Non-Fiction – Page 5 – Philadelphia Stories

On the Divine Lorraine and Falling in Love

We lived in the ethereal shadow of the Divine Lorraine only for a year, but it stands out in my head, still as bright as the neon lights dancing underneath its towering signage. An abandoned, graffitied, majestic husk of a hotel, it dominated the skyline where we lived at 15th and Fairmount. In particular, I remember the way the setting sun illuminated it from behind, oranges and pinks seeming to emanate from the building like a halo. My future husband and I began to build our relationship under the spell of this iconic Philadelphian landmark. Then and now, the image of the Divine Lorraine is a sense memory calling to mind the magic that is a fledgling relationship.

We’d met at the end of June at the former Grape Street Pub in Manayunk. He was in the band. I was watching the band. During a break, he offered me an Altoid. I quoted Chuck Palahniuk. We were immediately infatuated with one another. But then, in early August, I had to leave for graduate school, a Ph.D. in my far future and my new boyfriend (hopefully not) in the past.

He was in Philadelphia, playing bass for a rock band, writing solo pieces on the piano, and otherwise immersing himself in music. I was at the University of Illinois, an accelerated Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Distance does not make the heart grow fonder. Homesick, miserable, and increasingly unmotivated as time went on, I missed viscerally what was waiting for me in Philadelphia: My boyfriend, his rescue Doberman named Max, an elderly cat, and a cocoon of unconditional love without the pressures of academia.

Despite wanting to succeed, unceasing loneliness wore away at my resolve to finish the degree. My physical and emotional health suffered. I burned out. I dropped out of the program, packed my car, and headed to Philly. I didn’t exactly show up unannounced on his doorstep with all my belongings and my cat; I gave him at least twenty-four hours notice that I’d be showing up on his doorstep with all my belongings and my cat.

Some hidden corner of my subconscious remembers his concerns that we hadn’t been together long enough (about six weeks before I left for school, to be precise), that we’d break up if we moved in together too soon (we’ve been together for eleven years now, by the way), that the cats wouldn’t get along (they didn’t).

I, however, was too caught up in the flurry of discarding my current life and driving fourteen hours straight to share those concerns. So with my cat and everything I owned, I moved in with my first real boyfriend. I decided upon entering his tiny apartment, a clichéd bachelor pad covered in animal fur, that I would just hope for ‘happily ever after.’ I dumped all of my metaphorical eggs (and the literal ones, too, I suppose, given that we now have a son) into the fragile basket of a relationship that had existed for less than two months. Blind optimism, it seems to me in retrospect.

The truth is, we started living together before we knew each other. I was young enough that our seven-year age difference seemed insurmountable. He was cynical enough that he didn’t see the point of legal matrimony. We disagreed about a number of fundamental issues and ideas. We were taking an immeasurable risk.

I’d arrived in the dead of winter. The Divine Lorraine greeted me, a beacon of beauty in what was then a less-than-charming neighborhood. My car was broken into within a week of my arrival. After dark, I couldn’t walk around outside without Max, his Doberman. It was an alien environment, and my naiveté was immediately apparent. The sight of the Divine Lorraine, steps away, offered me a sense of comfort and wonder in a sea of anonymous strangers and unfamiliar sights. It towered above the cacophony of street noise and angry voices, above the homeless

men on the corners and the litter in the gutters. It was haunting, and lovely, and made me glad to be outside in its presence.

My boyfriend and I joked about it, christening it the “Divine Shannon Lorraine.” I suspect the name we share is a large part of my fascination with the structure. But the rest is due to my fondness for a dark, eerie, Tim Burton-esque beauty. It’s easy to imagine a time when the hotel must have stood proudly, windows like glass eyes watching over old-time Philadelphia. Back in late 2005 when I moved to the city, however, it was a glimmer of its former self.

We started walking around at night together, passing by the Divine Lorraine on our way in and out, two insomniacs with a dog in tow. Part of it was the pull of the building, part of it was the thrill of the dark, and part of it was the sheer joy that comes from falling in love with someone for the very first time.

We learned about one another slowly, taking longer and longer walks around the neighborhood. I came to realize, as I’m still coming to realize every day, the depth of his character and his capacity for kindness. I learned that he is empathetic to a fault, practically a musical savant, someone protective of those he loves and those in need. I heard about his effusive Jewish family, his band, his former cats. I learned who he truly is with the Divine Lorraine as our sentinel, standing guard.

After all the months apart, a relationship birthed of phone calls and letter writing, it was surreal to be in one another’s presence, to have as much of the other as we could possibly want. The Doberman wasn’t even necessary as we started walking longer distances, to neighborhoods with trees and window boxes and silent statuesque houses. Our conversations were all over the spectrum, ranging from our hopes to our phobias, never following the same path twice. We talked about anything and everything, posing endless questions and thought experiments.

He would ask, “What’s your favorite movie?”

I would say, “Probably A Clockwork Orange. What’s your favorite movie?”

And…

“If you were on a deserted island and could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?”

“When would I ever possibly be in that situation?”

“Just answer the question.”

“I don’t know, probably ice cream.”

And…

“Wow, did you see that bat?!”

“I know! I saw it!”

Those nights around the melancholy old hotel marked the learning curve of our relationship. Through our walks and talks, we stumbled through painful baggage, but also discovered our shared sense of humor. Looking back, my sheer innocence shocks me. When I’d moved in, we were, essentially, strangers.

In the shadow of the Divine Lorraine, we began our life together. We’ve been through euphoric highs and rock-bottom

lows. As the Doberman sadly passed on less than a year after those urban midnight hikes, we’ve since acquired more cats, in addition to the baby. We’ve stressed about making ends meet. We’ve had health scares and stretches of unemployment, but we’ve somehow, miraculously, managed to stay as enamored with one another at the end of the day as we were in those early months.

Even with all the memories of our nights together crowding my skull, I still remember, quite distinctly, my favorite one from very early on. It was a cold spell in February 2006. Me being perpetually freezing, I was cloaked in layers and a down coat, my hands shoved into his pocket, exhaling clouds of smoke as my breath met the frigid air. We were walking by the Divine Lorraine in a peculiar silence most unlike Philadelphia. We had the dog walking contentedly next to us and Wawa coffee and no iPhones to distract us while in the other’s presence.

