Of Grant Monsters and Historical Societies
I’m presenting/lecturing/reading at the Queens Historical Society tomorrow evening. This is cool. I wrote a historical novel that takes place in Queens and Manhattan and the Queens Historical Society asks me to come speak at their author lecture/reading series. I’m pretty excited about it. I better get drressed up.
But first I have to finish my grant application for my day job. It’s due this afternoon at 12pm which means it must be finished by 10 so it can go out at 11 to be hand delivered. I have one more line to cut. It’s a different kind of writing, grant writing. It’s not very pleasant but it’s a skill that helps my fiction writing so I do it. Oh yeah, and it helps me keep my day job. And I can’t give it up yet. So I cut one line. Sounds easy until you see you’ve cut everywhere else after reading it over and over the day before into the night. But I digress a bit.
I’ve never been to the Queens Historical Society. I don’t know who will be there or what kinds of questions I’ll get but it will be different. I’m going to speak about the creation of Cid, the protagonist of Open Wounds, and how he came into being. He’s from Sunnyside, only two towns – about 30 minutes walk – from where I live in Jackson Heights. The 7 train takes you there in five minutes. The 7 also takes Cid in to Manhattan to see Captain Blood on his first day of freedom.
The reading runs from 6:30-8pm. Here’s the address of the Society:
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Weeping Beech Park
143-135 37th Avenue
Flushing, NY 11354 |
Why the Point is Quicker than the Edge
I’ve still got three questions to answer from CWPost. I’ll get to them. I promise.
But a birthday today got in the way, as did a grant proposal that I have to write for my day job in order to stay employed and keep my staff employed. So it’s important. And it takes up all my time for a few days – driving my anxiety up and me near into madness. Well… you get the picture.
So last week I did a fencing workshop/reading/Q&A at the Flushing Library with my friend actor/stage combatant/fencer Dave Brown. Dave’s the best because he does these things for me for no other reason than I ask him (and I take him out ot dinner). He is an extraordinary friend. We get to fence in front of an audience – and he’s the best fencing partner – totally trustworthy and only once in our time as fencing partners has he every hit me by mistake. Hah.
At the reading there were three kids who had read my book and who actually helped me give the synopsis of Open Wounds. That was the first time I’ve had people in the audience who’d read the book. Morya Haughton, the most excellent YA Librarian who invited me and rounded up the kids for the event, told me the library had six copies of my book and it was in constant rotation… and rarely on the shelves. That pretty much made my day.
So there were twenty some odd kids at the event and I didn’t know any of them and that was cool. They liked the swordplay – who wouldn’t and most of them stayed an extra 45 minutes after the event was over to handle the swords and ask questions about writing and fencing. Dave and I had a blast.
One young woman asked a question that really got to me. She was one of the people who had read the book. “Why is someone like Maddie (Cid’s grandmother) who believes in God, so cruel to Cid?” I had to stop a moment just to let that one sink in. My answer was pretty simple. “Because she is. Just because someone believes in God doesn’t mean they can’t also be cruel. It just works that way sometimes. It’s not pleasant but it’s true.” She nodded and looked away. It made me wonder what the question behind the question for her was.
I think human beings are complex and rarely all good or evil – usually a mixture of both to different degrees. Mad Maddie Wymann is like that. You know little of her past but it must have been bitter to turn her into the person she is. And when her son, Cid’s father, disappears, she grieves for him.
When she is lost, Cid grieves for her because she is all he has.
So it goes.
Flushing Library
I’m doing a lecture/reading/Q&A at the Queens Historical Society this Thursday. Let’s see what questions I get there.
Fallout: 9/11
Jackson Heights is underneath the landing line to Laguardia airport. Planes come low over Canelle’s French Patisserie on 31st avenue and 76th street shopping center. It hurts my ears when I look up at the underside of the dropping jets, their landing gears exposed. In my neighborhood closer to the elevated 7-line, further east and south, the planes look smaller, feel less massive, but they run across the sky still one after the other guided by air traffic control. When I walk home some days I still imagine them exploding, like bright flares pitching parts and incandescence in a shower of light. It makes my chest tighten a little. It’s only my imagination working overtime. It’s happened so often over the years I pause only a moment before I move on.
For months after 9/11 I still jumped at loud noises.
I was sitting in a meeting room at a university up in Albany where an AIDS Institute training center meeting was going on and outside the lid of a large dumpster fell closed and the crash made me visibly flinch. My co-worker, who was in tower two with me did the same thing. The speaker who was presenting stopped talking and my colleague laughed nervously. We looked over at each other and forced smiles on to our faces but it was good to see that she had done the same thing I’d done. I know we both felt comfort in that. It was just part of the environment now – something that we had lived through. I’ve dealt with an anxiety disorder most of my life and 9/11 exacerbated the problem for me – though I didn’t connect the two for a long time – as hard as that can be to believe.
