Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Writing

Single Dads in Non-Fiction and Fiction 

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It was only coincidental. I read Joseph Luzzi’s In a Dark Wood: A Memoir (2015) and the next in my reading pile was Unconditional: A Novel by Stephen Kogon. Both books, one non-fiction and the other fiction, told the stories of young men suddenly finding themselves single fathers.

Luzzi is a professor of Italian and teaches at Bard College in New York. In 2007, just as his lecture class was about to begin, he noticed a security guard come into the room. The message was awful; Luzzi’s wife Katherine had been in an automobile accident and was seriously injured. Katherine was also eight-and-half months pregnant. The baby, a little girl, was delivered and survived.  Katherine didn’t.

And thus began a journey of grief, the loss of his wife, navigating funeral and death arrangements, caring for a newborn, and eventually dealing with lawsuits filed against Katherine’s estate and countersuits filed against the other driver. And that on top of trying to resume a “normal” life, as if life could ever be normal after that.

Luzzi turned to the poet Dante and his Divine Comedy. Like Virgil serves as Dante’s guide in the great poem, Dante served as Luzzi’s guide. He tells a moving, heartbreaking story, a man overwhelmed by loss and grief and with the responsibility of a child. If there is a hero in this story, Luzzi might be the first to admit it was his Italian mother, who essentially moves in to care for her granddaughter.

In addition to The Divine Comedy: A Biography, Luzzi has also published Romantic Europe and the Ghost of Italy (2008), A Cinema of Poetry: The Aesthetics of the Italian Art Film (2014), My Two Italies (2014), In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love (2015), and Botticelli’s Secret: The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance (2022). He received his Ph.D. degree from Yale University, and he teaches literature, film, and Italian Studies. He is also the founder of the Virtual Book Club, which focuses on the world’s great books and storytelling.

Writer and filmmaker Stephen Kogon has previously published a young adult novel and two children’s stories, and Unconditional is his first aimed at adult reader. It tells the story of Matthew Russell, a 35-year-old bachelor who is a photographer for the Arizona Cardinals in Phoenix. He’s attending the retirement part of his best friend (and football team member) Kenny when he receives the telephone call that changes his life. 

The Albuquerque police explain that Matthew’s estranged brother Paul and Paul’s girlfriend have been killed in an automobile crash. Apparent suicides, they’ve left behind a premature baby girl who’s in a hospital neonatal intensive care unit. The only note they left behind read “Please take care of the baby.”

And Matthew is the only person capable of doing that. Overwhelmed with loss, not to mention having to manage his brother’s death and funeral, he has to decide what to do with Allie, his new niece. What he decides is that he will take care of her, even if it means radically changing his life.

It’s a moving tory, sometimes borderline sentimental, but that’s of little account when you become engrossed with the story. Matthew surrenders his life to fatherhood, and that includes changing jobs and putting aside his relationship with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Monica. 

Kogon previously published Max Mooth, Cyber Sleuth and the Case of the Zombie Virus and two children’s stories, Squiglet the Ryming Piglet and Squiglet the Piglet Goes on a Nature Hike. His first film, Dance Baby Dance, was released in 2018. He’s also written screenplays, comedy sketches, and comic strips. 

Related:

Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Biography by Joseph Luzzi.

Top photograph by Illia Panasenko via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Forgetting All the Illustrations I Studied for a Non-Illustrated Book

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My historical novel Brookhaven has no illustrations. I spent an estimated third of my research time hunting for them.

The novel is set in two different time periods – the Civil War and immediately after, and then 50 years later, in 1915. From the beginning of the first draft, I quickly learned that I had to see both periods. I had to see what people wore, what they ate, how they traveled, what their homes were like, what their streets and communities were like, and more. 

From early on, I had to spend far more time looking than reading, and vastly more time looking than writing. Thos 50 years were some of the momentous in American history – rapid industrialization during the war and after, wagons and carriages giving way to automobiles, the advent of flight, the rapid spread of newspapers supported by wire services like Associated Press, rapid changes in the position of women in society, and mechanized agriculture becoming the rule rather than the exception.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW Blog.

Illustration: Men’s golfing fashions in 1915.

The New Edition of Cultivating Oaks Press: Fidelity

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The autumn edition of Cultivating Oaks Press is online, and its full of stories, articles, poetry, and beautiful photography. The theme is fidelity, defined by my Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the quality or state of being faithful” and “accuracy in details.” Synonyms are faithfulness, trustworthiness, and loyalty.

This issue includes stories and articles by Tom Darin Liskey, Annie Nardone, Sam Keyes, Rob Jones, Amelia Friedline, Andrew Roycroft, and Lara d’Entremont, among several others. I have a poem, entitled “52,” and an article entitled “A Lock of Hair.”

It’s a wonderful issue.

Related:

A playlist for the autumn edition, Fidelity, of Cultivating Oaks Press.

“Brookhaven” and the Pearl River Lumber Company

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A reader of Brookhaven sent n email, asking if I modeled the McClure Lumber Company in the novel on the Pearl River Lumber Company. A great-grandfather had worked there, the reader said, and she wondered.

That I had to research the Pearl River Lumber Company to respond to her should answer the question. Or, more briefly, no. 

The company was founded in 1899, building a large mill on the outskirts of Brookhaven, Mississippi. A community grew up around it and was called Pearlhaven. A rail line was built, appropriately named the Brookhaven & Pearl River Railway, and extended from Brookhaven to Monticello in the next county to the east. Coincidentally, int he novel this is roughly the road or direction that the young Sam McClure travels to reach home some months after the Civil War has ended. I even mention Monticello by name in the book. 

