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Charles Degelman

New Generation reviews tale of '60s Resistance, Rebellion, Love

5/25/2023

During the 1960s, the civil rights and New Left movements were largely successful at exposing racism, organizing to make racial and gender equality the law of the land, and opposing the immoral and illegal invasion of Vietnam.

Our opposition to society's norms and government policy shook the racist foundations of voter suppression and the military-industrial complex's exploitation of anti-communism. Our resistance to the status quo contributed to the rise of second-wave feminism, environmentalism, the introduction of minority studies and across-the-board social, political, and cultural reform.

The corporate and governmental power structure, including the media, reacted to the effectiveness of our resistance by trying to diminish the power of the resistance movement. By the time Generation X came of age, many Americans thought that the resistance movements had been populated as one Gen Xer put it, "a bunch of hippies who just hung out, smoked a lot of dope, and got laid."

I wrote the Resistance Trilogy pictured above, in an attempt to set the record straight about the resistance movements of the 1960s. I lived through the 1960s as a radical artist and social activist, but want the generations that followed to have an idea of how exciting, terrifying, ingenious, dangerous, hilarious, serious, and sexy the sixties really were. So...

I am always excited when someone like Jane Witten @bookandbeveragereview sits down with one of the volumes of the Resistance Trilogy. Here is Jane's YouTube review of Volume I of the Resistance Trilogy, Gates of Eden.

The Scoop — 5-Stars for Rocked in Time

12/15/2022

Wow. I was intrigued when I read the blurb, but I was not expecting what I found inside these pages. I was absolutely blown away. Degelman does an excellent job of plopping the reader right into Vietnam-era America, and the characters are all so vibrant and real. There’s something about his writing style that just wraps around you and makes you feel as well as see the story. I didn’t want to stop reading once I started, and I’ll absolutely be going back to read the first two books in this series. I cannot recommend this enough for historical and literary fiction lovers. -- Liliyana Shadowlyn

https://www.thefaeriereview.com/2022/12/rocked-in-time/

Midwest Book Review Features Rocked in Time

12/7/2022

"Rocked in Time" by Charles Degelman slips behind the scenes of a blasphemous theater company hell-bent on toppling America's Vietnam-era establishment with punch lines, pratfalls, and comic rebellion. Along the way, "Rock's" protagonist pursues a love for the stage and a passion for resistance amid the tear-gassed campuses and burning cities of a nation at war with itself.

A fictional reflection of an historical era, novelist Degelman's "Rocked in Time" offers a compelling and compulsive page turner of a read that is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. A captivating work of historical/literary fiction, "Rocked in Time" is unreservedly recommended for personal reading and community or academic libraries' Contemporary Literary Fiction collections.

http://www.midwestbookreview.com/ibw/dec_22.htm#LiteraryFiction

Author, Blogger Reviews Rocked in Time

11/14/2022

ROCKED IN TIME: Confessions of a Radical Theater Artist by Charles Degelman (Harvard Square Editions) is the third volume of a trilogy that began with Gates of Eden, and A Bowl Full of Nails.  This Resistance Trilogy is set in the political and social movements of the 1960ås and 70s in the United States. Fiction based on fact, this novel recreates the era from a variety of viewpoints of race, sex and class. The basis of the struggle, what was accomplished at what cost, and what it was like to be on the cultural ramparts of historical struggle are explored.

Compared with France's short-lived June Rebellion of 1832, popularly immortalized as Les Miz (from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables), resistance movements in the U.S. from 1960s-70s are rarely studied beyond a paragraph in U.S. history textbooks. The era is dismissed in pop culture memes or in narratives narrowed by current politics by subjects in Ken Burns' epic presentation. But this period of radical political and social change altered the course of a nation. Over 15 million people participated in the only mass political movement in the U.S. that succeeded in ending an unpopular war.  Every age, race and religion participated, and it was supported by broad participation by civic, political and military groups, such as The Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Fuelled by the escalation of the war and the growing power of the "military industrial complex" that profited from the war, as well as the inspiration of Martin Luther King's vision of the spiritual nature of freedom and "the storm of hope" to end racism and oppression. The huge national concensus, visible from President Johnson's window, was a major factor in ending the war. My favorite book in the trilogy, ROCKED IN TIME: Confessions of a radical theater artist is great fun. It's the story of a cultural foot soldier, pre-internet, using his art to entertain, communicate the state of the nation, and rally the people.

