Blue Ear Books in 2023
Dear friends,
The New Year and the successful launch - after many months of hard work by Andrew Russell and me - of the updated edition of Christo Brand’s memoir Doing Life with Mandela gives me occasion to reflect with satisfaction on all we’ve been doing at Blue Ear Books to get to this point, poised, going into 2023, to kick things up to the proverbial “next level.”
BEB’s 2022 really began with the fall 2021 publication of Thomas MacDonald’s book Here Is What Happened: A Black Man’s Discoveries and Decisions. Thomas is a longtime personal friend of mine, and he has a fascinating life story. I feel more than honored to have had the opportunity to help him bring it to publication, and - looking back - I reflect on how important my work with Thomas was in establishing a replicable model for Blue Ear Books editing and publishing projects. I also feel grateful to have Thomas as a role model and advisor on sound business practices.
Next, in April 2022, we published Stories from the Front: Pain, Betrayal, and Resilience on the MST Battlefield, Lisa Carrington Firmin’s compelling book detailing the prevalence of military sexual trauma (MST) within the United States armed forces. Lisa, a retired United States Air Force colonel, is a leader by both personality and training, and she has helped lead me and Blue Ear Books toward developing a robust line in books by military veterans. Coming in spring 2023 will be No One Leaves Unscathed: A Woman in the Marine Corps by Stesha Colby-Lynch. (It was actually Stesha who introduced me to Lisa.) Also in development is a powerful memoir by Stephen Russell, a combat veteran of Iraq. It’s not usually advisable to make hyperbolic comparisons, but Stephen’s manuscript calls to my mind classics of war literature such as Dispatches by Michael Herr. Several other veterans’ books are also in the pipeline, and you’ll be hearing about those in this newsletter in due course.
Next up for publication, early in this new year, is Just Keep Pedaling: A Peace Corps Volunteer in Uruguay by Connie Ness. I’m proud to be helping Connie publish her touching and generously illustrated book, which seems to me a fine example of a Peace Corps memoir that demonstrates the very real, very ground-level and personal value to all parties of service in that estimable institution.
Connie came to me via my former professor William L. Andrews, whom I saw in person for the first time in many years in August 2021, when he visited Seattle. Bill also was kind enough to provide a blurb for Eugene Smith’s book Back to the World: A Life after Jonestown (published in 2021 by TCU Press), which I helped Eugene write, describing it as “a gripping story of survival” and a work of “life-affirming prophetic witness.”
There’s much to tell on other fronts, too, which I can only touch on in this message. Watch this space! Andrew Russell, who edited the new edition of Doing Life with Mandela, is hard at work now on his own book with the working title The Leadership We Need: Lessons for Today from Nelson Mandela. Elsewhere on the same continent, Patrick Rutikanga, whose family has for decades run the Gisimba Memorial Center in Kigali, is writing a book on generational trauma and recovery in children in the wake of the Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994, when Patrick himself was a toddler.
Yuliya Shirokova is writing her memoir of growing up in Ukraine, immigration to the United States, and the current war, to be titled Light in the Fields. Jonathan Garfunkel has two books in the works covering the Japanese American experience on Bainbridge Island, Washington - one a biography, the other a documentary history. Jeb Wyman is preparing a new edition of his anthology of combat veterans’ accounts What They Signed Up For and beginning work on a book on how the post-9/11 wars have changed American culture.
A very good old (in the sense of longstanding) friend of mine in the UK, Nick Ryan, is the author of Homeland (U.S. title Into a World of Hate), a prophetic 2003 book of reporting on far-right movements in Europe and America (and one of the first full-length books that I edited). One highlight of 2022 for me was when Nick suggested I publish the autobiography of his friend Hikmet Tabak, a Kurdish activist from Turkey, now living in exile in England. Nick and I are working together editing Hikmet’s fascinating manuscript, and we hope to publish it later this year or in 2024.
The last project I’ll mention for now is a book I’ve begun collaborating on with my extraordinary Haitian friend Gerald Oriol Jr. For various reasons - including sadly obvious ones - I’ve been unable to travel to Haiti since 2017, so Gerald and I are composing a book in the form of an ongoing conversation via WhatsApp and email, covering the current situation as well as Haitian history, literature and, of course, politics. This project gives me a welcome occasion to stay in regular touch with an important friend as well as with Haiti itself, a country that has been crucially important in both my life and my career ever since I first went there in 1982 at age 16. I see this book with Gerald as, among other things, a kind of sequel to my own book Bearing the Bruise: A Life Graced by Haiti, published in 2012.
Blue Ear Books authors have promised me they will contribute regularly to this Substack in 2023, as Lisa Carrington Firmin and Qaisar Shareef have done in recent weeks. Their contributions will help you become aware of their stories and ideas and, of course, their books.
Finally, thanks to all of you subscribers for your interest in and support for Blue Ear Books. I invite you, if you don’t already, to support Blue Ear Books materially by becoming a paid subscriber at $50 or $100 per year or $5 per month. If you do (and if you email me your postal address), until further notice we’ll send you a copy of Doing Life with Mandela with our thanks.
Happy New Year,
Publisher, Blue Ear Books