Our Town
My first piece in English was a novella about a childhood town, an absolute knockout. Maybe I should publish it. Or maybe not, because it’s… seriously, I’ve never seen anything like this in literature. Maybe in religion. Oh, that’s the take.
I wrote it in New York, seven years after I had clocked in here, and it rolled me into the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, just like that.
Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town at MacDowell. I was now walking the streets of Grover’s Corners of the play. I first saw Our Town on Commie TV as a teen and never again, but I was easily replaying from the memory now the chirping of the kids in the play, the concerned voices of the parents, the politeness of the neighbors, the eerie life-longings of the denouement. After watching it just once at an early stage in life, this wholesome-as-much-as-life-affords-wholesome world had gotten imprinted in me like a prayer. A variation of a call to go.
At the Colony in the Heyward Studio I was expanding the novella into a book, sticking in also the newest, American experiences.
When I got back to New York and wrote some more, I called Kelly, a fellow New Yorker I had met at the Colony. She was a prose editor at the top teen mag. I told her that I had half a book now and should I start looking for a publisher, or wait till done. She said I could do either, but did I have an agent? I said no, I don’t have an agent. She said, oh, you have to have an agent (those New Yorkers). Then she said she’d call Melissa, tell her about me, meanwhile I should mail Melissa the draft.
Melissa, as everybody knew from the New York Mag, the NYT Book Review, and even the Post and the Daily, wasn’t an agent, she was a super agent, as they strive to be pegged in the City.