Omaha World-Herald

Red Summer Revisited in Omaha World-Herald

| Ted Wheeler

riotlead_hTnAvzbIn case you missed it on Sunday, the Omaha World-Herald had a huge feature on my book Kings of Broken Things and the history of the summer of 1919 here in Omaha that serves as the backbone of the novel.

It’s really a great portrait of those months that led up to the Omaha Race Riot of 1919 and lynching of Will Brown, from the labor struggles and use of scab labor to a spike in the cost-of-living to the political intrigue and machinations of boss Tom Dennison to the migration of African-Americans to Omaha.

Honestly, it was a great relief to see that my research lined-up with theirs on all these important factors. (I’d feared that when this day came and the article came out that it would focus on how much I’d messed up the details–this the showing-up-to-the-first-day-of-class-only-in-underwear nightmare for a historical novelist.) Anyway, it was heartening to see that all my fears and attention to detail paid off.

owh archives

Thanks so much to Micah Mertes and OWH for running the feature and for all the work they put in to bring attention to this important part of Omaha, Nebraska, and national history.

Here’s a taste of the article:

Many years later, Wheeler worked as a reporter for Courthouse News Service, the job bringing him to the Douglas County Courthouse several times a week. Repeatedly at the scene of one of Omaha’s most shameful acts, Wheeler once again became fascinated with the story of the 1919 riots.His fascination led to his newly released debut novel, “Kings of Broken Things.”
The book, which took Wheeler seven years to write, takes place in Omaha during and before the “Red Summer of 1919,” tracking three key characters in the tense days prior to the riot.
“It really was a powder keg,” Wheeler said. “The riot itself was completely irrational, but the fact that it happened was somewhat logical based on everything else that happened.”
“Everything else” included union strikes and economic hardship, migrations of blacks from the South to Omaha, yellow journalism that stoked the flames of racial resentment and a corrupt political machine led by Tom Dennison, who would stop at nothing to discredit Mayor Smith and his reformist government.
It was an era rife with drama, and it now serves as a compelling backdrop for a novel.

 

More Photos from August Events

| Ted Wheeler

Here are a few more photos from my events this month. Between the release of Kings of Broken Things and the launch of our “roving” bookstore (Dundee Book Company) I took part in an even ten events this month, ranging from traditional readings to launch parties to street fairs, radio spots, a cocktail party, and finally setting up last Sunday at my grandparents church. It’s been exhausting and exhilarating to talk to so many people about the book, and the events start up again this Friday when touring-author Zachary Schomburg and I will read from our debut novels at Solid Jackson Books. See you soon!

My nephew’s favorite authors.
Special menu for 1887 Society event at Mercury Lounge. (Photo by Omaha Public Library)
Waiting for studio time at NET before recording my NPR debut.
Working the room at the 1877 Society cocktail party. (Photo by Omaha Public Library)
Gallery of authors at the 1877 Society event, including Tosca Lee, Cat Dixon, myself, Liz Kay, Lydia Kang, and Leo Biga. (Photo by Omaha Public Library)
A warm welcome to the Lincoln launch of Kings at Indigo Bridge Books.
Dundee Book Co. book cart in action.
OWH print edition.

Kings Named a “Must-Read” by OWH

| Ted Wheeler

Check out today’s Omaha World-Herald, which named Kings of Broken Things one of 13 must-read books for this summer! We’re less than six weeks out before pub day and it’s amazing to see this go out across the city and interwebs. 

Thanks so much to OWH for calling Kings a novel of “special interest to locals” that’s getting “national attention.”  

More soon…

“Folding Nebraska into fiction” from the OWH

| Ted Wheeler

58e8eeebf4180-imageCheck out this article from last month in the Omaha World-Herald by Micah Mertes that explores how Nebraska has been used as a setting by contemporary novelists.

The article focuses mostly on Dan Chaon and his new book, with some choice quotes from Stephen King, Jonis Agee, Timothy Schaffert, Rainbow Rowell, and a hot young new-comer named Wheeler with a new novel coming out this summer. It’s a fun article, and an honor to have my thoughts included with the titans above.

