Marshall Cook Day

I'm sure many of you have heard of Marshall Cook. In fact I told you a bit about him in my introduction post. Today I want to share my blog with him and post something he wrote about when he wrote for my newspaper The Pike River Community News. It is a great piece and I thank him for it. Check out his books and also sign up for his newsletter. This blog is to share so if you have anything to say please let me know and I'll include yours as well.

Small town boy in the Internet age
by Marshall J. Cook
Several years ago, I had the joy of writing a regular column for the Pike River Community News. It was a wonderful paper-- key word “community” -- completely local, personal, folksy, reflecting the loving kindness of its editor, Janice Kaat.
Actually, Janice was a whole lot more than editor. She was founder, funder, publisher, primary writer, photographer, janitor, layout and design department, chief finance officer, and IT consultant. She put her heart and soul as well as her money into that paper, and it showed.
My column was called “Small Town Boy in the Big City.” The small town was Altadena, California, where I grew up in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains. The “Big City,” (relatively speaking) was and is Madison, Wisconsin, where I moved with wife Ellen and son Jeremiah over 30 years ago.
The “boy,” well, that was me. I was that barefoot lad with cheeks of tan (sunburn, actually) playing pick-up baseball all day in the summer, taking a break only to walk down to Salibee’s for a soda or one of those disgusting plastic tubes filled with cherry or grape guck. After you drained the guck, you could chew on the plastic tube for the rest of the day and pretend it was chaw, just like the big leaguers used.
I wrote about overcoming my terror and discovering the joys of winter in the Midwest, about how hard it was to order “just” a cup of coffee in a cappuccino latte town, about getting used to the constant noise of living off of a big street. And I wrote a lot about my growing up time in that little town in southern California (back when there were little towns in southern California).
You can take the boy out of the small town, but, well, you know.
Jan let me write about whatever I wanted, which was part of the joy and the wonder of her newspaper for me.
When I’d get my copy of the new News each month, I always checked my own column first. (Don’t all writers do that?) But I read everything else in the paper, too, the recipes (especially the ones Jan’s mom wrote up), the local color and gossip, the inspirational pieces, the captions to Jan’s great photos.
Although I never set foot in the community or dangled my toes in the Pike River, I got to feel as if I knew the place well and would one day go “home” to visit.
I was so sad when Jan had to fold the paper, sad for her, sad for the loss to the community, sad for myself because I knew I’d miss it.
Now I write a regular column called “Keep the Day Job” for Ned Burke’s fine online magazine, The Perspiring Writer. It’s another wonderful gig, and Ned’s another great editor to work with. I like the company I’m keeping there, too, especially Madonna Dries Christensen, who also writes for Ned’s other online magazine, Yesterday’s Magazine, and for my own online newsletter, Extra Innings.
Adjusting to online publications is a bit like making the transition from small town to big city, I think. The process of shaping the words into what I hope will be sense -- and, better yet, fun -- remains the same, and the “pages” look just like a print publication on the screen. But it’s different, of course, more immediate and also more transitory. I love it, but I still cling to my old ways and print out my columns, so I can hold them in my hands and keep them in the same big binder where I stored all of my old pieces for Jan’s Pike River Community News and other magazine pieces I’ve written over the years.
I know that publishing online isn’t just the future but the present, and I want to be a part of it for as long as I can push the keys. But I’ll always be a child of print, just as I’m a child of the small town where I grew up, and I’m betting that words on paper and small towns will survive and thrive right alongside the Internet and the metropolis.
Wherever we live and whatever the delivery system, we will always need our stories, our local news, and our connections with far away folks we’ve never even met.
You can read back issues of Marshall’s newsletter, extra innings, by visiting
www.dcs.wisc.edu/lsa/writing/extrainnings
and email Marshall at mcook@dcs.wisc.edu