Roland Merullo's Blog

I don't remember exactly how it started, but for a while in the 1990s I was a fairly regular contributor to the Boston Sunday Globe Magazine. It was a time before digital "content", when the newspaper and magazine were both healthy, when there were a lot of opportunities for freelance writers and a lot of courage among editors, and the magazine ran a number of my medium-length essays on subjects as varied as tobacco farming in the Connecticut River Valley, the atmosphere at the Canadian-U.S. border, and a new golf course built from a family farm. They even accepted and published a six-part serialized novella called The Boston Tangler.

Deanne Urmy, an editor at Beacon Press (she's now at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) called the house one day, said she liked the essays, and, somewhat sheepishly, asked if I'd be interested in putting together a book of personal writing. We went to lunch in Boston - I liked her immediately - and that was the start of what became Revere Beach Elegy, a memoir in ten parts.

Some of the pieces had appeared in the Globe, some elsewhere, and half of them were new, written specifically for Deanne. Beacon had, and has, a reputation for making attractive, high-quality books. They did a nice job with Elegy, the reviews were great but sales were modest, and I was unsurprised when they didn't ask for another book, and quite a bit surprised when Elegy won the 2003 Massachusetts Book Award for non-fiction. After some years, the rights reverted to me, and PFP/AJAR Contemporaries reissued the memoir in 2011.

I won't talk about all the essays in the memoir, but I'll mention a couple of favorites. The lead piece, "What a Father Leaves", is a long remembrance of my father, Roland Sr., who talked his way into law school at age 50, with no undergraduate degree, a full-time job, an hour-plus round-trip daily commute by subway, and three teenage sons. Somehow, he managed to graduate and then pass the bar and he enjoyed a few years of private practice before his sudden and untimely death at age 66 in 1982.

He was a wonderfully supportive father and his grit and persistence served as a key example for me when I was struggling to make a writing career. His warmth and devotion serve as daily examples to me now, in my own years of fatherhood.

On a lighter note, there's an essay called "The Notion of North" in which I lived out a slightly weird fantasy. One day I simply got into my car and drove north as far as I could go (with a four-wheel-drive truck I could have gone a bit farther). This was done with the encouragement of my good and adventurous wife, Amanda, (who did not accompany me on that trip) and it led me far up into Canada to a place called Chibougamau, where the trees were about my height, the storefronts had signs in what I believe was Cree, and where I took a cool, solitary dip in a pond fringed with stunted fir and tiny white birch, then turned around and drove back home.

Thanks, I suppose, to a penchant for no - or poor - planning, a spirit of adventure that sometimes borders on the foolhardy, the aforementioned supportive wife, and a determination to make a career of writing rather than pursue something with more security to it, I've had an unusual life. The pieces in Revere Beach Elegy touch upon various stops along that crooked road - a hospital stay during which I grew three inches, a terrifying summer job on the John Hancock Tower as it was being built in Boston, an abbreviated stint in the Peace Corps in Micronesia, years of working in the former USSR, an important trip to Italy, and the beginning of my relationship with Amanda.

As somebody once sang: "Regrets, I've got a few, but then again, too few to mention." I've been very lucky and very unlucky, had a fair share of suffering and more than a fair share of enjoyment. The truest thing I can say is that I have appreciated the simple fact of being alive, and still appreciate it, and I tried to put that sense of appreciation into Elegy.

Strangely enough, that word is associated with mournfulness, and it's really, on balance, a happy book. I suppose the mournfulness comes from the idea, the awareness, that, at some point, the leaf has a short stretch of bright last days, the stem lets go in a storm or a gentle breeze, and you tumble and twist in a final trip back to where you came from. The memories subside. The relationships with those we love, well, who knows - I like to think they persist in what the Bible calls "the fullness of time". Maybe, as Buddhists and Hindus believe, we take another form, learn other lessons, circle back again and again into the lives of the ones closest to us. Or maybe we just play unlimited free golf in heaven with those who made the voyage on an earlier breath of air, and we look back at what we did, or failed to do, and laugh.

In January of 1995, Amanda and I - married sixteen years and childless at that point - flew to Venice for an Italian vacation. My mother, who'd never been to Italy, joined us for the first week and then returned home. For the next two weeks Amanda and I developed a new travel strategy: we'd walk down to the local train station, look at the partenza (departures) board, choose a train destined for a city we'd never seen, buy a ticket, and get on board. There was a beautiful spontaneity and simplicity to that strategy - we had only one piece of luggage each - and it led us to magnificent places in the far north of Italy: Merano, Trento, Verona, and Vipiteno.

Amanda was working as the photographer at the Historic Deerfield Museum then, and had a limited amount of vacation time. I was teaching at Bennington, but only half the year, and there were no classes in January and February in any case. So after three weeks she flew back to work, and I stayed another week, hoping to have a solitary European adventure.

After seeing Amanda off, I rolled my only suitcase down to the Venice train station and looked at the partenza board. There were plenty of destinations to choose from, but the most intriguing option was a midnight train to Zagreb. Jimmy Carter had brokered a Christmas ceasefire in the war there so I figured there wouldn't be much risk. I bought a ticket, killed a few hours, found a seat on that train and went to see what was left of Yugoslavia.

It was a strange decision and a murky ride, a slow trip through darkness and then into a gray Northern Italian winter morning. I had a short layover in Trieste, a pretty city with pastel-colored Austrian-style palazzi along the Adriatic shore. Once the connecting train left Italy and crossed into Slovenia, there were no other passengers in my car. The border agents there and, some hours later when we crossed into Croatia, were understandably suspicious. I told them I was going as a tourist. Sensibly enough they asked: Why would a tourist want to go to a country that, until a few weeks earlier, had been ravaged by war? I was curious, I said. I was a writer. I wanted to see things with my own eyes and I'd heard it wasn't dangerous just then. The fact that I carried a passport with an old photo that showed me with an enormous black beard and a scowling expression didn't help matters. In fact, after a mini-interrogation, the agent at the Croatian border told me, in a somewhat less than kind and friendly way, "You need to get this photo changed. You look like a terrorist."

