In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Diamond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

Joe Monninger has published 15 books and counting over a long and varied career.

He's written memoirs about turning a barn into a house and a road trip with his beloved golden retriever.

His nonfiction book, Two Ton about Tony Galento and Joe Louis fighting in 1939, is a classic.

And then there are the novels for adults like Margaret from Maine, just out and several acclaimed novels for young adults.

He's done a lot of teaching.

Currently he's at Plymouth State University.

He served in the Peace Corps, raised and raised sled dogs with his wife Wendy and his son Justin.

He's led bike tours across Europe, sailed the Great Barrier Reef, hitchhiked three times across the country and has been a licensed fishing guide.

So we should have a little bit to talk about.

Welcome, Joe Monninger.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.

It gives you a lot to write about.

Yeah, that's the idea.

That's the idea.

the experiences are for the writing or the writing comes out of the experiences, one or the other.

I don't know what Fitzgerald always said.

If you reach the age of 25, you have plenty to write about.

Just think of your average Thanksgiving meal with your family.

You have.

You have plenty to write about forever.

So, yeah.

Well, I thought we could talk maybe about the Peace Corps, because that's where you really started as a writer.

Is that right?

Yeah.

It's interesting because I'm a teacher now, and I see kids come through who take creative writing and fiction writing to, to to reflect back on my own beginnings.

And we didn't have courses like that.

If they were there, I didn't find them, let's put it that way.

So, when I graduated from college, I had no idea what I, what I wanted to do.

And I had, without really thinking very much about it, put in an application for the Peace Corps one spring day in my senior year, and I'd forgotten about it, honestly, and then received a letter that said, congratulations.

You've been accepted in the Peace Corps and you are going to Upper Volta.

And I had no idea where Upper Volta was.

I didn't I thought, surely there must be a Southern Volta.

If there's an Upper Volta or a Lower Volta, there isn't one.

It's now called Burkina Faso.

So in the course of about three months, I went from receiving this letter to getting on a plane to first Paris and then to, Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso.

So you said that that was formative for you to to do that Peace Corps stint?

Right.

So I'd grown up playing, sports, actually, at a big Irish Catholic family in new Jersey.

And I thought, this is what I'm going to do.

I don't know, I'd be involved in sports somehow, but I ended up in this tiny little outpost without running water, electricity for, two years, without a mirror.

I always tell people this, and my students sometimes find this hard to believe, but without an actual mirror, it doesn't mean that I never saw myself.

It's just that I simply didn't have a mirror around the house because it was a little hut.

And so one of the great things that the Peace Corps did was that they would send you out to your position with a bunch of books.

And of course, books became really rare commodity, so that anytime you went into the capital, you brought your books with you, and you traded with other volunteers who might happen to be in there, particularly in English, because this was a French speaking country.

So I read in a way that I'd never read up until that point in time.

I read the 19th century novelists, I read, Dickens and all the fat novels that you say you're going to read someday, but you may not have.

I've read a lot of them.

Yeah.

The bigger the better.

Really?

Because it just took up more time.

It was more interesting to do so.

And somewhere along the line, I started writing letters home and receiving letters back.

And I guess I got a few compliments.

People said, hey, you write a pretty good letter.

And that, of course stoked the fire a little bit.

And I said, well, maybe I'll try to write a story.

I have no idea why I started, but I began writing stories down and trying to think about what what a story was.

So that's how I got started.

Wow.

So it really came after college?

Right.

Yeah.

No, I didn't even think about it in college.

I just, I guess I always assumed there would be time to do something more serious later.

I was too busy goofing around in college, so.

Yeah.

Well, then becoming a writer and being a writer and for a lifetime is not an easy thing.

It's a it's it's not a straight road.

It's a crooked road, you know?

And, we talked about this a little bit in preparation for this interview, but, with a long career like you have and like, I have the motivations then and the motivations now may have changed.

And what's so what's kept you writing all this time?

And why does someone choose someone like you?

Choose to be a writer?

Well, there's so much in that question.

