Spotlight on #author Nicholas DiGiovani @nidigiovanni @VCCA

Today's Friday Fellow is Nicholas DiGiovanni, a fiction writer, essayist and award-winning journalist from New Jersey. Nick is currently completing his fifth residency at VCCA (Virginia Center for the Creative Arts) and reports that he has written over 10,000 words during his stay!  

His essay collection, 'Man Has Premonition of Own Death,' was inspired by his strange tale of his great-uncle, a 23-year-old carpet-mill worker, in the 1920s -- and by the author's own sudden encounter with serious illness. Below is a sample. The complete work is available on Amazon. http://amzn.to/2BIWO6w

The old radio star Edgar Bergen had a ventriloquist dummy named Mortimer Snerd who had a well-known catchphrase: “Who woulda thunk it?” 

I’m here to say “Who woulda thunk it?” And I’m here to talk about death, mortality and a young man named Thomas Crooks.

Years ago, I stumbled upon, in an old Bible, a yellowed newspaper clipping from a now-defunct daily newspaper in my old hometown, The Yonkers (N.Y.) Herald Statesman. The headline read: MAN HAS PREMONITION OF OWN DEATH. The article, from 1923, was about the death of a 25-year-old worker at the Alexander Smith carpet mill.

It reported that young Crooks had met his fiancé for lunch one afternoon at a lovely old burial ground across the street from the mill. When the whistle blew at the carpet mill, young Thomas headed back to work. That’s when, the article reports, Thomas stopped, turned around, looked back at his fiancé and declared, “I am going in. But I shall be carried out.” 

Fifteen minutes after relaying his bizarre message to his girlfriend, Thomas “fell” into a shallow vat of acid that was used in the carpet-curing process. Workers pulled him out. Others ran to fetch the lad’s mother. She rushed to the hospital, got there while Thomas was still alive but mortally injured, and held her son in her arms. The last sentence of the newspaper article:: “Mrs. Crooks was burned about the face as she continually kissed her dying son.”

Mrs. Crooks was my maternal great-grandmother. Thomas was my mother’s uncle and my grandmother’s brother. I, of course, never knew him, but I have been to his grave – in the same cemetery, across from the same carpet mill.

I’d been working on this eclectic collection for a while when I had my very own Mortimer Snerd moment. One night, I went to plug my telephone charger into a wall outlet and toppled over as I lost my balance. After that, it’s all very vague. I remember a couple of young policemen, I remember being in the emergency room. I don’t remember getting there. An emergency CAT scan determined that I had a foreboding mass of some kind at the back of my head. The tumor was removed in emergency surgery – and so my own battle unexpectedly began.

Who woulda thunk it?

Read the 5* buzz for THE SOLDIER'S RETURN @historicalfiction #series from #BHBW

The Soldier's Return, the second book in our historical fiction series, just concluded a virtual book tour. We'd like to share some of the buzz with you! 

From Donna Maguire of Donna's Book Blog: "This is a great story and a really good historical fiction novel.  I love the setting and I am a fan of that period of history and crave reading anything by new authors to me.

"The plot in the book was well researched and it was historically accurate for the period.  The writing style and pace is spot on for the book and I loved the characters and their interaction.  They work so well together to give an excellent book all round.

"The Soldier’s Return is the second book in the Heaven’s Pond Trilogy, I am yet to read the first book and did not feel at any detriment from this so I would say that the book is fine to read as a stand alone.

"Five stars from me for this one – a really enjoyable read!"

THE SOLDIER'S RETURN is available here:    Kindle Edition     Paperback Edition

The year is 1626. A senseless war rips through parts of Germany. Ongoing animosity between the Catholics and the Protestants has turned into an excuse to destroy much of the landscape situated between France, Italy and Denmark. But religion only plays a minor role in this lucrative business of war.

The young dutchman, Pieter van Diemen, returns to Amsterdam in chains after a period of imprisonment in the Spice Islands. He manages to escape but must leave Amsterdam in a hurry. Soldiers are in demand in Germany and he decides to travel with a regiment until he can desert.

His hope of survival is to reach Sichardtshof, the farm in Franconia, Germany; the farm he left ten years ago. His desire to seek refuge with them lies in his fond memories of the maid Katarina and her master, the humanist patrician Herr Tucher.

