My Evolution as a Writer

Vinny Cusenza in his garden.

Hello to all who’ve landed on the launchpad of my writer’s blog! I’m so very glad to have you along for the blastoff. It’s an exciting time for me, with my debut novel Blood and Soil just published in July, and readings, interviews, articles, podcasts, and award submissions coming in the fall.

Right now I sit under the spreading cherry tree that shades me on this hot August day in Brooklyn, the city half-empty and unplugged, and I’m reflecting on my odyssey from would-be novelist to published author.

Heaven knows, I’d had this idle daydream for many years, but something always held me back. Gumption? Imposter syndrome? Fear of flying?

I’ve always taken inordinate care expressing myself in correspondence, travelogues, personal essays, creative non-fiction, memoir, and thought pieces on life and the state of the world.

Always little pieces. I didn’t dare to think big, because to be a novelist would mean to be in the company of the great authors I read in college Lit.

I’d need to master all of Greek mythology and absorb the entire Western Canon, to share shelf space with Joyce or Hemingway. No way that was ever going to happen.

I grew up with the World Book Encyclopedia in twenty volumes and a ten-pound Funk and Wagnalls dictionary at my fingertips, but novels?

Sure, in my bedroom I had a shelf or two filled with books like A Wrinkle in Time and Johnny Tremain and Catcher in the Rye, and I read every mystery by Helen Fuller Orton in the Bayside public library. But my parents didn’t read novels, and our home was no storehouse of literature.

My teachers gave me the bug for stories, and school friends seeded in me early on the idea of actually writing them. In second grade, a precocious boy enlisted my support in writing a “dirty novel,” and within a year, another friend and I embarked on a series of books about the adventures of a boy named Bill and his—wait for it—pen and pencil!

The Adventures of Pen & Pencil by Vincent Cusenza & Stephen Drayzen

With consummate confidence and naivety, we mailed our fully illustrated manuscript of volume one to a publisher, making us, at age nine, perhaps the youngest writers ever to receive a formal rejection letter from a major publishing house.

In more recent years, I found myself still not writing novels, but rather, editing hundreds of them for a living, many about outsiders struggling to author their own lives. Increasingly, in my own creative life, I was dead-tired of that struggle. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was too busy polishing other writers’ stories to write my own.

Eventually, the truth-telling by all of these authors made me understand that if I was ever going to live authentically, I had to unleash my own creative voice and tell my own tale. And I had a lifetime of mental sticky notes saved up for the job.

So, here it is: the fruits of my writer’s journey, Blood and Soil. I hope you will enjoy it, and that it fills you with the magic, healing, and inspiration that I’ve always taken from a good yarn.

Happy reading!

Vinny Cusenza