Feel the Love

Chip Wendt’s Running Wolf Press is all about the juice

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld

Chip Wendt, the owner and force of nature behind Running Wolf Press in Healdsburg, is looking for some juice. Not Napa grape; not Gravenstein apple. This “juice” comes from the flesh and bones of local writers creating what Wendt terms “needed” art, or more specifically, poetry.

Sniffing the air, flashing a grin as we make our way to a riverside Petaluma cafe, Wendt spins his philosophies. “Poetry is my core artistic legacy,” he begins. It is a legacy made possible, in part, by an inheritance that allows him to write, practice flamenco guitar and tend to the press’ priorities without the constraints of a nine-to-five job. “For now,” he adds.

“If you sit around writing poetry all day long, the heart gets lost in verbiage,” he says, acknowledging that, for many writers, the nose-to-the grindstone approach is what works. His method of poetry spinning is more meditative.

His poems often come while playing guitar, when he has lulled himself into that theta brainwave state of near trance. Within the theta, Wendt’s poems spawn.

“Spawn” might be an appropriate word to use for the formation of Running Wolf Press. After all, the impetus appeared to him in a dream about rivers.

In 1992 Wendt sailed from Long Island to Scotland with his father, crossing the Atlantic Ocean for 21 days without sight of land, and experienced lucid, cinematic dreams. In the most significant dream, he describes being in a rowboat, tooling down a rushing, brown river with none other than the great scholar of mythology and mysticism, Joseph Campbell himself. In the boat also sat a trunk containing all the writing Wendt had ever composed. Instructed by Campbell, Wendt was charged with pulling the boat alongside a big rock and setting his work on it, out of the flood. He was unable to complete this dream task, but when he awoke, his course of action was clear to him. “I knew,” he says, “I had to make a book.”

His first book, Teachings of the Serpent, and his new career, Running Wolf Press, were born together in 1993, as Wendt sought a way to put his poetry out in tangible form. “I was taking the phrase ‘desktop publishing’ literally,” he smiles.

What followed was a period of intense insomnia for Wendt. “Something burst open inside me,” he says. “I wrote several hundred poems. I had [compared] myself to the great writers through the physical object of a book; I experienced the synergy that occurs between poems that you have written when they are placed within covers.”

In the time between, however, Wendt was inspired by the work of the first Healdsburg literary laureate Doug Stout, and Running Wolf Press–whose named is inspired by Wendt’s childhood nickname–published Stout’s chapbook Urgent News in 2000, followed by Sonoma County poet laureate Don Emblen’s chapbook Want List and Other Poems about Aging.

He has supported a great number of local artists, producing inexpensively manufactured chapbooks in small enough quantities to make them affordable, but not chintzy. The books are produced with care and quality. The book that arose out of Wendt’s insomniac nights, Cold Valley, wasn’t published until 2001.

“I had to reconcile the part of me that wanted to live in a cave far, far away with my regular, daily life,” he says. “Up until age 28, I was a sort of hippie, spiritual seeker. I lived on communes, I joined cults, did lots of meditation–all the appropriate behaviors.”

“Writing Cold Valley settled me down,” he says. “I found I could go away without going away. The book was a weaving of the metaphor in which I could hold the family and the spiritual seeking.”

Cold Valley was also a book about place: the town of Healdsburg, the county of Sonoma, the bosom of Northern California.

“Everything I’ve done is local,” Wendt underscores.

“‘Local’ is a word that artists tend to shun, like it’s an insult, like it means that their work isn’t fabulous or grand.”

Here is where the juice comes in: from Wendt’s point of view, juice is what local artists have and produce and keep flowing, an electric creativity that pulses with life.

“High-cultured art that comes from the top down is like bones where the marrow has already been drained out,” he proclaims. “The marking of excellence in our culture is a damaged process. What we consider to be good is built around a model that values technique more than juice.”

This leads to the question of who and what Running Wolf publishes. Wendt doesn’t go scouting local talent, holding “call for submission” periods or asking to see every manuscript in a 40-mile radius.

