Chuck Yeager, 'The Right Stuff' on tap for Literary Journalists again

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - Tom Wolfe's classic book about the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff, will be up for discussion again Monday night in Literary Journalism class.

The book got generally good reviews in the first round of class chatter - I even got to tell my Chuck Yeager story.


Chuck Yeager about the time he broke the sound barrier


A much older Chuck Yeager

I had just taken over as editor of The Union newspaper in Grass Valley in 1980 - after a particularly bruising time in the newsroom with a rebellious staff. I came back from lunch to find a grinning Chuck Yeager, sitting in my editor's chair with his cowboy boots on the deck, heels digging into some papers I had left there.

I went straight for the desk and told Yeager to get his $^%&#&* boots off my desk, embarrassing the then-chair of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors, Eric Rood, who had brought Yeager in to show him off.

He and Yeager had served in the US Air Force together.

I had no idea who Yeager was, and in hindsight all these years later, I probably still would have told him to get his $^%&#&* boots off my desk had I known that the cocky guy sitting in my chair was the legendary Chuck Yeager.

Yeager and I met a few times after that at Nevada County social functions and laughed (sort of) at that incident.

Back to the twin pursuits of columns and literary journalism

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, Sacramento, Sacramento, CA USA - With two heavy duty writing classes on my schedule this semester - Literary Journalism and Column Writing - it would seem that I should get inspired to get back to my own writing.

Perhaps.

Moving into a new house, after flying 2,500 miles to get here, took most of the writing starch out of me with this missive being the first writing since leaving Valois, New York more than a week ago.

Que lastima.

But these two classes (and two basic news writing courses) almost always provide a kind of weird kinetic vibration that gets me writing again after short respites.

In Literary Journalism, we will be reading the works of Sebastian Junger, Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Krakauer and a half dozen others. The students will also be producing a draft of a major piece of Literary Journalism, after a semester of research.


Hunter S. Thompson

In column writing, students will be producing two 650-word columns per week - an admittedly heavy load - except that the work is, well, the work of writing and by the end of the semester they should be, for the most part, facil writers who can bang out a column.

And me? I'll be reading a lot of student work, but also getting back to work on my fiction (Soundtrack, a novel that has been in progress for five years) and beginning a work of literary journalism about immigration. I say beginning because my best sources are in Mexico, a few houses from where I will be living this winter and spring.

And, time permitting, I'll be back using this column to talk about making money with writing.

Time permitting.