5 Things You Should Know About Eternal Graffiti
By Peter Marlton
- I’m proud to say that Eternal Graffiti is nominated for a PEN/Hemingway Award for a Debut Novel.
- It took seven years to write, off and on, and I ended up writing it all over the place. Parts were written in Seattle, Venice Beach, the Wellspring House Writers Retreat in Ashfield, MA, the Martha’s Vineyard Writers Retreat in Martha’s Vineyard, La Muse Writers Retreat, in Labastide-Esparbairenque, France, the village of Drumcliff, County Sligo, Ireland, and Paris.
- I wrote it without an outline because I never use one. I wrote a lot that I couldn’t use. I ended up cutting 16,000 words, which is about 65 pages. I wish I could have kept a scene in which Owen works a horrible Day Labor job in the basement of a fancy restaurant in Westwood, using a sledgehammer to break up a concrete floor with several Eastern Europeans. There is an immigration raid which leads to all sorts of complications.
- In order to write with some credibility about Kiera I had to go to Ireland to find her village and her house. I couldn’t afford it, but it had to be done. I thought she was from Kilkenny but when I got there I knew that was wrong. It just didn’t feel right. My daughter and I drove around the island looking. It took about three or four days and then we drove into Drumcliff and then up to Mullaghmore and that was it exactly. It was an amazing experience. About a year before that Kiera had just appeared on the page one day and took over.
- The scene with Owen and his father playing “This Land Is Your Land” is based on a weekend I had with my father when I was twelve. I was happy the story unfolded in such a way that the scene found its way into the book.
Peter Marlton is a pseudonym for Pete MacDonald, both as a fiction writer and as a musician and songwriter. He was born in San Francisco and has lived in Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, and in three European countries. He’s published short stories, a novella, and essays in various literary magazines and The New York Times.
His latest book is the adult literary fiction, Eternal Graffiti.
You can visit his website at www.petermarlton.com or connect with him on Twitter.
Title: Eternal Graffiti
Author: Peter Marlton
Publisher: The Story Plant
Pages: 352
Genre: Literary Fiction
Blurb:
“I don’t know if this is a confession or a purge, a scream or a lullaby,” begins twenty-seven-year-old Owen Kilroy’s journal, in which he writes about the remarkable women—friends and lovers—who’ve come and gone and who have shaped his life, as well as the many varieties of heartbreak he’s experienced.
Owen revisits himself as a seventeen-year-old guitar player, songwriter, and drug dealer in a small, fictional California desert town. He relives being arrested, violently, by half the town’s police force and sent to juvenile prison. He faces the pain of being disowned by his mother and having his father disappear. And he re-experiences inadvertently killing his girlfriend by providing her with drugs.
After escaping from juvenile prison, ending up broke, desperate, and homeless in Venice Beach, he eventually meets Kiera, a nineteen-year-old Irish student at UCLA. She is the great love of his life, a love that he knows would cripple him if he were to lose her. Now, ten years later, Owen discovers that writing about her and all that came before isn’t enough. If he is to move on, he realizes he must go back to California and face his ghosts directly.
“Marlton’s prose mixes lyricism with grit, which often results in evocative images. The author has an eye for nuance and detail, and he manages to evoke the era and the youth culture of the time.” ― Kirkus Reviews
Book Information
Release Date: September 6, 2022
Publisher: The Story Plant
Soft Cover: ISBN: 978-1611883329; 352 pages; $16.95; eBook $7.99
Amazon: https://amzn.to/3brycU7
Barnes & Noble: https://bit.ly/3oOBns2
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Book Depository: https://bit.ly/3BIRLlo
Chapters: https://bit.ly/3QfBpVt
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