Q & A with the author

Q. At your age, what prompted you to write a book?
A. I thought about doing some creative writing, and try selling short stories to magazines. So I enrolled in a fiction-writing course at Kent State University. I wrote Chapter I as a short story, and Zee Edgell, my teacher and a published author herself, said I should try to develop it into a book. I took her advice, and wrote chapter after chapter during three more semesters of Fiction I and II.

Q. How did you find going back to the college classroom after a 55-year lapse?
A. What a change! Very informal. I always wore a dress shirt, sweater and tie to class at Marquette. Jeans are in now. There were about a dozen students sitting around a table in a workshop setting. We ate pizza, cookies and drank pop. Everyone read their manuscripts, and we offered criticism. I received a lot of feedback from numerous class members, as well as the journalism professors. I was four times older than my classmates, and twice the age of my teachers, but everyone treated me as just another student. I enjoyed the classes very much, and made a lot of young friends.

Q. Did you have trouble organizing the story?
A. Not at all. I didn’t resort to an outline. I’m a swimming freak, and most often, I would compose each chapter as I swam laps in the Twinsburg rec center pool. There are four main characters, and after a couple of chapters I switched the story line from one to another, to try to keep the readers’ interest.

Q. Is your novel biographical?
A. Edna St. Vincent Millay once said that writing a novel is like taking your clothes off in public. I spent a brief period in the Jesuit seminary in Milford, OH, so I took advantage of that experience. I also worked as an editor of a family magazine published by the Divine Word Fathers at their seminary in Techny, IL. However, many of the seminary events are pure fiction--examples of my imagination run wild. The first chapter was suggested by the death of my sister, Mary Elizabeth, who suffered a stroke and died after 59 days on a respirator. The events at the now defunct St. Elizabeth Hospital in Dayton, OH are also fictionalized. The novel contains many composite characters that I’ve met throughout my 37-year newspaper career. Most of their traits are embellished and exaggerated.

Q. What is setting for your story?
A. I wrote about the area in southwest Ohio where I grew up -- Jamestown, Xenia, Dayton and Cincinnati. Jamestown is my wife’s home area. We were married in St. Augustine Church in Jamestown.

Q. In view of your background as a Catholic newspaper editor. Is this an expose about the Church or the Cleveland diocese?
Is it a religious novel?
A. As one reviewer pointed out, it has a strong Catholic theme throughout. It is a story of an Irish Catholic family in southwest Ohio in the 80’s. But it is not a pious meditation.

Q. Did you use liberal splashes of sex and violence?
A. Not really. There is some violence, but it’s appropriate to the story. One character does spew out World War II army language. In class, we had a disagreement over language. Some young classmates used profane and vulgar language regularly in their descriptive writing. . I insisted that it lowered the standard of their writing, unless they put the words in the mouths of their characters. I lost that argument. Only one classmate agreed.

Q. If you were casting it for a movie, whom would you pick?
A. Ted Lyons, one of my professors, selected Kathy Bates to play the role of Myrtle. Another friend chose Cloris Leachman. Reese Witherspoon could play Jeannie, Liam Neesam fits Ned’s description, and Matt Damon and Ben Afflek would be great as Bob and Tim.

Q. Will there be a sequel?
A. No, I don’t have the energy that I had even four years ago. The book took two or three years to write, plus a lot of time on revisions and corrections.

Q. Any good reviews?
A. The Akron Beacon Journal called it "an enjoyable ride." Sun Newspapers, a Cleveland suburban chain published a biographical sketch; and Catholic News Service which serves about 140 Catholic papers in the U.S. praised it, as did diocesan papers in Baltimore, Denver, Ft. Wayne, Toledo and Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio. Several readers have left positive reviews on Amazon.com

Q. Any other reaction?
A. I’ve had phone calls and e-mail notes from friends I haven’t seen in years. One e-mail in particular was from Marianna Polglase of South Charleston, Ohio. I grew up there and her mother, Annamelia Paxton Wildman was a neighbor and family friend. Marianna appreciated the fact that I honored her mother by using her name for one of the novel’s principal characters. I welcome more feedback. My e-mail address is .