Novelist Thomas Reed joins me today to chat about his new dark family comedy, Pocketful of Poseys.
Bio:
Thomas Reed was born in Oberlin, Ohio and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, where his father was a university professor. Tom taught literature, film, and writing at Dickinson College for thirty years.
Pocketful of Poseys draws on his experience growing up in an academic family; his education at Yale, the University of Virginia, and Oxford; years spent living in Rome and Christchurch, N.Z.; travels around the world with his wife and children, and courageous decisions made by his mother-in-law as she faced her death.
Tom’s first novel, Seeking Hyde, grew out of decades of researching, teaching, and writing about the life and times of Robert Louis Stevenson. Seeking Hyde was named Finalist in the 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Historical Fiction.
He and his wife Dottie now split their year between Sarasota, Florida, and Camp Pemigewassett, a summer camp for boys in New Hampshire. Founded by Tom’s grandfather and two partners in 1908, it is the oldest residential boys’ camp in the country still owned and operated by the founding families.
Welcome, Thomas. Please tell us about your current release.
Grace Tingley and Brian Posey are forty-something twins whose constant conflicts, Brian reckons, date from their racing each other to the birth canal. When their Woodstock-Nation mother, Cinny, is diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and refuses all food and drink, the twins are forced to deal with her decision as a team. Once she is gone, they must also carry out her last wishes—to take her ashes, along with those of their father, and sprinkle them at six locations around the globe that were important to the pair, some remote and exotic, some challengingly public. Accompanied by their quirky lot of spouses and children, they jet across four continents following their mother’s detailed letters of instruction—which also happen to include some shocking revelations about their parents’ lives.
What inspired you to write this book?
Cinny, the matriarch of the Posey clan, is unquestionably if somewhat loosely based on my mother-in-law, Claudia Grant, who decided after years of dealing with Parkinson’s disease that she had lived a long and fulfilling life and was ready to move on. Like Cinny, she stopped eating and drinking, and also like Cinny, she asked her children and grandchildren to take a trip together “when this is all over” to celebrate their rich family ties. Claudia’s ashes rest peacefully with her husband Dave’s in a columbarium in Baltimore, but her sending us off on our post-hospice holiday (to Antigua, as it happened) inspired me to imagine what that kind of trip might look like if part of its purpose were to spread parental ashes at multiple spots around the world that had been important to the parents.
When my wife and I were discussing the idea (over a drink!) with my own mother’s caregiver, a wonderful man named John Peck, the challenges of sprinkling ashes in what might turn out to be a very public spot popped into mind. I remembered the ploy the prisoners use in the marvelous movie The Great Escape, moving the excavated dirt from their sub-barracks escape tunnel out into the camp yard by putting it in their pockets and then pulling a string to release the dirt down their trouser legs to the ground. “Perfect for St. Peters,” I said to John, with a smile. “And if you were having trouble and someone saw you whipping your leg around,” replied John, “you could always say you were just trying to get your mother-in-law out of your pants.” I didn’t actually have anyone use the technique in the story, but they discussed it—and John had largely given me the overarching comic tone.
Excerpt from Pocketful of Poseys:
Despite their ongoing gibes and jabs—always directed, in either direction, with the exquisite timing and lethal accuracy unique to those who know each other intimately—the thought of her twin brother getting to Hanover Hills was tearfully buoying to Grace. Cinny was thrilled as well. The week that ticked by between Brian’s booking his ticket and his arrival felt to them both like the run-up to Christmas.
Grace met him at the Hopkins Center bus stop and drove him straight to the nursing facility. When he stuck his head inside the door, Cinny rose from bed, unassisted, for the last time she ever would and lurched barefoot across the cold floor to embrace him. Grace could see tears as Brian squinted above a bittersweet smile. Cinny held him tight for a good minute, eyes closed, head pressed against his chest.
Suddenly, from across the hall, came a plaintive, twanging whine. When I tell you that I love you, you just whisper, “Go away!” All those kinky duds I bought you? Now—consarn it!— you won’t play.
Cinny pulled back from the clinch and looked Brian square in the eye. “You hear the shit I have to put up with?”
Although the tremor in her voice unsettled him, Brian laughed as he helped his mother turn back toward the bed. “That Milt?”
“How’d you know about Milt?”
“I guess Gracie mentioned him.” Brian smiled.
