News
Local author captures turmoil of an era with new novel
By Sesame Campbell
SPENCERTOWN — Author Wesley Brown will give residents a fictional look into the tumultuous era of Vietnam, where Americans waged an internal and external war, with bullets, bodies and idealism that turned the country inside out, Saturday with a reading from his new novel “Push Comes to Shove.” The reading is part of the Writers & Readers Series at the Spencertown Academy Arts Center and will take place at 4 p.m.
“Push Come to Shove” takes readers back 40 years to the summer of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is about several characters caught up in the late 1960s and early 70s, which included the Vietnam War and the racial turmoil that had the country in a grip of uncertainty.
In the 1960s, America experienced one of its greatest periods of upheaval to date. African-Americans demanded equality in the Civil Rights movement. Inspired by their efforts, women took strides to gain their own equality. In the midst of all this tension, America plunged into war abroad and people protested against it.
College students across the country were among the most involved in all three movements. Brown was one of them. Although he is an accomplished novelist and playwright, it took him 25 years to write “Push Comes to Shove.”
When asked if the novel is autobiographical, Brown replied, “A novel is the autobiography of the writer’s imagination — not necessarily the writer’s life.”
He should certainly know — Brown has been writing for the last 40 years. He became a writer listening to his father, who was a storyteller.
“He was the reporter of the family history,” Brown said of his father. “Those stories had an enormous impact on me. My writing came out of the need to tell stories like he told stories, except I wrote mine down.”
Brown would listen as his father told stories that had been passed down generation to generation. “Dad would tell stories of the family, stories of slavery and of his grandmother. He had a way of telling me about these images that were so vivid. People who were long gone that I’d never met, but knew from his stories.”
Other influences were the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and his experience working with the Voter Registration Movement in 1965.
“These were rural blacks who were challenging the system to live up to its creed at the Democratic National Convention in 1964,” Brown said. “For the most part, up to that point, no one really cared what they thought.”
Brown’s father and mother both migrated to Harlem from the south. They brought with them the deeply ingrained scars of segregation.
“I was aware through the stories and the images of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi,” Brown said. “The images of his mutilated body from the lynching, images of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and black people walking to work and students being escorted to school by the National Guard in Little Rock, Ark. — those were the images I had living in New York City that were imprinted in my mind.”
In the 1960s, the Freedom Riders, participants from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), got involved in the Civil Rights Movement as a way to get African-Americans out from under the lash of segregation and the suffocation it caused.
Brown became involved with the movement while he was at SUNY Oswego in 1965. “Guys from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to give a talk at the university right before the march from Selma to Montgomery. I was so taken that I wanted to make a connection with what was happening.”
He went to Mississippi that summer, not far from where the three civil rights activists were murdered. James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish organizer, also from New York.
That summer was a defining moment in Brown’s life. “I was thrown in with a group of blacks from the south who had been working for four to five years in the movement,” he said. “The feeling of community, working for something that mattered and doing something that was freeing for yourself as well as making a common cause with others.”
In 1968, Brown became a member of the Black Panther Party. Five years later, he was sentenced to four years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent 18 months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. “I was fortunate not to have been raped,” he said.
Brown left prison and went back to college and got a job teaching at Hunter College and Rutgers University. He finished writing a novel he had started while in prison called “Tragic Magic.” The novel, published by Random House in 1978, was of that same period. Set during the Vietnam War, “Tragic Magic” tells the story about a man who refused to go into the army and goes to prison. It follows what happens to him when he gets out, his notions about manhood and his struggles with trying to figure it all out.
“I realized that period wasn’t through with me,” he said. “I had to find out what I still had to write.”
Twenty-five years later, Brown finished “Push Comes to Shove” about the end of that Golden Age of the Civil Rights Era.
“The country’s responses to the demands for change were changing,” Brown said. “The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act were passed within two years of each other. People in the movement saw that there were structural problems with the system that those in power wouldn’t change.”
The book examines, through characterization and historical references, the mechanism that was operating when social forces pushed against the resistance of the society and the government. “To quote Isaac Newton, ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” Brown said. “Young people began to experience frustration with our efforts to end the war in Vietnam; equal opportunity and the unrest in urban areas was festering.”
“Push Comes to Shove” has been published by the Concord Free Press, which publishes novels and gives them away for free, asking that readers make a voluntary donation to a local charity or individual in need. According to a statement released by the publisher, the novel “Give + Take” by Stona Fitch generated more than $40,000 in donations to diverse causes and individuals in need throughout the world.
Beginning Friday, Concord Free Press will distribute all 2,000 trade paperback copies of “Push Comes to Shove” through its network of independent bookstores and request via its Web site, www.concordfreepress.com.
