Fahrenheit 2014: or, the Bonfire of the Vanities II

Local authors fume as Bezos holds secret Santa Fe retreat

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos watches a from the wings during the June 18 launch of the Amazon Fire Phone in Seattle. Bezos is hosting a covert gathering for the culturally elite in Santa Fe. Associated Press file photo

(Blogger's note: this is an article from the Santa Fe daily newspaper, the New Mexican, in which we learn more than we ever hoped to know about Jeff Bezos and his happy little bonfire of exploited writers. I couldn't excerpt this thing very well, so I present it pretty much whole, interspersed with my usual nasty little images. Goody.)

Posted: Saturday, September 20, 2014 7:00 pm | Updated: 1:36 am, Mon Sep 22, 2014.

By Anne Constable
The New Mexican 

A hush-hush, very private, under-the-radar, author-schmoozing affair for the creative elites is taking place in Santa Fe.

Nobody, but nobody in the know will talk on the record about Campfire, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ early autumn gathering of writers and other visionary types held in recent years at the Bishop’s Lodge Ranch Resort & Spa. It’s the local version of Northern California’s Bohemian Grove, although that all-male retreat is filled with politicians and captains of industry.

Everyone connected with the covert affair here is sworn to secrecy — hotels, restaurants, even those who handle staging and logistics. As one author who has participated in the past put it, “Campfire is a private event, and the sponsors prefer to avoid all publicity.”

As far as The New Mexican could determine, no local writers are invited this year, even though Santa Fe is home to many, including best-selling authors whose works are sold on Amazon.

But several Santa Fe writers were among more than 900 who criticized Amazon last month in a letter published as an ad in The New York Times. Santa Fe-based Authors United accused the retailer of targeting them in its long-running dispute with publishing firm Hachette over e-book pricing. The writers, many of whose works are published by Hachette, say Amazon is threatening their livelihoods by delaying delivery of their books and refusing to accept pre-orders.

“Every year, Jeff Bezos of Amazon invites authors, artists, musicians and other creative people for a secret, swag-laden get together called Campfire,” said Authors United organizer Doug Preston, a writer who lives part time in Santa Fe. “Meanwhile, for the past six months, Amazon has been harming the livelihoods of 2,500 authors by impeding and blocking sale of their books in order to gain leverage in its dispute with the publisher Hachette.”

Carol Armstrong, also known as Carol Held Knight, the widow of astronaut and moon walker Neil Armstrong, said in a brief phone interview this week that she attended Bezos’ secret Santa Fe gathering in 2011 and 2012. “It was very interesting,” she said. There were about 50 people at the event, which she described as “low key,” with talks by authors and dinner excursions.

Tours to nearby sites such as Puye Cliffs are arranged for the guests. One year, the event included a geocaching treasure hunt on the Plaza.

The invitees are all ages, all very accomplished and, most of all, interesting to Bezos. And they don’t exactly get here by bus. Pilots are warned about extra traffic at Santa Fe’s airport during Campfire weekend because of all the incoming Lears and Citations.

But even in the age of the Internet, it’s hard to find out much more about Bezos’ Campfire.

Only a few snippets show up online about the 2011 event.

Diversified Production Services, which produces special events, listed the “featured talent” that year as Neil Armstrong, Man Booker Prize-winner Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale), musician, songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett (Crazy Heart), street artist and graphic designer Shepard Fairey, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin, Czech model and philanthropist Petra Nemcova and Pulitzer Prize Winner Alice Walker (The Color Purple), among others.

Publishers Lunch, a daily online report on stories of interest to the professional trade book community, confirmed Oct. 11, 2011, that a “select group of authors, performers, thinkers and others” were gathering outside Santa Fe for the second annual Campfire, where the theme was said to be “storytelling.”

Kurt Andersen, a former Time magazine writer, author and host of Studio 360, Public Radio International’s guide to pop culture, revealed in 2011 that he had attended the gathering in Santa Fe the previous year. His website says he “felt the company [Amazon] was trying to soften up the literary establishment as it moves toward publishing.”

Dennis Johnson, writer/journalist and co-founder of Melville House, the independent publisher in Brooklyn, N.Y., said on his book blog that year, “Well, now that Jeff Bezos is pretty much done destroying American book culture, he’s decided to spend some of his ill-gotten gains on … looking like a champion of writers. Or maybe he just needed to buy some friends.”

