Hopscotch

Walking can be a great way to relax and to come up with solutions, or to be inspired in some way.  For author Steve Cushman, the idea for his new book, Hopscotch, published in 2017, started while he was out walking his dog, Suzy, about 10 years ago.  In the author's own words, here's what happened.

"A block or so away from my house, we came across a hopscotch board someone had drawn on the sidewalk.  Normal enough stuff as we have a lot of kids in the neighborhood.  But for some reason on this day I wondered what would happen if a hopscotch board was on the sidewalk of the hospital where I worked.  I'd been working in hospitals for over twenty years and had never seen a hopscotch board at one of them.  So I started thinking about how such a thing might affect people at the hospital, whether patients or staff.  That was the start of it, and then over the years I added characters and situations and a hopeful mystery until somehow it felt done and ready for the world."

Hopscotch tells a story through the (third person) points of view of the main characters, Dr. Jeffrey Boles, Emily, John, Stan, Mary, Rosa, and Metalhead Mike.  Dr. Boles is the first one to notice a hopscotch board drawn in chalk in an unlikely place, on the sidewalk near the entrance of Alfred Stone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he works as an orthopedic surgeon.  John, a janitor at the hospital, is asked to remove the hopscotch board, and he does (after hopping around on it a bit).  But after it's cleaned off, the hopscotch board mysteriously re-appears.

Emily, a young girl fighting cancer, Stan, a wheelchair-bound Iraqi War veteran, Mary, the wife of a man who's doing very poorly, Metalhead Mike, who has had a bad head injury, hospital staff, and others are drawn to the hopscotch board.  Each chapter is headed by the name of the character whose story is being told, making it easy to follow.  As you read you learn more about each character as their individual stories unfold. 

Hopscotch is heartbreaking at times, but it's also hopeful.  Although it's not labeled specifically as YA fiction, I think this absorbing novel will appeal to young adults, due to a format that makes it easy to follow, its shorter length, and to the focus on some younger characters and the childhood game of hopscotch.  As an "older adult", though, I enjoyed reading this book very much.  I cared about the characters, which counts for a lot.  The hopscotch board--a symbol of hope in a setting that's often associated with illness and despair--makes the characters smile, and it made me smile, too.  This childhood game provides a welcome respite from their cares and troubles.  The stories in this book are touching, and the hopscotch board is a silver lining that connects the characters and provides joy, hope, and simple fun.  This is a wonderful book! 

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Every Saturday, Booking Mama hosts Kid Konnection, a fun feature that highlights books for children and young adults.  Many thanks to the author for sending me an advanced reading copy of his new book.

Thanks for stopping by!  Your comments are welcomed.

What I Came to Tell You: A Guest Review

Move to the South, become a writer?  Lately I've been wondering if there's a unique inspiration in the South that leads to the pen.  I've noticed a new wave of authors in the southern states, including the Carolinas, although perhaps it's only my awareness of them which is new.  At any rate, one of "my" southern authors, Steve Cushman, the author of Heart With Joy, wrote a review of another southerner's book, Tommy Hay's book, published in 2013, What I Came to Tell You.  I enjoyed the review, and decided to share it with my readers.  I've also linked it to Kid Konnection, as the book is geared toward children in middle school.  I like that this book features a prominent, southern literary figure. You'll have to read the review to find out who I'm talking about!

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What I Came to Tell You by Tommy Hays:

A Guest Review by Steve Cushman

Asheville author Tommy Hays’ first middle grade novel, What I Came to Tell You is sure to touch the hearts of readers young and old alike.  The novel follows Grover Johnston, a 12-year-old Asheville boy, as he tries to come to terms with the loss of his mother 6 months earlier.  

After her death, Grover retreats into the bamboo forest near his house and creates beautiful weavings, or tapestries, out of bamboo and leaves and branches and anything else he can find.  While Grover retreats into the woods, his father spends more and more time at work, managing the failing Thomas Wolfe house and essentially leaving Grover and his 10-year-old sister, Sudie, to fend for themselves.

If things weren’t difficult enough for the Johnstons, it looks as though one local man’s greed may take away the very things that are keeping them going--the bamboo forest and the Thomas Wolfe house.  But over the course of a few months, the Asheville community along with new neighbors, the Roundtrees, who are recovering from their own loss, help put Grover and his family on the path to healing and loving each other again.  

