Connecticut Voices; Interview with Alan Sternberg

Hello and welcome to Connecticut voices a production of the Connecticut Center for the book in partnership with the Hartford currents North-East magazine. I'm Nancy Cobb. My guest is short story writer Allen Sternberg. In the 70s and 80s Alan Sternberg was a newspaper reporter at several Connecticut newspapers including The Hartford Current. During these years his work earn him awards from United Press International and the New England Press Association. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker Yankee Magazine and the Hartford currents northeast Sternberg's first book Camero city published by Harcourt Bryce is a compendium of short stories set in a Connecticut factory town closely resembling Meriton. In fact Connecticut landmarks and byways abound throughout this book. Alan Sternberg was born in Springfield Massachusetts grew up in Connecticut and now lives in Geneva Switzerland where he works as an editor and press officer for the United Nations. He joins us in our Hartford studio. Welcome Alan. Thanks.

I'd like to just share with the audience that Camero city is. Has how many short stories in here. There are 10 in title blazer city built right airport beach. Tina broken violin King Day splat and Hoeber this is been very well reviewed in The New York Times Kircus Publishers Weekly and they've continued to talk about how you celebrate the world of the underclass. How do you know this world and I'm not sure I'd call the underclass. Many Americans call that maybe one story deals with with the underclass that this is more the lower middle class collar community. I guess I only know it because I grew up in Marin and observe it for a long time and maybe I was more curious about it because I wasn't myself. I grew up in a neighborhood where. I think along the

street where we lived my parents and the parents of one of their family had gone to college but everyone else had they were factory workers and policemen and firemen and so on. As a child I often wondered what made these people tick. But your kids were different than when I was a kid. Kids were different when I was a kid. They were your classmates and you know they were my classmates and kids that I played with and I really didn't fit in a lot of boys. And I used to wonder what was different about us what was basically different about us. And so I thought about it a lot as a child and not really understanding it later when I was trying to get started as a writer. I started thinking about it again and I understood a little better. Did you want to did you want to be part of that group insurance or because you were Yeah because you were in the minority really. Yeah. They had an easy way of talking with each other and a very strong sense of who they were.

The title story in this book America city takes place in a town where a Camaro is the car of choice I guess you'd say. And one of the characters has had his car stolen his Camaro has been stolen he has. He runs out of hard luck but his Camaro has been stolen and it's the fifty sixth Camaro that's been stolen since January. Is this true or Camaro What's the devotion to the Camaro. It is true at least in the city where I grew up it's true that you see a lot of them. I think that. They have their advertised and shapes to appeal to blue collar people. And it works they do. They appeal to both women and men but especially women. Is that him. Would it be called a muscle car. And I mean you know like I don't know if or if I would say a muscle car

that underthings shows up more in the in the Blazers in the pickup trucks in the Rangers or whatever they are that these people drive. That's another common vehicle that you see. Muscle is more obvious there are these things or are jacked way up on huge tires and they're very blunt objects and they give they give a very exaggerated image of power. The Camaro was slicker than the sleeker. Built the lingo the dialogue that you so clearly have an ear for. Is that something that resonated back from your childhood or was that just also part of being a journalist and hearing and being on the beat or how did you get that solo acts up except for. The last four and a half years and for when I was in college I lived there. 33 or 34 years later so it does become part of your

background noise you really do get an ear for it after a while so you can play it back and in your head. Yeah it helps it helps too to go back and listen again to to hear people talking to each other you just won by the local donut shop and it clicks back and very quickly to her is how did you make this transition from journalist to fiction writer. Very painfully house. I had a job as a feature writer at The Hartford Current which I quit. And but before I decided to quit I consulted the. Editor of The Record Journal who had always been very kind and supportive about some sort of a part time arrangement and we did work something out so that I was at least making enough money to pay my bills to pay the rent and so on and I certainly wasn't saving anything. And then I basically sat in a room for two years and failed. Oh I sent out stories and got rejected and sent out stories and got rejected and.

