We are especially blessed in the Berkshires with a large community of very good writers. Today, we are launching this new feature, “Berkshire Reads,” to introduce you to some of them. The six Berkshire writers whom we present here offer you a delightful variety of possibilities: novels, poetry, memoir, science fiction, history and essays. We hope you will discover enticing literary adventures among them.
This feature will reside in our online magazine section. The magazine focuses on places to go and things to do, and we feel that curling up with a good book satisfies both those requirements, especially in this time of COVID when we are all looking for new and safe ways to amuse and occupy ourselves. Just think of the places you can go as you venture forth into the pages of a good book.
We also urge you to patronize our local independent bookstores. We have several outstanding ones here in the Berkshires: The Bookloft in Great Barrington, The Bookstore in Lenox, Shaker Mill Books in West Stockbridge and, slightly to our north but well worth the trip, Northshire Books in Manchester, Vermont. So, before you log into that big online book seller (you know which one I mean), think how nice it is to preserve some brick-and-mortar options nearby, where you can browse the shelves, ask for a recommendation and also order a book for delivery.
* * *
Saint X
Alexis Schaitkin (lives in Williamstown)
Celadon Books, a Division of Macmillan Publishers, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Alexis Schaitkin
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
AS: In Saint X, an American teenager disappears on the last night of her family’s vacation at a Caribbean resort. Two decades later, the victim’s younger sister is living in Brooklyn, when a chance encounter with one of the suspects in the case pulls her back into an obsessive pursuit of the truth.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
AS: The setting of a Caribbean resort was my starting place. I think it’s a fascinating space. It’s a ‘paradise;’ it’s a crossroads; it’s a place where people of different nationalities, races, and classes share space intimately for a brief time. I knew I wanted to write a book that started in the confined space and time of one week at a resort, and then rippled out from there to show how the events of that week upended the lives of all of these different characters—from the victim’s family to other tourists to employees at the resort—across decades and continents.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
AS: The book took three years to write. During that time, I alternated continuously between phases of research and phases of writing. I would research enough to do some more writing, and then the writing would point me in the direction of more research, and so on. I had tons of little notes and ideas before I started the first draft, and I had a general sense of the arc of the plot, enough to give me the confidence to dive in, but it evolved a lot from there. In my mind the core store was always there, but when I look back at some of the plot points I had originally planned, they are really, really different from the finished story.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
AS: While I was writing Saint X, I was working a million other writing-adjacent jobs: editing, ghostwriting, tutoring, teaching creative writing; I wrote curriculum for an education start-up and worked seasonally in admissions at Williams College. But I was lucky that all of that work was flexible: I tried really hard to devote the first couple of hours each day to writing.
Pre-pandemic, I always wrote in cafes. I like being surrounded by other people, even if I’m not talking to them, because writing is so solitary. In the new-normal, I’m writing at home. I used to think I “couldn’t” write at home, but of course it turns out that’s not true. So, it’s been a useful reminder not to be too precious about the “ideal” writing set-up, just to sit down and do the work.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
AS: My publisher is Celadon Books, a relatively new imprint within Macmillan. I was really lucky. The book sold fairly quickly, and because Celadon is small and new, they put a lot of energy behind it.
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
AS: The island where the novel is set is fictional, and I wrote a lot about the island that didn’t make it into the book—its history, the childhood experiences of the characters who grew up there, etc. But I think a world feels more real in a novel when you have the sense, as a reader, that there’s more of it beyond the pages you’re reading, so I think it’s okay, even good, that not everything made it into the finished book.
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
AS: I’m working on my next book now. It’s set in an isolated town in an unnamed country where strange things are happening. It’s quite different, though like Saint X there’s an underlying mystery, and a sort of eerie, unsettling atmosphere.