It was very, very late, the kind of stillness that can only be experienced while the rest of the world is asleep. The moon was very nearly full, either waxing or waning; I tried to be mindful and present, to take a visual photograph of the moment, to remember how it felt to be loved on a beautiful night in (what I was slowly starting to view as) a beautiful city.

Against the silhouette of the derelict edifice, he looked at me, and I knew suddenly what was about to happen seconds before he spoke. He took a deep breath, and then validated my decision to uproot my life, forego my Ph.D., and take this huge gamble with three short words.

“I love you.”

Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her soul mate, their son, and several spoiled cats. She works for a non-profit organization in Center City while attempting to author the Next Great American Novel. Her interests include writing, theater, ballet, and philosophy, and she harbors an unhealthy obsession with Mt. Everest, the Hill Cumorah Pageant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the summer Olympics. Shannon’s goals are to eventually pay her way out of debt with her writing, to raise a child who uses gender-neutral pronouns, and to acquire even more cats. Her work has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the Philadelphia City Paper, WHYY’s Speak Easy, the Metropolis literary magazine, and the elephant journal.

The Narrow Door: Remembering Denise Gess

[img_assist|nid=20678|title=Narrow Door/Lisicky|desc=|link=node|align=left|width=194|height=140]The late novelist Denise Gess, a native Philadelphian and editorial board member of Philadelphia Stories, lived a life rich in irony and contradiction. She was a writer of great talent and immense ambition who devoted large parts of her life to other things – searching for the perfect love, searching for the perfect writing table.

Now, six years after her death, at 57, from cancer, comes Paul Lisicky’s memoir The Narrow Door, which meditates upon their long friendship, and, with it, the greatest irony of all: that Gess is likely to be remembered more enduringly for her mentee’s experience of her, captured with grace and breathtaking precision, in the pages of The Narrow Door, than for her own writing.

Gess’s two novels, Good Deeds and Red Whiskey Blues, both published with some fanfare, by major publishers, in the ‘80s, have long been out of print; had been at the time of her passing. Her third, Trespasses, never found a publisher, a deep wound for Gess, and one that never healed. That manuscript is packed away, wherever Lisicky and her daughter Austen, Gess’s literary executors, have stored it. During her final illness, between chemo and radiation treatments, Gess worked with mad determination on a fourth, and on more essays and stories. These manuscripts, too, are packed away in archival boxes in climate- controlled storage. (A third book, the nonfiction narrative Firestorm at Peshtigo: A Town, Its People, and the Deadliest Fire in American History, co-written with her ex-husband William Lutz, published in 2003, remains in print, and was optioned for a film.)

The Narrow Door, out in paperback from Graywolf, isn’t only, or even primarily, about Gess, my colleague and friend, and the first essay editor of Philadelphia Stories, though her ‘great shimmering aura’ is felt throughout the book. Rather, The Narrow Door is about friendship and love, both sexual and otherwise. It’s about ambition and success and failure. It’s about pairing and coupling; competition and betrayal. Most of all, The Narrow Door is about the at times harrowing journey into and out of the self – as played out through life’s most bewildering entanglements.

Given Lisicky’s own complexity (a gay man raised in the suburbs of South Jersey in a family of deep Catholic faith), and the depth and breadth of his aspirations in The Narrow Door, it’s no wonder readers are denied a straightforward chronology. Instead, the story loops around in time, patterned by experiences that repeat, echo, or interrogate each other. Whisked into this mix are compressed, lyrical set pieces on volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, oil spills, even the backyard fish pond outside his home in The Springs, East Hampton, which he shared with his Beloved, ‘M’. These set pieces, most of imagistic beauty, buttress or advance the book’s many interlocking themes. A passage from the home in Springs:

The pond is skimmed over with ice…Just where the pump flows back into the water, there’s an opening in the ice. What must it be like to look up through that opening, no wider than a foot or two? The smaller younger fish draw to it, their mouths hitting the moving surface as if they’re gorging on oxygen. Or maybe it’s nothing as extreme as all that. They’re curious. They want to see what’s up there, on the other side: the sky with its rushing clouds, the sun, the geese that fly overhead.

As charted in The Narrow Door, the late aughts are a time of reckoning for Lisicky. By then he’s published two acclaimed books, the rambunctious bildungsroman Lawnboy, and the memoir Famous Builder. But, despite critical acclaim and many honors, he’s yet to achieve financial stability. He loses his mother, first to dementia, then death. The novel that he hopes might earn some money is rejected many times before being published by an indie press with no advance. He loses Denise first to an estrangement, and then, after their reconciliation, to cancer. His marriage to the Famous Writer he calls ‘M’ (M is the poet and memoirist Mark Doty, a luminary in American letters, with whom Lisicky shared his life for 16 years.) begins to come apart. ‘Some joy has been lost in our relationship,’ M tells Lisicky, though ‘this comes as news’ to him. An anguished Lisicky wonders if the ‘gauzy thickness’ of his grief over his losses has driven away his Beloved.

Lisicky was named after his mother’s twin brother, killed at 17 in a car crash, and he wonders if he will always be compelled to ‘live up to a ghost.’ Early in the memoir, he acknowledges his position as a replacement in M’s life, for his previous partner Wally, whose death from AIDS is recounted in Doty’s radiant memoir Heaven’s Coast.

“W has been gone for sixteen years, but M’s attachment to that fact does not shift or diminish. Death shadows his face. It draws him away from me…. I have learned not to think: replacement—I am not his great love. The love coming at me is the love intended for the lost.”

Lisicky was in his early 20s when he became friends with Gess, a beautiful divorce and single mother whose first novel Good Deeds, ‘was poised to make a splash.’ Both were teaching assistants in the graduate English program at Rutgers Camden. Back then, Lisicky says, ‘I wanted to become myself, but there wasn’t even a self to work with.’

Gess takes Lisicky under her scintillating wing, her needy wing. He becomes ‘an outlet for her obsessions.’ Years of long late night and early morning phone calls; of lunches, dinners, caffeine powered gab fests, follow. Ages of Platonic intimacy before Lisicky comes out to her, to anyone, though he wonders ever after about his reticence, about ‘the costs of bandaging, of mummifying myself’ for so long.

