The Toll Road North

My novel is complete, thanks in large part to Molly McGrath, who calls herself an editor but I believe she is truly a professional cheerleader, wielding her expertise and encouragement in equal measure. So many people (family, friends, acquaintances, the guy who works at the research desk at the Auburn Public Library) want to know what I've been doing the last couple of years, that I thought it best to share a brief synopsis of the novel here.

Today begins my submission process - which can take years, and often ends without publishing success. I'm ready for the journey. Thank you to everyone who believes in me and this project!

The Toll Road North synopsis

How would you react if caught in a random act of violence? When Dee recognizes the face of her 17-year-old captor, she sees her chance for personal and family redemption.

The Toll Road North (76,570 words) is a suspenseful, character-driven, contemporary novel about intertwined and intergenerational families set in the French-Catholic community of Lewiston, Maine in the 1960s and 1970s and present day. The story explores small town life, family secrets, and class divisions as they come to light when present encounters past. 

Dee Langlois is living a charmed life as a Connecticut housewife until she returns to her roots in Lewiston during a college visit with her son and they are caught in a hostage situation in the local sandwich shop. When she recognizes the face of the disenfranchised youth waving the gun, Dee realizes that she has to face her past, despite her fear that her husband, son, and friends may never again see her as the same person. In interwoven chapters, we meet Dee’s and the young gunman’s ancestors who set the tone for the future generations of each of their families. The novel exposes the reader to Dee's family secrets, filled with unwanted pregnancies, name changes, and abandonment, through a cast of small town recognizable characters who create the best images they can muster from their dark pasts. As the reader follows Dee, her younger parents, and their friends through a series of bewildering discoveries, The Toll Road North explores the idea that family legacy shapes the adult persona and that we can't escape our roots.

Full Embrace

To learn about yourself, sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone. I pushed myself WAY out of my comfort zone this weekend and attended the Slice Literary Conference in Brooklyn.

I have discovered this writing life to be ironic. It is the most insular undertaking I have ever experienced: sitting in a small space, with the reflective glow of my laptop as my only companion. However, the point to sitting alone for hours every day is to artfully get my thoughts on paper to be shared with the world. True confessions: I miss the community nature of teaching, the energy of other people, the dramatic highs and lows of working with teenagers. I spent the last year writing a novel, alone, and found myself talking to my cat and dog way more often than is acceptable. It was high time for me to find a larger community of writers.

Thanks to the lovely and talented Celia Johnson of SliceLiterary coming to Maine and teaching a killer workshop on the business of writing through the Maine Writers and Publishers Association, I discovered that writers actually do leave their hovels from time to time to blink at the sunshine of the world. I applied to attend the Slice Literary Conference and was accepted. Then, I enrolled for a couple of agent meetings, and was confirmed. I was on a roll – so I entered the Bridging the Gap competition. My poem, Emotional Eater, earned me a spot as a finalist in the competition, which gave me entry into two specialized workshops. It was all too good to be true, and I hadn’t even left home yet. Of course, all this news came to me as I sat, alone, in that reflective glow of the laptop. Last Friday, I had to actually pack a suitcase with my anxiety and get on a plane.

My family, friends, local writing acquaintances, all support my foray into this world – of course they do, they are not the ones facing their greatest fear. As a fledgling in this world, I was about to learn if I had what it takes to make it. The pronouns are intentional here: I don’t even know what either “it” actually represents. I am clueless. My goal for the conference was to become informed.

The conference was certainly an eye opener, full of plenty of its own irony. The amount of intelligence that surrounded me was overwhelming, but I learned that every writer there felt ignorant in comparison to the person next to them. (Apparently we are a self-demeaning bunch.) People traveled from great distances, including a lovely young woman who came all the way from Istanbul, to enter a space full of people who usually sit alone. The majority of writers agonized over agent meetings, full of passion about their completed works, and most of them were told their work was not really complete. Overall, the entire experience of being part of the literary community was mind-jolting enough to make me secretly long for the moment I could be alone with my laptop again. And so, here I am, alone, basking in the soft glow of the computer screen, hyper-focused on my time at the conference, where I found my people.