I arrived in Zagreb in the early morning darkness and it turned out there was one other passenger on the train, an Italian man going to visit a friend or perhaps a lover. The station police took our passports and while they held them and did their research and paperwork, the Italian paced nervously back and forth on the platform, talking to himself and to me, worrying aloud that we might be put back on the next train to Venice....or worse. For whatever reason, I wasn't concerned. I'd spent a lot of time in the USSR in the Seventies and Eighties. I'd been through more passport checks than I could count; I'd seen a hundred stern-faced, suspicious guys in uniform, and nothing really bad had ever happened. From all accounts, the ceasefire was holding - in Croatia, at least - and, though there was horrible fighting, torture and genocide further south, I was fairly sure that Zagreb would be quiet and safe. I had no Croatian money, didn't speak a word of the language, and didn't know anyone there, but I figured that, somehow, it would all work out.

After an hour we were given back our passports. A cab driver took me to a hotel filled with UN peacekeepers and, on the way, told me about a woman he knew who rented a room in her house; it would cost me a third of what the hotel cost. I took his card, spent one night at the hotel, had an interesting conversation with a UN Peacekeeper at breakfast ( "These people will hate each other for the next five hundred years," he said), then moved to the private house for another couple of nights.

During the day I passed the time writing and walking around Zagreb, where the mood was somber but the stores open and moderately well stocked. I found food in the usual way - guesswork, sign language, people who spoke English. Two days of that and I decided to stretch my luck a bit: I took another train to the former tourist city of Opatia on the Dalmatian coast. It was a beautiful place, but there were bombed out buildings on route, and the Opatian hotels were full of refugees from the war. I interviewed one of them, a man who'd been kept in a one-room "camp" prison. Some of his teeth were missing. He told me that one day his jailers walked in, holding crowbars, and started beating the men at the front of the room. He survived; several of his fellow prisoners did not.

After a few days in Opatia I took the slow train back along the coast to Venice and flew home. The twelve-page memoir I wrote about that week remains in a drawer in my office. I look at it from time to time but I've never tried to publish it. I wasn't a war correspondent, after all. I wasn't anywhere near the fighting. I was just a curious American who wanted a glimpse - from a safe distance - of the horror that had been in the news for so many months.

But the point of telling this story here is that, on the month-long trip to Italy and points east, I decided to try a different way of writing a novel. I had brought with me four yellow legal pads, and, pondering one day in my school office, I'd imagined the voice of an old Italian American carpenter, and I'd come up with what I thought was a good first sentence ( "It was a Revere night, the night the life I been holding together all these years started pulling apart." ). I wrote that sentence on the first page of one of the legal pads, and then just kept writing, not planning, not analyzing, not thinking things over, not drawing any kind of outline at all, and never reading what I had written in the previous days and hours.

Some days I'd write twenty or twenty-five pages, longhand. I just poured it out, unselfconsciously, working from a kind of blind intuition that was as innocent and hopeful, in its own way, as our new Italian travel strategy had been. By the time I boarded the plane for home I had 190 handwritten pages of the novel that would eventually become Revere Beach Boulevard. I read it over for the first time on the flight across the Atlantic. It was very rough, but it had a beginning and an end, some sort of plot, and I could hear the voices of most of the ten first-person narrators who would eventually tell the story.

At home, I spent half a year or so reworking those pages, and my agent then, Cynthia Cannell submitted the manuscript to a list of editors. Over the course of 1996 and 1997, they all said no. Our first daughter, Alexandra, was born that December, and Amanda left her job to be a full-time mother. I was overjoyed, of course, and, at the same time, given the new financial pressures and the string of rejections, I was starting to wonder if my writing career was over. I'd published two books in the previous six years - Leaving Losapas in 1991 and A Russian Requiem in 1993 - and had heard very little good writing news since then, a very hard five-year silence.

But on a Friday in January, 1998, three years after the Croatian trip, Cynthia submitted it to Michael Naumann, who was then the Editor in Chief at Henry Holt and Company. He devoured it over the weekend, loved the book, and made an offer on Monday. In a nicely ironic twist, I ended up, in March of that year, doing the final copy-editing in a rented apartment in Lucca, Italy, with Amanda and Alexandra in the next room.

Though he left Holt before the book was published (to become Minister of Culture of Germany), Michael Naumann and I had a nice relationship, and Holt did a good job with the publication. Amanda took a wonderfully haunting photo at Revere Beach and everyone agreed it belonged on the cover. The novel went into paperback, and, a bit later, was optioned for film by the actor Tony Musante. Though it was not made into a film, the story lives on to this day, 22 years later, selling a few hundred copies a year purely by word of mouth.

I can't look at the photo on that cover without thinking of the trip to Croatia. It was an odd thing to do - careless, hopeful, naïve, maybe even a bit brave - and writing the novel that way was odd and hopeful, too. I just went forward on faith, figuring things would work out. Strangely enough, after Boulevard, I've written most of my books with that new technique, and I've never again had a five-year stretch without publishing something.

I've taught in a number of workshops, conferences, and MFA programs: Queen's College in NC, Lesley U. low-res MFA in MA, Stonecoast (U of Southern Maine), Solstice (Pine Manor College)also MA, and Writers in Paradise (Eckerd College) FL, among others, and have always been amazed and heartened by the passion for writing that so many people bring to those gatherings.

In the past year I've put together two of my own: a weeklong writers' conference in Orvieto, Italy (there is still one space left for the second installment, May 28-June3, 2020), and a one-day meditation/writing workshop held in Northampton, MA last week.

Like most teachers, I've always run these workshops with an emphasis on respect, and here's why: if someone had looked at my writing in, say, 1985, they would have given me little chance to ever publish a book, let alone the two dozen I have published. I always keep that in mind. People improve at different speeds, and you never know if someone whose work seems only fair, might produce something tremendous a few years down the road.

