Date: 5/29/2019
LONGMEADOW – What happens when a Longmeadow resident – turned New York City editor at Hanover Square Press – spends a summer at a share house in Montauk with a few dozen people? He writes a book.
John Glynn was born in New Haven and lived at the “X” neighborhood of Springfield in a two–family apartment until he was five years old. He and his parents lived on the second floor and his maternal grandparents lived on the first. Glynn spent most of his childhood in Longmeadow, and went to the Longmeadow Public Schools (LPS) including Blueberry Hill Elementary School, Williams Middle School and Longmeadow High School, from which he graduated in 2004.
Following his time in the LPS district, he attended Boston College where he graduated in 2008, and moved on to New York University where he received his Masters in English in 2012.
“I still return home to Longmeadow frequently and will always consider it my home,” Glynn shared with Reminder Publishing. “My parents and much of my extended family still lived in the Pioneer Valley. I’m very close with my cousins, including my cousin Jay King, who is also a writer, a sports journalist for The Athletic.”
Reminder Publishing participated in a Q&A interview with Glynn to discuss his new book, which was published on May 14, “Out East.” The following is a lightly edited interview.
Reminder Publishing: How would you describe your book to someone who is picking it up for the first time?
Glynn: “Out East” is a memoir of first love, heartache, and a group of friends who became a family in a Montauk summer house. It’s modern story of what it’s like to fall in love unexpectedly, and how those feelings can upend everything – including your sexual identity. It’s nonfiction that hopefully reads like page-turning fiction, the kind of book you take on vacation and can devour in a couple sittings from the comfort of your beach chair.
Reminder Publishing: While I understand your experience sharing a home in Montauk was your inspiration, what drove you to put pen to paper and to share your story with the masses?
Glynn: I live in New York City and have spent the past six summers living in a Montauk share house on the weekends. The small beach town at the eastern tip of Long Island has come to represent freedom, escape and for my friends and me – family. When I first joined a share house in Montauk, I unwittingly stepped into a time-honored tradition.
For decades, young New Yorkers have pooled their resources to rent summer cottages together. During my first summer, I was in a share with 31 other people. It was, to say the least, a narrative-rich milieu, and I felt it would be interesting to explore this particular subculture in a book. Initially I thought it might be a novel, but then, having gained some distance from my first summer, I realized that it had to be a memoir.
Reminder Publishing: Who do you think your audience is? To rephrase – who did you write this book for?
Glynn: I initially wrote the book just for me! I thought it would be fun to have some sort of narrative document of our first summer together, and I also wrote the book to make sense of my own experience falling in love with a guy for the first time. After I finished a draft, I shared it with a couple friends, who encouraged me to find an agent. Now I realize I wrote the book for anyone who has ever grappled with self-doubt, anyone reckoned with an internal crisis, and relied on the boundless love of the friends to get them through. It’s for anyone who has been swept up in the intoxication of first love. And it’s for anyone who loves the hazy energy of a endless summer night.
Reminder Publishing: How long did the process of when you first came up with the idea for “Out East” up until the date the book was published take?
Glynn: It took about two and a half to three years from start to finish. I wrote the first draft of the book in a white heat. The story poured out of me. It’s a phrase I hear often as an editor, but this was the book I felt “I had to write.” The editorial process was logistically very smooth, but I was unprepared for the emotional toll. My editor challenged me to dig deeper into the emotional arc of the narrative and create more flashbacks to my childhood and family in western Massachusetts. It was difficult to mine my feelings in such a deep and sustained way, but I’m so glad I did because it made the book much stronger and more resonant. And I especially loved including more scenes set in Western Mass.
Reminder Publishing: Do you have a favorite and perhaps least favorite part about writing your book?
Glynn: My favorite part about writing Out East was the collaborative nature of the story. While the narrative is anchored in my own perspective, my housemates play a crucial role. I sat down with six or seven of my Montauk friends and gathered their memories, secrets and reflections from that summer. It turned out that all of us were at a really dramatic turning point in our lives that summer. And most of us were suffering in silence. It was an honor to be entrusted with my friends’ stories, and I hope I did their experiences justice on the page.
My least favorite part about writing the book was the anxiety-inducing submission process. When my agent sent my book out to potential editors, I realized I was exposing a big part of my life to everyone in my industry. The people who did my job at other imprints, some of whom I knew personally, were in charge of evaluating the merit of my work, but because I had written a memoir, it felt like they were also evaluating my entire life. When I found out I got a book deal, I had never been so relieved!
Reminder Publishing: As an editor for Hanover Square Press, you read books each day and I’m sure know “what makes a good book.” How has your work experience prepared you for writing “Out East?”
Glynn: As a book editor, I get to engage with books and authors on a really molecular level every single day. When I was first starting out, I learned how to edit memoirs behind my then boss Shannon Welch. We’d often do two passes, the first for structural notes and big picture suggestions, and then a second round for line edits. Through osmosis I absorbed the mechanics of the genre. I learned how to hone a strong narrative voice, how tell a story effectively, and how to develop characters and scenes. I was also seeing in real time how the market was responding to our books and taking note of the elements of an effective publishing campaign. I didn’t know it then, but I was slowly acquiring the toolkit to write my own memoir.
The editorial process has also informed how I edit my own authors. As familiar as I was with the publishing process, I never could have anticipated what it would be like on the other side. Now when I’m editing an author’s work I can relate to the complex, often contradictory mix of emotions that the editing process can evoke. I try to be as specific as possible in my editorial notes because those were the ones that served me the best as a writer. I’m fortunate to have a brilliant, exceedingly kind and enthusiastic editor at Grand Central named Maddie Caldwell, and I’ve learned a lot about the craft under her care.
Reminder Publishing: As someone who I’m sure is incredibly busy with work, how did you manage to find the time to write “Out East?”
Glynn: The answer is simple: I write whenever I can! I snatch time before work or after work, and often on the weekends. I’ll look at the week ahead and plot out at least one window of time to write. Then I guard that window with my life.
In Glynn’s free time – when he isn’t reading or writing – he enjoys traveling, spending time with his friends and family, and going to the beach. In addition, he loves to snow ski, which he learned to do at nearby Blandford and raced competitively in High School.
“Out East” is available wherever books are sold, however it can also be found at this link: https://www.grandcentralpublishing.com/titles/john-glynn/out-east/9781538746646/