What's Next: An Excerpt from Starting with Goodbye, a Jersey Shore Visit Tonight (6/14)

Today I'm celebrating a little, as the terrific website Next Avenue (a PBS venture), has published an excerpt from Starting with Goodbye: A Daughter's Memoir of Love after Loss. 

I don't know if I'm more thrilled about the excerpt or the photo of me and Dad, taken on the morning of my wedding. You can't quite see it, but he's joking around by handing me a wad of cash. How I miss that sense of humor!

The excerpt is from an early chapter in the book, and I'm so happy that Next Avenue -- whose tagline is where grown-ups keep growing --  wanted to share this with their readers in the days just before Father's Day, a time when memories of gone fathers might be both comforting as well as painful.  

                                                                          * * * 

Meanwhile, it's time for me to hit the road (again), heading down the shore to an event tonight at BookTowne in lovely Manasquan, NJ -- the place I was when I got the call about my father's stroke (that's in Chapter 2 of the book). There, I'll be in conversation with another NJ author I've recently come to know, Laurel Davis Huber. Her book, The Velveteen Daughter, is a work of historical fiction about the artist prodigy daughter of the women who penned The Velveteen Rabbit. I read it last weekend when I needed to relax not only from the busy book promo schedule but because my wonky knee insisted on it. I couldn't have asked for a more absorbing, unusual story to have for company.

Memoir Excerpt: Flash Nonfiction at Litbreak

Among my latest published online works is the short nonfiction piece, "Searching for Silvio," which appeared at Litbreak a couple of weeks ago. 

It's a tale about the odd things we do when someone we care about asks us to; about how, if we're honest, we do one thing but we are all the time really doing something else entirely; and about the unusual and unexpected ways grief and memory find their way into almost everything. It's also about bonds between siblings, the lifelong desire to be loved, and the gift of quirky and sometimes bothersome relatives.

Here's a small excerpt:

"First, I recruit Lenore, my best friend of 45 years, who loved my father, knows all about his dippy relatives. We canvass the hangouts, asking counter clerks and old geezers if they know my uncle, and some do, but no one has seen him in days. They call us doll and honey and give us buttered rolls and donuts. At the Hot Grill, I order a frankie-all-the-way-one. But we don’t find Silvio."

You can read it in full at Litbreak.

A List, Fragments, and a Father's Day (Essay) Card

Every December 31, I make a secret list: places I'd like to see my essays published in the coming year. Sometimes, it actually happens. That's the case with Hippocampus Magazine, an online home for (only) creative nonfiction, a journal I have always admired.

When the editor accepted "Going Through Your Things/Superhero" (an excerpt from my memoir-in-essays manuscript) in late January, she suggested publishing in June to coincide with Father's Day. 

This somewhat unusual essay began as fragments in my head eight years ago in my father's home office the week after he died. I spent several hours looking through the things he kept on his desk and shelves, his drawers, files, and closet. That day, I learned some things, about how I thought of him when I was a child, teenager, and young adult--and about myself (not all of it pretty or tidy).

It begins this way:

I am going through your things, Dad, and there is the black and white Kodak picture with the curly edges, me on Thunder, just a Sunday morning at the pony rides.

Oh Daddy, please take me for a pony ride; please, Daddy, wake up; it’s Sunday morning; let’s go; you promised to take me to the pony rides. Daddy, can I please have riding lessons; Aunt Louise said she’d take me when she takes Shelly; it’s only once a week, okay, Daddy? I got straight As again, Dad, so that’s $5 each, right? Dad, look at these cool new shoes I got at the store on the ship Mommy and Cathy and I took to France this summer. Hey Dad, can we go to a Broadway play for my birthday this year; thanks, Dad; and can I bring four of my friends, too; thanks. Dad, will you get tickets for me and AnnaMarie to the David Bowie concert, the Elton John concert, Beach Boys, Chicago, Frampton, Three Dog Night, the Steve Miller Band. Cool; thanks, Dad.

* * *

When I was a child, and even through most of my teenage years, even when I was convinced he was a hopelessly old-fashioned dolt, my father seemed to be able to get anything done. Tickets to any event. The son of a friend out of a parking ticket. A nephew out of jail. A new toy every store was sold out of. Broken stuff fixed, in the house, car, factory. In touch with someone important, maybe even famous. The back story. The back way to get somewhere. The right thing to say. How to convince someone to do, or make, or arrange something they didn’t want to do or make or arrange. Reservations, when every seat or room or table or flight was booked and had been booked for months. The right amount to tip. Which person to tip, and the way to fold the bill and when to offer it and how. 

