Charles Degelman's Blog

Degelman's second novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, just made mystery short list for IndieFab Book of the Year Award, sponsored by Foreword Reviews.

Published by Harvard Square Editions, Nails tells a '60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love.
Read a review here...

Did you know that monarch butterflies flew south in the winter, just like birds? As with many of her novels and essays, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior sails on the wings of the novelist’s scientific alter ego. Flight Behavior excels in using the microcosm of small lives in flux — human and otherwise — to explore how we grasp and respond to macro concepts and realities so daunting as to appear overwhelming, e.g., the consequences of climate change.

But in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver doesn’t stop at exploring impact. With typical courage, the author explores how living beings confront seemingly impossible phenomena and struggle to address the universal existential question that presses all species…

What is to be done?

Flight Behavior follows Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother of two who — en route to an uneasy assignation — discovers a migration of Monarch butterflies that has flown astray and crash landed by the millions in the Appalachian forest above her home.

Kingsolver introduces this environmental calamity with mystery, through the eyes of her bright, quick-witted, poorly educated protagonist so that the reader struggles alongside Dellarobia to understand the powerful apparition that has landed in her familiar forest.

The unhappy young mother’s bewilderment is tinged with irony: Dellarobia left her glasses at home to please the manifestation of her restlessness — a local lineman hunk. As she climbs through the forest, the newly arrived Monarchs appear to her as a lake of fire, unidentifiable, anomalous, possibly a warning against her sinful intent.

The clandestine tryst with the lineman is never consummated but a new love begins for Dellarobia — the discovery of her rapacious curiosity and deep-running wonder for a world beyond her child-father husband, overbearing in-laws, and the demands of survival in a churchy community ravaged by chronic rural poverty.

Word spreads quickly. Something odd has happened in Dellarobia ‘s hardscrabble farming township. The community first responds with denial and pragmatism. How will Dellarobia’s husband and father-in-law log the mountain top with an infestation of bugs covering the trees? Who cares about a bunch of butterflies? There’s plenty more where they came from… right?

Ironically, Kingsolver sets the Monarchs demise — an event of sudden and gigantic proportions — in a community long-besieged by soggy, deviant weather that has delivered a near-Biblical saturation to the delicate landscape, ruining crops and making life tougher than ever for its hard-working tenants.

The unprecedented rain also serves to introduce Kingsolver’s exploration of how humans cloak themselves in denial and blind faith in a world where life had been defined by everyday life and the predictable cycle of the seasons.

Denial and lack of understanding play major roles in Flight Behavior. Her characters are not dumb; they’re complex and worthy of high regard. The women are stoic or whipsaw sharp, the men stubborn but often thoughtful and surprisingly vulnerable. But Kingsolver’s butterflies numb their sensibilities and intelligence, despite their deep understanding of the prominent role nature plays in their lives.

So now, when nature goes awry in Dellarobia’s world, Kingsolver serves up folks too busy, too poor, and too religion-bound to recognize the significance of the Monarch's confused arrival. Besides, what are you gonna do? How do you fix a world that has run amuck?

Enter the dialectic forces of the media and science. Feathertown’s citizens may be annoyed by their majestic, orange-winged squatters, but the outside world has gotten word of the aberration. The beleaguered insects' newsworthiness appears in the form of an inevitably blonde, disinformed, and ambitious broadcast journalist who corners Dellarobia.

Our young protagonist awkwardly spills her jumbled but intelligent reflections for the charming lady, with Kingsolver making sure we see both versions: Dellarobia’s awkward truth versus the media-ized outcome where the journalist personifies Dellarobia as a simple but intuitive native, a sexualized witness to the profundity of the Monarchs, her words yanked from her mouth and twisted into a separate reality.

Science arrives in the form of Ovid Byron, a tall, Jamaican lepidopterist who appears unannounced in Feathertown, makes a preliminary foray into the forest, and returns with a research party and a field station. Ovid’s return brings with it the realization that the aberration in the forest is earth-shaking. Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet and with a scientist's mind that gives us a window into the deep, darkness that often comes with knowledge.