Here’s the full article if you’re interested, and a quote for now:

Depending on the writer’s aim, that emptiness can yield horror, despair or loneliness. It can yield solitude, serenity, God. It can yield mystery.

“And mystery,” said Omaha author Theodore Wheeler, “is what drives almost all fiction in one way or another. Every story needs something to solve, I guess.”

Wheeler’s next novel will explore a different kind of the unknown, and one closer to home: the immigrant culture of Omaha in the 1910s. “Kings of Broken Things,” on sale Aug. 1, casts fictional characters amid precise historical detail and real-life events — like the Omaha race riot of 1919.

More Press for Bad Faith

| Ted Wheeler

owhIt’s nearly been a month since Bad Faith was released. I’ll have some photos from the book tour posted here before long, as it’s been an exciting month of travel to get out and talk to as many people as possible about my first book. After 17 out of 30 days spent on the road, in 12 different cities around the Midwest and both coasts for 11 readings and events, some family vacation mixed in along the way, it’s nice to be home in content exhaustion. I met and reconnected with so many great friends and booksellers along the way, the last month was a real privilege. More on this soon.

In the meantime, here’s a gaggle of links to press the book has received.

The Rumpus said that “Bad Faith builds a world that exists for its own purposes. The collection is interspersed with vignettes that lead like breadcrumbs from the opening piece to the last. The finale, also titled ‘Bad Faith,’ unfolds in a three-part structure, guiding us back around to the beginning and answering the question that has been on our mind since page 23. It ties the whole collection together and ends the book on a different—and more intriguing note—than it opened on. To say more would be to spoil the treat. Suffice it to say that if a novel is meant to end with a sense of opening out, then this collection leaves us eager for more of Wheeler’s dark, quiet world.”

The New Territory said that, “In Bad Faith, Theodore Wheeler’s debut collection of short stories, it is certainty that causes trouble. Ideas become boundaries, lines any reasonable person might draw for him or herself: beliefs in who they are or were, that what they’re doing is the best thing for them. Marriages, homes, children, careers. And yet here, at the borders of identity and place, is where Wheeler makes his incision.”

Fiction Advocate says that “Wheeler’s characters are hopeless but resolute, savvy and unremorseful. They face the world head on, acknowledging its ugliness and its dark side. Like Rodney, we readers remain alert to the presence of danger and death—the entire collection hints of it. Yet as the title suggests, this is a promise made in bad faith. Wheeler makes us think we know what will happen, and from what direction the danger will come, only to show us just how mistaken we are.”

Blue River literary journal interviewed me on their blog, posing 10 questions about the writing life after grad school and my path to publishing books. I’m not sure how insightful my responses are, but I did my best. Here’s a sample: “Like a sea turtle, those first few steps outside the shell can be treacherous, but I didn’t have to explain to anyone why I was still writing and that was tremendous. Not that there haven’t been a lot of bumps along the way. Having some success to point to never hurts, though.”

The Daily Iowan previewed my reading at Prairie Lights, saying that “Wheeler, who also works as a reporter covering civil law, takes a different approach to the concept of belief in his début, Bad Faith.”

The Omaha World-Herald featured a few quotes from me about local bookstore The Bookworm (along with the above photo) and earlier gave a preview of Bad Faith in its Bookends section with a nod to my forthcoming novel.

And Akademie Schloss Solitude very generously featured an excerpt from Bad Faith on it’s Schloss Post web portal.

Also, we’re doing a Goodreads Book Giveaway. Please stop by and enter if you’re on Goodreads.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Bad Faith by Theodore Wheeler

Bad Faith

by Theodore Wheeler

Giveaway ends August 31, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

 

Bad Faith Pub Day!!!

| Ted Wheeler

box o booksIt’s publication day for my first book!

Thanks so much to all of you who have ordered Bad Faith or bought a copy at one of my recent events. I’m very grateful for all the support.

