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Channeling Morgan
Every writer needs a voice. For Derick Sweetwater, it's usually someone else's. Hoping to shed his mantle as ghostwriter to the stars, Derick escapes to Provincetown to work on a novel--only to land his biggest client yet. Clive Morgan, a studly movie star with a secret, hires him to write his autobiography and promises to "tell all." But a creepy New Age cult has its own designs on Clive, and Derick's new boyfriend has a secret of his own that tests his commitment to honesty. In Lewis DeSimone's witty, fast-paced satire, the literary world collides with Hollywood mores, Manhattan drag queens, and the occasional ghost--all as Derick tries to sort out his own life while Channeling Morgan .
324 pages, Paperback
First published October 2, 2017
236 people want to read
About the author
Lewis DeSimone
15 books15 followersLewis DeSimone is the author of the novels Exit Wounds, Channeling Morgan, Chemistry, and The Heart's History. His work has also appeared in Christopher Street, James White Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, and the anthologies Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling, Best Gay Love Stories: Summer Flings, I Like It Like That: True Tales of Gay Male Desire, Second Person Queer: Who You Are (So Far), The Mammoth Book of Threesomes and Moresomes, and My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them. His contribution to the latter was highlighted on Salon.com and reprinted in Ganymede and Best Gay Stories 2010. He lives in Minneapolis, where he is currently at work on his next novel.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 15, 2019
This is a great book. I couldn't put it down. Dereick is my favorite character. Provocative, surprising and intriguing. A certain revered gay author makes an appearance. Keeps you entertained. I was so sad when I finished reading this great book. A must read.
October 21, 2017
Lewis DeSimone's third novel starts off as a lighthearted take on beach reading, with a few spot-on pokes at literary pretension of participants in a writer's workshop. But it soon evolves into a more mature take on identity, artistic integrity and the search for finding one's own truth.
Derick makes a living as a ghostwriter for celebrities, but longs to complete his own novel. At a Provincetown writers retreat, he's one of several would-be novelists hoping to find favor with a famous author. A chance meeting with a closeted film actor leads to a new ghostwriting gig. But various subterfuges and complications force him to confront his own inability to break the block of telling his own story.
A budding romance with Jared is hampered when Derick sees his new beau performing in drag. He's forced to confront his own biases, even though his cocktail-sipping pals, and his sister, support him amid lots of clever barbs.
A married older gay couple provides some inspiration, even as more complications ensue after Derick's return to Manhattan. With several nods to author E.M. Forster's 'A Room With a View,' and a dreamlike bit of late muse inspiration, the clever story weaves inter-related family and personal problems, all told with a deft wit as Derick faces his own blocks, both personal and literary.
Derick makes a living as a ghostwriter for celebrities, but longs to complete his own novel. At a Provincetown writers retreat, he's one of several would-be novelists hoping to find favor with a famous author. A chance meeting with a closeted film actor leads to a new ghostwriting gig. But various subterfuges and complications force him to confront his own inability to break the block of telling his own story.
A budding romance with Jared is hampered when Derick sees his new beau performing in drag. He's forced to confront his own biases, even though his cocktail-sipping pals, and his sister, support him amid lots of clever barbs.
A married older gay couple provides some inspiration, even as more complications ensue after Derick's return to Manhattan. With several nods to author E.M. Forster's 'A Room With a View,' and a dreamlike bit of late muse inspiration, the clever story weaves inter-related family and personal problems, all told with a deft wit as Derick faces his own blocks, both personal and literary.
April 23, 2022
E. M. FORSTER AND DRAG QUEENS
I read Lewis DeSimone’s Channeling Morgan for the first time in late October 2017, soon after it was published. I was in the hospital in cardiac care after undergoing triple bypass surgery. When I was well enough to sit up in a chair by my bed, I grabbed the novel from my bag and read it from beginning to end with hardly any interruptions. I’ve read it again at least two times since then.
Lewis DeSimone is one of my favorite gay authors. His novels have not obtained the attention and awards that they so deserve. The Heart’s History, DeSimone’s second novel, published in 2012, is one of my favorite gay novels of all time. DeSimone is a meticulous writer. He always chooses the perfect word(s) to say what he wants to say.
