The Bluegrass and Beyond

Kentucky doesn’t just produce writers; it celebrates them.

The biggest annual celebration is Saturday, when about 200 writers — 150 of whom are Kentuckians — will gather at the Frankfort Convention Center for the 28th annual Kentucky Book Fair.

Authors will sit behind long rows of tables so thousands of readers can stop by, meet them, buy their books and get their autographs.

This year’s lineup includes pop ular Kentucky writers Silas House, Erik Reece, Bobbie Ann Mason, Ed McClanahan, Thomas Parrish, Richard Taylor and David Dick.

Also there will be retired Courier-Journal columnist Byron Crawford, who has put together a 30-year collection of his work in Kentucky Footnotes, and journalist Leslie Guttman of Lexington, who writes about a year in the life of a race horse hospital in Equine ER.

Coach Rich Brooks and co-author Tom Leach will sign their book, Rich Tradition: How Rich Brooks Revived the Football Fortunes of the Kentucky Wildcats.

And retired Keeneland chairman Ted Bassett will autograph his memoir.

National authors at the fair will include George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, who has written a book about Abraham Lincoln.

“I’m always so proud to live in a state that supports literature the way Kentucky does, and the Kentucky Book Fair is real proof of that,” said House, who will sign his new novel, Eli the Good.

“Everywhere I go, all over the country, people assume that Kentuckians are illiterate,” House said. “And I always take that as an opportunity to correct them and tell them about our long literary history and how great the support for writers is in our state.”

When you think about that tradition and support, it makes perfect sense. Writing is about telling stories, and there are few things Kentuckians love more than a good story — and storyteller.

Jesse Stuart and me at his home, summer 1963. Photo by Marion Eblen

I’m the son of a school librarian and a bookstore manager. Writers, especially Kentucky writers, enjoyed celebrity status in our home. My first memorable encounter with that celebrity came the summer I turned 5, when my mother’s parents came up from far Western Kentucky for a visit.

My grandparents were Jesse Stuart fans and wanted to see the Greenup County he wrote about. While my father was at work one day, my mother took us to Greenup, thinking we could drive past Stuart’s home. What she didn’t know was that the narrow gravel road ended at his home.

It didn’t look as if anyone was home, so before she turned the car around, my grandparents urged her to look in the window beside the front door. When she did, Stuart looked back. Then he opened the door and invited us in to visit.

I had just learned to do somersaults, and, much to my mother’s horror, Stuart encouraged me to practice on the braided rug in his living room. I was barefoot, so when he took us to see the cabin where he wrote, he carried me out there, giving my mother a Kodak moment.

Writers such as Stuart and James Still found rich material in the people and places of Eastern Kentucky, just as Mason has explored the land and psyche of her native Jackson Purchase region, in far Western Kentucky.

I asked Mason last week about the importance of Kentucky writers, past and future. As you might expect, her response was well worth reading:

“Kentuckians have been confused about our identity, who we are and how others see us, what we have here and what there is in the larger world. Sometimes we feel smugly superior, sometimes inferior. Kentucky writers have always walked a tightrope between Kentucky and the Outside.

“Now even though the boundary lines are easing, and Kentucky is part of the wider mainstream, our writers can continue to lead the way on the most critical issues of our time, because we can write firsthand with passion and with historical perspective about what is happening to the land and its people. Our land of contrasts is an example and a warning to the rest of the world.”

Readers of Conde Nast Traveler magazine recently voted the 21C Museum Hotel in Louisville as the nation’s best hotel.

It was in the news last week and discussed on NBC’s Today Show this week.

“It sounds like the idea behind this is brilliant,” said Today Show host Matt Lauer, who seemed barely able to hide his surprise that Kentucky could be on the cutting edge of anything.

The 90-room luxury hotel that houses a public, all-hours contemporary art museum really is brilliant, and the Today Show and Conde Nast Traveler are just the most recent examples of the positive buzz it has created for Louisville.

The 21C was the brainchild of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, who worked with Lexington-based Gray Construction to create the museum/hotel by renovating and connecting four century-old buildings.

The complex is not far from developer Bill Weyland’s Glassworks art and office complex and Louisville Slugger factory and museum. They are all on Louisville’s West Main Street, in renovated old buildings that less imaginative developers would have demolished.

These attractions have sparked a vibrant entertainment district popular with locals and visitors alike. Last year, the American Planning Association named West Main Street as one of the nation’s 10 best streets.

Gray Construction’s chairman, Lexington Vice Mayor Jim Gray, worked closely with Brown and Wilson to create 21C - and it wasn’t easy. Some of the buildings needed new foundations and steel reinforcement. “There was one day when we almost lost one of them,” he said.

But Brown and Wilson never considered tearing down the old buildings, Gray said. And it wasn’t just because the $180-a-square-foot cost of renovation was cheaper than new construction.

“They knew that the character of the old buildings was what would inspire and create the energy for the project,” Gray said. “Within the frame of the old buildings they were going to create something new and contemporary and inspiring.”

Last year, during Lexington’s debate over the now-stalled CentrePointe project, Gray often mentioned 21C as an alternative approach to the generic skyscraper developer Dudley Webb planned. Webb could create something special by saving some of the 14 old buildings he wanted to tear down and weaving them into a quality piece of contemporary architecture.

Webb wasn’t interested. The old buildings weren’t worth saving, he said, even though renovation would have been cheaper than new construction.

So, here we are more than a year later. The block has been cleared of 180 years of Lexington history. CentrePointe is stalled and probably dead. Louisville has 21C and a lot of national buzz. Lexington has a pasture in the middle of town and a missed opportunity.

But it’s not Lexington’s only opportunity.

A few blocks away, developer Barry McNees is scraping together money to create the Lexington Distillery District. His vision is to renovate two abandoned bourbon distilleries and other industrial buildings in one of the city’s long-neglected neighborhoods. They would become the nucleus for a mixed-use neighborhood reflecting Lexington’s heritage and authentic culture.

The Distillery District is struggling amid the credit crunch. Still, the 150-year-old Old Tarr Distillery warehouse has become Buster’s, a popular nightclub. Galleries and artists’ studios are sprouting nearby.

“You clean that place up and it’s a destination,” Gray said of the Distillery District. “There’s nothing like it in Lexington, and that’s what appeals to people.”

So here’s the question for May Jim Newberry’s administration and Lexington’s business leadership: Where should this city place its bet? Will a prosperous future look more like what’s happening on Louisville’s West Main Street, or what’s been happening for 30 years on Lexington’s West Main Street?

Tuesday is the National Day on Writing. Do you have a sentence or two to contribute?

If so, the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning wants to hear from you. To celebrate this day, the center is putting together what it calls the “longest short story ever written.”

The center is seeking contributions from average folks and from established local authors, including Ed McClanahan and Bobbie Ann Mason. First lady Jane Beshear plans to finish the story during an event at 5:30 p.m. at the Carnegie Center in Gratz Park.

The idea is to put together a snapshot of Lexington and what’s going on in people’s lives this day, said Neil Chethik, the Carnegie Center’s writer-in-residence.

People can add their contributions by stopping by the Carnegie Center from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or at the following places and times: Starbucks in Chevy Chase, 7-9 a.m.; Starbucks downtown, Third Street Stuff or the Eagle Creek Library, 9-11 a.m.; Joseph Beth Booksellers or Barnes & Noble, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.; The Morris Book Shop, Waldenbooks or Northside Library, 1-3 p.m.; or the Village Branch and Central libraries or Common Grounds Coffee, 3-5 p.m.

Ed McClanahan

McClanahan has started the story with these two sentences: “I found her sitting on a bench in Woodland Park. She looked up when my shadow fell on the letter she was writing.”