I am going through your things, Dad, and here is the canceled check for...

You can read the rest over at Hippocampus, here.

A Summer Full of Publication

This summer has been good to me, publication-wise.* Excerpts from my memoir manuscript have been appearing in literary journals with a bit more frequency, including the narrative piece, "Old Men Who Write," which is now part of the first online issue of Under The Sun.

It traces my experience several years ago when a writing class I offered at my local library brought me into contact with two elderly men who -- what else? -- reminded me so strongly of my father, and the confusion this caused me as I worked hard to maintain our respective roles.

Here's a bit of it, which picks up in the middle of a class, and focuses on one student, Robert, who is 90 years old:

...I begin a discussion about reaching back in our lives for stories, and I notice Robert’s brown-flecked big hand resting on a small diary, the once-black leather worn to dull brown on all edges. I ask him about it. 

“This is my diary from when I was a boy, in the 1920s. Oh, there’s a lot of stories in here, you bet,” he says.  I expect him to say more, but he quiets, nods, and taps his fingers on the book.  For a second, I want to reach across and push open the clasp (does it still lock, I wonder?), but of course I do not. 

“I hope you’re thinking of writing about some of those times?” I ask, stupidly impressed with myself. 

“Oh, I don’t know. It was all so long ago. I’m pretty old, you know,” he says, his hand stroking the book, his eyes averted to a shelf of nearby reference books. 

“Well, that’s okay,” I say, not knowing what else to say. 

Robert throws his arms up in the air and smiles. “It’s okay that I’m old? Well, thank you very much!” The lightheartedness is back in his tone, the tease returned to his watery eye.Everyone laughs. I notice he’s crossed his stilt-like legs one over the other at the knee the way my father used to and, also like my father, that on his eyeglasses a frayed Band-Aid cushions the part over the bridge of his nose. I am glad to have my notes to concentrate on, printed out, slid into plastic sheet protectors, in a neat three-ring binder, because I don’t know what will happen if I keep looking Robert’s way. As I discuss writing, I glance at each student and try to ignore Robert’s slow nods, the way he raises an index finger in the air and dips it slightly to signal his agreement. 

I can’t look, and I can’t look away.

You can read the whole thing here.

There's a bit of a full-circle moment about this. It comes just as I'm preparing to present brief, interactive writing workshops at a bunch of senior citizen centers in southern New Jersey this week. 

Life is like that sometimes.  Writing too.

*Oh, the rejections still arrive too; but when there's a good acceptance/publication run, and it coincides with an otherwise stressful couple of months, you bet I'm going to brag just a little bit!

Another Piece of the Memoir Pie

Many months after I first realized that my memoir was all about my father's death and my grief at midlife, what I didn't yet understand was that there was other grieving to do, grieving connected to other loss, the loss that comes from choices and decisions made during his life -- and those that were thrust upon him.

This essay (an excerpt from the manuscript), now appearing in the August issue of Pithead Chapel, looks at this through the lens of my father's cigarette habit, which I so often fought against, and never completely understood.

Here's a bit of it:

My father smoked three, four, or sometimes more packs a day by the time I was old enough to understand the differences between addiction and social posturing. He once told me he had his first cigarette at 8 or 10, and was smoking regularly, openly, by age 12.  A boy smoking at 12 in 1938, in the Italian immigrant neighborhood where he’d grown up, was nothing shocking, not unexpected. Boys were regarded as young men by that age, already able – expected – to help their fathers with matters of earning money, doing heavy work, using their bodies as a wedge against poverty, homelessness, hunger.  Already, at 12, he was working alongside his father after school and on weekends. His father was a junk man, hauling broken down furnaces and other metals from residential basements or old factories, heaving them onto a wagon pulled by a horse.

When my father told me these stories, I tried to picture my elegant father, who liked to neatly turn up the bottoms of the sleeves of short sleeved shirts into a neat, crisp cuff, as a gangly adolescent in torn, dirty pants and too tight shoes and soiled, sweaty shirts, tried to picture the wagon, the horse (old and often lame, he said), the streets, the occasional motor car, housewives holding open their doors for the boy and his panting father, as they maneuvered out hulking, broken down and rusted radiators, boilers, utility sinks, pipes, the housewife pulling from her apron pocket a few pennies or a nickel for a tip, the boy taking puffs between stops.

You can read the whole piece here.