It took my friend and fellow writer, Bill Marley, 17 years to write 21 Yerger Street, his first novel. Hearing that made me think about the gift of time.
It's inspiring to know these authors kept going as time came and went. For me, their books, each in its own way, shed more light on the struggle to fit in in America, to find one's place in the world.
Wilkerson's book is a brilliant account of The Great Migration from 1915 to 1970 when six million black Southerners fled a crushing Jim Crow caste system, seeking better lives "up north."
Diaz's hero, Oscar, is a Dominican Republic-born, nerdy fat kid and writer wannabe, burdened with a curse, searching for love and stumbling through life in, among other places, Paterson, New Jersey.
Bill Marley's white teen-aged protagonist lives in Depression-era Mississippi where he watches the people next door and learns things that rock his world, things that would shock his upright unsuspecting family.
I've heard all three authors in public readings of their work. Bill Marley sat down with me for an interview about his writing life.
Marley started writing his novel in the first of four summer novel-writing workshops at the University of Iowa. "It was a writing community, more bookstores than TV antennas," he says.
We are in the Innavore art gallery space on the ground floor of Marley's home in Pennsylvania. And as he recalls those Iowa days, his face softens, his eyes light up and he is transported back to where the long gestation of his book began.
Marley describes how each summer he climbed into his car, loaded a books-on-tape version of Hero of a Thousand Faces, narrated by Joseph Campbell himself, into his cassette player and headed west. One thousand, one hundred and thirty miles later he arrived in Iowa City. "It was heaven, just great," Marley says of the idyllic hours spent in a community of writers---novices as well as seasoned authors---working on craft and learning from one another's work. "I would still be there if it was still going," he says. But times changed and the Elderhostel program that sponsored the workshops fell by the wayside.
Gone was Marley's writing family, his circle of careful listeners. And though Marley was sad and disappointed, he was grateful to walk away from the last workshop with two good things: A completed first draft of his budding novel and "a note from the instructor wishing me well."
Back home, Marley tucked the draft---and the note---away. "I put it in a drawer and it sat there while I was working on plays." Marley was an established playwright and lyricist back east, and a cabaret performer who founded his own theatre, Hauska House, In Pennsylvania's Pocono mountain resort area.
Performing kept Marley busy while the first draft of his novel slumbered on, until a friend invited him to join the Greater Lehigh Valley Writer's Group, and that stirred something in him. "The guilt trip that the novel was still there in my computer." Marley accepted his friend's invitation, started meeting regularly with a critique group and slowly breathed new life into his novel.
Two main characters draw readers into 21 Yerger Street. One of them is 14 year old Tom, curious, watchful and naive. Like Tom, Marley grew up in Mississippi and when I ask if his debut novel is autobiographical he replies, not missing a beat, "Very definitely. You write what you know and I know my childhood. The difference is the story is all fiction, but the young boy is through my eyes." In other words all the goings on at 21 Yerger Street once the new tenants move in is completely made up. Though, again like Tom, Marley did live next door to a house that stood empty for awhile. "So I peopled it," he says, grinning with the pride and satisfaction of a true fiction writer. The neighbors Marley gives to Tom expose the boy to worlds deeply foreign to his genteel middle class upbringing. By story's end Tom is changed, wise beyond his 14 years and knowing secrets he may never share.
When I compliment Marley on the cinematic quality of his storytelling, especially a scene in the end, he says, "I just imagined I was there and what I would see."
Marley self-published his novel and in September he held a proof copy of it in his hands for the first time. "I really was just 'Wow!' God this is beautiful."
In time, everything changes, even publishing. What was once traditional in the book industry is being undone and rearranged by technology and the explosion of social media. Who dreamed 17 years ago that indie publishing would demand respect? That writers like Marley would get new opportunities to put their work before readers? That in a world flooded with "content" authors would be challenged to put on the hats of marketers and entrepreneurs in order make themselves known?
Marley says the e-book and print version sales of 21 Yerger Street are going well, locally. And though his first royalty check might just about cover the cost of a modest dinner out, Marley's hopes are high that there will be many more readers and more royalties.
www.bywilliammarley.com
www.amazon.com for both print and e-books
and e-books on all platforms