McClanahan, whose books include The Natural Man, said he doesn’t know what will come from this community story.

“It will generate some interest among people (in writing), I’m sure,” said McClanahan.

He said writing is a useful exercise for anyone. “It is an opportunity to examine one’s life and experiences and thinking processes. It’s a way of looking at yourself and what’s going on in the world.”

This community story will be written on butcher paper, the pieces of which will be taped together into a big scroll. Excerpts will be published online, including on www.galleryofwriting.org, the Web site of the National Council of Teachers of English, which sponsors the National Day on Writing.

It sounds like a fun project. I’m just glad I don’t have to edit it.

“I’m glad I don’t have to, either,” McClanahan said.

Non basta una vita - Italian for “one life is not enough” - was the late John Regis Tuska’s motto to describe his artistic ambitions.

Now, his son is discovering that two lives may not be enough, either.

For the past dozen years, Seth Tuska has worked to preserve and publicize the legacy of his father, a prolific artist and University of Kentucky art professor who died in 1998 at age 67.

Seth Tuska, 51, turned the family home at the corner of Old Park and Central avenues into a museum of his father’s art. He engaged a filmmaker and curator to put together a documentary film about his father and catalog and traveling show of his work.

He sought commercial outlets for reproductions of Tuska pictures and sculptures, which depict the human form in motion. And he started a bronze foundry on Walton Avenue to support regional sculptors.

But last November, after a bronze-pouring at the foundry, Tuska said he went home with a ringing in his ears. Then, on Christmas morning, he awoke at 4 a.m. with an intense pain in his chest. Foolishly, he didn’t see a doctor for three weeks. When he did, he was taken straight in for quadruple heart bypass surgery.

But the worst was still to come.

Tuska said when he resumed normal physical activity in March, the ringing in his ears, which had never really gone away, got much worse. He now suffers from a severe case of tinnitus - a constant sound like cicadas in his head that makes it hard to sleep, read or concentrate.

Tuska said he now needs to deal with his medical crisis and entrust his father’s legacy to others. “I have to move on and figure out what’s ahead for the rest of my life,” he said.

The first public steps in that direction will come Friday. Mayor Jim Newberry is to issue a proclamation honoring John Tuska and his work, and he will accept the loan of a bronze figure, Energy Source, for display at city hall.

That evening, during Gallery Hop, the Kentucky Theatre Gallery will display 18 Tuska pieces. The theater will have two showings, at 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m., of  Non Basta Una Vita, a 2008 documentary about John Tuska by Arthur Rouse and Kiley Lane.

Thanks to the event’s sponsors, attendees also will be given a film poster, popcorn and a drink. Tuska said he has worked with local arts educators to distribute many of the 600 tickets to students.

Where things go from there, Tuska said, depends on community interest - both artistic, and financial.

Tuska sold the foundary to artist Amanda Matthews Fields and enlisted a group of community leaders to advise him on how to proceed with setting up a non-profit Tuska Museum and Learning Center foundation to take over the family home and his collection of his father’s art.

Tuska lives upstairs in the home, but is in the process of moving out. He wants to keep the collection of his father’s work in Lexington.

His vision is to continue the home’s first floor museum. But, more importantly, he wants to use the upstairs apartment to house visiting artists and the 2,500-square-foot lower level for educational space.

Downtown developer Phil Holoubek, a member of the advisory group, said several strategies have been discussed. “Seth will have to decide what he feels most comfortable doing,” he said.

Holoubek said the Tuska collection includes outstanding art that could not only enrich the community culturally, but promote economic development.

LexArts President Jim Clark, who for six years directed the New York Public Art Fund, agreed. “If John Tuska had done this work in New York City he would have been a very prominent sculptor,” he said.

Clark sees a lot of potential for the Tuska Museum and Learning Center, if it gets the right leadership that can attract the necessary money.

“Having a house museum is perfect for Lexington,” Clark said. “It is intimate in scale. It’s in a beautiful neighborhood. Anybody flying into Lexington for the (horse) sales, that would be a perfectly lovely discovery. Part of that is just working with what they’ve got and marketing it.”

With more regular museum hours, more advertising and an experienced curator, Clark thinks the Tuska museum could become an important cultural destination. And he thinks Seth Tuska has the right idea about using his father’s legacy to encourage arts education.

In addition to the high quality of John Tuska’s work, Clark said, what made him special was his dedication to teaching. Great artists who also are great arts educators, like Tuska and Centre College’s Stephen Rolfe Powell, are rare.

A learning center that promoted arts education - and honored arts educators with a “Tuska prize” and residency - could put Lexington on the arts map. “That would be a very big deal in this country,” Clark said.

What’s needed now is for people to step up and help Seth Tuska make it happen.

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With all of the public attention focused on President Barack Obama’s speech to the nation’s school children, I had to wonder: Did the adults learn anything?

Obama urged kids to study hard and not give up, even if they don’t like some classes or things are tough at home. He reminded students that each of them has special abilities, and it’s their responsibility to develop them.

The president acknowledged that, like many of us, he was “a little bit of a goof-off” when he was young. He told kids that success takes hard work, and nobody else will do it for them.

It was a speech that could have been delivered by any responsible leader, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative.

AP Photo by Stew Milne

It was a pep talk about personal responsibility, not politics. But from the way the right-wing fringe and some Republican Party officials reacted to it beforehand, you would have thought Obama was planning to sprout horns and advocate devil worship.

There was a lot of bluster about Obama “overstepping his authority,” even though previous presidents have made similar speeches. Timid school officials offered opt-outs for students whose parents objected. Cowardly school officials skipped the speech all together.

Steve Robertson, chairman of the Republican Party of Kentucky, last week called Obama’s plan to speak to children “very concerning and kind of creepy” and an attempt “to circumvent parents” and “gain direct access to our children.”

Robertson and some talk radio entertainers focused on an ill-chosen phrase that federal education bureaucrats used in material prepared for teachers. The phrase, suggesting teachers could have students write letters to themselves about how they can “help the president,” was reworded to how they “can achieve their … education goals.”

It seemed like a lame excuse for objecting to a presidential speech, because that’s exactly what it was.

Some GOP leaders have no interest in working with Obama and other Democrats, whether it’s rebuilding the economy, reforming health care or anything else. They just want to see Obama fail.

The talking heads of the right-wing media relentlessly bash Obama. They shamelessly distort facts, incite fear and call anyone who disagrees with them radical, socialist or even communist. It’s a profitable business model, because gullible listeners lap it up.

Obama is no radical, unless you think “middle of the road” means the right shoulder. But there are radicals out there, on both sides of the political spectrum, and this episode is a good reminder that responsible people should be wary of them.

American politics has always been messy, but it works pretty well. In robust, fact-based discussions among responsible people, ideology usually gives way to artful compromise and practical solutions. One of history’s best examples was Lexington’s own Henry Clay.

On the other hand, history’s ills can usually be traced to political or religious ideology and extremism, from Mao’s China and Hitler’s Germany to the Spanish Inquisition and modern Islamic terrorism. Those perpetrators believed they were right and their opponents were evil, and they had no reservations about saying or doing whatever it took to win.

Obama’s agenda and proposals should be carefully studied and vigorously debated. Thoughtful discussion could lead to good compromises, better ideas and ultimately solutions for the nation’s problems, some of which can be traced to past examples of ideology trumping common sense.

That has become more difficult, though, because modern communications technology amplifies the voices of irresponsible extremists, ideologues and the willfully ignorant people who follow them.

The best lesson to take away from the president’s speech to school children is that personal responsibility is a good concept for adults, too.

It was an exhausting two-day trip from her home in Chendu, China, to Lexington, where Tianjiao Yang will become a nursing student at the University of Kentucky.

