Editing, Writing, Design, Illustration
Below are samples from Boston magazine, Brooklyn Bridge, social media and several projects I have been involved in, including my current one, the book Promises Kept, about a woman’s decision to give up her sons for adoption.
Thank you for taking a look. — Don Armstrong
Editing
National Book Award finalist Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog) wrote about an Iraq War veteran for Boston. It won the Bronze Award for Feature Writing from the City and Regional Magazine Association.
………………………………
This story by boating writer Kate Yeomans, about the sinking of a scalloping ship, also appeared in Boston.
………………………………
Jeanne Schinto tells about a record-setting antiques auction in this feature for Boston.
………………………………
This profile of a Brooklyn photographer by Jack Rosenberger ran in Brooklyn Bridge magazine.
………………………………
In this story from Emerge magazine, writer Roberto Santiago tells about a trip to Cuba and meeting Fidel Castro.
………………………………
The following is an excerpt from a work in progress.
Promises Kept
by Deborah M. Blanchard
After I returned to my parents’ home, my marriage all but over, it took a while to settle in. Finally, after two months, I began to feel at ease and knew it was time for my two boys, John and Jim, to attend Sunday school and for me to rejoin the choir. This was the church I had belonged to since my early teens. As we headed out on a Sunday morning in April, the sun was shining, the forsythia was just starting to bloom, and the colors and smells of spring were permeating the air.
Downstairs, in the Sunday school, the room was beautifully decorated for preschoolers. There were teddy bears and ducks stenciled on one wall and on another there was a picture of a pasture with sheep, black-and-white cows, and a huge yellow sun shining down on all kinds of flowers. The profusion of bright colors was everywhere.
When I returned to pick the boys up after church, I noticed children had gathered around John’s playpen. John and Jim were the only biracial children in an otherwise all-white Sunday school class, so I thought to myself, It’s perfectly normal for the other children to be curious. When they saw me coming, however, the children scattered like they were doing something wrong.
The teacher did not seem concerned and said she was confident things would change once the newness wore off. For the time, I agreed with her.
There were many storms in my life that I would have to deal with, and one never knows when a cumulus cloud will turn dark and produce rain, then thunder and lightning. Perhaps a hurricane or tornado will happen, and happen it did. That morning, when the children scattered, it was a very small cumulus cloud beginning to take seed.
There were other episodes at church when Jim, who was three, would complain about kids picking on him and John and calling them names, asking why they never washed and looked dirty all the time. One Sunday when I went downstairs to pick up the boys, Jim was nowhere around. I asked the teacher where he was.
“He was in the hall a few minutes ago,” she said. “I saw him run out, thinking you had come to pick him up.”
I went to look for him and began to get a panicky feeling in the pit of my stomach when I couldn’t find him. I walked around the church and found him huddled in a corner with his nose bleeding. When I ran over to him he was crying and nothing he was saying made any sense. I tried to calm him down and said we would pick up John and head home. He cried all the way, and it took the rest of the afternoon for things to settle down. The following week the only thing he would say was “That big boy was bad. I don’t like him.”
I tried calling the teacher but was unable to reach her, so I decided to leave early next Sunday and talk to her then. When we started to head out for church the following week, Jim became agitated, and as we approached the building he began to cry.
“I don’t want to go to Sunday school anymore.”
“I need to go in and talk to the teacher about what happened last Sunday and see if we can find out who the boy was that hurt you.”
“Do I have to stay?”
“No,” I replied.
When I went into the classroom, Jim clung to my leg.
I explained to the teacher what had happened and asked if she remembered seeing a bigger boy talking to Jim. She was unable to shed any light on what had gone on or who the bigger boy might have been.
Meanwhile, the threatening phone calls I’d been receiving were becoming more frequent. They were always in the daytime. The language was becoming more offensive. The callers would describe what would happen to me and my boys if we didn’t move out of town. I tried calling the police. They said they could do nothing. Many times I would not answer the phone, but that stopped when my mom said, “I know you are home. Why don’t you answer the phone?”
I knew I could not tell her the real reason. “I was busy changing John’s diaper,” I said. “Sorry about that, Mom.” From that point on I would just pick up the receiver, say nothing, and slam it right back down again.
