A Young Musician Follows His Dreams

This weeks contribution from my sis Nancy.....

The Friday assembly at Rippowam Cisqua School was a full circle moment in our family. Alum and singer song-writer Collin McLoughlin returned to the place where he fist got up on a stage to sing. I can remember his role as "Tartan" the male lead in the school musical 14 years ago.

In those days, Collin was a frail fifth-grader, wearing a furry caveman costume which barely covered his scrawny shoulders. He belted out the songs with a high-pitched quaver and it was a lightning bolt moment for us as parents. His dad and I had never heard him sing before.

That was just the beginning. Collin addressed the Rippowam audience with a motivational speech about following dreams, a timely topic, since the bonus track on his newly released EP is called "Chasing Dreams." The day the new album (entitled "Stark Perspective") was released on iTunes, it was the second most downloaded in the singer songwriter category on the world charts.

Mr. Fonera, Collin's former Rippowam music teacher, was the first to put a guitar in his hands as part of the music program. He attended the Friday assembly and seemed to enjoy what must have been a satisfying "teacher moment."

Collin briefly outlined his personal "post-Ripp" journey, which took him through Wooster Academy, and then on to Colgate University. Although a philosophy major, he explained how writing and singing music enabled him to enter and win contests while at college.

"We started out doing 'crunk' rock," he told the kids. "It is distorted guitar and crazy heavy drums with rap singers and choruses, which are what I wrote and sang."

After a generous donor created a state of the are recording and broadcast facility at the college, members of his band, who were not considered part of the music department, gained access to the premises under cover of darkness when a sympathetic janitor, who was also a fan, let the group in to record and write music off hours.

Eventually, Collin was granted permission by the administration to use the new space and launched Broad Street Records, a Colgate-student run record label still in existence today. The label promotes and encourages all Colgate musicians to record and produce their own music, some of which was then broadcast on the college radio station and website.

"I wanted everyone to have a chance to be heard even if they weren't officially going into music as a career," said Collin, who found he loved managing the label.

The college asked for permission to utilize some of Collins original acoustic soundtracks for use on their website as background.

Winning student votes in a school competition earned their Colgate group, entitled, Nautical Young opening slots for popular artists on tour like Lupe Fiasco, Wale, and K'naan. When the group graduated, its members scattered to follow new career paths.

Collin launched a solo career, opening for and collaborating with popular artist on tour like Sam Adams, and spending the first summer playing shows in club settings like The Bitter End in New York City and Cafe Lina in Saratoga Springs.

Collin addressed the Rippowam students and spoke about finding a passion in life. He advised them to "try everything" saying that a school like Rippowam teaches students to place and equal value on arts and athletics.

Collin described how his very first guitar lesson, still a mandatory part of the Rippowam seventh grade music curriculum, was less than inspiring. "Why didn't you like it?" came the questions from Mr. Perry, Collin's former science teacher. "Learning the basic building blocks of guitar chords means you have to start with very simple songs. To get to the next level, you have to stick with it and practice." He added, " I was impatient. You can only play so much row row your boat before you just want to upgrade to something from the radio."

The six foot two musician stood with an acoustic guitar strung over his shoulders and said, "Its Friday and I remember what that means around here. How are you all doing?" In and effort to elict more volume from the audience he grinned saying, "You can do way better than that, lets hear more." And the students complied, hooting, clapping and shrieking.

Playing concerts in venues that include boarding schools and colleges, his bookings take him as far away as California, and have helped to amp up them demand for his new music. In the past he has written dance tracks and acoustic, electronic ballads, many of which he has sold to record labels like Ultra.

Collin closed the show by playing a sneak preview on a big screen of his cover video "Not Over You," which has since been released.

Each student left with a copy of the very first CD of songs Collin recorded, containing music produced when he was just a few years older than the Rippowam audience. It was Collin's way of sharing an earlier piece of himself and restating his message, "It is never too early to start following your own dreams."

Guest Blog by Nancy McLoughlin

So proud of my nephew! Vote for him in the Billboard Battle of The Bands! (Click below for the scoop..) Lee
http://www.billboard.com/features/northeast-battle-of-the-bands-2012-1006354752.story#/features/northeast-battle-of-the-bands-2012-1006354752.story 

SIGNED, SEALED AND DELIVERED...

....And this fall....it's yours! 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE 

I did it.  Ta-daa!  My first novel, “Those We Love Most” will be out September 11, 2012.  It’s my wedding anniversary, among other important milestones.

And as I put the edited manuscript in a big padded envelope and filled out the UPS label (too scary to trust to regular mail) I thought I’d feel a total kick-up-my-heels sense of joy.  A kind of Sound of Music, bodice-heaving, running over the hills with glee kind of approach.  It wasn’t exactly like that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  Finishing a book is a big old dealy-bop.  Stapling that envelope shut is the culmination of a lot of hours, creation, frustration, editing, re-writes, self–doubt, deleting and erasure chewing, although frankly few writers I know still use erasers.