But when she arrived Sunday at Blue Grass Airport, Judy Phillips was there to greet her and take her to her dormitory. And Yang didn’t need to worry about dinner.

That’s because Phillips and other volunteers from UK’s International Hospitality Program, along with the Lexington Rotary Club, had put on a huge picnic spread to welcome Yang and more than 100 other new international students.

A long table on one side of the E.S. Good Barn, where UK’s College of Agriculture has its offices, was loaded with hamburgers, brats, side dishes and all of the trimmings. Outside, for the few who dared brave the heat and humidity, there were corn hole boards and written instructions on how to play.

Mostly, though, there were a lot of smiling faces to welcome Yang and her fellow students from 24 nations to their new Kentucky home.

“I was a little nervous, but American people are very friendly,” Yang said only a few hours into her first day on this side of the world. “Judy is very kind. She helped me a lot.”

The program has been making the transition to American life a little easier for UK’s new international students for more than four decades.

Later this week, as they did last week, volunteers will take students shopping for everyday necessities they couldn’t bring with them. Later this fall, a square dance is planned to introduce them to traditional Kentucky culture.

And for students who want one, there is a host family or person who has agreed to spend some time with them off campus once a month — invite them to their home for dinner, or take them on a family outing.

Hosts also are only a phone call away for seemingly simple questions that can baffle someone fresh from another culture, such as how to open a bank account, get a driver’s license or figure out what size sheets to buy for their unfamiliar American bed.

The transition usually isn’t difficult for students from Australia, Western Europe and other places with cultures similar to the United States. But it can be daunting for some students from Africa, Asia and parts of Eastern Europe.

Yang was one of several students getting airport pickup service this year from Phillips, who is in her 19th year as an IHP volunteer and host.

“It’s really a great program in that you can have a relationship with an exchange student, but they don’t live in your home and you don’t have a financial commitment,” said Phillips, who over the years has traveled to Poland, Egypt and Dubai to visit exchange students she once hosted. “They become like your own kids. I have thoroughly enjoyed it.”

Stephanie Hong, executive director of the city’s Partners for Youth program, has served for many years as an IHP board member and host because she remembers how important it was for someone to show her around when she arrived from Taiwan to become an undergraduate at Eastern Kentucky University.

She often takes students to a pumpkin patch before Halloween, to a Thanksgiving dinner and to see Christmas lights to help explain American culture. “It’s a one-year commitment for the host family, but it often becomes a lifelong friendship,” said Hong, who once traveled to India to attend a former exchange student’s wedding.

“We’re always looking for more host families,” said Karen Slaymaker, assistant director of UK’s international affairs office, who oversees the program. People interested in becoming hosts or volunteers may call her for more information at (859) 257-4067, ext. 237, or go to the Web site, www.uky.edu/intlaffairs.

UK usually has about 300 international students from as many as 100 nations at any given time, from teenage undergrads to post-doctoral students.

“They’re all somebody’s children,” said Pat Bond, assistant dean of UK’s graduate school and chair of the International Hospitality Program. “They’re courageous to be doing this in the first place, coming to a new country and culture. Just little acts of kindness mean so much to these kids.”

FRANKFORT —Frank Lloyd Wright was hired in 1910 to design a Frankfort home for a Presbyterian minister he met during a trip to Europe. But it would be nearly four decades before the architect would visit his creation.

Wright was speaking in Louisville and Lexington, and he asked to be taken by the house. When the man who then lived there answered the door, the story goes, Wright walked in as if he owned the place.

During the visit, the man asked Wright, then 80, what he had in mind when he designed the display case around the top of the living room fireplace. It is the only one like it in any of the hundreds of homes Wright designed.

After a few moments, Wright replied that he couldn’t remember what he was thinking at the time, “But I’m sure it was very advanced.”

Ed Stodola, who has owned the Rev. Jesse Zeigler house at 509 Shelby Street for nine years, smiles when he tells the story. Wright was almost as famous for his outsize ego as for his innovative architecture, so Stodola thinks the story of that 1948 visit just might be true.

One thing is for sure: Of the more than 1,000 structures Wright designed during his 70-year career as perhaps America’s greatest architect, only one was built in Kentucky.

Wright is getting a lot of attention this year, the 50th anniversary his death in 1959 at age 91. It also is the 50th anniversary of Wright’s last great building, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. The art museum on Fifth Avenue marked the occasion with a retrospective of Wright’s work.

Wright is best known for his “prairie” style buildings that blend into the natural landscape. His most famous creations might be the Guggenheim and Fallingwater, a house built over a waterfall in rural Pennsylvania.

Wright’s ideas about architecture had a profound influence on 20th-century home design, from the bungalows of the 1920s to the ranch-style homes of the 1950s. He pioneered and popularized open floor plans, built-in cabinets and carports. He experimented with pre-fabrication and even designed furniture and fixtures for his houses.

Stodola and his wife, Sue, are Wisconsin natives who were taught in school about native son Frank Lloyd Wright the way Kentucky children are taught about Abraham Lincoln.

Stodola, a psychologist, was living in Lexington in 2001 but doing most of his work in Frankfort. He vowed he would move to Frankfort if the Zeigler house ever came up for sale. Driving by one day, he noticed a “for sale” sign in the yard. He soon bought the house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places.

The four-bedroom Zeigler house, which like most Wright houses is of modest size and distinguished by strong horizontal lines, was built by a Frankfort contractor. The leaded-glass windows and Roman brick on the fireplace came from Wright’s studio in Chicago, Stodola said.

Zeigler, who had a wife and three children, economized in a few places: the upstairs floors are heart pine, rather than oak, and plain glass was used in rear, upstairs windows.

All but one room open to an outside terrace or deck. That and the windows help accomplish Wright’s goal of “organic” architecture that visually brings the outside environment inside.

There are many small design touches, such as the pink dogwood blooms painted on the shades of wall-mounted light fixtures in the master bedroom, echoing the pink dogwood tree that has always been in the front yard.

Although Wright’s designs are an architect’s dream, they can be a structural engineer’s nightmare. Fallingwater has been jokingly called “Fallingdown” because it has required costly repairs over the years.

Luckily for the Stodolas and the four previous owners, the Zeigler house hasn’t had many such problems. One reason could be that its roof is more steeply pitched than those of many Wright houses. It also has a basement, a rarity in a Wright house.

“This home is very livable,” Sue Stodola said. “I never feel crowded in the rooms, because they feel bigger than they really are.”

Light shines through the wavy, leaded-glass windows and reflects off the oak woodwork differently depending on the weather and season. Ed Stodola loves sitting on the back, upstairs terrace with a glass of wine during a summer rain; the drops make an interesting sound on the roof overhang.

“There’s this ongoing discovery with the house,” he said.

The Zeigler house also has another claim to fame: Woodrow Wilson slept here.

Soon after the house was built, and three years before Wilson became president, he was Zeigler’s guest while attending a National Governors Association meeting in Louisville. Wilson was then president of Princeton University and had just been elected governor of New Jersey. The two men had known each other at Princeton.

The Zeigler house has had a state historical marker out front for many years. The Stodolas added a small “private home” sign after more than a few curious sightseers knocked on their door or looked in their windows, thinking the house was a museum.

One woman came to the door and explained that she was a schoolteacher visiting Wright houses as part of a cross-country trip. As it turned out, she was from Denmark, Wis., Stodola’s tiny hometown. After a few minutes of conversation, they discovered that his mother had been her fourth-grade teacher and she now taught in her old classroom.

The Stodolas have come to accept that the occasional stranger at the door is the price you pay for living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house. His designs are so iconic, his influence on architecture so great, that it feels natural for some people to want to walk right in as if they owned the place.