Les Miz is loved for the fight of Law and the political power it serves, and human dignity. The hero of ROCKED IN TIME is similarly inspired by the powerful political plays of German playwright Bertolt Brecht, a kind of guiding light in his work with The San Francisco Mime Troupe, a '60s guerilla theater dedicated to toppling the war machine with pratfalls, punch lines and comic rebellion. He first encounters the legendary group in a Berkeley park. Wildly entertaining Comedia del Arte poked fun at the war and "Whiteface" vaudeville at racism.

Our hero's apprenticeship in ROCKED IN TIME began with the founding director's grueling physical work-outs, which included classical mime and dance training for split-second timing. The author's talents as a musician, designer and performer were put to use in works that were performed in parks and universities, in street forums, concerts, formal auditoriums and political demonstrations. Venues could feature arrest and/or injury, so protecting personnel and equipment was a reason to be fast and nimble.

Mummers marches enlightened audiences, as did controverial "gutter" hand puppets, which dramatized the Black Panthers' bids for housing and education. This serious theater troupe, exposed truths about society and of course had their own failings. There was a corp group, the director Vinnie and the beautiful compelling Olivia and newbies who became corp cadre, like the hero and the lovely dancer-actress Nikki. The politics of the troupe are fascinating, a communal command with a leader. A leading lady forced to deny her strength. While celebrating the 60s search for life's deeper purpose in authentic experience, the author shows that the nascent woman's movement had yet to break through.

Alternative lifestyle experiments in the 60s-'70s led to breakthroughs in media, science, art, architecture, as well as "sex, drugs and rock and roll." Unfortunately, the excesses of the era are better known than the triumphs. Think of freewheeling hit-and-run theater with something serious to say, free stores with clothes, tools, furniture, food and sometimes housing provided by the antimaterialistic Diggers Commune. Think of a nation, linking arms in Marches in cities across the country. The Mime Troupe, an ancestor of Mabou Mines, has yet to be matched for its serious inspiration, effectivenes and pure fun. Read ROCKED IN TIME for vicarious FUN.

— Susan Weinstein

A Bowl Full of Nails earns bronze from Independent Publishers Book Awards

6/9/2015

I was just honored for the second time with an IPPY. The first IPPY descended on my earlier novel, Gates of Eden, a 60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Now, A Bowl Full of Nails, a counterculture thriller becomes the happy IPPY recipient.

It's uplifting to be surprised by an award but I feel particularly simpatico with the organization that sponsors this award, Independent Publisher, a powerful voice in the independent publishing industry. Check them out here, including their award programs and the IPPYs.

In their 19th season, the IPPYs — the Independent Publisher Book Awards — honor the best independently published titles from around the world. The awards are intended to bring increased recognition to the thousands of exemplary independent and academic press titles published each year.

Good news for A Bowl Full of Nails and bravo! for the Independent Publisher Book Awards and the work they do to provide robust alternatives to corporate publishing.

CSULA television and film student captures essence of a collaboration

5/20/2015

When old friend, fellow traveler, and actor, writer, activist Peter Coyote invited me to join him in a reading at Barnes & Noble books in Los Angeles, Cal State LA student Ideth Hernandez was on hand to capture the moment and report the session for Cal State LA's "Arts & Letters — Firsts, Bests, & Onlys."

Ms Hernandez distilled Peter's and my joint reading session beautifully, caught the essence and message of our words and actions that night, and — perhaps most important — evoked the spirit of Peter's and my friendship. Bravo, Ideth!

Cal State LA's "Arts & Letters — Firsts, Bests, & Onlys."

Lit journal reviews my latest 'resistance novel...

5/8/2015

Literary critic Rachel Jagareski writes about A Bowl Full of Nails in Foreword Reviews, a quarterly trade journal.

BERKELEY, CA — May 15, 1969: It’s Bloody Thursday at People’s Park and street theater activist Gus Bessemer returns from his confrontation with the “pigs” with a butt full of birdshot and the need to skip town for a construction job a thousand miles away. In Charles Degelman’s A Bowl Full of Nails, Gus is served the titular breakfast by his live-in girlfriend the morning after he announces his solo travel plans. Foregoing this iron-rich snack, he hits the road for a transformative year with a mother lode of independent spirits in Montgomery, Colorado. Read more...

From fact to fiction: I tore down and rebuilt the building with the blue trim and false front. It became the town community center, featured as a main character in my novel reviewed here, A Bowl Full of Nails. I'm amazed and delighted to see the fact behind the fiction still stands.