One afternoon the boys and I had just come back from our daily walk when the phone rang. I figured if I did not answer it, whoever was on the other end would just let it ring. The feeling of helplessness was overwhelming. What should I do? Try talking to them? That was the one thing I hadn’t done. What was there to lose? I practiced what I would say but couldn’t do it. A week went by. Finally I had the courage. This time when the phone rang I answered it, and the person at the other end — a male; it was always a male — went on a tirade. When he realized I was not hanging up, he asked, “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I am still here and would like to ask you and try to understand why you hate us so much?”
“Well, you are right about one thing. I do hate you and do not have to explain anything to you.”
He asked when I was going to move and I told him I had no intention of moving.
“I want you to listen very closely to what I am about to say,” he replied, “because your life and your black nigger babies’ lives depend on it. If you do not move and one of your nigger babies start school, he will disappear. You cannot be with him twenty-four seven, and I promise you will never see him again.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“You are damn right I am threatening you, and you better listen.”
“Why would you hurt an innocent child? He is just a child.”
“Lady, you keep referring to him as a child. He is not a child. He is a nigger baby and not a human being.”
With that I vomited onto the phone and screamed, “May you burn in hell!” then slammed the receiver down and started walking around the house in a panic. I ran into the bathroom and vomited some more.
By now both the boys had woken up from their naps and I ran upstairs and held them both close and vowed I would never let anything happen to them. Somehow I would keep them safe.
………………………………
Writing
………………………………
The Genuine Article
Country music has changed, they say. Rock, rap and radio have ruined it. Not true. It’s still out there, but you have to use the right search engine.
By Don Armstrong
As I pulled into Nashville, my new home to be, traffic was backed up on I-24. It had been smooth sailing since Newark.
“How did you get here?” my cousin asked after I got to his place in Brentwood, just south of the city.
“I don’t know. I just followed the GPS.”
“Did you go through West Virginia?”
“I don’t know.”
I had abruptly chucked two decades in New York City for life in the country-music capital. It was not entirely by choice. I couldn’t go home because of a run-in that had turned physical, so I decided it was finally time to follow my dream and head south. A night in a jail cell will awaken your thirst for freedom.
And what better way to indulge that impulse than in Music City, where I hoped to do more writing? I would soon learn that that sobriquet was, ironically, inspired by the queen of England after a gospel performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, but it is country music that comes to mind when anyone says “Nashville.”
David Allan Coe, one of the genre’s most emblematic performers — he wrote “Take This Job and Shove It” and was locked up for much of his youth — asserted in “You Never Even Called Me by My Name” that country music comes down to five things: mama, trains, trucks, prison and “gettin’ drunk.” He deftly excised the final g in the gerund, a pronunciation I know to be authentic.
Sometime in the late ’80s, I received an e-mail, and later a very crude, self-published autobiography, from the esteemed Mr. Coe, then as now one of my favorite artists. I had written to him with some alarm after coming across a copy of his notorious, underground X-rated album. For years beforehand, I had dismissed the line in “If That Ain’t Country” in which he says his father worked “like a nigger.” As an African-American, I might be expected to take offense at that comment, but I understood what he meant. His dad worked hard, Coe was saying, and the lyric is part of a haunting tableau that comes as close to touching the lifeforce of country music as any song ever has or ever will. And I love country music.
Like many of Coe’s best works — “Human Emotions,” “(She Finally Crossed Over) Love’s Cheatin’ Line,” “Lately I’ve Been Thinking Too Much Lately” — the song is tinged with gospel. It’s passionate. It tells about a man at the lower end of the social spectrum who doesn’t beg for the acceptance of others. And of course it references prison, vehicles and alcohol.
I could relate to all but the last. (My ex-wife jokes that I get tipsy after half a can of beer, and I don’t test the theory enough to argue.) On the X-rated album, though, there is a song called “Nigger Fuckers,” and I had written to Coe to complain. I felt betrayed.
When he was in prison, Coe wrote back in prose too broken to have been produced by any publicist or paid assistant, they did not segregate themselves by race. (I’m paraphrasing, as I am still not allowed in my former place of residence. And for the record, the charges were untrue.… Yeah, I know: Everybody is innocent…yadda yadda yadda.) Then came the line my ex-wife and I puzzled over for months: Coe didn’t even know he was white, he wrote, till he was 21.
