A Tribute to Dorothy Bryant

Dorothy Bryant (1930–2017) was a brilliant writer whose work deserves much more attention. She excelled both as a novelist and a playwright. My favorites of her works are the prophetic fantasy novel, The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You; her work of historical fiction, Confessions of Madame Psyche; and the play Dear Master. Dorothy’s complete works span twelve novels, seven plays, and two books of nonfiction. She explored an amazing array of genres, including historical fiction and drama, fantasy, mystery, criticism, and realistic novels set in the present day. 

Dorothy Bryant

I met Dorothy in 1994 when I was working on the first English translation of Horace, a novel by George Sand. I was trying to find a voice in English that was the equivalent of Sand’s sculpted French prose. Dorothy had written the deeply moving play Dear Master, based on the correspondence between George Sand and Gustave Flaubert, where she created authentic conversations in English between those writers. I sought out Dorothy’s guidance and support. She was an incredibly kind and encouraging mentor, and a spellbinding and witty storyteller in conversation. 

She was born Dorothy Mae Calvetti to an Italian-American immigrant family in San Francisco’s Mission District. Dorothy grew up in a working-class household where her father ran a small gas station and her mother was a homemaker and office worker.

Dorothy (left) with sister Rose

She attended Mission High School, where she felt she did not have the most rigorous education. She longed to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley, the leading public university on the West Coast. But Dorothy’s older sister Rose had gone there and did not finish a degree, and their parents did not want to risk a repeat. They told Dorothy they would only pay for her to attend San Francisco State College (now University). Dorothy, who loved piano, applied there and majored in music, graduating in 1950. She particularly enjoyed playing the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. I wonder if Dorothy’s skill in creating dialogue was shaped by the Bach of the Two-Part Inventions.

After graduating from college, Dorothy began teaching at the age of 23. She and her first husband, Lou Ungaretti, already had a son and daughter. In the late 1950s, Dorothy taught Music and English in San Francisco at Lick-Wilmerding High School, which then only admitted boys. Dorothy also led the glee club there and wrote the music and lyrics for the school plays.

Dorothy Bryant teaching at Lick-Wilmerding High School, 1950s

She went back to San Francisco State College and earned a Master’s degree in Creative Writing in 1964. Dorothy then taught at Contra Costa Community College for many years, and created that campus’ first Black history course. Dorothy was a beloved instructor. She wrote in her novel Anita, Anita, “… nothing is so intoxicating as teaching. It is the closest thing to loving… ”

Dorothy began her literary career with the novel Ella Price’s Journal, published in 1972 by a major press, Lippincott. That book was way ahead of its time in taking seriously the struggles of married women who worked in the home.

 

By virtue of that success, Dorothy was able to get a literary agent, who then read the manuscript of her second novel, The Comforter, later retitled The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You. But the agent flatly refused to represent her book. He told Dorothy, “I don’t want to show this to anybody because I don’t want to prejudice publishers against you.” Because of his negative reaction, Dorothy gave up on sending the book to editors. On the recommendation of her second husband, Bob Bryant, she decided to self-publish it, calling her publishing company Ata Books, after the fantasy world in the novel. The book sold out its first run within two years, and Random House approached Dorothy to reprint it. Their one caveat was that they wanted to change the title to The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You, a phrase from the book, and Dorothy agreed.

Dorothy Bryant with son John and husband Bob Bryant at John’s college graduation, 1972

A pioneering work of the fantasy genre, The Kin of Ata depicts a world where happiness is measured not by material success or status, but by how harmonious a person’s dreams are. This farseeing book has become a classic and has stayed in print for 50 years. It remains Dorothy’s best-known work.

Following that difficult experience with the agent, Dorothy elected to self-publish almost all her subsequent books. They span an incredible range of settings, subjects, and genres, from the epistolary novel Prisoners; to her mystery Killing Wonder; to Confessions of Madame Psyche, an exploration of the craze for seances that a hard-luck young woman exploits in the San Francisco of the era of the great earthquake of 1906, which won the 1987 American Book Award. To replace the role of editor, Dorothy relied on friends such as Anne Fox to critique her self-published manuscripts.

