Tag Archives: The Fifties

12.19.23
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Izzy Rounds Third, Headed for Home

To be filed under “Further Adventures of a Literary Lion”:

Your New Favorite Writer is pleased to announce that his middle grade novel,  

IZZY STRIKES GOLD!,

will be published in 2024 by independent publisher HenschelHAUS, Milwaukee.

TA-DA!! Huzzah!! Thank you very much.

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AND HOW DID THIS GREAT BLESSING COME TO PASS?

Here’s a recap:

When I retired from my retirement job in 2016 to devote myself to writing, I did not know exactly what I would write about. But I figured whatever touched the emotional core of my being would be a good place to start. 

That sent me back to my childhood. Specifically, to my grade-school years in Streator, Illinois, a prairie town of fewer than twenty thousand souls. The era was the 1950s. 

Yes, Gentle Reader, those 1950s. The famous Fifties. The Fabulous Fifties. Which were not always completely fabulous, in case you didn’t know.

But here’s the thing: Life, by itself, does not make good art. If I wrote a simple recollection, you would find nothing remarkable or interesting about it. Indeed, when I look back on my actual childhood, no meaning or theme can be divined. 

Yet it draws forth a strong emotion, a yearning to revisit those moments and find something . . . momentous. That’s why I write fiction. Perhaps I can touch the core truth of life by wrapping it in pretense.

So I made up a juvenile character, Izzy Mahler, a young boy in a small town in the 1950s, beset by bullying schoolmates, mystifying grownups, and a drive to reconcile conflicting events. Izzy’s experiences are my own, but rearranged in the hope they will add up to something.

I wrote a short story, “Nickel and Dime,” that links a six-year-old Izzy with two separate memories—being shaken down by bullies, and buying a candy novelty on credit. The tale had humor and nostalgia, and The Saturday Evening Post featured it on their website May 27, 2016.

Hoping to repeat this success, I wrote a seven-year-old Izzy into a romantic competition with an intriguing classmate, both kids hoping to win a bicycle. This was web-published as “The Liberation of Irma Ruger” on February 3, 2017.

And I hit the trifecta with a slightly deeper story, “The Lion’s Den,” about Izzy, still age seven, and his family tree. This piece won honorable mention in The Great American Fiction Contest and was published in its annual contest anthology.

There was more yet to say about Izzy. I thought there might be a coming-of-age novel buried somewhere in Izzy’s experience. I wanted to write it but didn’t quite know how.

MEANWHILE, my Scandinavian ancestors lured me to devise a fictional story featuring Norsk immigrants and fugitive slaves. This sweeping historical epic took five years to reach fruition and was published in August 2022 as Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

After most of the writing was done on Price of Passage, and while engaged in a two-year struggle to get it published, I doubled back and started to work on Izzy’s coming of age. 

This book would be a bit stiffer in content than the innocent childhood tales picked up by The Saturday Evening Post. It would focus on an older Izzy, in the momentous year when he was twelve. 

Alluring and enigmatic Irma Ruger plays a part in the story, and bullies from earlier Izzy stories also appear, as well as a couple of new bullies. This time around, Izzy is mired in a family drama with serious dimensions. But there is also humor and a huge dose of authentic Fifties nostalgia. 

You will enjoy the read, and so will your grandchildren. 

When I thought the book was finished, I did the same thing I had done when I thought Price of Passage was finished. I took it to Christine DeSmet. 

Christine DeSmet

In the most respectful and encouraging way, she took it apart—chapter by chapter, paragraph by paragraph, line by line—and helped me see what was working and what was not. We found enough needed improvements to make the book five hundred percent better than it had been. 

Nobody can do this like Christine. She has a gift and a calling.

The next step was to expose it to the target audience. Though written for ALL readers, Izzy Stirkes Gold! will be classified as a middle grade novel, merely so the booksellers know what shelf to put it on! It’s unlikely the book will appear on many bookstore shelves. Most of its sales will be online or direct from author to reader at book fairs and craft shows. But the need to categorize persists. 

In the publishing world, if your protagonist is twelve years old, you have written a middle grade novel. It’s that simple. Many such books provide enjoyment and edification to full-grown adults, but no matter; they are still middle grade books.

I wanted to see how Izzy would do with its nominal target audience, so I contacted my grandson’s fifth-grade teacher, Matt Fiedler, and asked if I could introduce Izzy Strikes Gold! to his students. To my delight, he invited me to visit two or three afternoons a week and read the whole book aloud to his class, a half-hour at a time. 