* * *
A Guide to The Battle of Bennington and the Bennington Monument
Phil Holland (lives in Bennington, Vermont)
West Mountain Press, 2016
Copyright © 2016
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
PH: The title answers that question.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
PH: I had self-published a little guide to Robert Frost’s years in southern Vermont the year before, and it had sold well. When I visited the shop at the Bennington Battle Monument and realized that there was no attractive little book about the Battle on the market, I decided to write one. I wanted to pitch the story at the general (but curious) reader, even someone unfamiliar with American history. Upwards of 30,000 people visit the Monument shop every year (every year but this one!), so I figured I could sell a few books and tell a great story at the same time. I’m not a historian by trade, but I know how to do research, and I had access to academic libraries. The subject took hold of me, and in fact it hasn’t let go yet.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
PH: When it came time to write, I needed a beginning. I remember I was pacing the kitchen floor when the words “The course of history is shaped by the outcome of battles” came to me and gave me an opening. The project took 15 intense months from inspiration to having the book in my hands: 56 pages with 43 color illustrations. It was printed in Pittsfield by Qualprint, which did an excellent job.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
PH: I write professionally, but in semi-retirement I don’t have to make a living at it. The balance of writing for myself and on projects initiated by others (for example, the Berkshire Edge magazine) has been about right.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
PH: I had already self-published two books (a book of poetry and the Frost booklet), so I knew how to go about it. I had called myself West Mountain Press for those books, and I already had an LLC (Phil Holland Voice and Word) for business purposes. I was able to work again with the terrific graphic artist and book designer Leslie Noyes (who also designs for the Edge, of course). The commercial success of the book owes a lot to Leslie’s design, especially of the cover!
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
PH: Second thoughts for a second edition: I would include new research, including Lion Miles’s discoveries about Blacks at the Battle.
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
PH: I issued a new and improved version of my Frost booklet two years ago, and I wrote a couple of scholarly articles (one on Frost, one on the Battle) for the Bennington Museum’s Walloomsac Review this past year. The last thing I published (in print and online) was an essay on the role of rum at the Battle, as Edge readers may recall. With tourism depressed, the market for my commercial books has been battered by Covid this year. I’ve been giving talks on the Black presence at the Battle via Zoom, and fortunately, I can stay home in the beautiful southern Vermont countryside while I decide what to do next.
* * *
Twilight Time
Susie Kaufman (lives in Lenox)
Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2019
Copyright © 2019 Susie Kaufman
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
SK: Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement is a reflection on memory, aging and mortality in the form of a collection of personal essays. The subject matter touches on growing up in New York in the fifties, family, politics, the discovery of the natural world, becoming contemplative and considering the unknowable future. It is emphatically not a how-to book about staying fit and taking up a hobby in old age. Twilight Time is a philosophical exploration of the texture of life, looking back at where I have been and forward to who knows where.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
SK: I have always been magnetized by people’s stories. Earlier in my life, I studied to be an archivist, nosing around in other people’s stuff, notably the papers of Edna St. Vincent Millay at Steepletop. Later, I shifted into spiritual autobiography and trained to be a chaplain, ultimately working at hospice in Holyoke. The work I did there focused on listening to the narratives of people’s lives as they entered their end-of-life process. When I retired from hospice, I began to write my blog, seventysomething (susiekaufman.blogspot.com), which was a natural outgrowth of the interpenetration of my story with the stories of the people I accompanied as they were dying. The blog entries, along with pieces I wrote for the Housatonic monthly open mic, IWOW (In Words Out Words), formed the core of the book.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
SK: My writing is very dense. I tend to be flooded with ideas and images that wobble around a subject, although the relation of one idea to another may not be initially obvious. The trick is to look deeply into the associations to discover how the pieces of the jigsaw might fit together. The format of most of my material is the short essay. At IWOW, I have five minutes to say what I have to say. This boils down to 750 words, which, interestingly, seems to be enough to convey whatever concentration of thought and feeling I am experiencing at any given time. I never force anything. I have found that an essay waiting to be born is organic and will arrive when it is (almost) fully formed.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
SK: I do my best writing in bed when I first wake up and am not yet burdened by the day’s demands. I experience tremendous pleasure drinking strong coffee and inviting the words to come out to play. I am not a great reviser. Generally, when I re-read a piece, the wrong notes jump out and hit me over the head. There is rarely a question about what needs to be taken out or changed.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
SK: A dear friend in Toronto pestered me until I had no choice but to entertain her suggestion about sending my book to Wipf and Stock Publishers in Eugene, Oregon. They had published her poetry collection and she just had an intuition that they would be interested in my work. Wipf and Stock primarily publishes books about religion and spirituality. Every person that I engaged with on their staff treated me with grace and generosity.
