February 3, 2011
Some still leery of where COTA will go By KEVIN PARKS ThisWeek Community Newspapers
Two of those on a citizens working group seeking to assist COTA officials in finding a replacement location for a bus turnaround on North High Street in the vicinity of Graceland Shopping Center went into a meeting last week with a good deal of skepticism.
They left somewhat mollified, but … Prior to the session last week with COTA chief executive officer William J. Lhota, Sharon Heights Community Association president Keith Beveridge said he felt the meeting was a “little overdue” and complained about a lack of communication from transit authority officials. For her part, Clintonville Area Commission District 9 representative D Searcy
said that she was “hoping they will be clear about is exactly what is it that they are looking to build” at the oft-delayed meeting, which was facilitated by State Rep. John Patrick Carney, D-Clintonville. After the meeting, at which members of the public offered COTA representatives three possible alternatives to the strip shopping center that had been targeted for the turnaround last summer, Searcy
and Beveridge said that they thought things went well, but expressed some continued reservations. COTA board members, faced with vehement opposition to the real estate transaction that would have resulted in relocating or closing down several businesses to make way for the bus facility, voted unanimously in July to shoot that idea down.
COTA administrators, in the wake of that rejection, vowed to do a better job of gaining the trust and cooperation of the community. Their goal is to find a place where buses can turn around when, at some point down the road, Graceland Shopping Center is no longer an option. Lhota provided a copy at last week’s meetSee SOME STILL LEERY, page A2
Baer Wheels
Bike shop replaces bookshop By KEVIN PARKS ThisWeek Community Newspapers
By Chris Parker/ThisWeek
Clintonville-area resident Charlene Fix is a professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design, as well as chair of the English and Philosophy department.
Accomplished poet found inspiration from much-loved pet By KEVIN PARKS ThisWeek Community Newspapers
Poet will read from her works
As Charlene Fix was completing work on a book of poetry, the inspiration for it, her dog Bruno, sickened and eventually died. She continued to write through Bruno’s illness and even, at the urging of an editor, composed a “death poem” for inclusion in the book. And there it is near the end, in all its heart-rending clarity for any who have loved a pet knowing that bidding them farewell is a sad part of the equation. “All the Intruders in the World” concludes with:
Poet Charlene Fix of the Clintonville area will be giving a reading from her works at the Rumba Café on Monday, Feb. 21. She will be appearing as part of the winter 2011 Poetry Forum at the café, 2507 Summit St. The readings begin at 7 p.m. The Poetry Forum has been a staple at the Rumba Café since 1984, making it the longest-running poetry venue in Columbus, according to Fix. For more information, call (614) 268-5006.
Ten years you protected me from postmen and familiars. You wagged and warned and slurped my nose and chin And professed, stoutly wrapped in fur, Your metronomic heart. Now the portal Is unguarded, and all the intruders in the world Can enter. Here comes the cat. She sprawls on my chest, trying to absorb my fear. Clintonville-area resident Charlene Fix is a professor at the Columbus College of Art and Design, as well as chair of the English and Philosophy department. She teaches writing, literature, poetry, and film and literature. Fix was born in Washington, D.C., where her parents met during World War II. Her mother was from Manitoba, Canada, and her father from Waterville, Maine. The two corresponded while he was in Hawaii dur-
ing the war, and Fix feels perhaps her affinity for the written word stems from that. “I think they fell in love through letters,” Fix said. She and her only sibling, a sister, grew up in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid. “We weren’t steeped in all the great children’s literature, but we were read to,” Fix recalled. Her career path was fixed early. “I knew I wanted to be an English teacher in the third grade,” Fix said. She was writing poetry even at that age, inspired by her teacher. Fix attended Ohio State University, where she earned bachelor of science and master’s degrees. After serving as an adjunct faculty member, Fix taught for a decade at Bishop Watterson High School before going to CCAD nearly a quarter of a century ago. Between the teaching and having three children with her husband of now 40 years, Patrick Fix, a retired OSU English teacher and librarian, Charlene Fix took a 10-year hiatus from writing. Then one day she bought “reams and reams of paper” and has been filling it ever since. Fix said that she requires long stretches of absolute
