In front of the Cleveland Museum of Art sits a bronze cast of Rodin's "The Thinker."
"You'll notice his feet have been blown away," says Dr. Susan Streeter Carpenter, a Cleveland native and assistant professor of English at Bluffton University. A nearby plaque notes the defacement is "the work of vandals" and adds, "The vandals were never found."
Those words were an invitation to the novel that Carpenter set out to write for her doctoral dissertation at the University of Cincinnati. "Who would do such a thing, and why?" she asks. "What I'm doing with this novel is finding out," she says of "Riders on the Storm," her first book, published recently by Huron, Ohio-based Bottom Dog Press.
The book is available on amazon.com and at Powell's Books online. Bluffton's Musselman Library will host a public reading by Carpenter, followed by a reception, at 4 p.m., Tuesday, April 27.
"Riders on the Storm" tells the story of young activists in 1968 Cleveland, a time and place familiar to Carpenter, a 1969 graduate of Case Western Reserve University. But "this is not an autobiography," she points out. "I did not rely on my memories," she says. "They are spotty and inaccurate." Instead, she did research, including use of primary and secondary documents and interviews with people she hadn't seen for years.
Carpenter has called writing the book "a long process of coming to terms with the cataclysmic events of those years, events at once personal and national."
"I write to try to understand things," explains the author, who believes the late '60s hold unresolved issues for many Americans who came of age then. And, against a backdrop of actual events from 1968 and surrounding years, that's where the characters in her book are. "They're trying to come of age, but it's quite difficult," she says. "They have a ways to go before they come to terms."
"One of the problems with the way we understand the late '60s is that so many of the cultural details have become stale clich'es," Carpenter says, and when that happens, "the meaning is drained out of it." Even films as early as "Alice's Restaurant," she says, fail to accurately capture the feeling of the time, "and what I wanted to do so badly in this book was to get how it was."
Among those who have endorsed Carpenter's work is Karen Joy Fowler, author of "The Jane Austen Book Club." Reviewing "Riders on the Storm," Fowler writes, "I've always wondered why the '60s are so hard to write about. But Susan Streeter Carpenter proves it can be done with equal parts insight, generosity and honesty. Her evocation of the time is among the best I've seen."
"That made me really happy, that she thought I got what it felt like," says Carpenter, who moved "The Thinker" explosion from 1970 to 1968 for plot reasons.
"It was a time when things were happening so quickly, on so many fronts, that you felt like you were living in a ratchet"-going forward and unable to go back, she remembers. "You would suddenly feel the world move forward, and that happened every other week. It was just one shocker after another."
After graduating from Case Western Reserve, Carpenter eventually settled in Yellow Springs, Ohio, working as an alternative-school teacher, anti-poverty worker, home health care administrator and independent radio producer, as well as a freelance writer and teacher of writing.
Her work on what became "Riders on the Storm" began in fall 2002, when she was seeking a new project for her dissertation at Cincinnati. "I thought, 'Let's see if this will fly' and wrote a few chapters. People liked it," recalls the author, who received her Ph.D. in 2005-the same year she joined the Bluffton faculty.
She received fellowships from Cincinnati that made the work possible and, after her dissertation committee told her more was needed, writing and rewriting continued after she came to Bluffton, which also supported her with a fellowship and a research grant.
"It's the best job I've ever had," says Carpenter of her current position at the university. "I work with people who have a sense of who I really am."
