Book Tour Information

I'll leave Hoboken Tuesday (November 17) for the launch of my book The Fair Hope of Heaven in paperback. Enterprising readers may have already ordered it from amazon.com in that format, but I held back its general release to the Fairhope reading public until now. It was first published in hard cover in January, and I went to Fairhope at that time to get it into the local indie bookstore. It will retail for a mere $16.95 in paperback, as against $26.95 for the hard cover.

I've written a lot about the book on this blog, and on my other blog "Finding Myself in Hoboken," and on my website. It seems much of my life is devoted--when not finding myself in Hoboken--to finding Fairhope.

Even though the book has the words "fair" and "hope" in the title, I never thought of it as a book about the town of Fairhope until market forces--read that to mean publishers--informed me that it was. I thought it was about the way history and events transform people and places, reflecting on this through my memories of a unique childhood in the kind of nonconformist environment that Fairhope, Alabama, offered in the middle of the 20th Century. I included character sketches of people I knew, thinking for all the world that I had created a new Lake Wobegon Days, and, although knowing it would appeal to others who shared the memories, I felt that my book was universal in scope. Part of me would still like to believe that--but the reaction from publishers was that it was charming but limited to readers in Fairhope. I hope sales of the soft cover may still prove me right.

So I'll get on the plane Tuesday and plan to visit old friends and see the new construction in the town where I spent much of my life. I'll investigate the possibility of taking control of the old family homestead.

My schedule of public appearances include book talks at the Fairhope Museum of History, 2 P.M. Thursday, November 19 and the Marietta Johnson Museum, 2 P.M. Friday November 20, and signing the book at Page & Palette Sunday November 22 (at 2 P.M. also). I'll have Thanksgiving with a couple I've known for at least 60 years, with their friends and relations. I'll see family and classmates and people I worked closely with before I moved to Hoboken in December 2007. I'm no longer distraught at how many of the old building and funky cottages have been destroyed and replaced. Like a newcomer, I'll be refreshed by balmy weather and sunsets on Mobile Bay.

From The Fair Hope of Heaven: "The coastline of Mobile Bay with sunset views is just one part of the equation. Its calming effect cannot be denied, and the transcendent, everlasting quality of that particular body of water and its constant gentle motion is a source of comfort and serenity to all who live anywhere near it."

I look forward to this trip. Indeed I do. I hope I see you there.

Ready Or Not, Fairhope: Here I Come!

In two weeks I'll be cooling my heels in the very town about which I've written two books and innumerable blog posts: Fairhope, Alabama. I've released The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia in paperback, and will be signing copies at the beloved indie bookstore Page and Palette November 22 from 2-4 P.M.

If you've followed this blog at all, you know about The Fair Hope of Heaven. My original title was When We Had the Sky, and much of the material was contained in the first books, Meet Me at The Butterfly Tree, but this book really came to life after I had lived in Hoboken for several months and read a delightful little book called Utopia, New Jersey. It inspired me to take a more positive look at Fairhope's utopian origins and compare them to the Fairhope of today. There is much history of the real Fairhope in The Fair Hope of Heaven, and some conjecture about its present and future.

In addition to chapters about Upton Sinclair's brief life in Fairhope, and that of E.B. Gaston, the founder of the village, there are chapters about the eccentric Communist Willard Edwards (who left Fairhope for what he expected to be greener pastures in Soviet Russia under Stalin) and Dian Stitt Arnold, who built her own utopian life around horses, dogs, and children. I'll be discussing Fairhope history and the earlier chapters of the book at the Fairhope Museum of History at a tea (made from Fairhope-grown tea leaves) on November 19 at 2 P.M. and reading the chapter on Dian Arnold and her mentor Blanche Brown at 2 P.M. November 20 at the Marietta Johnson Museum.

If you are in the Fairhope area, I hope you'll come to one of the events. If you don't live anywhere nearby, the book is available at amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.com. I'd love to meet you and talk with you about the Fairhope I remember and the Fairhope you want to get to know.

Fairhope, A Storybook Town

It has come to my attention that Fairhope is billed in the promotional literature as a “Storybook Town.” It has also been called such things as a “little Norman Rockwell town,” and a “Disneyland town.”

Aargh. I am doing what I can, by harping on the subject of Fairhope history on this blog, to keep it from becoming any of those things.

When I first moved back in 1988, there actually were some remnants of Norman Rockwell cottages, little houses that had been built between the two World Wars -- modest houses that looked as if nice families lived there. Fairhope had an undiscovered quality that I would hardly have called “storybook” in the sense of the charming little Tudor homes of California or the New England farm houses, or the Midwestern carpenter gothics of the 1800’s. It was almost unreal in its quietness. The last of the fabled hotels of the town, The Colonial Inn, stood decrepit in its prime spot overlooking the bay, all but abandoned, awaiting the wrecker's ball.