 

Dorothy began writing for the stage with her play Dear Master. The original 1991 production featured the stellar cast of Barbara Oliver as George Sand, and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert. The play was so well received that it launched Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre, named for George Sand’s actual given name, Aurore. Dorothy’s husband Bob Bryant, a contractor, built the seating and stage for the theater in Berkeley’s historic City Club, designed by architect Julia Morgan.

Barbara Oliver as George Sand and Ken Grantham as Gustave Flaubert
in Dorothy Bryant’s Dear Master

Someone recently asked me who were some of my favorite playwrights, and I named Tom Stoppard, Jez Butterworth, and Dorothy Bryant. I included Dorothy primarily on the basis of Dear Master, because in that play she takes the static material of a written correspondence between two writers and turns it into the most moving and memorable drama about a literary friendship that explores deep questions about life.

Dorothy’s other plays also focused on historical topics, including The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. The plot revolves around the stranger-than-fiction case of a woman in the 1840s whose husband deposits her in a nunnery so he can become a priest. When the husband changes his mind a year later and tries to reclaim his wife, she refuses. The husband then goes to court to force his wife to return.

 

As with all of Dorothy’s historical fiction and dramas, she meticulously researched The Trial of Cornelia Connelly. She often traveled to verify sites and events in her works. For her historical romance novel Anita, Anita, based on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s wife, Dorothy retraced the couple’s epic journey from Brazil to Uruguay to Italy. Neither of those historical projects brought Dorothy wealth or fame, but I greatly admire that she followed her literary passions and interests, regardless of whether they led to popular successes.

 

Dorothy Bryant was also no stranger to controversy in her literary career. Before feminism became fashionable, Dorothy was outspoken in her depiction of the challenges of women. She also created sympathetic working-class characters of a kind rarely seen in post-World War II U.S. fiction. Her nonfiction includes Writing a Novel, a book on the writing process; and Literary Lynching, a survey of unofficial censorship by groups of readers

 

Dorothy was hardly one to toe the party line. She was just as tough on hypocrisy on the left as she was on elitism on the right. In that sense, Dorothy Bryant reminds me a great deal of George Orwell. She was not afraid to call it as she saw it, no matter who might take offense. Dorothy Bryant’s willingness to disregard accepted dogmas and to aim always for the complex truth is much needed in our current intellectual landscape.

 

Many thanks to Dorothy Bryant’s daughter Lorri Ungaretti for providing much of the information in this blog.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Interview with Molly Giles about Her Memoir, Life Span

Molly Giles is the award-winning author of five collections of short stories, including Rough Translations, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Prize for Short Fiction. Her first novel, Iron Shoes, was released in 2000, and twenty-three years later, she published the sequel, The Home for Unwed Husbands. This interview is about her engaging and moving memoir, Life Span.

Molly Giles, photo by Ralph Brott

Zack Rogow: As someone with a long and celebrated career as a fiction writer, what motivated you to switch to nonfiction for your memoir Life Span?

Molly Giles: I had jotted down a few childhood memories with the intention of developing them into short stories, but then I got lazy; I thought, why go to all the bother of inventing things? Why not just say what actually happened? So much easier!

 

Q. The structure of this book is not like any other memoir I’ve ever read. How would you describe it?

 

A. Life Span is a memoir composed of flash fictions stitched together year by year, starting in 1945 and ending in 2023. Each short episode happens on, near, or under the Golden Gate Bridge or alludes to the bridge through a memory, allusion, or image of some sort.

 

Q. At what point in your writing process did you decide on that structure?

 

A. Early on. It just seemed right. Assembling the pieces into an actual book did not occur to me for a long time, though—that was a suggestion put forth by a writer friend I trust.

Q. What inspired you to mention the Golden Gate Bridge in each segment of the memoir? Were you at all influenced by Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” or Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”? 