If you haven’t ordered a copy but would like to, Bad Faith is available online from Queens Ferry Press, Amazon, and IndieBound. Also, there are a limited number of signed copies at The Bookworm in Omaha, Indigo Bridge Books in Lincoln, Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis, Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee, The Book Cellar in Chicago, Prairie Lights in Iowa City, and Beaverdale Books in Des Moines. If you’d like a signed copy but can’t get to one of those locations, message me here or hit me up on social media and we can work something out.

There’s been some recent press about the book, if you’re interested, as Bad Faith was listed on The Million’s Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2016 Book Preview, and articles were printed in the Omaha World-Herald and The Daily Iowan.

It’s funny timing for the official launch date, as tonight in the final stop on the seven-day book tour I’ve been on the last week with Dave Madden and Tyrone Jaeger. There will be more on the tour later, but for now, let’s celebrate!

 

Omaha’s Underground City

| Ted Wheeler
Photo by Kent Sievers.

The Omaha World-Herald ran an interesting piece this week with Erin Golden’s “Life beneath the street: Downtown sidewalks conceal a hidden world underground.” The article details the condition and current use (or non-use) of several giant vaults that remain under the streets and sidewalks of downtown Omaha.

Per the article:

Some of the below-ground history is clear. The vaults were used for storing coal and merchandise, which could be dropped in through chutes or lowered through metal trap doors built into the sidewalks.

But there are other possibilities, too. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, spaces like Hawkins’ were directly below the heart of an area known as the Sporting District, where a crime boss ran bootlegging and prostitution operations.

My novel contains several pivotal scenes in tunnels under the city–the crime boss ones–so this is pretty interesting to me. From what I’ve read, I don’t think vaults like the one pictured had much to do with criminal operations. Pimps and bootleggers were more concerned with secrecy and transportation, less so with storage, so narrow tunnels were favorable. As is fictionalized in my book, tunnels were used to connect hotels with brothels, so patrons could move discretely without being scene walking in the front door of the house where they took their pleasure. Several of Tom Dennison’s offices and saloons he ran were rumored to feature tunnels as well, to facilitate a quick get-away if necessary.

Society as a whole seemed to be obsessed with tunnels and secret underground vaults those days. Many people had them dug under their yards, to their garages, elsewhere. Big retail stores like the Brandeis had tunnels that connected from the bargain basement level to nearby banks–so customers didn’t have to go out into the weather should they need to make a withdrawal. “Tunneler” was a pretty common professional during these times too. As a dangerous job that demanded skill, I’m sure it paid well.

Thinking of this reminds me of the scenes in The Jungle when Jurgis Rudkus joins the project to dig the Chicago subway. Or, more recently, Colum McCann’s captivating portrayal of the sandhogs who tunneled under the East River to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn by rail in This Side of Brightness, my favorite McCann novel.

At any rate, I’m pretty jealous of Phil Hawkins, the artist whose kept a studio in one of these vaults the past few years. Not that I’d want to give up my cozy home office or anything, but that’s awesome.

Hansen Writes on Tom Dennison for the Omaha World-Herald

| Ted Wheeler

dennisonSome more Tom Dennison content to share, as Matthew Hansen’s column in yesterday’s Omaha World-Herald gives an overview of Dennison’s forty year career as political boss in Omaha. The column focuses on the 1932 Prohibition trial of Tom and his associates, and features a few quotes from Dennison expert Orville Menard, whose book River City Empire was recently reissued.

ORDER KINGS OF BROKEN THINGS, A NEW NOVEL ABOUT DENNISON-ERA OMAHA!