The item went on to say that the “Amazon oligarch” had flown authors Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini and Neil Gaiman, songwriter Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, and film directors/producers Jason Reitman and Werner Herzog, in addition to Atwood and Walker, to a “think-tanky” event he called the “Amazon Campfire.”

(Gaiman is in Santa Fe this weekend for a sold-out event with his wife, Amanda Palmer, at the Jean Cocteau Cinema called “Another Night of Random Stuff with Neil and Amanda.”)

Johnson’s blog quoted Publishers Lunch as saying that Bezos had paid for all the accommodations.

Johnson said in an interview that the event had been “hotly rumored,” but until the Publishers Lunch item, he hadn’t dared write about it. “Nobody knows anything,” he said. The invitees sign nondisclosure statements, and “they’re sticking to them.” Breaking the agreement would be taking your life in your hands, Johnson added, because “he [Bezos] will pursue you.”

Bezos, the technology entrepreneur who was born in Albuquerque and graduated from Princeton University, founded and runs Amazon, the largest retailer on the Web. Named Time magazine’s Person of the Year in 1999, he bought The Washington Post newspaper in 2013. He is also a member the Bilderberg Group, another super-secret assembly of 120 or more political leaders, and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media who are invited to take part in annual discussions about megatrends and major issues facing the world.

Preston, who said his paperback and e-book sales are down more than 60 percent since Amazon began its tactics to pressure Hachette, said the book retail giant should put more focus on the thousands of writers who supply works for Amazon rather than the elites he is hosting in Santa Fe this weekend.

‘These writers, most of whom are struggling, mid-list authors, have seen their book sales decline 50 to 90 percent at Amazon.com,” he said. “They are fearful about what this means for their future careers. If Mr. Bezos truly cared about authors, instead of inviting an anointed few to his little Campfire and handing them a bag of goodies, he would end the sanctions against thousands of authors and their books.”

Santa Fe author James McGrath Morris (Pulitzer) conceded that Amazon has done as much good for publishing as it has done harm and is “not necessarily a one-dimensional evil monster.”

But McGrath Morris still sees irony in the fact that Bezos holds his Campfire in “an artistic, creative city with independent bookstores who are suffering from competition with Amazon and Kindle Fire.”

To hold the Campfire here, and not to reach out to local authors and bookstores, he said, “seems a little lacking in forethought.”

One of those bookstores, Collected Works, has a sign in the window banning Amazon’s Fire Phone, which shoppers can use to order books by scanning their covers, automatically placing an order and bypassing brick-and-mortar stores.

Contact Anne Constable at 986-3022 or aconstable@sfnewmexican.com.

Blogger's note: I can't tell you how relieved I am that all this crap is finally coming out. I suppose that up to now it's been justified by a "private little event" mentality, with high-profile writers easily seduced with lots and lots of candy. Otherwise it never would have gotten off the ground.

I said in my last post that silencing a group of people by coercion or veiled threats has another name: abuse. It also has the shameful stink of bullying, of casual manipulation through generating a nameless, formless dread. But I've thought of something else (there's always something else, as followers of this little insignificant blog will realize): it also has the flavor of "YOU can play in my tree fort (if you're rich, well-known and extremely malleable), but YOU can't (if you don't have high status and won't keep your mouth shut)". My mother used to sing an ancient song that now comes to mind: "I don't want to play in your yard/I don't like you any more. . .No, I don't want to play in your yard, if you won't be nice to me." "Nice" meaning, in this case, ultra-discreet, also known as "silent". 

These writers had to sign a sort of oath of silence even to be let in. More tree fort mentality. It's like one of those really neat Captain Marvel clubs of the '60s where you sent away for identification papers, strict printed rules, and a badge. You're in; everyone else is out. Otherwise it just wouldn't be any fun. 

Writers often take a vehement, even violent stand against elitism and the worst excesses of capitalism - well, some of them do, sometimes, when they're not out there spelunking or whatever-the-fuck-it-is, getting wrapped in vast polar bear robes that they get to keep in their Vespucci endangered-alligator suitcases. For all we know, they eat bush meat, capybaras and such, roasted komodo dragons, with spotted owl souffle for dessert. Anything to keep those pesky writers satisfied - and quiet.