I would like to say I had a great epiphany about myself or made a highly intellectual connection with another writer as my great take-away from the conference, but I have to be honest. My greatest moment at the conference was at the informal presentation by Neal Thompson of Amazon Author Relations, when he encouraged us to ask ourselves, “what do I want to get from this life as a writer?” I was taking notes on my iPad when his question entered my existence, forever changing me. I shut my iPad and sat there, heart pounding, not hearing another word of the presentation. And that’s when it happened. I saw the woman next to me, taking notes on paper, obsessively boxing for emphasis the question, “what do I want to get from this life as a writer?” I tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Mind-blowing, right?” She looked at me, eyes glazed over, and nervously laughed. I stifled my own laughter, and then the woman on the other side of me leaned in and added, “I need to go home now.” As the presentation ended and the three of us collected our things, basking in our commonality, a couple of other women from a nearby table joined us, saying they enjoyed seeing our reaction to that burning question. One of them said, “I have no idea what I want,” and the other chimed in with, “I’ve never even considered what I am doing as creating a new life.” I summed it up for us by stating that I was done. Conference over. I could go home and spend the next year trying to answer that question.

It seems many of us “emerging writers” have it all wrong. We are focused on creating work, and we are supposed to be focused on creating a life. Let’s face it, not too many people can support themselves as writers. That’s why most of the writers I met this weekend are also grad students, teachers, scientists, political consultants, wait staff. We love our writing work, and we produce art – then move on to our regular existence. We have all been cheating ourselves. Writing is supposed to be who we are, how we live our lives.

So, here I am. In my small space, trying to dull the glare of the screen with words that will prove to you, reader, that I experienced a great life lesson this weekend. Prepare for the letdown – my great life lesson is that I have the ability – the freedom – the responsibility – the need to create a life for myself as a writer. There is no great formula to success, there is no corporate structure that I need to mold myself to, there are no steadfast rules about hours or workflow. There are only words that need to be artfully arranged into a platform for my life. That platform is totally up to me – no one is going to hand it to me, or determine how it should look. In all the confusion, it’s really very simple.

I am a writer. 

www.peggyldeblois.com

Emotional Eater

This poem was selected as a finalist in poetry for the Slice Literary Conference's Bridging the Gap competition in September 2016.

Emotional Eater

May 3, 2016

I am an emotional eater -

Of words.

I can binge myself for hours,

gobbling them so fast I sometimes have to

flip through the pages in disbelief of

the quantity I have consumed.

Indigestion,

Burning in my throat like a swig of bad whiskey,

Fearing all the while that they will regurgitate within me

And come back out in a burning gust of release,

Smelly and disgusting,

Leaving me weakened on a cold bathroom floor.

But I cannot resist eating more.

Finding those morsels of sweetness that soothe me

Phrases of Kaopectate that slowly crawl down my throat

Coating my insides

Protecting them from another batch of fiery phrase.

Words to be chewed,

mashed between my molars

mixed with the acids in my digestive tract,

Becoming part of me.

Their spice

seeping from my pores

so that I may smell

of Shakespeare

or Dickens

or Angelou,

Depending on the day.

And so -

I become a chemist.

Wanting to mix my words,

Turn new phrases,

Develop a scent that will be uniquely mine.

Serve a salad with a casserole of words

That are not ever truly mine.

I can only use the leftovers to reconstitute a new meal.

And if my guests do not arrive,

I will gorge myself on these new concoctions.

Savor some -

Spit some out.

Rejection is not a judgement,

Just a realistic way of sorting words,

Of finding sustenance.

Teachers belong to you, their students and families

August 22, 2016

Dear fellow parents,

Today may be your child’s first day of a new school year. I totally share your excitement and anxieties – letting go of that little hand and trusting that the world will be kind. It is my child’s first day, too – as a teacher. I’m writing to you to plead for your support of new teachers.

