Amherst Reads Transcript

Victor Levin: Welcome everyone to Amherst Reads. My name is Victor Levin '83 and it’s my distinct pleasure to be here today with Howard Michael Gould '84 on occasion of the publishing of his wonderful first novel, Last Looks. It issued from Dutton and it is available in hard copy and online, and electronically, and by every other means.

Howard Michael Gould: And audiobook, read by our friend John Michael '85

VL: Audiobook, carrier pigeon, there is no way you cannot find this book. Howie first of all congratulations this is a wonderful day.

HG: Thank you, thank you very much and thank you for doing this

VL: It’s my pleasure welcome to Amherst Reads. I thought that before dove into the book we give em’ a tiny little bit about our personal History and much more about yours but Howie and I have known each other since meeting on campus on what would have been 1982. So that’s a long time and then we both went to work for Young & Rubicam we were copywriters­—

HG: We were often next door to each other

VL: Yeah and then somehow we both migrated out here to write television and film. And I remember running into you one morning in the elevator on the rally lot shortly after I had arrived and you were already here and we hadn’t seen each other for a while and it just seemed as inevitable as the wind!­­ Now that was a long time ago but let’s dive into the book. The book is a wonderful detective story written with a superb comic touch. Great style a lot stole. It’s really very literary. How did you…Did you conceive at is serious fiction, commercial fiction or some imaginative fiction.

HG: I did not conceive as fiction [Laughs]. I conceived it as yet another movie. Just like you and I have been doing for many years you know just trying to scratch our way. Actually, I came to think of it as s TV show at first. So I, when the business sort of crashed around 2008/2009, the movie portion of the business crashed the worst.  There were producers who would call me because I had TV profile so movie producers wanting to get into the TV business. They think Oh this is the person who’ll get me a meeting.

VL: It was like that scene in Titanic when people are in the water and the lifeboats are going by.

HG: Yeah, and I’m sure to each of them we look like someone who is holding on to a piece of wood. So a very good Producer called me and says—not the usual call I get like I got an idea for a sitcom (?)—the producer calls me and says, “What would it look like if you and I did a show about a woman detective this a long version here so we went down and we pitched something and we sold something and I wrote it and it was a little bit low concept and didn’t get made but it was—I had never written for hire a detective anything before. It was just a new surprising world to me. And I loved it because you were mostly worried about the story. You weren’t about building for last (?)And I thought I’d like to do another one of these if I had a stronger character to do it with and around that time my daughter Amanda showed me a video called The Story of Stuff. Have you ever seen this?

VL: No

HG: It’s like fifteen to twenty minutes of a simple animation set, twenty years old, done by a woman named Annie Leonard, who now I think runs Green Pea. But it’s basically about how we are depleting the planet’s resources in service of this plan of consumerism that makes us all hungrier for more and more stuff making us work more and more hours for less and less happiness and destroying the earth while doing it. And its life-filled animation and its great and it really got under my skin and it was just the right time in my life when I was like what are we doing what is this all about, we have all this junk and I got rid of a lot of my stuff and I thought what if there was somebody out there who was not just aggressive about getting rid of this stuff as I was but upset with this stuff and what would make him mad and I started thinking about Waldo and Lorena who you’ll meet in the first chapter and I thought that’s a TV show right, that’s you know I’m going psycho-environmentalist detective and his uber materialist girlfriend solving crime.

VL: And did you pitch it?

HG: Liv pitched it a t CBS and they are stoic at CBS. And at the end of the pitch they applauded. I have never had that in my entire career applause at the end of a pitch.

VL: You mean clapping hands?

HG: Yes like three of them making noise and I thought this is great and two days later they called the tag. And they said at CBS we don’t do private eye we do policemen. I really don’t understand the difference at all but they put Waldo away.

VL: What year was this?

