In the Harbor Art Gallery on Wednesday, February 19, 2003, a rare and encouraging speaker named Mary Sullivan read from her first novel, Stay. As I walked into the gallery I expected to sit in boredom and actually could not wait for this assignment to be completed. To my surprise, Mary Sullivan was an approachable, down-to-earth person. An introduction from The Watermark representative Nate Beyer started off the event.
The gallery was filled with chairs, forming a semi-circle surrounding the podium. Many seats were empty, most likely because of the snow, but possibly because college students are not interested in hearing a reading. Nonetheless, after quick refreshments, those who were present took their seats. Later, I discovered the Student Senate provided the refreshments.
Sullivan, who stands about 5’3″ and appears young, approached the podium and began reading two short poems. She read confidently and calmly. The audience, however, was still getting comfortable and rustling their belongings. Sullivan quickly finished and began reading the first chapter of her novel Stay. If someone had seen my eyes they would have been rolling, I could not believe she was going to read the whole chapter.
Within minutes, Sullivan had captured the audience. She read beautifully, keeping me interested and getting the audience to settle down. If I were not on such a budget I most definitely would have bought the book. It was on sale for only $10.00 and can be purchased at any major bookstore for $13.00. Set in 1974, the book is about a girl named Emily Stone who is coping with the death of her twin brother, Ham. At age eleven, this girl spends her days watching the rebellious acts of her other siblings and searching for signs of Ham. Sullivan has her walk a path of life filled with turmoil and grief. Emily must cope with her brother’s death, an older sister’s rape, her mother’s rambling and her father’s tyrannical denial of his role in Ham’s accident. As Kimberly B. Marlowe of The New York Times said, “This is a disturbing story that Sullivan tells in convincing and precise fashion.”
At the end of the reading, Sullivan spent a half hour describing in great detail how she got published and talking about her own life. She grew up in Medfield, MA as one of eleven children. All of her siblings ask her who they are in her book but she says, “…most characters are part of yourself. It is never black and white.” Graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1990 with the Emily Chamberlain Cook University Prize for poetry, she was recently was awarded a St. Botolph’s Prize in Literature and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. Currently she lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband and daughter.
It took her four years to get Stay published and about the same for her next novel, Ship Sooner, which is due out in April 2004. She emphasized that having a good agent is crucial, someone you trust and can work with. Sullivan sent out over one hundred copies of her manuscript and only got word back from two interested agents. Sullivan advised the audience to never send work to a publisher without an agent, she said they just would not read it. Answering questions from the audience Sullivan explained, “Stay is written in the first person present tense. That makes the book more immediate. I needed the reader to follow the character and what she was learning as [she was] growing.”
Sullivan also spoke of becoming a novelist, saying, “I always worked full time and wrote for two or three hours everyday. It is the discipline of just doing it. You have to arrange your life so you can do it. For me it is my escape, not my job.” As one UMB student named Suzy Saul said, “She was good and interesting. Very vivid and realistic.” Another student who wished to remain anonymous said, “I thought that was wonderful and also funny. Just really very good.”
The man behind the event, Nate Beyer, also thought the event was a success. He said, “I thought it went great; Mary read really well, people were attentive. This week was hard with the snow, but people enjoyed it. We would like to do more of this and start a series. I picked Mary to start it off because I thought she would appeal to the students at UMB. I wanted it to be diverse and not just have old white males.” Well, Nate picked a winner and next time The Watermark has a reader I encourage you to go.