The novel is set in Asheville, and Hays does a fine job of pulling in the local feel of the town with its bookstores and coffee shops.  The town’s most famous literary figure, Thomas Wolfe, is also omnipresent throughout.  The cemetery where Grover’s mother is buried also contains Wolfe’s family.  And Grover and his sister are named after characters in Wolfe’s most famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel.  

Hays is the Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and teaches at UNC Asheville.  His previous novel, The Pleasure was Mine, was a wonderful story of loss and connection and the importance of family, and was selected for several community-wide reading programs in various cities and counties, including Greenville, SC, and Greensboro, NC.

While What I Came To Tell You is aimed at younger readers, it certainly will catch and keep the interest of readers of all ages.  Anyone who believes in the healing power of art, and family and love, will find something here that will touch them and make them glad they’d taken the time read this new gem of a novel by one of North Carolina’s best writers, Tommy Hays.

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Thank you for this terrific review, Steve!  Kid Konnection is hosted each Saturday by Booking Mama.  Your comments are welcomed, as always. 

Book Blogger Hop: A Challenge Taken to Heart

The Book Blogger Hop is a weekly event for bloggers and readers, a chance to socialize in a virtual way, to connect with other book lovers, make new friends and followers, and share an appreciation of books. Hosted by the brilliant Jennifer from Crazy-for-Books, this Hop lasts from November 12 until November 15, so there's still ample time to sign-up and enjoy the blogosphere's best BOOK PARTY! If you'd like me to visit your blog, please leave a comment.

Jennifer's Book Blogger Hop gets better each and every week! In addition to presenting a question-of-the-week, often submitted by other book bloggers, she posed a unique challenge last week. Admittedly, I was reluctant at first to take on her seemingly hefty challenge. To sum it up, Jennifer asked that we find a new blog and really get to know it throughout the week, to leave at least five comments on that blog, and then to post about the experience during the next Hop. Initially, I was not going to do this challenge, because I already have plenty to do, blogging-wise and other-wise. But I thought about it, and I realized that this was indeed the whole point of the Book Blogger Hop, to discover a new blog or two that you truly want to visit frequently. At that point, I decided to follow through wholeheartedly on Jennifer's challenge.

After some perusing, I decided to focus on Leslie's blog, Under My Apple Tree, which features mostly books, with a bit of nature, birds, flowers, food and photography, interconnected in an artistic fashion. These are some of my favorite things, so I thought this blog would be a good fit for me. I was undoubtedly also influenced by a book I recently finished reading, Heart With Joy. While I don't routinely read many young adult books, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, reviewed it, and even interviewed the gracious author, Steve Cushman. Anyway, in this book there's a wonderful character, "Old Lady Peters", who is an avid bird-watcher and teaches the main character in the story, Julian Hale, to also watch and care for our feathered friends.

To make things easy for myself, and to insure that I would, indeed, leave frequent comments, I added Under My Apple Tree to my blogroll (which allows me to know at a glance when a blog has published a new post). Throughout the past week, I visited this blog numerous times and left many comments. (Leslie may have wondered who I was and why I was suddenly leaving so many comments!) I will continue to follow this blog in an earnest fashion. Because really, as I've mentioned already, the point of blog hopping is precisely to discover sites that interest you in more than a superficial way.

Thank you, Jennifer, for giving me the push I needed, and for helping me to discover a very lovely book blog!

Each week, Jennifer presents a question for participating book bloggers to answer. This week's question is from Christina from The Paperback Princesses: If you find a book that looks interesting but is part of a series, do you always start with the first title?

Another interesting question! As a general rule, I do try to start with the first book in a series. For example, I've read all of the books in The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith in order, although I have yet to read the last book in this series (it sits patiently in my TBR stack). However, there are definitely exceptions to the "rule". I read--and enjoyed--the well-crafted thriller, The Rembrandt Affair, which is a part of the Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva, without having read any of the preceding books. I should add that this book "stood alone" quite well.

Thanks for reading!

A Conversation with Steve Cushman

Having recently read and reviewed a new, memorable, coming-of-age novel, Heart With Joy, I am thrilled to now present an interview with the author, Steve Cushman.

1) Welcome, Steve! Please tell us a bit about your background, and the main inspiration for your latest book, Heart With Joy.

