Could I Be a Guest Lecturer For Kathleen Rooney's Course?

Perusing Literary Hub the other day, I was immediately attracted to a headline reading: "To Love New York City is to Walk New York City."

And, one might add, to write about one's walks.

After all, that's what my novella "Manhattan Morning" is all about.  My protagonist, Dan Morrison, with time on his hands, decides to walk from the Warwick Hotel at the corner of 6th Ave. and 54th St. down to just beyond Grand Central Terminal in order to buy a ticket for a bus that will take him to the airport the next morning. That's a distance of about 13 blocks.

As he walks, Dan is assailed by the sights and sounds of the city, which bring to mind a variety of topics thanks to a  process known as associative thinking. Ducking into St. Patrick's for a respite turns out to be anything but as the interior of a church brings to mind an incident Dan would like to put behind him, but still finds troubling.  Eventually, he has an unexpected encounter with a woman at lunch in Grand Central that gets him thinking about his future and his values.

You can read a free illustrated edition of "Manhattan Morning" by clicking on the name of the book.





Alternatively, you can take a photographic walking tour of Dan's route on my author's website without reading the entire novella.

I mention all of this because the Lit Hub article centers on an interview with Kathleen Rooney, author of the recently published book "Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk"  -- a walk from the Murray Hill section of Manhattan down to almost the lower tip of the city and then back. That's a lot longer than Dan's walk, and a very long walk for Lillian who is in her early 80s.  But she is indefatigable and apparently always has been. My review of the book is here.

AS I read the Lit Hub  article, I discovered that Ms Rooney also teaches a class called "The Writer as Urban Walker" at DePaul University in Chicago. I'd love to have an opportunity to at least audit it, but here I am in Seattle.

Lit Hub's interview with Ms Rooney is an interesting read -- she has a lot to say about her novel and her approach to writing it. If you are interested, click on the link in the first paragraph of this posting and take a look.

I'll quote just one line from the piece:

"To many people, New York is the epitome of what we think of when we think of city life and I hope that Lillian's walk shows that the city is a wonderland."

I hope that Dan's walk does so, too.