The blurb on the back cover of Channeling Morgan calls the novel “a witty, fast-paced satire.” Derick Sweetwater, who works mostly as a ghostwriter, attends a writing workshop in Provincetown to try to find his own voice. DeSimone skewers the phenomenon of writing workshops. their leaders, who are often pompous, self-absorbed darlings of the literary establishment, and the wannabe writers who attend them. Derick soon finds himself falling in love with Jared. When he discovers that Jared earns his living performing as a drag queen, Derick experiences further confusion and conflict that he hadn’t anticipated in addition to the problems he is dealing with in the writing workshop.
DeSimone’s wit knows no bounds, such as these lines from Channeling Morgan: “an epidemic of chintz” and “time wounds all heels.” My absolute favorite is this interchange between two of the characters: “They say [love] always happens when you’re not looking.” “So do car accidents.”
In a couple of essays by Desimone that I discovered soon after reading Channeling Morgan for the first time, he explains a great deal about what he does in Channeling Morgan. In “Channeling Forster,” DeSimone mentions A Room with a View and then asks the question, “What if [Channeling Morgan] were a love story not about George and Lucy, but about George and Freddy?” In Channeling Morgan, we have the romance between Derick and Jared. Gay society in Provincetown in the early twenty-first century is hardly comparable to English society in Florence, Italy at the beginning of the twentieth-century, or is it? Neither society has any more depth to it than the other. DeSimone also mentions that Channeling Morgan “is full of inside jokes that will be clear to people who know Forster’s work, particularly A Room with a View.” Here’s a link to “Channeling Forster”: https://lewisdesimoneblog.wordpress.c....
In the essay titled “Serving You Literary Realness,” DeSimone celebrates the liberation that drag can cause. He says that he wrote Channeling Morgan “to examine how even gay men who seem perfectly comfortable with their sexual orientation can be susceptible to the misogyny that permeates American culture.” DeSimone goes on to write: “The drag queen [Jared] at the heart of the book challenges his lover [Derick] to question his own assumptions about gender and what it means to be a man.” Here’s a link to “Serving You Literary Realness”: https://lewisdesimoneblog.wordpress.c....
Channeling Morgan teems with parallels to A Room with a View. Characters’ names, chapter titles, dialogue, and even the two-part structure of the novel evoke Forster’s masterpiece. The first chapter is cleverly titled “A View of the Room.” The first sentence of this first chapter is “It all began with the room.” DeSimone immediately throws you into Forster country. All through the novel, he captures Forster’s tone and sensibility, but everything about the novel belongs to DeSimone. It is not an imitation of Forster. Channeling Morgan is DeSimone’s own creation. It even includes a surprise guest appearance in the second half.
When I read Channeling Morgan for the second time, I eagerly anticipated, because I couldn’t remember, If and when DeSimone or one of his characters would use the word “muddle.” That’s what I remember from Forster, his frequent use of the word “muddle” in his works, particularly in A Passage to India, and also in A Room with a View. Would DeSimone disappoint me?
You can just read Channeling Morgan and stop there. But if you go on and read the two essays that I mentioned above, then give A Room with a View a go, and then read Channeling Morgan again, you’ll discover how brilliant, wonderful, clever, and just plain entertaining Channeling Morgan is. And, again, I ask, why hasn’t Lewis DeSimone received the recognition and awards that he deserves?
I read Lewis DeSimone’s Channeling Morgan for the first time in late October 2017, soon after it was published. I was in the hospital in cardiac care after undergoing triple bypass surgery. When I was well enough to sit up in a chair by my bed, I grabbed the novel from my bag and read it from beginning to end with hardly any interruptions. I’ve read it again at least two times since then.
Lewis DeSimone is one of my favorite gay authors. His novels have not obtained the attention and awards that they so deserve. The Heart’s History, DeSimone’s second novel, published in 2012, is one of my favorite gay novels of all time. DeSimone is a meticulous writer. He always chooses the perfect word(s) to say what he wants to say.
