Two Sacramento Writers

            Willa Cather once wrote that authors should write about what they knew at 15. Where they lived, where they grew up. They should speak of the living Earth they knew in their youth. That particular place where writers grew up never leaves them. They know its moods, its ways, its smells and sounds. Its unique history and its stories. Its secrets and its longings.
This brings me to a point about a friend from Sacramento—Father Steven Avella. We’re alike in so many ways. As his name suggests, he’s Italian-American as I am. We are both proud products of the Diocese of Sacramento’s school system.
He is a professor, as I was until my retirement. He teaches at Marquette University in Milwaukee in their History Department. That’s a D-1 school, and I’m not talking about sports leagues. It graduates PhD holders, not just those with bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Big league, to be sure, for a professor.
Steve earned his PhD from Notre Dame. In fact, our graduate careers crossed there for a few semesters. My initial time in South Bend was while he was finishing; I had taught high school before starting ND. It was great to chat about Sacramento with him, especially during my first winter when I thought hell had frozen over and fallen down on South Bend. And that winter was the one after the famous Blizzard of ’78, a mammoth storm that closed Notre Dame and all of South Bend—the one of legend, as embellished as any Rockne story.
Besides our Italian heritage, degrees, and professions, we hold another similarity.
Sacramento is in our blood. Father Steve has written three academic works:  The Good Life:  Sacramento’s Consumer Culture plus Sacramento and the Catholic Church:  Shaping a Capital City. Both would make Cather happy because she is absolutely correct about what a writer knows. His latest and third work, Charles McClatchy and the Golden Era of American Journalism, delves into Sacramento lore again.
For those of you not up on your history of journalism, Sacramento, and California generally, McClatchy is a significant figure. The McClatchy family owned many newspapers throughout California. I read the Sacramento Bee every day when I lived there. I still check it online. Even my neighborhood high school was named for that powerful dynasty—McClatchy High School. I went across town to Bishop Armstrong, now Christian Brothers—part of my Catholic upbringing in the late 50s and 60s.
When I got my copy of Steve’s latest work, I thought of Cather’s prescient remark.
Some of you have read Book I of The Marsco Saga, The Marsco Dissident. No plot spoiler here, but it starts in the year 2092 in Sac City, what my future Sacramento is called in the late 21st Century. My main character is “from” Sacramento and has settled there after living on Mars. As the novel begins, he has been back home again for the past ten years.
Book II, Marsco Triumphant, begins in Sac City. A troubled Sac City on the verge of unrest and witnessing draconian measures to prevent any further strife.
This Spring, after launching Book II, I began editing my draft of The Marsco Sustainability Project, the third novel of the four-novel set. Chapter One is not set in Sacramento, but many of the central actions takes place once more in Sac City.
I now live in Minnesota as I have for nearly 27 years. In a few years, I will have lived longer in Marshall than I lived in Sacramento as a boy and young man. I plan on setting a novel here in this town; I’ve written pages about the plot and the characters. All these characters will be transplants, like myself, who came to my fictional Marshall (“Milton, Minnesota” in this work) to teach at a fictional state college in my fictional part of the prairie we know and love as “the Upper Midwest.”
Cather rings true. I can’t write of this area the way locals can. I didn’t sit in a school desk here. I didn’t bowl or dance with classmates who grew up on farms outside of Marshall. I didn’t ice fish or play hockey. I didn’t pick rock or drive off tar. I didn’t ask to “borrow me a pen” from a friend or sell Schwan’s door-to-door for the Speech Team. I didn’t see a Marshall sky as a boy—it would have filled me with wonder as it does now, so often clear and star-studded. But, an invented childhood here won’t ring true. Not like when I write of Sacramento.
You can take the boy out of that Capital City, but you can’t take that Capital City out of the man. Father Steve and I are much like Jim Burden in Cather’s My Ántonia, trying to recapture what we had as youths. Sometimes words fail us, but then again, sometimes the words keep coming.