“I follow the juice and the juice is in my personal connections,” he explains. “I go to a reading and I get deeply moved. There’s no attempt to be fair; there is just an attempt to follow the juice. Where fairness is concerned, more people must do what I have done. More poets must make books for themselves and for other poets.”

Admirers of Running Wolf Press–which has also published chapbooks by Healdsburg literary laureate Penelope La Montagne, SSU professor Jonah Raskin, Buddhist teacher and scholar Robert Hall and others–should not be discouraged by the limits on the manuscripts the press publishes.

“We don’t need to worry about whether Running Wolf Press is a more famous press than any other or how many books it publishes. My goal is to show people that you can do something that will make the world around you much better, without it being a big deal,” Wendt says. “As an artist, I came to learn quickly that you have to help hold up the art world, help create a pipeline for it.”

Capping off lunch, he produces a book, proclaiming, “You have to hear poetry today.” And he is right.

From the April 7-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

‘Dancing Barefoot,’ by Wil Wheaton, is available from Amazon.com.

Wheaton in his ‘Star Trek’ days.

Adult Reader

Wil Wheaton steps out of Crusher’s shadow

By Joy Lanzendorfer

You may or may not remember Wil Wheaton from Star Trek: The Next Generation. On the show, Wheaton played boy genius Wesley Crusher. Before Star Trek, he was a successful child actor with several films to his credit, including the lead in the 1986 hit Stand by Me. But despite his early successes, Wheaton couldn’t seem to get out from under the heel of Wesley Crusher, who (for reasons unknown to us normal mortals) has been called the most hated character in Star Trek‘s 20-year history. Wheaton found himself typecast at age 18 and, with a few exceptions, more or less disappeared from the public eye after leaving the show in the early ’90s.

That is, unless the public happens to spend a lot of time on the Internet.

Since 1999, Wheaton has kept a popular blog, www.wilwheaton.net, where he maintains daily posts about his life and career. At this point, he has amassed a fairly large following and has become something of an Internet celebrity. His blog averages about 600,000 page visits a month, many of them repeat visitors. While his self-depreciating humor and likable personality factor into the mix, many of his readers relate to Wheaton, 31, because of his status as a self-described “geek.”

“When I think of someone as being geeky, I think of them with an overabundance of specialized knowledge,” he says by phone from his Southern California home. “I definitely have a great deal of that. I get excited about role-playing games and text-based computer games. And I have a real affection for science fiction.”

Last month, Sebastopol’s beloved tech publisher to many a geek, O’Reilly and Associates, published Wheaton’s first book, Dancing Barefoot. Culled from five auto-biographical stories that were originally published in some form on his blog, this is the first of two books O’Reilly will put out by Wheaton. The second, Just a Geek, will be released in June.

Wheaton never considered writing a book until cartoonist Dan Perkins, known as Tom Tomorrow and creator of the “This Modern World” strip, urged him to think about it.

“He said, ‘Your blog is popular and a lot of people read it–you really ought to write a book,'” Wheaton says. “I remember saying, ‘I’m not an author, I’m a struggling actor. I can’t write.’ But Dan said, ‘Look, you write every day. Just think about it.’ And I thought about it, and then some of my weblog entries began to turn into more developed stories.”

The stories became Just a Geek, a book about how Wheaton came to terms with the success of Star Trek and his lack of success as an adult actor. But Wheaton ended up with 100,000 words, far too many for the kind of book he was writing. From the trimmings came Dancing Barefoot. He shaped the stories, gave them some context and set up online fulfillment of Dancing Barefoot on his blog. His initial print run of 200 books sold out in four hours.

“It was just taking off,” Wheaton said. “I was getting all this magnificent, wonderful support from independent booksellers and small stores and people who read my website and really believed in me.”

He sold 3,000 copies from orders coming into his site before O’Reilly approached him to publish the book.

The stories in Dancing Barefoot range from Wheaton and his wife dancing in the rain (thus the title) to Wheaton’s introduction to William Shatner. Since it came out in March, the book has ranked as high as 184 on the Amazon.com list and was number 10 in its category. As of this writing, its Amazon ranking is 764.

