Madison BookBeat

Part two of Stu Levitan’s conversation with his friend and former newspaper colleague Michael Dorgan, about his new book No Fight, No Blame: A Journalist’s Life in Martial Arts. It is an absorbing read about a fascinating life which both general readers and martial arts aficionados will enjoy.

And quite a life it has been in both those fields for Michael Dorgan, taking him from Richland Center Wisconsin to Beijing China as bureau chief for Knight-Ridder Newspapers and as a formal disciple to the most renowned Chinese internal martial artist of his generation, Hunyuan Taiji Grandmaster Feng Zhiqiang.

And there were some pretty interesting – and frequently dangerous – journalism stops along the way as well, in places like Islamabad, Singapore, Hong Kong. Thankfully, his only arrest as a journalist was during the strike against Madison Newspapers in late 1977, for kicking the door of a VW bug filled with scabs plowing through our picket line. That’s how I first knew Michael, as a colleague at the Capital Times and then the strike newspaper Madison Press Connection.

With the strike doomed, Michael headed to California. As a journalist, he rose to become assistant business editor and Pacific Rim correspondent for the San Jose Mercury News. As a martial artist, he turned away from the Okinawan karate he practiced at UW-Oshkosh and the Korean Tae Kwon Do he studied here with Master J. B. Chung and pursued various styles of the internal Chinese martial art Taiji, or for those who don’t speak Mandarin, Tai Chi.

Among his Taiji teachers in San Francisco in the early eighties, Master Wong Jack Man, whose secret fight in 1964 with the soon-to-be-famous Bruce Lee looms large in martial arts folklore, with lingering uncertainty as to what really happened. Reverting to his journalistic identity, Michael published a major magazine article detailing, for the first time, Man’s account of the fight, which was licensed and freely adapted for the 2016 film Birth of the Dragon.

In 1999, Michael moved to China to become the Beijing bureau chief for Knight Ridder Newspapers, parent company of the Mercury News and at the time the world’s second-largest newspaper chain. That’s when he began studying with Grandmaster Feng – a practice that proved so important that in 2003 he took a leave of absence and remained in Beijing for a year and a half to train intensively with Grandmaster Feng and his disciple Master Chen Xiang. Which in turn caused a documentary about him to be filmed and broadcast on Chinese TV to a viewership of about 800 million. You’ll hear more about all this in a few moments.

Returning to California in late 2004, Michael returned to the Mercury News, as an editor in the business section. Until the business of newspapers got so bad that Michael left and devoted himself fulltime to his Hunyuan Martial Arts Academy of San Jose. An endeavor helped no doubt by Michael’s designation in 2007 as an honorary instructor at the Feng Zhiqiang Martial Arts Academy in Beijing.

Michael returned to journalism just this week, with a powerful opinion piece in the aforementioned Mercury News. Sadly, the headline tells a tragic tale: Cancer-drug shortage creates ‘death panels’ for patients like me. And the sub-head: I’m deemed expendable as a national scarcity of life-extending chemotherapy medications has resulted in rationing.

Because Michael has a mysterious metastatic cancer that has caused him to be cut, burned and poisoned with some progress but without a cure. So I’ve edited to tape to start with that part of our conversation, then we’ll roll it back for talk of martial arts in the Bay Area and China, then reflections on the newspaper strike, and some closing thoughts.

Here’s Michael Dorgan, author of No Fight, No Blame – A Journalist’s life in Martial Arts. 

The stories included in Steve Fox’s new collection “traverse a tapestry of tenderness, dissonance, indifference, dystopia, and charm.” They frequently feature Midwest settings, along with motifs centering trauma, loss, class, and politics. 

The collection, titled Sometimes Creek, was published earlier this year by Cornerstone Press, and won the 2022 Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Wisconsin Writers Awards.

Incoming Madison Book Beat host Cole Erickson sits down with Steve Fox for more about his collection, his process, and what’s next.

About the guest: 

Steve Fox is a Wisconsin writer. His debut collection Sometimes Creek (Cornerstone Press, 2023) is the winner of the 2022 Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Wisconsin Writers Awards. Steve studies creative writing at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and lives in Wisconsin with his wife, three boys, and one dog. You can follow his work at his website, stevefoxwrites.com, or follow him on Twitter or Instagram.

The Palestinian city of Jenin, in the West Bank, is in international headlines after several were killed and dozens injured in an Israel raid. The city is a significant symbol of Palestinian resistance — and it figures heavily in Christa Bruhn's new memoir, Crossing Borders: The Search for Dignity in Palestine. 