Beyond that, though, people often come to these workshops and conferences to have their passion for writing validated by the presence of like-minded souls. The last thing I would ever do would be to dissuade or disrespect them. Unlike, say, athletes or actors, writers don't attract hundreds of thousands of rabid fans. It's a quieter satisfaction, a subtler--but I would argue, more valuable--contribution to this world. So it's not a bad thing at all to spend a day or a week among others who value the written word. And it's appropriate for writers who lead these workshops to offer criticism and suggestion, but always with respect.

For me, as a teacher/facilitator of these discussions, the satisfaction lies in helping people gain the technical skills necessary to tell their stories, whether fact or fiction. Everyone has a story. Most people have many stories, and part of the reward of teaching is getting to hear them all, having a window into so many aspects of human life.

Sometimes difficult subjects come up--I've had people write about loss and addiction and abuse--but often we'll have humorous moments, too, and just about always there will be a kind of light in the room. It comes, I think, from the courage to share what you've experienced or created. When we write, we can't help but strip away some of the social protection that guards all of us in our day-to-day world. When we read, we connect to the writer at a level of intimacy that's also rare.

There are lots of good workshops out there. If that's the kind of community you enjoy, I hope you find one that's right for you, a teacher/facilitator/professional writer who is not only experienced and competent, but respectful and supportive as well...because it can be a very lonely business.

I always find it much harder to put together a readable draft than to polish and edit it once it's on the page. The former feels to me like pushing a big round boulder up a steep incline, and the latter like pushing it across a flat plateau once I've gotten it up there.

I know that a lot of writers have a resistance to rewriting. I understand that. It takes great patience, and a tolerance for 'hearing' your own words over and over again. (I have a chapter on that in my small writing-advice book Demons of the Blank page). And it's so easy to have a 'this-is-good-enough' mindset.

But 'good enough' isn't that appealing to agents and editors, and probably not as memorable to readers. It would be like spending months or years crafting a beautiful rocking chair and then not bothering to sand or finish the wood.

I'm in the midst of editing another WWII novel, set in Italy, like Once Night Falls, but in Naples rather than Lake Como. The research was fun; Naples is a wonderful place. The assembling of the story was a minor nightmare of infinite possibilities and the need to stay close to historical facts, but the polishing is a pleasure. I go very slowly, checking details, making small adjustments, adding, changing, cutting.

The sad truth is, we could continue to polish forever. At some point, you have to let the book go. When I get to where I'm taking commas out on one read-through and putting them back in on the next, I know I'm finished.

It all started in ninth grade. I moved from Revere public schools to St. John's Prep in Danvers, Massachusetts, and for reasons known only to God and the administrators there, was given, as one of my five subjects, Russian Language. I remember getting my list of courses and being puzzled. Russian? I hadn't signed up for Russian! I'd struggled with French in junior high; Russian sounded so much harder.

That turned out to be true. I was a terrible Russian student at St. John's, and later at Phillips Exeter, and even later at Boston University and Brown. But I loved the literature so much that I kept going, and ended up majoring in Russian Studies and getting a Master's in Russian Language and Literature.

Still, even after nine years of study, I couldn't speak well at all. But I'd put in so much time that I figured it would make sense to try to go to the country where the language was spoken. Maybe I learned better that way, living the language rather than studying it.

My wonderful grad school advisor, Dr. Victor Terras, told me about a program run by the United States Information Agency, a branch of the State Department. The USIA put together traveling cultural exchange exhibits in the USSR and they were looking for Russian-speaking American guides.

It doesn't sound like much, "traveling cultural exchange exhibit", but it was actually a very successful anti-propaganda campaign, and the exhibits themselves were like traveling museums. In those years (my first tour was in 1977 when Brezhnev was running the country), the Soviet government had extremely tight control over information that reached its citizens. With precious few exceptions, Soviets could not travel abroad. At home, the media depicted America, and the West in general, as a version of hell where police were constantly beating students, where blacks and white could not sit down at the same table, where the streets were littered with homeless men and women, where only a tiny group of Capitalists lived well, and the rest of us were a step above slavery.

Our exhibits, meant to counter that propaganda and allowed because we paid the Soviets in dollars, (a convertible currency), were huge, expensive affairs, sometimes as much as 50 container loads of displays and equipment, 10,000 square feet of various exhibits centered on a particular theme of American life.

I was hired for Photography USA, which had everything from a portrait gallery, a working darkroom, a circular slide-show, Polaroid SX-70s and other exotic-at-the-time photo equipment. It was manned by 25 Russian-speaking American guides, of which I was one. We helped set up the exhibit in Ufa, a city about 900 miles east of Moscow, and 15,000 people a day came through the doors to gawk at an America they had never read or heard about, and to fire questions at the guides.

My Russian was shaky at first, but we worked six days a week for six weeks in each of three cities, answering questions asked by a circle of visitors sometimes three and four-deep around each guide, and we often went out with Soviet friends at night, so it improved quickly. After that eight-month tour, I was called back again in 1987-88 to work as General Services Officer - basically overseeing set-up and take-down, customs clearance, and security - on Information USA, and then, in 1989-90 as Field Director of Design USA (a show that included a rotating red Chevy Corvette, a working graphic design studio, an American kitchen and lots of other beautiful stuff).

Amanda came with me on those last two tours, and did a lot of video and photo work for the show. She also taught herself Russian by walking around the streets taking pictures and talking to people and listening to guides on the stand!

It's hard for us to overstate the impact of those tours (28 months for me, over a thirteen-year stretch). We met some of the bravest, kindest, and most memorable people we've ever known, exhibit visitors who were willing, at great risk, to have us as guests in their homes, to feed us meals that cost them a week's pay or more, to give us gifts, thank us for our work. We saw, first- hand, both Soviet communism and, in the later tours, the death of Soviet communism. We stayed in Soviet hotels, ate in Soviet restaurants, vacationed between cities in Soviet resorts. We saw the country from Leningrad to Irkutsk, from Ufa to Tashkent, from Tbilisi to Kiev to Novosibirsk.