HG: 2010 OR 11 and a year and a half later I got a call from a movie producer I worked with who has a new sort of independent financing company and said we would love for you to write something for us if you had a detective with some comedy. And so the simple version is they offered me sort of a creative blank check stapled to a very small actuation

VL: I’ll imply bigger than the table

HG: It felt slightly bigger than that piece of wood. (?)so anyway I pitched him this and I sort of BS myself through some phone calls and then I had to write this script which turned out to be the very artist movie. Script I ever wrote which is one way around to your question really because I wanted it to be a legitimate complex detective story right, I wanted a Chandler-esq vibe and had some of my satirical ideas underneath when people read the book you’ll see what I’m talking about but I was not designing it like a comic. So then I start to write it and I go “gee, you know since The only mandate was that it’d be a comedy this thing needs to be funny” So it was never sort of each scene saying okay what can I do with this trope that would seem—how do I do this differently right­­(?)How do I make that the case? And I sort of ought to my way slowly through the whole script working like that.  And then went back to read it over and it felt like fifteen different movies clipped together and I was very unhappy with it and I just kept taking pass after pass after pass and after a while it sort of found a stone and after more months than it usually takes I pitch in—“this is really good this is one of the best things I have and the producers loved and right away we got an actor and we got a director and the actor fell out and the director fell out then we got another director who wanted to make it worse and then we did then he mercifully fell out and another actor… it just goes on, you know.

VL: So what year are we in?

HG: now were up to about 2015. And you know Life is a movie I’ve been doing a TV series and you know just weekends and hiatuses, lot of free work and it’s not going anywhere. And one of the reason it wasn’t getting made I realized was because the business had change so much. That this was small for studio making but sort of big for an indie. And they just don’t make that many detective movies any more—

VL: A tweener

HG: A tweener. But they do publish a lot of detective books.

VL: Lets pause there for one second and talk little bit more about that because the movie business has really become polarized its either—and for those who aren’t in the swag with us all day its either a massive temple film featuring super hero or it’s a quirky risky indie film very often made for very little money and the gulf in between the two is where your script has fallen and that become rather a wasteland because nobody writes those movies.  And when you and I were thinking about getting into this business, those were precisely the movies that brought us here. And they don’t make them anymore. It’s everything from Like the Godfather, you know you mention Chandler,  I mean there’s no end to the number of movies that are on our favorite list that are completely gone from the landscape now so I feel you.

HG: But I didn’t want this to be just one more big pile of paper that doesn’t go anywhere. And I thought you know I had not written fiction since I was a teenager so I looked at you and some other writers as having much more talent in that direction than I think I would have so I took a creative writing class with a visiting professor and it left me feeling like I should stick to plays while at Amherst. But I thought alright this would be like writing a novel with training wheels because I have everything. I have characters I have themes I have the story and I have all this stuff I’ve worked out but I was afraid it would ruin my TV and movie career if that got published and people didn’t approve(?)

VL: This is your TV and movie career?

HG: Yeah! So I wrote it under a pin name. Did I ever tell you?

VL: I think you said something like that at your LA Book Nights.

HG: I wrote it as Ryan Surfer

VL: That’s the first name that I think about if I was trying to find a name for a novel.

HG: The names were Nolan Ryan and Larry Surfer were the first I thought about (?)

VL: So you finished the first half of manuscript when?

HG: Of the books manuscript?

VL: Yeah

HG: On October 2016

VL: And then you sent it out were there a lot of revisions after there was an agreement to buy?

HG: No very, very few and you know very smart from the publisher. It was not like what were used to.

VL: Well I have so many things to ask about what you just said. But just in terms of starting with the sort of more entry friendly questions, you know you sit down to write your first piece of post fiction since you were a teenager, now you and I and everybody listening to this you know wave all—most of us anyway have all been exposed to literature and taught it by the best people in the world, and so the standard  are very high and I always found that very daunting because you know you’ve been shown what good writing is and it is really good and it may be not be something of which you are  capable of. Now if you’re writing screenplay forum or even for the theatre you know that the standards aren’t as rigorously laid out for you as they were in prose. Right? Would you agree with that?

HG: I’d go a step further and say—I’ll say this about you instead of saying it about me but there’s nobody out there who I look at and say that guy can write a page instantly better than Vic Lev can write a page—

VL: That’s very nice but—

HG: Because that’s not how I feel about prose fiction. I’m saying that that isn’t exhausting at all to me you know.

VL: I think that it’s just much easier to sit down and write a screenplay or a play because you’re not going to be compared to the people you studied but at least in your own mind but certainly by your teachers and by your creative peers you’re going to be compared to the people you studied when you write prose, so now you’re holding yourself up against King Lamus which brings me to that entry question I felt like the name were Pyncho-esque or Pynchonian whatever people call it I feel like a lot of the comedy was King Lamus inspired. I felt like there was some Saul Bellow in the characters plight and in his general orientation towards the world

HG: Good good!

