.
Many, many hours at a keyboard stand between most of us and that destination. That's after (actually, before and during, too) the spinning roulette wheel of all the stories that could be told stops on just one. Then you've got to figure out where that story starts. Then keep – and keep, and keep – writing it.
All the while, of course, you're worrying about who you can get to publish it.
Which all your potential readers dearly hope won't happen until you've hired a professional editor. No, a friend who did well in English class won't do. A real editor has to have not only specialized knowledge but also the stick-to-it-ness to stay glued to your manuscript despite the siren calls of the rest of life. (She has to know, for example, how the not only — but also conjunction really works.)
So the fact that any book ever gets published is a minor miracle.
In this issue, Bay Weekly looks into that miracle multiplied, in one of our authors' cases, like the bread and wine of the marriage at Cana.
That literary engine is Elisavietta Ritchie, celebrating the publication of her 22nd book.
Name sound familiar? Could be for lots of reasons as the poet, journalist, novelist and writer of short stories, translator and mentor has her hand in many literary pots.
One is Bay Weekly, where you've seen her stories over many years. Poems now and again, too, for Elisavietta bombards me with poems apropos many a subject and occasion. Just last week, she responded to a Bay Weekly Creature Feature with eight poems on spiders.
Maybe you know her as your teacher at Calvert Library, where her memoir and creative writing classes have encouraged many a story out of its keeper and into print. Many of those stories, too, have appeared in Bay Weekly, including many from our long-time contributor Sandy Anderson, lost, alas, to all of us this spring.
Maybe you know Elisavietta as collaborator, for many of her books of poetry feature the work of local artists, photographers and designers, for instance Megan Richard and Suzanne Shelden.
Or as the editor — at Washington Independent Writers — who might hold the key to your literary future?
In this issue you'll get to know her better and learn some of the secrets of her literary success.
High among the bodies longing to write books are journalists.
Elisavietta's husband Clyde Farnsworth, retired from the New York Times, proves that rule four times over. This week Bay Weekly features Farnsworth and his latest book, Tangled Bylines. It's the story of Clyde H., our Clyde, and Clyde A., his father, both foreign correspondents who together reported on history in the making during the second half of the 20th century. Read it for history told from a first-person-present human perspective by an erudite journalist who tells not only the story but also the story behind the story. Among the many stories Clyde has packed into his 300-page-book is the tangled personal story of a son and his absent — but oft reappearing — father.
Elisavietta and Clyde are the sorts of people youíd expect to write books, aren't they?
So we balance the scales with the everyday guy so inspired by a story — this one made up, by the way — that he put in the discipline to make it a book. You may know Thomas Michael from the aisles of Graul's Market Annapolis, where he's a manager. You'll meet another aspect of Michael — the writer angling for a movie contract — in Bob Melamud's profile of the author and his mystery novel Birdland Murders. Adding to the fun in these World Series days, our own Orioles' Minor League clubs and ballparks are the bloody settings of Birdland Murders.
Read, enjoy — and maybe give your own story a nudge toward the book it wants to be.
Sandra Martin
www.bayweekly.com
June 2017
June 24th, 2017
1960 to 2017. EPIC, end of an era, party at the family home on Macomb Street, Washington, D.C. New Chapter. New Challenges.
May 2017
Clyde presented Tangled Bylines at the Concorde Bookstore outside Boston on Thursday evening, May 11, 2017.
Andrew: "The literary tradition of Concord continues! We had a great crowd at the bookstore last night -- where the questions just kept on coming. Clyde was in rare form.... We were happy to have Charlie Ritchie join us as well!"
Loose lips sink ships, warns a World War I poster that after recent Presidential indiscretions about ISIS should drape the Oval Office. My book, Tangled Bylines, somewhat amusingly shows how the issue dogged reporters, including AP foreign correspondent Clyde A Farnsworth, my Dad, in World War II.
