Betsy Robinson's Blog - Posts Tagged "upper-west-side"
NYC’s Upper West Side is a character in two new novels
[Read on Medium: https://medium.com/@robinsonbetsy/nyc...}
Novelist Betsy Robinson has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 50 years. She’s been an actor and playwright, doing temp work to pay rent; then gradually she dropped the acting and wrote her first novel while working nights in a law office. It took 16 years to get it published and during that time, she switched from temp to working for magazines. A decade before the pandemic, the magazine she worked for went virtual, so her rent-stabilized apartment also became her office. And when the economy imploded and she lost her job, the switch to freelance editing came fairly seamlessly. So did writing more novels.
All her novels take place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her first, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, about negotiating life with PTSD and free-falling through the 1970s, won Mid-List Press’s First Novel Series award and was published in 2001. By the time it went out of print, DIY publishing was easy, so she revised and published a second edition. Black Lawrence Press published her second novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, as winner of their Big Moose Prize in 2015, and again, a character without a clue lives for half the book on the UWS.
By 2023, Robinson had done every job in publishing, had a wonderful literary agent, but still her new books Cats on a Pole and The Spectators made the rounds fruitlessly. “They weren’t rejected,” says Robinson. “Nobody would read them!”
Feeling as if both books — firmly rooted in our current cultural tumult — would miss their window, she decided to start her own company, Kano Press, despite the bleak realities of publishing and selling books without a platform of a million followers, without a celebrity name, and given that her stories will most likely appeal to a small, albeit ever-increasing, part of the reading public who are more interested in owning uncomfortable truths than in slick humor or denial.
Cats on a Pole, the first book to launch July 2nd (available for preorder now), is the story of a protagonist who goes to healing school in search of others like her who feel energy, and it takes place not only on the UWS but in many different energetic neighborhoods of NYC.
The second book, The Spectators, is firmly rooted on the Upper West Side. After being blown away by Sun House by David James Duncan (The Brothers K, The River Why), Robinson reached out to him for a blurb for it. Says Robinson, “Duncan not only understood what I’m writing but wrote a treatise, allowing me to extract from it an ecstatic cover blurb:”
The Spectators launches September 3, 2024 (available for preorder now), and is part love letter to the UWS, featuring Central Park as almost a character plus a small band of older women with dogs negotiating chaos in New York City in the era just preceding Trump.
It is the story of reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to UWS resident Paul Simon to terrorists. The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
As part of the publicity, Robinson created book trailers about each book’s inspiration:
Cats on a Pole: https://youtu.be/PYsiKDkxuUE?si=EX9bZ...
The Spectators: https://youtu.be/1FanAUJsIq0?si=jbBA0...
For most of Robinson’s 50+ years in the neighborhood, she’s had dogs. Here she is by the Balto statue with her last dog, Maya, who also has a role in The Spectators.
For more information, go to www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
Novelist Betsy Robinson has lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for more than 50 years. She’s been an actor and playwright, doing temp work to pay rent; then gradually she dropped the acting and wrote her first novel while working nights in a law office. It took 16 years to get it published and during that time, she switched from temp to working for magazines. A decade before the pandemic, the magazine she worked for went virtual, so her rent-stabilized apartment also became her office. And when the economy imploded and she lost her job, the switch to freelance editing came fairly seamlessly. So did writing more novels.
All her novels take place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her first, Plan Z by Leslie Kove, about negotiating life with PTSD and free-falling through the 1970s, won Mid-List Press’s First Novel Series award and was published in 2001. By the time it went out of print, DIY publishing was easy, so she revised and published a second edition. Black Lawrence Press published her second novel, The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg, as winner of their Big Moose Prize in 2015, and again, a character without a clue lives for half the book on the UWS.
By 2023, Robinson had done every job in publishing, had a wonderful literary agent, but still her new books Cats on a Pole and The Spectators made the rounds fruitlessly. “They weren’t rejected,” says Robinson. “Nobody would read them!”
Feeling as if both books — firmly rooted in our current cultural tumult — would miss their window, she decided to start her own company, Kano Press, despite the bleak realities of publishing and selling books without a platform of a million followers, without a celebrity name, and given that her stories will most likely appeal to a small, albeit ever-increasing, part of the reading public who are more interested in owning uncomfortable truths than in slick humor or denial.
Cats on a Pole, the first book to launch July 2nd (available for preorder now), is the story of a protagonist who goes to healing school in search of others like her who feel energy, and it takes place not only on the UWS but in many different energetic neighborhoods of NYC.
The second book, The Spectators, is firmly rooted on the Upper West Side. After being blown away by Sun House by David James Duncan (The Brothers K, The River Why), Robinson reached out to him for a blurb for it. Says Robinson, “Duncan not only understood what I’m writing but wrote a treatise, allowing me to extract from it an ecstatic cover blurb:”
“A novel that in the last chapter reaches the only heaven to which I aspire: a life fully awake to this beautiful bleeding Earth”
— David James Duncan
The Spectators launches September 3, 2024 (available for preorder now), and is part love letter to the UWS, featuring Central Park as almost a character plus a small band of older women with dogs negotiating chaos in New York City in the era just preceding Trump.
It is the story of reluctant psychic protagonist Lily Hogue and her loner friends, with guest appearances of real and fictional historical events and people, from Bernie Madoff to UWS resident Paul Simon to terrorists. The Spectators’ cast of characters battles the problems of foreknowing disasters we cannot control and being part of an uncontrollable human herd.
As part of the publicity, Robinson created book trailers about each book’s inspiration:
Cats on a Pole: https://youtu.be/PYsiKDkxuUE?si=EX9bZ...
The Spectators: https://youtu.be/1FanAUJsIq0?si=jbBA0...
For most of Robinson’s 50+ years in the neighborhood, she’s had dogs. Here she is by the Balto statue with her last dog, Maya, who also has a role in The Spectators.
For more information, go to www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