I was 33 or 34 at the time I wasn't a kid and. I really. Especially. After this had gone on for a while I really couldn't believe I was doing this so you start to lose confidence and faith and it's always a big risk to begin with. Do you. Mean to keep going. At a certain point there was nothing else to do. It was nothing else to do. But I went through a very depressed time and it was painful. But it's also necessary in a way you. Have to be desperate to really learn how to write as as you have to be desperate to learn how to do a lot of things well. Do you think they are inextricably linked. They do not address directly some people are talented. Some people can just do that sort of thing. Yeah but there there is certainly I think that I was just reading the wisdom of the dream Miss Carlyon book last night about how without the pain

there is no pain no gain but I literally think that it's so many writers that I've spoken to feel you know most most writers go through something like that you know that's no comfort at the time. No. Well you can always look back and feel proud about it if it's worked out well in the end. When you when it's happening you have no assurance that you're ever going to get out of it pretty ghastly. And you think a lot about about how much more you can take and whether you should just give up. Was there anybody in during the rejection slips who was very encouraging to you. What did you hang your hope on other than you know you had to keep doing this. But with that I really learned a lot. I learned that there are different magazines like different flavors of stories somehow. And. I guess it was my it was my good luck that the flavor of story that I ended up writing appealed to the New Yorker which you know. Not only pays the most but also has published most often so that there's a greater market. The Atlantic

publishes very good fiction but only comes out 12 times a year. So we need many fewer stories. I got some encouragement from Harper's. But I never ended up selling them anything. Anyway after perhaps a year of the rejection notices that I got from the New Yorker shifted from being a preprinted cards that were completely impersonal to two. Short letters to longer letters how thrilling. You know at that point anything positive would thrill you. But I mean it's the New Yorker this is a pretty major the first serial rights for a camero city. Our listeners should know were sold at the New Yorker and several of the stories were published in The New Yorker and you know to go from from impersonal rejection notices to stories being but your first fiction being published in The New Yorker is pretty major. Yes it was a lie. Again.

At the time when when I when I was getting encouraging rejections there were still rejections and. I was both thrilled and worried because. I wasn't sure that I could do better than that in the story they just rejected I'd put everything I could into that one and it still wasn't good enough so I would I would be both happy that I had that you know I got an encouraging response but I also worry that. The challenge was even greater than I thought it was that it still wasn't good enough and that I'd have to find some way to to do even better. Did they give you a direction did they make suggestions about how you might. And was there an editor that you were dealing with. Yeah I was dealing with Roger Angel or not but that helped. In fact when I was a graduate school at Columbia he came to speak about his sports writing about his baseball articles but it was mentioned that he was a fiction editor there and it always seemed difficult to me to to send a story off.

Without putting a name on the address but I don't think it really mattered I think that the New Yorker gets hundreds and hundreds of unsolicited stories and they have to pass through a filter of underlings who we dot almost all of them except a few that are passed on to people like Roger Angel and so even though I had addressed it to him I think it may just have been happenstance that he was in want to wind up dealing with the stories that I sent him. So he remained your editor then yes. You know once once you sell one to a particular editor as long as he's there you tend to deal with him. Right. Right. There are three or four at the New Yorker. What was it like to have your your first story finally accepted. It was a major thrill mainly because it redeemed two and a half or three years of my life when they bought that story then it was suddenly all worth it even if I never sold another one at least I had something to show for this thing that I had done which

in a lot of ways was very riskier sponsible if if I had stopped then and had gone back to working at newspapers or done something else I could at least point to having accomplished this one thing after two and a half years. Is there a comfort level with fiction is in other words being a journalist and going for the story and doing it in the eleventh hour and editing it down and getting it out there day after day. Why the difference for you as a person or as a creative person and in doing the fiction. How is that. It's much different. It's much much harder at least I find it much harder. I really enjoyed the deadline aspect of journalism. You could finish your work and then you didn't have to worry about it anymore. You know some of you got your facts straight. There was this wonderful tension and release quality to journalism and it's fun to be in a room full of people who are in the same situation. The other thing about writing fiction is you're off by

