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Michael Downs

Baltimore, Missoula
As seen in: AARP, Los Angeles Review of Books, Baltimore Magazine, The Millions, Baltimore Fishbowl
Covers:  Sports, literature, age, personality profiles, U.S. history
Author, THE STRANGE AND TRUE TALE OF HORACE WELLS @acre_books, THE GREATEST SHOW: STORIES @lsupress. I'm here for the #SundaySentence.
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Articles by Michael Downs

James Magruder chronicles first 50 years of Yale Repertory Theatre

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By Michael Downs
| Baltimore Fishbowl Verified
The Yale Repertory, an institution of American theater, celebrated its 50th anniversary eight years ago, in 2016. James Magruder’s book about the Rep’s history was first dreamed of as a way to mark that anniversary, but for many reasons (including a pandemic), the book is only now arriving on bookshelves. No matter. The Play’s the Thing: Fifty Years of Yale Repertory Theatre (1966-2016) is well worth the wait.
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“I Believe Nothing if Idols Don’t Tell Me”: Q&A with Michael B. Tager

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By Michael Downs
| Baltimore Fishbowl Verified
“Dudes of a certain age,” Michael B. Tager says, “weren’t necessarily taught how to socialize in real and meaningful ways.” Instead, such dudes bonded over pop culture: bands and sports and movies and TV and video games. And by pop culture, Tager means everything from The Fast and the Furious to David Attenborough nature shows.
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The Night Truman Capote Fell Down at Towson State

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By Michael Downs
| Baltimore Magazine Verified
For decades John W. Ruark has told the story at cocktail parties: how on a November night in 1977, as a student at what was then Towson State University, he took Truman Capote’s arm and led the inebriated, incoherent, profanity-spewing writer off stage. “Mr. Capote,” he told him, “It’s time to go.” A crowd of about 1,800 people had come to the university’s Towson Center to hear Capote read from his work, according to a report that week in The Towerlight, the school newspaper.
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Letter from Kraków: Towson Prof Michael Downs and His Students Talk Poetry and War

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By Michael Downs
| Baltimore Fishbowl Verified
An astonishing thing about the first day of teaching my first-ever creative writing class in Poland is that students came at all. University COVID policies, tangled bureaucracy, and technical failures forced me to cancel our initial meeting. But, via email, I’d invited any student who wanted to chat informally during class time to find me at a park near our campus. Look for the American with a book and a laptop seated near the bust of the Polish poet, Zbigniew Herbert. I had no expectations.
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13 Baltimore Writers on the City's Past Literary Stars

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By Lawrence Jackson, Laura Lippman, Michael Downs
| Baltimore Magazine Verified
B BEHIND LOCKED GLASS DOORS in the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library's staff-only section sits a bank-style vault. Inside, safely stored for posterity, there's a letter penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald-who was living in Paris at the time-to H. L. Mencken, thanking the Sage of Baltimore for reading his just-published novel, The Great Gatsby. Mencken's diaries, at his request, are kept there, too, as well as Mencken's limited edition copy of James Joyce's Ulysses.
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Love and the Older Woman

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By Michael Downs
| AARP
The first old man I wanted to be was named Ray, a relative I met only once. Wearing a rakish smile and a driving cap he called his "Go to hell" hat, Ray let a 4-year-old me stick my head through the sunroof of his VW Beetle as we hurtled past Long Island cow pastures. At the house, he rolled me around in his wheelchair, a traveling throne. Old men! Emperors of the universe! See also: How to keep your marriage strong.
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The Patron Saint of America’s Opioid Crisis

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By Michael Downs
| The Millions Verified
The Patron Saint of America’s Opioid Crisis Before there was an opioid crisis in America, before our national struggles with Valium, heroin, and laudanum, there was a 29-year-old dentist in Hartford, Connecticut, theorizing about nitrous oxide—laughing gas—and surgical pain. He suffered then from an aching molar and needed it pulled. Extraction, though, would be its own agony, because this happened on December 11, 1844. Anesthesia wasn’t yet a thing.
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