 

I’ve always been a sporadic writer.  My huckleberry pie life is cut up into lots of different slices, drawn and quartered on any given day; mom, wife, journalist, writer, advocate for injured service members, public speaker.  I’m a daughter as well and right now that involves a measure of caretaking and coordinating as my parents fail and falter in different degrees and disparate ways.  And somewhere in there I’m a girl friend too.  And I’ve always valued my female friendships, even as we all lamented how much work and family often came between more than a few plans to do lunch or grab a drink.  So many of my posse have been just as absorbed in the rat-a-tat-tat of the child rearing years as I have been. We are only now, most of us, poking our heads out of the foxhole and blinking in the coming dawn of the empty nest.

 

But I digress.  This is about my book.  The book I always wanted to write and the writing process.  Oh geez, you say.  Boring.  The writing process?  ZZZZZZZZZ.  I’m going to delete.   And you may.  But for any of you who have struggled to realize a dream or long held the notion that there is a finite time line for what you want to accomplish, hang on a tick.  Stay with me.   I am here to say that anything, really, is possible. But this is also about realizing dreams.  It’s about second acts.  And if you want it badly enough, you WILL find a way to get it done. Whether it’s getting your pilot’s license or doing your first stand-up gig or composing a song.  I’m living proof.  And I’m certifiably over 50.  Fabulous freaking fifty.

The truth is I stopped and started this novel a number of different times.  There were points I didn’t believe in my ability to weave a tale that any of you would want to read.  This is a round-about way of telling you that at one point I thought the book sucked.  But then all of a sudden it didn’t.  Last summer I found myself with a stretch of time and I got busy.  Instead of writing in the corners of my life, on airplanes, in hotel rooms, and occasional early weekend mornings, I got a little serious.  I wrote whatever was coming out, and out it poured, rushing head-long into a decent story, with characters I’d come to care about.

 

(the desk where I love to write..)

And while the result still required some shaping and pruning, my friends at Hyperion publishing saw the possibilities.  And so we shaped, we pruned.  And we clipped a little more.  One whole characters voice was scalpeled out.  This is where you trust your editor like a lover.  This is where you become partners and go to couples counseling.  

 

But turning in the manuscript was only the beginning.  The galleys will be out soon and they will go into the hands of illustrious book reviewers and journalists, other writers and bookstore influencers, bloggers and indie owners and the people who place the advance orders.  This will feel a bit like my pre-pubescent self standing naked in front of the mirror after middle school school gym class.  I will be a harsh chronicler of all my flaws.  Art is, after all, a subjective thing. 

 

But then the real work begins.  The marketing and the talking it up, the book selling and the chatting. There will be tweeting and blogging, the readings and signings.  I am an author who kind of likes being out on the road.  I really do mean it when I say it’s the people.  But then again I’m still a relative virgin on book number three, the accomplished and prolific ones will tell me.   

 

Will readers turn out to hear my fiction the way they turned out for the first and second non-fiction books to hear about our family’s journey through injury and then recovery?  “In an Instant” was a bird’s eye view of the bleached bones of a disaster and a marriage.  Everyone slows down on the highway to eyeball a roadside wreck.  But will they care as much about this fictional family I have created and blown life into? I hope so.

 

Writing a book for me was a lot like giving birth to a baby after 40.  In fact, in some ways it’s much harder. First you mess around a little, hunt and peck and see what you’ve got.   And then when the stick hasn’t turned blue, when nothing much is happening on the pages, you get serious.  You come up with a plan.

 

Suddenly the writing process needs to be plodding and methodical, a bit like taking temperatures for ovulation and shot for hormones and doctor’s appointments and monitoring and… well, you get the drift. Writing a book is a lot like that.  But there are moments of unbridled joy.  You can feel it occasionally when the story is coming, when a line or a paragraph sings out to you like the buzz of a zip line.  Every writer has experienced those tracts of time, those beloved fugue states, so much better than a chemical high.  If only we truly knew how to conjure them up on demand.

 

Photo by CATHRINE WHITE

 

Indulge me the tired old “giving birth” analogy as a writer.  I’ve finished a damn book.  I’m elated and cautious all at the same time.  And as I move past the moment without celebration, without popping the sparkling apple juice at the dinner table or crowing too loudly on Facebook or tweeting, (OK, I posted it once) I am conscious the whole time that this process is a marathon, not a sprint.

 

I am still struck by something the writer Anthony Horowitz told me.  He is the officially sanctioned British author for all future Sherlock Holmes novels and the beloved Alex Ryder series for kids.  When I asked him what he did to celebrate completing a book he answered, “I take one full day off before I begin the next.” 