By the time of the third tour I'd already had a book accepted by Houghton Mifflin, so it seemed natural for me to write about the USSR. In 1991 I started a novel that became A Russian Requiem. It was bought by a man at Grove Press who was considered the dean of American literary editors, Alan Williams - he'd edited such luminaries as Saul Bellow - but he resigned while the book was in production. My agent moved me to Little, Brown, my editor there resigned or was fired the day the book came out, and it sold poorly and never went into paperback.

It's a fairly complicated novel - a lot of suspense, a lot of characters with Russian names - but some people (my well-read mother for one) consider it my most literary and best-wrought work. I can't say.

All I can say is that I tried to put into it everything I'd seen, felt, and experienced in the former USSR - all the beauty, all the horror, all the eccentric characters, and at the same time tried to say something about communism, and capitalism, and America, and love, and fear.

I hated Little, Brown's cover, though. Some years ago PFP reissued the novel, with a beautiful cover photo taken by Amanda, and I've had some nice notes from readers since then. It's very different from the Revere books and the Buddha books, but I've always tried to write about what I care about. And in the early nineties, our time in the Soviet Union had left an indelible mark, and so, when I went to the well, what came up was Russian water.

In 2010 we were fortunate enough to be invited back to Russia by my good friend John Beyrle. John and I had been guides together. He'd moved on to the Foreign Service, eventually becoming US Ambassador to Bulgaria and then to Russia. All four of us went - the girls were 12 and 8 at that point - and we stayed for five nights in the Metropol Hotel, where I'd stayed as a guide, and then, thanks to John's generosity, five more nights in Spaso House, the Ambassador's residence.

The city had changed to the point where it was all but unrecognizable, but we still found the Russian sincerity and generosity, and, for the girls, it was the experience of their young lives. I don't know if I'll ever go back again. My Russian is as rusty as an old hoe left out in the yard for three winters, and it's very sad for me to see the way Putin has dragged the society back into the past.

But I still speak Russian in my dreams once in a while, and still remember some great train rides and vodka-sweetened nights. So . . . maybe. And maybe there will be another book about the place, a little more water in that well.

Leaving Losapas tells the story of a Vietnam veteran who chooses to live in the Pacific islands after his tour ends, rather than coming home.



As many of you know, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia in 1978. I went there with high and altruistic hopes, and ended up on a tiny atoll you could walk around in fifteen minutes. Way off in the distance, you could see one other small island; the rest was ocean and sky.

There were no other volunteers on my island, and no other Americans - which wasn't a problem for me. But there was absolutely nothing to do, which was a big problem. I hadn't gone into the Peace Corps to have an adventure; I'd gone to help people. It turned out that the people on this island needed very little help, and the kind of help they needed - medical care, mostly - I wasn't equipped to provide (though I did help save the leg of a young man who'd cut himself to the bone with an accidental swipe of the machete).

So I spearfished for hours every day, made circuits of the island as if it were a running track, started to carve a chess set, did battle with the coconut rats that invaded my rooms at night, contracted intestinal worms and terrible ear and prostate infections, but otherwise just sat around in the tropical heat for hours on end. I am not good at doing nothing, especially in tropical heat and humidity.

A field-trip ship came every couple of months with mail and medicine, but there were long stretches between those visits and eventually the boredom and the sense that I was wasting my life became too much for me. I gave away my snorkeling gear, took one of these ships to the main island, refused the Peace Corps' offer for reassignment to another country, and flew home.

I moved in with Amanda - we've been married for 35 years - in a ratty apartment in Allston, Massachusetts, a part of Boston.

(Please see "Low-Rent Rendezvous" from Revere Beach Elegy: A Memoir of Home & Beyond. )



I did various things to make money - drove a cab, loaded trucks, did temp work, made phone calls for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. And in my spare time I went to the Allston Public Library and wrote with a BIC ballpoint and a yellow legal pad.

I had carried a lot of health problems home from paradise. I had no health insurance, very little money, and I was disappointed in myself - ashamed, really - for having quit the thing I'd been dreaming about doing for a long time. Writing, and the dream of one day publishing a book, was an anchor that kept me from floating out into Boston Harbor on a tide of discouragement. I spent hours and hours and hours in that library - a very noisy place! - trying to write about the amazing things I'd seen in Micronesia, trying to describe a world that was all but untouched by human 'development'.

A year or so later, in the fall of 1979, just before we got married, we moved to Martha's Vineyard so Amanda could take a job teaching Spanish at the high school there. I found work with a carpenter - but only three days a week, so I would have time to write. After one difficult school year, and one bleak island winter, we decided Martha's Vineyard wasn't for us and we moved up to Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I coached the Williams College men's freshman crew team (for no money!) and Amanda found work first as a waitress, then as a bartender, and finally as a photographer at the Clark Art Institute.

I started my own handyman business, which was so unsuccessful at first that I had plenty of time to write - in the Williams College Library this time, or in our cold apartment wearing my down jacket. At one point I was so discouraged, and still so sick, physically, that I took the 400 pages I'd written since coming back from the islands, carried them around to the dumpster behind our humble, unfurnished, and freezing apartment, and threw them away.

Do I regret doing that? YES!

But through carpentry I met a wonderful man named Michael Miller. Michael had been in the Marines and had never gone to college, but he was - and is - one of the best-read people I've ever known. While doing a small job on the house where he lived with his wife and infant son, I told him I was trying to write, something I revealed to almost no one in those days.

He offered to read what I was writing - mostly poetry and essays then. One night a week for several years we went out for a beer or a meal and talked about books. He read and marked up my pages, and he was nothing if not honest: He'd X out whole pages and scribble "BULLSHIT!" at the top. Or he'd circle a paragraph and write, "You have a great gift!" He recommended books and films, and kept telling me that, even though I was in my thirties, I wasn't too old to make a career of writing. Lots of writers hadn't published their first book until middle age or older.