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
SK: One story, “Trade-In,” imagines a business establishment where you could trade in your life the way people trade in used cars. It’s an entirely fanciful humor piece that unfolds in a tone that’s very different from any of the other pieces in the book. When I read it at IWOW, the laughter was uproarious. Still, I had misgivings about including it in the collection. It demonstrates a looser, rougher side of me that I wasn’t sure I wanted to share.
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
SK: This is a difficult time to plan large projects going forward. Fortunately, my writing manifests in small bites on the blog, so I have the luxury of allowing ideas to arise in their own time. It’s certainly possible that they may aggregate at some time in the future and ask to become a book.
* * *
The Mercury Man
Frank Gioia (lives in Lenox)
Troy Book Makers, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Frank Gioia
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
FG: The Mercury Man is a collection of thirty-six memoir narratives about growing up on the streets of Brooklyn in an Italian working-class family in the 1950s and early ’60s. Some of these pieces also evoke memories of my time in the army and the year I spent in Vietnam. Through these stories, the reader will have an opportunity to join me in exploring the rich texture of an earlier time and place. This journey into the past opens a window on both the pain and joy of my early experience.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
FG: I put this collection of short stories together as a way of articulating what I’ve come to embrace as the defining period of my life. These are my formative years, a time when friendships filled in for the broken family of my childhood. I hope the book will convey an understanding of my journey.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
FG: When I have an idea for a story, I begin to type whatever thoughts enter my mind onto my iPad. I put everything I can remember down on the page. I use Google if I’m not sure about an event or place. Then I review it, re-write it and edit until I think I have a viable narrative.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
FG: I generally try to write in the morning, often in bed before I get up to meditate. It is a quiet time, drinking coffee and looking through the glass doors in the bedroom at the natural world outside. I also write at other times of the day as the spirit moves me. Since I’m retired, I don’t have to go to work and earn a living.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
FG: I wanted to get the book out by the end of the year so I researched the world of self-publishing. Subsequently I decided to try and find an agent. There was someone in New York who was interested in my work but then Covid reared its ugly head and I was back to square one. So I selected Troy Book Makers because they had published a friend’s work and came highly recommended.
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
FG: I have written other pieces that traverse more current periods in my life and initially I thought I might include them. Ultimately, I decided that the material I chose for this collection describes an earlier version of myself that informed who I became as an adult. I had visited this period in 2016 when I wrote a play, 14 Holy Martyrs, that explored the depth and importance of the friendships from my past. Writing The Mercury Man has put me in touch with similar content and allowed me to further probe what it was like growing up on the streets of New York.
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
FG: No, I don’t have another book in my plans. I will continue to write short stories and, following my interest in performance and voice, read them at IWOW (In Words Out Words) in Housatonic, Mass., when Covid is past. One of the pieces in the book, “Seventeen,” may lend itself to further development as a play. I will more than likely see where that leads.
