Saturday, December 24, 2011

Tell Them I'm Not Home - a memoir by Pete Byrne

'Tell Them I’m Not Home' is a lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in the Olney section of North Philadelphia in the decade following World War II, a place not unlike Jean Shepherd’s Hammond, Indiana of a decade earlier. The close-quarters life in a blue-collar neighborhood of row-house streets provided the author with a cast of characters, many funny, some scary, as well as a near-endless litany of stories. 'Tell Them I’m Not Home' is a ticket back to the Olney & Philadelphia of the late 1940s and early 1950s, a place as singular, colorful and as lost to today as Hapsburg Vienna or tenement New York.

Pete Byrne

Pete Byrne is a retired corporate and advertising copywriter living in New Jersey. He’s a parent, grandparent, music enthusiast, a sometime painter and a snowboarder, not necessarily in that order.

An Interview with Pete Byrne

What inspired you to write your first book?

Well into my sixties, I found myself trying to answer the question posed by David Byrne (no relation) "...How did I get here?" The gulf between my coming-of-age in the decade between 1945 and 1955 and the early Twenty-First Century seemed unbridgeable in any way other than a book.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

That a reader will take away some authentic feeling or insight into a recent but already unknowable past, a singular, specific past in an urban, blue-collar, Roman Catholic world in the years following World War Two. I don't have a nostalgic bone in my head, and the book is, I believe, absent any of the "Happy Days," "good old days" nonsense that seems to pervade so much of 1950's memory. Then as now, coming of age, despite the material differences, remains pretty much a process of "working on mysteries without any clues."

Is there any special method to your writing?

Initially structure proved the most difficult barrier to getting the book written. It was only when I set the chronological boundaries of 1945 and 1955 that I was able to harness and winnow out the material. I used chronology, the boundaries of the neighborhood and specific subject matter; my family, people in the neighborhood and mostly myself and my memories of how I felt about what was taking place. I used cars, clothes, streets, corners, etc., to organize the flow of the narrative. Each chapter is almost a stand-alone piece, but if the book is read  sequentially it does form a coherent whole.

How many hours a day do you spend reading /writing. 

Constantly. Like most people who write, I'm a printed word obsessive. I read, often to the detriment of more pressing matters. I've written for a living. I've journaled compulsively for over forty years and the journals serve as a place to try things out. I've also been blogging at "The Compost Heap" for the past several years.

What books have most influenced your life?

Wow! From Harvey Kurtzman's EC Comic Books of the early 1950s to the academic canon; Joyce, the Russians, Eliot. Then there's everything Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have written. Russell Banks, John Banville and Richard Russo are on my lists, as are W. G. Sebald and John Gardner. I was a History major and I gravitated toward  the more literate historians, both academic and popular; John Lukacs, Max Hastings, Fritz Stern, Antony Beevor and on and on and on. At this writing, I'm two-thirds through Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence," and I hope that Lethem's terrific writing, like the writing of every author I've ever read and liked, will in some conscious or unconscious way influence my own writing.

If you could be the author of any novel, which would it be and why?

Evelyn Waugh's Second World War trilogy, "Sword of Honor." Even his active service in something as overwhelming as a world war couldn't tarnish his powers of observation or his withering wit. The series also communicates, sadly and gently, his awareness that the war will destroy everything he holds dear in English life.

What are your current projects?

There's a half-finished novel, about 60,000 words to date, on a working life in the belly of a major American corporation. Again referencing Waugh, It' s general tone so far is one of benign if grotesque comedy. There is also a stack of unpublished short pieces that I hope to develop into a short story collection.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

826 National

If you’re looking for any last-minute gifts check out 826 National’s whimsical and creative gifts for your literary friends or readers! How about "Are You Ready To Publish Your Novel" poster, a spirit-boosting Motivational Postcard for Writers Who Need a Little Motivation ("That Thing You're Writing Is Awesome"), or both in the Emergency Novel-Finishing Kit. With these by your computer, that novel will basically write itself, and — best of all — all proceeds go directly to the eight 826 writing centers for under-resourced youth. Check out 826 National's store out for other whimsical and creative gift ideas!

Emily Dickinson Doll

Jack Kerouac's 'The Sea Is My Brother' And Other Lost Novels

Dog’s Walking Song by José Luis Rey, translated from the Spanish by David Francis December 2011

