Guest Author

Montage on Broadway is a restaurant as casual and sophisticated as its name, even though it’s in Greenville, Ohio, home to prosperous farmers who influence the town’s “super conservative” majority, according to Lianne Spidel, poet, host, and friend. She got the Friends of the Library (not so conservative) to invite me to read from my novel on Author’s night, which was yesterday, and I would not have been apprehensive except that my characters are the sort of people super-conservatives warn us against. Lianne suggested I explain a bit before reading.
How would that help? I imagined saying "These people are naïve ideologues trying to change society and overturn the government." Not a good beginning.
So I asked people (sitting at tables in subdued light) what they were doing in 1968. Many of them were having small children or being small children. One man had finished his tour in Vietnam shortly before. One woman was four; she remembers that year with vivid, painful confusion. That’s how I remember it, too, though I was in college, as was another woman in the audience. Some people didn’t respond, probably because they weren’t born yet in 1968.
To introduce the book I said “year that sticks like a giant cleaver in the memory,” said “a historical novel is about the time it’s written as well as the time it’s set in,” said “young people unable to count on a definite future, dubious overseas war, polarized society,” said “I hate polarization.” That is true.
And then I read, mostly scenes I’d read before, with dialogues between male & female, soldier & anti-war activist, young man and older lady.
I read the scene with Ivy, who plans to live with her boyfriend Chuck, talking with her mother, who knows all the reasons that’s a bad idea. There’s a moment: Mum says, “What if you get pregnant?” and Ivy says “I’ll just get an abortion.” Mum has a kind of meltdown.
Someone in the audience noted the irony of Ivy’s being against the killing in wars and in the inner city, yet still able to casually refer to an abortion. I said something like yes, Ivy’s focused young men’s right to life, and someone else pointed out that Ivy’s not yet had to deal with the implications of a pregnancy. And the conversation went on. A woman noted that Ivy and her mother could talk much more reasonably than she herself had been able to talk with her own mother at that age. The mention of abortion did not end the scene, which seemed to be mitigating polarization in the here and now.