Tribute to Edwin Forrest Ward

Edwin Forrest Ward – a Tribute 

By NC Weil 

In every community, at its heart 

Is a person who either made it start 

Or took it on as their own commitment, 

To grow, sustain, to care what it meant. 

For writers and songsters in Denver here 

The man who stood in the middle is clear – 

Ed Forrest Ward set up a venue, 

Inviting us all to be on the menu – 

Stories, Stories spread the plate 

To write, to tell, to captivate. 

You and Marcia reserved the Merc 

And Imagemaker got to work 

To craft the invites to us all:

“Fourth Tuesday – heed the siren’s call 

Of voices varied, come and share. 

Creative sparks will fill the air!” 

So many have, for ten fine years 

Embraced assembly with our peers. 

Leading off with a Philly tale 

Or seventies Denver: he’d unveil 

A place we maybe thought we knew, 

But from Ed’s unique point of view: 

Gone in a Taxi to the Dark Side 

Or with Lucia on a Pow-wow ride, 

Or a ghost from a bygone neighborhood 

The man in the attic lonely stood 

And watched cops puzzling in the street – 

Where can he be? He’s got them beat. 

All through life your stories rose 

Insisting to you: Stop! Compose! 

Share your thought and incidents, 

Steep them in your eloquence. 

An impresario is one 

Who trades in the phenomenon 

Of gathering, and drawing out 

The storytellers round about – 

The songs, the memoirs, and the fiction 

Made us richer through depiction – 

The deadline looms to stand on stage 

Painting us all another page. 

Thank you, Ed, for the groups you founded, 

Those magic nights we sat astounded. 

And we remember, by the way, 

That aphorism you liked to say: 

“A contract with the muse is a contract for life” 

You kept her happy – she’s been your midwife!

The Plague of Doves, by Louise Erdrich

This complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. 

Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. 

Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.