HINDMAN — This is the season for family reunions in Appalachia, when people come home to celebrate kinship, community and the mountain culture that shaped their lives.

There’s a big reunion in Knott County this week. Many of the 100 people there have been attending for years, if not decades. Few are related by blood, but they’re family just the same, bound together by Appalachia’s storytelling tradition and the magic of words.

Ask participants at the 32nd Appalachian Writers Workshop what it’s like, and they use the word “family” a lot. They come for inspiration and advice on the craft from some of the best writers these mountains have produced.

The workshop was started by two Knott County writers, novelist and folklorist James Still, and poet Albert Stewart. Others associated with the annual gathering have included poet Jim Wayne Miller and novelists Wilma Dykeman and Harriette Arnow, author of the 1954 classic The Dollmaker.

“It’s a central part of my year that I never want to miss,” said novelist Silas House, who was a participant from 1996 to 2001 and has been on staff ever since.

Participants apply and submit writing samples in May. There are always more applicants than spaces; the 102-year-old Hindman Settlement School’s cabins can hold only so many people.

Each morning, participants gather in small groups according to interest: poetry, novels, short stories, nonfiction, memoir and children’s literature.

When I visited the workshop Tuesday, poet and writer George Ella Lyon was in one room talking about the challenges of publishing books for children. In another room, novelist Karen McElmurray discussed using memoir to explore universal themes. In another, novelists Ann Pancake and Laura Benedict explained storytelling techniques.

Afternoons are for group readings and individual coaching from the staff of published writers. Everyone eats together, then washes dishes. There’s writing time throughout the day, and bull sessions late into the night.

“It’s an intense week,” said journalist Jason Howard, who is here for a fifth year. “There’s a great sense of family, and a lot of spiritual detective work going on.”

Mike Mullins helped start the workshop in 1978, soon after he became director of the historic settlement school that now provides literacy and cultural enrichment programs. He marvels at the workshop’s success.

“I think there’s always a crying need for all of us to express ourselves, to tell our story, or a story we’ve made up,” said Mullins.

A few of this year’s participants are college students, but most are much older — academics and blue-collar workers, business people, housewives and retirees. Some are beginners; others have published several books.

Mountain life has always been a popular subject in Appalachian literature. But many now write about the mountains themselves and what has been happening to them over the past half-century. Hundreds of thousands of acres have been leveled by mountaintop-removal coal mining or scarred by strip-miners.

“What we do to the land, we do to the people,” said Don Askins of Clintwood, Va., whose poetry focuses on the coal industry’s environmental destruction.

House and Howard, who both come from coal-mining families, recently wrote the book Something’s Rising about opposition to mountaintop-removal within the region. Howard also edited a collection of essays, poems and songs called We All Live Downstream.

Many writers here are women who have raised families or had careers. “They come with this full lifetime of experience and a passion to write about it,” McElmurray said.

Benedict first came to the workshop 20 years ago. “I had only been writing for a year or so and I was looking for a cheap vacation,” she said. What she found was a calling – and a husband, Pinckney Benedict, who was on the workshop staff. “We didn’t start dating until after the conference, but I gather we scandalized a few people,” she said with a smile.

The Benedicts were back this week as staff members. He is a novelist and short story writer who teaches at the University of Southern Illinois and at writing workshops across the country. She recently published her second novel.

“There’s a sense of community, a spirit of cooperation here,” she said. “They read a lot, and they all take their work very seriously.”

But unlike some other workshops, Benedict and McElmurray said, the writers here don’t take themselves too seriously. There’s no “staff table” at meals, no caste system based on publishing success.

But Benedict has discovered one advantage to being on staff: “I don’t have to do dishes.”

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There seems to be a fund-raising walk, run or bicycle ride for just about every cause, charity and disease.

So when Ed Stodola was looking for a way to raise money to restore the Grand Theatre in downtown Frankfort, the avid cyclist decided to organize a ride.

But what a ride.

The Grand Autumn Bicycle Ride Across Kentucky is a three-day trek that covers 11 counties and more than 200 miles, from the Ohio River at Carrollton to the Tennessee line at Dale Hollow Lake. Dip your wheels at each end.

In each of the past five years, the ride has attracted no more than 35 riders, but Stodola is hoping for the maximum 60 this year. For more information, go to www.gabraky.com.

So far, the GABRAKY has raised more than $68,000 for the Grand Theatre’s $5 million renovation. It has not been a lot of money in the Grand scheme, Stodola admits. But it has provided cash flow at critical times during the seven-year effort.

“The ride also helped keep the Grand efforts in the public eye,” he said, explaining that the first ride, in 2004, came when other fund-raising efforts had plateaued.

Organizers are planning the sixth ride for Oct. 9-11, with a couple of differences.

Instead of “Grand,” it’s now the “Governor’s” ride, reflecting its designation as the Beshear administration’s first Kentucky Adventure Tourism bike tour. Also, the theater’s renovation is almost finished. An open house is planned Aug. 7.

The Grand on St. Clair Mall was built about 1910 as a small vaudeville house and enlarged as a movie theater in the 1940s. It closed in 1966, and the building was put to other uses, from a dollar store to an auction house.

There was an effort to restore the Grand in 1983, but it failed. Then, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a group of Frankfort citizens began looking for a project to build community spirit. They remembered the Grand.

Since then, several other restoration projects have begun in downtown Frankfort, which has many beautiful old buildings. “I think it’s going to have a transformational effect,” Stodola said.

The renovated Grand will show movies, host concerts and be a venue for small stage shows. None of its 420 seats is more than 50 feet from the stage.

“We’re going to market it as Kentucky’s most intimate performance venue,” said Bill Cull, chairman of the non-profit Save the Grand Inc., which owns the building and is managing the restoration.

Cull and Stodola gave me a tour of the theater last week as workmen were installing seats and putting on other finishing touches. Sections of original plaster from the 1910 vaudeville house and 1940s theater have been preserved as part of a beautiful, modern theater that includes a small art gallery upstairs.

A mid-1800s house that shared a wall with the theater also has been restored. It will be used for administrative offices and performers’ dressing rooms.

The project was put together with a patchwork of government money, grants, corporate and private donations, volunteer labor and, of course, money raised from the bicycle ride.

A concert by R&B groups The Platters and The Coasters is planned for the theater’s grand opening on Sept. 25. Other bookings so far include the New York Theatre Ballet’s production of Sleeping Beauty.

Singer John Sebastian will perform at the theater during the Alltech Fortnight Festival on the first night of this year’s GABRAKY. And when the cyclists ride south the next morning, they can take a little pride in having helped the Grand’s marquee light up the Frankfort sky again.

It is a tried-and-true model: an “incubator” building with shared office space that cuts overhead costs and provides a creative community where business entrepreneurs can learn from and be inspired by each other.

Could the same work for social entrepreneurs?

In fact, it works quite well in many cities.

The Kentucky Conference for Community and Justice wants to create such a place in Lexington.

Within five years, the KCCJ hopes to have perhaps 20,000 square feet of shared work and meeting space near downtown for emerging non-profit organizations and entrepreneurs interested in making the world a better place.

The organization has a non-binding letter of intent to put the facility in the Old Pepper warehouse, a cavernous building on Manchester Street that is planned as a focal point of the Lexington Distillery District.

“When people come together, you have the space between where so much can happen,” said KCCJ Chair Shannon Stuart-Smith.

KCCJ has been developing the idea for two years in cooperation with other local groups. But the effort was jump-started late last month when a delegation visited the Centre for Social Innovation in Toronto, Ontario, one of North America’s most successful social incubators.

