My novel, Old Music for New People, is driven in part by its characters’ thoughts and feelings about specific songs and musicians (baseball and food also have prominent roles in the plot). Many of the stories I write, whether long or short, have music painted into them. Sometimes I wonder if I’m a bit too hopeful about the idea of using words to describe what music does to characters emotionally and philosophically–and what it does to readers as well in their everyday lives.
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A version of this essay was originally published at Medium.com and then with The Good Men Project “Modern Identities” imprint
I was 15 in 1973. It was the year my parents began their divorce. It was also the year that I began to seriously grow my hair long and think — quite innocently compared to life here in the 2020s — about why there are limitations on our behavior as male and female members of our society. What kind of person did I feel I wanted to become? Why did what people think of me make me feel so much pressure? What does it mean when we’re expected to conform?
I also fell in love with a girl who happened to be an amazing athlete and musician at the beginning of the summer. She was a whip-smart student as well. I was an okay athlete, could kind of sing, and did well enough in subjects that I liked. I should have felt emasculated by her. However, I took pride in being her boyfriend specifically because she could beat me at tennis and ping pong and most any card game. I didn’t feel like a lesser human at all. Even though we never talked about it, I don’t think she ever considered me lesser either.
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I just learned that the folks at Adelaide Literary Magazine published my story “Like They’re Waiting” at their site back in January. It’s a very short piece of flash fiction, but one of my favorite projects from the past few years even though it’s a bit confrontational for the reader. I came to it partially inspired by real life events. Also, perhaps, I was a bit touched in the head by all the time we all spent in that first two years living on Planet Covid.
Besides having a comprehensive online publishing presence, Adelaide Literary Magazine is a print-based operation publishing a monthly journal of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, book reviews, and interviews. They also run a small press imprint called Adelaide Books that is more prolific than any other micro-type operation I’ve encountered.
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A slightly different form of this essay was published in Medium.com
One morning nearly ten years ago, a voice showed up in my head as I was walking up the stairs to my 3rd floor writing room. They were offering the beginning line of a story. By the time I sat in front of my laptop, the voice made it clear that I needed to get to work immediately. “She” absolutely was not going to leave me alone.
No one told us we were going to have a summer-long visitor until the night before that visitor arrived.
Ivy Scattergood
A few months before that, I’d gone back and read a bunch of young adult coming-of-age stories. This was around the time I was becoming acutely aware of the fact that our youngest son was about to leave home for college. I suppose that because I’m a writer going back to my reading roots made sense. Maybe others return to old music, long walks, or pre-parent hobbies.
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I am grateful as heck to all the people who have been enjoying Old Music for New People, and to the team at The Story Plant working hard to get folks to pay attention to this story that wants to touch your heart. Sometimes I get quick texts or messages on Facebook where people tell me how engrossed they are in the story or that they’re having fun with 100 pages to go.
Gender identity is the big story driver in this novel, but there’s so much more to identity than the simple binary opposites of boy or girl. I don’t want to give the story away, but when one person questions who they are, whole families (extended families, in fact) become part of the questioning process. They become part of the answer, too. Things get messy. They can be intense. But the only way people grow is through messy, intense questions and answers.
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I’m happy to say that my new novel Old Music for New People comes out early next week (click here to go to its main landing page). As anyone who loves teens knows, stories about young people coming of age are stories about all of us. Without doubt, my intention with this novel was to write about family, love, and the problem everyone has trying to figure out who they are in this nutso world. Old Music for New People takes place at a time well before the covid pandemic ever hit the world. Hopefully it will be a balm to readers in this time of great uncertainty. Below you will find text from a letter my publisher’s staff and I prepared to go out to editors and reviewers everywhere. I think it’s a great introduction as well for potential readers.
Dear Editors, Reviewers, (and Readers),
A few years ago, one of the younger generation in our admittedly hyper-progressive extended community declared that they were considering a gender transition. Sadly, no matter how well-meaning and supportive the rest of us wanted to be, we wound up responding somewhat incompetently in how we handled this new knowledge. It became painfully obvious to me in our collective ineptness that gender transition moments are actually huge tests of love and insight and family intelligence.
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My coming-of-age novel, Old Music for New People, will be published by the independent publishing house The Story Plant on December 7th. Go here or click on the cover widget (near the top right on the screen if you are using a big screen; probably down low on the scroll if you are using a small screen) to go to the book’s landing page. You’ll find all the links you could ever need to pre-order the paperback and digital versions now. Reviewers with NetGalley accounts can now also access the ARC (Advance Reviewer Copy) at the NetGalley site. This is my first official novel, so I can use any and all the reviews I can get.
So what’s the book about? Well, there’s a big conversation going on in this country right now about gender identity. Mainstream media tends to focus on silly issues like the bathrooms people are allowed to use and whether transgender girls should be permitted to play sports with other girls.
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The traditional happy ending has the young lovers heading off together into the sunset. What the writer leaves out is the fact that not only do the lovers travel into the sun (such a beautiful and straightforward metaphor for the future) but the rest of the world rides off with them as well.
I worry some that all this negativity towards what we know to be Truth and the Good in Life may mean that certain people out there honestly don’t understand the idea of happy endings. Denial of things like the importance of public health and rational environmental investments carry an obvious dark and cynical set of presumptions.
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Along with the rest of the world, 2020 was pretty crappy in our household. [I originally wrote a long paragraph here about all the things we failed to do and how miserable we were, but what’s the point in that? Seriously! We’re still here and we’re vaccinated AF, and there’s really nothing else to say than: “Let’s go!”]
So, while a good portion of life certainly sucked here at the dead-end of our little street this past year, I managed to publish a number of short stories and flash fiction pieces with a broad spectrum of literary publications — large, small, well-known, obscure, etc. In addition to which, I signed a book deal in early January 2021 to write three novels over the course of the next several years.
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