I will eat clouds with you, my famous Verónica.
It will be the night of sirens, of police searching
empty apartments for a starfish,
of the bird that wanted to be a girl.
It will be the day when the school flew.
The bicycles, the rollerblades
have worn down the moon and you don’t come
for teatime at home when it snows. Don’t you know?
I see a forest spinning in the washing machine.
But whenever you want, when you say so,
I will eat with you the hot apples
that tell us: time is a dream, too, the lost fisherman
who in the heavens made of linen wouldn’t know how to read my cards anymore.
Just a bit, a story, a small fragment.
That’s what we are,
drifting cupcakes.
But OK, what are you saying, so solemnly.
Now it doesn’t tend to rain and sunshine doesn’t come in: everything’s different,
say it like this,
everything’s in a different way.
It’s OK, it’s OK, what I want to say
is that we’ve seen things no one would believe:
for example, the harbor on the roof of the room.
I remember vaguely having once gone ashore there,
and everything was orange, the cars, the merchants shouting,
and the machines’ cranes cawing, and mosques in flames, insurrections perhaps.
No one knew to tell me: so many people in turbans.
What will I do with these fragments,
this work of burying bones.
There’s an antique piano on the hill.
When you return Ornella. The privateer plunders the Estate
Delegations in each village.
That’s also how I remember being happy
and another way was by invading the freshness, the years
were leaping forward like trout, the crystal was breaking
and that was our fortune. You came singing in the avalanche.
And now you already see it: inclined this way, I couldn’t spread the morning over us,
the yellow rollerblade that was scraping lines on life.
Oh llamando, llamando, llamando. This is the voice of the shepherds calling.
I wanted to live there and solitude
would ring out at times because you
were speaking or returning from work. And the children tell me
about our trip from yesterday, the moments never
will return and they are mine.
Perhaps our home wasn’t beautiful, deserted in twilight,
with the centuries breaking in like branches?
Do you like this outfit?
I will open the walnut shell’s windows.
With perhaps a little bit of our childhood, with a rusty gesture,
with the white words of winter, with the longing to be
fugitives and young, learning to swim in the adventure,
with that living moment, with the moss on my snout,
traveling through the land from rooftop to rooftop,
with some sort of smile, with the first months of love,
with the days that fall from our ellipse,
with your embrace, which is water, with the things we were,
binding all of this, who knows,
perhaps we have a satchel,
a happy satchel and to walk, to walk.


Robert Frost Ruled Notebook

And I could tell    
What form my dreaming was about to take.

Robert Frost Ruled Notebook

The person on your list a big reader?

Send them some Dzanc titles. Buy One, Get One Free for the Holidays. Simply order one, and enter a note with the title of your free title (of equal or lesser pricing)--this works for both print and eBooks. And as a shopping bonus, every print book you buy (including your free one) that has an eBook available will see you getting that eBook emailed to you immediately. There are additional deals on books at the site via this  link. And if you buy books written by Jeff Kass, Kyle Minor, Michael Czyzniejewski, Matt Bell, Peter Markus, or Steven Gillis, you can even get them signed for that special person you are buying for!!! Any orders of their books will receive the eBooks by email with a question of how you want the print books signed.

For your holiday shopping. Available exclusively from Poets.org


This outfit is perfect for the next generation of poets and future readers in your life, for all to whom Whitman writes: "I consider'd long and seriously of you before you were born."

News from DISQUIET

The second annual DISQUIET: Dzanc Books International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal is now accepting applications and the contest and scholarship competitions are open!

We also have a brand new website: www.disquietinternational.org

2012 guest writers and faculty include: Junot Diaz, Denise Duhamel, John Frey, Robert Olmstead, Anthony De Sa, George Saunders, Richard Zenith, Kim Addonizio, Sally Ashton, Dan Bern, Deanne Fitzmaurice, Frank X. Gaspar, Philip Graham, Christine Hume, Joshua Knelman, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Josip Novakovich, Deb Olin Unferth, Terri Witek, Luísa Costa Gomes, valter hugo mãe, José Luís Peixoto, Jacinto Lucas Pires, Patrícia Reis, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Rui Zink, editors from Dzanc Books, Guernica, and Open Letter, and many others.

This year, in addition, to workshops in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry, we're offering workshops in Songwriting with Dan Bern; Photo-Documentary Storytelling with Pulitzer-Prize winning Photojournalist Deanne Fitzmaurice; and Book Arts with Portland's Independent Publishing Resource Center.

Last year's inaugural program was a resounding success, with more than fifty North American writers gathering in Lisbon for workshops, seminars, talks, and frivolity with contemporary Portuguese writers and artists.

This year's program will take place from July 1 - July 13, 2012 and will include, in addition to the workshops, literary walks and other excursions, craft talks and readings from North American and Portuguese writers.

The International Literature Award: A full scholarship (airfare, tuition and lodging) is available for the winner of the Dzanc Books / Guernica International Literature Award, judged this year by Colson Whitehead. This multi-genre contest seeks poetry, fiction, or non-fiction that broadens the landscape of North American literature beyond the boundaries of North America. The winning work will also be published in Guernica, one of the best literary and cultural magazines on the web.

Full and partial scholarships are also available through a partnership with the Luso-American Development Foundation for North American writers of Portuguese or Luso descent.

The deadline for contest and scholarships is January 31, 2012.

Further details available at our website, http://disquietinternational.org. Please direct any questions to disquietinternational@gmail.com. Join our Facebook Group. And/or like us!

Interesting reading: The Academy of Urbanism in the UK recently voted Lisbon the European City of the Year.

We look forward to seeing you in Lisbon! 

The DISQUIET Staff