There was very little to do on a Saturday night. There were a few eateries, but only one really nice one, a remodeled old farmhouse out behind the new shopping center, known as Dusty's. It was owned by a local character who had had a career as a cocktail pianist and had a young, creative wife who put the restaurant on the map, thereby giving parched little Fairhope a first-class place to take visitors or a special date.

A novel had been published in 1959, written by a young man named Robert E. Bell, who had been so entranced by what he called the magic of Fairhope, that he set his story in a fictionized version of the town, renaming it Moss Bayou, and smothering the setting with such phrases as "Somewhere after a turn down the street, he saw a glimmer of water, gold-flaked through the trees; the frond-dragging palms bent with the curve of the road which heat-danced ahead of him, charging the sky with its electrical glare." The title of the book was The Butterfly Tree, and it was not the last book to drench Fairhope in the mysteries of the imagination of an outsider.

An insider, I worked with Bob many years later on a book that I hoped would present a more realistic picture of the Fairhope I knew, incorporating his lyrical prose describing a town projected from his memories with my own workaday knowledge of what it was like to grow up in the little enclave that I found neither magical nor romantic. The book we collaborated on reflected two sensibilities and embraced Fairhope from two sides. Its title was Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree, and if you've read much of this blog or if you click on the link, you'll know almost all there is to know about it short of actually reading it.

Both those books may have contributed to the myth that Fairhope was some kind of ethereal, enchanted locale, a Brigadoon that only appeared in the line of vision of the fortunate few. Charming as that image might be, it simply isn't true. My second book, The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years After Utopia, seeks to dispell the mythology as much as possible.

Fairhope was a very real town, founded on the principle of providing economic parity, especially in housing. Land was available on a 99-year lease basis, with a low “rent” or tax, to be paid to the Colony yearly, to be determined by what would be considered fair market value. Each family could build what it could afford on the land leased from the Colony. Little houses were built by the impecunious couples who wanted to participate in the Utopian experiment known as the Single Tax Colony, and these houses were expanded room by room as the families grew. That is why so many of the early cottages had small rooms and lots of them. Those little affordable abodes grew with the families that inhabited them.

The Single Tax experiment could hardly be called a rousing success, especially after the Federal Government established an income tax on all citizens in 1913. It was a sound principle that eventually was proved wildly impractical, perhaps especially in Fairhope, the town that was created in order to prove the opposite. Apparently greed is human nature, and the selflessness required to ensure cooperative individualism -- the term used by E.B. Gaston, Fairhope's founder to describe his ideal economy -- was soon overshadowed by the wave of opportunists who learned how to exploit the very land he fought to preserve.

If Fairhope is a storybook town, the story has been rewritten too many times to be of much consequence. Even the historical cottages, for the most part, have been demolished and replaced by monuments to the prosperity of their owners -- huge, ostentatious houses that compete with each other for attention and blur the landscape that was once authentic, meaningful and charming in spite of itself. That it is still a storybook town is the greatest fiction of all.

Before Fairhope Was Precious

I've written a lot about my memories of Fairhope, both on this blog and in two books. I lived there as a child and again when I moved back in 1988 until I left for good in December of 2007.

Others are compelled to write about Fairhope too--from Sonny Brewer with his lyrical The Poet of Tolstoy Park to Rick Bragg in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

It is Bragg's latest that inspires this post. He is, like many of us, somewhat conflicted about Fairhope. He writes that he loves the bay, the surrounding geography of what is now Fairhope, but that he finds it "too precious" to be a comfortable place to live. It's a tourist town now, and an extension of Mobile, and his article, which you can read here and post a comment on if you wish, has generated much response across the board. There are those who love Fairhope and think Bragg got it right, others who love Fairhope and think he didn't, and those who just love everything Rick Bragg writes and don't know anything about Fairhope.

If you want to read some about old Fairhope, you can find a post on this blog "In Praise of Old Libraries," or one with a picture of the Christian Church, one of the first structures in town, or one about the corner of Fairhope Avenue and Section Street, which I call "The Center of the Universe."

There was a time when I thought I'd live out my days in Fairhope. But life has its way of changing, and the time came when I didn't want to live there another day.

But I still love to visit, and I still cherish all the memories I have of when it was simpler and less self-conscious, less precious--simply an extraordinary little town peopled with unusual, special, thinking folks. I recommend that Fairhope. You'll find it in the writings of those who knew it long ago, including myself in Meet Me at The Butterfly Tree and The Fair Hope of Heaven. Newcomers and visiting luminaries tend to write about the little city as if it held the answer to all questions, the fount of all wisdom, and as if it is the magical Norman Rockwell town they've always dreamed about. Fairhope has a great many pleasant qualities and a few drawbacks. It is in transition now from a haven for intellectuals to some new incarnation, but it is situated in one of the most beautiful spots you'll find. Just don't expect too much. There is more to Fairhope than meets the eye, but it isn't all pretty.