The most intense period of their relationship occurs through her writing of Red Whiskey Blues, though the novel is not named. Lisicky isn’t merely in her thrall but serves as her first reader, a privilege and obligation he’ll repeat later in his life with ‘M.’

“Over the phone, her sentences speed past me like meteors, and I can feel Denise listening to me as I am listening to her…. she is listening for laughs, pauses, silences after lines that are supposed to be jokes. She is listening for changes in my breathing. The enormity of this responsibility wipes me out sometimes. “

An indefatigable friend, the kind Gess demanded, Lisicky sees her through the devastation of her editor’s first terrible response to the novel, and her subsequent frantic months of revisions. Both obsess for hours over the chosen cover. They hate it. To Gess, it signifies a terrible but necessary capitulation to the exigencies of publishing. The novel, as published, Lisicky says, is a replacement for the dream book. Others will never see the dream book, but she’ll always have it in her head. It will pulse like a jellyfish, dangerous, blue…’If only’ she’ll say years later, punishing herself for walking away from it.

‘Listening to Denise was my real education,’ Lisicky says, though he’ll go on to earn his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a place Denise yearned to go but never sent in her application. She got to the mailbox with it before she turned away, one of several unsolved mysteries in Denise’s life.

Lisicky, driven by his own ambition, his talent, moves out to Iowa. He takes the steps etched on tablets for writers of great promise who also believe in themselves and their own talent: He goes to Bread Loaf, in one way following in Denise’s footsteps, but, in another, cutting his own path. For Denise, at Bread Loaf, had fallen crazily for a Famous Writer, (John Irving, unnamed) a relationship, or whatever it was, that ended terribly and publicly outside Bread Loaf’s famous Barn, an incident Gess believed forever after caused her banishment from the garden. She was never invited back.

Lisicky, paired with M, makes his way into the heady upper reaches of American literary life. Gess remains rooted in Philadelphia. No surprise, then, that Lisicky soon surpasses Gess in achievement and acclaim. But their role reversals create a perpetual tension between them, and, however obliquely, their eventual falling out.

The book’s title is taken from a homily Lisicky heard at mass during his deepest period of grief after Denise’s death. The narrow door is the one all of us must pass through to reach salvation. Its main story and the side bars are replete with pairings, couplings of many kinds: Vincent VanGogh and Paul Gaugin; Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell; Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell – a talismanic figure for Lisicky and Gess, both for her artistry and for the way she lived her life.

The end of Lisicky’s marriage to M is played out in the context of these other couplings, his shattering realization that M is seeing someone else: There is a person in my house, at my chair at the dining room table. In my refrigerator, on the toilet seat, feet on the bathtub, hands on the sink.

They have lived well, the two of them, Lisicky and ‘M’, with an apartment in Manhattan, a second home on the water. They’ve traveled everywhere together, to visiting writer gigs, readings and festivals, other fine literary events. Lisicky agonizes, ‘Who will I be if I have to leave him behind?’

In the early 2000s, Gess accepted a tenure track position in creative writing at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. This would turn out to be the last chapter in Denise’s life, though nobody had any reason to think so at the time. We were thrilled to have finally hired her after trying for many years. (By then she needed a regular paycheck and benefits.) She was no longer the literary star she’d set out to be. And yet, and yet, she radiated confidence and glamour.

Gess showed up in an ancient beater, a Civic handed down to her from her pharmacist brother, but she might as well have been driving a golden chariot, so regal was she. As slender as a ballerina, she enchanted students and colleagues with her erudition, her classroom performances, her barks of rowdy laughter. She soon traded in her stilettos for leopard print flats, but lost none of her allure. Among her most memorable qualities: Her skill articulating her ideas and theories; her uncanny ability to see exactly what students were trying to achieve and to help them move their work forward to fruition.

Gess became a great friend, generous, intuitive, smart and funny. She was on board with Philadelphia Stories from the start, devoting her considerable energies to the magazine’s success. She was, as Lisicky describes her, a ‘firestorm’, forever ‘surging forward.’ That’s how, I’m certain, she made it through the narrow door.

In this memoir Lisicky practices what Gess, a demanding teacher always preached: that making art out of lived experience requires much of the author: an arduous and dispassionate dive into the self and the casting out of all taint of sentiment and melodrama; surgical precision with the sentence as it incises one’s own life and the lives of others.

At considerable risk to himself, Lisicky satisfies the highest of the Gess’s high demands. His prose crackles with energy and heat, exploding Joan Didion’s infamous proclamation that writers are always selling someone out. Instead Lisicky, with a consciousness as sensitive as a tuning fork, opens his own life and the lives of his loved ones, to a rare and resonant form of empathic examination. Lisicky surpasses the empathy exam.

Julia MacDonnell has lived many lives, among them, urban homesteader, circus performer, modern dancer, waitress, anti-war activist, newspaper reporter, and ‘gluer’ of velvet boxes on a production line in a rosary bead factory. MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last! was published by Picador in 2014, and in paperback in 2015. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Ruminate, Alaska Quarterly Review, Many Mountains Moving, North Dakota Quarterly Review and others magazines. She is the nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories. She has a master’s in journalism from Columbia, and one in creative writing from Temple, and is professor emeritus at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. where she taught workshops in fiction and creative nonfiction for many years.

Holiday Card 2015: The Story Behind the Photo

This image, which appeared on our holiday greeting card, is by Kevin Hogan, a native Philadelphian whose work involves the use of his iPhone and mobile image software in a process called app smashing. He submitted this photograph, titled “Mercer Oak,” for the holiday card because of its historical connection to the season. This large white oak tree stood on the site of the Battle of Princeton, fought on January 3, 1777, where British soldiers surrendered shortly after Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River. The 300-year old tree fell in March 2000, and in May 2000, an 8-foot sapling grown from a Mercer Oak acorn was planted inside the stump of the former tree.

Q&A with Chapters 10-13 Authors

How did you get on board with “Naked Came the Cheesesteak?”

Shaun Haurin: The lovely and talented author Kelly Simmons is an old friend, and she tipped off the editors to my existence.

