Endless Knots

Roland Merullo: Importing common sense from Cuba

Roland, author of so many books including his recent Lunch with Buddha (as well as a novel about Cuba completely unrelated to this story, Fidel's Last Days), traveled "90 Miles From Home" (see Warren Miller's 1961 book by that title) recently on assignment for a golf magazine, picked up a few souvenirs (total value = $75), and had them confiscated at his port of re-entry, Burlington, VT. Irony aside that the only state with a "self-described democratic socialist" as senator should be the customs gate that enforces our antiquated embargo of Cuban imports, Roland, as usual, reflects thoughtfully on why it's time to change our policies in "A new path to Cuba: It’s time the US admitted the embargo doesn’t work." Note also that instead of doing what countless other visitors to Cuba likely do -- pretend that they were in Mexico or Canada, allowing custom officials to look the other way -- Roland went for the true story, which ultimately makes for a better one.

Here's the opening to whet your clicking:

On my way home from Cuba the other day — Havana via Montreal — I had all my souvenirs confiscated at the US-Canada border. I’d spent a week in Castro country and had loaded up on about $75 worth of T-shirts and small gifts. Instead of lying to the customs officials and saying I’d been in Montreal visiting friends, which would have been easy enough, I decided to tell them the real story: I’d gone to Cuba on an assignment for a golf magazine. Good-bye, T-shirts.

I’m not really blaming the rules-bound customs guys at the border checkpoint north of Burlington, Vt. US law says that any goods purchased in Cuba — with the strange exception of literature — must be confiscated. “You should have checked the State Department website,’’ one of them told me, and he was correct. But setting my own travel sloppiness aside, the law that says you can’t bring home a small bag of gifts from Cuba is absurd. If I remember right, we lost 58,000 good Americans in Vietnam, and 40 years later you can bring home just about anything from that nation. China, Russia, Albania, Burma, the dictatorships of Africa — please, spend some money there, bring home souvenirs for your kids.

But don’t spend a peso in Cuba...

PS: This makes me want to create a new category: Common Sense, but alas I fear it would lack for entries.

 

Merullo's "Lunch" launch, tonight, Newtonville Books, 7 PM

Photo by Amanda Stearns Merullo

Roland Merullo's launch party for Lunch with Buddha takes place tonight at Newtonville Books, 10 Langley Road, Newton Centre. Lots of parking, two blocks from the Newton Centre T, easy to walk to from virtually any of the Newtons.

And just in case you need more background on Roland, this from the press release:

Roland Merullo is an awarding-winning author of 14 books including 10 works of fiction.  Breakfast with Buddha, a nominee for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is now in its 14th printing.  The Talk- Funny Girl was a 2012 ALEX Award Winner and named a "Must Read for 2012" by the Massachusetts Library Association and the Massachusetts Center for the Book; Revere Beach Boulevard was named one of the "Top 100 Essential Books of New England" by The Boston Globe, A Little Love Story was named one of "Ten Wonderful Romance Novels" by Good Housekeeping and Revere Beach Elegy won the Massachusetts Book Award for non fiction.
 
His books have been translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean and Croatian.

And here's the book summary for purposes of tantalizing you. For the record, the material around losing a spouse is remarkably well portrayed:

On the surface, Lunch with Buddha is a story about family. Otto Ringling and his sister Cecelia could not be more different. He's just turned 50, an editor of food books at a prestigious New York publishing house, a man with a nice home in the suburbs, children he adores, and a sense of himself as being a mainstream, upper-middle-class American. Cecelia is the last thing from mainstream. For two decades she's made a living reading palms and performing past-life regressions. She believes firmly in our ability to communicate with those who have passed on.
 
It will turn out, though, that they have more in common than just their North Dakota roots.
 
In Lunch with Buddha, when Otto faces what might be the greatest of life's difficulties, it is Cecelia who knows how to help him. As she did years earlier in this book's predecessor, Breakfast with Buddha, she arranges for her brother to travel with Volya Rinpoche, a famous spiritual teacher - who now also happens to be her husband.
 