You know, in the beginning, I think there's an element of showing off that I can do this, I can write, I can be this thing, you know, romance.

There's a romantic attachment to writing, to the whole Hemingway myth, the expatriate idea, the idea of publishing novels.

And so I certainly succumb to that and felt that and was interested in that.

My dad was a wonderful man, but he was a guy who went into New York and worked every day, suit and tie and all that.

And I didn't know much in my life, but I knew I didn't want to replicate that particular thing in the suburbs.

So writing was one of the things that maybe I thought would be more interesting.

And without knowing anything about it, without really sort of knowing the first thing of what it would entail, what it would be to publish a book where you would send a book to get it, I mean, nothing.

And so I just started kind of blindly doing that.

My motivation to maybe impress, maybe to kind of feel self-importance.

And now, looking back 40 years later, I write for an entirely different purpose.

So it's interesting.

Who can predict and why do you write now?

Well, part of it is habit.

Part of it is is a way of defining the world.

It's kind of like jogging, you know?

Every day I get up and do this, I wake up early in the morning, walk out to a little shed in the backyard, and and try to write a thousand words every day.

I also have become more aware of the role of books in people's lives.

I think, actually, the purpose of books is shrinking in our culture.

I mean, I I'm afraid we have to admit that it's changing.

We're not going to have the same relationship to books.

I think, down the road that we do now.

Certainly our younger people don't have the same reaction to it, but when we like a book, when it means something to us, there's nothing else like it in the world.

So I'm reading for that.

That moment, John Updike used to say famously, he writes for a moment when his book, this is after any publicity, the book cover has come off.

It's sitting on a library shelf and some little boy in Kansas, picks it up and starts reading it and makes a connection with that.

And I've had that experience both as a reader and I think at times as a writer, too.

So yeah, yeah, it becomes part of you.

The book becomes part shape your life.

You seem to be able to connect to a lot of different kinds of characters, and I've been thinking about what's distinctive about your work and the word that I come up with is love.

There's so much love between characters in some you write.

Some like overtly romantic, romantic, and people love to read those, right?

Oh yeah.

Yeah, we love those.

And, and then there's also, you know, the love story, this, this new one Finding Somewhere, which is, it's about friendship and it's about a young girl's love for a horse.

The horse.

Right, right.

I wonder if you could read a little bit from that.

Sure, sure.

Yes.

Then we galloped you may call beast, I whispered and leaned down to stay close to the white horses neck.

The horses felt full for the whole thing too.

I knew it, they ran straight ahead, ears back, their long pulling gaits pegged to a thoroughbred stride.

They threw their hind legs through the front legs, the big haunches yanking and shoveling their mouths, and necks, starting to sweat.

I gripped harder up ahead of me.

Dolores let out a war whoop, and then we crested a hill I hadn't even noticed, and headed down.

I smelled a river somewhere, or at least water.

And the drops my horse came up in white dots around me, the hooves casting spray from the wet grass, and when I checked Dolores, she appeared to be running on a lake top, a girl on a fairy horse sprinting across fresh water.

As I looked, Dolores let go of the baize mane and set straight up, riding only with her legs and hips, her arms out as if to fly.

She tilted her head back to, and she looked so perfect doing it that I didn't dare try to copy her.

This was something only for her, something I could only witness.

And she'd gallop down that hill with her soul somewhere up in the sky above her.

We both knew it and we never had to mention it It's about friendship and freedom.

Think so I hope so.

So this is a what I would call YA, young adult right.

But what everybody's reading YA.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

Twilight.

Yeah.

We were talking just briefly about this, young adult field right now is the hottest field in publishing.

It's growing in leaps and bounds.

Adults are reading it all the time.

It's the.

I was just in the library over in Hanover, and they have expanded their YA sections.

The only thing that's kind of puzzling is that the whole shelf is black.

It's all Twilight zombie killers.

It's interesting the amount of, fantasy.

And it's interesting.

I don't write that.

I'm not particularly good at writing that, but I would be better served.