Not many people ask me about that day and not many know I was there. My part in the whole event was small and I was terribly lucky. I was on a low floor, the sixteenth. I was in tower two. I didn’t listen to the announcer when he said to go back to our offices – that everything was okay. I was just out of the stairs and on the mezzanine when tower two was hit. I saw some things. I didn’t see others. I saw the hole in tower one. I saw debris falling outside my window. I caught the last E train out of Chambers Street World Trade Center – last stop in one direction and first stop in another.
Sometimes people talk about that day when I’m travelling to do a presentation at a conference and we’re out at dinner afterwards. I don’t usually say anything other than nod and agree that it was a terrible thing. It was. My wife was pregnant with our son – some two months at that time – and I still think she had it worse, waking up and hearing what happened, worrying about me and wondering if I was alive or dead. Being there made time go faster and left me to worry much less until I was already out on 14th Street. That was when it all hit me. Looking down 6th Avenue and seeing the two towers from there gave me the whole picture. It let me know where I’d been and what I’d left behind.
What follows is my story of that day. It’s one of many and doesn’t feel special in any way, except of course to me. But maybe for you, thinking of those who are gone and all that has happened in the ten years since, it will have some meaning, some sense of time and place. Some days need to be remembered from different angles. This is just one.
FALLOUT
By: Joe Lunievicz
The sky is falling.
I look out my window and the sky is falling in large pieces of steel, concrete, paper, blood and bone.
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It’s October 11th, 2001, thirty days since my office was destroyed on the sixteenth floor of the World Trade Center, Tower Two. I stand on 23rd street and 6th Avenue, looking up at the new office building we’ve just moved into. I squint because the glare from the skyscrapers around me is intense.
I watch as a plane comes out of the sky and hits it.
I watch it again and again before I blink my eyes and the sky clears. I step through the front doors and into the elevators.
We’ve been bombing the Taliban in Afghanistan for five days. My stomach still turns to jelly when I’m outside and a loud noise assaults me — when a car hits a large pot-hole, a siren blares, or a garbage truck releases a metal container that crashes to the earth. I resist the urge to duck but inside I flinch. My exterior is molded plastic, hard to the touch. It’s easier to exist indoors where the noises are muffled.
The critical incident counselor called these images intrusive thoughts. Intrusive, as if they intrude upon a tranquil place. Inside my head, if tranquility exists, it lies behind a door, far back in the dark….
Click here to continue reading the essay: Fallout- 9/11, by J.Lunievicz
Book Launch at Seaburn Book Store
"I've waited 33 years for this moment..."
Last week, on Thursday night, we launched Open Wounds. It sounds funny that way but it really felt like a launch. The only thing I didn’t do was break a bottle of champagne across the bow of the book – though that would have been an interesting sight to see. There was wine and pastries from our favorite French Patisserie Canelles. But more than anything there were people. We filled the downstairs room with friends, family, colleagues, writers, and some folks from the neighborhood – Astoria – who saw the advertisement and stopped by. There were over 65 people with many standing in the back. It was hot and thunder-stormy – humid and thick, even with the AC on. The fan had to be turned off so you could hear me read. And I did read. That’s what felt like a launch – the reading, the showing off of my work to others, the revealing of my secret life as a writer.
Before it filled up and overflowed!
And it was fun. And the book store sold 42 copies. The book store owner walked around with a big smile on her face.
My publisher/editor Evelyn Fazio, introduced me to the audience with some kind words and there were two other wonderful WestSide authors in attendance: Karen DelleCava (latest book is A Closer Look) and Selene Castrovilla (latest book is The Girl Next Door and Melt) to help cheer me on.
My father also came and I finally signed a book for him. He still hasn’t read Open Wounds but I’m waiting to hear what he thinks ’cause now it’s on his list. What follows is a picture of the inscription. The ship has launched and the party was a good one to send it on its way. I couldn’t ask for more. I’m only sorry my publicists Marissa, Julie, and Sami from JKS Communications couldn’t be there to celebrate with me – as it would never have happened without them.
Inscription for my father...
DC Fencers
I had no idea where Silver Springs was and how far it was from the conference center I was staying at. But I made it to the evening open épée fencing at the DC Fencer’s Club with a half hour to spare. It always pays to leave early (and take a cab).
The head coach, Janusz Smolenski, sat down with me in between students and let me pitch him the book. He was very
interested in the fencing but even more so in my last name, recognizing both the Lithuanian and Polish influences. Then he invited me to fence. I told him I had not brought my gear and before I could say any more he suited me up with gear from the salle and paired me up with my first opponent. I fenced for two hours with a short break to talk to the whole group that Janusz organized when some twenty students had filled the room. Now I thought the room was filled but he told me their six strips (it is a big salle!) are packed with sixty plus students in the fall when everyone is back from vacation. I had way too much fun fencing – getting beaten by a young man and finding some equal matches against others my age and younger. Soaked from my workout I got a ride to the metro from a fencer named Jay, who also happens to be a journalist and a budding novelist.
I left them two copies of Open Wounds and a lot of perspiration. The only problem was that I had so much fun fencing I forgot to take any photos. I had the camera but it never made it out of the bag. The photos are curtesy of their website!
Thank you Jay and Janusz. I hope to be back in the fall for other events. Only next time I’ll have my own equipment.
Lunievicz 