Here’s the situation – I was a teacher for twelve years. I loved teaching, because I loved your kids. I left for one simple reason: I could not take the system. And please understand, I had a cushy teaching job in a private school where I was very well respected by my students and parents, but over the years I saw parent-teacher relationships spiral out of control. I was not strong enough to exist within a space where my teaching peers were forced to live in fear of a parent phone call to the office. Back when we were students in these schools, our parents let teachers do their jobs. The most effective classroom management strategy for a teacher was simply to suggest your actions might warrant a call home – now, students have learned to turn the tables on teachers and declare that their parent is going to call the school. Somewhere along the way, teachers became your enemies – villains who simply don’t understand the special needs of your child. It’s never your child’s problem in the classroom, it’s the inability of the teacher to reach him. While the teacher is home at night researching new methods to try, you are drafting a strong letter of complaint to the principal, and if she doesn’t respond immediately, that letter makes it to the superintendent, then the school board. Suddenly, the teacher who chose this profession to help your child is being vilified. What have you gained? You’ve taught your child that rather than take any responsibility for his own education, he should blame the system for failing him. And that new teacher? She will retreat to her classroom and stop trying so hard, learn by default to just follow the mandates, try to get through the year without doing anything that might be construed as beyond the norm. At first, she will worry more about losing your kids than losing her job, but eventually she will become tainted by the reality. You will volunteer at your PTA and be dismayed to learn the teachers in your school are unhappy, bordering on bitter, and you will wonder why they became teachers in the first place.

Today, as my darling girl begins her vocation as a teacher, I am nervous to let go of her hand for fear that the world will not be kind. Every bit of logic tells me that I should have tried harder to get her more interested in another field – she is extremely intelligent and would be successful at anything she pursued. Teaching means she will always be underpaid, and now worse, undervalued. She chose to get her degree in a program with some of the most rigorous requirements for licensure because she wants to be prepared for the challenges that she knows lie ahead. She is going in eyes wide open, choosing to work in urban high-needs education because she is passionate about making society better by working with families below the poverty line. She is trained in all the theories, practiced in all the methods, volunteered in the kinds of systems she wants to work in. She gets it. She is ready.

Most people are shocked when they hear my daughter, a child of middle-class privilege, is working in Lawrence, Massachusetts, one of the most challenging high-needs systems in the country. True confessions: I hoped she would get a job in a nice, “normal” suburban school, a place I would recognize. But you know what? She absolutely made the right choice. In Lawrence, the teachers make home visits the week before school starts, and Ashley was welcomed in to their homes and showered with gratitude. She had one parent who demanded Ashley make accommodations for her son, and the administrative team immediately put together a plan to support Ashley’s interactions with that child. Today, her students will arrive and be greeted at the building door by the principal, at the hallway by the second grade dean, and at the classroom door by Ashley – not because the first day is special, but because this school does this simple routine every day. They engage with the parents, empower them to be part of the community, ensure them that the children are safe in their care. This school and the community have learned to work together, to trust the professionals, to respect the families, ultimately, to love the children.

From our privileged vantage point, we see this school as a failed institution in a dangerous neighborhood. From my daughter’s standpoint, she sees a new approach where she can make a difference. Take another look: the school in your own middle class neighborhood is struggling, too. The new teacher there is excited to meet your kids, but that joy is overshadowed by the pressure to meet tough testing standards, or worse, the constant threat of your demands. The socio-economic status of the school doesn’t matter – we need a mind shift to trust each other, to allow our children the freedom to be nurtured by someone other. To be hurt on the schoolyard without making an accusation of negligence. To fail a test without saying the teacher never covered the material. To cry over homework without telling them they don’t need to do it. You will make mistakes with your child, as will the teacher. See each other face to face and recognize that you are both working toward the same goal of your child’s success.

So please, on this first day of school for your child, think about my child, too – the new teacher. She sees your child every day, probably for more waking hours than you do. She will be influential in your child’s life, and maybe that’s the real threat. We all want so much for our children, and life is so busy and demanding that we feel we are never doing enough for them. And then this smiling young woman enters your child’s life as his new teacher, and you can’t let go of your child’s hand and put him in her care. You are incapable of this level of trust with your most precious cargo. Please understand, she loves your child – even though she’s not required to, she does. Even if your child is a challenge, she does. She wouldn’t have chosen to teach otherwise. And, most importantly, she’s not judging you. She knows you are doing the best you can, understands you have challenges as a parent that she cannot begin to grasp. You love your child. It is the universal in our world, no matter how bitterly divided we become. Now it is her turn to help your child move forward, even tiny steps, because she can. She is uniquely skilled at connecting with children, looking into their eyes and seeing their insecurities, listening to their voices and sensing their hopes – and finding the sweet spot between that insecurity and hope and helping them get there. Teachers strive to enable – not to assess, analyze, and record – that belongs to the system. Teachers belong to you, to students and their families. My girl belongs to you now. Please cherish her as I have. She is worthy of your child. Your child may love her, or not, but she will cherish each of her students regardless of his actions, or yours. She is blessed with that ability, her gift from God, and lucky for all of us, she has chosen to be a teacher. It is her vocation. Please support her.