 

And so forgive me, dear reader, if I return to the next book, which is already tugging at my sleeve.  I hope to meet you in the fall on the road, in a book store, at a forum or library or Skyping into your book group from my cramped home office.  I thank you for reading and caring, for wanting to hold books in your hands or devour them digitally on a tablet.  I hope you always have an appetite for stories. Stories, after all, are the things that connect us.

 

“Those We Love Most “ – published By Voice – on sale September 11, 2012

 

Happy Valentine's Day

Recipes are the currency by which generations of women define and distinguish themselves from other families.  These sometimes secret formulas, handed down from mother to daughter, are inscriptions of endearment, the personal stamp encrypted in each dish like DNA.  For my husband’s family, it’s the rutabaga recipe at Thanksgiving and the corn and oysters stuffing.  On my side, it’s the secret ingredient of buttermilk in which to cook lima beans, Snickerdoodle cookies and a simple homemade teriyaki marinade for flank steak that tenderizes meat as if it were a five-star chop house.

 

And if cooking is a physical manifestation of love, then it was a heart-felt gift this past summer to receive my grandmother’s well-worn 1943 original  Joy of Cooking.  Like a butterfly working it’s way out of the cocoon, my mother has begun wriggling free of her possessions.  It’s an almost compulsive need to shed herself of her earthly weight before she is incapable of doing so, although thankfully there are no signs that she is flagging.  She is a methodical person, a plotter and list maker like me, and she is determined to hand her three girls the physical pieces of our legacy in person.

When I eyeballed the cracked spine and no-nonsense pale blue and white cloth cover, I hesitated.  True confession: I’m a sloppy cook book chef.  I like to improvise too much and I’m lazy when it comes to precise directions.  Blanching, poaching, measuring, sifting, these are all too fussy.  I like to experiment a little, break the rules.  Besides, I thought, I had already lovingly transcribed my favorite family dishes onto index cards in a recipe holder I‘d made as a kid in 4-H.   The book was delicate, the pages yellowed.

Inside the front cover was a notation in pencil from my grandfather.  And then in my grandmother’s alternatively loopy and cramped handwriting was a poem she had clearly copied as a younger wife, presumably to remind herself that the way to her young husband’s heart was ultimately through his stomach.

“Crestfallen bride, you labored long

To bake that lovely cake
And heard your husband’s
“Not so good as my mother used to make”

Before you shed your angry tears
Or hang your head in shame, 
Remember – not too long ago
His father said the same”

I smiled when I read this anachronistically docile and sentimental ditty.  Nana Stokes was anything but a blushing bride.  She was a grand, strong, southern woman, a concert pianist who moved north when she married a Yankee.  She had her funny eccentricities, her fur coat, her French words, her guided tours to foreign countries.   But almost above all of that, she was a consummate cook whose love for us all manifested itself in her giant Sunday suppers.  Long before people anguished over clogged arteries, gluten-free diets and veganism, she was a cooker of lard, that southern staple that made for feather-light fried chicken and pie crusts that flaked like croissants.   She boiled okras and used bacon grease liberally.  She salted watermelon and made berry sherbets and pound cakes with dairy cases of butter. She would have laughed in the face of canola oil or scoffed at Mrs. Dash.

My grandfather, a much quieter soul, was probably stunned into submission by her cooking.  I imagine that it was her ability in the kitchen that held him at times, that endeared her to him, that smoothed out her rough, bossy edges and her strident voice.  I wonder now, how he viewed her when she was hard at work, her tongue  clucking, arms flailing around the timing of her roast, a shock of curly hair wilted onto her forehead by the blast of oven heat. 

Even in the later years of their marriage, where habit and familiarity had frayed their patience, made them snappish and outwardly less considerate, her cooking brought all parties to the table on a Sunday after church.  Food was the great equalizer.  Being called to the table meant children washed their hands and grown-ups laid down their discussions before pulling up a chair and smoothing a napkin on their laps. Heads bowed, lips murmured, silverware clattered.   Family time. 

Flipping through the middle pages of The Joy of Cooking, a yellowed newspaper clipping fell out, and I reached to pick it up.  Now this was more like the feisty grandmother I knew. 

“Remember Christopher Morley’s little stanza – 

 “The man who never in his life
 Has washed the dishes with his wife
 Or polished up the silver plate –
 He is still largely celibate.”

And there it was, I smiled to myself.  The bookends of a bride’s life captured in this best-selling bible of domesticity.  She had left her father’s house to marry with the unbridled hopefulness of a young woman. And she had evolved, like all of us, into a more realistic and gimlet-eyed wife.  Her chosen stanza reflected the shrewder woman who had come to terms with a rich, mellowing love amidst the servitude and routine of real life.  It was this wife who had wisely learned to barter a little nookie in the bedroom for some help in the kitchen.

Because lets face it, when all else fails, a cook can always withhold the dessert.