Writer Tommy Donovan joins me today to chat about
his coming-of-age memoir, The Rail: What
Was Really Doin’ in the 60’s Bronx.
Bio:
Tommy Donovan grew up near
the Amalgamated Cooperative Housing in the Van Cortlandt Park area of the
Bronx. Coming-of-age during the turbulent and questioning 1960s helped shape
his spirit of inquiry and critical thinking. He currently lives in Big Timber,
Montana, with his life-partner, Dr. Kim C. Colvin. Tommy holds a doctorate in
psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute, and is a Faculty Fellow in the
Honors College at Montana State University.
Welcome, Tommy. Please tell us about your current
release.
This is my coming-of-age
memoir that depicts the struggles of the son of an Irish immigrant growing up
in an all-Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx, between the end of World War 2 and
the shadow of the Holocaust, and the emergence of the turbulent 1960s. At home,
I wrestle with family dysfunction, while in the streets I must navigate a world
where being a goy (gentile) confers a
hurtful, outsider status on him. Eventually, my life hangs in the balance as I
struggle to not surrender to the pull of drug addiction while fighting to break
free and flee the Bronx for good. My confrontation with these formidable
obstacles, on my journey to manhood, takes place center stage at “The Rail,”
where my allies and nemeses gather daily.
What inspired you to write this book?
This is my first book. I
was compelled to write this because whenever my childhood friends and I have
described our growing up, we consistently get amazed reactions and someone
inevitably says, “Your stories should be a book.”
Excerpt from The Rail: What Was Really Doin’ in the 60’s Bronx:
There was one particular
section of the fence that ran along Van Cortlandt Park South, that came to
serve as each generation’s true north and the epicenter for all manner of
social interaction – especially for the postwar baby-boomers. Directly in front
of the park, this portion of the fence stretched east from the retaining wall
to the asphalt pathway leading into the playground area, approximately 60 feet
in length. When we were little, it was just part of the landscape demarcating
the boundary between the street and the park, claiming no particular attention
during our comings and goings. At that tender age, even if we noticed the older
kids hanging out there it had little impact on us and even less interest. As we
found ourselves inexorably thrust into our teenage years, this spot in front of
the playground began to loom larger and larger in our lives and our
imaginations as the place to be. This section of fence was known to everyone
as, simply, The Rail.
* * * * *
I AM THE BASTARD SON of an immigrant Irishman. For this reason, and more
that you will discover in the course of this memoir, I have had a difficult
time locating home, trusting family, finding safe harbor in many of my intimate
relationships. Yet between the years 1956-1972 (spanning the ages between five
and twenty-one), home, family, and a place of safety were located in the Bronx.
I found them not in my own house, but in the homes, schoolyards, playgrounds,
and streets of a tiny, modern-day shtetl populated predominantly by Jews. Beneath
the apparent incongruity of this statement – safety in the streets of the
Bronx, family among
people of a completely different religion, and home within others’ homes – a
deep and abiding kinship revealed itself over the course of my childhood, a
kinship with a place and the people who lived there that shaped decisively who
I was then and who I am now. Indeed, this sense of kindredness has informed my
entire life; during these tender and impressionable years, I learned how to
trust, how to share, how to stand up for what I believe, and how to love.
The soil that nurtured
this unlikely, lifelong bond with this place, with Jewish culture, and with the
friendships forged there – many continuing to this day – was seeded by a
variety of episodes, traumatic and elegant, painful and exquisitely loving.
Mine was a coming of age in a peculiar time and place. Wedged between the
nightmare of World War II and the thunderous, shattering Sixties, my coming of
age awoke in me, and many of us, common rhizomatic stirrings to live beneath a
sun different than the one we inherited. Pulled by an indescribable draw toward
a deep mutuality, there arose a desire to band together in ways that would lift
us beyond what the larger world offered as the apparently irreconcilable differences
of ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and race. Our sensibilities were shaped
by a nascent determination to defy a history of fear and the promise of more of
the same and, instead, create something we imagined would be entirely new.
What exciting story are you working on next?
YA fiction based in
Celtic Mythology.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I began writing at age 14.
I would write stories about our neighborhood gang, completely romanticized, and
read them in installments to my friends gathered in the basements of our
neighborhoods
Do you write full-time? If so, what's your work day
like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to
write?
I am a college professor
at Montana State University. I write when I have breaks in the teaching
schedule, mostly on weekends, semester breaks and especially over the summer
months.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I cannot move to the next
sentence unless I feel the previous one evokes precisely what I want to convey
emotionally.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
Back in my day I imagined
myself being a firefighter or a policeman. By the time the 1960s erupted I
wanted to be a nomad.
Anything additional you want to share with the
readers?
If you are writers, keep
reading everything, and write to express your soul-daimon and not for any other
motive.
Links:
Thanks for being here today, Tommy! Happy writing.