yourself. You're not being regularly paid. And there's a momentum involved in being in a room full of other people who are writing. It just makes it easier to do it yourself and it makes it easier to take yourself seriously. And it's in a community of yes like minded when you're doing this there is nothing to encourage you to take yourself seriously. Quite often especially if you haven't sold any stories you really wonder if if you're being a total fool. And I wanted that often. And one of the best things about the part time arrangement I had when I was going through this period was it was a wonderful relief to be able to spend some time every week doing something I knew I could do. I knew I could accomplish and that had a beginning middle and end you know I would also be printed and I would be proud of that and knowing that I would be paid. Yes I would think that was a that was a good balance at the time at the time I had scientist friends down at Yale. I don't know exactly how this started but I spent a lot of time with them and eventually it was one of them was a girlfriend. Their situation was a little the same. They would try 20

different things and one or none of them would work. And there was a lot of failure in that job. The only difference was that they still got paid at least. You know we tried 20 things and they all failed they still got paid. I'd love you to read now from if you would from built right the one of the stories Camero city. My guest is Andrew Sternberg whose first book which had its first serial rights printed in The New Yorker is called Camaro city 10 stories that take place in a city with that quite resembles marriage in Connecticut where Allan grew up. This is from. This is the last few pages of the story called Bill right. And it's the main character is someone whose construction company is defunct he isn't out of business but he's very close to that and he's laid off all his employees and he's lost his office. This is during the recession that struck Connecticut in the early 90s. Ralph bounced up Raelene drive in his truck with stacks of scaffolding rattling in the back.

He could see Ramsey in my lucky in the rearview mirror in Ramsey's pick up. They were all headed for Ralph's house where they were going to store the scaffolding for the time being. The house was three years old now and Ralph still hadn't finished it. Like other small time builders he was busy with his customers when business was good. And he couldn't afford home improvement projects when contracts were scarce. RAELENE drive which was unpaved had once served as a rear entrance to the more trap rock quarry but the quarries excavations had cut off the far end in the early 70s. What was left one through some woods by a low ridge that overlooked a golf course and ended after a fifth of a mile at a clearing that once it held a small trailer park housing in the 60s for seasonal quarry workers. Ralph owns two scrubby acres here. He hadn't gotten his grass in flanked on the low side by an old rail line where small trees grew between the tracks. A wooden bridge had been removed but there was a footpath up the far side of the road cut in the road beyond was

lined with old trucks and boilers and gravel crushing equipment. The week after he closed the company Ralph had spent a lot of time out there trying to calm down. He and Hagan had poured the concrete for the garage floor when they put in the foundation of the house. The unfinished garage had become an informal patio and during the happy summers of the construction boom the crew would come over for dinner once or twice a week and Relford barbecue chicken for them in a sawed off barrel. Now he in my look IAN RAMSAY began to pile built right scaffolding on the concrete. It was a gritty winter day and slogged over the half frozen ground carrying pieces of his dismantled business. He felt depression dropping around him like a curtain. This was hard work and usually associated scaffolding whether going up or down with the cheerful activities of construction and money making piling it here when the reason was his own insolvency. He found it hard to believe that a cardiologist would hire him to build a $300000 house. I should add here that this is happened earlier in the story that even though he has closed this company down there

ISN'T IT has recently come up an opportunity that may or may not come off to build a house for a cardiologist. They had to walk the last 10 yards because the driveway was gravelled only to the point where the front walk hooked in the final stretch was uphill and Ralph didn't want to risk the truck in the mud in the ice past the corner of the house the construction forklift wrapped in green tarps poked dinosaur like into the air. The nail guns and air compressors have been put away in the cellar after 20 minutes or Alford board shifting and Ramsay yelling as he slept. As Ramsey went down one of the planks hit him in the face. His nose was bleeding and he seemed dizzy as they helped him inside. Paula who would come home for lunch went to the refrigerator for an ice pack on my luck he went back outside after a few minutes leaving Ramsey in the kitchen. His clothes were covered with mud and so was the kitchen floor. Ralph himself slipped 10 or 15 minutes later in the shadowy spots the ground was frozen