Real Life and Real Estate

There's a house for sale in Fairhopeland, Montrose to be exact. Practically the last historic house standing in what used to be a quiet, mysterious village on the Eastern Shore, rife with stories about days dating to the early Spanish explorers. This example of Creole Cottage architecture was built from timbers and on the foundation of an early Catholic church and has housed many a complex and happy family, including Morris Timbes and his adorable wife and delightful and brilliant children (one of whom was me). Today the bids are flying, and the house is coveted by at least one delightful family with hopes of someday occupying it. Don't these endearing people just touch your heart? Don't you wish every story in real life had a happy ending?

The Latest News of the Fair Hope of Heaven

Don Noble, Alabama's premier book reviewer, wrote some very nice words about my book The Fair Hope of Heaven/A Hundred Years after Utopia. His review, which was aired on Alabama Public Radio, can be read at this link. Click on the blue letters and read what the nice man said.

I love Don's thoughtful interviews on Alabama Public Television, and am angling for an appearance next time I'm in the state. Right now it looks as if that will be October. Whether I get a booking on the show remains to be seen. Watch this space for further information. In the meantime, go to amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com or go to Page and Palette in Fairhope and buy the book.

Also, this was published in John Sledge's book column in the Mobile Press-Register on Sunday: "...Mary Lois Timbes is also inspired by memories of growing up in a simpler time and place. In The Fair Hope of Heaven, she has expanded and updated her earlier reminiscence of Fairhope, Meet Me at the Butterfly Tree. Her new effort features more stories and more characters. 'All little towns of the late 1940s an early 1950s were simpler and more nurturing than they are today,' she writes, but this particular one had a history of and until recent years retained a faint whiff of the bohemian.'

"Included in this delightful volume are portraits of such Fairhope icons as Ernest Berry Gaston (the founder), Marietta Johnson (of Organic School fame), Winifred Duncan (author of Webs in the Wind, a book about spiders) and Craig Sheldon (sculptor). Also highlighted are the bayside burg's more quirky facets, like the nudist colony that once flourished around 1910.

"Despite all the changes since Timbes' youth, Fairhope's magnificent natural situation remains impressive, and she gives it due coverage. The modest architecture and colorful, outsized personalities have mostly gone, but the sweeping bay views, dramatic gullies and warm evenings remain constant, and continue to draw visitors and new residents from far and wide. 'Fairhope may have changed as the world has changed,' Timbes concludes, 'yet it retains remnants of Utopia at its heart.'"

I've posted a great deal about the book on this blog, so if you want a taste, browse the blog. You can read more reviews here, and once you've read the book, you might post a review of it yourself!

Education Reform? It Started in Fairhope

President Obama is committed to a deep reform of the educational system. I hope while investigating options his experts will take a look at what they call in Fairhope the Organic School.

Founded in 1907 by visionary educator Marietta Johnson, the Organic School was based on the same kind of reform that Fairhope itself was, and it fit in the little village like a glove. It was to work hand-in-hand with the Single Tax Corporation for its first years of existence, and the two institutions shared many of the same benefactors and local support.

The principles of Organic education remain radical. The basic premise is that education is natural to life (Mrs. Johnson used to say that education is life), and that children's curiosity and love of learning is to be incorporated in the process of teaching. She wrote two books on the subject which are incorporated into a slim volume called Teaching Without Failure now for sale at the Marietta Johnson Museum.

That's a daunting title. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of her system was that Mrs. Johnson believed that no child should be allowed to "fail" at education. The concept of failure was turned on its head; if the student didn't grasp the subject, it was failure of the school rather than the child. She solved this dilemma by simply eliminating measurements from the equation.

How, then, said the education Establishment, are we to know what a child is learning? The answer is that "we" don't. Any child can cram facts and pass a test, but has he really learned? Only the student in question is capable of knowing how much he has learned. In today's obsession with test scores, this is the most difficult aspect of Organic education to sell to the public.

Today, many of Mrs. Johnson's tenets have been softened at the school. It was essential to her system that students begin at the earliest year possible and remain in the school through high school. If an unfortunate child had to transfer, he had a big adjustment to make to adapt to the atmosphere of adversity in a traditional school, but soon emerged victorious, having been imbued with a basic love of the learning process. Now it is seldom that a student remains in a school from kindergarten through high school. The Organic School itself goes only through the eighth grade at this point.

But there is much to be learned from the school, which Mrs. Johnson considered a demonstration of the direction for all education. When travelling in Progressive Education circles, she was often challenged about her idea of education. "It sounds lovely," she was told, "But it could never work."

"Come to Fairhope and see," was what she answered. Many did, and many took away ideas which have become part of the schools of today.

There is a lot written about this unique approach to education reform. Read my books about it, which are at Page and Palette Bookstore in Fairhope or at amazon.com or Barnes and Noble.com, or drop by the Marietta Johnson Museum on the Faulkner campus for information about Mrs. Johnson and the school, or go to the campus on Pecan Ave. east of Section Street.

Or look it all up on the Internet!