He was, in other words, a kind of angel, an incredibly generous and wise man who taught me about writing and about life. (You might like his new book of poetry, Lifelines , published by Pinyon).

As, error by error, I learned the trade, my one-man carpentry business became more successful. Amanda was hired at the Clark. We bought a four-room house, two miles down a dirt road in nearby Pownal, Vermont. I'd come home after a day banging nails, have dinner, wash the dishes, then go down into a corner of our unfinished basement and write until I was too tired to go on. We had a dog we loved, a house of our own; we were putting money away, but I was pretty much obsessed by the idea, that impossible dream, of making a living as a writer.

After one of our beers - at the Williams Inn - Michael said to me, "You should write a novel."

"Michael," I told him, "I can't get a story or a poem published. I can't even get a ten-line "tip" published in a carpentry magazine to earn twenty-five bucks, and you're telling me to write a novel!"

"Well, some people are sprinters and some people are long-distance runners," he said. "Maybe you're a long-distance runner."

Those words made a huge difference in my life, though I kept sending out essays and poems and "tips" and getting back nothing but rejections. In January of 1984, I had a funny little essay published in the "My Turn" column of Newsweek. I was paid $1,000 for that piece - a spoof on the number of television replays during a football game - which was more than I made in a month of building decks and hanging doors.

That bit of success and Michael's advice encouraged me to start the book that would become Leaving Losapas. I set it in Micronesia, on an island very much like the one where I'd served, but I didn't want to have the main character be a Peace Corps volunteer.

In February of that year, using some of the thousand bucks (Amanda and I used another part of it to take a vacation in Puerto Vallarta; plane flights were cheaper then.) I made a trip to Chico, California, to see a Peace Corps friend, Russ Hammer. While I was there (helping him out at his streetside flower stand during the busy Valentine's Day rush) I read a very small article in the local paper about Vietnam veterans who were living up in the Sierras.

Probably because of what they'd been through in Southeast Asia, these men wanted nothing to do with society, but chose to live in a way not so different from the way the Micronesians live: they hunted and fished and grew food. I'd had two cousins who fought in Vietnam; the plight of returning vets had a special emotional resonance for me. And so I decided that would be the reason why my main character, Leo Markin, was living on a tiny atoll in the Central Pacific.

In 1986, having ruptured a disc in my lower back, and working in constant pain (Anyone ever had sciatica? Anyone ever tried to do carpentry for eight months while having sciatica? Fun!), I decided to try something crazy and convinced Amanda to go along. I sold my truck, she took a leave of absence from the Clark, I took out every penny I had in the bank and we went to live in Mexico for three months so I could finish the novel and let the back heal (I did, it didn't).

We lived in five-dollar-a-night fleabag hotels, were a bit hungry at times, but she kept busy taking photos, and I kept busy pounding out the last part of the first draft of my book on a manual typewriter we'd bought there. We spent a month each in Merida, San Luis Potosi, and Mazatlan, had a few adventures, met some nice people, and came home broke.

But I had a finished book.

Back surgery in 1987 effectively ended my carpentry career and I will always be grateful to my friend, Peter Grudin ( Right Here )- someone I also met through carpentry - who lent me his only computer during my recuperation, and taught me how to use it. He's been a supporter of my writing for almost thirty years now.



I'm grateful, also, to another carpenter/writer, the novelist Dean Crawford ( The Lay of the Land , who offered to introduce me to his agent, Susan Lescher.



At that point - early 1987 - I was called back to work on USIA exhibits in the former USSR. Amanda left her job and joined me on that thirteen-month adventure, and, hoping that Susan would agree to take me on, I worked on polishing the book in my few off hours.

We were still over there, behind the Iron Curtain, when she took me on as a client. When we returned home - it was the fall of 1988 by this point, and I'd been working on Losapas for four years, from Mazatlan to Moscow - we moved to the house where we currently live, on a paved road in the hills of Western Massachusetts. One fine Friday afternoon Susan called to say that an editor at Houghton Mifflin had read the first half of the book and loved it. He promised to read the rest over the weekend and let us know on Monday.

On Monday she called with the bad news that the editor didn't like the second part very much and wasn't going to make an offer. That was probably the most disappointing phone call of my life. "But," Susan said, "and this is unusual, he liked the first part enough to say he'd be happy to talk about the second half with you if you want to give him a call. I know you're disappointed, but I think you should take him up on that."

It took me a full day to recover and to build up the courage, but then I called the editor - John Sterling - and he mounted a very convincing argument as to why the second half of my novel didn't work. He said he'd be willing to consider it again if I rewrote it.

So I did.

It was a huge, difficult, and complicated rewrite, that took six months and every ounce of self-belief I had. When I finished, I naively carried the manuscript to the Houghton Mifflin office on Park Street and handed it over in person - to a secretary who, sensibly enough, wouldn't let me go upstairs.

Four months later, John Sterling invited me to Boston and made a very low offer on the book ($7,500), but it felt like five hundred thousand to me. He introduced me to the woman who would edit it, Janet Silver. I left the offices and floated around the city on a cloud. Janet did a wonderful job, as did the publicist, Lorie Glazer. The book came out in 1991, had great reviews all over the country, an embarrassingly nice blurb from one of my literary heroes, Robert Stone, ( A Flag For Sunrise but it sold modestly, only about 6,000 copies in hardcover.



I'd always thought I'd be "all set" once I had a book published, that I could, as the saying goes, quit my day job. That wasn't the case. But I'd worked on that book for six and a half years, at times holding to the thinnest filament of dream. Amanda had been amazingly supportive - as she still is - during that time, and, though I wouldn't be able to 'quit my day job' for another ten years, that day was the start of something.

I always mark that date - June 29th - with a dose of gratitude and a bit of pride, and remind myself of Churchill's famous dictum: Never, ever, ever surrender.

Well, that's the truncated version of a much longer tale. I hope it's of some interest - maybe to the writers among you.