Yeah, but that's black, too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sometimes it's hard to distinguish what's YA and what's adult.

I mean, To Kill a mockingbird, for example, could be considered YA becasue of the protagonist.

Sure.

Yeah, sure.

Do you.

I wonder how you think about that, how you say this is going to be a book for adults?

This is going to be a book for young readers.

I mean, is that it's in the contract.

Yeah.

Some of it obviously is is is business driven, right.

So, I always tell my students, if you have to write a report about what you did last weekend and you have to write it to your best friend, to your girlfriend, and to your minister, a rabbi, you write three different letters, right?

So so you have to determine what you're writing for.

And so when I sit down to write a young adult book, it's different, although much of it is the same to Nick Hornsby who's who's an interesting guy, said about young Adult, it's the same as the other, except it doesn't suck.

Which is which is a horrible word, but it does bring into the fact that it's about plot.

You know, they don't spend as much time contemplating things.

They're much more plot driven.

So I think that's interesting.

It is interesting.

It is interesting.

Now, Margaret from Maine is your latest book.

And, I love this quote that Publishers Weekly said, the, in Margaret from Maine, Henry David Thoreau meets Nicholas Sparks.

Yeah, yeah.

That's pretty.

You know what I think it I think that's great.

I like that they met.

They I think that, yeah, I think they should have lunch.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

So now this is a different kind of book.

And it starts with a bang.

With a bang.

Right.

Sorry.

Right.

Sorry.

Do you want to talk a little bit like.

Sure.

Whatever you like.

Just give people a sense.

One of the things I love about your work, Joe, is that I call him Joe.

It's like, you know, I've known each other a long time.

A long time.

A long time yes.

You're fearless.

You'll try anything.

Well, I hope, I think I hope you'll try all different kinds of writing, all different kinds.

Some people pick, like, you know, pick a kind of writing.

They do that their whole career.

But you have you're just you're picking and choosing all the time.

Well, you know, if you were talking to my agent right now, she might say that's a problem.

You know, one of the things that I think Americans come to expect is a certain brand recognition so that if you're if you go to a Woody Allen movie, you're expecting a Woody Allen movie.

If Woody Allen comes at you with something completely different, although he is doing that lately, which is kind of interesting.

Then you're kind of thrown in, you're not sure how to how to how to take it.

But moreover, the people who market the thing and get it out, they don't quite know how to market it.

Right.

Because who who is this guy is doing all sorts of different things.

So if I could give a piece of advice to myself 40 years back, if my intention was to be popular and more widely distributed, it would be do one thing and keep doing it over and over and over again.

And if you think if you go through in your head, I won't bring them, but if you go through your, in your head, different authors, they tend to write the same thing, you know, over and over.

Oh, we know what to expect, right?

We know what to expect, right?

Read the author's name and you know what that's going to be.

Yeah, murder for me, is the story of a woman who's a dairy farmer in Maine.

And, she, she's she's married to to a man.

And this man, they have, financial problems again, this kind of rural poverty thing going on again.

And he ends up joining the Maine guard, during our current wars, in order to help, support the farm.

This is his story.

The story goes that he goes there, get shot, and then she has to live with the idea of, well, what do I do now?

He's he's no longer.

Well, you'll see what he's not.

But this is a story of him, his military service over there.

And what happens to him in a small place in Afghanistan.

So I'll read it then.

Maybe we can fill it in.

Yeah.

The last sound Maine Guardsman Sergeant Thomas Kennedy heard was the whine of a mosquito.

At least he thought it was the last sound.

Although what he thought would actually occurred had little to do with each other.

He raised his right hand to brush it away, conscious of the heat under his helmet, the dry, sweltering heat that soaked his uniform.

But now a mosquito.

As his hand lifted, he saw a glint, just a fracture of light, and he glanced down at Private First Class Edmond Johnson, who happened to be changing the back rear tire of the team's Humvee.

In that instance, many things did not make sense.

What were they doing here in Afghanistan to begin with?