Tickets for the reading are $10 and may be purchased through the Spencertown Academy’s Web site at www.spencertownacademy.org or by calling 518-392-3693.
“Push Come to Shove” takes readers back 40 years to the summer of 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It is about several characters caught up in the late 1960s and early 70s, which included the Vietnam War and the racial turmoil that had the country in a grip of uncertainty.
In the 1960s, America experienced one of its greatest periods of upheaval to date. African-Americans demanded equality in the Civil Rights movement. Inspired by their efforts, women took strides to gain their own equality. In the midst of all this tension, America plunged into war abroad and people protested against it.
College students across the country were among the most involved in all three movements. Brown was one of them. Although he is an accomplished novelist and playwright, it took him 25 years to write “Push Comes to Shove.”
When asked if the novel is autobiographical, Brown replied, “A novel is the autobiography of the writer’s imagination — not necessarily the writer’s life.”
He should certainly know — Brown has been writing for the last 40 years. He became a writer listening to his father, who was a storyteller.
“He was the reporter of the family history,” Brown said of his father. “Those stories had an enormous impact on me. My writing came out of the need to tell stories like he told stories, except I wrote mine down.”
Brown would listen as his father told stories that had been passed down generation to generation. “Dad would tell stories of the family, stories of slavery and of his grandmother. He had a way of telling me about these images that were so vivid. People who were long gone that I’d never met, but knew from his stories.”
Other influences were the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and his experience working with the Voter Registration Movement in 1965.
“These were rural blacks who were challenging the system to live up to its creed at the Democratic National Convention in 1964,” Brown said. “For the most part, up to that point, no one really cared what they thought.”
Brown’s father and mother both migrated to Harlem from the south. They brought with them the deeply ingrained scars of segregation.
“I was aware through the stories and the images of Emmet Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi,” Brown said. “The images of his mutilated body from the lynching, images of Rosa Parks, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and black people walking to work and students being escorted to school by the National Guard in Little Rock, Ark. — those were the images I had living in New York City that were imprinted in my mind.”
In the 1960s, the Freedom Riders, participants from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), got involved in the Civil Rights Movement as a way to get African-Americans out from under the lash of segregation and the suffocation it caused.
Brown became involved with the movement while he was at SUNY Oswego in 1965. “Guys from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) came to give a talk at the university right before the march from Selma to Montgomery. I was so taken that I wanted to make a connection with what was happening.”
He went to Mississippi that summer, not far from where the three civil rights activists were murdered. James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man; Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old white Jewish student from New York; and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish organizer, also from New York.
That summer was a defining moment in Brown’s life. “I was thrown in with a group of blacks from the south who had been working for four to five years in the movement,” he said. “The feeling of community, working for something that mattered and doing something that was freeing for yourself as well as making a common cause with others.”
In 1968, Brown became a member of the Black Panther Party. Five years later, he was sentenced to four years in prison for refusing induction into the armed services and spent 18 months in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. “I was fortunate not to have been raped,” he said.
Brown left prison and went back to college and got a job teaching at Hunter College and Rutgers University. He finished writing a novel he had started while in prison called “Tragic Magic.” The novel, published by Random House in 1978, was of that same period. Set during the Vietnam War, “Tragic Magic” tells the story about a man who refused to go into the army and goes to prison. It follows what happens to him when he gets out, his notions about manhood and his struggles with trying to figure it all out.
“I realized that period wasn’t through with me,” he said. “I had to find out what I still had to write.”
Twenty-five years later, Brown finished “Push Comes to Shove” about the end of that Golden Age of the Civil Rights Era.
“The country’s responses to the demands for change were changing,” Brown said. “The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act were passed within two years of each other. People in the movement saw that there were structural problems with the system that those in power wouldn’t change.”
The book examines, through characterization and historical references, the mechanism that was operating when social forces pushed against the resistance of the society and the government. “To quote Isaac Newton, ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,’” Brown said. “Young people began to experience frustration with our efforts to end the war in Vietnam; equal opportunity and the unrest in urban areas was festering.”
“Push Comes to Shove” has been published by the Concord Free Press, which publishes novels and gives them away for free, asking that readers make a voluntary donation to a local charity or individual in need. According to a statement released by the publisher, the novel “Give + Take” by Stona Fitch generated more than $40,000 in donations to diverse causes and individuals in need throughout the world.
Beginning Friday, Concord Free Press will distribute all 2,000 trade paperback copies of “Push Comes to Shove” through its network of independent bookstores and request via its Web site, www.concordfreepress.com.
Tickets for the reading are $10 and may be purchased through the Spencertown Academy’s Web site at www.spencertownacademy.org or by calling 518-392-3693.
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