* * *
Field Light
Owen Lewis (lives in Stockbridge)
DOS MADRES Press, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Owen Lewis
Chosen as a “Distinguished Favorite” in the 2020 NYC Big Book Awards
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
OL: Field Light is a book of and about the Berkshires. Written in mostly poetry, but with some prose and drama, it is a story that encompasses the social, cultural, and political history of the Berkshires as personal discovery. Thoughout these pages, history becomes folk-lore, as its main character, sometimes me, often departing from me, looks to understand his own history and comes to see personal history as affected by, and effecting, shared history. The histories of the Mahigan, of Mumbet and Theodore Sedgewick, W.E.B. Du Bois, Patty Hearst, authors such as Hawthorne and Melville, the more contemporary poets including those from Worcester, artists like Daniel Chester French and Norman Rockwell, the music of Tanglewood and the music of Arlo Guthrie are all part of the living history that makes the Berkshires what they are. Threads of these stories are woven into the fabric of the book which I believe reads with the fluidity of a novel but with the intensity of poetry.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
OL: For almost thirty years I’ve lived in a home that at first I did not know was historic—The Dormouse, so named by Daniel Chester French who renovated it in 1920 as a wedding present for his daughter, Peggy Cresson. She lived here until her parents passed away and she moved to Chesterwood, the property of which it adjoins. The cover photo of the book shows Peggy and her husband visited by neighbors Hilda Beecher-Stowe (granddaughter-in-law of Harriet Beecher-Stowe) and her sister Gertrude Smith. They sit the same back porch where, a century later, I sit. Here we are inhabiting the same space but not the same time. Are they here in some way? I don’t mean as ghosts, but what traces of them are still here? Have I absorbed something from them? I began to imagine their conversation. I began to wonder who they were. In doing so, I become part of their history, they part of mine. I began looking at wider Berkshire history in much the same way. I am part of this place, but to know myself better means to know this place better. Road signs such as Stockbridge, 1732, or Glendale, 1730. Real dates. Real points in time. And so began the discovery that became Field Light.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
OL: Field Light was written over a three-year period. I did not at first know it was a book I was undertaking. It began with one poem in which the “caretaker” appeared. Who was this caretaker? I don’t actually have a “caretaker,” so he interested me greatly. Soon I discovered his name was Adam, who is “part Mahigan, claims descendency from the Presidents Adams and is also related to Mumbet. He embodies both knowledge of the land, the natural order, and history. This poem became a short sequence, a longer sequence, a chapbook length, and finally, realizing how much there was to say and to discover, an entire book. What surprised me was the way it opened up like an accordion. A line that didn’t sit right became a poem. One section would suggest another. It felt at some point that the story became self-generating. I’d only need to reread a section, and it would tell me what to do. There are well over a hundred versions. Regarding research, I followed my nose. When the information on the internet was not sufficient, I went to libraries, archives, even researched deeds. My research was not intended to be complete but to satisfy my curiosity.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
OL: My writing perch is a separate small study off the bedroom of my house in Stockbridge that looks out over the back field and woods. That’s my “go-to” place for writing. My physical surroundings don’t matter as much as time of day. I’m an early-riser, and when the house is quiet before anyone else is up, before I’ve let the deluge of emails and texts in, my mind is most open and sees possibilities that close up as the day progresses. So for me, protected time is more important than protected space. But once I am taken over by a poem, pieces of it may come to me whenever and wherever. It’s as if the poem creates and insists on its own time and place. I am a physician, a psychiatrist, and a professor at Columbia University where I teach various applications of Narrative Medicine. Fortunately, I can now maintain a schedule with protected time for writing as well as practice and teaching, which in their own ways offer unique inspirations.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
OL: I returned to my publisher (Dos Madres Press), which has brought out three of my previous books. Distribution is through Small Press Distribution. That said, developing local interest, events, and distribution is important. Currently the book is available at The Bookloft, The Bookstore in Lenox, and through the Chesterwood website.
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
OL: I gave this book sufficient time to become what it was intended to become. It could have been a much longer book, but I didn’t want to write something of such length that it put readers off. I aimed for a long afternoon’s read. There are a number of sections I removed that do nag at me a little, one in particular on the opioid crisis, though I’ve written about drug abuse elsewhere (best man, Dos Madres Press, 2015).
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
OL: Yes! And it’s happening.
The Dormouse has been a refuge for me in times of emotional difficulties, but I long suspected it might one day become an actual refuge. I did not, however, imagine the circumstances that Covid presented. When it hit, my wife and I moved here full-time, almost eight months ago, and this has become our full-time home. With us live our youngest daughter, her husband, and our first grandchild Noa. Our other children have spent extended time with us. In the midst of this terrible pandemic, a chance to live with nature and the changing seasons, not just to visit them, and to watch our granddaughter grow—opportunities we would not have in normal times. I am not certain about the title of the next book, but a good deal of it is written. Whether as description or title—The Noa Poems.
