I just had to post this photograph of that time I shared a good laugh with Judi Dench.
Heh-heh.
No, actually, it’s Brendan O’Hea, co-author with Dench of the fascinating book I just finished, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent. But oddly, he looks rather like me, doesn’t he? Or like a long-lost cousin?
The photograph, from the back cover flap of the book, has me reflecting on the architype of the double in life and literature. Perhaps it is strangest when it occurs in the real world.
Nonna and I had a great time at my lecture last night in Chenoa, Illinois (pop. 1,695), despite the nuisance of fans from around world thronging the library to chant my name and throw their panties onstage.
In the first photo below, I am seated by Sean, the tech guy, who saved the day by getting my PowerPoint presentation up on the Roku TV. Library director Sheryl Siebert and her husband Reid generously served Nonna and me a dinner of shepherd’s pie and sweet rolls from a local Amish bakery beforehand. Unlike my bitter journalist character, Ian, in my novel The Insurrectionist, I love small-town America.
One of my hearing aids was in the shop, so attendees had to bellow their questions like drill instructors, but somehow we managed. Also, I am not terribly enamored of my title, but I had to slap up something so people wouldn’t think I would be lecturing on two-headed babies.
I was showering in the bathroom of our high-rise hotel in Urumqi, China—a Muslim-majority city in the restive Xinjiang region—when Nonna and my stepson, Sergei, banged on the door.
“Russ, come here, hurry!” they called.
Wrapped in a towel, I rushed out to see the TV showing what I mistook for a Chinese disaster movie of particularly bad taste. Grainy footage showed a plane flying into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The skyscraper dissolved like a sugar cube in a glass of water.We couldn’t understand the narration. My first thought was, Who comes up with these outlandish plots?
The people we met were uniformly sympathetic, as I report below. Not all Chinese felt that way, however. Writer Liuyu Ivy Chen, later a Chinese immigrant to the U.S., wrote last year about her shame as she recalled the perspective on the catastrophe which she learned as an 11-year-old in central Zhejiang Province.
Hordes of Mongols, multitudes of Visigoths, entire Tribes of Israel, and jalopy-loads of Oakies are already thronging Route 66 on their way to Chenoa, Illinois, for a lecture and reading I will deliver on Sept. 24. If you and your chain-migrating clan happen to be in the neighborhood and wish to claw and pummel your way into the crowded venue, possibly losing an eye or an ear in the melee, please join us.
Fittingly, for a handbill promoting the much-anticipated event, the Chenoa library grabbed a photograph of me in front of a circus sideshow museum in the tourist trap of Uranus, further down the celebrated highway in Missouri. Why Route 66 is so famous, beyond a forgotten TV series by that name from the early sixties, is a question for pop historians. (Fascinatingly, Jack Kerouac once contemplated suing the series for misappropriating characters and themes from his On the Road.) However, you will find many fine oddities along the way, among them a store entirely devoted to Donald Trump paraphernalia, a 19-foot fiberglass statue of a smirking lout holding a hot dog, and an octagonally shaped library in a town Abraham Lincoln used to visit as a prairie lawyer riding the judicial circuit.
In my new novel, The Insurrectionist, a plucky FBI frogman drowns in a rural pond during a raid on a family who protested (peacefully) during the Capitol Hill riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Read about the national day of mourning that follows.
The media frenzy peaked with the funeral of Frogman Jones. A blond female-presenting announcer with CBS’ Inside Edition began her coverage, “A sendoff for a hero, as FBI Frogman Jericho Jones was honored today at the citadel of democracy he died defending.” The viewing in the Capitol Rotunda drew a milelong line of mourners snaking through the streets. Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, and President Biden knelt before a sarcophagus modeled after Lorenzo de Medici’s in Florence (draped in reclining marble nudes representing Twilight and Dawn, with Jones, wearing a Roman helmet with the visor up, gazing down on them).
A couple years ago, writing coach Chip Scanlan asked me to answer several questions on craft. Today, a search for a story of mine pulled up this interview, and I thought it might interest writers in search of advice from almost famous authors.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?
Go. See. Do. Be present. Participate. Observe. Make your writing more than a desk job. Make it a journey of exploration: Teddy Roosevelt up the Amazon, Ernest Shackleton on the frozen Weddell Sea, Jane Goodall in Gombe Stream, Tanzania. Don’t just imagine, don’t rely on the internet; go find the scenes you are writing about and talk to the people who can illuminate your characters. Investigate the worlds you want to bring to light, whether it’s a corner barbershop or the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.
By popular demand, here’s the video my younger son and I put together to ballyhoo my new novel, The Insurrectionist.
The topic? A reporter pursuing a Jan. 6-related story ends up entangling two families—including his own—in an FBI investigation. The Insurrectionist, a darkly satirical novel, lampoons the news media and woke America.
In May 2023, Nonna and I jetted to Hong Kong as guests of a storied auction house founded in 1796. Phillips had invited us for an event we never imagined participating in: the auction of a priceless watch that had belonged to Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last emperor of China.
We had spent nearly a year working on contract for Phillips, helping verify the watch and writing a catalogue the size of a coffee table book. And suddenly we found ourselves schmoozing with the kind of people who could casually spend a fortune on a watch. The timepiece eventually sold for $6.2 million.
Writers, was the script for the attempted assassination of former President Trump too outlandish to believe? Is it just too implausible that the storied Secret Service, protector of presidents, didn’t think to cover that slightly sloped rooftop?
Joseph Mallozzi—a showrunner, writer, and executive producer for “Dark Matter” and “Stargate”—offers a wry commentary in the style of an executive’s critique of a movie script. He scorches the Secret Service’s ridiculous excuses for why a gunman got within a hair’s breadth of shooting Trump through the head.
Thanks for the script. Overall, the plotting feels contrived and, at times, defies logic, so we’re going to require a fairly extensive rewrite for the second draft.
In my new novel, The Insurrectionist, Chicago Bullet reporter Ian Landquart learns that he is no longer heading to the Paris bureau, as planned. He must make way for a more diverse correspondent. Instead, he is assigned to one of the paper’s suburban satellite offices.
When he balks, the editor says, “Take it or leave it, Ian. If you don’t want it, I got a stack of résumés that high from reporters who’d give their left arm to write for the Chicago Bullet.”
A harmless metaphor? No way. Ian—who lost a leg several years ago in a hiking accident—resolves to turn tables on the newspaper, using his disability as a pretext to file a civil rights complaint against the paper. The following scene is from his first day at his new work station.
The DuPage bureau, where Ian showed up on Monday, was located in Oak Brook, a suburb full of office parks with grassy berms and ponds with spritzing fountains where Canada geese paddled about, too lazy to migrate further north for the summer. Bureau chief Krystal Brufke, she/her, was a pudgy White woman with frizzy gray hair, dressed in a mauve suit, flowered blouse, and mom sneakers. Her rainbow-colored mask asserted, undeniably, LOVE IS LOVE.
The Elephant Box 