The blurb on the back cover of Channeling Morgan calls the novel “a witty, fast-paced satire.” Derick Sweetwater, who works mostly as a ghostwriter, attends a writing workshop in Provincetown to try to find his own voice. DeSimone skewers the phenomenon of writing workshops. their leaders, who are often pompous, self-absorbed darlings of the literary establishment, and the wannabe writers who attend them. Derick soon finds himself falling in love with Jared. When he discovers that Jared earns his living performing as a drag queen, Derick experiences further confusion and conflict that he hadn’t anticipated in addition to the problems he is dealing with in the writing workshop.
DeSimone’s wit knows no bounds, such as these lines from Channeling Morgan: “an epidemic of chintz” and “time wounds all heels.” My absolute favorite is this interchange between two of the characters: “They say [love] always happens when you’re not looking.” “So do car accidents.”
In a couple of essays by Desimone that I discovered soon after reading Channeling Morgan for the first time, he explains a great deal about what he does in Channeling Morgan. In “Channeling Forster,” DeSimone mentions A Room with a View and then asks the question, “What if [Channeling Morgan] were a love story not about George and Lucy, but about George and Freddy?” In Channeling Morgan, we have the romance between Derick and Jared. Gay society in Provincetown in the early twenty-first century is hardly comparable to English society in Florence, Italy at the beginning of the twentieth-century, or is it? Neither society has any more depth to it than the other. DeSimone also mentions that Channeling Morgan “is full of inside jokes that will be clear to people who know Forster’s work, particularly A Room with a View.” Here’s a link to “Channeling Forster”: https://lewisdesimoneblog.wordpress.c....
In the essay titled “Serving You Literary Realness,” DeSimone celebrates the liberation that drag can cause. He says that he wrote Channeling Morgan “to examine how even gay men who seem perfectly comfortable with their sexual orientation can be susceptible to the misogyny that permeates American culture.” DeSimone goes on to write: “The drag queen [Jared] at the heart of the book challenges his lover [Derick] to question his own assumptions about gender and what it means to be a man.” Here’s a link to “Serving You Literary Realness”: https://lewisdesimoneblog.wordpress.c....
Channeling Morgan teems with parallels to A Room with a View. Characters’ names, chapter titles, dialogue, and even the two-part structure of the novel evoke Forster’s masterpiece. The first chapter is cleverly titled “A View of the Room.” The first sentence of this first chapter is “It all began with the room.” DeSimone immediately throws you into Forster country. All through the novel, he captures Forster’s tone and sensibility, but everything about the novel belongs to DeSimone. It is not an imitation of Forster. Channeling Morgan is DeSimone’s own creation. It even includes a surprise guest appearance in the second half.
When I read Channeling Morgan for the second time, I eagerly anticipated, because I couldn’t remember, If and when DeSimone or one of his characters would use the word “muddle.” That’s what I remember from Forster, his frequent use of the word “muddle” in his works, particularly in A Passage to India, and also in A Room with a View. Would DeSimone disappoint me?
You can just read Channeling Morgan and stop there. But if you go on and read the two essays that I mentioned above, then give A Room with a View a go, and then read Channeling Morgan again, you’ll discover how brilliant, wonderful, clever, and just plain entertaining Channeling Morgan is. And, again, I ask, why hasn’t Lewis DeSimone received the recognition and awards that he deserves?
April 19, 2024
Lewis DeSimone's latest novel, "Channeling Morgan," is a wonderfully engaging, romantic, insightful story about friendship, family ties and career fulfillment, told from the point of view of an aspiring author who habitually becomes deeply involved in the lives of others, thereby neglecting his own personal and professional happiness.
Derick Sweetwater is a single New Yorker in his thirties who makes a living as an accomplished ghostwriter, anonymously penning celebrity biographies. Motivated by his unfinished novel (which is inspired by the works of E. M. Forster), Derick enrolls in a weeklong creative writing workshop in Provincetown, joined by his close friend and fellow writer, Chris.
While the feedback Derick receives from the other workshop participants isn't especially encouraging, sparks fly when he meets Jared, a seasonal resident who also calls Manhattan home. Derick also makes the acquaintance of film star and action hero Clive Morgan, who is in disguise to hide both his identity and his rumored homosexuality.