After early chapters in which the family gathers for an important event, the novel portrays a road trip made by Otto and Rinpoche, in a rattling pickup, from Seattle to the family farm in North Dakota. Along the way the brothers-in-law have a series of experiences - some hilarious, some poignant - all aimed at bringing Otto a deeper peace of mind. They visit American landmarks; they have a variety of meals, both excellent and awful; they meet a cast of minor characters, each of whom enables Rinpoche to impart some new spiritual lesson. Their conversations range from questions about life and death to talk of history, marijuana, child-rearing, sexuality, Native Americans, and outdoor swimming.
 
In the end, with the help of their miraculous daughter, Shelsa, and the prodding of Otto's own almost-adult children, Rinpoche and Cecelia push this decent, middle-of-the-road American into a more profound understanding of the purpose of his life. His sense of the line between possible and impossible is altered, and the story's ending points him toward a very different way of being in this world.

Pub date for "Lunch with Buddha"

This is from Roland Merullo's Facebook status, simply too good to just "share" on FB. Book #15+ from, in my view, the best living American writer. I know that's high praise but ... read a half-dozen or so of his books and then decide whether his subjects are as human, compelling, and challenging as life itself -- and whether his mastery of writing is as superb as anyone's-- and did I mention his humor?

Bostonians: Thursday night, as in day after tomorrow, Newtonville Books, 7 PM, for official launch of Lunch with Buddha, in the high 3000s on Amazon at the moment. All the writers reading here know what this means. Go, Buddha!

Now for those of you with normal vision, the words from the man himself:

Status Update

By Roland Merullo

A famous writer friend of mine once said, on the publication date of his book, "you half-expect a parade in front of the house with sirens and a marching band". Today is Lunch with Buddha's oficial pub date and I can't say I'm watching out the window for the big parade. Still, even after fifteen or so of these, it's a nice feeling. My thanks to Peter Sarno and his crew for the massive amount of work they've done, for the investors and Kickstarter contributors, for all the readers our there who make it possible for me to keep going, and for the kind ones who've written encouraging notes. It's a good day. I'm grateful to be able to do this. . . even without the parade.

 

 

"Lunch with Buddha" – Here goes!

It's happening. The e-dition of Roland Merullo's newest, Lunch with Buddha, is out and the launch for the print edition is coming right up, next Thursday, Nov 15, 7 PM, at my hometown bookstore, Newtonville Books. This sequel to Breakfast with Buddha, the laugh-out-loud send-up-with-a-serious-undertone about spiritual practice, has its own think-about-it strain, a grieving husband. Even after reading so many of Roland's books, I'm still not sure how he does it: his clever way of doing analogies without constantly using the words "like" and "as if," his ability to hit the emotional notes with precisely the right pressure, his humor-without-insult. The story of how the book has been published is its own brave tale of friendship, dedication, and good business hunches. Here, the press release.

Roland Merullo’s funny roadtrip novel, Breakfast with Buddha (2007), is in its 13th printing, has sold over 130,000 copies, been optioned for film and translated into Korean and Croatian, and was nominated for the prestigious Dublin IMPAC Literary Prize — a success by any measure. However, for the sequel, Lunch with Buddha, Merullo turned down a six-figure advance and chose a very small publishing house owned by a good friend, instead of going with one of the larger houses that have published his novels to wide acclaim since 1991.

Merullo, 59, and publisher Peter Sarno, 58, grew up within a mile and a half of each other in the working-class city of Revere, Massachusetts. They played, at the same time, in different divisions of the city Little League. Their fathers knew each other well. Peter’s mother and Roland’s aunt were best friends, and their acquaintances overlapped in scores of places, but the two men didn’t meet until 2006 when each had moved far from Revere and each other.

During that period, Sarno had returned to graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. As part of a course requirement for George Garrett Award winning author and AGNI magazine founder, Askold Melnyczuk, Sarno conducted a craft interview with Merullo based on one of the assigned texts: Revere Beach Elegy, winner of the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award for non fiction. Sarno would later go on to teach literature and writing classes at UMASS. Before the 2011 Spring semester began, he discovered that Elegy, (which had now become one of his own course staples), was no longer available. He contacted Merullo, asking if he could find a way to get it back into print. From that conversation, PFP Publications was born. Sarno proceeded to publish not only five books from Merullo’s backlist, but titles by such notable authors as the aforementioned Melnyczuk, Elizabeth Searle, Craig Nova, Sterling Watson and others.
On November 13th, PFP’s imprint, AJAR Contemporaries, will publish Lunch with Buddha.