The memoir, ten years in the making and published this summer by Little Creek Press, follows Bruhn's journey of curiosity to Jerusalem and Gaza, first forged while studying abroad and later as a mother of three Palestinians. It documents the challenges Palestinians face living in the shadow of the State of Israel, and the deep connection Palestinians have to their homeland that inspires them to keep on living their lives in spite of those challenges.

Christa Bruhn is an author, photographer and culinary artist with a lifelong passion for peace and justice. She has a PhD from UW-Madison in Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. She now splits her time between her home in Madison and extended family abroad. She joins host David Ahrens in conversation about her debut book, and what she's learned from her travels.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with JK Cheema on her new memoir, The Black Attache: Vignettes from a Life (2023, Calumet Editions).

Born in 1942 to a Sikh family in Lahore, Cheema witnessed history in the making as the subcontinent of India was being divided into the separate countries of India and Pakistan. After moving to the United States to earn Master’s degrees in Social Work and Public Health and a PhD Social Sciences, Cheema joined the United States Agency for International Development as a career Foreign Service Officer in 1991 where she worked until her retirement in 2012. During her career, she oversaw development programs in Burkina Faso, Kazakhstan, and Armenia, to name only a few locales. For retirement, Cheema settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where she founded “A Place to Be,” a salon for creative conversation and dialogue on Willy Street. As a collection of vignettes, The Black Attache offers glimpses and reflections on Cheema’s life experiences, foregrounding writing as a necessary aid to remembering the past and as an indispensable antidote to loneliness.

The US education system has been sold as the solution for individual success and economic security. Should that still be the model?

Our guest, Jonathan Shelton, questions the idea that education should be the main way to access economic opportunity - especially when pitted against other social democratic alternatives. That's the starting point to his richly-researched new book, The Education Myth, published this spring by Cornell University Press. David Ahrens speaks with Jon Shelton about his new book.

Jon Shelton is Associate Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. A national expert on teacher unions, public education, and the history of working people, Shelton's work has been featured in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and numerous other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @prof_shelton. 

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with John West about his genre-bending memoir, Lessons and Carols: A Meditation on Recovery (2023, Wm. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Co.).

Lesson and Carols takes its shape from the Christian liturgical practice of the same name, often celebrated on Christmas eve. The service consists of nine short lessons that sketch the fall of humanity, the coming Messiah, the need for redemption, and hope found in the birth of Christ. Between each lesson, congregants sing Christmas carols that provide musical counterpoint to the lessons just received. And John West’s new memoir is divided accordingly: nine lessons structure a fragmentary narrative that reads equally as short meditations, prose poems, collections of quotations, and memoir on addiction and recovery, mental health, becoming a parent, the desire for redemption, the urgent need for poetry and music and ritual, and the elusiveness of language. The carols that divide the lessons are West’s translations of the Latin poet Catullus’s elegy. Driven by a desire for order and meaning, West’s narrative nevertheless lingers with doubt, depression, and loneliness. Finding meaning in the rituals we co-create in the company of others, Lessons and Carols suggests that “maybe redemption is not a place you find, but a system of mapmaking. Sketch a land. Pencil in dragons. Imagine it real, resplendent, and broken under a waxing moon.”

John West is a technologist and writer, currently reporting the news with code at the Wall Street Journal, where his work has won multiple awards and been a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Previously, he worked at the MIT Media Lab and the digital publication Quartz. He holds an MFA in writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars and degrees in philosophy and music performance from Oberlin College. He lives in Boston with his partner, their daughter, and a cat. You can follow him @johnwest on Twitter.

Stu Levitan welcomes Mark Borthwick, here to talk about his new biography of his second cousin thrice removed, A Brave and Lovely Woman: Mamah Borthwick and Frank Lloyd Wright, from the good people at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Mamah Borthwick was a highly educated, charismatic young woman from Oak Park Illinois at the turn of the 20th century, soon to become the translator of the internationally renowned Swedish feminist Ellen Key. But as Mark Borthwick writes, she lived with a man she didn’t love in a house designed by a man she did, and despite her many talents and accomplishments, Borthwick would become one of the most reviled women of her era because she left her husband and young children in 1909 to go to Europe with the architect of that house, Frank Lloyd Wright, and then live with him at the magnificent hillside home he built in Spring Green WI, Taliesin, where she and her children were murdered in 1914.

It is quite a tale of forbidden love and devastating loss social change and artistic triumph which Mark Borthwick tells well in this important addition to the literature about the self-proclaimed world’s greatest architect.