That experience alone was worth the whole effort. I found out what eager learners those kids are, and how they identified with a boy much like them but living in The World of Sixty-Five Years Ago. We had a fabulous time, and they affirmed for me that Izzy Strikes Gold! brings the reader some of the same longings and frustrations I knew as a boy.

By then I had begun a wide-ranging search for an agent or publisher to help me make the manuscript into a book. 

A few weeks ago, I began conversations with Kira Henschel, a very experienced publisher with a catalog of books by wonderful authors. 

As a result, I am now to be one of the wonderful authors in her catalog. This blessed event will occur about halfway through 2024. 

Don’t worry, Dear Reader; I’ll keep you informed. 

When the book comes out, do yourself and your grandkids a big favor: Buy it!

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer

07.30.19
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Memoir-ization

We’ve all got a good memoir or reminiscence book buried inside us. It’s quite another thing to actually get it out on paper, virtual or real, in any useful form. Because it requires selectivity. Unless you’re a major public figure, the world probably doesn’t need your autobiography. But it might not be able to resist your own take on the choicest bits.

That’s why there is so much to admire in what my friend, Michael Bourgo, has done. His memoir, Once Upon a Time: Growing Up in the 1950s, delivers exactly what the title claims—the experience of childhood in that now-legendary era from which so much of today’s pop culture—Happy Days, Back to the Future,  Leave it to Beaver—derives.

Unlike Hollywood’s version, however, Michael’s version has the smack and tang of real events as lived in a particular person’s life. That person happens to be a warm, engaging old man recounting oodles of details from a long-ago period of his life. The struggles of a young family trying to get a start in a dynamic yet unpredictable postwar economy; the thrill of shopping at Marshall Field’s in Chicago’s Loop and dining at one of that elegant store’s six on-site restaurants; the satisfaction of showing up at summer camp self-contained and not dependent on a helicopter mom (yes, they had them in those days, too!) to unpack one’s footlocker. 

Most of us, when we go to write a memoir, get overwhelmed by the imperative of sharing everything we have experienced—because every bit of it is significant to us, and we are sure that if we simply spray it out in its entirety, our own deep appreciation of each detail will transfer automatically to the mind of the reader. That is a delusion.

Write for the Reader, Not the Author

What readers want is information that is in some way new and significant to them—not a catalog of what is old and significant to the author. While trotting out an abundance of details from his amazing memory, Michael Bourgo always respects the reader’s need to get something surprising and interesting from the narrative. He also knows when to quit. This never becomes a recitation of everything that happened in the author’s life. He knows that what is significant, that today’s people might need or want to know, has to do with childhood in the Fifties. He sticks to that subject.

Jerry Mathers as The Beaver. ABC Television. Public Domain.

With a format composed of solid chapters arranged on chronological and topical lines, alternating with page-long poems that shed further light on matters already covered in prose, Michael gives us a credible understanding of life in the Fifties, one that goes well beyond the stereotypical adventures of Beaver, Wally, and Eddie Haskell. 

For example, describing the ritual of young boys getting haircuts in those days: “There was another side to Ken’s [barber shop]. . . . My brother, always a more astute observer than I, figured it out when he was in high school. One day he overheard a strange exchange between a patron and one of the barbers, and he realized they were using some sort of code to set up a wager. So, in addition to cutting hair, Ken’s was also a front for a bookie operation that handled bets on sports. No doubt this was a service that many citizens found useful because in those days there were only two places to place a legal bet—at a horse track or in Las Vegas.” (I also, Dear Reader, patronized that kind of a barber shop as a boy. But I only got my hair cut.) 

Those of us who lived through the times Michael Bourgo describes will recognize many of our own experiences in his narrative; and we will encounter other episodes, foreign to our own experience, that reflect the broad range of life lessons disclosed to members of different families in different places. 

For readers who did not arrive on the scene before the Fifties finally petered out (around 1965), this well-balanced and life-affirming memoir will showcase a whole new world in richness and nuance—a world that Marty McFly would never find in his DeLorean.

I recommend Once Upon a Time: Growing Up in the 1950s to anyone who would like to re-live the era through a different set of eyes, and also to anyone who would like to experience it for the first time as it really was—not just as shown on TV.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author 

Larry F. Sommers

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

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(History is not what you thought!)