Shedding Skin: a writing professor bares his alter ego

4/9/2015

I teach dramatic and narrative writing at California State University, but I’ve spent most of my life outside academia. As a student at Harvard, many of us became aware that America’s universities had become land-grabbing, ivory-towered, defense-research factories while outside their ivy-covered walls, there was a war to stop. The Free Speech Movement in Berkeley had led the way with this growing awareness, but universities around the world became — as they often had before — magnets for revolutionary thought and action. I was lucky to be there.

Upon graduating, I immediately stepped away from academia, determined to change the world through theater, music, and fiction. I would be vulnerable to the draft that was devouring young men as quickly as the U.S. military was destroying Vietnam. “It was a tough job,” I always admitted, “but somebody had to do it.” I left campus life to pursue an anti-career as political activist, actor, musician, writer, carpenter, gypsy trucker, and utopian anarchist.

Years later, I returned to university life, hungry for scholarship and knowledge. I also hoped to pass on what I had learned about resistance and the power of art as a tool for social change. In every class, a handful of my students took notice and began to ask questions that lay beyond the purview of my lectures on diction, grammar, and syntax.

In this brief interview — produced by students in Cal State LA’s Television, Film, and Media Studies program — I drop my role as writing teacher to speak about coming of age in the 1960s, performing in Cuba, about my participation in the resistance movements and art collectives and communes and the counterculture that arose— in the words of Bertolt Brecht — from those who practice their art “under the regime of bourgeois liberty.”

Bookpleasures.com Interview: Meet Writer & Editor Charles Degelman

1/20/2015

Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest today, writer & editor, Charles Degelman. Charles currently teaches narrative and dramatic writing at California State University, Los Angeles. Previously, he served as staff writer and editor at a Los Angeles-based educational organization while he produced original work for the stage and wrote fiction, screenplays, and political commentary.

In 2010, Charles edited A Voice From the Planet, an award-winning collection of international short fiction, published by Harvard Square Editions. Recent work includes Gates of Eden, a '60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Gates garnered a silver medal from the 2012 Independent Publishers Book Awards. A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the counterculture of the 1970s, was a finalist in the PEN/ Bellwether Competition and will be published by Harvard Square Editions in February, 2015.

Charles lives in Hollywood with his playwright companion and four cats.

Norm Goldman — Editor and Publisher of Bookpleasures.com: Good day Charles and thanks for participating in our interview.

How did you get started in writing? What keeps you going?

Charles: I started writing as a teenager. I was an avid reader from the age of five and matured into an odd cross-up between rambunctious youth and book-buried recluse. I was fortunate to have grown up in a literate family and was surrounded by books. I still remember my father reading every novel written by Mark Twain, and listening to his voice grow distant as I dozed off.

My reading lead me to a sense of purpose about the written word, fiction and non-fiction. As a teenager I became a romantic about America, its egalitarian and transcendentalist history, the struggles of the working class, its great, industrial energy, its wilderness.

At fifteen, I began playing folk music and surrounded myself with the musicology of every rag, blues, holler, Appalachian ballad I sang, anything by Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, Dave Van Ronk and Big Bill Broonzy. And who was this guy named Howlin’ Wolf? Yes, it was music, but folk music is highly literate and informed my understanding of history and the power of the written word.

I keep writing for the same reason I kept reading — I have things I want to talk about. I think art is a powerful tool for social change and — although I assiduously avoid being didactic — I am motivated by the simple words of another writer, Bertolt Brecht who said “Change the world; it needs it.”

Read more...

Not Another Book Review: A Bowl Full of Nails

1/19/2015

BERKELEY, May 15, 1969 — Riot police carrying shotguns killed one bystander and wounded several protesters. When interviewed at the hospital, one protester observed, "getting shot in the ass has certain strategic connotations. One, it suggests that you had pissed somebody off. Two, that you are running away from that somebody. And three, that somebody has got the guns and you don't." All of those things were true at People's Park on Bloody Thursday.

This is the factual event that begins the fictional odyssey of Gus Bessemer, antiwar activist in Charles Degelman's new novel BOWL FULL OF NAILS (Feb, Harvard Square Editions). Gus, who goes to People's Park to protest w/guerrilla theater, is stopped in his tracks by the "Blue Meanies," riot police with shotguns and live ammunition. The next morning, while his girlfriend, Kate, is tweezing birdshot pellets out of his butt, Gus realizes it may be time to leave town. The "Man" is sure to come after him. Then Kate confirms he's on the list of protesters to be incarcerated in a new jail. He's strangely proud to have made that list.

Read More...