I’ve re-posted these pictures from Stony Brook, NY. I took them down because there was a dispute over who actually took them, my daughter or my sister. I wasn’t there at the time, so I can’t say definitively who took them, or if they took turns with the camera, or what. The birth of a new family feud.
I’ve put them back up, however, because the place has been on my mind lately. In the late 40’s my grandparents, who lived in a rented apartment in Queens, scraped together enough money to buy a small cottage in Stony Brook, which became their summer home. When I was growing up in the ’60’s, I spent a good part of each summer with them and I have very fond memories of the place, as do my sisters and my cousins. I wrote a bit about it in a personal essay about my grandparents.
One of the things that I think is important in a piece of fiction is a strong sense of place. Whether it be Hemingway’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin, placing a reader in a place they can see, taste, feel and smell, is critical creating what John Gardner called “The Fictive Dream.” It’s necessarily about burying the reader with dense passages of description, it’s about providing just enough to capture the essence of a place and time, using as many of the five senses as possible.
For me, my memories of Stony Brook are particularly vivid and I have been writing a series of stories set there during the time I was growing up. They’re not really autobiographical; I grew up in Queens and my fictional characters are seem to me to be like people I might have known, but aren’t based on myself or any real person. The stories are about a family in Port Jefferson, a town near Stony Brook that I actually lived in for a few years as an adult. The first story, “Brothers,” was published first in Static Movement and again in The Square Table. “Come Together,” the second story will be appearing in a future issue of Cantaraville. I’ve completed a third story, I think the best of the set, that is under consideration for publication next year in a well regarded literary journal (I’m keeping my fingers crossed). I’ve also begun a fourth story. The story cycle isn’t something I’m actively working on. Usually when I finish one story, I have absolutely no idea what happens next. When it finally comes to me, six months or a year later, I write the next story.
One of these pictures played a role in the writing of one of these stories. The picture at the top of this article was taken from the fishing pier at the Stony Brook town beach, next to the Stony Brook Yacht Club, and just across the street from the historic Three Village Inn. That strip of beach on which stands that little green beach house is a place that my grandparents used to take us for cookouts. It’s located at the end of a road that extends past West Meadow Beach and past some cottages, whose legal status has been questioned for years. This picture was my desktop background while I was working my third Long Island Story. I was writing a dramatically tense scene and I needed a break. There before me was that lovely place that I remembered so well, so I had my characters jump into a convertible on a sunny spring day and drive out to that little green boathouse. It provided a happy, energetic interlude in an otherwise sad story.
Email This Post
Print This Post