For Dellarobia, Ovid reflects the claustrophobic inadequacy of her own life and reveals the excitement of an urgent new world represented by the troubled Monarchs and the exactitude of scientific inquiry. Through Ovid’s carefully moderated response to the Monarch displacement and Kingsolver’s detailed and fascinating description of how a scholar studies a natural phenomenon, we see Dellarobia begins to absorb and codify her own response to this earth-changing butterfly visit.

The Monarchs' presence resonates throughout the tight community. The local pastor labels Dellarobia’s discovery as a vision. Her judgmental mother-in-law struggles with the concept of no return in a world where seasonal repetition and weekly sermons has established the rhythm of the universe. Her husband opens his eyes to his child-bride’s power, and the village patriarch yields his forest clearcut plans with grace and dignity.

The tide of carelessness, denial, and disinformation turns when Ovid Byron locks horns — or antennae — with the blonde, assumptive media maven. He shoots down her media clichés and assumptions and banishes her from the scene. But always, Dellarobia’s heart and mind beats at the center of Flight Behavior, giving us a window into the reality of the unrealizable — that our planet is changing, fundamentally, drastically, and forever.

Through Dellarobia’s efforts to grapple with our anthropocene reality, accompanied by the diverse efforts of her family, neighbors, and parishioners to shake off their sleepwalk and through the labors of and the intensely engaged Ovid, Kingsolver asks us — as she makes her characters ask themselves — What is to be done?

Kingsolver is one of my favorite novelists: she inevitably weaves deep social meaning into the fabric of her skilled and gorgeous works. But, as with many writers who have reached well-deserved heights, she needs editing. In Flight Behavior, she indulges us — and possibly herself — with a near-endless chapter in a goodwill store, describing in revolving detail the items for sale, the speculated-upon origins, and her kids' reactions to her 'yeses and nos. The scene serves a purpose, Dellarobia discusses plot points with her sidekick, Crystal but ten pages would have covered the territory; the other 40 seem over the top.

Conversely, toward the end of the book, Kingsolver seems to rush to the finish, using narrative to briefly describe life-changing scenes and circumstances.

Editorial problems notwithdstanding, As Dellarobia moves into her next chapter, beyond the end of Flight Behavior, the reader is left with Kingsolver's subtle but definitive answer to the question "What is to be done?" Plenty.

A bowl full of bronze nails for author Charles Degelman — his new novel collected a bronze medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards.

The awards, known as “IPPYs” are intended to recognize and honor exemplary independent and university titles published each year.

This year's IPPY Bronze is the second kudo for Degelman's 60s tale of resistance rebellion and love. Earlier, A Bowl Full of Nails rose to finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver.

Published by Harvard Square Editions

Literary critic and book store literati, Rachel Jagareski, writes about my latest 'resistance' novel, A Bowl Full of Nails, in Foreword Reviews...

"May 15, 1969: It’s Bloody Thursday at People’s Park in Berkeley, California, and street theater activist Gus Bessemer returns from his confrontation with the “pigs” with a butt full of birdshot and the need to skip town for a construction job a thousand miles away.

In Charles Degelman’s A Bowl Full of Nails, Gus is served the titular breakfast by his live-in girlfriend the morning after he announces his solo travel plans. Foregoing this iron-rich snack, he hits the road for a transformative year with a mother lode of independent spirits in Montgomery, Colorado..." [Read more...]

Yes, book reviews can be helpful to an author, but I was especially thrilled when a student journalist from one of my writing classes interviewed me to write this Cal State LA University Times article. Excerpt and link below:

"A Bowl Full of Nails, like my first novel Gates of Eden, has been part of an effort to set the record straight about how ingenious and successful the resistance and alternative-lifestyle movements of the 1960s really were," he says. "Those were important times, not only for me, but for the entire nation. And much of this significance came from the energy, idealism, and action of students on campuses who protested the Vietnam War, including '60s war resistors on our own Cal State LA campus!" [read more]

A Bowl Full of Nails
Charles Degelman
Harvard Square Editions

Synopsis — May 25, 1969, Berkeley, CA — Fiery young Gus Bessemer vows to stop the war in Vietnam. His weapon of choice? Guerrilla street theater. But when a Berkeley riot squad escalates from teargas to shotguns, Gus' defiant art attack screeches to a halt.