But ten years is a long time and the farm has changed. Franconia is not only torn by war but falling victim to a church-driven witch hunt. The Jesuit priest, Ralf, has his sights set on Sichardtshof as well. Ralf believes that ridding the area of evil will be his saving grace. Can Pieter, Katarina and Herr Tucher unite to fight against a senseless war out of control?

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Jim McGarrah @jmcgarra offers #Memoir Workshop at the TYCA-SE #Conference Feb 22

February 22, 2018: Blue Heron Book Works author Jim McGarrah will offer a memoir workshop at the TYCA-SE (Two-Year College Association) 

Marine, social worker, carpet layer, janitor, bartender, race horse trainer, and college professor, Jim McGarrah lives in Louisville, Kentucky, close enough to Churchill Downs to hear the crowd roar each year at the Kentucky Derby.  His memoir of war, A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007) won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Non-Fiction Award, and the sequel, The End of an Era, was published in 2011.  He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of the anthology Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.  His most recent memoir, Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Confession of Life, was published in June 2017.

Jim is also a poet and author of three award-winning books of poetry: Running the Voodoo Down (Elixir Press, 2003); When the Stars Go Dark(Main Street Rag, 2009); and Breakfast at Denny's (Ink Brush Press, 2013).   His poems, essays, and stories appear frequently in literary journals such as Bayou Magazine, Breakwater, Cincinnati Review, Chamber Four, Connecticut Review, and North American Review.

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.tycase.org/2018-conference-info

Or visit the event's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/514318808952575/

Available here!

Nothing cozy about this #cozymystery by #BHBW author @BathshebaMonk

 

 

 

AVAILABLE HERE!

 

 

I don't like cozy mysteries and I don't like amateur detectives, which is why I did like Bathsheba Monk's DEAD WRONG, her first Swanson Herbinko crime novel. The Swedish and the French, with their absolutely gruesome fictional mysteries, have shown us, once and for all, that murders never are cozy, and only the British still believe that gentlemen (or gentlewomen) operatives can ever get anything done, which may explain why they lost their empire to the Cambridge Spies. Ms. Monk's surprisingly good-natured (and funny) book has crimes gruesome enough to be Scandinavian, but her investigator, a neophyte divorce lawyer who doesn't see herself as a detective, wisely employs a proper ex-cop (the multi-purpose Dick) to do her sleuthing. Which is a good thing because the book's central skullduggery is slowly revealed as a complicated tangle, and so the breathless reader is genuinely grateful to have Ms. Herbinko along as a tour guide for the bumpy, surprising ride. Swanson's job is to share the reader's dumbfounded reaction to the book's felonious gumbo even as her smart mouth and wicked sense of humor function to take the edge off a series of bloody murders committed by a set of comic opera villains. The intestinal respite this amusing-yet-frightened voice provides from the drippy mayhem is a service to the reader that Henning Mankell might consider adopting as he moves forward.

As I read DEAD WRONG, I thought of Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Weiner and their sassy female PIs, but now, with the mayhem and revelations over, I think of the book as the print incarnation of Gosford Park, the wonderful country house murder film by Robert Altman and Julian Fellowes. Both pretend to be murder-filled cozies. Both have intriguingly messy plots with dozens of quirky characters. And both of them are stage-managed by an inept police officer who simply joins the agog reader for the ride through the thicket of man's inhumanity to man. The cop in Gosford Park is a bumbling Lestrade-like detective played marvelously by Stephen Fry, while the often clueless mistress of ceremonies in Ms. Monk's book is her heroine, Swanson Herbinko, who claims she got her name from a TV dinner and who sometimes seems more worried about her expansive waistline and her nicotine habit than she is about the bodies dropping around her. I enjoyed Fry's performance in the Altman movie immensely, and I was just as pleased with Ms. Monk's use of Swanson as an everywoman, who should be told--by the way--that a size i2 is undoubtedly smaller than the dresses worn by most American women. Give yourself a break, Swanson.

Bathsheba Monk is the author of 7 novels, three plays, editor at Blue Heron Book Works and the creator of the popular Swanson Herbinko Mystery series which is being written by Andrew Sloan, Joe Taleroski, and Paul Heller. She writes young adult novels under the pen name, Maddy Wells.

#BHBW author Nicholas Digiovani is awarded @VCCA fellowship @nidigiovanni

https://nicholasdigiovanni.com/

Nicholas DiGiovanni, author of the essay collection “Man Has Premonition of Own Death,” published in June by Blue Heron Book Works, has been awarded a month-long fellowship and writing residency at the prestigious Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

VCCA fellowships aim to intensify creativity by freeing more than 350 artists a year, up to 25 at a time, from the disruptions of everyday life. Fellows have a private room and studio, with three meals a day.