A. Sadly, no—I love Hokusai’s prints. Although I admire Wallace Stevens hugely, I can’t honestly say I understand him. And I’m not sure I was “inspired” by the Golden Gate Bridge. It was always just there. I was born in San Francisco and have lived in the Bay Area all my life. (Although I taught in Fayetteville, Arkansas for fourteen years, I returned to my home in West Marin every summer and Christmas holiday during those years.) The bridge has been my steady beacon, companion, and friend throughout my life; I simply love it.

Q. The sense of humor in this book is winning, but at the same time, it has a dark tinge. Often, terrible things end up being funny. For example, when the author’s second child Rachel is born, the older daughter Gretchen is jealous and absolutely refuses to say her baby sister’s name when her mother prompts her:  

“Can you say Rachel?”

Gretchen plugs her thumb into her mouth and closes her eyes. No. She cannot say Rachel. Will not. Should not be asked to.

Why do you think some of the episodes about the most difficult interactions end up being humorous?

 

A. I’ll probably misquote him, but Bukowski once pointed out that nothing is funnier than the truth.

 

Q. Many of the stories or entries in this book are only a page and a half, but they are extremely moving, such as the one about the wife having a dream where she tells a stranger to kill her husband. How does a writer create deep emotion with few words?

 

A. By cutting. You have to pare and pare to get to the heart. Then you have to be careful not to stab the heart. You have to know when to stop. One of the most frustrating things about trying to teach creative writing, as I did try for 35 years, is that some things, like this, cannot be taught. They have to be learned.

 

Q. There’s a lot of tragedy and betrayal in this book, and yet the tone is mostly light rather than grim. How did you manage that?

 

A. Being a memoir, the book is about me, and my life. And though I don’t take myself too seriously, I do love my life.

 

Q. In the end, what were the gains and losses for you in using such a particular and unusual structure? Did the shortness of each vignette challenge you, or restrict you, or both?

 

A. Neither. I never felt challenged or restricted by the brevity of the pieces—I felt freed. It helped me zero in on what I wanted to say. I like to overwrite and then cut back. I was constricted by my decision to only include incidents relating to the Golden Gate Bridge, however—I had to leave out the entire East Bay!

_________________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Memories of the Summer of Love in San Francisco, 1967

I started hearing about the hippies in San Francisco in the mid-1960s when I was a teenager living in New York City. I mostly knew about the hippies from reading Ramparts, a political and arts magazine based in San Francisco. I devoured each issue of Ramparts that arrived in the mail, with its articles and photos on the radical experiments in lifestyles taking place in the Bay Area. I read about the collective called the Diggers distributing free food. I dug the solarized, DayGlo posters for the Fillmore Auditorium’s rock concerts with the letters rippling like flames. I saw the long hair for women and men and the loose-fitting garments made from paisley Indian bedspreads. The more I saw in Ramparts and heard about on the news, the more I was hooked. I had to experience all of it firsthand.

Rock poster, San Francisco, 1960s

I was only 15, but I had a mom who was an unusual free spirit. It didn’t take too much convincing to get her to agree to leave New York and spend June, July, and August in San Francisco in 1967. I might be the only person who went to the Summer of Love with his mother.

The Rogow family in 1967

My mother, my sister, and I arrived in San Francisco in early June with no clear idea of where we would stay. We found a hotel room near Union Square when we first arrived, but that proved extremely expensive. Our search in the San Francisco Chronicle for short-term rentals didn’t yield any results. Wandering around North Beach one day, we happened by chance to pass the office of Ramparts magazine. On an impulse we went inside and my mother asked the receptionist if she knew of any apartments for rent for the summer. It turned out the receptionist lived nearby on Leavenworth Street at the top of Russian Hill, and offered to rent us her place for the summer, while she moved in with her boyfriend. Kismet!

