I was introduced to movie producer Brian Grazer yesterday and being curious (he’s known for that), he asked me what my new novel was about. I told him it was called THE MARTIN LUTHER KING MITZVAH and explained a few things about it. He quietly listened and I look forward to seeing him again. Meanwhile, I found this interview he did at the Aspen Institute and I learned a lot from it. A video of the interview is at this link:
It is August 2017, and I have just completed revisions on my novel The Martin Luther King Mitzvah for the Fitzroy Books imprint of Regal House Publishing. My editor Jaynie Royal asked me to write a blog entry about my inspirations for the book relating to my hometown of Larchmont, New York, which in the book is the fictional town of Beachmont. Well, where to start? We all have mixed feelings I’m sure about the towns in which we grew up, and I chose to memorialize the good and the bad of Larchmont from 1966-67 in this novel in which two twelve year-olds, a boy and a girl, not only get to play Romeo and Juliet but meet Martin Luther King and embark on changing the world. (Sounds like a movie to me)
So join me on a tour around Larchmont to see some of the landmarks of my childhood. These places are highlighted in the novel, and I will point them out here through my own photographs, taken on June 18, 2009. In Photo 1, you can see the intersection of Larchmont Avenue and the Boston Post Road in downtown Larchmont. That is actually a temple on the right side of the photo, but not the temple I feature in the novel, which exists down Larchmont Avenue to the right, toward the Long Island Sound. Lots of action takes place on Larchmont (or rather, Beachmont) Avenue in the book, like throwing snowballs at cars, and anti-war demonstrations. You can see the street sign for Larchmont Avenue on the right side of the photograph.
In Photos 2 and 3, you can see the house in which I lived from fourth grade until I graduated from the University of Rochester in 1975. I lived there while I was in seventh grade, when the action of the novel takes place. In Photo 3, I am standing where I normally entered the house, through the back gate and in through the kitchen. In this photograph, I am looking in the direction of the creek in the novel, which is at the end of a street across from Adam Jacobs’ (my main character’s) house. You can see the creek in the background of Photo 4, at the end of the street, but there is no ice on the creek as in the novel, where some dramatic incidents occur (I’m not going to give them away, but the ice gets a little bit thin.)
One of the characters in the book is Adam’s grandfather, who is called Grappa. The real Grappa lived in the house in Photo 5, which is also where my real mother grew up and where Adam’s mother in my novel spent her childhood as well. The real Grappa gave me a camera and he was a great photographer himself and developed his own black-and-white photographs in a darkroom in this house. In the novel, he does the same thing.
The winter ice and skating plays a roll in another dramatic scene in the book, which takes place at the Duck Pond, pictured here in Photo 6. I remember skating on this pond when I was a kid, but I never got into a fight with one of the neighborhood bullies on this pond, as Adam does in the novel.
In the book, Adam and his friend Sally Fletcher spend some time down in Manor Park, playing on the rock formations that they visualize as various objects. In Photo 7, you can see the “toaster ,” where you start at the right and drop down to the low spot in the rocks and then climb up the other side when you are “done”; and the “whale” in Photo 8, where the cleft in the rock looks just like the open mouth of a whale. In Photo 9, you can see a gazebo in the background, where Adam has his first kiss with Sally. It does look like a romantic spot, doesn’t it?
Adam and Sally are befriended by an elderly blacklisted author named Gladys McKinley, and Gladys lives on Beach Avenue, the sign for which is shown in Photo 10. It fits that there is a Beach Avenue in Beachmont, don’t you think? In real life, an author named Phyllis McGinley lived on Beach Avenue, and her property actually abutted the backyard of my house. I was in awe of this personage whom I never saw, and although McGinley was never blacklisted, she became the inspiration for my character Gladys, with whom Adam bonds as he embarks on his early career as a budding writer.
I enjoyed writing this novel, and I think it brings a great message of Martin Luther King to the world at just the right time, when people of all backgrounds should learn to live in peace with each other. If my book contributes to making the world a better place in this way, I will have done my job.
