Seven years ago, I sent a personal essay about swimming to a Chronogram contest and got a phone call from editor Brian Mahoney, who (after gently informing me the contest was for fiction), asked whether I’d like to write profiles. My first assignment was New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan, such a treat that I couldn’t believe I was going to get paid.
Soon after, Chronogram invited me to become its books editor. It’s been my privilege to profile more than 50 area writers, often working with photographer Jennifer May. While crossing the Hudson on one of many scenic drives to an interview, we started to dream about collaborating on a book. SUNY Press enthusiastically accepted our proposal for River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers, and the real work began.
The Hudson Valley is home to thousands of writers, and choosing our 76 subjects was a daunting task. Jen and I wanted to offer a glimpse of the region’s astonishing literary diversity, including writers of all genres, of various ages and backgrounds, living in different parts of the river’s long watershed. She wanted great faces; I wanted great stories. At some point we realized we could include more people by interspersing the magazine-length profiles with single-page “minis.” Here is a selection of these shorter pieces and Jen’s eloquent portraits. Consider them amuse-bouches, a tasting sampler not only from River of Words but also from the magnificent bounty of the Hudson Valley’s literary feast.
ALISON GAYLIN
How many Edgar Award nominees have been thrown out of David Hasselhoff’s wedding? “There are not many more embarrassing things that can happen to you,” laughs Alison Gaylin. Fresh from a theater major at Northwestern University, she was hired by the LA bureau of the Star, where her beat included going undercover as an extra on TV sets and crashing Fred Savage’s bar mitzvah.
At Columbia journalism school, the former tabloid reporter was richly amused by the required course on journalistic ethics. “For everything I did at the Star, I never falsely reported there were weapons of mass destruction,” Gaylin maintains.
A lifelong reader of mysteries, true-crime classics, and “darker fiction” by authors like Joyce Carol Oates, Gaylin loves an adrenaline rush. “I never minded having nightmares,” she says. “I liked the feeling of being scared.” So she started writing a crime novel called Hide Your Eyes.
Her first draft didn’t sell. “I had great characters, but not the suspense,” she reports. Gaylin taught herself structure by reading a hundred mysteries, rewrote “top to bottom,” and sold her manuscript to Signet—10 years after she started it. Then her career hit the fast track with an Edgar nod. In short order, she turned out a sequel (You Kill Me) and two hardcover stand-alones (Trashed and Heartless). “My work process involves lots of Red Bull and Rock Star,” she deadpans.
Woodstock, where she lives with her filmmaker husband and their young daughter, may counterbalance the energy drinks. Or not. Gaylin’s just started writing a new series about a missing-persons investigator with a rare form of total recall. Like her previous books, they’ll feature smart, feisty women and plenty of blood. “I write crime fiction with a fair amount of humor, but also some grisly murders,” she says, grinning. Bring on the nightmares.
EDWIN SANCHEZ
Eddie Sanchez knows how to make a theatrical entrance. As he steps onto the deck of his mountainside home in Sullivan County, he’s joined by a peacock in full iridescent plumage. This is Percy, who showed up “out of nowhere” three years ago. Sanchez and his partner of 28 years, Alden Thayer, lured him with birdseed and music; Cher did the trick. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, he’s gay. Another dresser.’”
Sanchez was born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. His family lived in the Bronx till he was 13, then returned to Puerto Rico. At 20, he moved to New York to be an actor. “At that time, the only roles available to me were stereotypical: You were either a gang member, a pimp, or a drug dealer, and your one big line would be ‘Yo!’”
He wrote his play “Trafficking in Broken Hearts” “to explode a stereotype”: the complex lead, Papo, is a gay hustler. “At the first staged reading at South Coast Rep, they posted a sign that said Adults Only, so of course the whole staff went—they’re no fools. I was so nervous, I was climbing the walls.” The Q&A afterward wowed him. “They were so kind. They called it a lovely play, a love story.” The play launched his career.
He went on to upend other controversial topics, including a priest’s love for a 10-year-old boy (“Clean”) and serial murders (“Unmerciful Good Fortune”). A professor at Yale Drama School once told Sanchez he’d be more successful if he didn’t write so many Hispanic characters. “So of course I wrote more.” He shrugs defiantly.