solitude in order to write poetry, and so waited until her youngest child was in school. Unlike most modern poets, Fix does not have a master of fine arts degree. “My MFA was reading and finding poets I liked, and reading them deeply,” she said. Fix is also one of now six members of a group, the “House of Toast Poets,” who meet once a month to share their work and offer criticism and encouragement. The others are Fred Andrele, Jerry Roscoe, M.J. Abell, Linda Fuller-Smith and Jacquelin Smith, and they’ve been getting together for about 15 years. Fix did not intend to have a dog, let alone one that would inspire an entire book of poetry, but allowed herself to be talked by a CCAD student into taking one of two puppies found in a box on some church steps. Fix soon found herself taking two slow, contemplative walks a day with the dog she named Bruno. “A lot of poems came out of those walks,” she said. One day over coffee with CCAD philosophy professor Susan G. Josephson, Fix happened to mention the more than 50 poems that Bruno had inspired over the years. Joseph-
son asked to look at them, and ended up putting the poems in order by season and creating illustrations to go with them. That “Flowering Bruno: A Dogography” got published at all is somewhat unlikely. A book of poems, let alone focused largely on a dog, isn’t exactly the next Tom Clancy potboiler or the latest bestselling legal thriller from John Grisham. On top of that, no university press and very few small presses, the primary source for books of poetry, will touch an illustrated one. Finally, however, in 2006 XOXOX Press of Gambier brought out “Flowering Bruno.” The title is derived from a family outing to Goodale Park during which one of Fix’s daughters, Sonya, fashioned a garland of flowers for Bruno, only to have the nonswimming dog take an ill-advised plunge into the pond. The book, which was designed by another daughter, Madeleine Fix, was a finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. It is also, Charlene Fix believes, a fitting tribute to a much-loved companion. “He was my muse,” she said. Fix is also the author of a chapbook of poems, entitled “Mischief” published by Pudding House Publications of Columbus. Her latest manuscript of poems, for which she is seeking a publisher, is called “The Spent Music of Light,” which is divided into poems on myth, poems on books and poems on films. Finally, Fix is currently working on a critical nonfiction study of Harpo Marx. And she has another dog, a collieshepherd mix named Sasha. “My sister made me,” Fix said.
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In a Facebook posting about Baer Wheels rolling on up High Street to a new Clintonville location, someone referred to it as a “really, really old shop with a new look.” “Really?” owner David Baer thought. He doesn’t feel all that old, nor does he think his enterprise, which celebrated a 20th anniversary on Jan. 1, exactly dates back to the horse and buggy era. Nevertheless, Baer Wheels does have a new look and a new location. The business — which not only sells a variety of brands of new bicycles, accessories and apparel, but also offers maintenance, upgrades and even custom builds — has moved from 3030 N. High St. to 3510 N. High St. The latter was home to Areopagitica Books. Owners Doug and Rebecca Rutledge were forced to close the vintage and antiquarian book shop in late August after not quite seven years in business. Baer moved the store, which was initially located on Weber Road when it opened Jan. 1, 1990, for several reasons. “The biggest being that the old store was 1,500 square feet approximately and this space is about 3,600 square feet, and we needed the room desperately,” Baer said. The inventory had outgrown the old location, he said. When people are interested in a specific purchase, he said, and they come into a retail store. If they don’t find the right size or color in stock, “that kind of deflates the buying procedure a little.” The display space for bicycles in the new digs is almost triple that of the old, accommodating about 70 bikes — up from about 25, according See BIKE SHOP REPLACES, page A2
Ecological food association to host event The Clintonville-based Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s 32nd annual conference, “Inspiring Farms, Sustaining Communities,” will take place Feb. 19-20 in Granville. This event will feature nationally recognized keynote speakers Joan Dye Gussow and Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens, over 70 workshops, a trade show, organic and locally sourced meals, a kids’ conference, on-site childcare, and evening entertainment on Saturday. Klaas and Mary-Howell Martens made the transition from conventional farming to leading experts in organic production. Farming organically since 1993, they raise about 1,400 acres of corn, soybeans, small grains, and other crops as well as heifers, pigs and chickens in Penn Yan, N.Y. The Martens’ venture into organic farming led them to start an organic grain business in 1996. Lakeview Organic Grain has expanded to supply more than 300 organic farmers in central New York and is the state’s only dedicated organic feed mill and organic seed operation. Gussow was one of the first people to envision, teach and write about a local, organic, whole food system, earning her the title “matriarch of the modern day food movement,” according to OEFFA proSee WORKSHOP, page A2
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