Mary Anna Evans: I came to the Cheesesteak family through a circuitous chain of connections. I had recently moved to the Philadelphia area to study for an MFA in creative writing at Rutgers-Camden. A friend from Florida introduced me to a friend of hers who had recently graduated from Rutgers-Camden, but who is now in a PhD program in Tennessee. He heard that Mitch Sommers was looking for Philadelphia-area authors for a collaborative novel. Mitch and I got in touch and shook hands on the deal, electronically speaking. Because there is always a significant lag time in publishing–Great writing takes time!–and because I was scheduled to write the last chapter, I had graduated and taken a job at the University of Oklahoma by the time I wrote my installment. And all this multi-state activity took place by email, yet resulted in a pretty cool book, if I do say so myself. Amazing!

Don Lafferty: I can’t remember if Tori or Kelly Simmons approached me first, but when I heard they were on board, along with my good friends, Merry Jones and Gregory Frost, I was honored that they’d thought of inviting me to be part of the project.

Diane Ayres: Accidentally. I was at the annual Xmas Writer’s Party which my husband and I co-host for our fellow writer friends and acquaintances every year who don’t work in offices. We all miss out on those wild parties, so we have our own,( although it’s relatively tame). It was December 2014, and I was catching up with my old pal Greg Frost at the party when Merry Jones approached, and they started telling me about the serial novel they were writing with eleven other local writers. They mentioned that one of the writers had dropped out recently. Since I just happened to be standing there, they were both way too kind and polite to let me feel like the odd author out, so they asked if I would I be interested in doing a chapter. I was well into my second martini so I said “sure!”

Tell me a little about the characters and story in your chapter.

Shaun Haurin: Without giving too much away, my chapter is a character study of Detective Chelsea Simon’s restaurateur husband, Arturo. He’s about to open yet another new restaurant and is contemplating the wisdom of such a decision the night before Halloween. He also has his Uncle Bull on his mind (the eatery’s namesake) as well as the recent death of his mistress, Chelsea’s colleague on the police force. Needless to say, it’s not an especially enjoyable evening for him (though I hope it’s enjoyable for the reader!).

Mary Anna Evans: By the time the manuscript rolled around to me, the setting had moved to a completely new city. None of the previous chapters had been set there, and I’ve never been there. The character list was down to two, unless I wanted to stop the narrative action by plunking them on a plane and sending them home to Philly. Thank you, Warren dear, for that little curve ball.

Don Lafferty: I can’t. My chapter is a spoiler. This also gets me out of public readings.

Diane Ayres: Unfortunately, I’m incapable of telling “a little” about anything, as the audacious length of my chapter demonstrates. For this, I can only beg the forgiveness of my worthy peers and fellow Cheesesteakers. But a serial writer’s gotta do what a serial writer’s gotta do. And in my defense … There was a lot going on in chapters one through ten, with many entertaining characters and plot twists and turns, but it was a little short on any pending resolution. With only two more chapters to go, I felt a great deal of responsibility to braid some of those loose threads together. I did my best to work in some aspect or element of every chapter, although I did not succeed with a couple that were self-contained—not that there’s anything wrong with that. There were quite a few narrative points of view, including Nathanial Popkin’s chapter in the first person, which added another refreshing dimension and perspective. Randall Brown picked up on the voice in one of his scenes in Chapter 9, which I felt was the perfect set up for me to carry it on and give it a name, Steven Barr.

My opening CNN scene was purely satirical because I decided that the only way to handle all of those dead bodies and unanswered questions was to take it over the top, making all of that confusion a seemingly intentional and integral part of the plot. In addressing the absurdity in that first scene, the following scenes would seem more plausible, by comparison—more real. The “realest” scene being the conversation between Ben and Chelsea at Dirty Frank’s—which was my take on Nathaniel Popkin’s dive bar of relevant and/or irrelevant characters. (And also nostalgic because it’s in my old hood.) I also felt the need to flesh out at least two major characters, who had been emerging as a potential love interest all along whether on purpose or unconsciously. These two were always clashing in chapters from the get-go, out of proportion to the problems—protesting a little too much, I thought, which could only mean one thing. They were hot for each other. This revelation afforded me the opportunity to have them meet privately so I could work in some crucial plot points and explanations while also slipping in a sex scene, such as it is, a gritty make-out moment behind Dirty Frank’s. (I don’t know about other readers, but I need a love interest in a novel to hold my interest.)

As for Steven Barr, I thought he needed something in his background to explain all of that deviant, homicidal, sociopathic, domestic terrorist kind of behavior, so I had a field day with the Freudian stereotypes, as well as the neurobiological psychiatric updates (i.e. genetic implications of having a clinically depressed father who committed suicide). I even threw in a warped Hitchcock joke: “Mother’s” waspy blonde hair that turns out to be a wig—perhaps even a wig made out of Mother’s hair before she lost it to cancer. How creepy is that? Yes, of course, my take on Steven Barr borders on camp, but it was also a chance to pick up on another, more serious undercurrent in the novel. The one wherein certain writers out of thirteen do a little riffing on the nature of being writers in the subtext. From Greg Frost’s satirical portrayal of the journalist—“journo”—as buffoon, Vincent “Pants” De Leon, at the Pen & Pencil Club in Chapter 3, to Steven Barr declaring the difference between fiction and nonfiction writers. And in the final scene, journalist Ben Travers insists he is incapable of writing fiction while also denigrating the fiction writers he envies for sitting around in their underwear all day making stuff up.

How did you go about writing your chapter now that the story’s coming to a close?

Shaun Haurin: I left the rollicking plot lines to the mystery-writer professionals and in effect hid behind my imaginary paisano.

Mary Anna Evans: As it turned out, these tight constraints sparked an idea that I think tied up the narrative tightly and unexpectedly. I believe all of us felt the tension between the story handed to us and our own plot ideas and our own style, but that’s not a bad thing. Tension is inherent in any art. In fiction, it is what drives the story forward. I got a real creative jolt when I saw what I was going to have to do to resolve this tale. It was fun.