"Dad attended the sunrise briefing inside a new hangar of bamboo and lashings. Eight hundred men stood around -- the flight crews of seventy-two Superfortresses, including Dad's Monsoon Over Anshan. An intelligence officer showed slide projections of Japanese fighters. Men fidgeted. Cigarette smoke drifted around silvered cones of light.
"The AP story included an unintentional breach of censorship derived from the briefing, which almost cost Dad's accreditation. The degree to which military censorship was then enforced stands in sharp contrast to more recent exercises of press freedom, such as Wikileaks or the Pentagon Papers, and it will probably take forever to find the happy medium between the public's right to know and the sanctity of jealously guarded secrets of national defense. Winding up the briefing, the intelligence officer said: "In case any of you guys gets his ass shot off over the target but can still make it to your alternate, you know what to do."
"'Egg in your borscht," came a voice from the back, followed by snickers.
"Monkeyshines from the Catskills, Dad thought, and incorporated the assumed GI wisecrackery into his account. Alas, when the intelligence officer, Colonel Jesse Williams, a former functionary at Texaco, read the clippings, he lost his cool. He accused Dad and the AP of a serious breach of security.
"Egg in your borscht" was not just a wisecrack. Under a secret protocol between Roosevelt and Stalin, it was code for safe harbor for disabled American aircraft. Stalin vetoed U.S. bases in Russia, but he assented letting crippled American planes land in Siberia, provided it got no publicity. Moscow could have used the AP story to revoke the accord. Denied such landing rights, more American airmen might have perished. It was a very serious charge. Dad demonstrated that the story had cleared through the regular channels. Only an informed reader would ever notice, and the breach was inadvertent. Colonel Williams eventually backed down, but he rode Dad hard for weeks."
April 2017
TANGLED BYLINES is now in print and available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. A successful reading in Denver's Tattered Cover bookstore.
Friday, April 21, 7 pm, presentation and Q&A in Denver at the Tattered Cover Bookstore.
Clyde will be presenting at the Concorde Bookstore outside Boston on Thursday evening, May 11, 7 p.m.
February 2017
BOOK PARTY! Clyde's Book Tangled Bylines arrives several weeks sooner than expected! Book party is on the birthday of Clyde's father, Thursday, March 23, 5pm onward, for both TANGLED BYLINES and my two published in 2016, BABUSHKA'S BEADS and REFLECTIONS: POEMS ON PAINTING, A POET'S GALLERY. Also celebrating Cameron's birthday, and her own many books.
Some of Clyde's most recent news is on his Facebook Page, click here to read it. Join his community.
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I have just finished
a massive project,
TANGLED BYLINES: A Father-Son memoir of two journalists.
...a journey of father and son, both journalists who reported from around the world.
University of Missouri Press accepted manuscript for publication in 2016 |
After the police beat for Ohio newspapers in Prohibition, Big Clyde covers Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers for the AP in World War II, stays on in Asia for Scripps Howard, reporting both the Chinese Civil War and early stages of war in Korea. As the last president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, he rescues two British newsmen from a Shanghai police firing squad, founds the successor club in Hong Kong. Little Clyde has earlier played Tag Along Sundays, while Dad, an AP slot man, marshals news of those gathering storms in Asia and Europe. The son hangs out at 50 Rock, plays checkers with office boys, teletype operators, knocks off a Werewolf story, heeds warnings not to get in the grown-ups' hair. No surprise, the kid, after a Bronze Star in Korea, follows Dad as a newsman in his own right: United Press, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times, an Overseas Press Club E.W. Fairchild award under the belt, barely missing out on a Pulitzer. The two have recorded nearly a century of history, sometimes together, such as the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. They tell what it was like, boners, accolades, tangles with fate, even reveal a source or two, in this behind-the-scenes look at the gripping and all-too-human world of journalism.
Some of Clyde's most recent news is on his Facebook Page, click here to read it. Join his community. |