How did he come all this way from Bangor, Maine, to be standing beside a beached Humvee beside a private named Johnson who had arrived at this point in time from Solon, Maine, and where, after all, had the flash of light come from, they were in a dry, featureless plain in the mountains, arguably the most rugged mountains in the world were too far away to provide a sniper with sufficient height.

So how could it be a flash of light gunfire when all the world lay flat, and even and empty?

That's when it occurred to Sergeant Thomas Kennedy that a mosquito is not always a mosquito, because he felt his hand shattered, the bones flying apart under his skin, his chin exploding so that he tasted teeth and blood in the same instant.

Oh, he thought, just that what they had feared, what they had all feared, had finally arrived.

They were pinned down and a mosquito was not a mosquito.

And he turned and spread his arms ridiculously like a crossing guard, and tried to protect Private Johnson.

The second bullet went through his shoulder, and he only felt it spin, and it didn't hurt.

It felt like a bird.

Someone yelled at him to get down, but Johnson still kneeled behind him completely exposed, and Sergeant Kennedy spread his arms to expand his protection.

And he knew that was a bad idea.

He hardly even knew Johnson.

The kid had arrived a month and a half ago from basic, and he was supposed to be an excellent mechanic, a diesel engine mechanic for Freightliner.

But taking a bullet for him was another matter.

But Sergeant Kennedy was fourth generation Maine, and it was part of his Yankee nature to use things up, so he made no sense to him to let two people get shot when one was already plugged.

It would be like punching a hole in a second bucket when the first was already punched.

And so when the third bullet hit him in the right knee, he figured he was done for anyway.

He kept standing, shielding Johnson.

Strangely, Sergeant Kennedy knew absolutely knew that what he was doing would be called brave.

And that was simply curious because it didn't feel brave.

It all felt stupid.

And he thought of Margaret, the new baby, the dairy cows plodding quietly into the milking stations.

And he wondered why the sniper couldn't see how the entire thing was absurd.

Why were they shooting at each other?

He had no idea what an Afghan wanted in this world, but he figured that most humans wanted to live a peaceful life.

And so as he held out his arms to protect Johnson behind him, he could not imagine that the sniper would not cease.

Couldn't a sniper put the situation together?

They were just grunts, just stupid soldiers doing what they were told.

And if the milk prices hadn't fallen through the floor, Sergeant Kennedy would still be on the sweet dairy farm in Maine, watching his herd.

But the farm had debt and the military promised to help.

And now here he was with a man shooting at him.

Sergeant Kennedy held up his hand to tell the shooter to stop, but instead he felt the fourth bullet go into his shin.

And then it became a perverse game.

See if you can knock me down.

Sergeant Kennedy was a big man.

He had played center for Millinocket High School, all county selection, and he had hands as strong as any man he had ever met.

His strength was always a fact.

He knew what existed inside him in a deep, quiet place, and he had scuffles with stronger looking kids, more muscled men.

But Sergeant Kennedy had always come out on top.

Maine strength.

They called it down east.

It came, he felt from growing up on a farm, handling cattle, pushing and shoving the goofy bastards every single day of his life.

He had lifted more calves and he could count had engaged in wrestling matches with Holsteins, their warm flanks pressing him into the stall wall until he had pushed back until his bulk and strength and shoved move over was a joke to use on the farm, so that that was his strength.

The last bullet, the one that did him, as they say, shattered his spine at the spot where neck and backbone joined.

He fell like a slinky.

So much for seeing if they could knock him down.

He went slack, his body piling up on top of itself, and vaguely he heard more bullets ricocheting off the Humvee.

So it turned out that the mosquito was not the last sound.

After all.

But he didn't make a conscious correction in the last nervous jolt he would ever know on this earth.

He remembered a full fall day right before he enlisted.

It had been a perfect autumn day.

No insects, and the farm ran all the way to the pine forest, and he had seen Margaret walking toward him, her hair blowing in the wind and the backs of the cattle catching the sunlight was a happy memory.