Sanchez just finished his first novel, Diary of a Puerto Rican Demigod (“I love it when people ask, ‘Is it autobiographical?’”). But he’ll never be far from the theater. “I still adore writing plays,” he says. “You’re creating this whole world. My favorite moment is tech week, when you see all these people working: actors, people with tool belts—everybody came here because one day I looked at a blank page and wrote down ‘At Rise.’”
SPARROW
“Is it just me, or is there something about the Hudson Valley that makes every single person who lives here eccentric?” asks Sparrow. He’s wearing a parka over an unseasonably bulky sweater, and removes his shoes after sitting in Kingston’s Wing Shui Chinese restaurant. He always carries a bag full of books in case he gets stuck in an elevator. “I have anxiety—that’s why people think of me as a humorist.”
Sparrow’s laugh is a sharp, percussive double bark that sounds almost as if he’s saying, “Ha. Ha.” At readings, he riffles through dog-eared piles of paper painstakingly lettered in different-colored inks. His comic timing is impeccable. Bob Holman once posted a sign outside the Bowery Poetry Club billing Sparrow as “the world’s wisest, funniest, and worst poet.”
The native New Yorker got his mononame from a fellow employee at Mother Earth Health Foods in 1975. He moved to Shandaken when his wife, writer Violet Snow, started yearning for greenery. “I begged her to go to Mexico—at least they have a culture. As you may have noticed, living in America is like living in a shoebox.”
Sparrow has run for president in every election cycle since 1996, when he ran as a radical communist in the Republican party. His books Republican Like Me; Yes, You ARE a Revolutionary! and America: A Prophecy are published by Soft Skull Press. He also writes for The Sun and the New York Observer; his Phoenicia Times column “Heard by a Bird” includes fictional gossip, imaginary bumper stickers, and biweekly portraits of actual clouds. (Sparrow is also a frequent contributor to this magazine, as well as a former columnist.)
Sparrow calls himself “a subsistence writer. I grow just enough words to live.”
Where would he most like to subsist? He scratches his beard, then remembers a National Geographic he saw at a laundromat. “The cover photo was this arid but bizarrely beautiful landscape, and I thought, ‘That’s where I want to live!’ It was Mars.”
KRIS CARR
A lovely young woman is framed in the window of Woodstock’s Garden Café. Her name is Kris Carr, she has cancer, and she wants to rock your world.
The former actress got an out-of-nowhere diagnosis in 2003, after a strenuous yoga class left her with abdominal pains. Doctors found 24 tumors of a rare, inoperable cancer called epithelioid hemangioendothelioma. Two weeks later, she started a video diary, which became the Learning Center documentary Crazy Sexy Cancer. Carr explored every form of alternative healing she could find and bonded with other “survivor-babes.” Along the way, she married her cameraman, wrote a bestseller called Crazy Sexy Cancer Tips, and wound up on Oprah.
“It usually takes a trauma for people to wake up. When you wake up, you look around. That’s what happened with me,” Carr says, stirring soy milk into her chai. A vegan and raw-foods enthusiast, she calls health food stores and farmers’ markets “my pharmacy.”
Though she’d been an “obsessive” journal-keeper since age 16, Carr didn’t envision herself as a writer. But healing opened the floodgates. “Crazy sexy cancer” was her subject line on e-mails to friends. “I wanted to prove I still had my sense of humor; I’m still the same girl,” she says. “I didn’t want to be safe about it.”
Carr grew up in Pawling and moved to Manhattan at 19, but “after the diagnosis, I wanted to be back in nature.” So she and husband Brian Fassett moved their production company upstate. Carr wrote Crazy Sexy Cancer Survivor in 2008; Crazy Sexy Diet, a lifestyle and diet book, is forthcoming. She’s also developing a TV series based on her motto “Live Like You Mean It.” Being Kris Carr is a cottage industry, and she does it with irrepressible style. “I broke up with hijiki,” she says of her macrobiotic period. “Hijiki and I are ex-lovers.”
Seven years later, her tumors remain stable. “I could wake up tomorrow and it’s worse, I could wake up tomorrow and I’m cured, but I don’t think about either of those things,” Carr asserts. “It’s the same old, same old: Gotta change the world.”
This article appears in September 2010.