I'm still not seeing very much coverage on this event - Bezos is still keeping a muzzle on those who attended, apparently - or has he managed to intimidate the media, too? (Does the name William Randolph Hearst mean anything to you?). It's been pointed out that Bezos has a fondness for fire imagery: Kindle, Fire Phone - and now, Campfire. Why is this? Oh, I don't know, it's "hot" maybe? Or maybe it will just burn up the competition entirely. It's a pretty alarming take on the word "campfire". This time, however, what with all that fuss about ebooks, we don't even need starter fluid. The conflagration has already begun.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Barnes & Noble

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Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Amazon.ca
http://www.amazon.ca/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?

I'm your puppet (short fiction)

 

Human puppet: someone who is easily jerked around by others. Someone who realizes her position in life is always so, so fragile. Someone who gingerly creeps, tippy-toe, tippy-toe, along thin ice at the top of Niagara Falls.

 

She doesn’t know how it got that way, but maybe she does. Right out of the egg? Wrong egg, wrong sperm? Sometimes it seems that way. And it truly does not matter what she had to bear to survive her childhood, to pull herself out of an inferno of post-traumatic stress in her 30s: it has all been reburied, forgotten again, put away. Then there was the alcohol, but we won’t get into that, will we? About how her kids at first felt proud of her for going to AA, for finally getting her act together and not landing in the goddamn hospital with sickening regularity?

 

 

Going to AA wasn’t exactly a picnic, but her kids were there at her cakes, and her daughter even gave her a cake at some point, maybe five years. Who knows what the creep of time brings? A restored life, maybe, spreading out in many directions, being seen almost as normal sometimes, though of course she wasn’t. Only she knew about how the fragments of her life were wired together, held together by main strength and force of will.

 

And then, many years later, when everything exploded and flew to pieces again, it was: sympathy, compassion, love? No: horror, denial, and accusations that she was making the whole thing up. Faking sickness to get attention for some bizarre reason. When the truth was, for most of her life she had been faking health, trying to keep up a mask that looked enough like her that most people were fooled.

 

All right, all people.

 

How is it that you can be married for 40 years and have a spouse who knows absolutely nothing about you? How is it that he can even admit, “look, I learned to tune you out a long time ago for my own survival”? Admitting that what she said was just noise, verbal garbage, narcissism and histrionics in a form that wasn’t even words any more, just a sort of “bluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluhbluh” that didn’t even go in one ear and out the other, because it never went in one ear to begin with.

 

So he has learned to tune me out “for his own survival”, and he has become extremely good at it, to the point that any time I am in pain or distress, a big soundproof sliding door comes down with a heavy clang.  But what about MY survival? Or have I already died in this family? I try too hard, I know I try too hard with the grandchildren and it is beginning to backfire. I see the hard-eyed looks my children give me, the sense of “what the hell is she up to now?”. I realize the things I love and work so hard at are so incomprehensible them that not only do they not take any interest in them, they don’t even know what planet they are from or why anyone would want to bother with them at all.

 

 

So I am lonely. If I say I am lonely within this family that I co-founded so long ago, the response will be outrage that I would ever accuse them of being so heartless. Lonely?? What are you saying, when we allow you to come to our houses and look after our children, when we give you every chance to make individual gifts by hand for their birthdays (secretly sniggering about it behind my back: “waaaaaaaay too much time on her hands!” - I’ve heard them at it, but mustn’t say anything. Mustn’t.)  How can you be “lonely” unless you’re some kind of freak? Go out and make some friends! Do something normal for a change, stop pretending you’re a “writer” and being so pretentious and unrealistic.

 

She remembers the shrink, a thug who looked like Leonid Brezhnev, who said to her in his thick deep thug voice, “Get a job. Get a job at 7-11 maybe and just do writing as hobby.” If she’d had a gun in her hand his wonderful vocational counselling would have been spurting out the other side of his fucking thug head and splattering the psych ward walls with  brain pulp that had turned out to be a complete waste of time.