Fellowships have been awarded to more than 4,000 writers, composers and visual artists nationwide and from 63 different countries since 1971. Honors accorded VCCA Fellows have included MacArthur genius grants, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, and the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations.

Admission to VCCA is highly selective, based on a review of applications by panels of professional artists. There are separate panels for each category (poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, playwrights, performance, film and video artists, painters, sculptors, photographers, installation artists, composers and cross-disciplinary artists) with over 50 panelists serving at any one time.

DiGiovanni plans to work on a new novel while in residence at VCCA.

Available here!

"How strange that a book so unrelentingly about death should contain so much life. But that’s what we have in Man Has Premonition of Own Death, which stands athwart decay and demands to know why."

Misdemeanor Outlaw: Jim McGarrah's Path and Some #Boomer Criticism from a Gen Xer #genx

Vincent Francone

Vincent Francone is a writer from Chicago whose memoir, Like a Dog, was published in the fall of 2015. He won first place in the 2009 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition (Gwendolyn Brooks Award) and is at work on a collection of poems and stories. Visit www.vincentfrancone.com to read his work or say hi. 

#BHBW author Vincent Francone reviews Jim McGarrah's memoir, Midemeanor Outlaw

 

In his funny, self-lacerating look at Baby Boomers, Balsamic Dreams, Joe Queenan accuses his generation of navel-gazing and premature nostalgia.  He cites Carol King’s “So Far Away” as being the beginning of the Boomers’ descent into soppy, untimely ennui.  To be sure, 1971 was too soon for this generation to be so goddamn depressed about the loss of time, considering the average Boomer was around 20-30.  Yeah, Queenan’s making a bit of hasty generalization, but for the sake of argument let’s accept his point.  If we do, we can easily see how, though not unlike other self-absorbed generations, Boomers tend to mythologize their heyday, perhaps driven to do so after the utopian dreams of the late 60s gave way to the disillusionment of the 70s and the crass materialism of the 1980s. 

Most of the Boomers I know— hi, family!—tend to agree that the music and culture of their generation represents the pinnacle of human achievement, which always makes me want to smother those aging pricks in the bubbling tar of punk rock.  This boomer insistence that their version of rock and roll is the greatest thing ever, that Woodstock was the event, man, and the agonizing claim that they ended a war (sure took them long enough) via smoking weed and sitting in the dirt playing bongos has always made me roll my eyes.  Which is why I approached Jim McGarrah’s book Misdemeanor Outlaw with a bit of trepidation.  Do I really want to read 180-pages of Boomer self-aggrandizement? I asked myself.  Turns out I was wrong about the book, though not 100% wrong about Boomers.
 

Available here!

(Side note: All writers are self-aggrandizing.  I aspire to be part of the club; I wrote a memoir and asked people to read it; I write poems and get them published in corners of the internet and then ask people to peek into those corners.  I am as self-aggrandizing as the next damaged bastard.  Even those of my generation with the good sense to try their hand at pursuits other than writing are myopic and sentimental.  So yes, we Generation Xers, and certainly the much-maligned Millennials, are equally guilty of the above accusations leveled at Boomers.  And while we’re at it, so are the members of the so-called Greatest Generation.  We’re all human; we’re all flawed and beautiful.  We all suck.) 

But here’s the thing about Misdemeanor Outlaw: it’s a book by a Boomer, not a Boomer book.  Meaning it’s not overly sentimental; it’s not the equivalent of one of those goddamn Facebook memes with a photo of a 45 record adapter and the request to “Like and share if you ever used one of these!”  It’s a damn fine collection of loosely connected essays that jump through time in a mostly linear manner, forming a meditation on the author’s inability to find his place among rules and authority figures.  Along the way, he makes and loses friends, gets married and divorced, picks up a social disease, faces the horror of combat in Vietnam, swallows an apothecary worth of dope, and even tries his hand at the post office (which I, a former mail sorter, was delighted to read about).

The epilogue does, as expected, contain a sort of case for the 1980s—a decade I tend to romanticize—being the example of how corporate culture corrupts true art and beauty, evidenced by the rise of pop songs like “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go” a nauseating tune, indeed, though the boomers would have us believe that their generations’ musicians never recorded anything as soulless and vile.  One need only recall the Ohio Express’s “Yummy Yummy Yummy” to debunk that claim. 