beneath a slick surface of mud. They were finished with the planks and it started with the pipes he was carrying three of them and he threw them was right as he fell and ended up on his forearms and knees. Muddy water splashed onto his face and chest and the cold shocked him just below the water the ground was hard as concrete. When Ralph in my lucky we're done they slog up the steps to the kitchen door as Ralph opened it he heard Ramsay extremely upset telling Paula it's simple there's a recession people need jobs they should make some goddamn jobs. Your Boots Paul shrieked because Ralph had continued directly into the kitchen. She had just cleaned up around Z's mess. It's not like that stuff will look Roy's leg Ramsey said. His nose has stopped bleeding but his voice was hoarse. What's the big deal. There's something wrong with the goddamn doctors why don't they fix it. What's the problem. Maybe if they'd fixed his leg he would've crashed. I should add here that Lacroix is a colleague who had injured his

leg earlier earlier in the year working for this company. What are you talking about Paul said staring at him. Ralph went to the counter by the sink and took the pot from the coffee maker and a mug from the cupboard. I must be stupid he said as he sat down. I don't understand anything that's happened the last six months but everybody else around here always says everything simple. We don't know why the lumber blew up and Lacroix in the first place right. But don't mind me everything simple clean off your face and change your clothes Paula told him. When he ignored her she got up took her coat from the hook and left. Ramsey had removed his jacket Relf who wasn't injured only dirty had taken off his work gloves they were soaked with mud in his coat sleeves were left vague Brown swirls like something done with water color on the yellow formica of the table. A streak of dirt ran across his forehead. He was slumped in his chair. I guess he's going back to work he said. So what's simple. Tell me one thing that's simple around here. My lookee coming in

said Ramsey has to think that way. He's a moron. You're both morons Rolf said angrily. I bet this is why the Japs are taking over the country. You think they think things are simple. You think the Germans think things are simple. You think people ever sessions over there because people are so stupid they lend money to Donald Trump. What Ramsey asked. My look he started to laugh. When they take over the country they can put me in Ramsey in a zoo He said Everyone else can come and look. Why don't you guys get out of here also. He propped his face in his muddy palms. Thanks for the help and get the hell out of here. After they were gone he sat for several minutes then stood up and tried to throw his coffee cup through the kitchen window. The window had a number of small panes in the cup at one of the interior frames cracking the adjacent glass fell back into the kitchen and shattered in the sink. Then Ralph raked his chair over the counter sweeping the other cups onto the floor. After that he slammed the chair onto the table the chair didn't break although one of his legs was bent

pan and he put the chair upright and sat down again. Hagen showed up 20 minutes later Higgins another construction collie. Ralph and clean the place and hadn't changed his clothes. He seemed calm enough after letting him get in the kitchen door he crunched over the broken cups to his place at the table. News travels a concert. I just saw a girl back at McDonald's who's the rich guy that wants a house. You can go back or talking to each other and that fight was months ago. Sure. I just told Ramsey in my lucky to get out of here they were driving me nuts. Hagan was looking around the kitchen. Things are so bad I can't even get mad anymore Ralph explained. I started doing this and I kept thinking I should stop. Are you cleaning this up before Paula gets home. I'm trying to think of something to do or I'll respect myself. I haven't thought of it yet. Clean it up you jerk. Don't get her mad. This team is wrecked or else. Look those guys are a couple of babies. How to get into this

