• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Janice Beetle Books

Writing, editing, book development, and publishing help

  • Home
  • About
    • My Books
    • Clients’ Books
    • Privacy Policy
  • Services
    • Creative Writing Review/Coaching
    • Book Development /Writing
      • Book Development Sampler
    • Book Editing
    • Copy Editing
    • Book Design
    • Publishing Guidance
  • Blog
  • Poem Pods
  • Shop
  • Contact
  • Order My Book
You are here: Home / All / Reviewing a Colleague’s Work

Reviewing a Colleague’s Work

April 1, 2014 by Janice Beetle Leave a Comment

Fred Contrada is a longtime reporter for The Republican of Springfield.

I know Fred because in the late 80s and early 90s, we were colleagues, working together at the newspaper in its Northampton bureau, searching for good stories and getting them out.

Fred was also a neighbor in Florence, Mass., where I lived until 2007, and for several years in the 90s, we were in a fiction writing workshop together.

Fred has a great nose for news. He’s a skeptical guy, and so he knows how to ask tough questions and dig deep. He has a no-nonsense approach to news. Fred’s fiction carries the same weight, and like news and real life, it is serious, sometimes harsh and raw.

I knew this from the work I read of his in the writing group. Fred was prolific, and whenever it was his turn to show us a finished piece or chapter, his work was clean, polished; it would always shock you out of your safety net. His protaganists were hikers on long, rugged and solitary journeys and misfits who tended to wander.

In the years since I moved away from Florence, Fred has self-published four major works. As soon as I learned that his good work was in book form – in February – I wanted one.

It was tough to choose from his available titles, but I picked “New Orleans Stories,” about a 20-something guy named Jack who lands in New Orleans hungry, fresh out of luck and with 50 cents to his name. Jack is one of Fred’s trademark wandering misfits, a guy who sleeps on a bare mattress and has a tendency to get so drunk he can’t think.

In the early chapters of this page-turner, Jack settles in to the French Quarter with the help of a preacher man named Haystack, who takes Jack in, but after Haystack proves to me more of a sexual predator than a man of spirit, Jack moves on and finds his own place, a quaint yellow cottage he rents for about 60 bucks a month.

While this book – and the image of the cottage on the cover of the book – really fueled the fire that has become my desire to travel and explore, it also put a damper on my need to visit New Orleans.

Jack is surrounded by other wandering misfits. There are prostitutes, jailbirds who get hired to work on a painting crew alongside him, transvestites who walk the streets, and a young teenaged woman Jack falls in love with. She has a toddler and seems like a young dear who could give Jack a family, but she too can’t be trusted; she turns out to be an abusive mother who coats her baby’s pacifier with whiskey to calm it down, and she has sex with another man in Jack’s bed.

Fred’s characters are multifaceted, victims of life’s oppression who don’t know how to move forward or get out of their own way.

Jack, for instance, is by no means a freak. He is well-read and spends a good deal of his time reading books so heady I haven’t cracked their bindings, and he is a good and ethical man. But at the book’s end, he has gone nowhere. Fast.

There’s another fellow who is good and kind and so insecure he needs Jack to travel with him on a long and rather random trip to find a job that the guy doesn’t hold for very long. And there is Cat, a man who seems to think he is a cat; he refers to his hands as paws and tends to “meow” when asked a question.

I highly recommend New Orleans Stories – and any of Fred’s books. His characters are rich and alive, and they will force you to think and confront worlds very much outside your own.

Fred’s three other available titles are: Dorchester Ave, Trager Stories and The Trail. Dorchester Ave is available on amazon.com. To order the others, email Fred at fcontrada@comcast.net.

Fred continues to write for The Republican, and he has a column that runs every Thursday. You can find his journalistic work on MassLive.com.

 

← Previous Post
Next Post →

Filed Under: All, Local writers

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Subscribe

Please enter your email address to receive blog posts by email.

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A Conversation with Domenic Ciannella
  • Author hopes to help people dance through grief into a new normal
  • A Q & A with Gerry Hass

Archives

  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • April 2023
  • October 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • September 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • November 2012

Footer

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter

© 2023 Janice Beetle Books · Privacy Policy
Content by Janice Beetle Books · Site by Turn Signal Media