Located in a renovated industrial building, the Toronto center rents desks, telephones, printers, Internet connections and other modern necessities to social-oriented entrepreneurs, companies and non-profits that have fewer than five workers.

The center also fosters an atmosphere — both physical and psychological — that encourages networking, brainstorming and collaboration. That includes everything from informal conversations between desks to planned events, such as twice-weekly “salad club” meals.

That atmosphere is what KCCJ hopes to replicate in Lexington.

“The tenants didn’t think of themselves as tenants; they thought of themselves as partners in the program,” said jeweler Joe Rosenberg, a KCCJ board member. “What we’re hoping to do is take what they’ve learned and build on it.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that once you put this together, you’ll fill it up,” Rosenberg said.

Debra Hensley, an insurance agent and former Urban County Council member who has been working on the idea for several years, estimates there are 100 fledgling organizations and entrepreneurs around Lexington whose mission involves social and environmental issues. Many work out of their homes, or in isolated offices.

“Within 10 minutes, I thought, this is what I’m looking for,” said Jason Delambre, a young Lexington-based sustainable energy consultant. who went with the group to Toronto.

KCCJ, which started as a chapter of the old National Conference of Christians and Jews, has worked for decades to fight discrimination and promote human equality and inclusiveness. The organization sees creation of a social incubator as perhaps the best way it can contribute to future progress in Kentucky.

The next step involves figuring out how to raise $1 million to $5 million to build the space and develop a business model to sustain it, Hensley said. Similar centers in other cities have a variety of financial models, depending on local circumstances.

“We’re making a tremendous leap with this project,” said longtime member Marilyn Moosnick.

But then, the work of the Kentucky Conference for Community and Justice has always involved making tremendous leaps. Perhaps that’s why it has been able to do so much good.

Sometimes a dream deferred can come true.

You could see that dream in the faces of many of the 200 people who gathered Thursday morning at the corner of East Third Street and Elm Tree Lane to break ground for the long-delayed Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center project.

The crowd included community leaders and city officials, some of whom had worked for 18 years to restore the Lyric, an icon of Lexington’s African American community.

It also included many longtime Lexingtonians who have been waiting 46 years for their Lyric to reopen.

They’ll have another year to wait before the cavernous shell of a theater is rebuilt as a city-owned performing arts and community center.

“It means a number of years of frustration are over,” said Robert Jefferson, a former Urban County Council member who helped start the long crusade. “This is a very emotional time for me.”

After a 1987 fire damaged the Kentucky Theatre on Main Street and the city announced plans to restore it, Jefferson urged then-Mayor Scotty Baesler to appropriate $250,000 for the Lyric.

It was only fair, Jefferson said: “As a native Lexingtonian, I hadn’t had the right to go to the Kentucky Theatre because of segregation.”

But it would take years of struggle and legal disputes before Mayor Jim Newberry, the Urban County Council and a dedicated group of community activists would succeed in putting together the Lyric’s $9 million renovation and operating plan.

Many of those who came out remembered the Lyric as the place where black Lexingtonians came to see movies, vaudeville shows and jazz musicians from 1948 until the theater closed in 1963.

Tassa Wigginton said her childhood Saturdays were spent at the Lyric, visiting with friends, eating popcorn and watching cartoons and movies.

“We came with a quarter; 10 cents to get in and 15 cents to spend,” she said. “One day when I was a teenager my daddy let me come with him to see a stage show and I thought I was in seventh heaven.

“This was really the community center,” Wigginton said. “This and Dunbar High School were the pride of the black community.”

Don Garrison said he began working at the Lyric selling tickets and ended up as its last manager. “I was here the night we shut it down,” he said, noting the irony that desegregation ruined the Lyric’s business.

Julian Jackson Jr., another early supporter of the Lyric’s restoration, said he hopes the new facility will preserve the East End’s colorful history.

Many people know the area was once home to Lexington’s pre-Keeneland race track and the famous black jockeys Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield. But Jackson said they may not know of other neighborhood greats, such as the opera singer William Ray and the inventor Joseph Bailey Lyons.

As with the Lyric, desegregation led to decline in the historically black East End — a decline that has been in rapid reverse over the past decade, thanks to work by the Urban League, city government and many others.

S.T. Roach, the legendary basketball coach at the old all-black Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, was thrilled to be able to attend Thursday’s ceremony.

“I’ve been waiting for this for many years,” said Roach, 93, who once worked at the Lyric and ran an ice cream bar next door.

Roach recalled the vitality of the old East End and thinks the Lyric’s restoration could kick the neighborhood’s renaissance into high gear.

Former councilman George Brown agreed.

“I think the new Lyric will become a meeting place, a community place, a place for new artists to be discovered,” Brown said. “Who knows what could be spawned here, from Third and Elm Tree Lane? Only the mind can imagine.”

Poet Sunny Montgomery reads to Glyn Dawson and staff member Tonya Perdue at Homestead Nursing Center. Photos by Tom Eblen

Art expresses the human spirit. It also can nourish it, especially in places where the human spirit can feel challenged.

That was one of the ideas behind local poet Sunny Montgomery’s visit to seven Lexington nursing homes Wednesday.

Montgomery visited dining halls and went from room to room, asking if she might spending a few minutes reading poetry.

The project was organized by the ELandF Gallery and the Nursing Home Ombudsman Agency of the Bluegrass.

“Just having artists or anybody from the outside coming in consistently creates a culture that’s good for the residents and staff and more open to the community,” said Bruce Burris of ELandF.

The ombudsman agency plans a public meeting July 29 to seek ideas for other arts programs that might be done in local nursing homes. Those could include visiting artists, or participatory arts programs for residents. The meeting will be at 2 p.m. at the agency’s office in the senior citizen center at the corner of Nicholasville Road and Alumni Drive.

Montgomery visits with Emma Hutchison, right, and daughter Emily McCarty after reading poetry Wednesday at Homestead Nursing Center.

A tough economic period isn’t the time to hunker down and wait for the storm to pass. It’s a time to seek new ideas and create a more prosperous future.

In fact, history has shown that some of the best innovation occurs in uncertain times like these.

“I think it’s an opportunity to think strategically,” said Kris Kimel, president of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corp. “It kind of gives you cover while everybody else is scurrying around to think about new opportunities and how to take advantage of them. Anytime there’s disruptive change, there are new opportunities.”

Kimel is also the founder of the annual Idea Festival in Louisville, which on Friday is announcing the lineup of speakers and performers for this year’s event, Sept. 23-26.

As usual, the Idea Festival will feature an eclectic assortment of some of the brightest minds on the planet. You can hear what they’ve been thinking, and the massive collision of ideas might give you a few of your own.

The biggest celebrity appearing this year may be chef Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen Confidential and host of The Travel Channel’s No Reservations. On the other end of the food spectrum, Will Allen, founder of the non-profit organization Growing Power, will talk about developing community food systems worldwide.

Musicians performing at the festival include the Ahn Trio, a chamber music group from South Korea; concert pianist and psychiatrist Richard Kogan and 10-year-old cellist and pianist Marc Yu, who will talk about what it’s like to be a child prodigy.

Scientists speaking include Bert Hölldobler of Germany, co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a book based on his research about the behavior of ants; noted astronomer Bob Berman; Chris Turney of Australia, who studies the history of climate change; University of Kentucky neurobiologist Diana Snow; and University of Louisville biologist Lee Alan Dugatkin, who studies the evolution of goodness.

As always, there is a large group of speakers from the world of film, including actress Veronica Bero; actress and director Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, daughter of Martin Scorsese; screenwriter Michael Dougan; and documentary filmmakers Arthur Rouse of Lexington and Kembrew McLeod of Iowa.