The white farmhouse shown in the sunlight, the red barn beside it, and Margaret raised her hand to wave.

And then, like a movie ending abruptly, the image fizzled.

The spine snapped in two, and Sergeant Kennedy of Bangor, Maine, fell into the puddle of himself and became a brown box of meat stored forever.

An electric hum, not dead, but no longer viably alive.

Well, you're allowed to clap.

(Applause) That's a start to a novel.

Well, yeah, it puts the pressure.

I don't know why these quotes come into your head, and you just kind of.

Over the years, they kind of pass through you.

But one of the ones that I keep saying to people now is, is a Hitchcock quote.

And he says, a good story is about two people having tea at a table.

But even better stories.

If you put a bomb under the table, you've got to have pressure on characters.

So this is the pressure that that she's going to she's going to receive.

Yeah.

I wonder if, that's what you pass on to your students.

Is the bomb under the table or of all the things that you can, if there's one thing that you can teach, well, what would it be?

What would it be?

Well, two things, two things, two things.

One is that I say over and over, come into the story as late as possible.

Yep.

Which is a great piece of advice for all of us.

I have to remind myself of that all the time.

And the other is from Ernie Hiebert, who's a wonderful New Hampshire novelist you've had here.

Yeah.

And I've heard I've heard him speak.

And he said this thing and it almost went past me, then went, wait a second, that was really good.

He said the number one obstacle we face when we write is that we give ourselves a chance to pretend that we'll do it better next time.

In other words, we guard ourselves.

We don't want to admit that this is the best I can do at this point in time.

Judge me on it.

Take it for what it is.

No, instead, there's always going to be this other time, and I know I do this myself.

I'm writing something and say, well, this is okay, this is pretty good, but where do you see what I do next?

And then it's like, no, no, no, no, stop.

Stop that.

Do the best you can at this single time, point in time and stand behind it and own up to it.

And, and I think it's a great piece of advice.

This brings me to my favorite Joe Monninger book I like.

I know it should be the last one, but this is my favorite book and I don't know why.

It's called Two Ton: One Fight One Night, Tony Galento versus Joe Louis I don't like boxing.

I don't like sports.

But I love this book.

Well thank you.

Why is that?

I don't know, I mean, it's it's about this.

I do love this book.

Talk about this book.

This is nonfiction that a lot of research.

You did a lot of research.

It's all about the late 30s in America, what was going on.

And the construction is fascinating.

It's back and forth, back and forth.

You can talk about, well, this is by far the hardest book I ever.

I'm not surprised.

Yeah, it took me at least two years and all sorts of research, lots of trips of the Dartmouth Library and then to new Jersey, then to the oranges in new Jersey, and Newark, new Jersey, a lot, a lot of, research.

So this is 1939.

Tony Galento, a bartender from orange, new Jersey, five foot eight, five foot nine.

Big chubby guy.

He ended up fighting Joe Louis, who was by far the greatest heavyweight of his time period.

This beautiful athlete, 190 pounds, perfectly graceful and all of this stuff.

And Galento was just this guy with a left hand.

Joe Louis, beautifully dapper and was dating all these beautiful women and movie stars and all that stuff.

Galento was the most working class guy you could ever imagine.

Nobody gave him a chance.

They filled up the stadium in Yankee Stadium, 1939 a night in June.

They went there and Galento who, hit him so hard, knocked him into the air.

He was champ of the world.

This is what I love about this guy.

He was champ of the world for about two seconds.

Five seconds, something like that.

And then, of course, Joe Louis got up and annihilated him.

So it's a compelling story.

It's an American story.

This guy from nowhere who makes good, who has some some bragging, but but actually lives up to his brags.

It's a tremendously interesting time.

The cover of the book is really also the central passage of the book, which is where that happens, where you describe that moment when he lifts him off his feet and Joe Louis is on the on the floor.

Yeah.

And that's the cover.

Yeah.

So the whole book sort of moves to that point and from that point is almost right in the middle.

Yes.

Amazing.

Amazing constructed.

Thank you.