[An excerpt from the December 2014 Newsletter]

Wherever you pitch your tent in our politically and socially divided land, and whatever holiday you celebrate in the last weeks of the year, I extend my warmest thoughts to you for an enjoyable season and a healthy and peaceful New Year.

For us, the holiday is Christmas. I like the lights and the music and the traditions, and I've always liked the stories associated with the religious aspect of the season - Christ's humble birth, the mysterious intuition of the three wise men, angels and shepherds and happy new parents who are also, maybe, a little bit afraid. Of course, our crazy commercial appetites have taken the wise men's reverent generosity and turned it into things like the stampedes on Black Friday and the financial pressures of showing our kids we love them by showering them with the gift-of-the-year and assorted other things nobody really needs.

But somehow, within the foolishness of all that, I am able to hold onto a scrap of quiet satisfaction. I was raised among generous, fun-loving relatives and I like giving things to people I care about. I don't mind the holiday gatherings as much as I used to. Food, family, friends, a glass of vodka, time off from work for most of us - it's hard to be a Scrooge about those things.

Not so hard to be Scroogish about, or at least upset by, the news in the latter part of this year. However you look at the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, and Cleveland, it's obvious that, so many years after the abolition of slavery, we haven't yet been able to make a true, deep, and lasting peace across the national racial divide. Of late, I've also been more aware than usual of the male-female divide, the liberal-conservative divide, the rich-poor divide, and of a swelling tide of anger in the country I care so much about.

"Why so angry?" Rinpoche asks Otto in Breakfast with Buddha, and I've been pondering that same question a lot these days.

Are there legitimate grievances involved, real reasons for anger in those areas?

Yes, obviously and of course.

Is violent anger and hatred productive? Does it actually move us in a direction of addressing those grievances?

I don't think so.

I think it deepens the divides - all of them - alienates the "Other", whoever that other might be, and while it seems, in the moment, a perfectly legitimate outlet for the frustration that comes from generations of inequity, I don't see any evidence that violence, fury, divisive speech, revenge, or hatred moves us so much as a millimeter in the direction of a just, peaceful, harmonious society.

I'm not advocating the idea that if we all simply smile at each other everything will be fine.

Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Aung San Suu Kyi, the brave Soviet/Russian dissidents of years past and times present, workers who risked and sometimes lost their lives so that we'd have decent wages and safe working conditions, women who broke old stereotypes so that - for one small example - my daughters are now able to participate in sports programs and aspire to every kind of career and lifestyle - they are all examples of people who had real grievances and who found the courage to stand up and bring about change.

But when those movements toward fairness take on a cargo of hatred or divisiveness, my own sympathy for the cause is eroded.

Fighting for justice without giving in to hatred is an extremely difficult moral challenge. I listen to talk radio sometimes on my late-night trips home from a speaking event, and the mockery, ridicule, name-calling, divisiveness, convenient bending of the truth, and brutally one-sided thinking makes me have to wrestle with my own anger. It makes the Loud Ones feel good, that kind of talk. There's often the stink of the bully to it, the urge for power, victory, vengeance, the need to have an Enemy. There's a satisfaction in feeling that you and your cronies are right, and that the oppressive Other is the cause of every wrong.

I try, in my own work and despite my own failings, to be a force acting against all of that. I have white characters marrying black characters ( In Revere, In Those Days) and loving brown characters (Leaving Losapas). I have people with old-school mindsets struggling to be open to the full humanity of a homosexual child (Revere Beach Boulevard). I have caring and strong men and brave handicapped women (A Little Love Story). I have people struggling with addiction (The Return). I have Jesus coming to earth and running for president on a platform that tries to respect both right and left and foster dialogue (American Savior). I have strong women (Fidel's Last Days, Vatican Waltz, A Russian Requiem) and people trying to climb out of the grip of abuse and poverty (The Talk-Funny Girl). I have, I hope, open-minded and respectful discussions about spirituality (Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Buddha), and I try to put in a measure of humor (Golfing with God, Taking the Kids to Italy, The Italian Summer, and others) because humor can be medicine for the sometimes self-righteous attitudes that plague us.

I have the good, the bad, and the ugly, but, like most serious novelists I try to make them individuals, not clichés, not types, not representatives of a certain gender, race, or class, but actual, complicated, human individuals. I try to see the world that way, too: each person a human being first, and then woman or man or black or white or Asian or Hispanic or Native American or straight or gay or liberal or conservative only as a secondary characteristic.

I do battle, in my books - and in real life - with my own prejudices and slanted attitudes, my own assumptions and close-mindedness, the limits of my own empathy and courage. That battle is what life is about, it seems to me, or at least a big part of what life is about. I try to laugh at myself on occasion, try to feel others' pain to the extent humanly possible. And, even in times like these, maybe especially in this season, I try hard to avoid oversimplifying the massively complex predicament that is human life and to avoid the false salve of finding someone else to blame for all America's troubles.

Wherever you stand in that conversation, whichever ring in the human circus you inhabit, I send - in this season and beyond - an abundance of good wishes to you all.

If you are interested in being part of our second annual Orvieto Writers’ Conference, please email me at Roland@RolandMerullo.com.

The conference will run for six nights and seven days, from May 28 to Jun 3, 2020, and will be held at the beautiful Locanda Rosati, an agriturismo, or Italian country inn, just outside the marvelous small city of Orvieto, an hour north of Rome.

The Locanda offers simple, elegant rooms with air conditioning, linen service, and free Wi-Fi, along with three delicious meals each day—a buffet breakfast with fruit, yogurt, coffee of choice, cakes, cereal, eggs, etc. A lunch buffet that is usually a variety of vegetarian dishes, salads, sometimes pizza. And a phenomenal four-course dinner with appetizer, pasta course, meat course, and dessert. There is unlimited local white and red wine at both lunch and dinner, and the Locanda’s chef can prepare meals for people with various dietary preferences and restrictions— vegetarian, gluten free, vegan, etc.

