♪ UPBEAT JINGLE ♪ Coming up next on State of the Arts, a favorite American author brought back to life, a gecko in a bathtub, and an anthropologist turned mystery writer.

These stories and more on State of the Arts.

♪ UPBEAT AMBIENT SONG ♪ The literary arts play such a crucial role in the way we learn about the world, about history, and about each other.

They're often left out when we talk broadly about the arts.

This week, let's explore different ways literature serves the creative process as a way of self-expression.

First, we meet an actor who, for 35 years, played the role of one of American literature's most beloved authors.

In this piece, we see McAvoy Layne bring the writings and musings of Mark Twain to life.

♪ ENERGETIC CIRCUS SONG ♪ Becoming Mark Twain is fun for me.

You know, you just mess up your hair and slip into a white suit.

It's kind of rumpled.

Pick up a pipe.

I can't talk without it after all these years.

My name is McAvoy Layne, but I'm more recognized as Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was the father of America's literature.

He left us about 28 volumes, but the ones you might remember most from your childhood were the boy books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn .

And maybe as you got a little older, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .

My favorite is Roughing It because there's a lot in there about Nevada.

I arrived riding a small yellow donkey.

So small, my feet touched the ground on both sides.

[ AUDIENCE LAUGHING ] And he was able to bend around and bite me on the legs.

[ AUDIENCE LAUGHING ] Before Mark Twain tapped me on the shoulder, I was in radio.

And in a perfect place, the Hawaiian Islands.

♪ ROCK AND ROLL SONG ♪ I was off the air at 10 o'clock and on a wave at 10 after.

I had everything a boy could want except skiing.

So I rented a cabin here at Tahoe for five days.

♪ WHIMSICAL AMBIENT SONG ♪ I was so excited I could hardly sleep the first night, but it snowed five feet overnight.

It took them five days to plow up to where I was.

I thought it was the worst stroke of luck, but it turned out to be the best.

I threw darts for two days.

Then my elbow gave out.

And I sat down and on the coffee table was the complete essays of Mark Twain.

And I had cabin fever by then.

My brain was soft.

So that seed was planted in fertile ground.

♪ BANJO SOLO ♪ It took me ten years to read everything he gave us before I had the courage to go out and have a white suit made and started visiting classrooms in our schools.

I would see ten schools a week and I'd go see secondary schools Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

And then on Thursday, I'd go see a couple elementary schools.

And then Friday, I'd always schedule a middle school to keep from getting soft.

And I'd come home on a gurney.

♪ BANJO SOLO ♪ When I first started portraying Mark Twain, I was 45 years old.

So I wanted to sound older.

I wanted to sound 70.

So I would affect my voice.

Well, now, old Jim Blaine would get comfortably and sociably charged and tell the story of his grandfather's old ram.

Now I'm older than Twain would be.

I'll be 80 this summer.

So I'm older than he was when he died.

Now I'm trying to sound younger.

But you're still throwing that little Missouri accent.

I must confess to you, I have no formal education.

In truth, I am as unlettered as the backside of a tombstone.

But I've gained worlds of knowledge secondhand, none of it correct.

Know all you need for success in this life is ignorance and confidence.

[ AUDIENCE LAUGHING ] And then success is sure.

[ AUDIENCE LAUGHING ] My very favorite part about being Mark Twain is the way people react to being near him and asking questions or perhaps sharing a story of their own.

It always brings out the best in people.

Mark Twain days.

♪ UPBEAT AMBIENT SONG ♪ Piper's Opera House rests up there on B Street in Virginia City, and it is the shrine for me.

The luckiest break I ever got was when I was first starting out, I got a call from Carol Piper Marshall, the great granddaughter of John Piper.

She said, "McAvoy, I hear you're portraying Mark Twain in the schools."

I said, "Yes, I'm loving it.

I'm seeing ten schools a week."

She said, "How'd you like to do two shows a day, six days a week for four months at Piper's?

Over 200 shows."

And I got to try out new material on a live audience everyday because some of Twain's writing is wonderful literature but does not recite, and you find out what works with a live audience.

So by the end of that summer of 88, 35 years ago, thanks to Carol Piper Marshall, I wasn't ready for primetime, but I was ready to go out on the road.

On the 30th of September this year, I'll be standing on that stage in my last program as Mark Twain.

♪ UPBEAT COUNTRY SONG ♪ When I laid down my pen at the Territorial Enterprise, I had four horse whippings and two duels owing to me.

And yet when I said goodbye to Virginia City, Carson City, Lake Tahoe, I knew I was saying goodbye to the most vigorous enjoyment of life I would ever be afforded.

Those days were full to the brim with the wine of life, and there have been no others like them.

[ AUDIENCE CLAPPING ] Mark Twain liked to look at the good side of human nature.

Toward the end, after his wife Olivia died, he got a little bit sour and went off on the dark side of Mark Twain.

But before Livy left this earthly realm, she taught him to use his humor like the wheel on an upper glass to focus our attentions on more serious matters at hand so he could comment on our society and human nature with his humor in such a way that it would stick with us.

Like, always do right.

This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

That's wonderful wisdom.

When I first started out being Mark Twain, I made myself a promise.

One, have fun.

Two, don't play loosely with his material and make Twain scholars happy.

I've stuck to that all 35 years, and I'm proud of that.

♪ UPBEAT COUNTRY SONG ♪ Janina Marie Fuller uses her writing to express her love of nature.

In her book, The Gecko in the Bathtub , she includes stories about her encounters with different types of animals.

We head to Louisiana to learn more.

The book is called The Gecko in the Bathtub: Encounters with Marvelous Creatures .

There are three stories in the book in which the animals are not in the normal context where you would expect to find them.

One is about the hawk on the porch.

One is about a monkey on my head.

And the other one is about the Gecko in the bathtub.

And I knew I wanted the book to have sort of a lighthearted tone, so I could have called it The Monkey on my Head, I guess, or The Hawk on the Porch.

But the title, The Gecko in the Bathtub , kind of made me giggle a little bit, so that's what I went with.

I was going to take a bath one day, and I went into the bathroom and looked in the bathtub, and there was a gecko.

It surprised me because how did it come up through the pipes?

I didn't think it had come over the top of the bathtub.

It must have come up through the pipes.

But never has there been a time when we've run water in the bathtub or the sinks or the shower and had geckos float to the surface, so I still don't know how it got there.

The book is a collection of short stories, and they're anywhere from two to five or five and a half pages long.

It's great for bedtime reading for kids.

That's one thing that makes it a great book to read at night.

I think about a third of the chapters come from right around this house.

The Luna Moth is a moth that lives in Louisiana.

It's about this big.

I had lived here for several years and never seen one, and I lived in this property for several years and never seen one.

I walked out on the screen porch one day, and there was a Luna Moth hanging on the screen, and I thought if I could catch it and release it, then we would get to have more Luna Moths.

But the moth was already deceased.

We still have it.

It's in a little shadow box on the mantel behind us.

The monkey was in Ecuador, as my son and I were en route to the biology research station where we were going to stay for a week.

We had this stopover from which we had to pick up a boat, but the boat wasn't coming for about 45 minutes.

We were relaxing at the riverfront, and suddenly there was a monkey sitting on my shoulder.

It was up before I could respond, and then it was on my head.

Clearly, this monkey knew how to be around people, so I wasn't really afraid of it, but it also had a lot of teeth.

I was laughing very, very hard.

I had a baseball cap on, the monkey was sitting on top of the hat, so if I had leaned over, it would have fallen off my head, but I didn't think to lean over, and finally it just jumped off and ran away.

So that was a pretty fun moment.

Also from Ecuador, my son and our bird guide were with me when we saw the monster fish, and the mother jaguar and her two cubs that were swimming right across the river right in front of our boat, and there were about 15 of us on the boat, and everybody saw them.

Those were quite spectacular experiences because they were so, so, so unexpected.

The story on the Galapagos Islands, this owl standing on top of a volcano in the middle of a hot, dry day with people walking around him, and he just didn't care.

It was like something from another world, and later that day we were on the same island, but in a different part where there was forest, and it was raining, and we came up on this vermilion flycatcher, and this bird is just this bright, vivid, scarlet red that stood out so much against the leaves behind it and the gray sky, and it was pouring rain, and the two birds didn't really have anything in common except they were on the same island, and they were both alone.

There was something about that moment when we drove underneath that bird.

It just felt like my dad, who had passed about four years before that, was just reaching down right into my heart and saying, "I love you.

I'm here with you.

I'm proud of you."

My brother and sister are quite a bit older than me, and when they were in high school, they had to take a biology class that involved a bird unit, but they weren't old enough to drive, so my dad drove them on these early morning birding trips on the weekends, and as a little kid, I always wanted to be with the big people, do what they were doing, so I tagged along, and that's how I started to learn how to look at birds when I was about nine.

I never imagined that I would ever have a caged bird as a pet because I think birds don't belong in cages.

When our friends who were moving begged us to take their love bird because they couldn't take him with them to Hawaii, I couldn't say no.

I knew this bird already because we'd spent so much time at their house, and then when the mother of my son's friend had baby love birds that she didn't have space for, I took them to.

So I have these four birds, and we lived in a small apartment.

The only reasonable place to put them was in my bedroom, so I had them in the bedroom.

I hung sticks from the ceiling.

I let them out a couple of times a day.

They could fly around, hang out with each other or with me.

I have learned to notice.

I've learned to look for things that I don't expect to see.

I've learned to look around the corners of the windows on the outside to see what might be lurking in there or building a nest there or a web.

During the day, this little gray tree frog usually sits above the board under the porch roof and just sits up there in a little hidey hole, a little cubby hole.

And then at night, we turn the porch light on around dinner time, and at nighttime she comes down and she sits on the lion's head or right on the porch light, and she eats the bugs that are attracted by the porch light.

She has this little mini migration up and down, up and down.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's still sitting on the lion's head.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's gone, and then I think, "She's gone, and if she's gone, I never know if I'll see her again."

And maybe two, three, or even four days go by and then suddenly she's there again.

I do have a relationship with the turtles.

Here's how I think of it.

Animals and these plants, they were all here way long before we were, long, long, long before we were.

And I consider it a privilege to live in their space.

So I thank them for allowing me the honor of seeing them when the turtles float up to the surface or swim up and eat the cat kibble that I throw out for them.

I thank the hummingbirds that come to our feeders.

I thank the armadillos, even though they dig holes in our garden.

I just think that we need to kind of turn around how we regard our relationship with the plants and animals around us, because we're all part of the same system and it might be in some danger right now.

♪ RELAXING AMBIENT SONG ♪ Cris Siqueira of Milwaukee is a cartoonist and multimedia artist.

A lover of independent comics, she's the co-owner of a bookstore cafe and art space specializing in zines, prints and small press books, and art comics.

And she herself is a graphic novelist.

Let's find out how she uses her writing to explore the balance between the natural and the supernatural without a superhero in sight.

Julie Doucet is a superhero of mine and this is an edition of my New York diary in Portuguese that I've translated and I wrote an introduction for it too.

Julie, I think she influenced me a lot because the disproportionate characters maybe, the giving you permission to have the characters look like that, she's an absolute genius.

So this is a British cartoonist called Nathan Cowdry and I suggested to my editor in Brazil that he would be a good person to publish in Brazil and it is my claim to fame that he did.

He's an amazing cartoonist, extremely funny.

♪ RELAXING AMBIENT SONG ♪ So I consider comics an art language.

It combines visual arts and storytelling.

It's honestly my favorite art form.

We're at Lion's Tooth.

This is my shop.

Lion's Tooth specializes in small press, comics for kids and adults, no superhero comics.

Either it's comics for kids or it's comics that are what I consider art comics.

When you make independent comics, you play every part, you're every character, you are doing custom design, you're doing location scouting, every aspect of it depends on you.

They are very authentic.

People are very passionate about it.

And there's really no limits of what a comic can be.

♪ RELAXING AMBIENT SONG ♪ My last name is pronounced cicada, like the bug.

It's very different from the way you write it and a lot of Americans will say, "Oh, I can't roll my R's."

But then if you say cicada, you're actually saying the way that we say my name in Brazil.

[bell rings] So I was born and raised in São Paulo.

I moved to Milwaukee at 30 years old to go to W.M.

for graduate school.

So when I was a kid, I would read comics all the time.

But I was not, I did not like superhero comics.

I liked the comics that were made for kids.

And then somebody published Love and Rockets in Brazil.

And that was when I became, I was like, "What is this?"

That's when it opened my mind.

So this is an edition of Jaime Hernandez, Maggie the Mechanic , part of Love and Rockets .

And this one I did not translate.

I reviewed the text and I wrote an introduction.

And I included in the introduction this picture that Jaime drew of me.

He was just making sketches at the San Diego Comic Con, and that was the sketch that he did.

So this is very dear to me.

After many years, not having confidence about drawing my own comic, the technology evolved that I can draw in a tablet in a comfortable way.

And then working at Lion's Tooth and seeing everybody's work, I was kind of like, "I should do this."

Recently, there's also some things that I discovered that kind of reminded me of what comics can be.

And one of them is this book.

It's called Why Don't You Love Me?

It's a book that has not one but two twists, but the way that it's written and what it did, and the way that it references comics as a language, reminded me that comics can be that.

So I wanted to give myself the chance to make a comic from beginning to end, like a long-form comic.

♪ RELAXING AMBIENT SONG ♪ It used to be cute to like conspiracies.

We're living in a time, everything is black and white, everything is, like in particular, eight or eighty.

You know, like everything in the extremes.

And there's not a lot of conversation, there's not a lot of nuance in arguments.

So the book is a lot about the internet and misinformation and rumors.

Luisa, the main character, she comes from a family of palm readers.

The three main characters are basically Luisa, her grandmother, and her mom.

Luisa's mom is a con artist.

She doesn't believe anything is real.

She doesn't believe in the magic.

Like there's no magic.

Like she would be like the hardcore atheist, you know, pragmatic person.

And her grandmother is a spiritual and intuitive.

So Luisa is in between those two characters.

But what I hope this story is going to show is that two things can be true at the same time.

You can have space for intuition and for the invisible world without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

And that's one of the things that I believe in, that the world is weird and mysterious enough without it being flat, without aliens being among us, without reptilians.

There's enough in art and science and the actual world that is mysterious and that we don't need to make up more.

♪ RELAXING AMBIENT SONG ♪ Mystery writer Bill Douglass was an anthropologist and a scholar before becoming an author of fiction.

As he indicates in this next story, any aspiring writer had best also be an avid reader.

His approach involves reading a lot of books and combining his stories with his knowledge of history in his hometown of Reno, as well as his study of the human experience.

♪ AMBIENT GUITAR SOLO ♪ I read three or four hours a day.

I've got, I don't know, five thousand books in my house.

If you're aspiring to write, you better be a reader.

I'm an anthropologist by training.

I've published two dozen books and 200 articles in my life.

And most of them have to do with Basque culture, Basque immigration, also Italian culture.

I was the director and founder of the Basque program for 33 years and then retired, so it was the only job I ever had.

Until I was retired, I really didn't publish outside of my field.

But in 2002, I decided to write a book about fly fishing around the world because I'm an inveterate fly fisherman and I had spent many, many years traveling to a lot of different destinations around the world.

So I wrote a book called Casting About in the Reel World .

That was my first real venture in non-academic publishing.

And then at the same time, I was starting to work on Starlight Hotel Casino .

There's a way in which the novel is an ethnography of the casino industry.

I was an owner and an administrator in both the Riverboat and Comstock.

They went under in the late 1990s.

They failed for a variety of reasons.

Competition from Las Vegas, competition from Indian gaming, spreading around the country, an evolution of technology and whatnot within the industry.

Starlight is a composite of the Riverboat and Comstock.

And so the novel is about what happens within a casino family and the employees of a casino that's failing.

I actually started writing Starlight right after our family casinos collapsed.

Something would happen to me and I would think that would work for such and such a character in Starlight .

And so I'd jot it down, maybe write a couple of pages on yellow pad, and then I had a whole box full of yellow pad when I finally sat down maybe three years ago to do the final edition.

It was a way for me to get through and set aside that experience and get on with life.

"God, Manny was nervous as he waited to be admitted to the in-progress meeting behind the closed doors.

Manny Cohen had always thought of himself as a good admin, at least until he volunteered for assignment in Nisburg.

With Vegas' hands around his throat and Indian arrows pointed at his heart, Reno gaming was toast.

Only the schmucks and the inner sanctum failed to realize it."

♪ AMBIENT GUITAR SOLO ♪ It's amazing how autobiographical all novels are and how focused they are upon family because those are the most intimate relationships that their authors have experienced in life.

As an anthropologist you have to describe the setting that you're working in.

When God paints landscapes, he is an impressionist, except for the coastlines that separate watery domains from terrestrial ones and the occasional soaring mountain range.

His transitions are subtle and shaded, more processed than events.

Not so in the Truckee Meadows, along whose western edge the alpine energies of the Sierra Nevadas dissipate in a last gasp of conifer groves.

To the east, Juniper and Sagebresk covered foothills herald the beginning of the vast Great Basin.

In short, Reno sits astride the division between verdant California and the arid interior of the American West.

My writing style, I never work with an outline.

When I sit down and start on a project, even my academic work, I really don't know where the book's going to go.

Consequently, the last thing I do is come up with the title.

♪ AMBIENT COUNTRY SONG ♪ Perhaps this week's episode has wet your appetite to crack open a good book.

A great way to pass the time until we meet again next week on State of the Arts.

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