Gilded Memories

 GILDED MEMORIES

I want to write again. It eats at me, has been eating at me for more than a decade.

As each of those years passed, I reminded myself that I’d spent many others without putting pen to paper or digits to keyboard. Those days, the urge ate at me insatiably as well, but something always came along to shake me out of it.

I guess I relied on that happening again, until I realized at 78.5 years old I’d best just get on with it.

So, I fooled with a sequel to the novel I wrote in 2014 (Don’t Ya Know) with a WIP called “Healing Properties”. It is the continuing saga of a fictional island off Long Island’s East End. However, the mojo required has failed me, repeatedly, even while I hear my late friend Martha urging me on. (Damnit, Martha. I know. I know.).

I’ve also played with creating a story about my maternal grandparents and their roots in Ireland. I’ve scrapped it. The scenes I write don’t read ‘real’ to me. 

I dabbled with a full-length piece about the oldest, or at least most interesting, book club in Atlanta and loved every minute of its research and writing. It’s a good, solid feature. I was pleased, but not further inspired.

I would venture to write about the impending death of American democracy, however the Heathers, Robin, and Mary Geddry are acing the topic; Anne Lamott covers the fear and faith angle; and,  I’m trying my damndest to engender only kindness in my 80s.

Once upon a time, I wrote weekly features for an old LI newspaper while living on a small Island lush with natural beauty, surrounded by a bay, and ripe with wonderful characters. 

I haven’t lived there for more than three decades, and though I’ve lived long enough to know there are intriguing people and places everywhere, it’s so much harder to see them in the tech corridors and townhomes where I live now (in a city the NYT has named #1 this year for jobs and homes).

My character studies assume no one in this town is like Lottie, our feisty 100 year old Island neighbor who told stories on everyone in residence or Mal, the philosophical seafarer and one time town supervisor who bellowed his truths to all who’d listen or Jimmy, aka Commander Cody, who can still filet a fish faster than most humans while cackling away at some great story about his SC youth.

Currently, all the quirky humans I know are my dearest friends. NDA’s exist, legally binding though implicit.

There was a time when my ‘new’ town hadn’t been discovered globally and  companions to my characters of yore lived here. I was writing about other places then, and I missed the opportunity to feature the former cotton farmers, or the oldest of the Old Soldiers who still marked 1865, or the Methodist quilters who made blankets to comfort any bereaved family in their little town - population 3,000 in the 1980s and 68,000 today. Now, houses with many garages, multiple stories, and enormous windows have replaced modest, mid-Century ranches that dwelled on large tracts of land. Their owners have moved on.

As for our former home, these days I see it as a visitor and note a similar facelift has surgically altered the landscape. It’s true that mansions have looked out at the Long Island Sound for decades. They appeared to respect the sole source aquifer beneath the loamy land. Likewise, generations of bay families had lived harmoniously in cottages along the shores. They fished the waters to make a living. A few of them still do, and I respect the hell out of how difficult it must be. The same for the old family merchants and ancestral residents, the ones who fight to retain what was, but isn’t so much any more. Because the cottages have given way to the colossal second homes of new Island wayfarers - to private planes and personal beaches. They are people living on the land, not with it.

The new structures - there and here - dwarf the characters dwelling within them. The owners aren’t outside caring for their tomato plants, waving to their neighbors, or crossing the street to chat. 

Oh, I know there are exceptions, and thank the good Lord there are many. My own husband, a front yard gardener,  knows all our neighbors by name. That is not me. I’m more of a waver than a chatter, but I understand one simple fact - humans crave interaction. The popularity of Allen Levi’s Theo of Golden supports the theory. In it reside characters galore. Fictional ones, but symbols of the intimacy we’ve lost somewhere along the way and want to read about in record numbers.

And all the while here I am, listening for my voice after so long and wondering what it has to say. It’s me, waving to my reading neighbors while we stop to chat about that pesky American dream becoming gilded again, and I position myself in a boat battling the current where I find myself, like Gatsby, being “borne ceaselessly into the past” and thinking it’s a far more comfortable place to be.

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Fiction: Don’t Ya Know

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-ya-know-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1122048551

Memoirs: Manhasset Stories I & II

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1112360942

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/manhasset-stories-more-baby-boomer-memories-suzanne-mclain-rosenwasser/1113982658

A Video 44 Years in the Making

My husband and I made a video ad for a reading I'm doing of my novel,  Don’t Ya Know. Once again, in the head to head spirit of the 44 years we’ve worked together, we reached the end of a project.

Let me tell you, it isn’t easy to be on a creative roll with one’s spouse. Issues arise, even in a one minute film edit. What we’ve learned to do is keep our mouths shut and take a break when the whole thing sucks.

That’s why this latest production took a bit more time than usual. The learning curve on these computer programs is rough when you only use them once a year. And we’re in our…well, we’re seniors, a group not known for long, IT retention.

“What did we do last year when this happened?”

This question threads our work which positions Michael at the large screen iMac with me speaking over his shoulder.

“Did you save it as a movie file?” I ask.

“I’m going for a Quicktime movie, right? That’s what we did last year, right?”

That much we recall, but QT looks different and iMovie requires an update. The reviews for the update say it’s worse. But we persist with many deep breaths and a few temper flare ups, mostly aimed at Apple. The glitch-filled draft loops by us and through us hundreds of times, maybe thousands over a week.