mess I got half my stuff sitting outside in the middle of winter. Have you called this rich guy back yet. He just called this morning. Don't give me any team stuff right now Hagan said. Don't get mushy. This is business. Ralph went to the refrigerator and got Hagen a beer. Then indicated a rocking chair that was just inside the living room doorway and strangely enough the chair had been the cause of Higgins fight with Dave Grohl back back in August. Paul had heard it from L.L. Bean practically the only thing she and Relf had ever gotten from a catalog. Oh Hakan said no dragging the rocker into the kitchen. He sat and smiled. The chair had been on the patio the night of the layoffs and grow back and recognized it as an LLB presidential rocker goback also had remembered that the catalogue said the rocker was the kind JFK had used to relieve his lower back pain grow back and asked if there was also an LLB in presidential

adultery mattress on which Kennedy had gotten the back pain to begin with. There was a big mess after that. Hagan all over grow back. Who was half a size three or four other struggling to pull Hagan off people yelling beer bottles falling from the picnic table and exploding on the concrete Lacroix banged his leg again. I almost wish girl back didn't tell me about this house. Hagen said now to Ralph. He's got me thinking about it. I'm thinking about last week I did five or six flooded basements with Rollo Rollo Israel's father. You know what that's like Ralph said. I kept telling myself never again. And that's dangerous. I could be out there next week. We don't know what's going to happen with anything now. For years Rollo had wanted help during cold snaps and for years Relford managed to be too busy. We were driving home he told Haig and I said to Rollo this is terrible my company's gone and I've been in what cellars my

whole life and you do it one day and you turn into a goddamn baby. Shut up. That was the worst one he said. Ralph had been grouchy about thawing the pipes although he was grateful for the money. It's purple out he'd said to Rollo was discussed as they were carting their equipment up the back steps and out to Rollo's van. Their feet were frozen the tips of the trees were bare and there were steely patches of ice here and there in the grass. I sort of understand why you had grow back he said to Hagen. I was surprised at first but I've been thinking about it Hagan said. Somebody messes the JFK I'm going to bust his nose. I don't care if the guy was thirty years ago. It's like having your childhood insulted or else a mention of JFK made him think of small ranch houses. Ford Fairlane is baking in driveways and circular backyard swimming pools with mother sitting around in large lawn chairs smoking cigarettes and talking about Jackie in the house he'd

grown up up in on Kitty lane. His father an ex Navy man had kept a model of the USS Missouri in the bedroom when my mother thought things were ok there for a while or else they had a Catholic president in the White House and the Singing Nun on the radio. I think Rollo even went to church a few times. Ralph and Hagan were the same age and both had grown up in subdivisions filled with the kind of houses they later built. They can sometimes set construction was like being a kid. You spend all day playing in the dirt swearing and making noise with your friends. The Singing Nun committed suicide he said Now that's what I heard. What did your parents think when they found out Kennedy messed around real fast. That he did it right in the White House. I don't know. I never asked them about it. When Hakan got up to go a few minutes later Ralph went along as far as the walk. The weather had closed in and snow was starting to fall. I called this doctor about the house in a couple of days or else and I don't want to push too hard too fast.

Whatever he hoisted himself into his pickup truck with the construction workers move all in with both hands from above and swinging his feet into the cab. He stuck his head out the window as he backed down the drive. Ralph watched the pickup go up the road. It dimmed and then disappeared in the descending gray flakes. He found himself wondering what was so bad about calling themselves a team. As soon as the company had fallen apart everybody started getting into trouble. At least one built right was on a job things never got completely out of hand. But Hagen thought all this was mushy and so would Rollo if Rolf was ever foolish enough to bring it up. It bothered Rolf that he was lost tof than his father. Rollo didn't even think that what Ralph was going through right now was a very hard time giving it up and went inside to clean up the kitchen. So Alan Sternberg reading from Camero city his

book his first book that has just been published by Harcourt Brace 10 stories and that story was called built right. You care about these people and you make me care about these people. Do you feel hopeful. At all there. There's something about the frustrations. That occur in these people's lives and hardships that certainly echo the recession that began while you were writing this and it's still happening and in the northeast. As we go into the next century how do you feel about all this what's going to happen for people like this. I think something very interesting is happening I think it's more than just the recession it's a larger event than that. It's the factory economy existed in places like this for a long time for several generations and a culture grew

