Odyssey background
The “Odyssey” series now appearing in The Review is a unique, long-term interview with Belden and Lisa Paulson. The interview is based on their memoir “Odyssey of a Practical Visionary.”
It's a love story. It's about a couple unusually inquisitive about what ails us. It's not about how to think or what to do. It's about wondering, then trying. They have the credentials to back up what they say.
The format for the series is itself innovative. Review Publisher Barry Johanson met the Paulsons many years ago when the woods, hills, fields, streams and ponds of Sheboygan County's town of Mitchell stole their hearts away.
In the “Odyssey” series, Barry extracts and e-mails questions related to the memoir. Belden and/or Lisa respond. Each of the couple is a gifted writer, so the answers being published have a quality often absent in the shoot-from-the-lip, partisan hissing of today's political, blogging or digital comment.
The Paulsons, who have just celebrated their 56th wedding anniversary because they agreed to “stick with it, whatever it was,” have painstakingly constructed closely examined lives trying to identify who is in the lineup of global thugs with names like poverty, war, intolerance and environmental dismemberment.
Many of us have shared dreams of doing something concrete and personal to rid our streets of such abominations. Uniquely, the Paulsons kept an extraordinary file of their daily pursuits – successes and failures – which they then devoted a decade to sort through, organize, write, critique and publish. What became a book was first conceived as a letter to four grandchildren.
Compare that effort with what we are told about so many of today's headline makers who are used because they have svelte bodies, or have excelled at their craft, or athletics, or acting, or political posturing, or any of the other fun excitations we have every right to enjoy.
The Paulsons’ situation is not too unusual to be true, and somewhat more like the problem of the famous poet W.H. Auden when he had been asked to return to Oxford and take up residence in a cottage of Christ College.
As the Scottish novelist Alexander McCall Smith put it: “It had been hoped that Auden would sit in a coffee shop and undergraduates would come up and engage him in – for them – improving conversation. Auden was willing to sit in the coffee shop, and did so, but very few people plucked up the courage to go sit at his table and talk to him. So mostly he sat alone. How sad, and what opportunities lost!”
Our “Odyssey” column is some kind of relative to Auden's table setting in a coffee shop. We have an opportunity to ask questions for which it's highly more likely than not that there will be carefully articulated answers, or at least intriguing observations.
At the conclusion of Homer’s classic story, “Odyssey,” an oar is planted in the sand, that it may sprout and become a tree. That image would be a fitting symbol for this “Odyssey of a Practical Visionary,” www.Thistlebooks.com. Any questions related to it will be forwarded to the Paulsons and should be directed to reply@plymouth-review.com.
Eavesdrop only, or join.
