Many years in the making, already!

Whats this Blog all about? The making of a documentary film about Carl Sandburg.


My connection to Carl Sandburg started young. When we moved to Flat Rock, North Carolina in the early 1970's I was seven. Soon my Mom was volunteering at Connemara, the home of Carl Sandburg and his wife Paula for the last twenty or so years of his life. It had just a few years earlier been turned into a National Park and there we were, milking goats, growing vegetables in our own garden plot and exploring the houses and trails that make up the historic home and grounds. Soon I was learning how to write Haikus in the grassy fields around the house, part of a poetry class I was taking with my Sister.

Sandburg then was a distant grandfatherly figure in photos, unfathomable to some extent. But the goats were real, the cats were real, the hippy poetry teacher was real and the place seemed to have a magic about it. Sandburg seemed to me then as some sort of magician, capable of both the simplest poems and enormous books that I would'nt read for many years. There were cigar butts and papers still where he left them. Guitar strings that he had casually strummed. All of it rich with history and importance, but yet humble and tangible.

We are well on our way of telling a new and fresh story about Carl Sandburg, hopefully on PBS. We've been hard at work for the past two years (this the 'modern effort') doing research, grant writing, interviewing and team building. In the next few posts I'll go back re-cap where we've been, and bring you up to the present. Then you'll be along for the ride as we battle our way through a story that is as immense as it is wonderful, a process that is as painful as it can be long... and twists and turns that will have you begging for me to just "call me when it's done!"