SC: I was born in Massachusetts but grew up in Florida and moved to Greensboro, North Carolina in 2000 to attend the MFA writing program at UNC-Greensboro and have lived here ever since. I've been an X-ray tech for about 17 years and writing for about 15 years.

My first novel, Portisville, was published in 2004. In 2008, I published a short story collection, Fracture City. Heart With Joy is my second published novel. The main inspiration for this novel was basically me thinking about what happens when a mother leaves her husband and son. I knew this father and son did not get along very well and I knew that I had to somehow bring them together. It took me about six years to figure out to do this. All my fiction starts with characters in a situation and then I do my best to figure things out from there.


2) Heart With Joy is a character-driven novel. Julian, his parents, and other characters come to life in your book.  Are your characters based on people you know or knew, from your imagination, or both?

SC: I usually don't base my characters on people I know, but in this case the Mrs. Peters' character is certainly modeled after my neighbor, Barbara Hughes. Barbara is not in her nineties and has never run over someone's leg, but she is a big bird watcher and the two of us have spent a good amount of time talking about birds. While none of the characters are based on me per se, there are instances where my thoughts come out through the story. For example, many of the things Julian says or thinks about cooking are things that I have thought.


3) As a multi-genre writer, which of your three works did you find the most fulfilling to write, Portisville, a literary thriller, Fracture City, a collection of short fiction, or Heart With Joy, a novel for young adults?

SC: Each book is special to me for various reasons--Portisville because it was the first one. To hold your own book in your hand or walk in to a bookstore and see it on a shelf is a pretty big deal for a writer. Fracture City basically represents the span of my writing life. Some stories were written twelve years ago and others were written two weeks before the book was accepted for publication, so it was very cool to have this collection of my writing. Heart With Joy is special to me because it is a novel that I always believed in and because it allowed me to write about so many things that were important to me: cooking, bird watching, and writing.


4) I am intrigued by the writing spaces of authors (and perhaps a bit nosy!).  Would you please share a photo and a few words about your writing or computer desk?

SC: My writing desk is nothing fancy, just a large table with my computer and printer. You can see that the monitor doesn't match and that's because I've gone through a couple monitors during the seven years I've had the computer. The desk is located upstairs in our extra bedroom. This is fine except for when we have company and I can't get to my desk. I'm thinking about getting a laptop for two reasons--one is that I simply need a new computer as this one is terribly slow and the other is the portability a laptop would offer. I write on the computer as opposed to pen and paper and if I have a laptop I can set it up anywhere and write away. We'll see. The room and desk are special to me in that I've spent so many hours there over the years and I've gotten some good news as well as not so good news sitting there.

Steve's writing space looks comfortable and very organized.
 You can catch a glimpse of Lucky, his cat, in the photo.
(Steve said that all of his pets make it into his writing.)

5) How did you pay your "writing dues"?  What is the best writing advice you have ever received? What additional advice would you share with aspiring authors?

SC: I think to pay your dues you have to sit your butt in your chair and write. Also, you have to read, a bunch. I did attend two creative writing graduate schools: Hollins University and UNC-Greensboro. While I think writing programs do a great job of giving you a foundation on what makes good writing the real test is afterward when you are out there on your own and you don't have a piece of writing due and you have to do it because you want or need to.

As for advice given, I met Larry Brown (a favorite writer of mine who died in 2004) back in 2002 and I told him I was a huge fan of his and that I too was a writer and he said to me "just keep working and good things will come." Simple advice but true and helpful and that is the same advice I would give to aspiring writers: just work and read and try to figure out why you like certain books and keep writing and eventually good things will come. I've known many people who were much better writers than me who stopped writing for a variety of reasons. I believe if you want to do something, then you do it no matter what.


6) Which books or authors did you enjoy most growing up?

SC: I didn't read much growing up, no more than what was assigned in school. But when I was in my late teens and early twenties I was working at a record store in Orlando, Florida. The manager of the store, Jim Boylston, would come in every day with stacks of books. He was in his thirties and owned a record store, so I thought he was pretty darn cool. I asked what he was reading and he told me about Larry Brown and Cormac McCarthy and Raymond Carver, so I started reading them. It was through reading these writers that I got interested in writing. I thought hey if they can do it why can't I. So of course I wrote a ton of bad stuff for a few years but by then it was too late. I was hooked on writing and eventually I did get better.