 

Thinking about dying is something she has become very good at: she started at maybe age thirteen. Though there have been many fallow periods, even years at a time when it never crossed her mind, it was inevitable that SOMETHING would toss her right back to the beginning again and hold her there until she suffocated. She has come to realize that you must not just think of “a way to do it”. You must choose at least two methods concurrently. Take pills, slash wrists (and if you’re really thoughtful and caring, do it in the bathtub so there will be less mess to clean up. Just turn on the tap, you’re done, no towels spoiled). She saw that YouTube video of the guy jumping off a bridge and thought it was magnificent, but he’d have to be full of pills, a lethal amount, first. A dear friend of hers, incarcerated in a psychiatric ward when his psychic agony began to overflow again, smuggled in pills, took them all, then wandered out in the middle of a blistering winter night, passed out beside the railroad tracks like a bum, and was found frozen stiff the next day, a Bobsicle, doublekilled. Man, he was good! He must have practiced for a long time.

 

 

She wondered about THREE ways, but didn’t know how to juggle it all: slish, slash, I was takin’ a bath; jumping-jack flash, it’s a gas-gas-gas; and she couldn’t think of anything cute and self-concealing for the pills. Suicide was hilariously funny. She could not count the number of times she had made therapists smirk, smile or even bark with laughter. They thought she was funny. Badda-boom! She had trained herself that way all her life, learned in her cradle to be amusing, to be the mascot, to keep her father from murdering her in her bed. She had learned to be witty while her older siblings got her drunk at parties and snickered when they found out their married friends (with their wives in the next room) had groped her in the bathroom.

 

But it’s all in fun, isn’t it? Fun, fun. I was lucky to have those social occasions. So they said to me. I should’ve been grateful. And though for years and years she thought she had escaped those poisonous dynamics, she hadn’t. Once again she was a sharecropper in her own home. All she had was some sort of fragile tenancy that could fall through at any moment. “Oh, massa, don’t sell me down the river!” Bark, bark, oh, that’s so funny! Don’t look at me that way! Stop it, stop looking so hostile, it’s just that you’re funny, that’s all. You’re obviously trying to be funny, so why do you get so hostile when I laugh? You’re very entertaining. Besides which, are you really sure any of this really happened? Your Dad sounds like a pretty swell guy. You’ve heard of false memory syndrome, haven’t you?

 

How could anyone want to keep going, to feel any relish for life, when after years and years of struggling to do reasonably well everything blew apart again and hurled you back four decades into helplessness? How could anyone be “entertaining” when their life was unravelling like a sweater, when they were trying frantically to grab on to  a greasy pole, when some hideous beanstalk or poison tree had suddenly thrust up out of nowhere to blow all order and sanity apart?

 

The most important part of the suicide thing, and the place where nearly everyone falls down, is not letting anyone find you. DON’T do a Marilyn Monroe and get on the phone. DON’T call 9-1-1 because 9-1-1 doesn’t rescue useless pieces of shit that want to die anyway. Sylvia Plath set it up so that someone would find her, but oopsy, doopsy, this was a person who wasn’t very punctual, and on that particular day she was tardy enough to cause Sylvia Plath’s death at 30. Or at least, to not prevent it. Everyone dies anyway. Lots of people die catastrophically every day, accidents, poison, murder. Some die in the womb. We all get erased, then the timer is reset to before we even came on the scene. Click! Isn’t this just speeding it up a little?

 

 

But she doesn’t, not on that particular day anyway, because even though she ceased to believe in a benevolent God a long time ago, she has still not completely dispensed with the fear that there is a hell, that she won’t escape herself at all, that she will be pinned, doomed to drink her own poison for all eternity. Or perhaps watch her family howl and scream with rage: “How could she do this to me?”

 

 

The powerless now

I don't know why I just wrote that story, the one about the dog.  It occurred to me last night, came into my head, kept on bugging me, and my first reaction was, "No." I didn't want to write it. I knew it would end badly. I knew it would be about pain and abuse and powerlessness. I wondered what dark corner of my soul drove me to express all that anguish. 


There's a theory floating around, mostly in these reality shows that I never watch (except Hoarders), that we somehow recreate (and recreate and recreate) the conditions of our childhood, especially the pain and grief. THIS time it's going to be different. It's a dynamic that comes out in relationships. Daddy will be gentle this time, Mommy won't end up in the psych ward, brother won't set fires and go to jail. Or just: I won't be a wimp, I won't be unpopular, THIS time I'll test myself at home, at work and at play, and come up shining.


And you know what happens?


Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

You don't win, because you can't. Childhood may be the template for adulthood, but I've started to think our only hope of being happy (unless we've been incredibly blessed with a happy childhood and unconditional love) is to shed it, shuck it off. Let it drop off like dead skin or a turtle shell.