Mathew Tekulsky grew up in Larchmont, New York. He attended the University of Rochester and graduated in 1975 with a BA in history. He spent his Junior Year Abroad at Birmingham University in England and wrote a thesis on Aldous Huxley as part of his English literature studies there. Mathew was awarded a Certificate of Achievement in the Short Story category of the 1984 Writer’s Digest Magazine Writing Competition. His short stories have been published in numerous literary magazines.
In his nonfiction writing career, Mathew has been drawn to subjects that concern the natural world. In the tradition of the great natural history author John Burroughs, Mathew has written essays on his birding experiences for the NationalGeographic.com website in a column entitled “The Birdman of Bel Air,” as well is in his contributions to Wake-Robin, the newsletter of the John Burroughs Association. His books Backyard Bird Photography (Skyhorse, 2014); The Art of Hummingbird Gardening (Skyhorse, 2015); and The Art of Butterfly Gardening (Skyhorse, 2015) explore the natural history of their respective subjects and blend memoir with how-to. His essay “John Burroughs and Yosemite,” along with four of Mathew’s photographs of Yosemite National Park, was published by North American Review in 2017. Mathew is also the author of the best-seller Making Your Own Gourmet Coffee Drinks (Crown, 1993).
In Mathew’s novel THE MARTIN LUTHER KING MITZVAH, a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl act in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, while they embark on a quest for a mitzvah (a worthy deed) to end the Vietnam War.
In my novel The Martin Luther King Mitzvah (to be published by Fitzroy Books in 2018), my main character Adam Jacobs is a twelve year-old boy with a crush on his seventh grade classmate Sally Fletcher, and he follows her home along Beach Avenue in the fictional town of Beachmont, New York. The inspiration for Beachmont is my hometown of Larchmont, a bedroom community in Westchester County and just up the coast from New York City.
In June of 2009, I took some photographs of my old neighborhood, including Beach Avenue right in front of the house where an author named Phyllis McGinley lived in 1966. I modeled a character after her in my novel, named Gladys McGinley, and Gladys’ house is on Beach Avenue as well, on Adam’s route home.
In Photo 1, you are looking north on Beach Avenue, back in the direction of Adam’s school, Beachmont Elementary. It’s about a ten-block walk back to school, but Adam has other things in mind, namely Sally Fletcher and her bouncing ponytail in front of him. In Photo 2, you have turned around in the same spot as Photo 1, and you are looking south on Beach Avenue toward Long Island Sound. Where the sidewalk stops and there is a right turn, you can see where I walked down Hazel Lane to my house (Adam lives on the fictional Oak Drive in the novel.) In Photo 3, you are almost at my house on Hazel Lane, which is two houses down from here on the right, but the house is hidden. It’s really a beautiful walk home for a kid.
If you go down to the end of those double yellow lines and go around the corner to the right, you will be on Kane Avenue, and my house was on the corner of Hazel Lane and Kane. In Photo 4, you are looking down Kane Avenue at my house on the left, where the double yellow line goes around the corner. I usually approached my house from Kane Avenue, but in the novel, I have Adam go down Beach Avenue almost all the time…because that’s where Sally is walking. In Photo 5, you can see the gate (which was an unpainted wooden gate and a lot older when I was a kid) that I opened in order to get to my house, which I usually entered through the back door which leads into the kitchen.
So this is my old neighborhood, and this is what I visualized as I wrote The Martin Luther King Mitzvah, which is a love letter to Larchmont and those great days of the 1960s, when Martin Luther King was giving speeches about civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, and Pete Seeger was singing his heart out for social justice.
The imprint for my book THE MARTIN LUTHER KING MITZVAH will be Fitzroy Books. Thanks to Regal House Publishing for posting this on their website. Be sure to check out other Regal House titles. They are a fine, new, literary house.
Children’s: Middle grade
Mathew Tekulsky’s THE MARTIN LUTHER KING MITZVAH, a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl, act in the tradition of Romeo and Juliet, while they embark on a quest for a mitzvah (a worthy deed) to end the Vietnam War, to Jaynie Royal at Regal House, by Peter Beren at Peter Beren Publishing (World). peterberen@aol.com