The lumber company was eventually acquired by the Goodyear Syndicate, and the rail line was sold to the Illinois Central in 1910. The mill was closed that same year. The rail line operated for another 18 years, finally shut down in 1928. 

In Brookhaven, from the 1850s Sam McClure’s family has been operating a grain mill, a lumber mill, and the general store across from the railroad depot in downtown Brookhaven. The grain mill, facing consolidation in the industry because of the growth of the big milling conglomerates like General Mills, was eventually closed and the property converted to racing racehorses. The lumber mill continued to operate, and the war in Europe increases demand for lumber and wood. I included a short scene about British and French representatives signing a contract with Sam, a contract which would lead to a major expansion of lumber operations. 

The Illinois Central deport in Brookhaven about 1903.

But I didn’t know anything about the Pearl River Lumber Company or the associated railroad operations. The genesis of including a lumber yard in the story came from the fact that Brookhaven is part of the Great Piney Woods of Mississippi, and natural resources like wood and lumber would come to characterize the “New South” after the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South had enormous natural resources, and while agriculture would remain the major industry, it was industries like lumber that helped pulled the South out of post-war economic devastation. 

While the novel had been published, the reader’s question took me back into research. I was rather tickled to discover what little I knew actually aligned very closely with the real story. 

Top photo: Operations at the Pearl River Lumber Company.

“Your Accent! You Can’t Be from New Orleans!”

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When you’re born and raised in a city like New Orleans, you become aware of certain things very early on.

First, there’s food. The basic New Orleans food groups are red beans and rice (on Mondays), crawfish, shrimp, beignets, and drive-thru daiquiris to go. A fifth food group might be the muffuletta. When I’d stay with relatives in Shreveport in north Louisiana, one aunt would make sure she fixed rice, because she worried I might be homesick.

Second, there’s weather. You’ve never met humidity like what saturates New Orleans. When you live in a place bounded by a lake, a river, and a gulf not too far away, and it’s built on swamp and bayous, then you will know what real humidity is like.

Third, there’s the accent. It’s not exactly unique; there are echoes of the New Orleans accent in Brooklyn and even south St. Louis. It’s a multicultural gumbo of influences, including French, Spanish, Cajun, Black American, Jewish, Italian, and German, embedded within American English. New Orleanians would be completely at home ordering in a crowded deli in Brooklyn.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Beignets by Julian Rosser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

An Evening with Elizabeth George

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“As long as the stories are there to be told, I’ll be writing.” – Elizabeth George.

Last Friday, my wife and attended an author’s talk with mystery writer Elizabeth George at the St. Louis County Library. The library’s foundation maintains a robust author program, bringing in some 150 a year. 

It’s been some time (like more than a decade) since we last attended one of these, an evening with poet Billy Collins. That one had been packed with some 800 people; the program was free. I remember having to park across a busy highway at a shopping mall.

George is the author of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. We had been fans of the PBS series (2001-2007) with Nathaniel Parker as Thomas Lynley and Sharon Small as Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Just recently, a new version has started on Britbox, with Leo Suter as Lynley, Sofia Barclay as Havers, and Daniel May’s as a perfect malevolent detective chief inspector and Lynley’s boss. We’re enjoyed the four episodes of the first season, including Daniel Mays as the character you love to hate. In fact, we finished episode four the night before we saw Elizabeth George.

Lynley 2025: Daniel May, Leo Suter, and Sofia Barclay

I’ve read about half of the books by George, now numbering 21. She’s on tour promoting the book, A Slowly Dying Cause, set in Cornwall. 

The program was interview-style, with George asked questions by St. Louis writer, filmmaker, and director Katherine Bratkowski. About 250 people attended; the program had an entrance fee included an expanded fee if you also bought the book. The people who attended, and it was largely a female audience, were Lynley fans.

“I really wanted to take my characters around England,” she said, “because I like England.” In the series, Lynley’s aristocratic family lives in Cornwall, so he has a good excuse to be in the area. He has to deal with problems with the family estate (a Grade II listed building, meaning repairs can only be made with materials from the time it was built). He takes DS Havers with him, “because she’s in trouble; Havers is always in trouble,” George said.

She explained that she originally created the two characters to be complete opposites. Lynley was created first – upper class, Oxford-educated – while Havers is from the working class, comprehensive-school educated, and always seems to be eating. In the original TV series, George said, “Sharon Small really got the Havers character.” For all of the characters in the stories, she writes an assessment that’s physical, emotional, and mental before she ever works them into the story.

With A Slowly Dying Cause, she says she wrote five beginnings, rewriting until it worked like she wanted it. She writes everything first draft and then goes back and edits and pares down heavily. For several of the stories, she didn’t know how the crime would be solved, “a really scary situation.” 

George says she’s been an Anglophile since the 1960s; she majored in and taught English literature for several years before turning to writing. She writes every day, emphasizing that, for any writer, discipline is the key. She said it takes about 18 to 24 months to write a novel now. 

One of the first questions from the audience was “why did you kill Helen?” Helen was Lynley’s great love, and she’s murdered in one of the books (it made a big impression on me, to the point where I can still remember who the murderer was). George’s answer: to keep the story open. Had Helen continued in the series, the overall story line would have closed down in family and children.

Yes, I got my copy of the book autographed.

She starts stories with the place or setting, then the victim, and then how the victim was killed.

George said she likes the new Lynley series on Britbox, but the episodes are very different from the books they’re based upon. “You can see the series and then read the books because they’re so different.”

It was a fun, informative evening; George loves to talk about her books and writing, and she was graciously patient in signing copies for the long line of people (including me). And she posed for photos for anyone who asked. I’ve now started reading A Slowly Dying Cause, and it’s already a great story.