Don Lafferty: I was traveling, and so unable to attend when the team met at Cordelia Biddle’s crib to discuss the premise of the story and map out the chapter assignments. Email summaries of that meeting made their way to me, but I still didn’t quite grasp the voice or tone toward which the group had decided to aim. When the project got underway and I finally read Kelly Simmons’ opening chapter, I became acutely aware that I was in for something completely different from any writing project I’d ever been part of. Since I had nine months before my chapter would have top be written, I decided to wait until all the chapters were written before I would read any more. When one of the contributors bailed right out after reading Kelly’s chapter, I had a real WTF moment. And then when, a few weeks later, Cordelia bailed out over the direction the book was headed in light of the Pope’s upcoming visit to Philadelphia, I began to wonder if I’d somehow consigned my immortal soul to the dark side. All the while the chapters came in month after month. And I let them pile up. When it was finally my turn to write, I read the book in one sitting, and then, with my mind completely blown, feeling totally inadequate to move the story forward in a meaningful way, thought about it for a couple of tortured weeks. Then I wrote it. Then I strung poor Mitchell and Mary Anna out for a couple of weeks more. Then I sent it.

Diane Ayres: [See answer above.]

What do you think of the story overall?

Shaun Haurin: [insert string of thumbs up and ecstatic eye-patched ghost emojis]

Mary Anna Evans: It’s creative and weird and fun and engrossing. It hangs together as a whole in a way that I never expected it could, coming as it did from thirteen very different brains. It says a lot for the authors that the group was able to create together a work of art as large as a novel, while still staying true to themselves as individuals.

Don Lafferty: I think the story is an honest reflection of each author’s unique perspective on the city we all call home, seen through the lens of each one’s storytelling sensibility. As a movie I see it as possibly, the Coen brothers’ first chick flick.

Diane Ayres: It’s a lot of fun.

What have you taken away from this experience? Did it meet your expectations?

Shaun Haurin: It was great fun! As someone who’s become conditioned to working (and receiving criticism) alone, I highly recommend getting a dozen other people to help write your next novel!

Mary Anna Evans: I take a lot of satisfaction from the finished product, and that’s particularly true because I wrote the summing-up chapter. While the other chapters were being written, I lived for months with worries like “What if there’s no way to make this thing internally consistent, much less fun to read?” More to the point, I worried that I personally wasn’t up to the task. I got a huge rush on behalf of all thirteen of us when I typed the last line. I’m grateful to have had the experience of working with everybody involved.

Don Lafferty: I went into this without expectations, that is, I knew this would be a learning experience, so I was going open to wherever my collaborators led me. Little did I know that it would turn me upside down, shake me up creatively and teach me to jump off a whole new ledge in my personal journey as a writer. And like every piece of writing I’ve ever delivered to an editor, I am reminded in the process, that while I know what I like, I don’t know the first thing about good writing.

Diane Ayres: It was a fascinating meeting of the minds and methods of fiction writers, and also good for me to share a creative experience, because I have always been exceedingly isolated in my work, and it’s good for me to get out occasionally. In regard to expectations I had none, but I would like to add that initially I made light of Greg and Merry being accidentally trapped into asking me to join the project, but it was, in all seriousness, a great honor and pleasure to participate. And I hope my effort didn’t disappoint.

Q&A with Chapters 7-9 Authors

How did you get on board with “Naked Came the Cheesesteak?”

Randall Brown: I wish I remembered, but ever since I turned fifty this year, my memories have begun fading. In any case, I’m so thrilled that we found each other. I’m a huge fan of PS Books!

Nathaniel Popkin: I have trouble saying no….no, really, I thought it would be fun to write under a completely different set of circumstances than what I am used to, and to work with these excellent writers.

Warren Longmire: I’ve been tangentially connected to Philadelphia Stories for years through my time as editor at Apiary Magazine and have recently been on a panel or two they held at Rosemont College. Though my focus is on poetry, I had done some fiction in the past and was intrigued by the chance to jump back in. I’m happy to have a chance to represent North Philly, my birth place, among the panel of writers.

Tell me a little about the characters and story in your chapter.

Randall Brown: I focused on one of the detectives in the story and her search for the murderer and his/her weapon(s) of choice. That search leads her through the icy city streets on the first winter strom of the year. Also I had been in the middle of a binge of CRIMINAL MINDS, so I think that show influenced my chapter a lot, especially the desire to profile characters.

Nathaniel Popkin: My character is the killer, who in the imaginative framework of my chapter is the writer. He is in hiding and seems to be seeking revenge on someone. Or not—it may be hard to tell. I just was interested in playing with some concepts, particularly those having to do with authorship and the wall between word and story, story and reality. With a book written by a chain of writers, the process really is the thing. So why not acknowledge it in the fiction itself?

Warren Longmire: My chapter attempts flesh out some back-story on Chelsea, the lead investigator in the murders and introduces are father Howard. The last we saw her, she had pretty brutally beat down a suspect (and incidentally, the only other black character in the novel) in the killing from Strawberry Mansion, a neighborhood in Philly not far from where I grew up. There was then a detour into a new, suspected mysterious character in West Philly hinted at being involved. I wanted to give nods both to this new development in the plot and explore what would make a black women from a hood-tinged area of a city become a police officer, let alone to participate in police brutality.

What are your thoughts on the direction of the story so far now that we are mid-way through the novel?

Randall Brown: It has more ups and downs than a paper route in Manayunk.

Nathaniel Popkin: I just hope that the reader is rooting for the writer.

Warren Longmire: Lots of twists right? SUCH MISDIRECTION! The previous chapter in particular through much doubt into where the investigation was heading.

What was your writing process like?

Randall Brown: I am a very, very short fiction writer who primarily focuses on flash fiction, stories under 1000 words. So I think having to write a single chapter of a novel was a good experience for my own foray into longer forms. I approached it by writing the chapter in bite-sized chunks.

Nathaniel Popkin: I paced around my office, which is around a half wall/bookcase from my bed. I finally sat down. For some reason the idea of a New Yorker Magazine holiday party appeared in my head (not that I would know what such a party is like). I went from there. By the end of the day, I figured that the rest of the writers were going to come to my house and do a little cheesesteak number on me. So I was hesitant to press send. Then I did and no one showed up, so I went back around the wall and went to bed.