Injured, outraged, and on the lam — Gus splits for the Colorado Rockies to work with his hands and get his head together. Ironically, Gus' quest for inner peace brings him face-to-face with a Rocky Mountain counterculture full of colorful communards, FBI snitches, stolen dynamite, and a dead body in the National Forest.

A Bowl Full of Nails offers the reader a suspense-filled tale bursting with humor, espionage, and rebellion while the author explores Gus' dance between personal demons and political resistance.

A deftly crafted novel from first page to last, A Bowl Full Of Nails is an impressive testament to author Charles Degelman's talents as a skilled, engaging, and above all, entertaining story teller. A rewarding read, A Bowl Full Of Nails is highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library General Fiction collections.

— Carl Logan, Midwest Book Review

Bookpleasures welcomes as our guest today, writer & editor, Charles Degelman. Charles currently teaches narrative and dramatic writing at California State University, Los Angeles.

Previously, he served as staff writer and editor at a Los Angeles based educational organization while he produced original work for the stage and wrote fiction, screenplays, and political commentary.


In 2010, Charles edited A Voice From the Planet, an award-winning collection of international short fiction, published by Harvard Square Editions.

Recent work includes Gates of Eden, a '60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Gates garnered a silver medal from the 2012 Independent Publishers Book Awards. A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the counterculture of the 1970s, was a finalist in the PEN/ Bellwether Competition and will be published by Harvard Square Editions in February, 2015.

Read interview...



Charles Degelman

Ten Thousand Waves: Poems by Ping Wang

My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Ten Thousand Waves
Ping Wang

Since childhood, the poet Wang Ping has been aware of her own restless spirit. “I want to play,” she writes in her recent poetry collection, Ten Thousand Waves, “See the world before I become too old.”

Wang Ping’s wayward-seeking energy has transported her from the China of Mao’s Cultural Revolution across a myriad of geographies, cultures, and fantasies. Like a shaman, Ping dances, seamlessly assembling a layered collage of portraits, stories and dreams. She blends personal experience with conjured people, places, events, and reflections so honestly that we trust her flight from storytelling to poetic reportage, from fiction to fact.

Advancing on Ping’s often-guileful but compassionate voice, Ten Thousand Waves embraces the contradictions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the enigma of Tibet. She gives voice to the microcosms of life in a new China. She celebrates the simple contentment of a snail merchant and mourns the hope, hardship, and cruelty of immigrant lives in New York, the Metal City of Yongkang and on the murderous tidal flats of Wales.

Content drives her diverse stylistic choices. “I consider reading poetry to be a social obligation,” Ping says in one interview. “The small people are speaking,” she writes. “...and no dam of bullets or machine guns or pepper spray tanks media smears can stop this tsunami of justice and peace…this is not violence.”

Ten Thousand Waves plants images and impressions in the reader’s memory where they gestate, waiting to surface in unpredictable forms. Wang Ping’s poetry is the work of a mirthful, gentle trickster with an urgent and intricate agenda. In Ten Thousand Waves, her restless spirit follows the poet’s heart while her pen delivers the world to us.




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A Bowl Full of Nails

Ever get asked to distill the essence of your novel down to an 85-second audio blurb? I did.

Peter Johnson, producer extraordinaire at The Authors Corner gives authors 85 seconds to "make an impression, paint a vivid image, the most poignant..."

Eighty-five seconds? It was fun, exciting, and a huge challenge. Here's the resulting excerpt from my new 'resistance' novel, A Bowl Full of Nails.

Just click on The Author's Corner and scroll down...

You probably don’t think about editors when you first sit down to write. You’re driven by the strength of an idea, you’re in love with words and eager to see them pour from your keyboard or pencil tip. You may be immobilized, intimidated by a blank page or screen. Either way, you begin to write your story or make your claim and you may realize that you already have an editor — perhaps more than one — perching on your shoulder.

The more you write, the better you’ll get to know these editors. They’ll bark at you, coo at the grace of your prose, haunt you with questions, call you an idiot or a genius. Whoever they are, regardless of your doubts and dreams, you will want to shape them, train them to work for you because — before you submit your work to an editor — you will want to edit yourself.
[Read more...]