Sincerely,

A Teacher’s Mom

All I can do

I am embarrassed by the comforts of my life. There is so much horror and violence in our world, and I watch it all from the comfort of my home, my family intact. It struck me this morning that many of us share this blessing - we might be concerned about the terror in our world, but we revert to our everyday lives and pray it won't happen to us, directly. The whole thing is so frustrating to me, that I decided to write a poem about it....because that's about all I can do.

A White Robe

December 4, 2015

In the mornings

I don a robe;

White, soft, thick,

a cloud on my shoulders.

Down the stairs

Click on the news

Stopped by images-

Enthralled by violence-

Feed the cat.

An infant saved from icy waters

On the run before she can walk-

Brew the coffee.

People’s screams, fleeing

From a movie theater-

Open the shades.

Troops in our streets – our streets-

Keeping the peace-

Make the oatmeal.

Weapons of mass destruction

Mass destruction by weapons -

Tighten the belt on my robe.

Instinctively

Sheltered by ignorance.

Comforted by apathy.

Protected by white

By the softness of a cloud.

On the road with SueBob, day 5: food and glass.

If you know me and Mitch even a little, you know we are foodies. Mitch has a photographic memory of every meal he has ever eaten. He can tell you where we ate and what he ordered in St Marten back in 1987 when we were on our honeymoon. 

On Wednesday, we had to say goodbye to our hosts at The Inn on the Main, Jaynee and Guy. As a farewell tribute to them, let me spend some time here telling you about the breakfasts we enjoyed. Day one started with a grilled peach with marscapone cheese. Clearly this couple was setting the stage for an impressive show. The main course (yep, this breakfast has courses) was a summer vegetable frittata. When served a savory main course, a guest should finish with a sweet treat, according to Jaynee, so we had pear cake with an apple cider reduction. 

The next day began with a fruit plate, dusted with powdered sugar and garnished with fresh mint. The main course was blueberry French toast stuffed with lemon creme fraiche. Yea, it was good. By day three, you would think it would be getting difficult for these chefs to jump over the bar they had set. But they opened with a parfait of yogurt, granola, and fruit, and followed it up with a spinach and cheese strata. Ah, yes, that's a savory main course, so let's finish you off with a fruits of the forest strudel. 

Like all good things, this visit must come to an end. On our last morning, we jinxed ourselves by siting at a different table, and you will never in a thousand years guess what was served. A gorgeous presentation of fresh pineapple. Now, everyone else was pleased with this appearance from the tropics....except Mitch. Pineapple is one of literally two foods he will not eat (the other being coconut - apparently he had a traumatic experience in a tropical locale in his previous life). His spirits were lifted minutes later when they presented our main course of macadamia French toast.

I truly cannot say enough about the outstanding food at Inn on the Main. In addition to the breakfasts, there was always a homemade baked good waiting for us when we returned in the evening: peanut butter balls, cranberry bars, chocolate walnut cookies, fudge brownies, Oreo truffles. 

Overall, the Inn on the Main gets five gold stars from all of us. Meticulously neat, beautiful bedding, all the thoughtful details - chocolates in the room, coffee right outside our bedrooms, local menus and maps. Guy and Jaynee are truly gracious hosts and made us feel right at home in Canandaigua.

How does anyone transition to another hotel after this experience? At the Corning Glass Museum of course. I will readily admit I thought it was some strange that everyone kept telling us this museum of glass was a not to miss item on this tour of the Finger Lakes, but they were all spot on. Glass as art in one section, where Sue and I kept nearly walking into walls because the enormous all-white space was  one big optical illusion. This was followed by a demonstration of a gaffer sculpting and blowing glass, taking a ball of lava and turning it into a gorgeous blue vase. Glass as science. Engineering. Physics. Chemistry. The complete history of glass, through time and cultures. It's all here, in the Corning Museum of Glass. 

Totally cultural and educational, but don't worry, we didn't stray too far from our roots. We made it to a winery before five, just in time for its last tasting of the day.

