Prof's 'House of Good Hope' opens doors
Michael Downs to leave UM, teach in Maryland

By Emily Darrell
J-School Web Reporter       

The publication of Michael Downs' first book, "House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City," coincides with his announcement that after seven years he will leave the University of Montana.

"House of Good Hope" tells the story of five young men – all talented athletes – growing up in gritty inner-city Hartford, Conn., Downs’ hometown. The book follows their lives from junior high to their 10-year high school reunion, centering on a pledge they made to one another to go away to college, but to return to Hartford and use their degrees to make a difference in their crumbling city.

“They are good-hearted men,” Downs says of his five protagonists. “I adore them. I consider them friends.”   

Throughout the story of the five friends, Downs weaves his own family history in Hartford, the thematic link being: What allegiance do we owe the place from where we came?

“I used journalism and the skills I learned in journalism to explore a question that really doesn’t have an answer,” says Downs, a visiting professor at the J-School since 2000 who will take a position at Towson University next fall teaching creative writing.

Downs will read from his book at 7 p.m. April 10 at Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Missoula, and at 7 p.m. April 25 at Chapter One Bookstore in Hamilton. Downs will also travel to Connecticut this month for additional readings.

Though the book has met with favorable reviews and won the 2006 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Downs sent the manuscript to nearly two dozen New York publishing houses before having it accepted by the University of Nebraska Press. 

“It’s Hartford," Downs says of the difficulty of marketing the book. "It’s not a romantic landscape. The questions that it asks are not obvious.”

Though Downs’ family left Connecticut when he was only 9, eventually settling in Tucson, Ariz., he’d always considered Hartford home and knew he wanted to return someday. After earning a journalism degree and covering sports in Arizona for a few years, Downs decided to head East in 1989, landing a job as a sportswriter for The Hartford Courant.   

This is where he first made the acquaintance of Harvey Kendall – one of the five protagonists – who, at the time, was the star of Hartford Public High School’s track team.     

Downs writes of their first meeting: “Harvey was a talker. He listed for me Hartford’s problems, the mantra that afflicts so many post-industrial American cities: racism and poverty, the sirens and the blood spilled by knives and guns .... ‘Track can carry me into college,’ Harvey told me that day. ‘If I get me some good grades, get me a good major, make me some good money, I can help my mom and the people I love.’ ”       

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Though Downs didn’t begin working on the book until nearly a decade after this meeting, Harvey’s story, and the story of Harvey’s friends, had planted a seed in his brain.

In the spring of 2000, when Downs was back in Montana teaching at UM, he won a grant from the Freedom Forum. “This is when the book really took off,” Downs says.  

Though Downs learned that only two of the five friends had actually held to the high school pledge and returned to Hartford to make a difference, all were successful in their careers and personal lives and all were engaged in making a positive impact wherever they chose to live. Though Downs has a great respect for Joshua Hall, who returned to Hartford and became a high school teacher, he says: “I have no unevenness in my admiration. They are all remarkable men.”

“Eric was right, too,” he says, referring to Eric Shorter, one of the friends who became an urban planner in Rhode Island. “It takes courage to leave.”

Downs has so much respect for his five subjects that he actually sent each of them a copy of the manuscript before sending it to publishers to make sure he was representing them all fairly and accurately.      

“These men trusted me with their lives, ” he says. “The least I could do was trust them with my book.”       

Downs' decision to teach at Towson University in Baltimore means a jump from journalism to creative writing.

“I love journalism and I love literature, and at this point in my life literature feeds what I need in my life better than does journalism,” Downs says.    

Downs is looking forward to returning to the East Coast and to city life, though he's not without sadness about leaving.

“I wish I could be two different people in two different places, but I can’t,” he says. “Life leads you where it does.”

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