Warren Longmire: I tend to stick to place and image in my writing. Quiet moments draw me in and help to set the scene. Finally, I have a strong connection to the music of the language in my writing. The most difficult part of this project (in addition to sticking the word limit) was using these techniques in the service of my characters.

How do you feel about writing a serial novel? Is it challenging particularly because the novel is a murder-mystery?

Randall Brown: It was a challenge, because every chapter that preceded mine changed my own views about what my own chapter should tackle. As I wrote my chapter, to be very honest, I still had no clue who had done it.

Nathaniel Popkin: I have no idea what I’m doing being part of mystery-thriller, or whatever this is. Not my territory. So I was afraid, really afraid. Frankly, I’m not even sure anyone knows what to do with my chapter. Will they ignore it? Reader, feel free to skip right over!

Warren Longmire: YES. Even when I did write fiction, it was never genre. I’d enjoyed the process, though, and am excited to see the results.

Q&A with Chapters 4-6 Authors

How did you get on board with “Naked Came the Cheesesteak?”

Kelly McQuain: Mitch, the editor approached me. We’ve known each other since doing our MFA at the University of New Orleans. It had been a long while since I wrote a fiction project. I’ve been working in poetry and essays these last few years, and though I was a little shy at first I decided this might be a fun way back into writing fiction. It was.

Victoria Janssen: Greg Frost brought me on board, when one of the other writers cancelled. Greg and I used to be in a workshop together.

Tony Knighton: Christine Weiser got me involved.

Tell me a little about the characters and story in your chapter.

Kelly McQuain: I wrote chapter 6, and it seemed each chapter that came before introduced a lot of new characters. I wanted to bring back or mention as many characters as I could so that there would be a sense of continuity and development. That’s what I like in books with large casts, to see the way the characters’ stories weave in and out of those around them. As this was near the midpoint of the novel, I thought it was important to do so. Of course, to pull this off I had to add a new character that I hoped a later writer might further develop. Arhsad is his name, a college student who sheds some light on the backstories of some of the other victims. I also wanted to add more diversity in terms of race and sexual identity. I was delighted to have an opportunity to also flesh out Josh, the food truck owner whose truck is where the initial murder happens. He’s mentioned in chapter 1, but he had been kept off-stage. And, of course, his girlfriend Angela had to reappear. In terms of tone, I tried to be consistent with chapter 1, that this was a comic murder mystery, both a satire and an affectionate peaen to the City of Brotherly Love. I also wanted to pin down the passage of time during the fall term, so I set this chapter just before Halloween with a note to my collaborators that I hoped the upcoming holiday might make a good backdrop for a later chapter.

Victoria Janssen: My new characters were Olive Norvell and Laurel Gutierrez, police sidekicks for Chelsea Simon, the detective. I based their personalities very loosely on Laurel and Hardy; their main purpose was to serve as comedic foils. Given where my chapter fell, I thought it would be a good idea to sum up some of the previous action and create a bridge to later events, while working in another death. Greg had mentioned he’d created “Pants” to be a murder victim, so I obliged!

Tony Knighton: It seemed to me that the story was running away; I wanted to bring it back around to Angela (I liked her character). I had used Mickey and Mrs. DeSantis in another story and thought them perfect for something happening Downtown.

Did you read the previous chapters before writing yours? How has this serial novel structure influenced your writing?

Kelly McQuain: Of course! I would have felt like I was being disrespectful to the hard work of the other writers if I hadn’t done so, and I would not have benefited from the seeds they had lain. What was useful to me was the meta-data the editors and other writers helped generate, so that I could more easily track characters and happenings. A project like this is fun for the wildly different approaches you see in what gets turned in, but to me it also emphasizes that for my own writing projects the importance of timelines, plot diagrams, and outlines to the cohesion of the work. This project, by it’s nature, breaks the rules in a fun way, but at the same time it served for me as a reminder of why those rules are there to begin with.

Victoria Janssen: I did read the previous chapters before beginning to write. I tried to make my chapter build structurally on what went before while providing a launch point for succeeding chapters. I didn’t make any attempt to match styles, because I figured the different authorial voices were a feature, not a bug.

Tony Knighton: Of course I read the previous chapters, and liked them a lot. If this exercise has influenced my writing I’m not aware of it.

What have you noticed about writing for a serial novel and how it influenced the overall story?

Kelly McQuain: I had to make peace with the fact that the set-ups and characters I liked the most wouldn’t necessarily be embraced by later writers, who steered the ship in their own direction. A serial novel is not going to be as tight or as streamlined as an Agatha Christie novel. The fun lies in the diversity of approaches. I think what the overall novel becomes is a portrait of how 13 writers see Philadelphia at this moment in time. My favorite parts are how we satirize the city, how we critique its legal system and the exploitation of adjuncts on campuses throughout the city. How we poke fun at beloved low-brow cuisine like the cheesesteak as well as at Philly’s restaurant renaissance. How we even poke fun at the genre of mystery writing itself when the novel takes a possibly meta turn. A huge amount of geographical territory is also covered in the book. There are scenes at Kelly Writers House at Penn, at the Drexel Dragon, at Community College of Philadelphia and at Temple. Rittenhouse Square, South Philly, Strawberry Mansion, and so many other places also make appearances. The novel’s definitely a portrait of the city’s people and its places.

Victoria Janssen: I discovered how very useful it can be to keep a list of characters and their salient characteristics. I had done a couple of round robins before, so I was prepared for later authors to radically depart my expectations for the story.

Tony Knighton: I haven’t yet read the subsequent chapters; I want to read the story all at once.

Were you surprised at the direction any of the characters you wrote or created were taken by other writers, or did other writers express surprise at the direction you took with your characters?

Kelly McQuain: Merry, who wrote chapter 2, expressed surprise when I read at our launch party that I turned one of her characters gay. “No, Merry,” I playfully told her, “he was gay all along. Deep down in your sub-text.” The truth is, her character’s sexuality had not been clearly established, so I saw it as an opportunity to surprise the reader. Isn’t that what we try to do as writers? Just when a reader thinks they have everything pinned down, the writers shows them something new that deepens the story. Good old “recognition and reversal.” I’ll add that as a queer person myself, I do not operate under the de facto assumption that most of the world does, that all people are straight until proven otherwise. That’s a perspective and sensitivity I could bring to the mix, and probably one of the reasons Mitch wanted me on board.

