A writer's life
In a blink . . .
Larry Zuckerman, award-winning historian, will publish his second novel, To Save a Life, in October with Cennan Books/Cynren Press, following his fiction debut, Lonely Are the Brave, in 2023. His newsletter, GeezerVision, features short-short essays sure to raise a smile or prompt a thought worth keeping.
In a glance . . .
Larry Zuckerman's second novel, To Save a Life, will appear in October from Cennan Books/Cynren Press, the house that published his fiction debut in 2023, Lonely Are the Brave. An award-winning historian, he has appeared on NPR's Morning Edition with Renée Montagne, given lectures on three continents, and earned strong reviews for his books here and in the UK. His former blog, Novelhistorian, which he published weekly for ten years, built his reputation in the historical fiction blogosphere. His newsletter, GeezerVision, features short-short essays sure to raise a smile or prompt a thought worth keeping.
A longer look, otherwise known as, "Let's talk about snakes and suckers"
Storytelling mattered when I was growing up. My father fashioned drama out of just about everything, with himself as the star, and that was no accident. He'd met my mother in a high school play around 1939, and when I came along, they named me for a Shakespearean actor.
But Dad's dramas had no part for me (or my mother), except as audience, so I had to speak up for myself. Family lore says that around age four or five, I announced one night at dinner, "Let's talk about snakes and suckers."
I don't remember launching that conversational gambit. But I do recall, as a thirteen-year-old, deciding to write stories that would amuse, entertain, and enthrall legions of readers. I figured I got that ambition from reading constantly. Much later, I understood that I wanted my own voice in a family that heard only my father's.
In high school, I wrote plays, and I duly studied drama in college, fulfilling my birthright. But by my senior year, a painful truth dawned: my theatrical talents lay in dramatic criticism or theater history, neither of which excited me.
Feeling lost, I watched classmates prepare to enter the professional world while I took stock. And as I'd done volunteer work one summer in high school, I applied to the Peace Corps, which seemed a grander, overseas version of that experience and an escape hatch to a place where I could think. People thought I was crazy.
The Peace Corps sent me to a small town in the Central African Republic—snakes and suckers aplenty—to teach English to high school students. These kids already spoke three or four languages, but I was determined they learn mine, because that was my job. All they wanted was to pass a civil-service exam, for which they need not finish school, and live the good life in the capital. But despite that disconnect, the experience changed me in ways I could never have anticipated.
Africa taught me that I'd grown up in a bubble of wealth and privilege, and that electric lights and potable drinking water were luxuries. I thought about how I appeared to people very different from me and sought to appreciate them for who they were. I became fluent in French, the official language, a subject I'd hated in high school and wondered why they made me study it. That surprise typified my service; to be resourceful and justify my presence, I had to draw on everything I'd ever learned.
To be a writer requires the same discipline—and, incidentally, my ability to read French shaped three of my four books.
Over the past fifty years, I've worked in classrooms, a wine store, publishers' offices, and a newsroom. During the time I held that last job, I married a woman who's helped me hear what people are really saying and to speak from the heart.
We have two sons, now grown. I stayed home to care for them, a role I fell into through circumstance, which few men did back then. A trailblazer by accident—and, not for the first time, my choice made others uneasy, men and women both.
My books follow that model. Someone—always in the past—upsets other people by living a certain way, unwittingly blazing a trail.
My latest trailblazers are two Russian Jewish immigrants in early 1900s New York; their story, To Save a Life, comes out in October. Hope you'll take a look.