The two former Revere kids are doing everything themselves — raising money through an inventive IPO program (more than a dozen investors will each receive a one-time 10% return on their money once the book sells its 10,000th copy) and the on-line crowdfunder Kickstarter, hiring a designer and copyeditor (both of whom are nationally known and happen to live within a few miles of each other and the author on Merullo’s country road), finding printers, putting together a book tour, attending conferences, meeting with booksellers and reaching out to reviewers as well as long time supporters of Merullo’s work.

“We’re determined,” the author says, “not merely to do everything the big publishers do, but to do it better and faster and at a lower cost. Peter and I have been working from breakfast until midnight every day for months now. Our skills complement each other well: Peter’s a detail person, and I’m out in space half the time. He knows the world of computers inside and out, and I can barely send an email. He and his small staff are as devoted to this novel as I am, and after 22 years of putting out books with the publishing giants, I find that immensely refreshing.”

Lunch with Buddha has some refreshing twists, too. There’s an interview (conducted by the noted author Matthew Quick of The Silver Linings Playbook fame) and a reader’s guide between the covers, as well has several hand-edited pages from Merullo’s working drafts, a recommended reading list, and a list of web sites where photos linked to the text can be seen. In addition to the usual hardcover and paperback editions (published simultaneously), AJAR will put out an eBook that will include embedded photos, taken by Merullo’s professional-photographer wife Amanda, from the Seattle-to-North Dakota road trip on which the story is based, and a signed, numbered, limited-edition hardcover with a slightly different design.

“I’ve actually gained a lot more respect for the larger and established publishers during this process,” Sarno says. “It’s not easy reaching an individual author’s fan base, his or her supporters. Or establishing and discovering a new reader-ship in this digital and online world. You’d think it would be. But folks are bombarded with so much info these days that it can be difficult to capture their attention. We’ve employed as many of the new social media tools as we can, and the eBook format has so much potential. Yet, we’ve also gone back to what some would consider the ‘old fashioned’ ways of snail mail, returned telephone calls and cups of coffee with independent bookstore owners, librarians and booksellers as a means of connecting with Roland’s readers.”

The business partners have already contacted many of the book groups that chose Breakfast with Buddha, put together an extensive book tour, including stops in eastern Massachusetts, Maine, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New York State, and in the works are radio and print interviews, as well as catalogue and on-line advertising via publishing organizations, Book Buzz, Goodreads, and other reader-centric sites.

“I wrote this novel in such a way that those who’ve never read Breakfast will be perfectly at ease, and those who have read it will continue their American road trip and spiritual search with the eccentric monk, Volya Rinpoche, and the other characters they came to know, “ Merullo says. “This is my 15th publication, and I have to say I’ve never worked as hard or enjoyed anything nearly as much.”

Print books are already available for pre order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and several independent bookstores. eBook versions will be available in Kindle, Nook, Apple iBook and Kobo formats. Merullo plans to create an audio version in the Boston accent he and Sarno have never lost. Join them for the celebratory launch reading at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA, on November 15th, or elsewhere along the road in November, December, and January (For a list of appearances, visit LunchWithBuddha.com, or RolandMerullo.com, or the Facebook pages of Roland Merullo or Lunch with Buddha.)

Roland Merullo and Peter Sarno thank you in advance for any review attention or off-page coverage you can give to this new adventure, Lunch with Buddha.

Revere Beach Elegy reissued

Roland Merullo's meditation, which takes us back to his hometown strip of sand that was America's first public beach then across the world to Micronesia then deep into his own searching psyche, is out again. Revere Beach Elegy collects some of Merullo's essays, disarmingly honest while respecting the privacy that mutes some writers, always make me think and often cry. His ability to move fluidly across the page, funny here, sad there, ironic next, and sometimes purely observational, is remarkable. So glad to see this great writer with a second edition of this lovely volume, first published in 2001, one of his Revere trilogy that includes the heartbreaking novel, In Revere, In Those Days.

