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... and we're going to have a lot of fun talking about Philadelphia as an artistic canvas on November 5 at the Ambler Theater. We've invited Temple University student filmmakers to join us, and we're inviting the community (you) to share your memories of Philadelphia, which we'll stitch together in a virtual storytelling quilt. (Enlarge the poster above, and you'll see how you can share your stories.) I'll be reading as well from Love: A Philadelphia Affair.

I hope you'll join us. I've heard only good things about last year's event, which featured Matthew Quick.

Deep thanks to Lauren Smyth and Cheri Fiory, who reached out to me with this extraordinary invitation, and to Kristine Weatherston of Temple University's film department, who gamely responded to my request for work from her students. Kristine and some of her students have also agreed to join us that evening.

Finally, thank you to the Kiwanis Club of Ambler.

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“Art is a language,” Children’s book illustrator E.B. Lewis told a roomful of illustrators, aspiring and professional. What is a language, Lewis asked. “Letters of the alphabet that join together to form words, then paragraphs. And finally stories and jokes,” he answered his own question. And the mark of fluency? Maybe not what you think. “Telling [...]

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sent my literary work out into the world two decades ago.  Would anyone listen?  Would anyone care?  I didn't know.  I needed to find out.  I waited for word.

Among those who sent word all those years ago was Susan Balee, who was the editor of a literary magazine called Northeast Corridor.  Yes, she said, to a piece I wrote.  It was one more lodging in.

Today—so many years gone by in the interim—I meet Susan down on the Penn campus.  She is an associate professor at Temple now.  I am what I am still trying to be.  We will close the gap on nearly two decades and look forward at the work that moves us today.

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A new HBO series, Boardwalk Empire, premiered this weekend. Worlds away from what we see on Jersey Shore, it has reignited interest in New Jersey history and culture. Bryant Simon (author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America and Professor of History at Temple University) has been interviewed for the accompanying HBO documentary, and here we ask him some questions about the “dreamlike” place that is AC.

You’ve described yourself as a native of South New Jersey. What drew you to writing the history of Atlantic City?

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Vineland, Philly was not the place that drew us; it was more Atlantic City. That was where we went for splurge meals, special occasions, amusement parks, parades, and shopping. In fact, that’s where I got my bar mitzvah suit! Years later, my family moved just outside of Atlantic City and I watched, while riding my bike in the morning on the Boardwalk, as gambling woke the place up and irrevocably transformed it. I was transfixed by the city, by people’s nostalgia for it, by its nervous energy, and its aching sadness and painful poverty in the midst of plenty. Really, it had everything I wanted to write about it – it was like a Springsteen song, a place that could be mean and cruel, but a place of romance and possible redemption. How could I resist?

Compared to places like Las Vegas or Coney Island in its heyday, how did/does Atlantic City epitomize the urban playground?

All of these places share something in common – they are each the tale of two cities. They are places built in the interests of visitors, not necessarily residents; they sell (or sold) fantasies – fantasies that put tourists as the center of the narrative and allowed them to slip their daily skin and imagine themselves not as they were, but as they wanted to be. That is what people paid for when they went these places – they paid for fantasies.

As you researched the book, what memorable anecdotes did you come across that really captured the heart and history of Atlantic City?

One of the first things I learned about Atlantic City stayed with me throughout the project. I remember looking at a postcard from the 1920s or so. In it, the benches on the Boardwalk were pointed away from the beach. I asked if this was a mistake. “No” an expert on the city told me, “That’s how it was.” That was my first lesson that Atlantic City was essentially a stage and the visitors were both actors and audience.

You’ve been interviewed for a documentary that’s set to run in conjunction with the HBO series, Boardwalk Empire. What do you make of the series’ take on Atlantic City, and what to your mind does it say about public perception of the city?

If the show is a success, it will no doubt draw tourists to town, looking for the romantic, if still violent, past the program surely mythologizes. Yet the real Atlantic City Boardwalk of today has little relationship to the past except its common geography. Most of the dreamlike hotels – buildings that looked like French chateaux and Moorish palaces – have been torn down. The amusement piers are long gone or covered up and turned into air-conditioned malls. The crowds of people dressed in their Sunday – really their sleek and elegant Saturday night best – have been replaced by people in t-shirts and flip flops. Except for the ocean and

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