ONLINE: David Benjamin, Richard Merelman, Jeff Winkowski

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Junko Yoshida

Author and Last Kid Books founder David Benjamin.

Mystery to Me bookstore brings three local authors together to read from their latest writing; each has 12 minutes to read and answer questions. This month features poet Richard Merelman and authors Jeff Winkowski and David Benjamin. It's a nice way (despite the "slam" in the title) to be introduced to new works. Register here. 

More on David Benjamin:

David Benjamin is a prolific novelist and founder of the Madison-based publishing firm, Last Kid Books, named for his popular memoir The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked.  He once estimated his lifetime writing output at more than five million words. 

The Last Kid Picked, about his kid adventures kid in Tomah, Wisconsin, provides insight, both poignant and laughable, into Benjamin’s life as an underdog.

Since Tomah, his footloose career has morphed from youthful storyteller to news editor and columnist to prolific author, bridging three continents and claiming authority on topics from sumo to technology His award-winning journalism has ranged from the weekly Mansfield (Mass.) News to Heavy Truck Transportation. In April 2019, he launched Last Kid Books. Since starting his imprint, Benjamin has garnered ten independent press awards for ten titles — all of which embody his unofficial Last Kid Books motto: “Fun to Read”.

Keenly observant of all the places he has lived, he writes for example, in Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: “Paris is not the city that never sleeps. It not only sleeps, hitting the sack by 5 a.m. at the very latest, but it has a hard time getting up. Paris is the city that rolls over and heaves the alarm clock against the wall.”

Readers who were smitten with The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, originally published by Random House in 2002, have a new version to read at bedtime (but not to kids). Benjamin updated the original story after regaining the copyright from Random House. His imprint, Last Kid Books (www.lastkidbooks), published the new version of his coming-of-age saga.

Praised as a “classic comic memoir” by James Fallows of The Atlantic, The Last Kid Picked shadows the life — often in laugh-out-loud detail — of a kid coming of age in mid-20th century Wisconsin.

Viewers can find out more by watching Benjamin’s video on the Deforest Area Community Center website.  https://www.deforestcenter.org/ and the Center’s Facebook page.

Midwest Nostalgia

If you grew up in small town Wisconsin when there were no play dates or peewee leagues or parent-supervised tournaments, you understand the thrill of unstructured play. Benjamin says, “Kids learned the ways of adults by watching them, rarely asked them for help and didn't tell them any more than they absolutely had to.” 

The “hero” of the Last Kid Picked languishes at the bottom of the pecking order among fellow students at St. Mary’s School in Tomah. He is literally the last kid picked for playground games, and his only friends are fellow outcasts named Koscal and Fat Vinny.

“Remarkably,” Benjamin says, “Readers identify emotionally with my protagonist because they tell me, ‘I was the last kid picked.’ I hear this from as many women as men, in numbers that defy probability.” Humorously, he wonders, “I mean, what if everyone was the last kid picked?” 

Reviewer Deirdre Rogers wrote: “I laughed, I cried, and I cheered — especially during one particular baseball game where the last kid picked, my hero, struggles to make the right choice between being popular or helping an even less fortunate ‘last kid picked.’ If you enjoyed Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes or Ricky Bragg’s It’s All Over But the Shoutin’, you’ll truly love this book.”