The Belgium-born sidewalk chalk artist Julian Beever will be creating a special piece during the festival, and Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde will discuss his work, which explores the dynamic relationship between architecture, people and electronic culture.

The second $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize will be awarded. Last year’s winner, architect Luyanda Mpahlwa, will speak about his work designing affordable housing in South Africa. Also speaking about architecture will be Kulapat Yantrasast, whose Los Angeles firm is designing the expansion of the Speed Art Museum in Louisville.

Speakers from the media include best-selling humorist A.J. Jacobs; Jurriaan Kamp, editor of Ode, a print and online publication about people’s passions; National Public Radio technology journalist Moira Gunn; and Dana Canedy, a Kentucky-born editor for The New York Times, who will discuss the memoir she wrote for her young son about his father who died fighting in Iraq.

Nat Irvin of the U of L College of Business will speak about his demographic research into African-Americans in business; UK psychology professor Phil Kraemer will discuss the psychology of innovation; and social scientist Michael Johnston, who won U of L’s prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, will talk about his research into political corruption.

Cambodian human rights activist Somaly Mam will discuss her efforts to fight human sex trafficking, and Hira Ratan Manek, an engineer from India, will talk about his research into the ancient practice of sungazing.

The festival has moved from the Kentucky International Convention Center to the Kentucky Center for Performing Arts and the surrounding area of West Main Street, including the 21C Museum Hotel and the Galt House.

The festival will include a dinner under the stars on the streets of downtown Louisville, activities for kids and IF 2.0, a program that includes a pre-festival workshop and special events.

For the Idea Festival schedule, ticket prices, reservations and more information, go to: www.ideafestival.com.

I had been meaning for some time to check out the Southland Jamboree, a free bluegrass music show each Tuesday evening during the summer on the lawn beside Collins Bowling Centers-Southland.

I arrived after this week’s show had started, and more than 200 people were there. A great band was on stage, each man dressed in perfect Bill Monroe style: dark suit, tie and white cowboy hat.

It was a classic Kentucky scene until the music stopped and the band leader started speaking — with an Australian accent.

It turns out the band, Bluegrass Parkway, hails from Perth, Australia. Southland Jamboree was a warm-up gig for this weekend’s 35th annual Festival of the Bluegrass at the Kentucky Horse Park campground.

Band leader Paul Duff said afterward that he wasn’t a musician until he was 18 and walked into a northern Australian pub where a bluegrass band was playing. “I walked out and said, ‘I’ve got to play it,’” he said.

Duff learned to play the mandolin, then learned how to make one. He first came to Kentucky to work and study in the early 1980s, then returned to live in Lexington for a time in the early 1990s. He went back to Australia with a Lexington-born wife, Maria Ketron, and a mission to spread bluegrass music.

“It’s real music …. It has got that universality,” he said, explaining that bluegrass is increasingly popular around the world, especially in Australia and Europe. “I love the sociology of bluegrass music. The sound is great, and the lyrics are about hard times and people sticking together.”

The Festival of the Bluegrass this weekend will include fans from across the globe. Find the performance schedule and other information at www.festivalofthebluegrass.com. And if you doubt bluegrass music’s international appeal, check out the Web site’s online guest map.

Also worth seeing, doing

Visitors also will be coming to Kentucky this weekend for Cycle the Gorge rally and family fun ride Saturday and Sunday at Stanton. It’s a prelude to a summer of racing events at the Red River Gorge that will attract cyclists from around the country.

It’s not too late to register for the rally and family run ride. Go to www.tour-rrg.com.

For a less strenuous tour of Kentucky’s natural beauty, consider booking one of the Suburban Women’s Club’s behind-the-fences tours of local horse farms. This year’s tour dates are June 19, July 17, Aug. 21 and Oct. 16.

The five-hour bus tour visits Chesapeake and Woods Edge farms, with lunch at Chrisman Mill Winery. The tour costs $50, with profits going to the club’s charitable works, which include college scholarships and Operation Read.

The Suburban Women’s Club, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, has been doing these tours for 36 years. For more information, call (859) 624-2338.

If you like contemporary art, Breathitt County artist and former corporate lawyer Theo Edmonds, whom I wrote about in April, is back in Lexington. He has rented space at 351 West Short Street for a free gallery show 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day through June 19.

The show features some terrific work he created during six months in New York. Edmonds has set up a studio in the back of the gallery space, where he is working and eager to talk.

If you like less-contemporary art, you have three more days to see Excavating Egypt, the fascinating show of antiquities at The Art Museum at University of Kentucky in the Singletary Center. The exhibit closes Sunday at 5 p.m. For more information, go to the museum’s Web site, www.uky.edu/ArtMuseum.

For ideas and more information about things to see and do in Central Kentucky this summer, go to the Lexington Arts Council’s Web site, www.lexarts.com, or the Lexington Convention and Visitors Bureau’s Web site, www.visitlex.com.

If you want to change, you must expose yourself to new ideas.

That’s why I’m a fan of Commerce Lexington’s annual Leadership Visit. On Monday, more than 260 of Lexington’s government, business and civic leaders will board two chartered jets to Madison, Wis., for the 70th annual trip.

Each year, Commerce Lexington sponsors the three-day trip to a different city in search of ideas for improving Lexington.

(Another reason I’m a fan of the trip is that it helps influential people from different areas of the community get to know each other, and it brings new people into the leadership circle.)

Many of those on the trip will be business executives. Others include Lexington’s mayor, vice mayor, police chief and most members of the Urban County Council, as well as the mayors of Richmond and Versailles. Fayette Schools Superintendent Stu Silberman is going, along with representatives of four colleges and universities.

Last year’s trip to Austin, Texas, underscored the importance of “weird” creativity in building a city’s economy. It also showed how live music and other entertainment venues can attract creative young people and become an economic engine.

The year before, the people who went to Boulder, Colo., brought home the idea that walking and bicycle trails can improve a city’s quality of life — and, again, attract creative talent. That helped jump-start various trail-building efforts around Lexington.

Like those cities and others previously visited, Madison and Lexington have a lot in common. They’re about the same size and have beautiful natural settings, a major research university and other good institutions of higher learning.

The University of Wisconsin has reached the University of Kentucky’s goal of becoming a Top 20 research university. Madison is much farther along than Lexington in attracting and developing high-tech companies. Madison has a more educated population and higher per-capita income.

Madison and Lexington both often show up on national rankings of great places to live and work, although Madison often ends up higher on the list.

“Quality of life” is sometimes a hard-to-define characteristic, but everyone agrees it will be vital for cities to thrive in the 21st century economy. That is because technology and digital communications give companies and individuals more freedom to choose their location.

Among the topics on the Lexington visitors’ agenda: arts and culture, downtown development, recreation and environmental sustainability. They’ll hear from Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz and Rebecca Ryan, founder of Madison-based Next Generation Consulting and author of Live First, Work Second, who will report on her impressions of Lexington.

Commerce Lexington has visited Madison before, in 1997. And similarities between the two cities led the Herald-Leader to send reporter Jamie Gumbrecht there nearly three years ago to do her own comparison.

Among the things that struck Gumbrecht about Madison were the close town-gown relationship and the emphasis on walking (a major pedestrian thoroughfare, State Street), biking (150 miles of trails and bike lanes everywhere) and opportunities for people to gather for events or just to hang out (50 live music venues and a huge lakefront commons).

For my own quick preview, I consulted an old friend, Ellen Foley, a Madison resident and former editor of the city’s largest newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal. What, I asked her, makes Madison such a great city?

Foley cited qualities that may not be readily apparent on a quick visit. Madison has a history of being open to new ideas and different kinds of people, including immigrants. It has long valued education, partly because those immigrants saw education as the way to get ahead.

