J-school professor Downs explores hometown struggles, allegiance in his first book

By Jennifer Reed
J-School Web Reporter

Book cover of "House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City" by Michael Downs.

Come spring, there will be at least one more book in the case outside Dean Jerry Brown’s office and a University of Montana journalism professor will have one thing less on his to-do list.

“House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City,” will be published in March 2007, the first book by Michael Downs, visiting assistant professor at the School of Journalism.

Soon after that it will find its way into the collection of books by J-school professors kept in the big case outside the dean’s office.

Downs is on leave this semester, finishing a book of fiction and starting another novel. He will return to teaching in the spring.

Downs describes “House of Good Hope” as a combination of journalism and memoir and says it comes from his experience covering high-school sports for the Hartford Courant.

Downs met five Hartford teenagers who told him about a promise they had made, to their city and each other, to give back and make something better of their deteriorating community. They promised they would return to Hartford and they would change it.

Downs describes Hartford as a “crappy place in a lot of ways” and in the bottom 100 of places to live.

“It’s about people from my hometown and the struggles they face in deciding to stay there or to leave,” Downs said.

He admits that Stewart O’Nan, an author who wrote a blurb for the book’s cover, put it better: “A huge story hiding in plain sight, HOUSE OF GOOD HOPE recounts Hartford’s losses with a clear-eyed intimacy. Through the lives of five inner city kids striving to be responsible men, Michael Downs asks what allegiance America owes its failing cities and what we all, as individuals, owe the places we call home.”

Downs adds, “You have to weigh your own future against Hartford’s. How do you make that decision? I admired their fervent belief that they could change the place just by living and working there.”

Downs decided on the idea for the story in 1998, roughly 10 years after he started at the Courant. He began making contacts, namely with the five guys he’d interviewed when they were still in high school.

This, Downs said, is where the bulk of his reporting, which took him years to complete, came in. His research was supported by a $4,000 grant from the Freedom Forum in 2000. Downs finished the book in 2004.

In addition to tracking down the men themselves, Downs talked to their families, old coaches and friends and spent hours reading news clips, microfilm, court transcripts and public records. He spent three and a half years searching for an old friend of theirs who went to jail because of drug sales, finally finding and interviewing him.

Even the narrative and memoir parts of the book contain a great deal of journalism, Downs said. He recalled a piece of the story about a homicide in Florida.

“I was in second grade when it happened,” he said.

So he dredged up the details — everything from the weather that day to what was playing at the movie theaters — to recreate it.

But even after all his careful work — and after all five men, plus one’s mother, read the finished product and loved it — Downs is a little worried a glitch or two might present itself after publication.

Unlike his newspaper work, “I can’t run a correction,” Downs said. “I have a responsibility to all these people and all their lives and I have to get it right and that’s really scary.”

Downs entered “House of Good Hope” in a book contest and ended up winning the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize in June. That included publication of his work by the University of Nebraska Press.

Despite his success in getting his first book off the ground, Downs said much of the time between 2004 and the River Teeth contest was spent getting rejection letters — 21 of them.

Before he won publication, Downs tried selling his book through an agent but said he never actually got to see the letters himself. So he began asking for them.

“I expected it. I don’t think it’s an easy book to market,” he said. “It’s an honest portrayal of the city. There’s no romance to it.”

While the creation of his book could be considered something Downs did for Hartford, he considers it also something his hometown, and those five guys, did for him.

“I look up to them to care about where you’re from and where you live and how to give back to those places. That’s a gift they gave me.”

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