Speaking of disguises, Derick has mixed feelings when he discovers Jared is a drag performer and is even further conflicted (albeit intrigued) when Clive approaches him to write his coming out, tell-all memoir. Derick agrees to meet with the closeted celebrity in secret, much to the chagrin of his meddling assistant, Greta, especially when he investigates Clive's association with a New Age cult. Meanwhile, friends and family take notice that Derick has become uncharacteristically withdrawn, particularly Jared, who - unlike Derick - isn't one to mince words.
With Derick, DeSimone dutifully crafts not only a likable but a relatable character, challenged by familiar issues of loneliness, career missteps, and low self-esteem. Derick has reached a point in his life where he would have expected to know what he wants to achieve, and while the existential crisis is an often explored premise in literature, there is still something unique to be gleaned from Derick's journey of personal discovery.
The colorful cast also includes Derick's quick-witted, brutally honest sister, Lucy; his somewhat jaded, yet unapologetically direct therapist friend, Brad; and Billy and Bob, an adorable newlywed couple from the Midwest whose seemingly sheltered way of life proves invaluable and inspirational to Derick.
Readers will undoubtedly appreciate Derick's rollicking adventures with Chris at familiar locales in Provincetown and Manhattan, rife with catty conversation, overflowing cocktails and drag queens galore. All the while, Derick's story and his social circle remind us that beneath the pomp and circumstance are genuine, authentic individuals worthy of our attention and empathy.
Derick Sweetwater is a single New Yorker in his thirties who makes a living as an accomplished ghostwriter, anonymously penning celebrity biographies. Motivated by his unfinished novel (which is inspired by the works of E. M. Forster), Derick enrolls in a weeklong creative writing workshop in Provincetown, joined by his close friend and fellow writer, Chris.
While the feedback Derick receives from the other workshop participants isn't especially encouraging, sparks fly when he meets Jared, a seasonal resident who also calls Manhattan home. Derick also makes the acquaintance of film star and action hero Clive Morgan, who is in disguise to hide both his identity and his rumored homosexuality.
Speaking of disguises, Derick has mixed feelings when he discovers Jared is a drag performer and is even further conflicted (albeit intrigued) when Clive approaches him to write his coming out, tell-all memoir. Derick agrees to meet with the closeted celebrity in secret, much to the chagrin of his meddling assistant, Greta, especially when he investigates Clive's association with a New Age cult. Meanwhile, friends and family take notice that Derick has become uncharacteristically withdrawn, particularly Jared, who - unlike Derick - isn't one to mince words.
With Derick, DeSimone dutifully crafts not only a likable but a relatable character, challenged by familiar issues of loneliness, career missteps, and low self-esteem. Derick has reached a point in his life where he would have expected to know what he wants to achieve, and while the existential crisis is an often explored premise in literature, there is still something unique to be gleaned from Derick's journey of personal discovery.
The colorful cast also includes Derick's quick-witted, brutally honest sister, Lucy; his somewhat jaded, yet unapologetically direct therapist friend, Brad; and Billy and Bob, an adorable newlywed couple from the Midwest whose seemingly sheltered way of life proves invaluable and inspirational to Derick.
Readers will undoubtedly appreciate Derick's rollicking adventures with Chris at familiar locales in Provincetown and Manhattan, rife with catty conversation, overflowing cocktails and drag queens galore. All the while, Derick's story and his social circle remind us that beneath the pomp and circumstance are genuine, authentic individuals worthy of our attention and empathy.
March 22, 2023
A friend loaned me his copy of this book, and as I was starved for entertainment on 10 day ocean cruise, I began to read this account of a NYC gay struggling writer and his circle of friends, family, etc. I found it dull with a thin plot. More and more gay writers use their pulpit to preach values that are mainstream in NYC or LA, etc., but not necessarily in OKC. This book pushes the "drag" agenda and how we can all find ourselves by putting on a dress. Sorry, I don't find it necessary to perform as a faux woman and this became a huge turn off for me.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews