Madison Smartt Bell

Novelist Madison Smartt Bell and poet Elizabeth Spires have performed plenty of readings over the more than 20 years they have been publishing their writing. The Baltimore authors, who are married, have even shared the bill a few times. And, with their diverse interests and evolving styles, they keep finding new things to offer audiences. When they appear Oct. 18 at Howard Community College to open the 29th year of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo), Bell will play guitar and sing to accompany readings from his most recent novel, published this year.

Someone once described the ambition of getting a novel published as "a slender keyhole through which few have passed. " Rodgers Forge resident Eric Goodman has passed through that keyhole, and has found rewards on the other side - on Monday, June 4, he was in New York picking up the 2012 Gold Medal for Best Fiction in the Mid-Atlantic Region in the Independent Publishers Book Awards for his book, "Tracks: A Novel in Stories. " Goodman, 41, wrote his first short story when he was in third grade, and hasn't stopped since.

In this sun-splashed attic in suburban Baltimore, an 18th-century Haiti slave revolt was forged and fought. Tens of thousands were indiscriminately slaughtered; women raped, children mutilated. Plantations were burned and their owners were beheaded. It was a massacre of epic proportions and obscenity, arising from a complex maelstrom of race, caste and imperialism - and all of it spilled from the mind of a Southern-born white novelist while he was sitting in this peaceful attic office - as distant in time, space and character from Haiti's nightmare as might be imagined.

Madison Smartt Bell loves Haiti, has many close friends there, and initially rose to prominence because of novels he wrote about the impoverished Caribbean nation. So when an earthquake that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale struck a country that has had more than its share of bad luck, Bell was worried, heartbroken - and suddenly in demand as a media expert. As he wrote in the British newspaper The Guardian: "Haitians are expert in survival against all odds. They had been doing it for a century before their nation had a name.

WASHINGTON -- Novelist Madison Smartt Bell ascends to the pulpit of the Lutheran church across the street from the Folger Shakespeare Library dressed like an existential outlaw in gray and black punctuated by a skinny tie as blood-red as a recent razor cut.He reads from his book "All Souls' Rising" with the odd, flat diffidence of a hesitant bank robber. His accent recalls faintly his Tennessee birthplace. In the church, there's a hint of the oldtime country and western song about the soldier who uses his deck of cards as a prayerbook.

Madison Smartt Bell does not consider himself a Baltimorean. Not yet. Maybe not ever. "I feel like that would be an extravagant claim," the acclaimed novelist says, his Tennessee roots evident in his accent. "I've been here 20 years and that's not that long," Bell says. "In terms of people I consider Baltimoreans, that would be people who were born here and whose parents were born here, too. I'm a Tennessean in that sense." But Bell has become quite fond of Baltimore since moving here in the mid-1980s to join his wife, Elizabeth Spires, a poet.

PHILADELPHIA - It was a bright, happy afternoon outside the WXPN radio studios. Madison Smartt Bell, author of often dark, disturbing stories, suddenly looked nervous about taking a seat in front of the microphone. He couldn't have made this up: Not just anybody goes to XPN studios to be recorded; even fewer not-just-anybodies perform with the legendary bassist and record producer Don Dixon. So while two technicians calibrated audio pickups for Bell's first recording on the World Cafe radio show and Dixon-the-legend detached an E string and let it hang from his acoustic guitar - the tap of a dangling string sounded ominously against the moody chord he'd just tuned - the author nervously fingered opening licks to "Layla" on his black Les Paul electric.

The way it happened, you might have thought the ghost of Kurt Cobain had a hand in this thing, because who would give odds that Madison Smartt Bell, the novelist from Baltimore, would get his own recording contract to sing and play a Les Paul guitar with back-up from Don Dixon, the legendary producer who built successful careers for R.E.M., Marshall Crenshaw and the Smithereens? It shouldn't have happened. But it did. It's real. It's serious. And it started with a dream of Kurt Cobain.

Madison Smartt Bell begins the first session of English 306 at Goucher College by drawing two curved, symmetrical objects. He renders these deflated ovals with precise, exacting strokes. His students, however, don't have a clue what he's trying to show them. "Lungs?" is the first tentative guess. No. "Two chili peppers?" Nope. "A pair of squashes?" Uh-uh. The students are stumped. They know the objects must somehow be related to the ostensible subject at hand, creative writing. But until they solve the mystery of the ellipses, there will be no talk of writing, not overtly.

The Stone That the Builder Refused By Madison Smartt Bell Vintage / 768 pages / $16.95 Taylor Branch isn't the only Baltimore writer to recently complete a monumental trilogy. With this third novel, Madison Smartt Bell brings to an end his panoramic, tempestuous and bloody portrayal of the Haitian rebellion at the dawn of the 19th century.

Born and raised in Tennessee, Madison Smartt Bell has lived in New York and in London and now lives in Baltimore. The author of 12 novels, including All Souls Rising, a National Book Award finalist in 1995, Bell is a professor of English and director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing at Goucher College, where his wife, the poet Elizabeth Spires, also teaches. Last week, Bell received a $250,000 Strauss Living award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award, largest of the academy's literature prizes, is intended to provide the financial means to permit recipients to devote their time to writing for a period of five years.

Madison Smartt Bell does not consider himself a Baltimorean. Not yet. Maybe not ever. "I feel like that would be an extravagant claim," the acclaimed novelist says, his Tennessee roots evident in his accent. "I've been here 20 years and that's not that long," Bell says. "In terms of people I consider Baltimoreans, that would be people who were born here and whose parents were born here, too. I'm a Tennessean in that sense." But Bell has become quite fond of Baltimore since moving here in the mid-1980s to join his wife, Elizabeth Spires, a poet.

In his new biography of Toussaint Louverture, Baltimore novelist Madison Smartt Bell says the Haitian revolutionary can "fairly be called the highest-achieving African-American hero of all time." Toussaint led the "only successful slave revolution in recorded history," he says, and founded "the only independent black state in the Western Hemisphere ever to be created by former black slaves." Bell is talking in a third-floor workroom beneath the roof of his Cedarcroft home. He's written many of his books here.

The Stone That the Builder Refused By Madison Smartt Bell Vintage / 768 pages / $16.95 Taylor Branch isn't the only Baltimore writer to recently complete a monumental trilogy. With this third novel, Madison Smartt Bell brings to an end his panoramic, tempestuous and bloody portrayal of the Haitian rebellion at the dawn of the 19th century.

In this sun-splashed attic in suburban Baltimore, an 18th-century Haiti slave revolt was forged and fought. Tens of thousands were indiscriminately slaughtered; women raped, children mutilated. Plantations were burned and their owners were beheaded. It was a massacre of epic proportions and obscenity, arising from a complex maelstrom of race, caste and imperialism - and all of it spilled from the mind of a Southern-born white novelist while he was sitting in this peaceful attic office - as distant in time, space and character from Haiti's nightmare as might be imagined.

The Stone That the Builder Refused by Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon. 750 pages. $29.95. With the first two volumes of his ambitious Haitian trilogy, Madison Smartt Bell invited readers on a demanding literary journey: more than 1,000 pages of dense history, tangled plots and a colossal cast of characters. Now, with the publication of The Stone that the Builder Refused -- the trilogy's third volume -- Bell asks readers to embark on the final and most formidable stretch of this journey: a 750-page account of the last two years in the life of Toussaint L'Ouverture, hero of Haiti's slave rebellion.

SAVE ME, JOE LOUIS. By Madison Smartt Bell. Harcour Brace & Company. 351 pages. $23.95.TWO down-and-out drifters meet in a park one night. One's a Southerner who went AWOL from the Army years ago. The other is a college graduate who seems to have no explanation for being where he is.The two soon embark on a spree of unarmed automatic teller machine holdups that make the local news. Eventually they flee to Baltimore and hook up with a black ex-con who inspires them to higher stakes: armed robbery.

Anything Goes, by Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon Books 306 pages. $24. Madison Smartt Bell is known for his historical novels. This is his 14th publication, and it is classified, in that much used and abused category, as a story about growing up. The narrator, Jesse, is a guitarist in a rock band and he encounters natives along his way through the South. At every stop, including Nashville and Miami, the players, just like politicians, meet at a conference table in the bars and cafeterias for talk, much of it incomprehensible to outsiders.

PHILADELPHIA - It was a bright, happy afternoon outside the WXPN radio studios. Madison Smartt Bell, author of often dark, disturbing stories, suddenly looked nervous about taking a seat in front of the microphone. He couldn't have made this up: Not just anybody goes to XPN studios to be recorded; even fewer not-just-anybodies perform with the legendary bassist and record producer Don Dixon. So while two technicians calibrated audio pickups for Bell's first recording on the World Cafe radio show and Dixon-the-legend detached an E string and let it hang from his acoustic guitar - the tap of a dangling string sounded ominously against the moody chord he'd just tuned - the author nervously fingered opening licks to "Layla" on his black Les Paul electric.