She mentioned a vibrant, innovative business community and a deep sense of community philanthropy and civic engagement.

“We care about each other. We take actions to help each other,” she said. “We still go to the city council meetings that last until 3 a.m. Way before micro-blogging, our neighborhoods had active oral networks that shared stories and issues. We had a huge controversy in our neighborhood about putting islands in a busy street to slow traffic. One big issue was who was going to plant flowers in this island, and which flowers!”

For another perspective, I consulted a new friend, Rebecca Self, education director of Seedleaf, a non-profit group that promotes affordable, community-grown food in Lexington. A Lexington native, Self has lived in Madison and will be among those going on the Commerce Lexington trip.

Self said Madison residents feel a responsibility to get involved in civic affairs, and seem to be more proud of their city than Lexingtonians are of theirs.

“I think their self-pride actually helped to create their reputation,” she said. “From starting out in a place where they believed in themselves and their potential rather than doubting it, they were able to do some pretty impressive things, many of which I hope we’ll see and in some way replicate.”
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Now that the 70th anniversary Celebrity Curtain Call show is over, it’s safe for me to confess that I, too, am a Lexington Children’s Theatre alumnus.

I was hardly a giant of the stage. In fact, I was a dwarf — one of seven in the spring 1967 production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

My third-grade teacher told my mother that I seemed to be a frustrated actor. She suggested I try out for Lexington Children’s Theatre.

I ended up as the dwarf “Happy.”  The only line I remember was my response to Snow White’s critique of housekeeping in the dwarfs’ cottage. “Dust?  What’s that?”  (Perhaps that’s why my wife prefers me to vacuum and leave the dusting to her.)

Children’s Theatre was fun, although I apparently showed little talent for acting. But, then, we 8-year-old dwarfs were easily overshadowed by the show’s lead. Even at age 12, it was obvious she would become a star.

Five years later, Lydia Hodson became Kentucky’s Junior Miss, then America’s Junior Miss. After attending Transylvania University and graduating from George Washington University, Hodson went into television. She and Sam Dick were co-hosts of PM Magazine on WKYT-TV from 1979 to 1982. She went on to do a similar show in Louisville, married composer Phil Copeland and had a son, Ashton.

In 1986, she was diagnosed with Hodgekin’s lymphoma. She fought the disease and beat it, but the treatments left her body weak. She died from respiratory problems in October 1991.

It’s a shame Hodson wasn’t here to celebrate Lexington Children’s Theatre’s 70th anniversary. I have no doubt she would have been one of the stars of the show.

That is me, fourth from the left, beside Lydia Hodson as Snow White.

After one of his Courtney Avenue neighbors died and her house was sold, Gordon Burnette noticed several old paintings left by the curb with some other junk.

One in particular caught his eye: a picture of a mare and foal. Written on the back was the mare’s name, the artist’s name and June 1882.

The painting was in bad shape, though, so Burnette left it on the curb.

Later, his son saw the paintings and brought them home. “He said, ‘You like horses. You can have this one,’” Burnette recalled.

A little Internet research told Burnette that the mare, Miss Russell, was a great trotting broodmare whose 1898 death was reported in The New York Times.

The artist, too, was special. Thomas J. Scott was one of the most prolific equine portrait artists of the late 19th century. Beyond that, though, little is known about him. And aside from a few prized paintings, the fate of most of his work is a mystery.

Scott and his paintings have become an obsession for Burnette, a tool-and-die maker who over the past six years has become an amateur equine art sleuth.

Since January, he has been working with author Genevieve Baird Lacer to research Scott and track down his largely forgotten work.

While Scott painted more than 150 horse portraits, Burnette has been able to find only about 30 of them. Perhaps the most important one is a large portrait of the great Thoroughbred stud Lexington, which hangs in the clubhouse at Keeneland.

Another, of Lexington’s dam, Alice Carneal, is in the Georgetown and Scott County Museum. Others hang locally at Waveland Museum and Ashland, the Henry Clay Estate. And there are some in the Jockey Club of New York and the National Museum of Racing at Saratoga, N.Y.

Most of Scott’s other known paintings are privately owned. Burnette and Lacer suspect there are dozens more out there — many of them in Central Kentucky — decorating the walls of families who have no idea what they have.

Burnette has had his painting of Miss Russell professionally restored, and he recently bought another Scott on eBay — an 1874 portrait of the stallion Acrobat. Burnette isn’t so much interested in collecting as in documenting Scott and his work — and in bringing Scott the fame he thinks he deserves.

Eventually, Lacer and Burnette hope to gather enough information and images to publish a book about Scott. They also dream of putting together an exhibit of his work during the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games.

Lacer became interested in Scott because he was one of only two known students of the great equine portrait artist Edward Troye, whom she profiled in a 2006 book.

“Engravings of Scott’s paintings appeared in all of the leading horse publications,” Lacer said. “That’s how we know he was so important at the time. But later, he was forgotten. We don’t know why.”

Scott was born in Pennsylvania in 1830 and graduated from the Philadelphia School of Pharmacy in 1846. Apparently, his artistic talent and passion for horses led him to Lexington in the 1850s, where he studied with Troye and painted some of the greatest Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds of the age.

Because photography was then in its infancy, Lacer said, “We wouldn’t know what these great foundation horses looked like if these men hadn’t painted them.”

When the Civil War began, Scott joined the 21st Regiment Kentucky Volunteers (Union) and served under the artist Samuel W. Price as the unit’s hospital steward. After the war, Scott lived and painted in the Northeast for several years before returning to Kentucky.

Newspapers and horse publications of the day have frequent mentions of Scott and what he was painting at the time, but little other information about him.

Scott probably didn’t earn much as a painter, so he might also have worked as a pharmacist. He was a journalist for one of the leading horse publications, Turf, Field and Farm. He wrote under the pseudonym “Prog,” which means to wander and beg for food. He died in 1888 at St. Joseph Hospital and is buried in Lexington Cemetery.

If you think you might have a painting by Thomas J. Scott, you can contact Burnette and Lacer at g.burnette@insightbb.com. They have created a Web site, www.thomasjscott.com.

“These paintings have been revered by families so much that many of them remain in private collections to this day,” Lacer said. “If you have a horse portrait that looks old and you don’t know the origin of it, we might be able to help you identify it.”

Click on each image to enlarge it.

Journalists love anniversaries; they provide a flimsy but convenient excuse for writing about things we find interesting.

This week marks two important anniversaries for people who love good writing.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style, my favorite guide to good writing.

E.B. White, best known for his children’s book Charlotte’s Web, updated a writing manual used by his Cornell University professor, William Strunk. With simple commandments — Be clear. Omit needless words. — the book is a beacon in a world of blather.  National Public Radio has a piece about the book that’s worth hearing.

Reviewing The Elements of Style for Esquire magazine in 1959, Dorothy Parker wrote this piece of classic Dorothy Parker wit:  “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

White’s essays for The New Yorker remain classics. Two of my favorites are Here is New York, which captures the energy of the 1940s city, and The World of Tomorrow, which describes the New York World’s Fair of 1939 and man’s hubris.

Monday marked the 100th birthday of the late Eudora Welty, the Mississippi author and photographer.

Her novel The Optimist’s Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize. Her many stories, such as The Petrified Man and Why I live at the P.O., are great studies in human nature and Southern culture.

White and Welty were great literary stylists. Strunk would have been proud of them both.

Theo Edmonds spent the first 15 years of his adult life chasing traditional success.

From his native Breathitt County, he moved to Lexington and earned an art and theater degree from Transylvania University.

Then he went to New Orleans, where he earned a master’s degree in health care administration and a law degree from Tulane University. He was admitted to the Louisiana Bar and had good jobs in corporate America.