* * *
The Famine of Men
Richard H. Kessin (Lives in Norfolk, Conn.)
AuthorHouse, 2020
Copyright © 2020 Richard H. Kessin
TBE: Briefly, tell us what this book is about.
RK: The Famine of Men is about a young woman who has studied to be a virologist and is an Assistant Professor in a Pathology and Cell Biology Department at Tufts. She has received a grant from NIH to study a rather boring virus and all of a sudden her uncle, who is an MD, brings her a case with an unknown virus. It will turn out to kill the cells that make testosterone. It is very infectious but harms no one, except for the loss of male libido and muscle mass. It can be cured with testosterone, but there is a catch. I would not have learned all this stuff had I not worked in a department headed Mike Gershon MD, who was and is a superb teacher of cell biology and tissue biology.
TBE: What moved you to write this book?
RK: I have taught Ph.D. students for 40 years and I was their Dean for five years. There are very few novels that tell their story. Many of the characters here are loosely based on them or other members of my former Department of Pathology and Cell Biology. They are interesting, skilled, and mostly kind human beings. It was my privilege to work with them, whether in my lab or in our larger Ph.D. programs at The Columbia University Irving Medical Center.
It is also true that people do not know how scientific research works in this country, so I thought I would explain that along the way. I have a friend, an 80-year-old neurologist who years ago discovered the genetic defect in Tay-Sachs disease. When he read what happened to our heroine’s grant application for money to support her research in the NIH committee, he started to tremble. His applications had gone through the same process.
TBE: Tell us about your writing process. Do you outline the book before you start writing, or do you just dive in? Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, how do you research? How long did the book take you to write? Was there anything about the writing process that surprised you?
RK: I did outline it, but the outline kept changing because the object can’t be fear and loathing as humanity declines from male sterility (that has been done other dystopian novels) and it took me a while to figure a way out of that dead end. I also had to develop characters, which are loosely based on people I knew. NIH grant applications don’t have a lot of dialogue and eventually that form did not offer much range, Don’t get me wrong, badly written NIH funding requests always fail. Finally, I had a very good editor, Jaime Morris.
TBE: Where and when do you write? Do your physical surroundings make a difference to how you write, or can you write anywhere? If writing is not how you make your living, how do you find time to do it?
RK: I like to write in nice quiet offices but now that I am retired I mostly write in the Norfolk Hub or our dining room table. I do like to write in nice surroundings, or at least comfortable ones. The pandemic has been a problem that should begin to wane in the next six months.
TBE: What did you have to do to get the book published and distributed?
RK: I just decided to do it for relaxation but I could not find an agent interested in taking on a new author in his seventies and I did not have time to look, so I just sent it to AuthorHouse and paid to have it published. I learned a lot about what not to do since then. In the end., this book has already entertained and informed a lot of people. Among them are a several very fine women scientists with whom I have worked and, even better, two women with high school educations who took care of my mother at Geer Nursing. They had no trouble understanding the science and the fact that it is done by normal people.
TBE: Everybody has second thoughts. Is there anything you had to leave out of this book, or that you discovered after you finished it? Or anything you wish you had done differently?
RK: I read the scientific literature still and it recently transpired that a man with cancer needed a bone marrow transplant. A donor contributed bone marrow, which contains a lot of stem cells, including the ones that give rise to sperm. His child was actually that of his donor. That fits in with my plot. And maybe others.
As for second thoughts, I wish I had done this earlier and that I was a better marketer. A number of people think it would make a good TV series. My daughter has already picked a female lead.
TBE: Are you planning to write another book? Can you tell us anything about it?
RK: Yes, but it won’t be another novel. Instead, I am planning to write a book on the value of science to society. It will use recent epidemics to explain why the scientific method is the best way to examine nature, solve problems (vaccines) and expose bunk.
