LETTERS FROM HOME: WRESTLING PIGS AND FILLING A NEWS HOLE

May 3, 2001

Dear Julie,

Arcata was my California dream come true, not only for the reddish green hills and the roar of Mad River Beach but for the people grown there and drawn there.

There in Arcata I first met Jake McCarthy, whose columns I grew up reading in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. When Jake quit the newspaper to move to Arcata and take over the Jambalaya, I was already there in my assigned seat, mesmerized by the bebop blasts of poets like John Ross and Jerry Martien and the irresistible flux of jazz and rock 'n' roll and folk music and blues from night to night.

Even during the day, something was going on, if only George Winston playing piano on the stereo, warming the world with each note. Jack Hitt, slipping out of Northtown Books, might be there sipping a whiskey and hoping to be left alone. Listening to me talk about some esoteric teaching I'd just read he'd just shake his head and refer me to the "Tao Te Ching." Lao Tzu: "One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know."

Jake and I often talked about newspapers. I asked how you write a column about a city as big as St. Louis. He said it's no different from being based in Arcata or Cape Girardeau you end up writing about the same 20 people, though maybe their names change.

Bill McClellan looks like the proprietor of a bookstore, too, one that sells reading material Barnes & Noble doesn't bother with -- crime novels, undiscovered masterpieces and used paperbacks with artful inscriptions.

His tie tries but doesn't really belong in the same room with his shirt, his graying hair seems to spray in many directions at once, and his clothes don't so much fit his body as bunch around it. In print and in person, he is ham on wry.

He was my favorite speaker at the National Writers Workshop last weekend in St. Louis. Others talked about spending a year and a half writing their Pulitzer Prize-winning project or the pressures of meeting a New Yorker magazine deadline every three weeks. McClellan talked about a reality much of the audience was more familiar with: What you do when you've run out of things to say 12 inches into filling your 18-inch hole?

Someone did McClellan the favor of suing him the day one of his four weekly columns was due, providing him with a freebie. Suing someone like me is like wrestling a pig, he said.

"You get messy, and the pig likes it."

He was supposed to address the topic "How to tell a riveting story in 20 inches ... or less."

"My columns aren't that riveting," he assured us dryly. "Most of them aren't really that good."

McClellan has no pretensions that his writing is any less ephemeral than a newspaper, good for a day and no longer. Yet his column is the most popular feature in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where he says the motto was "What do people expect for a quarter, literature?" until the newsstand price went up to 50 cents.

He did write a true crime novel. When he tried to send a copy to the central character, the warden said he doesn't let the prisoners read crime novels. That seems a waste of a captive audience to McClellan, since there's nothing prisoners care more about than crime.

St. Louis had two major newspapers when McClellan came to town. He applied for a job at the other one but failed the writing test. On the bright side, that newspaper eventually folded. "There's a train wreck I'm not on because I couldn't get on," he said.

The Post-Dispatch hired McClellan to cover the police beat, but he didn't become a columnist until leaving the newspaper for Arcata. A hole opens up, lives intersect at odd angles, panoramas reveal themselves slowly, and you end up talking about the same 20 people over and over again -- Lao Tzu notwithstanding.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.