Then, one day, it hit him: “I realized I was doing something that wasn’t making me happy on any level. I knew I needed to be creative. So I called in one morning and quit.”

He returned to Lexington, where he spent much of the past two years in a rented industrial building on Manchester Street writing poetry, painting and creating large mixed-media pieces of art.

Edmonds, 39, is now finding a new kind of success with his art, thanks to talent, hard work and a generous patron. For the past five months, he has been living and working in New York City, where he opens a two-week show Thursday in rented space in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo district.

After the show, Edmonds will move to France and create work for a solo show in September in Deauville, Lexington’s sister city, during its annual American Film Festival. After that, another show of his work is planned in Dublin, Ireland.

Edmonds was having modest success as an artist in Lexington, where he said the contemporary art scene has begun to blossom. “Lexington has immense potential,” he said. “It’s an amazing place; you never know what’s going to happen.”

But living and working in Harlem has been a whole ‘nother world.

“The influence and energy in New York has been incredible,” he said. “My work has fundamentally changed and evolved since I’ve been here. It has become much more varied. I have more confidence in my work. I feel very blessed; I don’t know how else to say it.”

Many of Edmonds’ pieces are a combination of paint and castoff items that tell stories, often Appalachian stories.

“The idea of things having a second life is authentic to me, and very Appalachian,” said Edmonds, whose father, Teddy Edmonds, represents Breathitt, Lee and Estill counties in the General Assembly.

Since moving to New York, Edmonds also has spent a lot of time in art museums. He has studied the work of fellow abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and he has developed a new appreciation for the old masters.

“If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you might be able to go,” he said.

Edmonds’ show is built around three themes: Appalachian storytelling pieces he created in Lexington; a series called Gabba Gabba Hey, inspired by New York street culture; and a series called Circus Maximus, which uses circus characters to tell universal human stories.

Edmonds’ work in New York and France is being made possible by patron Martine Head, who comes from a French horse-breeding family and now lives in Lexington.

Head said she met Edmonds last May at a show of his work in Lexington and was impressed. “I think that Theo has got depth,” she said. “He’s a true artist … a profound soul.”

Lexington has always embraced traditional art. Since moving to Lexington, Head has noticed a growing appreciation for contemporary art. Still, many fine local artists receive little recognition.

Head remembered the first time she visited Tuska Studio, which exhibits the work of the late Lexington sculptor John Tuska in his former home near downtown. “I walked into that house and thought, Wow! There is this gem in Lexington and nobody knows it’s here,” she said.

Head thought that living and working in New York and Europe would allow Edmonds to develop his artistic talent and receive more exposure.

While Edmonds has spent most of his time in New York painting, he also has been writing poetry. On April 5, three Kentucky poets flew up and joined him in a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club.

The opening reception for Edmonds’ show in SoHo will have a decidedly Kentucky flavor: Acoustic music, country ham hors d’oeuvres, bourbon and Ale 8 One.

Edmonds said he is proud of his Appalachian roots, and is surprised by how many other proud Kentuckians he has met in New York.

“It’s a city of people like me who have a burning desire to say something through their art,” he said. “But hopes and fears and joys are the same in New York as they are in Breathitt County.”

The boss’ email popped into my BlackBerry just as the smiling young lady walked into the school office to escort me to her journalism class. I would have to read it later.

I spent the next hour talking with the smart, engaged students who produce The Lamplighter at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. They wanted to discuss ways to make their monthly newspaper more interesting, relevant, inclusive and professional. I had a wonderful time.

Afterward, as I walked to my car, I read the boss’ email. It was an update on the latest round of job cuts at the Herald-Leader, which will be announced soon. It also said that, for the first time, most of those who keep their jobs will have their pay cut.

I was glad the high school students didn’t want to talk about the future of journalism, because adults ask me about it all the time. They hear about the Rocky Mountain News closing and the San Francisco Chronicle on the brink and they ask, “What’s happening to newspapers? Will the Herald-Leader survive?”

It’s complicated, I tell them. It has to do with changes in the economy, technology and the ways people communicate. Nobody knows how it will all turn out.

The irony, I tell them, is that there has never been a bigger audience for Herald-Leader journalism. Print circulation has slipped, but online readership has soared.

The Herald-Leader staff’s work is no longer confined to once-a-day, regionally distributed ink on paper. We now report news and tell stories instantly to a worldwide audience with as much copy, photos, audio and video as we can produce.

What’s more, readers comment on stories as soon as they’re published online, offering additional information, corrections and their own views. It has made journalism better and more interesting.

But as technology has changed the way journalism works, it also has changed the way advertising works. That has dramatically changed the news media’s business model.

You see, the money to pay for journalism has never come from journalism; it has always come from advertising. Companies now have more ways to advertise and, in a bad economy, less money to do it with.

That means revenues have fallen for newspapers, radio and TV stations. Online advertising isn’t as profitable as with print or broadcast. Online ad revenues are growing, but not fast enough to make up the difference.

Blogs, social networking and video-distribution Web sites have given everyone a voice, and that’s great. But journalistic reporting and commentary have been swept up into a larger universe of “media” that has blurred the lines between journalism and entertainment, marketing and advocacy.

Much popular “journalism” these days isn’t journalism at all; it’s show business, more focused on maximizing profit than in seeking truth, informing the public or promoting healthy discussion.

Take, for example, Fox News Channel’s flag-waving, rah-rah coverage of the Iraq War, or the CNBC “personalities” who touted stocks and glorified CEOs rather than doing in-depth reporting and skeptical analysis.

It’s no wonder people are confused, because journalists haven’t done much to expose these frauds or explain journalism’s values to the public. It’s sad that some of the best media criticism lately has come not from journalists but from a comedian — The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart.

A decade ago, the Herald-Leader’s news staff stopped growing and started shrinking.

The same thing happened at radio and television stations. Lexington TV news has largely abandoned public affairs reporting to focus on crime, tragedy, sports and weather. There’s precious little reporting on commercial radio anymore; it’s all “talk.”

WVLK still has talk show hosts who discuss local issues, often based on the Herald-Leader’s reporting, but WLAP seems to have redefined its mission as right-wing political advocacy.

When people ask me if this newspaper will survive, I tell them I’m confident it will. The Herald-Leader remains profitable because no other advertising vehicle in this market comes close to its reach. As long as it has the journalistic muscle to be a must-read for Kentucky’s engaged citizens, it will maintain that reach. As the economy improves, advertising will return.

Much of the Herald-Leader’s current financial squeeze is the result of debt the newspaper’s parent, The McClatchy Co., took on a couple of years ago to buy its previous owner, Knight Ridder. I can’t complain; I welcomed the McClatchy deal.

Some people think local media ownership is always best, but I’m old enough to remember when the Herald and Leader were locally owned — and not very good. Outside ownership has some disadvantages, but it also can insulate journalism from powerful local interests and protect a news organization’s credibility.

I’m proud of the Herald-Leader. Reports about wasteful spending at Blue Grass Airport are the latest of many examples of local public-service journalism you won’t find anywhere else. I expect that work will continue, even with fewer people left to do it.

Newspapers aren’t about the paper, they’re about the news. As the old sayings go, good newspapers afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, print the news and raise hell. They celebrate success, shine a light on problems and hold government accountable to the public. They tell a community’s stories, and they provide informed commentary that sparks public discussion and makes democracy possible.

Good journalism is too important to disappear. So what’s the new business model to support it? I don’t know, but I’m confident somebody will figure it out. I’m also confident there will be plenty of young people — at Dunbar High School and elsewhere — with the intelligence and commitment to do the work.

The national perspective

The Pew Research Center puts together an annual State of the News Media report. The latest report was published his week. Click here to read it.