Shorts, short chapters back and forth.

Back and forth.

Yeah.

It challenge.

It was really a challenge.

And you know always trying to figure out what to leave out what to put in.

So there was all sorts of stuff.

The 1930s were such a rich period.

I had no idea 1939 had a million things going on.

People went to the fights like we not even like we go to the movies, like we turn on the TV.

I mean, it was they would go to 2 or 3 times a week.

They would go to the fights, particularly men.

They would go out and meet each other and say, let's go to the fights tonight.

And they would just go to the fights, on a Friday night.

It just happened all the time.

So Tony Galento fought I forget how many, but 150 fights or something like that.

He'd fight two guys in a night, he would drink beer in between.

He was just really colorful.

He was a character.

He was kind of a Babe Ruth.

Yes.

He was, And not necessarily the nicest man.

I mean, I also had some experience where he was a member of the manga manga Club in Newark, new Jersey in orange.

So he would go around all these restaurants, they would eat and I interviewed this one guy and he said, well, he was a pig.

He would just eat like a pig.

But he was larger than life and did all of these kinds of crazy things.

He fought an octopus.

He got into a, into a tank and fought an octopus.

He didn't know what he was doing.

But anyway.

Yeah.

Did he win?

No.

The thing it inked him.

It inked him.

He lost to the octopus.

This is a very short reading.

I have to ask you to do it, because it's.

It's the reading that goes with this, okay?

And it's really strong.

And this is the as the pivot point of the book, it's just you knew you knew how to do it.

You know how to get there.

So okay, so this is the fight, this is all a one day, one, one day in his life about the fight that's going to take place that night.

But it goes back and forth a little In the center of the ring.

Midway through the round, Joe Lewis began to throw a left in, dropping his hands slightly to gain leverage.

His right hand also dropped a millimeter.

A line drawn between the two men at that point would have been a perfect schematic.

They're soldiers, as gallant, who prepared his own left, had precisely the same slant they might have served as dance partners, or, better still, as a shadow Boxing Day book that had come alive to attack the reflection of each man.

210 Tony ducking and reaching for leverage that go over the left hand that would bring him fame for the remainder of his life.

It beat Lewis to the punch and collided with the bomber's chin, snapping it to Lewis's left and making the champ's head recoil from the impact for an instant.

An instant captured on film but now lost.

According to some old timers, Lewis left the ground.

Golenta's punch lifted the Brown Bomber from the canvas, the force sending him inches above the ring.

His feet rocked back like checkmarks.

Then Lewis crumpled.

Tony's follow through carried him halfway around and Lewis spinning with the force screwed into the ground and fell backward, his left hand groping out to brace himself, his left shoulder taking the brunt of the tumble.

Galento, in what would become one of several famous still photographs from the fight, shoved his hands down to his side opened his mouth and stared at the fallen Lewis and felt what what it would be like to be heavyweight champion of the world.

Wow.

Yeah.

(Applause) You're so good at character development.

And I wonder, sometimes I think of character development in the way I work is I write a draft and that's meeting the character, and then I write a second draft.

And then I spend a little time, and then over several drafts, I get to know the character.

Is that how you work or is it is it different?

Yeah.

I mean, I think to some degree, one of the things I always tell my students is the first time you meet a character, describe him or her, make sure.

And I think that's true in most novels that you read within the first time you run into a character.

One of the exercises I always do is, the sort of, the detective behind the desk, and somebody comes in with a problem.

I mean, I think that's a great first scene to just kind of work and imagine.

So, yeah, I mean, in my mind, I often will write a character and start going by and go, wait a second, wait a second, wait.

I don't know who that character is.

And I have to go back and say, let me fill out.

And so I will write a backstory.

I'll say, well, where did this person go to school?

Where they grew up?

What did they do?

What do they like the how big are they helped?

You know, all of that stuff.

And even if I don't always use that, I will have that.

They have to be fully imagined.

Right?

Right, right.

Well, I think we've about covered it.

So it's good I think so.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for that.

(Applause) (♪)