<![CDATA[Bringing Back Holleywood

<![CDATA[Bringing Back Holleywood - blog]]>Wed, 26 Apr 2023 19:04:26 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[hidden histories]]>Wed, 15 Dec 2021 16:51:55 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/hidden-historiesWe're one of the lucky towns coming through a world-wide pandemic with our local newspaper intact. The Lakeville Journal has been serving the Salisbury community since 1897, but in 2019, it was at a crossroads. Its founding template made financial survival dependent on advertising and paper sales, but that wasn't working in the digital age. Thanks to the doggedness of its publisher, staff and board members, and the acumen and generosity of supporters, our paper was saved and will hopefully continue to foster the free flow of information and opinion in our community for another 125 years.

To remain vibrant, a newspaper needs not only readers but contributors. With that in mind, and with the encouragement of publisher Janet Manko, I've started a column in the Lakeville Journal called Hidden Histories. It will highlight little-known stories, lives and places that contribute to the richness of our community, revealing sometimes surprising aspects of our local heritage. Research is based on findings I discovered while writing this site and also while writing my novel The Latecomers (Little, Brown 2018), a tale of New England life in the last century, inspired by the Holleywood house.

The first Hidden Histories column runs today. It tells the story of Fredrick Bauer, once a big name in town who has since been all but forgotten despite the fact that he not only gifted Lakeville a pond, a park, the historic train depot, and the former railroad right of way which now serves as access to the Town Grove, but funds for maintaining the properties. You can read it here. Or pick up a hand-held issue wherever local newspapers are still (thank heavens) sold.

]]><![CDATA[candlelit vigil]]>Wed, 15 Dec 2021 13:03:14 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/candlelit-vigil.A luminous gathering last night on the White Hart Green in memory of the 26 lives lost on December 14, 2012 in the Sandy Hook School shooting. Each name was read aloud between tolls of a bell. The gathering was organized by Sophia deBoer, co-founder of the Northwest Corner Committee for Gun Violence Protection. She and her husband Lee deBoer were parents of a student at Wesleyan in 2009 when a classmate was shot to death by a mentally unstable stalker with easy access to to guns. The grandmother of that victim, Johanna Justin-Jinich, had been a Holocaust survivor.

]]><![CDATA[tree time!]]>Mon, 13 Dec 2021 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/tree-timeWhen your gutters need a cleaning and a lift has to be hired and there's an opportunity to make it do double duty. May your holidays be luminous and bring in a lighter, brighter new year!

]]><![CDATA[COVID made us realize we moved to CT years ago]]>Wed, 01 Sep 2021 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/covid-made-us-realize-we-moved-to-ct-years-agoOnce Covid hit, our brains caught up to reality. We weren't living in Manhattan anymore. We were living in Lakeville. Our NYC apartment had become a very expensive storage unit for stuff we didn’t need anymore. I spoke to Joanne Kaufman of the New York Times about selling our co-op in the Time of Covid and making the brain shift to living full time to Connecticut, while hanging onto a tendril of the cord that ties us to the city-- a tiny 370 square foot apartment on the Upper West Side. Story here.

]]><![CDATA[caroling party in the Time of Covid]]>Sat, 19 Dec 2020 08:00:00 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/caroling-party-in-the-time-of-covidThanks to the carolers for including us in the masked merriment they brought to several places in town.

]]><![CDATA[a fictional house inspired by Holleywood]]>Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:49:55 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/a-fictional-house-inspired-by-holleywoodThanks to Lakeville Journal reporter Alexander Wilburn for delving into the history of the house that inspired my third novel The Latecomers. One of the things that made me fall in love with this house (even when it was falling apart) was the bookcase in the library, a floor-to-ceiling fruitwood with sliding glass doors. The glass was engraved 1860 and I’d often wonder what conversations took place in the very place I was standing, as Civil War brewed, what secrets could be held in its walls.

The Latecomers follows five generations of a Connecticut blueblood family and how they are changed forever by hiring an Irish immigrant girl as a housemaid in 1909. The story unfolds from a mysterious death and includes love, betrayals, old money, motherhood and 117 years of meticulously researched American history. The Latecomers comes out in November from Little, Brown, but you can pre-order a personalized copy here to arrive in your mailbox the day it's published, courtesy of Oblong Books & Music.

If you're in NW CT, please join me at the book launch at The White Hart Inn in Salisbury on Tuesday, November 6 at 6 PM. Election Day! I'll be presenting The Latecomers with a Hidden History of 20th Century America slide show featuring surprises I discovered while researching the book.

]]><![CDATA[balloon view]]>Tue, 12 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/balloon-viewIt was early on a Sunday AM and I was working in the tower room on the 2nd floor. I'd pulled down the shades to block out reflections on screen. Suddenly, it sounded like we had plumbing issues. What was happening? Something kept...flushing? I hurried downstairs to where Donald was working.

"What's that noise?" I asked.

"What noise?" he said. (Donald's defense against an old house is to try never to notice when something goes wrong.)

"It sounds like a whooshing, like pipes...in the front?" But there are no pipes in front.

We went to the hallway and through the sidelights we saw--something big and blue. Whattttt??? We opened the front door. There was a hot air balloon hovering at the second floor level. A guy in the basket was leaning over to ask, ever so politely, "Do you mind if we land on your field?"

"No problem!" we said. (Later I asked him, what if we'd said no? He said he'd have moved on to a school field nearby.)

I grabbed my phone and began taking photos as the balloon landed and the couple being transported (a husband's gift to a wife for her birthday) stepped out.

"Want a ride?" asked balloon operator still inside the basket. We said sure. So--there we were at 8 am on a Sunday morning, flying above the trees in our yard, getting a bird's eye view of our house. Thank you Spirit Ballooning!

]]><![CDATA[Victoria Homes magazine]]>Mon, 29 Aug 2016 19:16:07 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/victoria-homes-magazineA beautifully told story of our house in pictures appears in the September 2016 issue of Victoria Homes, thanks to New Canaan photographer Jane Bieles and writer Rebekah Wahlberg.

]]><![CDATA[onion snow]]>Sun, 03 Apr 2016 13:23:20 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/onion-snowThat's what they call snow that falls out of season. What a surprise to wake up to it today. I hurried downstairs for shears and a bucket, pulled on snow boots and rescued daffodils, coat over my PJs.

]]><![CDATA[writing on the wall]]>Mon, 14 Dec 2015 13:26:23 GMThttp://www.bringingbackholleywood.com/blog/writing-on-the-wall1Tucked under the fourth floor tower is a wonderful studio where I write. Outside the studio is a looooong hallway convenient for posting a timeline for the novel I've been working on, old school-style, with index cards. I (and houseguests) have lived with the timeline for years, but I was excited to finally take it down today. Early finished copies of the book are in! WHAT WAS MINE is a novel from Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books. The story is about secrets. (It was written in a house harboring many of them.) A childless woman takes a baby from a shopping cart and raises her as her adopted daughter for 21 years. The novel opens when the secret is out. It started out as a story, but after we acquired Holleywood, the story expanded, along with our living space. Pub date Jan 5, available here.

Before/After

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