“Milt’s never going to die.” Cinny cleared her throat with some effort. “He might as well be a vampire.”
“So, Mom,” said Brian, after he’d gotten her back into the bed and helped her pull up her covers, “what have you been up to?”
“Besides getting ready to check out of the Hotel California here?”
Brian looked at Grace with something between a grin and a grimace. “Well, sure.”
“Thinking about you. And Gracie. How good you are to come all this way. To give up all this time for your mother.”
“You’ve given up more than forty years for us, Mom,” said Brian.
“They’ve been the best years of my life.” Cinny beamed at the two until concern swept over her face. “Look at the pair of you now! I can’t be saying sentimental shit like that. The last thing I want is a tear fest.”
“What do you want, Mom?” asked Brian. “We’re here to help. Whatever.”
“Oh, you know. I want you and Grace to be happy. And Jack. And…”
“Ella?”
“Damn it! Yes. Ella. And Chelsea, of course. But to be honest,” said Cinny, “I sort of wish you’d walked in and told me my eyes had rolled up into the back of my head. You know?”
Brian looked at Grace, who managed a smile. He reached out for Cinny’s hand.
“Honestly,” she said, “this is so damned long and drawn out. I don’t have the faintest idea, really, how far along I am. Some nights I dream I’m dead. Then I wake up, and I’m not! It would have been easier to go out and get hit by a truck.”
“Maybe,” responded Brian through a nervous laugh. “I’m glad you didn’t, though. At least before I made it back.”
Cinny cleared her throat again. “Me, too.”
What exciting project are you working on next?
That’s still a bit up in the air. There’s a short story I published years back about rock-climbing, an all-but-mortally strained friendship, and miraculous forgiveness in a life-and-death situation on the cliffs of North Wales. It’s finally a kind of feel-good ghost story, and I’m toying with expanding it into a short novel. Alternatively, I have an idea about an older man walking the Appalachian Trail that has some appeal. Pocketful of Poseys gave me a chance to think about ways both to live a good life and also to wrap one up. I don’t think I’m done with that idea. I’m just not sure exactly where it might take me next.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I was a college literature professor, so I knew I was a writer of scholarship from graduate school on. As for fiction, that actually began to take off in some Freshman Seminars I taught when I asked all the students at the end of the semester to write a short scene or story on experiences or thoughts one of the book’s character might have had but that weren’t actually in the original: sort of a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exercise. I decided the process would work best if I participated myself, so we looked at my “gripping [hopefully] first paragraph” along with theirs and workshopped other bits in tandem. I was as careful as I could be to seem like just another student fulfilling the assignment. But, in the process, what I conceived of as a useful teaching tool began to feel like something I wanted to be doing outside the classroom. My first novel, Seeking Hyde, is about Robert Louis Stevenson penning Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and what happened afterwards. I never could have written it if I hadn’t been teaching the novel in class. It was all a fortunate kind of cross-pollination.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I’m retired now, so when I have a novel going, I tend to write every day and feel aggrieved when I can’t. I tend to write fairly quickly so, with an eye to quality control, I don’t often let myself work for more than three (maybe four) hours of the day—often 10:00 (after my morning walk) to 2:00. Unlike some other writers, I like to revise as I go forward, so I’ll often start my writing day by going back over what I’ve churned out the day before. That serves the double purpose of revision (lots of cutting back on unnecessary words and “darling killing”) and reminding myself where I am in the story. If I think I’ve written something funny, I have the annoying habit of trying it out on my wife in the other room. So far, she’s been remarkably gracious.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I don’t know if this is either a quirk or interesting, but I love to take a walk by myself when I hit a wall or “lose the map” when I’m writing. I find that the rhythm of movement somehow shakes everything up in my mind and lets it settle back into a more sensible pattern. I don’t know how I’d manage if I didn’t have this resource.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
In the early days, a baseball player, but later on, a college professor. My father was an art historian, and one of the best years of my life was when I was six, travelling through Europe with him, my mother, and my older sister in a puke-green Ford Consul as he took pictures for the Brown University Art Department. A life with sabbaticals seemed the only life worth living. I just chose literature, myself. And, yes, that year of family travel probably made Pocketful of Poseys possible.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Just that reading to children at bedtime is a priceless investment in the future of our kind. Turn off the devices and do it as often as you can.