On the Road with SueBob, Day 4: You can indeed drink too much beer.

There is no typo in today's headline. I have heard people say over in over in life, "you can never drink TOO much beer." Apparently, those people have never been to the Finger Lakes.

In honor of Bob's birthday, we went on a brewery tasting tour with Crush Wine and Beer Tours. Our driver, Gary, picked us up in a minibus wrapped in images of nature. Little did we know that he was Bacchus wearing shorts and a polo shirt.

Our first stop was the Naked Dove brewery, which in restropect should have indicated we were starting on a twisted religious journey. Here's how a beer tasting works: there's a wide range of brews to choose from, you choose one which is served to you in a mini glass, and the Brewer talks at you about  IBUs and ABVs while you nod and smile. I remember that the Brewer at Naked Dove was impressed by Bob's beer knowledge, although she trumped him with the background on the growler and the grumbler (these are jugs, I still don't understand why we have to call them anything special).

Enroute to this first stop, I predicted that our quiet ride would build to a crescendo later in the day, and the short ride to the second stop already indicated a higher level of NBC (nonsense bus chatter, measured in units of language per minute). 

Our second stop was at Three Huskies Brewery, which is located in the back of a pub called Dubbers. No, I'm not making this up. It turns out that Dubbers serves a great lunch, at least that was our impression after having another flight of beer tastings. Kudos to this brewery for cleverness - everything is dog themed. I'm pretty sure my favorite here was Barktoberfest, for obvious reasons besides the medium Amber color with a spicy nose and a hint of vanilla to finish. Again, I'm not making this up. Brewers take their beer this seriously. Just smile and nod.

Prior to boarding the bus, Gary informs us we have a 45 minute ride to our next stop in Honeoye (again no typo here). Mitch makes no apologies for immediately closing his eyes and falling asleep. It's a fairly quiet ride, low NBC, which I attribute to the fermentation process of the equivalent of four beers in a short period of time.

Sound the trumpets, our carriage has arrived at CB Brewery, a grand operation that primarily brews for restaurants and private label operations. This is home to the king of brewers who has a lot to teach us about our beer. It turns out we are oversimplifying IBUs and ABVs, not taking into account the malt factor. Luckily, we get six tastings here, so we have plenty of time to experiment. I'm intrigued by something called barley wine, mostly because I'm pretty sure it's the liquor of choice of Tess Durbeyfield's irascible father. (Please excuse the obscure literary reference, but I know Dawn Theriault and Marty Bressler have been reading these blogs, so shout out to my triad!)

Bob has decided to buy some of this microbrew, which gives Mitch the idea that they need roadies. In his world, BGE circa 1965, a roadie is defined as a beer to drink while in a vehicle. Much to the King Brewer's delight, he is able to conjure up a couple of cold ones for these two to imbibe. Sue and I wisely decide to move to the back seat together, allowing Bob and Mitch to have immediate proximity to their new best buddy, Gary the driver. The NBC (needless bus chatter) is at an all-time high on the next leg of our journey.

Our last stop is at VB Brewery in Victor. The Brewer here is apparently a scientist, as he tries to explain how all the IBUs, ABVs, and SMRs (color measurement....I think) are actually determined. About the time he said alpha-red beam, I assumed the position of nodding and smiling and thinking about dinner. Mitch absolutely adored the first beer he tasted, which was on a nitro tap, and just kept tasting that one over and over. Bob also loved this beer. We developed our own quality label of CTG (closest to Guinness), and deemed this one the winner. I cannot guarantee our judgement, as it came on our last stop of the day.

Gary finally pulled up to The Inn on the Main and poured us out onto the front lawn. None of us dared to sit down, afraid we would fall asleep. So, like any good, red-blooded American who knows how to live in excess, we went out for dinner. To a German restaurant. Was there really any other choice? We had enough beer in our veins at that point to make us pass a naturalization test in Germany.

And so, we ate schnitzel, and the guys had another beer, which was probably a mistake. And we returned to the Inn and ate the homemade peanut butter balls that our innkeeper left out for us. Probably another mistake. We all admit today to having to sleep sitting up, but hey, it's vacation. A little midweek overindulgence should teach us to reign it in for the second half of the week. We'll see how that theory develops.