While the article doesn’t really offer a whole lot of new information, it’s certainly worth a read. Here’s a highlight:

Tom Dennison, the dapper Irishman who strode to the witness box in November 1932, had for all intents and purposes run Omaha for nearly four decades. He had never been mayor, and, in fact, he never ran for political office. Instead, he got mayors, city councilmen, judges and even congressmen elected — or defeated — based on how willing they were to bend to his will. Neither was Dennison a reputable big-business man, the equivalent of a modern-day Fortune 500 CEO. It’s a tad difficult to fit in with the black-tie crowd when you are dogged by accusations that you had murdered rivals, robbed trains and become the Capone of the Cornhusker State. Not that the man on the witness stand was hurting for cash. He moved rivers of liquor during Prohibition, ran several wildly profitable illegal casinos, controlled and profited from the city’s 2,500 prostitutes and collected cash from every business — both reputable and underworld — that needed his protection. He also tampered with juries, stuffed ballot boxes, bought off the Omaha police, installed relatives and cronies into made-up city jobs, allegedly ordered the murder of one of Omaha’s biggest businessmen and may have purposely inflamed the racial tension that led to the 1919 race riot and lynching of a black man. A Chamber of Commerce stalwart he was not. But Tom Dennison was something else. He was untouchable.

From the sounds of things, Hansen will be devoting more of his column space to Tom Dennison in the future–the gangland murder of Harry Lapidus in particular–so that’s something to look forward to. Hansen has really done a great job since taking over as a columnist earlier this year. Some of his stuff has been pretty compelling, in both goof-ball and more touching ways, so I’m excited he’s turned his attention to this era of Omaha history.

Response to Omaha–Kipling, Twain, Harte, Sandburg

| Ted Wheeler

The following are from Omaha: a Guide to the City and Environs, written and Compiled by The Federal Writers’ Project, Works Progress Administration, State of Nebraska, in 1935. It was part of the American Guide Series.

–

Rudyard Kipling (1889)

“[In Omaha, Kipling] was shocked at the tricks of the embalming trade, the caskets with plate-glass windows, and the burial garments exhibited to him by the obliging undertaker. ‘Bury me,’ he explained, ‘cased in canvas like a fishing-rod, in the deep sea; burn me on a back-water of the Highli with damp wood and no oil; pin me under a Pullman car and let the lighted stove do its worst; sizzle me with a fallen electric wire or whelm me in the sludge of a broken river dam; but may I never go down to the Pit grinning out of a plate-glass window, in a backless dress-coat, and the front half of a black stuff dressing-gown; not though I were ‘held’ against the ravage of the grave for ever and ever. Amen!'”

Mark Twain

“In 1902 the Omaha Public Library banned Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the juvenile department in the library on the grounds that the book was bad for the impressionable minds of small boys. […] In response to a telegram sent by the Omaha World-Herald regarding the ban, Mark Twain wrote, “I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading Huck Finn, out of a natural human curiosity to learn what this is all about—people who had not heard of him before; people whose morals will go to wreck and ruin now. The publishers are glad but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry. I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves that got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you never can tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.”

Bret Harte (1874, to his wife)

“As I rode into Omaha this morning the streets were dumb with snow, and winter, savage and pale, looked into the windows of the cars. […] Imagine a hotel as large and finely appointed as the Occidental in San Francisco, and think of there being such a one in Omaha. Yet here I am—in a very pretty furnished parlor of the ‘Grand Central’ on the very outpost of the West, the cars of the Union Pacific starting on their long overland trip but a few blocks away. […] Verily the West is wonderful.”

Sandburg worked briefly as a coal heaver in Omaha.

Carl Sandburg

Omaha (1920)

Red barns and red heiffers spot the green
grass circles around Omaha–the farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon-loads of
cheese.

Shale hogbacks across the river at Council
Bluffs–and shanties hang by an eyelash to
the hill slants back around Omaha.

A span of steel ties up the kin of Iowa and
Nebraska across the yellow, big-hoofed Missouri
River.

Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,
Eats and swears from a dirty face.
Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.

–

Sunset from Omaha Hotel Window (1918)

Into the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
And to-day is not worth haggling over.

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand changes.
To-day is a goner.
Time knocks in another brass nail.
Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

The long sand is gone
and all the talk is stars.
They circle in a dome over Nebraska.