I was less surprised by the direction in which my characters were taken (and other people’s) than I was in my desire to still want to know more about them by the novel’s end. Several of these characters are interesting enough to drive their own books. One of the things that surprised me was that a project designed to be set in Philadelphia would ultimately end up somewhere else. But as for where… well, dear readers, you will just have to read and see.

Victoria Janssen: I haven’t finished reading the whole novel yet!

Tony Knighton: See [previous answer], and no.

Q&A with Chapters 1-3 Authors

How did you get on board with “Naked Came the Cheesesteak?”

Greg Frost: Mitch approached me, asked if I would be interested in contributing. I was aware of both its predecessors–Naked Came the Stranger and Naked Came the Manatee, the latter in particular; so I said yes.

Merry Jones: It was at Push to Publish. Mitch was talking to Kelly Simmons and Greg Frost about participating, and I thought, hey, sounds like fun. Why don’t I do it, too?

Kelly Simmons: It sounded like so much fun, are you kidding me? To write outside my genre, to have no control of the story after it leaves your hands — it’s like improv!

Have you ever contributed to a serial novel written by multiple authors before? In what ways has this structure influenced your writing?

Greg Frost: I contributed many years ago to a serial work by my class at the Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State University.

Were you given any set requirements for the chapter you wrote?

Greg Frost: None beyond the first two chapters that preceded mine. I read through those, thought about them a bit and then proceeded.

Merry Jones: The story was supposed to be based in Philadelphia, and a mystery. Other than that, no. My chapter came early so I thought I should set up some crime, making it clear that the death in the first chapter wasn’t a fluke.

Kelly Simmons: I volunteered to go first — before I realized how hard that might be! I had a lot of setting up to do, character introductions, settings, etc, and still had to start with a bang. We had agreed only on title, murder mystery, and that we would move it around different Philly neighborhoods. I had a lot of fun interpreting the title!

Tell me a little about the characters and story in your chapter.

Greg Frost: I created a character, Vincent “Pants” de Leon, as a kind of halfwit who thinks he’s twigged the identity of the killer. His real purpose in the larger story is to be available for killing by someone further up the line. I hoped one of the later writers would loop him back in and bump him off.

Merry Jones: My characters are college kids who like cheesesteaks. They weren’t meant to continue through the chapters. They were meant to be victims….

Kelly Simmons: I had the honor of writing the first chapter — setting up the clues for the first murder, dangling possible motives, and introducing characters like a detective and a reporter that could be used going forward. But I chose to start off my chapter in South Philly with The Nicholetti family and their daughter Angela, a beautiful but mouthy and whipsmart Drexel student whose boyfriend, Josh, owns a popular, gourmet food truck whose signature dish is a Vegan Cheesesteak called The Without — and who is accused of the first murder.

How do you think the story will turn out?

Greg Frost: I’ve absolutely no idea. A lot of raw material was laid out early on, but it’s all down to the last few writers to assemble something like a cohesive narrative, to choose the door marked “Exit.” I would not presume.

Merry Jones: Haha. Good question. It’s out of my hands. I won’t/can’t even venture a guess.

Kelly Simmons: Well, since I know the person tasked with the last chapter, it’ll end with a brilliant twist, I’m sure!

About the Editors

Co-editors
Mitchell Sommers
Tori Bond

Assistant editors
Jon Busch
Tiffany Sumner
Emi London

Intern
Lena Van

Acknowledgements
Ryan McElroy – cover art
Tyler Hanssens – photo credit Philadelphia cityscape

About the Authors: Naked Came the Cheesesteak – A Serial Novel

Fiction writer and editor Diane Ayres is the author of the novel Other Girls (Kensington Hardcover), the Bella Vista story “Seeing Nothing” in Philadelphia Noir (Akashic), and the poetry chapbook Rotation Stabilizes. A graduate of Chatham College, she has taught writer’s workshops at Penn, the GLVWG, and many other conferences.

Randall Brown has been published and anthologized widely, both online and in print. He received his MFA from Vermont College and teaches in Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries, which have won awards including the Mississippi Author Award, the Benjamin Franklin Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. She holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden, and she is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Gregory Frost is the author of novels—Shadowbridge, Lord Tophet, Fitcher’s Bride—and short stories of the fantastic, including “Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters—H’ard and Andy Are Come to Town,” a collaboration with Philly author Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s). He is the Fiction Workshop Director at Swarthmore College.

Shaun Haurin is a founding member of the artistic co-op Helveticats as well as the author of a story collection, Public Displays of Affectation. His short fiction has appeared in a variety of literary magazines.

Of Victoria Janssen’s three novels for Harlequin, The Moonlight Mistress (set during World War One) was nominated for an RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Award; her work has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Russian. Find out more at victoriajanssen.com or follow her on twitter @victoriajanssen.

Merry Jones is the author of nineteen suspense, humor, and non-fiction books. Her latest works include the Elle Harrison suspense novels (The Trouble With Charlie, Elective Procedures and, next year, Child’s Play) and the Harper Jennings thrillers (Summer Session, Behind The Walls, Winter Break, Outside Eden, In The Woods). Visit her at MerryJones.com.

Tony Knighton published the novella and story collection Happy Hour and Other Philadelphia Cruelties with Crime Wave Press. His story “The Scavengers” is included in the anthology Shocklines: Fresh Voices in Terror, published by Cemetery Dance, and his story “Sunrise” is included in the anthology Equilibrium Overturned, published by Grey Matter Press. He is a lieutenant in the Philadelphia Fire Department.

Don Lafferty is a writer, lecturer and marketing consultant. He’s written corporate communication, marketing and advertising copy, and feature articles for several national magazines. He’s the social media director of the literary magazine, Wild River Review, and serves on the board of directors of the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference.

Warren Longmire is a poet, web programmer, Philly native, and expert level whistler. He is the former poetry editor for Apiary Magazine and has been published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Eleven Eleven, and two chapbooks: Ripped Winters, and Do.Until.True. You can find his work at dountiltrue.tumblr.com.