One must decide for oneself about the validity of his claims. (My 26 hours in lockup, though colorful, provide no insight.) But this at least raises the silent issue lurking in the corner of country music, and perhaps southern culture in general: race. Too few country stars are African-American (or Mexican or Chinese or Filipino or…), though many of the themes, particularly the defiant independence, would seem to be a natural match. As it happened, about the time I arrived in Nashville the most requested song on Broadway — the avenue downtown where honky-tonks and tourists cram together like an auctioneer’s words — was “Wagon Wheel,” I was told, which Darius Rucker, an African-American, had recently taken to number one on the country charts. I like his rendition but prefer Old Crow Medicine Show’s original. And corny as it may be, I will simply invoke that old bromide “Music has no color” and move on.
In my own first visit downtown, four days after I hit town, I parked randomly, then wandered around till I got to Fifth and Broadway, where the Ryman Auditorium — the Grand Ole Opry’s longtime home — and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, once a hangout for Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline, suddenly arose right in front of me. I texted my sister and cousin: “OK, Jesus, you can take me now.”
Inside Tootsie’s, it was shoulder to shoulder and I found a spot by the stairs at the back. A singer who sounded like Charlie Robison was on the bandstand. He was good, too, and, feeling parched and eager for a new direction, I ordered a beer and thought how glad I was to be out of New York. After a while I left and wandered farther down Broadway, where every fourth or fifth store seemed to be selling cowboy boots. The hovering hordes on the sidewalk were all tourists, I realized, a few too many wearing Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirts, for the Nashville Predators’ last home game of the year was about to begin at Bridgestone Arena, down the street. I stopped into the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, where, at 55, I was about the youngest person on the premises, and even I didn’t buy anything.
Among other things, Nashville is my retirement plan. I knew I’d never be able to afford a house in New York. My life and career have been too disjointed: no more than three years on any job, with moves to St. Louis, then Boston, then back to the home of my ex-wife, where I had rented a floor until my arrest. When I left the first time, she declined to join me because of an affair I had acknowledged. My life, in short, has been one long country song.
I was eager to find a place of my own and, after three days in Tennessee, I went on Realtor.com to look at houses. I was contacted shortly by an agent named Brian Bandas, who had moved to Nashville himself nine years earlier to pursue a career in music.
“Have you heard of a band called Love and Theft?” Brian asked the first time we met. I had not. I’m all about older country, particularly the Texas variety: Waylon, Willie, Jerry Jeff, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Nanci Griffith, some Johnny and even more June.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said modestly, promising to help me make contacts in the local music community.
Love and Theft, I later learned, had had a number-one country hit, “Angel Eyes,” but that was after Brian left the band upon realizing his heart was in rock and roll. Still, he had toured with Taylor Swift, Tim McGraw and Jason Aldean during his time with the group. Two years later, he seemed — despite making a promising video with his new band — to be struggling, still frustrated over his interlude with country music.
“I don’t like the relationship country radio has to the industry and didn’t like feeling like no matter what I did, whatever they decide to do would dictate my career,” Brian told me when we met to talk music a week later.
“Do you think it would be different with rock radio?”
“No, I don’t,” he said, recalling how Love and Theft had been caught in the grindstone when it’s first label, Lyric Street Records, shut down: “Immediately, radio stopped playing us, because they didn’t have to, because nobody was calling them and bugging them.”
The band had failed to build up a solid fan base by playing enough live shows, Brian explained. “We had listeners, who were gonna listen to and like whatever was on country radio, and the second we weren’t on, they didn’t miss us. They moved on to the next thing that was on the radio.”
It’s a common complaint in country today, how much radio controls the type of music that gains traction and how much it favors new forms of country, infused with elements of rock and pop and even rap. Brian, who grew up in Austin, Texas, professed a continuing love for the true talents of country music: “Waylon and Johnny Cash, a lot of that stuff, but even in the modern era I think there’s some really cool stuff being made: Kacey Musgraves and Dierks Bentley. I really love Chris Young’s voice.”
Later, I went to YouTube and played some videos and fell in love with Musgraves’s song “Follow Your Arrow.” Brian was right. It’s catchy and funny and, for my money, country. Although it gained attention for a gay-friendly lyric, its message — do your own thing — is tried and true. It is country, to invert Coe’s phrase, so I’m going to lift a few elements from the video and add them to his list of country touchstones: There should be a dobro or fiddle (preferably both), cute girls, cowboy hats and boots, Nudie suits (five in this case) and self-deprecation. A cameo by Jesus doesn’t hurt. To me, that is country music. It has no color or age, and I couldn’t define three-quarter time if you handed me a dictionary. But I know it when I hear it.
2014
………………………………
Design & Illustration