Consequently, the underscore of the trailer follows me through the day, and then hums through my dreams at night, until the Hallelujah Singers awaken my morning brain with a full throated chorus of "Carry Me Home." I brush my teeth to their harmony and caffeinate myself to the heartbeat of their drums. This will go on for an indefinite period. Perry Como sang in my head for months when we did the promos for Manhasset Stories, so I’m prepared.

Despite the song worms, there are wonderful moments in this work Michael and I do together.  It’s teamwork that began in 1972 when we first met at Chemical Bank in Manhattan. Employees were not allowed to date. It was that simple. We kept our relationship a secret, though we worked a desk apart in a room full of desks. Our subordination solidified us. 

We got married, moved to a great apartment on the East River, and painted a large canvas together, using tape to mask off the colors in our velour sofa. Posting the photo, shown below, took courage; but here's what we turned out, offering proof that love is blind. Note, however: the painting sits down there at the bottom in a collage of our early years. It's the 1970s in New York and that defines an entire era for us.

There’s another scene that plays in my mind’s eye. It took place in our first home in Georgia, shortly before we became parents. One night we worked together over an old electric typewriter perched on the fireplace stoop. We planned to write our story as a memoir, alternating chapters with each other's perspective. It was a one-night wonder.

Later on,  I wrote a children’s story and Michael illustrated it. Then, I wrote a folk singer’s biography, and Michael read the copy three times before the editor saw it. Again, neither of these projects came to fruition, though each had plenty of drama - enough to leave us broken.

But we put ourselves back together and created another life. I wrote for a weekly newspaper, he set the type, and shoulder-to-shoulder, (with a team), we prepared the boards for the printer.

Stormy weather arrived again, figuratively and literally. It tore the life we’d made apart, and we worked night and day to clean up the damage for 20 years straight.

We slowed down when we retired a few years ago, and found ourselves comfortably back in the same old places, working together as we’ve always done.

Here's our latest effort, a book ad for a Long Island reading coming up. Michael is the one who made this minute happen. I was his assistant:

                                                   


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Order paperbacks or ebooks at all online sellers or click here for Amazon orders:

http://amazon.com/author/suzannerosenwasser

Visit:  http//:www.suzannerosenwasser.com

The Mysterious Thread of Creativity

When I finished writing my Long Island-based novel, Don’t Ya Know, in 2014, I wasn’t aware of the Shelter Island, New York discovery of an Indian grave in 2003.  I found this out when a Beta reader for the novel sent me a decade-old article from the New York Times.*

Of course, the five skeletons found on the Shelter Islander's property are not located in an Indian mound, so there is no similarity to the novel there; however,  in the news' story, local historians confirm that a communal grave is an uncommon find, and among the possibilities given for the unusual grave’s existence is a smallpox epidemic.

A skeleton found elsewhere on LI exhibits same position of SI finds.

In Don’t Ya Know, it is 1903 when a Spiritualist spots a gravesite on the fictional Corycian (Core-seen) Island, and she is sure she has found a pre-Columbian phenomenon. Quickly, the owner of the property casts off the Spiritualist’s suppositions:

        

“I don’t know anything about [Indian mounds],” Eula Morely says. “This is a grave for the victims of smallpox and such. They were buried ‘all-a-wanna’ as the natives say, that means ‘all together.’ Indians. All people.  They were buried together to keep the illness of their spirit seeds in one place.”

Sure, I know it isn’t a big leap to assume mass burials took place following any kind of epidemic; however, having the confirmation of the possibility does a writer’s heart good.

Making history align with cultural facts in fiction is a task I haven’t taken lightly. Consequently, the most meaningful compliments I receive often concern the quality of my research. Corycian Island is not Shelter Island, and even though I lit the story with glints of my love for the place, many of the novel’s stories were told by other islands I have known as well. My hope is that the result reflects a sense of time and place familiar to any who are part of the eastern seaboard’s island legacy. One of those compliments came from retired Shelter Island historian, Louise Tuthill Green, whose family’s Island roots run deep. Ms. Green praised the novel as “A gem. A time and place come alive again in a story that blends local color with cultural history.”

And somewhere, in those mysterious threads of creativity, fiction wove with reality. 

Members of the Shinnecock Indian Nation arrived to assess the Shelter Island gravesite in 2003. In my novel, (again: written without knowledge of the actual  find), a “curious coalition” of Montauketts visits Corycian Island in 1926 to challenge the long-rumored Indian mound. The Grand Sachem promises the caretakers of the land: “If this is an Indian burial ground, I assure you I will do all I can to protect it.”

I understand this is another small coincidence. Indian skeletons and artifacts are unearthed all over Long Island. Nonetheless, I lived on Shelter Island year-round for a decade and part of my heart stayed when I had to leave. So, the coincidence, for me, has a reverential quality to it.

In the reality of 2003 and the fiction of the 1900s, modern-day logic is applied to ancient intention. Each of the events is mired in myth and legend. The truth is somewhere in the stories, and isn’t that always the case, don’t ya know.

~~~

* 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/10/nyregion/shelter-island-surprise-is-likely-an-indian-grave.html

http://www.danspapers.com/2013/01/newly-discovered-burial-grounds-stir-debate/

http://www.danspapers.com/2013/01/newly-discovered-burial-grounds-stir-debate/

http://easthamptonstar.com/Archive/2/Tribes-Threaten-Board-Suit-Possible-litigation-over-construction-site-Shelter-Island-dig

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Order paperbacks or ebooks at all online sellers or click here for Amazon orders:

http://amazon.com/author/suzannerosenwasser

Visit:  http//:www.suzannerosenwasser.com

Don't Ya Know is also available at Book Revue in Huntington, LI http://bookrevue.com/index.html