There is a full-size outdoor swimming pool, sitting rooms, two patios, and very nice grounds.

In addition to the food and lodging, the conference fee includes optional meditation and yoga classes every morning, one wine tasting at a nearby vineyard, and four hours of daily writing workshops held, weather permitting, outdoors, in an ivy-covered arbor on the property.

* One morning during the week will be devoted to a talk on the intricacies of publishing, given by Emma Sweeney—just retiring from decades as a premier New York literary agent. During the afternoon, she will meet one-on-one with writers to answer questions about the publishing process.

* Morning workshops will be run by Roland Merullo (see RolandMerullo.com)

* Afternoon workshops will be run by Robert Braile (former Boston Globe book critic and long-time environmental journalist for the Globe, the New York Times, and numerous other publications. Bob has taught at Dartmouth College, Phillips Academy, The Goddard Writing Workshops, and The Waring School). He was with us in the 2019 conference, and is a superb and beloved editor and teacher.

Writers of all levels of ability and experience are welcome. We will meet you where you are. The atmosphere is relaxed and always respectful, but there is also serious writing advice for those who want it. We occupy the entire Locanda (11 rooms) and have dinner every night at a long table. Comments from last June’s writers are available.

Airfare to Rome and train fare between Rome to the Orvieto station (about $10) are your responsibility. We will give you travel advice, pick you up at the station on the first day, return you there on the last day, and drive you back and forth to Orvieto during free hours if you wish to take advantage of the sightseeing and shopping there (great ceramics and white wine). Non-writing spouses/friends/significant others/adult children are most welcome—at a reduced rate—and can participate in all activities except the workshops.

For fees and further information, kindly drop me a note at Roland@RolandMerullo.com. At the present time, we are already half full, and people will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. I’ll hope to see you in Italy.

You can see:
- the inn here: https://www.locandarosati.it
- and the city here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orvieto

[written for the Boston Globe July 2013]

I find myself wondering why we don’t have a Children’s Day, one unofficial holiday that formalizes our appreciation for the non-adults among us. Maybe the card and gift companies just haven’t thought of that yet. Maybe most parents are still emotionally and financially depleted from the materialistic orgy that used to be known as Christmas. Or maybe we feel we already spend enough of our waking hours acknowledging our children: driving them to ballet class or hockey practice, regulating their use of a baffling array of electronic devices, guarding them against insult, illness, and failure, or simply earning enough money to feed and clothe them.

On most days, you don’t have to look very hard to find examples of parental affection. In a café last month, killing time before picking up one of my daughters from school, I watched a new mother carrying her small son around the room. He was a restless little guy, inquisitive and energetic, and you could see, in the way the woman held and looked at him, the very essence of love. On the soccer sidelines, most mothers and fathers are encouraging and proud, having taken time away from household chores, golf, work, or recreational shopping to stand there and watch their kids burn through the unrenewable energy source we call youth.

That same love is painfully obvious in the lives of single parents and those working multiple jobs, in mothers and fathers with handicapped children, and in the pediatric hospital corridors. Any mom, dad, uncle, or aunt who’s ever experienced a very sick child, or, worse, a chronically or critically ill one, knows how the brutal mystery of life’s apparent unfairness rips at the insides.

That awful feeling is nothing less than the tearing of the fibers of love’s flesh. It’s a torment second only to the torment of losing a son or daughter. It’s also a tangible measure of how much we care.

Then, of course, there are those who don’t care so much. We’ve all seen them. There are fathers and mothers who have everything they need in the way of material goods and yet choose a lifestyle that minimizes time spent with their children. Some parents hit, some scream, some criticize mercilessly, some flee the responsibility entirely, and some just don’t pay attention.

To one extent or another we all take out our insecurities, dissatisfactions, and unfulfilled needs on our kids: They’re easy targets. We dislike our body, our job, our spouse, our debts, our boss, or our own mother or father, and that sly anguish gets passed along in ways that are hidden or all too obvious.

In “The Drama of the Gifted Child,’’ psychologist Alice Miller writes, “Only if we become sensitive to the fine and subtle ways in which a child may suffer humiliation can we hope to develop the respect for him that a child needs from the very first day of his life onward if he is to develop emotionally.”



And yet, children are continually being humiliated — by bullies in the classroom and by overbearing parents, coaches, and teachers. The ultimate example is the plague of sexual abuse, a societal sickness, a planetary disgrace, a blight on our collective spiritual life that has consequences so deep and far reaching we can’t begin to measure them. Somehow, most children survive, physically and otherwise, and stand among us like monuments to human resiliency.

This isn’t a call for “helicopter parenting,’’ or for the kind of self-indulgence that encourages catering to a child’s every whim and behavior. That’s not love; that’s laziness. Or, more precisely, it’s the parent hoping to salve his or her own wounds by trying to protect the child from every pain, real and imagined.

There is no such thing as completely protecting our children from pain. But there is such a thing as taking them for granted. So maybe, despite the ways in which the card and gift companies would surely corrupt it, Children’s Day isn’t such a bad idea after all — one day a year to do more explicitly what many of us do all the time: be grateful for this gift in our midst.

Thirty-five years ago, in 1984, I was making my living running a one-man carpentry business in Williamstown, Massachusetts. A few years earlier, my father had found me an old Sears van at auction and had it fixed up and repainted. In that van I carried around a modest collection of tools from six months working with a carpenter on Martha's Vineyard during the one awful winter we lived there, and four years of intermittent odd jobs and small projects, after each one of which I'd try to buy a new tool. I had a regular ad in the local newspaper that brought in enough work to let me pay my share of the bills (Amanda was bartending then at a restaurant that no longer exists, The River House, in Williamstown. We'd just bought our first house - for $40,000 - a four-room cape two miles down a dirt road, just over the border in southwestern Vermont). I took whatever offers came along: painting, decks, steps, shingling, simple repairs, easy tile jobs, even a bit of masonry and roofing.



