November 2024
When friends publish books...
Folks,
Growing up in Plymouth, Ohio, a town of about 1700, I didn’t have much opportunity to meet writers who had published actual books.
Not that I was totally without exposure to people who wrote. I was sort of vaguely aware that my dad wrote poetry at one time or another, and my mom worked most of her career as a reporter and then newspaper editor. (I have very fond memories of running around newsrooms in the evenings after school, sneaking into the darkroom with my little sister, and poking around stacks of back issues, intoxicated by the smell of newsprint.) But book authors seemed different. It felt like they must come from another planet, or universe, or perhaps dimension from me. In any case, actually knowing such people seemed unlikely.
Over the past five months, three friends have published books.
Matt Young published his debut novel, End of Active Service, this past June. It follows 23-year old Dean Pusey as he struggles to return to civilian life after four years serving as a Marine in Iraq. Dean’s voice, crass and darkly humorous, narrates a book Kirkus Reviews calls “a cleareyed, nonsentimental chronicle of the corrosive and far-reaching effects of war and its inevitable aftermath.” If you haven’t read Eat the Apple, his memoir of his own time as a Marine in the Iraq War, you might check it out. Maureen Corrigan reviewed it on Fresh Air back in 2018.
Elly Bookman, fellow UNCG MFAer (but before my time) and one of Becca’s closest friends from high school, published her debut collection of poetry, Love Sick Century, in September. In her review, poet Adrian Blevins writes, “In poem after poem, Bookman’s keen-eyed speaker shows us what it feels like to be mesmerized by dismay.” Elly’s work has appeared in a who’s who of the best places: The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and The New Yorker, to name just a few. We had the pleasure of hosting Elly when she was in town for a reading this past month.
Finally, our friend Joey Lew, a surgical resident at Duke University and another UNCG MFAer (and a top notch foosball player to boot), published her debut poetry collection, Insensible Losses, last month. Louise Aronson, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Elderhood, says “Insensible Losses is everything a poetry collection should be - moving, lyric, intimate, powerful, and witty… [A]n at once personal and universal behind-the-scenes view of medicine, illness, and the fragility of human bodies.”
What is there to say except to acknowledge that it’s unbelievably cool to walk into bookstores and see my friends’ names on the spines of their very own books. It’s an experience I didn’t really believe was possible when I was a kid.
Your friend in reading,
Evan
Becca’s Pick of the Month
Becca has chosen Love Sick Century as her pick of the month. “I’m enjoying reading Elly’s poems a couple at a time before bed every night,” she tells me from the bottom of the stairs during her lunch break.
She continues: “I don’t think I’ve ever read a book of poetry before. I do sometimes have to re-read the poems, like, three times to understand them. But it’s fun. I’m glad someone is paying attention and documenting things that are hard to document.”