I love a certain Bible quote, from Lamentations I think, which I put in one of my comments to good ol' Matt, my most faithful reader: it's all about being "new every morning".

I remember my affliction and my wandering,

the bitterness and the gall.
I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.
Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.


Oh, so it's the Lord's great love that is new every morning, not us! If we're not so new, then we're obviously made from the crazy-quilt scraps of the past. It's hard to shake, after all. Why did we evolve with such acute memories, and why is the loss of memory considered such a catastrophe? Isn't it really a blessing in disguise?

And yet, and yet. Having said all that, I have a problem with the currently wildly-popular "power of now" theories that purport to solve every problem you ever had. Those psychologists on TV who hold the hands of hoarders as they scream bloody murder at their families say things like, we must live in the moment. "Now" is the only time we have.

That pretty much does away with planning of any kind. There goes your estate, eh? And learning? How can you learn from the past, or from anything for that matter, in a sealed bubble of "now"?

If we always lived in the now, human evolution would not have taken place, or at least not beyond the level of chimps, who are fully capable of ripping the faces off their loving caregivers. We evolved to learn from the past and plan for the future, so we wouldn't bloody starve or get eaten by something bigger than we were.

I've got nothing against the concept of "now", in fact for the most part it beats the pants off the past, except that it doesn't really exist. It could be said, as time slides along, that it's always now (for what other time can it be? The future? The past?). But at the same time, because time does not stand still even for a nanosecond, there is no "now", nothing static, not even a "moment" that we can stand still to apprehend. So if it's always now, and never now, for the love of God, could someone please explain to me: what time is it?

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Once upon a time, and long ago

Every year, around the time of my birthday, the anticipation began to build. For some magical reason, the Mary Martin stage version of Peter Pan would always be broadcast on TV, either on my birthday or the day before or after.

My next-door neighbor/on-again-off-again friend Ann Peet had her birthday the day before mine. In those days, kids didn't go to those big video-parlor/jungle-gym/Build-a-Bear-emporium type of places for a birthday. In fact, my own kids, raised in the '80s, usually celebrated with a few friends (and ancient home movies reveal that they were the same friends, year to year) and a bucket of chicken.

My celebration back in the early '60s was even more basic, but no less magical. Ann and I would always exchange presents which (our mothers decreed) had to cost no more than $2. One year, all unawares, we gave each other Cinderella shoes with high heels made out of clear pink plastic embedded with gold glitter. These were held on with torturous pink elastic bands that left deep welts on your feet. Mine broke on the first day, and Ann had a near-concussion from a bad fall.

My mother made spare ribs. That's what we called them then, not ribs, and decades before all those so-called falling-off-the-bone southern recipes. Through hours of slow baking, she turned out ribs that melted in your mouth. You didn't even have to pick them up. Then a cake, made from scratch, on a glass pedestal. Toffee Swirl, or Spice Cake with buttercream icing.

She baked as a sort of grim religion, and though most of her cooking was good, she was too tight-lipped to really enjoy it. She was dutiful. She didn't like me, wished she had never had me, and I knew it. Had always known it, without being told.

But every year, there was Peter Pan. I can't tell you how completely enchanted I was - how captured Ann Peet and I both were, leaning closer and closer to the set until we nearly fell out of our chairs. It's essentially a filmed stage play, with the staginess left intact, so you have to mentally translate it into the much more intimate medium of TV. But it works anyway, especially because of Mary Martin's magnificent, heartbreaking performance. She's over 40 in this version, her body still girlish - or boyish - and her face androgynous before the term was even known about. And her voice. Oh.

I defy you to listen to the melancholy little lullabye at the end of this clip without crying. A few minutes ago I was sobbing, tears splashing down my face. I was not a happy child. Ours was not a happy home, though we pretended it was. I pretended Dad didn't get drunk every night and abuse me and tell me he wished I had never been born. I had to. No one can let wounds like that show.

We pretended a lot of things: that Mary Martin was a boy, or else we just didn't care if she wasn't. The loudly-proclaimed theatrical lines didn't matter. And when Tinkerbell began to wink out and die, Peter turned to the audience and said in a voice full of urgency, "Clap your hands if you believe in fairies!"

Then we heard something. A faint spectral clapping behind us, slowly growing faster, and louder.