You don’t hear much about this in the nostalgic recollections of the Summer of Love, but it turned out that the hippie movement had pretty much peaked in San Francisco by June of 1967. Many of the original hippies had left the increasingly violent drug scene in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to move to communes in the country. Haight Street itself was bumper-to-bumper with rubbernecking tourists gawking at the latter-day hippies who were still in town, hawking copies of the San Francisco Oracle and the Berkeley Barb alternative newspaper to sightseers. There were head shops selling posters of Che Guevara and the guy on the Zig Zag rolling papers package, who looked strangely alike.

We went to the opening of a show by the artists who created the rock posters for the Fillmore Auditorium: Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, and others. I idolized those artists and their rippled lettering that was like a secret code you had to learn by training your eyes to see the negative spaces. By the Summer of Love, though, those artists were selling their work in a fancy Union Square gallery, sitting in the back yakking about how much they were charging for their surrealist collages.

You could smell the pot in the air in Golden Gate Park, but beyond that, you could smell the freedom in the air. You could dress any way you liked (although the hippie rejection of style involved a style of its own). You could also love anyone you liked, and you could give things away for free (definitely verboten in the consumer culture of the U.S.A. post-World War II). At the Fillmore Auditorium, you could dance in a strange, unchoreographed way, wheeling your arms in the air and jumping up and down, while blobs of colored oils throbbed on the walls in a projected light show.

I remember my mother taking me to a gay bar on Grant Street (how many moms took their teenage sons to gay bars, especially in 1967?). We watched as two men partner danced to the tune of Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” I’d never seen a gay couple dance together before—that was also eye-opening. We heard the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish playing free concerts in the parks.

My sister briefly dated the son of Harry Bridges, the leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, so a whiff of the militant labor history of San Francisco also reached us. We socialized with the family of Earl Conrad, a radical novelist and nonfiction writer who lived with his wife in a very urban apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood. We had met Earl in New York when he was researching a book that mentioned my dad Lee Rogow, also a writer.

The author Earl Conrad

Evenings we often took the N Judah trolley all the way to the end of the line near the beach, to watch foreign films at the now-defunct Surf Theatre, a great old neighborhood movie house from the 1920s that showed the innovative flicks of Bergman, Fellini, and the Italian avant-garde directors. The impenetrable fog at night in that part of the city resembled an apocalyptic landscape out of an Antonioni film.

That first glimpse of the West of the United States was an eye-opener for me. It wasn’t that New York was devoid of culture and liberty—just the opposite. But something different was happening on the West Coast, a new kind of freedom that made for a bubbling arts and literary scene, more open to new ideas and lifestyles and to the cultures of the Pacific Rim.

For me as a writer, that summer was formative because it gave me the sense that the old culture and politics were crumbling, particularly in the face of the Vietnam War and the rebellions in the ghettos of the United States. Despite the commercialization of hippie art and fashions, there was a shared sense that a new and more liberating culture was being created. The literature that we read in school was fine, but it wasn’t the fiction and poetry that the current era demanded. That was still to be invented. The sense of openness was enormously empowering.

One thing I came to recognize only much later about the Summer of Love and the hippie movement was that they were the continuation of centuries of social and artistic experimentation. From the French Enlightenment, to the commune in the Lake District that Wordsworth and Coleridge founded, to the utopian socialist philosophies and phalansteries of the mid-nineteenth century, to the free-form designs of art nouveau, to the international Arts and Crafts movement, to the bohemian lifestyles of the Left Bank and Greenwich Village, to the Bengali renaissance and the mysticism of Sri Aurobindo, the roots of the Summer of Love went very deep into global culture and history.