up around it. And now the economy has died but the culture is still continuing. And what's interesting is how how do people cope with that. There are kids being raised in places like American and Britain right now who. Somehow it's hard to say how the single signals come down from parents to children are still being raised to work in factories. And I think that's especially true for the men it's easier for the women to make a transition into something else I think because the the difference in the roles of the masculine and the feminine roles that you see. One thing I noticed among the people I knew when I was growing up the kids I went to high school with and so on. They were from this background the women were much more likely to go on to college than the men they would usually go on to Southern Connecticut or Central Connecticut State Colleges state universities and their boyfriends and brothers. Wouldn't that you were a

sissy if you did something like that. And. The women who did this would not want to marry the men they met it. Up in Connecticut or central Connecticut they would want to marry men like their fathers and brothers and former boyfriends so they would come back home. In fact they probably never left or they just commuted to college and they would marry people from the men from this background. And then you have an interesting situation where the quite often the wife has a job where she doesn't get laid off and has a higher salary in the case of the husband in this is tough on the guy's ego. And so there's an underlying tension there and the romance is apt to wear off the. The wife is have to have a little less patience for that. It's culture that has grown up and for the the way it's exemplified by the by the man she's married. There's a certain camaraderie between the men and

then among the men is as the groups that you see in the in the working class that I often think you don't see so much in the white collar world except on the squash court. What comes out here are some strong feelings. Between the men in this book that often aren't expressed in words but you sense. It's confined to people. In blue collar jobs. I think maybe among a group of prosecutors at the end of the day you might see that sort of thing too. So if there are job specific is what you're talking not necessarily job specific No I think men are apt to be like that. But you're right about occupations some some are more prone to it than others. But it's certainly true it's certainly true in. These kinds of jobs. And I sometimes think it has something to do with the nature of the work if it's.

If it's dull and repetitive or physical. You have to look somewhere else to get your sense of importance and your. Pleasure. Work is a huge part of your life and one thing I've always noticed for example is. Various places I've worked that have security guards. This is a job that doesn't involve much but standing around in a way they compensate psychologically by by elaborate ways of greeting each other when they happen to run into each other they don't just pass each other in the corridor and not say anything is as I've seen happen in newsrooms hundreds of times. Yeah because you're busy and you have things to do and you're thinking about something that's interesting a story or writing it. These guys every time they pass each other they they shake each other on hands they shake hands of a slag each other on the back yeah it's physical but there's a greeting there's no obvious greeting. And I think it's a kind of compensation for it it's a way of getting a reward that they're not getting from what their minds and bodies are doing. Interesting.

There's also it's a little bit. I think a lot of these men especially if they're old enough to draw an analogy with combat it's an insurance it's something an insurance thing you get through the day you start early in the morning it's physically tiring. It's Dall. It's a battle. And when the day is over you do feel like you've been through something together. Going back to what you said before the so the legacy that these people are handing down to their sons and daughters is a world that no longer as I grew up in Pittsburgh which used to be a core of steel town and is now a medicine town. What happened what's going to how are these kids going to make the transitions. I'm doing some don't but a lot are. These are stubborn people. And I'm not sure I mean something has to change and they probably should change but I do wonder about this. When you think about the country as a whole. There's a lot of talk about how it's a mature economy and we're shifting from

manufacturing to services. That's just life. That is the way things go but I really wonder if it's in the country's best interest to. Isolate a large proportion of its population for meaningful work. These people can find jobs. But working at McDonald's doesn't cut it it doesn't provide the same income it doesn't give them the same self-esteem and so on. And if you think of the country as a vast pool of people you're always always going to have a percentage a significant percentage of the population. Who are not interested in going to college who are not interested in and earning a living from thanking or from the elaborate thinking that a white collar occupation requires. And it isn't really in the country's best interest not to protect. This proportion of the population. As it is theirs. It is more human psychological and economic although it's economic to its of these people don't they're losing the.