Merullo: "Letting in light on a disease of darkness"

Roland Merullo's op-ed in today's Boston Globe is required reading for anyone with depression as well as their family and friends, i.e. everyone on earth. He mentions "William Styron’s 'Darkness Visible' and Andrew Solomon’s 'The Noonday Demon.'’’ Having read Styron's brave memoir of his struggle with this illness, I can agree with Roland's assessment that the "popularity of books" like these is indicative of how pervasive the problem truly is. Anyone struggling with depression wants to shake off the demon; any writer willing to put words together deserves our thanks. So, again, Roland, thanks for tromping into such difficult waters.

Merullo on Hemingway

Four years ago this summer, I had the good luck to land in Roland Merullo's workshop on the novel at Solstice Summer Writers' Conference. With an opinion or two of my own about writing, I listened to what he said with a critic's ear. To my astonishment, I agreed with nearly everything--about writing, about workshopping, about raising kids. (Then there was his obsession with golf. Oh, well.)

Thus, Roland became my writing teacher--except for my editor when I was a young reporter, the only such instructor I've had--and, just when I think I have nothing more to learn, he pops up again, always without announcement, with another thoughtful approach to someone or something.

Today's Boston Globe brings  "The life Hemingway made," his op-ed honoring Hemingway's 110th birthday tomorrow, where he talks simply about the writer's life, Hemingway the writer, and his own as writer. Here's the kind of phrasing that has made me read every one of Roland's books (except the golf one): "...these were the notes of a song sung to the deepest part of me." Not forced, not complicated, but ... what notes of which "song" have reached the deepest parts of you?

This post also gives me the excuse to include mention of Roland's latest, his memoir of eating and, yes, golf, The Italian Summer, which I'm reading now. Guaranteed to make you hungry and to provoke a tendency to rent a villa, book a flight, and do what he, Amanda, and their two daughters, Alexandra and Juliana, did a couple of years ago: spend five weeks in heaven, excuse me, Lake Como. I also love this cover. Check out the golfer.

Let's help Alexandra cure cystic fibrosis

You know that I'm a great fan (and luckily a friend) of Roland Merullo, the fine writer whose novels, essays, columns, and nonfiction books are endless delights and causes for profound thinking. As per below, Roland and Amanda have a personal need to cure cystic fibrosis, as their talented daughter, Alexandra, has CF. One of Roland's finest novels, A Little Love Story, is about a young man who falls in love with a young woman with CF. I had the chance to meet Alexandra and her sister, Juliana, just a few weeks ago, and was impressed with both girls' poise, warmth, friendliness, and sense of humor. Read on and I won't have to convince you further to make a contribution to the CF Foundation's annual walk: Checks made out to Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and mailed to Merullo, Box 111, Williamsburg MA 01096.

Dear Friends,

Every two years Amanda and I send this letter to all of you, asking for donations to help find a cure for cystic fibrosis.  As most of you know, our older daughter, Alexandra, has CF.

She is 11 and staying very healthy, partly because she has been so diligent in keeping to her routine of therapy.  Every night for the past eight years she has done at least half an hour of chest physical therapy—one of her parents drumming on her back and sides to loosen the mucus in her lungs.  Recently she has switched to a pneumatic vest that shakes her pretty hard, but takes less time: fifteen minutes a day when she is healthy, twice that when she has a cold.

She has at least four annual visits to the CF clinic in Springfield, MA, blood tests, CT scans, throat cultures; a simple cold can turn into an infection requiring a month or more of antibiotics.  The disease affects her in other, more minor ways:  she can't be around anyone else who has CF, can't go in a hot tub or have a wood stove in the house; she suffers from occasional stomach and muscle pain and gets dehydrated very easily on hot days.

And she is one of the lucky ones.  Many kids her age and younger have already been hospitalized several times with lung infections or digestive problems.  Some don't grow normally, some have a three-times-a-day regimen of chest PT and inhalants, and have to take ten or twelve different medications.  Those with the most severe mutations of the CF gene sometimes require a double lung transplant before they reach high school.

Tremendous steps toward a cure have been made just since our last letter, in 2007.  There are new drugs going into human trials that promise, if not a comprehensive cure, then at least a significant extension of life expectancy—which is currently 37 years.

Even though the disease is rare (affecting only about 30,000 people in the US), which means that drug companies don't stand to make a huge profit from finding a cure, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation has come up with ingenious ways of persuading them to do work that benefits cystic fibrosis patients.  The Foundation has been cited by the Wall St. Journal for its efficiency:  90% of your donation goes to actually paying for medical research, only 10% to administrative costs.