As for now, I read all sorts of stuff but do lean toward literary fiction. In the last month I have read two books that I thought were simply amazing: Sherman Alexie's The Half-True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (this is actually considered young adult) and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Vergehese. Both novels blew me away for different reasons. Next, I plan on reading John Hart's The Last Child and Labor Day by Joyce Maynard.

(Steve, like good actors, good writers make the craft look effortless and natural.   It's only when you sit down and attempt to write that the reality hits you--it's a lot more difficult than it seems!)


7) How does living in North Carolina influence your work as a writer?

SC: I don't know that it does. I've been here ten years. Heart With Joy is set in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Hale's house and yard and neighborhood described in the book are essentially my home and neighborhood and the park at the end of my street. Most of my stories have been located in Florida because that is where I spent about 30 years of my life. So I don't know. I will say that Greensboro is a nice town--not too big, not too small.

Steve and his son enjoy a fall festival in North Carolina.

8) What writing project(s) are you currently working on?

CS: I'm working on some short stories and poems as I've been pretty busy promoting Heart With Joy. After the first of the year, I plan on working on a another YA novel that I wrote the first draft of back over the summer.   I'm looking forward to that.


9) Last but not least, please tell us something surprising or offbeat about your work or yourself.

CS: I played bass in a band back in the late eighties that opened for the Flaming Lips in Orlando, Florida. And yes, I had a mullet and wore it proudly.

Thanks for having me.

Steve, thanks very much for doing this interview. I wish you much continued success.

Your comments are welcomed.  Have I forgotten to ask Steve anything?  If you have a question for the author, please feel free to leave it in the comments.  Thanks for reading.

Heart With Joy

While I don't read many books for young adults, I probably should read more of them. They are a refreshing change of pace, and when I read books geared toward young adults, I often learn a thing or two that help me understand or relate to my own children better. Recently I read Heart With Joy by Steve Cushman, a new young adult book published in 2010.

Heart With Joy is the story of fifteen-year-old Julian Hale. His mother has suddenly left their home in North Carolina and moved to Florida, leaving Julian and his father to fend for themselves. Julian is not sure why she left, but he senses this is a separation between his parents. He was close to his mother, and misses her company, especially in the kitchen. In her absence, Julian begins to cook meals for himself and his father.

"Mom always made it look easy, the way she sort of fluttered around the room, moving a pan this way or that, sipping on her wine, Van Morrison singing about some poor lost soul in a faraway land. And working with my mother, I discovered that I actually liked to cook and enjoyed the challenge of reading a recipe, placing all the ingredients on the counter and turning it into a complete meal. Not that I would confess this to anyone but her. If Dennis, or any of my classmates knew, I was pretty sure they'd give me a hard time about it."
~Heart With Joy, Steve Cushman

Heart With Joy is a character-driven novel. I appreciated the fact that the characters have flaws, just like real humans. Although he's a good kid, Julian isn't perfect, and neither are his parents. His mother, a writer, smokes and drinks a lot of wine, and his father, a nurse, is a bit of a workaholic. At the beginning of the story, Julian and his father do not really have much of a relationship, but as time goes on they spend more time together, eating, exercising, and talking. Soon after his mother leaves, Julian becomes friends with his elderly neighbor, "Old Lady Peters", who has a way with birds and teaches Julian about them, and about the importance of following your heart, of following your passion (akin to Joseph Campbell's "follow your bliss"). Julian's friend, Dennis Kindl, is a great side character, because many of us have had friends like him, who tend to hog center stage and are domineering, especially if we were on the shy side, growing up.

Although I don't watch much TV, I do enjoy watching cooking shows every so often, so I liked the fact that Julian would watch and learn from contemporary cooking shows. Julian's salmon and spinach with butter sauce à la Rachael Ray sounds quite appetizing, and I must admit that I was eager not only to sit down to a good meal but also to create it because of this book. Julian's love of cooking is shared by his new friend, Tia Brogan, who works at the local Harris Teeter where Julian and his father shop for groceries together. Heart With Joy has all the ingredients for a terrific novel: characters who develop over the course of the story, realistic family relationships and friendships, a bit of romance, and the idea that even if things do not work out exactly as you may want them to, life can still be joyful. In my book, this is a good message for young adults, and older adults, to keep in mind.

Special thanks to Steve Cushman for sending me this book.