These books are just the beginning of Wheaton’s writing career. In fact, after facing his failure as an adult actor, he has started to redefine himself through his writing.

“I’ve worked very little as an actor in the last couple of years,” he says. “I took most of last year off to work on these books and my agents dropped me, so I haven’t had an agent in almost a year. My real focus for the last year or so has been writing. I’m working really hard to create stuff that doesn’t suck. Before it ever gets to an editor, it has to pass my inner critic.

“And my inner critic,” he chuckles, “is a surly bastard.”

From the April 7-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photo Courtesy of Willard F. Zahn, M.D.

Fifie Malouf.

Immigrant Song

The story of Arab Americans in California and the North Bay

By R. V. Scheide

Before Sept. 11, 2001, Sacramento writer Janice Marschner was working on a book about the thriving hot springs resort industry that existed in Northern California in the late 19th century. During her research, she kept encountering references to the immigration of various ethnic groups to the region, including some from the Middle East. California’s diverse immigrant population would be a great subject for another book, she thought, and she began working on a new proposal, California: An International Community. Then came 9-11.

“Following 9-11 there was a reported rise in hate crimes against Middle Eastern Americans and also others mistaken for Arabs and Muslims,” Marschner writes in the introduction to California’s Arab Americans (Coleman Ranch Press; $18.95). Realizing that very little had been written about the Golden State’s small Arab immigrant population, Marschner felt it imperative to rush an excerpt from California: An International Community to press as a separate, smaller edition. “I hope that this book . . . will provide Californians and all Americans a better understanding about our community members of Arab descent–the now third and fourth generation, as well as the new arrivals.”

Marschner’s hopes have been realized with California’s Arab Americans, a quick glimpse at the various Middle Eastern peoples who have immigrated here during the past 150 years and the cultures and traditions they’ve brought with them. She begins the book with a brief history of the Middle East, where both Christianity and Islam originated. She then notes that there have been three waves of Arab immigration, beginning with the arrival of an estimated 100,000 Syrians between 1880 and 1914.

While subsequent waves of immigrants have sought refuge in America from the war-torn Middle East, the Syrians’ arrival remains somewhat of a mystery to scholars, as there were no major political upheavals at the time. Some have speculated that the 1876 Centennial Exhibition’s worldwide call for global arts exhibitors may have lured Syrians with the promise of prosperity in America.

At any rate, some of those Syrians settled in Sonoma County, where their relatives can still be found today. In what is perhaps the most enjoyable part of Marschner’s book, she details the family histories of California’s Arab Americans by region so that readers may follow their footsteps, before history and assimilation wipe out all the traces.

“Sonoma County attracted several utopian colonies, but it has never been a draw for Arab immigrants,” Marschner writes. Never-theless, Arab Americans made their presence known. In 1915, Syrian immigrants Abe and Nazara Maloof ran a successful ice cream parlor in Guerneville. Later, they ran a bakery in Santa Rosa and in 1918 had a son, Milton, who served in WWII and spent most of his life in Sonoma County until passing away in 1999.

“He was real proud of being Syrian,” says wife Paula Maloof, who still lives in Sonoma County quite near the home where Abe and Nazara once lived. Milton worked in the Mare Island Naval Shipyard for 31 years; he and Paula were married for more than 50 years. She also remembers the most flamboyant member of the family, Fifie Malouf (like most immigrants, the Americanized spelling of the family name varies), who in the first half of the 20th century was way ahead of her time, having been married three times. Fifie lived on and off in Santa Rosa, according to Marschner, and at one time ran the local swimming pool. Paula adds that while in Los Angeles, Fifie purportedly ran a house of ill-repute.

Marschner cites several other Sonoma County families of Middle Eastern descent, including Michael Selby, who immigrated from Beruit, Lebanon, in 1902 and arrived in Santa Rosa in 1917, where he served as a popular barber for some of the area’s more prominent citizens until the age of 92. It’s delightful facts such as these that help humanize California’s Arab Americans, an insightful, timely book.

From the April 7-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.