Saratoga News

Style

Saratoga Reads features Salzman's books

By Jennifer M. van der Kleut

Leslie Zane, director of literary arts at Montalvo Arts Center, says few authors can write as well in nonfiction as they can in fiction.

So, after she read a few books by author Mark Salzman, she knew she had stumbled across something great.

When it came time to select the book for Saratoga Reads 2006, Zane brought up Salzman's book True Notebooks at the meeting with members of the Friends of the Saratoga Library, which partners with Montalvo to present the city-wide program.

Zane was pleased to discover several of the committee members had read Salzman and enjoyed his work. However, selecting which one of his many books the program should focus on presented a problem.

"We all had different favorite books of his," she says with a laugh. "We couldn't agree, but for a good reason."

Therefore, the committee decided to do something a little different this year. Rather than focus on a single book, they decided to focus on a single author.

"So, it became 'Saratoga Reads Mark Salzman 2006,' " Zane says.

Saratoga Reads was started by Montalvo and Friends of the Saratoga Library in 2004. Zane modeled the program after a similar one in Seattle. The program is designed to get the entire city reading the same book at the same time--"One Community, One Book," as the slogan suggests--as a way to foster lively and meaningful discussion among neighbors. The committee works in partnership with classes at Saratoga High School and plans local events around the book, such as book club discussions and presentations by the author.

Zane says Salzman was a perfect choice, not only for his powerful writing but also for his personality.

"He was at Montalvo probably five years ago, and he was one of the most energetic, engaging speakers I'd ever seen," she says. "I picked him up from the airport and he was this quiet, calm guy, and then you put him up on stage and he's just enchanting."

Zane thinks the students of the junior and senior classes at Saratoga High School, some of them participating in Saratoga Reads, could gain a lot from reading Salzman, particularly his novel True Notebooks, which centers on his experiences teaching writing to juvenile delinquents in Los Angeles.

"[Salzman] was writing a book with a character that was in juvenile hall and he just wasn't getting it right, so he went to Los Angeles to visit a friend who was teaching [juvenile criminals]," Zane explains. "He just got totally sucked in and ended up teaching there himself."

Zane says most of Salzman's students were between the ages of 14 and 18, and many of them were in juvenile hall for murder.

"He went in being fearful, as a well-educated white guy, but he was just blown away at the contact he had with these guys. As a reader, you get to see that, even though their lives were hopeless, getting life sentences at 16, now they had something new to take with them, which was their writing."

Zane says Salzman's writing style makes the book powerful.

"I loved that Mark was so Mark. Even though he was meeting with them, he wasn't this bleeding-heart liberal. He just went to observe. He maintained his fear for a little while, and his humor, even though he was afraid at any moment he would be attacked," Zane says. "He let them write about anything they wanted to. In the beginning, they would write about sex a lot, being holed up in juvenile hall. But then, it evolved into their hopes and dreams. He humanized these kids, and that, to me, was important."

Zane feels True Notebooks could offer Saratoga High students a glimpse of a life they've never come in contact with.

"For them, it could be seeing a whole life that I'm sure most of them can't even fantasize about--the L.A. juvenile hall system, and these kids spending the rest of their lives in jail for one horrific mistake," she says. "And, it's having compassion for people you normally wouldn't have compassion for--there's always another side of the story, and mitigating circumstances. They can think about the juvenile justice system, locking up a 16-year-old and throwing away the key."

Another one of Salzman's books Zane recommends is Lying Awake, which tells the story of a nun who has intense visions about talking with God, which lead her to write beautiful poetry. However, the visions are always followed by extremely painful, debilitating headaches. She eventually discovers the visions are a side effect of a brain condition she is suffering from, and she is faced with the tough decision of whether to try and cure the condition, which could rid her of the painful headaches, but most likely also stop the powerful visions.

"That book made me a true Mark Salzman fan," Zane says.

Montalvo and the Friends of the Saratoga Library welcome all to participate in Saratoga Reads Mark Salzman 2006, and join in the discussion.