Kelly McQuain is a poet, fiction writer, and artist. Recent projects include work in the anthologies The Queer South, Drawn to Marvel: Poems from the Comic Books, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. His chapbook, Velvet Rodeo, won Bloom magazine’s poetry prize. He teaches writing in Philadelphia. Learn more at KellyMcQuain.wordpress.com.

Nathaniel Popkin is the author of three books, including the 2013 novel Lion and Leopard. He is editorial director of Hidden City Philadelphia and senior writer of “Philadelphia: The Great Experiment,” an Emmy award-winning documentary series. He is fiction review editor of Cleaver Magazine. His literary essays and book reviews appear in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Kenyon Review, The Millions, and Fanzine.

Kelly Simmons’ novels have been hailed as electrifying, complex and poignant, and aren’t those nice words? Her third novel, One More Day, debuts February 2016. She’s a member of The Liars Club, a group of published novelists dedicated to helping fledgling writers. Read more at kellysimmonsbooks.com

The Kielbasy Run

Tucked into Philadelphia’s northeastern section, the small neighborhood of Port Richmond is still asleep. It’s 5:30 on a cold December morning, and a fog has fallen over the narrow streets and row-homes. Abandoned factories and ornate churches, still illuminated by the moon, cast elongated shadows across the neighborhood. Most residents are still snug in the warmth of their beds, I am not one of them. For the past 17 years, my mom, Aunt Pat and I have embarked on the “Kielbasy Run.” Set during the week before Christmas, we put on layer after layer of clothing and take the 20-minute drive on an empty I-95 to my family’s old Polish neighborhood, Port Richmond. The ride is mostly silent; Aunt Pat tries to catch up on sleep after consecutive night shifts at Jefferson Hospital, and I stare out the window.

Our destination—Czerw’s Deli—is located on Tilton Street, which closer resembles a back alleyway than a usable road. After parallel parking a few blocks away (the closest we can get to the store), we venture into the below-zero temperatures and wait in line outside. The store won’t be open until 7 a.m., but the line already reaches the end of the block. We do all of this in search of one thing: authentic Polish food.

We wait in line with familiar faces from years past. There’s the businessman taking a day off from work, the father with his young children who drove in from New Jersey and the old woman (hair still in curlers) who lives around the block.

Thirty minutes later, we pass the screen door leading to the back of the deli—a source of warmth and a sign we are nearing the main entrance. Through the screen, I can make out the faint figure of an old woman, hunched over with her cane faithfully by her side. Her hands move slowly and steadily as she packs beef into cabbage leaves. Her measurements are by memory, the movements of her fingers automatic. After wrapping up the finished product, she hobbles to the back hallway, calls out for one of her sons and hands off the package.

Just then, a large man—his white apron covered in reddish-brown stains—flings open the screen door and steps into the cold air to check the smoker. As he removes the lid, warm smoke and the woodsy smell of meat diffuses through the line. He grumbles to himself as he dips a finger in the juice pooling under the meat and raises it to his mouth.

“Needs more onions,” he states with a smack of his lips. He disappears back into the kitchen.

After nearly an hour in the cold, we make it to the large, wooden door. Inside, the deli is long and narrow, with enough room for only 10 customers. The line stretches along the back wall next to shelves packed with everything from Jewish rye bread to kosher dill pickles. One shelf displays four kinds of babka—cheese, raspberry, poppy seed and sometimes chocolate. In the back corner of the deli is a freezer full of pierogis. A large barrel full of sauerkraut gives the store its distinctive sour delicious smell of onions and garlic.

When we finally reach the deli counter, one of the three blond brothers takes our order.

“What’ll it be ladies?” the oldest brother asks in a gruff voice.

Mom recites our order like clockwork:

“Four pounds kabanosa, one pound fresh kielbasy, a pound of fresh bacon—sliced thick—one cheese babka, and four dozen onion & cheese pierogis.”

The rounded glass case is filled with red meat ranging from slab bacon to smoked kielbasy. Yellowed newspaper clippings hang in frames behind the counter, and a photograph of Pope John Paul II dutifully overlooks the cash register. After making our purchases, our food is handed to us in a large brown paper bag—20 pounds of pure culinary heaven. Our parcels act as a source of heat as we make our way back outside. Customers in line outside eye the trophy in our arms as we walk past.

The rest of our day is spent driving to three or four Polish bakeries—most are easy to spot with the country’s red and white colors proudly displayed. As we drive from bakery to bakery, my mom and aunt point out familiar landmarks:

“This is the cemetery where Babci [Grandma] is buried.”

“There’s the corner store our cousin used to own.”

“Here is where I first learned to drive our orange station wagon.”

Our foggy car windows display family history like a photo album. With each street comes another memory, and with each memory comes another anecdote.

By now it’s nearly 1 p.m., and we make our way into the last bakery for our most valued item: paczkis. Paczkis (pronounced PUNCH-keys) are Polish doughnuts filled with fruit jelly or cream. Their airy dough makes them significantly better than traditional American doughnuts. We select a variety of paczkis in flavors such as plum, prune and apricot.

As I walk back to the car—paczki in hand—the chilling wind hardly bothers me. I remove my thick gloves and let the powdered sugar fall onto my skin. The purple jelly stains my lips and tongue. I gaze once more at the grandiose churches dotting the avenue. From where I stand I can see the churches where great-grandma Frances Rybicki, great-grandpa Mikolaj Czekaj and grandma Catherine Wojcik all lived out the major events of their lives. I smile as our car pulls away and these familiar landmarks disappear into the Philadelphia skyline.

Once back at Aunt Pat’s house, the crinkling of the brown paper bag acts as the dinner bell. My five cousins—Brook, Matt, Monica, Chris and Erica—come running down three flights of stairs. We gather around my aunt’s round table and immediately begin to unwrap food from its paper packaging. We laugh for hours as Mom and Aunt Pat continue to share stories while we feast. Once my belly is finally full and I can’t bear to eat another paczki, there’s one thought running through my mind: I can’t wait until next year.

Born & raised in northeast Philadelphia, Rachel Garman has always had a passion for telling stories. She recently graduated from Penn State with a degree in print journalism, and she is currently a Public Relations Specialist for Penn State IT Communications. When not busy writing, Rachel continues her quest for the perfect doughnut (paczkis are currently in her top five).