One evening that summer I had a call from a woman who told me her name was Nancy Doherty. She said she lived in a big house on South Street that needed work. Could I come over and take a look and maybe give an estimate?

It turned out that Nancy was married to Joe McGinniss, the famous author of, among other books, THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT. The house they lived in, a gracious and rambling old creature, had carpenter ants in the raised back deck and a lot of structural rot there. It was a fairly big job, by my standards, and I was glad to have the work.



By then I had been writing seriously for about seven years and desperately wanted to make a career as a writer. But, I never used that word in describing myself; the dream of the writing life meant too much to me.

One of my rules was that I would never say I was a writer until, or unless, I published a novel. And another of my rules was that I would try not to 'use' people, that I'd avoid making the acquaintance of well known writers just for the purpose of cultivating contacts in the publishing world.

So, though Joe and I had a number of conversations during the weeks I spent fixing up his house, I never mentioned my secret passion. He was working hard on the book that would become FATAL VISION, a tragic story that became a big bestseller and ended up making him and Nancy some real money. But he was worried about money then, and worried, I think, about his career, and on breaks from his desk, he'd come outside and talk to me about the book, and I could tell it was a very difficult time for him, a very difficult book to get right under that kind of pressure.



I finished the job late that summer and, in October, got word that I'd been invited to the Edna St. Vincent Millay artists' colony in Austerlitz, New York. One full month of lodging, food, and a place to write, all expenses paid. It was the first piece of news I'd had that made me think I might actually have a shot at becoming a published writer. Before that, with one or two exceptions, I'd had nothing but a long list of rejections and many hours of doubt.



The residency was scheduled for February. I wrote longhand in those days, then typed up the manuscripts on an electric typewriter. The day I left for the Millay Colony I went down to the stationery store in Williamstown and bought some supplies. As I was leaving I happened to bump into Joe. He asked me what I was doing. I told him about the Millay invitation and he seemed both surprised and sincerely pleased for me. "When you finish the novel, let me take a look," he said.

I did send him an early draft of the novel and he did read part of it, but I didn't hear much beyond a short, encouraging note.

Thirty years ago, in June of 1989, that same novel, LEAVING LOSAPAS, was finally accepted. I'd been working on it for five years by then, and been working at writing - mostly at night and on weekends - for eleven years. The editor at Houghton Mifflin asked if I knew any writers who might provide a blurb. I mentioned Joe's name, and Joe was generous enough to read the finished book and give me a beautiful quote for the jacket. From that point on we stayed in touch fairly regularly. In January of 1993 he turned down a teaching job at Bennington College, but recommended me for the position, and I ended up teaching Literature and Writing there, meeting some very fine students and fellow teachers, before resigning in protest of faculty firings at the end of 1999.



Joe was a complicated guy, as the saying goes, and he made some mistakes in his life and career. (Who among us, upon honest reflection, has not?) But he was also a superb writer, a big-hearted guy, a fan of the underdog, a doer of many favors, and I was certainly one of the beneficiaries of his kindness. He died a few years ago and Nancy asked me to be one of the people who spoke at the memorial service in New York. I was honored, naturally, and I hold onto a lot of good memories connected to that day, and to Joe and Nancy.

I remember certain things he said over the course of our acquaintance. One comment in particular sticks in my mind, because my novel, ONCE NIGHT FALLS, was released yesterday by Lake Union Publishing.



"On the day your book gets published," Joe said, "You expect a parade to go by your house. Fire engines, marching bands, the whole show. But that doesn't happen."

These days, after twenty plus publications, I understand what he meant by that remark. It's not that I take a new publication for granted. I don't. Just the opposite, in fact: you've put months or years into the book, you've gone through all the various stages: the agent sends it out, you wait for news, you get bad news, and terrible news, and then no news, and then maybe good news, you sign a contract, meet the editor, you discuss changes, you make changes, you go through the tedious work of re-reading various copyedits and galleys, you fill out the publicity questionnaire, you may receive pre-publication reviews, and if they're good you're happy, and if they're bad you're depressed.

You wait.

And then the big day arrives and you can't help but feel a strange mixture of pride, fear, and hope. Usually, though, nothing happens on that day. Often, the success or failure of the book has been determined long in advance, and has at least as much to do with the publisher's commitment as with the quality of your own work. You can't help hoping the phone will ring, though, or an email will show up, and something magical and life-changing will fall into your lap. You can't help peeking out the window, wondering if, just this once, there might be a parade.

But there is no parade, as Joe counseled.

There are, though, subtler satisfactions: the feeling of having finished something that required a large degree of self-discipline and self-belief, of seeing your book published; then maybe some positive reviews, or wonderful notes from readers, or you get invited to speak someplace and earn a little money that way, or the book gets optioned for film. Sometimes the sales are good and you end up receiving royalty checks for years and years.

It's an odd business, much less straightforward than carpentry, where, if you do a good job the customer pays you and mentions you to others. There are no agents and publicists and editors and critics and sales and marketing people standing between you and the bank. It's just your work, with usually one or two people to please.

This is certainly not a complaint. Carpentry is much harder on the body, and it, too, can involve waiting for the phone to ring - along with other woes like cranky customers and tricky jobs. I feel blessed and fortunate, and I am grateful to the agents, editors, publicists, and copyeditors and all the other people at the publishing houses that have helped put my work into the world. I feel especially grateful to people like Joe, to friends who introduced me to agents, read my pages, lent me a computer, bought my books, invited me to read someplace for pay, provided a blurb, mentioned a book to someone else or proposed it to a book club.

On publication day there's a feeling of accomplishment, sure: the writer knows better than anyone how much work and sacrifice and frustration and worry went into those pages. At the same time, though, while someone might write a book alone, no one makes a book alone. I always thank Amanda first, for her patience and support, but, really, there are countless other people to thank, too.

The friendship of those people, their efforts, their generosity and good wishes - that's what writers have instead of a parade. I'm at peace with that. I imagine Joe McGinniss was, too.