I turned. There was my mother in the doorway, my mother the grim un-nurturing one who looked after me as a mother cat might look after a kitten, except less warmly. And, incredibly, she was exclaiming,

"Yes, yes, I do believe in fairies. I do, I do!"

Bad magic

If this photo seems a little misty, a little unreal, well, that's 'coz it is.

It is a chunk of my history, still bleeding and sore.

This is Park Street United Church in Chatham, Ontario, now taken over by St. Andrews, no doubt for financial reasons.

I attended this church from birth to ten

years.

When I was about six, I remember a neighbor boy saying, "There's a new minister coming. His name is Horse Burg."

He was close. The Rev. Russell Horsburgh was a man for his season, in many ways embodying the growing ferment in modern religion: social issues were bubbling up to the surface, and black people were actually starting to attend (though most of the congregation was appalled).

Most of all, Rev. Horsburgh wanted to create some new programs for the young people, who up to now had sat on their hands and yawned.

Yes. 1960: the verge of an explosion, though no one knew it at the time. We were lucky to have him, apparently, because he represented the "coming thing". He was cutting edge, just what our poky old church needed to jolt it

into life.

At first, everything went well. Hmmm - fairly well. I was six, so I didn't understand a lot of the murmurings that were going on. Some of the congregation disapproved of what Rev. Horsburgh was doing with his youth group. He was actually including kids who were "underprivileged", from "broken homes" (i.e. homes where Mom worked). At one point, to everyone's horror, he gave a series of talks on teen sexuality. No one knew how to stop him.

I only remember a few things, but they really stand out: a friend of my Dad called him a "psychopath" (a word I wasn't familiar with, and only understood in retrospect). My mother once murmured to her friend, "They found empty bottles in the basement, and cigarette butts. . . and worse." Only in retrospect did I realize the reference must have been to condoms.

So the young people were having sex in the basement? Evidently.

I remember also leaving choir practice and heading for my Dad's car. I saw several very inebriated teenage boys lurching around and saying things like, "Hey, where's the booze?" "You're alreadly plastered!" "Hey, Boozy Bozo." "Where's the Rev?" "Let's have one for the Rev."

Another time, on Sunday morning, the Rev suddenly exploded and began to rant about "mechanical men". "We're all mechanical men. Who wants to be a mechanical man?" he repeated, pointing his finger around the sanctuary.

The strangest thing of all was a church bulletin, usually typed out and mimeographed by the church secretary. But this one had a whole page covered with x's, blotted out. My brother Walt, 20 years old and a total cynic, held the page up to the window and began to read what it said: a quote from Martin Luther's infamous

tirade.

"I understand that this is the week for the church collection, and many of you do not want to give a thing. You ungrateful people should be ashamed of yourselves. . . I am sorry I ever freed you from the tyrants and the papists. You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don't improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine."

Signed: Martin Luther

Russell Horsburgh

Obviously, something bad was going on. Bad bad. Before long, the villagers with the flaming torches closed in. Horsburgh was eventually convicted of encouraging sexual activity among minors, and sentenced to a year in jail. He got out after a few months, and gradually a pro-Horsburgh faction began to grow.

By the time he died in 1971, he had become something of a hero, a misunderstood saint who was only trying to help those poor kids learn about birth control. Or something.

I remember a frightening man who became increasingly hostile and paranoid. Did he do all the things he was accused of? I don't know. I only know I didn't want to go to church any more because he scared the hell out of me.

Seeing this picture of Park Street United (I almost wrote "Untied") woke up feelings from decades back. I googled around for Chatham sites, and even the names of streets made the hair on my arms stand up. I had buried so much.

Rev. Horsburgh became a character in my second novel Mallory, only this time he was purely evil and corrupt. Perhaps something in my soul needed to see him

that way.

A few years ago, the church I was attending was ripped off by a fraud, a minister who had no real credentials and no pastor's heart. He was a travelling salesman who had already ruined other congregations: so why didn't we find out before we hired him?

It hurt me, gored me, because I had already been hurt in this vulnerable place as a young child. I was six. Why was it happening again?

Why are people so stupid about religion?

What sick needs are met, or not met, by this casual manipulation of power? For I have never known a minister who didn't need power.

Why do I still long to find a place, an oasis, a spring in the wilderness that will quench my agonizing thirst?