Between the Lines: Bonnie Jo Campbell on Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Zinta Aistars
for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Bonnie Jo Campbell

Bonnie (Photo by Christopher Magson)

The women Bonnie Jo Campbell writes about face abuse in many ugly forms, yet they emerge empowered. The award-winning writer launches her new story collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (Norton) in October. It continues Campbell's exploration of the relationships between women.

“We put this collection together from stories I’ve written over the years,” Campbell says. “My editor and I saw a theme about motherhood and daughter-hood, and also sisterhood and aunt-hood, and what it means to be a grandmother. But maybe the most potent of the stories address the issues and difficulties between mothers and daughters.”

Campbell’s women are tough. They love and hate their men; they endure abuse but know also how to dish it out while taking their power back. They smoke. They drink. They castrate pigs and drown kittens. They butcher livestock and skin squirrels and shoot guns and hit bulls-eyes. But even while she's taking on serious themes in her work, Campbell maintains a sometimes wry and dark sense of humor, finding the joke in humanity.

Her stories may skirt the edges of the bizarre and be filled with the grit of everyday life. But Campbell's own life story is rich fodder for her fiction. Campbell grew up on a small farm in southwest Michigan with her mother and four siblings. It was then that she learned how to care for farm animals and developed a love for donkeys. She still has two on her own property today in Kalamazoo. Campbell hitchhiked across the United States and Canada —something she does not recommend to others—and scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle. She ran away with the circus and sold snow cones. Campbell also founded Goulash Tours, Inc., which lead conducted adventure tours in Russia, the Baltic countries, Romania and Bulgaria.

Referring to her penchant for chasing down adventures, Campbell says, “I don’t admit this often, but ...

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Call it a comeback: Grand Rapids Public Schools on the upswing, poised to thrive

Call it a comeback: Grand Rapids Public Schools on the upswing, poised to thrive

ZINTA AISTARSTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2015

When GRPS Superintendent Teresa Weatherall Neal took the helm, she instituted an ambitious Transformation Plan with an eye towards stabilizing the district, then enabling it to grow and thrive. Nearly four years later, the district is decidedly on the upswing. Get the stats and the stories behind the turnaround, and see where Neal is steering the ship next.

This is the first in a four-part series.

When Grand Rapids Superintendent of Schools Teresa Weatherall Neal was hired for her position almost four years ago, she began her new job by listening. She called it her listening tour, and she listened to everyone. Realizing they were being heard, perhaps for the first time, members of the Grand Rapids community had much to say.

People stopped the superintendent in the street to talk with her. They scribbled notes on the edges of napkins and passed them to her in restaurants. On the backs of store receipts, even on torn off pieces of cardboard, people wrote their suggestions and grievances and passed them to Weatherall Neal. Whenever possible, they bent her ear. She was approached on the street, in the grocery store, in the hallway. She always stopped to listen, and she read every note given to her.

Students leave the bus for the C.A. Frost Environmental Science Academy. (PHOTO by Adam Bird)
“I asked everyone, because everyone deserves to have a voice,” Weatherall Neal says. “I wanted to keep it simple, so I asked four questions: what’s working, what’s not, what are the barriers to success, and what are the solutions for improvement.”

Weatherall Neal gathered together all that she heard from community members, teachers, staff, students and their parents, and from that input, she created the GRPS Transformation Plan. The Grand Rapids Public Schools, after all, were in dire need of transformation. Enrollment had declined by 8,000 students. Graduation rates lagged at 47 percent and the drop-out rate was at nearly 20 percent. The budget had been cut by $100 million and 35 schools had been closed while half-empty hallways echoed in others.

How could one person possibly turn this sinking ship around?

Weatherall Neal is the first person who will tell you that it can’t be done by one person. It takes every person in the community doing his and her part, she insists. What she has brought to the village, however, provides leadership to the transformation.

“I have been with this district for 41 years,” Weatherall Neal says. “I love this district, always have. I grew up here, one of nine siblings. I went to school here, and I never felt the desire to leave.”

From Creston High School, Weatherall Neal went on to Grand Rapids Community College, Grand Valley State University and Western Michigan University. She worked in GRPS as a student worker, then a receptionist, then a secretary, a compliance officer, a director, and assistant to the superintendent, until she took that seat herself. She knew and relished each step on the ladder.

“I knew what greatness looked like,” Weatherall Neal says. “And I never left that, that we could be the best.”

The Labor Pains of Transformation

Under Weatherall Neal’s leadership, her team sifted out three goals for the Transformation Plan ...

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Between the Lines: The Underwater Typewriter

by Zinta Aistars
for WMUK 102.1 FM
Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate



Between the Lines is my weekly radio show about books and writers with a Michigan connection. It airs every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m. (or listen anytime online), on WMUK 102.1 FM, Southwest Michigan's NPR affiliate. I am the host of Between the Lines.

This week's guest: Marc Zegans 

Marc Zegans (Credit Jeff Haynes)

Ann Arbor, Michigan native Marc Zegans is better known for the spoken, rather than the written word. “As a spoken word artist with a penchant for immersive theater, I perform periodically with the New York Poetry Brothel under the nom de plumeBellocq C. Obscura,” Zegans says. “I’ve been doing spoken poetry as long as I can remember.”

But with his new poetry collection The Underwater Typewriter (Pelekinesis Press, September 2015), Zegans hopes to expand his written word readership. His spoken word albums include Night Work (2007) and Marker and Parker, recorded with jazz pianist Don Parker (2010). His collection of erotic senryu, a type of haiku, calledPillow Talk was published in 2008. Zegans is also a playwright and performs on stage.

“I was Narragansett Beer’s first Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2013 and a Poetry Whore with the New York Poetry Brothel,” Zegans says, laughing. “I had two friends in the New York Poetry Society who had grown tired of academic poetry readings and wanted something with greater depth than slam poetry.”

One of his poet friends thought about what she liked, then said, “Well, I love poetry, and I also like bourbon, and I like sex. How do I put them together?”

Zegans recalls, “So she came up with this idea of a 1920’s Prohibition bordello where rather than hire a prostitute, one would hire a poet for ...

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