Mark Borthwick’s resume is perhaps not quite what you would expect from the author of such a book. A graduate of Northwestern University, he served with the US Army in Vietnam, and later received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Iowa and then two postdoctoral fellowships. After a stint on the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives, he became the founding US Executive Director of the US National Committee for Pacific Economic Cooperation, and then the Director of the United States Asia Pacific Council, a project of the East-West Center. His previous book, Pacific Century: The Emergence of Modern Pacific Asia, was the textbook companion to the award-winning, ten-hour PBS television documentary of that name.

It's a pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat Mark Borthwick

How should reporters consider their ethical responsibilities to the public? That's a question studied through a historical lens in a new book by UW-Madison journalism professor Kathryn J. McGarr. 

In City of Newsmen, McGarr explores how how the midcentury national press corps kept quiet about their skepticism in the first decades of the Cold War. National journalists, who were at the time almost exclusively white males, knew full well that they had reason to be cynical about the war and the US government's lack of transparency. The question, explored by McGarr from a bevy of personal correspondence from the time, is why they hid those doubts from the public. 

For more, Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens sat down with McGarr to talk about her research and her new book. 

About the guest:

Kathryn J. McGarr is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, where she teaches courses in literary journalism and the history of journalism and mass communications. Her research specializes in twentieth-century U.S. political history, with a focus on gender, foreign policy, and the news media. In addition to her recent book City of Newsmen: Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington (University of Chicago Press, 2022), she's also author of a 2011 book exploring Democratic power broker Robert Strauss.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Sami Schalk about her book, Black Disability Politics (2022, Duke University Press).

Across six tightly-argued chapters and two praxis-focused interludes, Black Disability Politics explores how Black cultural workers have engaged disability as a social and political issue differently than the mainstream, white-dominated disability rights movement. In doing so, Schalk argues that because Black disability politics take on different qualities, the work has been overlooked or misrecognized within disability studies and Black studies alike. Using archival work on the Black Panther Party and the National Black Women’s Health Project, as well as interviews with eleven contemporary Black disabled cultural works, the book offers a framework for both identifying and enacting Black disability politics for scholars and activists.

“We cannot understand Black disability politics,” Schalk writes in the Introduction, “without engaging histories of anti-Black violence, scientific and medical racism, health disparities, health activism and environmental racism. We also cannot understand Black disability politics without exploring how Black people have conceptualized not only disability, illness, and disease but also health, wellness, and healing within our own communities” (9-10).

Sami Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her interdisciplinary research focuses broadly on disability, race, and gender in contemporary American literature and culture. She has published on literature, film, and material culture in a variety of peer-reviewed humanities journals.

You can find out more about her at samischalk.com and follow her @DrSamiSchalk.

Cover photo courtesy of Duke University Press.

In Scott Mitchel May’s latest novel, a serial killer who believes he’s possessed by an Irish demi-god haunts Madison while a city detective tracks his patterns for years. A former Capitol intern becomes a separationist working to retake the American Southwest. The US is led by a President who speaks gibberish except when on the air, and a Wisconsin state senator who is past his prime casts a deciding vote to secede from the nation amid growing continental conflict.

Plots collide and timelines overlap in Breakneck: Or, It Happened Once in America (Anxiety Press, April 2023) a full-length novel from Madison author Scott Mitchel May. It could be described as cynical, neo-noir, postmodern thriller, with plenty of authentic Madison geography (Mickey’s Dairy Bar! Edgewood and UW-Madison! Eken Park! Apartments on Doty Street!).

As May tells us on Madison Book Beat, it’s “my book that I wanted to put Madison at the center of, and highlight a different kind of Midwest sensibility.” Scott Mitchel May joins us on Book Beat to tell us about his latest work, out April 28 from Anxiety Press.

Scott Mitchel May is a local writer whose work has appeared in a number of literary journals, including Maudlin House, Rejection Letters, The Bear Creek Gazette, The Maryland Literary Review, Bending Genres. He’s the winner of the 2019 Poem or Page Contest at the UW Writers’ Conference in the category of Literary Fiction and was a shortlist finalist for the 2022 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award. A former legislative aide in the Wisconsin State Senate, he now works an administrator for a charitable foundation, and is an avid skateboarder.

May’s debut collection of short fiction, DeKalb, Illinois is a Paradise What Eats its Own, was published by Alien Buddha in 2022. His forthcoming novelette All Burn Down is expected in October 2023 from Emerge Journal, and next novel Awful People is set to publish in winter 2024 from Death Print. You can find more about him on his website, scottmitchelmay.com, or on twitter @smitchelmay.