The foundations of their self-respect. It strikes me that they were refugees not only coming in from other countries but within our own country. That there are large groups of people who need to flee. Something that is no longer is not is not what it has been and they have nowhere to go. Well they do have somewhere to go but they're stubborn. These are not people who change easily now and they liked. They like their culture and they liked the. Props of their old lives. They don't want to surrender. Well it's an ecosystem it's really a very developed cultural thing that you're talking about and that you chronicle there is in comparison this is this is the American character that I think that Americans are anti-intellectual in a way. And this is especially strong in certain parts of the population and especially among these people.

The immigrants who came at the at the turn of the century and slightly before. I think that. There's a misconception about that there's the idea that Americans are are mobile and adventurous but in fact the these Polish Americans and Italian Americans and French Americans and others. That was an incredible wrenching up evil and they made it once and they arrived somewhere in the U.S. and they stayed ever since. They don't pick up and pack off and go somewhere else. They don't want to leave the cities where they grew up. Even though you have economic opportunities maybe better elsewhere they don't want to leave. And having having come from. Europe and spent several generations in one place and and found a niche. They don't want to change again if the people that you are the characters that you have been Camero city were to pick up this book and read it. How do you think they'd feel about that. The real characters of Meriden and the

people the kind of people you're talking about. Do you think they'd hear it. Do you think they'd feel heard. Do you think. I'd like to know I really don't know. In a way they're not they're not likely to read the sort of thing right. So I would be curious to see the one thing that I think is interesting is that there these are people who are willing to work hard they're spirited. And. What I find interesting are the reactions to the situation. Sometimes it's very good to be stubborn sometimes it's very good to be persistent and sometimes it's self-defeating. And. These are people who don't think a real lot about causes and consequences and and they aren't especially articulate. And so you have a range of reactions and some of them are are self-defeating there's a lot of self-defeating behavior in the book and you see.

Psychological symbols that indicate that they're upset and are trying to bolster their identities rather than change their identities the stress on fast large engine cars and the blue collar image of Camaro of Camaro is what you get. From the advertisements. It's a way of saying this is the kind of person I am. This is this is the kind of person I am and the world had better adjust to me rather than the other way around. And you certainly see it with with this trend it started out a little bit before five years ago you really saw it a lot these huge. Buyers on pickup trucks and on Blazers you practically needed a ladder to get into these things. And it's not as if the you know we're living in in an area of swamps and and off the road to write. These things were used to drive to McDonald's or who it was to Pastor. Yeah they're they're a way of saying I'm masculine and I'm physical. And I'm blonde at least the trucks especially the commercials are aerodynamic in a way

although there's also a kind of a bluntness a prehistoric quality to them. The trucks and the blazers are really. Trucks and blazers are really blunt objects and they force their way through the air and that's part of the part of the appeal of them to these people. There is one scene and the first story in the book and blazer were where one of these is parked next to a Toyota Camry. And I remember noticing that it there was such an aggressive predatory look to this to this blazer. And such a sophisticated yuppie look to the armory that I realized there was or there was some aggression here. There's a sense of resentment that isn't even spoken there. Well I think in the physical I mean the physical elements of these these blue collar people do feel as if they're losing ground to. These sissified people who are going to college and make a lot of money and don't get laid off. Doing things that that don't often seem like real work

to someone who comes from a factory background. And as I say in the book and I have this impression you almost think that the Blazer is going to crawl over the Camry just crawl over it and eat it or chew on it. My guess has been Alan Sternberg and we've been talking about his new book Camaro city which is published by Harcourt Brace. Ten short stories that evoke a lot of feelings in the reader. And and I think for anybody who's living in the Connecticut area there are many things that resonate in that you will learn about your fellow travelers. Alan thank you so much for being with us. Welcome. We had production assistance from Eugene Emma Truda Paul Brown composed and performed our same music. Our series producer is Phyllis Jaffe. And I'm Nancy Cobb. Join me again next week at this time for Connecticut voices. Connecticut voices is a production of the Connecticut

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