If many of us had known that in 1967, or been willing to acknowledge that our New Age and New Left culture and politics were part of a long and rich legacy that had its ups and downs throughout history, I think it would have been easier to sustain the momentum of the 1960s for radical political, social, and artistic change. As it was, that momentum began to decline even as it peaked in 1968, the year that Richard Nixon was first elected president of the United States. Very soon, there was a mass exodus from the Counter Culture of the 1960s back toward the status quo and consumer culture. I hope that the revival of interest in the Summer of Love will encourage new forms of social and artistic experimentation that will continue the legacy of social, personal, and artistic transformation.
______________________________

Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

A Writer Moves West, Part 1: The Summer of Love, San Francisco, 1967

I grew up in New York City and spent almost all of my life there until I started hearing about the beginnings of the hippies in San Francisco in the mid-1960s. I mostly knew about the hippies from reading Ramparts, a political and arts magazine based in San Francisco. Many issues of Ramparts brought reports on the radical experiments in lifestyles going on in the Bay Area, from the collective called the Diggers distributing free food; to the solarized, DayGlo posters for the Fillmore Auditorium’s rock concerts with the letters rippling like flames. I was hooked. I had to experience all this firsthand. 

Rock poster, San Francsico, 1960s

I was only 15, but I had a mom who was an adventurous free spirit, and it didn’t take too much convincing to get her to agree to leave New York and spend June, July, and August in San Francisco in 1967. I might be the only person who went to the Summer of Love with his mother.

My mother, my sister, and I arrived in San Francisco in early June with no clear idea of where we would stay. We found a hotel room near Union Square when we first arrived, but that proved expensive. Our search in the San Francisco Chronicle for short-term rentals did not yield any results. Wandering around North Beach one day, we happened by chance to pass the offices of Ramparts magazine. On an impulse we went inside and my mother asked the receptionist if she knew of any places for rent for the summer. It turned out the receptionist had an apartment nearby, and offered to rent it to us for the summer, while she moved in with her boyfriend. Kismet!

It turned out that the original hippie scene had pretty much peaked in San Francisco by the Summer of Love. Many of the early hippies had left the increasingly violent Haight neighborhood to move to communes in the country. Haight Street itself was bumper-to-bumper with rubbernecking tourists gawking at the latter-day hippies who were still in town, hawking copies of the Berkeley Barb alternative newspaper to sightseers. There were head shops selling posters of Che Guevara and the guy on the Zig Zag rolling papers package, who looked vaguely similar.

We went to the opening of a show by the artists of the psychedelic rock posters: Stanley Mouse, Victor Moscoso, and others—artists I idolized. By then, they were selling their work in a fancy Union Square gallery, signing posters while they yakked about what they were charging for their surrealist collages.

You could smell the pot in the air in Golden Gate Park, but beyond that, you could smell the freedom in the air. You could dress any way you liked (although the hippie rejection of style involved a style of its own), you could love anyone you liked, and you could give things away for free (definitely a no-no in the consumer culture of the U.S.A. post-World War II). At the Fillmore Auditorium, you could dance in a strange, free-form way, wheeling your arms in the air and clomping up and down, while blobs of colored oils throbbed on the walls in a projected light show. I remember my mother taking me to a gay bar on Grant Street (how many moms took their teenage sons to gay bars, especially in 1967?) and seeing two men partner dance to Santana’s “Black Magic Woman.” We heard the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish playing for free in the parks.

My sister briefly dated the son of Harry Bridges, the leader of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, so a whiff of the labor history of San Francisco also reached us. We socialized with the family of Earl Conrad, a radical novelist and nonfiction writer who lived with his wife in a very urban apartment in the Tenderloin neighborhood. We had met Earl in New York when he was researching a book that mentioned my dad, also a writer. 

Cover of a book by Earl Conrad, with a portrait of the author

Evenings we often took the N Judah trolley all the way to the end of the line near the beach, to watch foreign films at the now-defunct Surf Theatre, a great old neighborhood movie house from the 1920s that showed the innovative flicks of Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni. The drenching fog at night in that part of the city resembled an apocalyptic landscape out of one of those films.

That first glimpse of the West was an eye-opener for me. It wasn’t that New York was devoid of culture and liberty—just the opposite. But something different was happening on the West Coast, a new kind of freedom that made for a bubbling arts and literary scene, more open to new ideas and lifestyles and to the cultures of the Pacific Rim.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka