Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is up in heaven now. That's his favorite joke, he wrote in "A Man Without a Country." He also wrote, "If I should die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.' " Thanks to Vonnegut, who died April 11 at 84, every Dogwood Fine Arts Festival since the first one in 1993 has been anti-climactic. That's because the first visiting author happened to be my literary John Lennon. [continues 1173 words]
On Labor Day weekend 2001, a week before it would be obscured by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an American civil liberties battle brewed in a small, blue-collar town in his native southwest Michigan unbeknownst to Dean Kuipers. Kuipers grew up in Mattawan and remembers football scrimmages in Dowagiac. From Kalamazoo College, he went straight to New York and music journalism. Despite living in California, Kuipers subscribed to the Sunday Kalamazoo Gazette to keep connected with home. And when he opened his newspaper and began reading the Rainbow Farm account, he was "shocked. I kept scratching my head," although he found the two central figures "fascinating. I wanted to go back and look at who those guys were," so he did. For four years. [continues 1452 words]
