Rigors of the road: There is an upside

One often hears writers complain about book tours. Traveling constantly, facing small crowds, having the dream of the next book interrupted by the need to promote this one -- it’s all too much.

I’d expected to find Carol Muske-Dukes, back in L.A. last week to promote her novel “Channeling Mark Twain,” just as weary about book touring as everyone else. Instead, she felt energized by the opportunity to discuss with live audiences a book that has eluded her for 20 years.

Muske-Dukes’ novel follows the experiences of Holly Mattox, a young professor teaching poetry to prison inmates and struggling to find her place in the literary world of 1970s Manhattan. Part of the problem with writing it, she said, was that she saw two separate projects -- one about making a literary life in the 1970s and another about teaching poetry in a prison. Then, the reasons for keeping them separated faded away: ‘Hey,’ she thought, ‘I can do what I want,’ or, as one of her characters declares, “I get the whole all.”

Muske-Dukes told an audience at Dutton’s Brentwood Bookstore how the novel embodies her own struggle between a commitment to art and a commitment to social activism. Nothing, she said, challenged her notions of being a poet in the modern world more than teaching female inmates on Rikers Island, which she did for many years.

“There’s an urgency there, for these women need poetry to keep body and mind together,” she said. “I went there thinking I was the instructor. I didn’t realize I’d be the one who was taught so much.”

Her reading afforded a special learning opportunity. During her research, she said, she found that Mark Twain frequented brothels during his years as a riverboat captain. “Twain said he only went to the brothels to drink and get into fights,” Muske-Dukes said, grinning. “I’m sure we can imagine other dalliances, can’t we?”

The most memorable part of the reading, though, came at the end. To close the evening, Muske-Dukes read from a poem by a female character, based on someone she had actually encountered, whose face has been disfigured by her pimp:

. . . So he say: You never look good to no

Man again. And so right -- I look no good

To him that other day when I shot him once

Then got the gun up under his chin.

Slick? I say -- Better smile one last for me.

‘Cause now you get to have a new Face too.

The atmosphere was charged. Somebody gasped. I guess book tours do have their advant- ages.

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-- Nick Owchar