Aside from that one paragraph, I was far more engaged, amused, and compelled by Misdemeanor Outlaw than I expected to be.  I was familiar with McGarrah’s work.  (We share the same publisher, which, were we musicians, would make us label-mates; not sure what we are. . . Blue Herons of a feather? A Flock of Herons? Being close to “A Flock of Seagulls,” a 1980s band I assume McGarrah dislikes, I’ll go with that one.)  He is a writer who seeks to recollect things with less tranquility than honesty.  When McGarrah writes of his childhood, he eases up on the idolization of the all-American small town and presents not so much a Norman Rockwell Eden as a confining place of mores and customs that, even as a wee lad, he’s inclined to challenge.  Soon he’s dropping out of college to enlist in the Marines, a decision that sends him to Vietnam, then to a crisis of identity.  Rejecting the scare tactics and justifications of politicians, McGarrah actively opposes the war, grows his hair and embraces the hippie idealism that engulfed his generation the way Techno-solutionism is currently seducing Millennials.  When the limits of commune life are reached, McGarrah seems at his most unmoored.  Plagued by survivor guilt from Vietnam, unable to comfortably fit back into his hometown, and beset by uniformed men seeking to get over on him regardless of the length of his hair and manner of dress, our hero is the true representation of a man without a country, an outlaw, albeit of the misdemeanor variety. 

It would be remiss not to remark on the quality of McGarrah’s humorous, unflinching prose.  I laughed often while reading these pages, though the most impacting moments are the honest appraisals of the injustice done to the young men of his generation and the “true cost of these foreign policy adventures urged on by corrupt politicians and controlled by corporate interest.”  Recalling his stint in Vietnam, McGarrah writes, “On quiet nights, when the dead visit, I greet them with respect and we talk.  They speak of the loneliness of their fate and I speak in awe of mine.”  Though I know the man is writing of a time and place I can never understand, he may as well be discussing what it means to write a book.  Or, for that matter, to read one—we are seeking to converse with the dead, to compare our fates to theirs, to measure our struggle against theirs, to see what insights we can glean.  The result, in Misdemeanor Outlaw, is a book for anyone interested in walking in the shoes of a man on an absurd road toward self-actualization, though not in the trendy way Boomers sought to do as they went from well-meaning young idiots to 1980s sell-outs looking to reclaim their idealistic past.  McGarrah is too raw for that sort of thing.  His self-examination is his own, but in offering it to us, we’re privy to insights and anecdotes that are surprisingly familiar to anyone who’s ever felt mystified at the conventions the rest of the world is all too happy to obey. 

LIKE A DOG by VINCENT FRANCONE available here!

 

Read the 5* buzz for Man Has Premonition of Own Death #memoir #bookreview

AVAILABLE HERE!

A quirky walk through many graveyards, both literal and figurative,

...with delightful side trips through history, literature and popular culture. The series of essays offers the research and straight-forward prose of a veteran journalist, one with a fascination for the gently gothic and an near-childlike wonder at his own mortality. A bizarre accident that cuts an ancestor off in his prime inspires this collection, which explores every aspect of death while succeeding in being entertaining, amusing and pleasingly weird. The author is a fan of folk music and the spirit of a well-rendered folk tale makes this an enjoyable book to read and re-read. It will definitely make you want to pay an actual visit to the graveyard that houses some of his family members, as well as American icons including Alan Freed, Judy Garland, James Baldwin, Jim Henson and Malcolm X. The author's own brushes with death serve as a serious counterbalance to an often amusing journey where Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper'' shares a Final Supper dinner table with yellowing newspaper clippings, marble headstone epitaphs and an American past of union laborer, printing presses and the innocence of a boy forever changed by an empty seat in his grade school classroom, a family photograph of relatives who don't stop knocking even though they will never again show up at his Yonkers' front door.

Man Has Premonition of Own Death: An Ancestor's Strange Demise and Other Mortal Matters:

is Nicholas DiGiovanni’s contemplation of the un-ignorable reality of death is really a celebration of the relationships we form over time with the people around us, with our own histories, and with living itself. I can think of few authors able to write about death this honestly while maintaining the warmth, thoughtfulness and humor that make life worth living. “Man Has Premonition of His Own Death” is a welcome reminder for readers of all ages that we discover the meaning of life through living it deeply and fully. Michael N. McGregor, author of Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax

https://nicholasdigiovanni.com