On May 17th we will participate in the annual CF walk here in Northampton, MA.  Each family or person who walks is part of a team, and each team collects donations that are passed on to the Foundation.  We are the Alexandra and Juliana team.  We do not like to ask our friends for money, and we know that many of you already have other important charities in your life, and that you have given generously to CF in the past—through our walks and in other ways.  Some of you give through work, or just send in a check independently of the walk; one friend donated his car.

We also know that this isn't the best time in the country's economic history, and that for some of you any extra expenditure is difficult.  But for the sake of our daughter and the tens of thousands of other individuals and families struggling with cystic fibrosis, we ask you to consider sending a check to help us find a cure.  Two years ago, through your incredible generosity, we raised over $11,000.

If you are able to contribute, please know that any amount is welcome and appreciated.  Checks should be made out to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and sent to us at:

Merullo
Box 111
Williamsburg MA 01096

If you can join us in the Northampton walk on May 17th, or the walk at Revere Beach on May 9th, we'd love to have you. When we hand over our envelope of donations we always tell the people at CFF not to put our contributors on a mailing list, and they have always respected our wishes.

With sincere thanks,

Roland, Amanda, Alexandra and Juliana Merullo

Roland at the Fiction Book Club

In the pocket of secrets that fill our lives, threads fray. While most sew them right up,  an unusual few take certain strands and pull them in just the right way that they make what is normally private more public.

Such was the great luck of the Fiction Book Club yesterday when Roland Merullo visited us. That we were fortunate enough to have a few moments with Amanda, wife of, and Alexandra and Juliana, daughters of, was its own gift.

In preparation for our special Saturday session, we read Breakfast with Buddha, the novel of Roland's that's been nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award (and which he's discussing today as the book chosen for its first "Wayland Reads" program). As a bonus book, we also agreed to read his latest, Fidel's Last Days, which most in the group also read and loved.

We asked a lot of questions: Why did he write the book? How did he write it? Does he plot out his novels in advance? Why did the characters do this or that? When did he start writing? What did he do before he wrote and/or when he was waiting for his books to be published? What is he working on now? What in Buddha is real, what imagined?

While I could do a very long post now, jotting down all that Roland said, commenting on it and suchnot, instead I'm just going to report what everyone agreed:

"This is the best book club we've ever had."

And how the two-and-a-half hours with Roland affected us:

It was another four hours before everyone left, during which time we had perhaps our most profound conversation as a group about where we are in our lives and where we're thinking of going.

I doubt that was Roland's intention as he is hardly a person who tries to get others to do things or influence them in ways that seem right to him.

What caused this to happen, I think, is his openness, his "straightforward" way, as one book club member said.

I count myself as extremely fortunate to have met Roland when I did, at a point in my writing career when I needed someone to stand behind me and point in different directions, which is precisely what he's done. Unexpected has been his unstinting generosity, which I've been the beneficiary of in so many ways, including his taking time yesterday to sit with our book club and open us further to possibilities.

A rave for Roland on "Fidel's Last Days"

These are the reviews writers live for: "In "Fidel's Last Days," Roland Merullo takes readers on a fictional thrill ride filled with so much danger and drama that they won't want it to end."

Thank you, Chuck Leddy, reviewer for the Boston Globe ("A thrilling ride in Castro plot"):

In his 11th book, "Fidel's Last Days," local [he lives in Western Massachusetts] author Roland Merullo has penned a fast-paced and highly satisfying spy thriller about a conspiracy to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro. Merullo seamlessly switches the action from Miami, where a secret organization of Cuban expatriates is plotting to kill Castro, to Havana, where we see Castro's dictatorship in action and watch an internal assassination plot develop among Castro's own advisers.

Eleventh book. Think about that. How many writers can pump out so many, in such different genres (this and another are both thrillers, love stories, coming-of-age, memoir, technique (golf), an uproarious and cheeky trilogy about spirituality, politics, and the hereafter...)? This is talent.

Our Fiction Book Club is reading Roland's Dublin International Prize-nominated Breakfast with Buddha for our March book, which, not so incidentally also is the community read for the nearby Town of Wayland that month; Fidel's Last Days is our bonus book for our meeting and, lucky us, he's gracing us with his presence. We hope he'll talk about both. I promise to post some pictures.