Ken's Second Act

Meeting authors at the Tucson Festival of Books who touched my life

I attended the annual Tucson Festival of Books for first time ever March 15, and I chose this year because I have serious literary intentions now that I’m retired from journalism.

The festival featured 500 or more authors and presenters and at least 200 presentations during the weekend event at the University of Arizona. I missed the keynote speaker, Salman Rushdie, Sunday morning because I arrived too late at the Student Union. He faced a fatwa – Islamic death sentence – from the Ayatollah Khomeini for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1988 and lived in hiding for many years afterward. Although the fatwa had been lifted, an assailant stabbed him in the eye several times as he was about to give a speech in Chautauqua, New York, in 2022. He commemorated the experience — without mentioning the culprit’s name — in Knife.

I thought Rushdie’s appearance prompted festival officials to require attendees to bring see-through plastic bags as a security measure. However, campus police said the bag policy goes in effect during special events, not because of a controversial speaker. The Prescott Film Festival, where I volunteer, takes the same security measure.

I came to see other authors. I met Rosalie Rayburn more than 13 years ago when she

was a reporter at the Albuquerque Journal. She contacted me, in the first place, because she was working on stories about plans for an event center in her coverage area from a company that promoted one in Prescott Valley. Like me, Rosalie has retired and took up novel writing. She told me she self-published after trying for two years to land an agent. She has expanded her Digger Doyle saga into a mystery series that followed her debut The Power of Rain, about a lesbian reporter who investigates a shady developer while falling in love with an artist/activist who opposes the developer’s road project. It’s an easy, fast-paced read that won the National Federation of Press Women Award.

Rosalie, who now calls Portugal home, said the book festival accepted one of her books. I found her in a tent that she shared with several other indie writers. I believe in supporting other writers, so I bought her first novel to give to a local activist named Feather and the second novel, The Sunshine Solution, for my own personal library. She signed both books.

I also attended the festival to meet another author, Eric Lichtblau, who wrote

American Reich (Little, Brown and Co.), in the downstairs Integrated Learning Center. Before entering the building, I approached two young women who manned an information booth. One of them looked at my worn Whiskey Row cap and asked, “Are you from Prescott?” Lucia told me she graduated from Prescott High School in 2011 and is the daughter of a retired banker in town.

The book examines disaffected, angry white men in Orange County and elsewhere in America who embrace neo-Nazism and use violence to achieve the goal of starting a race war. The story became personal. One of them, Sam Woodward, was convicted of murdering my great-nephew, Blaze Bernstein, and sentenced to life in prison. Blaze’s murder in 2018 at the age of 19 became a national story. He was gay and Jewish, grew up in an affluent community and was on winter break from the University of Pennsylvania visiting his family.

Eric spoke about an “epidemic of hate” worsened by social media. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious award in print journalism.

At the end of the panel discussion on Homegrown Hate Crimes I raised my hand – not to ask a question and instead to mention my family connection. Eric said he was sorry to hear about my loss and asked whether my sister – Blaze’s maternal grandmother – was a Holocaust survivor. No, I said. He was referring to Blaze’s paternal grandmother, who was born in Romania. I told him afterward Blaze’s sister now attends UPenn.

I’ve read more than one-third of American Reich, which covers disturbing subject matter. Some of my family members have no desire to read it. However, my cousin Rob near Detroit expressed interest after I texted that I’d try to buy him a copy with the writer’s autograph. Eric signed mine with the message “with my deepest condolences.”

I hope to be able to publish my novel, We’re Cutting You Loose, and autograph copies someday.