VL: And I am not saying these things are conscious but you know to me there was a straight line in between the level in which you have studied and then level in which you were writing. Were you aware of it? Did you just sit down and this is what came out?       

HG: I just sat down and this is what came out. That really is true. I didn’t think about these guys. I mean the names all came out still alluding. So I certainly wasn’t thinking about them you know internally.

VL: Okay certainly would have been a character in your book?

HG: I guess yeah, all of that just goes into who you are, then I sat down to write the first chapter. I remember what I did. I did a re-outline the whole thing and I wacked it up until thirty chapters and I said ok, the first  chapter is when Lorena comes up, what do we need to know and what can we get internally before she gets there. Then you wanna klnow about the thhings for those of you who haven’t pciekd up thebook yet, of Charlie Waldo my lead is a detective who’s taken himself out of the world and is part of sort of a pathological environment and a minimalist who will only own 100 things. Your shirt is a thing, your fork is a thing, your goal—those are three things—so I thought, that’s an idea you want to get out there in the beginning. And I SAID well you know what can we use to tell that in a fun and interesting way and I started with talks. What happens if this is not in the screenplay? What happens if you get a whole in a sock? You know now y w that gives me something to talk about and what I found is that I’m doing in fiction is basically our got half a thing and you know does it become two things or is it one and I thought, you know what we’ve learned to do in TV which is your just trying to keep people interested. You  know you’re trying to find an entertaining way to tell whatever that thing you trying to tell and you do get a sort of instinct a sort of sentiment about the way you— you know I just went back to Multicam and did a show for Nick at Nite and TV Land. And the way you’re sitting there at the (?)going this page just looks a little long you know, this skits a little sluggish when you take two or four lines out of it and I’m doing the same thing.

VL: So is it fair to say that the 30 odd years that you’ve been doing this as a writer for moving image contributed greatly to your story skills not the other. In terms of breaking the story for this book, delivering it, knowing where to trim, knowing when to cut back, knowing when to flash forward, etc.

HG: Absolutely!

VL: I mean it felt to me like — to not give anything away—but there is a riff in the dialogue of the book which is repeated several times in the beginning and answered at the end and a beautiful rhyme and that sis a tough thing to do the right number of times. If you do it too much you’re hitting the shelf and if you don’t do it enough it won’t resonate with people. And I sense the exact same riddle that you and I wrestle with in the nests of television or film how many times can you go back with this well that it precisely the right number of times to be satisfied and good and not so many that you’re happy. Right?

HG: That’s exactly right!

VL: And there’s not fat in your story. It moves along. It goes forward when you sense that you want it to go forward and it lingers when you sense you want it to linger. 

HG: I mean we learn when they’re giving you 21 minutes a 15 seconds to tell your story, if you’re going to digress it better be really good.

VL: Let’s talk about that a little more I think it’s very interesting not just to writers but to everybody else, what is the difference in your experience between writing in this media and writing in the other media in which you have for so long labored. I mean for one thing you are not dependent on somebody’s performance or somebody’s direction, if it’s not you or somebody’s production or whether or not it rained that day. They’re all those things and it’s on you to be all those things.

HG: Right. You going to have to do that with an adjective instead of counting on casting to get that done. You also are not going to have the interference—at least with my publisher— it’s been a very happy experience where imp just getting really smart eyes giving relatively few but very appreciated sharpening notes. But knowing —there is a thing that seeps out of you when you’re in TV or featured writer—even if you’re a showrunner— that if you have actors, or stars, or studio or network people who are going to be cooperating you with notes —I used to say that when a show is really working it’s kind of like golf. With each shot you’re trying to get closer to the whole you know you only get so many. But when you’re in a talk show it’s like bad hockey. You’ve just dealt the bucket to the other end and now something bad is going to happen. Here, you have to do all of that. There’s a whole bunch of things that are different too when you’re doing an episode, you have to build up to it but the same pre-production is weak and this is going to sound weird because we’re talking about my first book coming out. My second one, I finished my revision this morning, and it’s the sequel to this coming out next summer, my third which I gave to my agent which is not in the series, and now I’m back on Waldo with my fourth book which is now the third Waldo book and I am in the early stage of outlining. And so I am back in that place of doubt you know. There are a whole bunch of things that are different and I’m sorry that I am answering your question all over the place.  Even in movie scripts, we can knock a draft out in a few weeks. You know you spent some time outlining or whatever 

VL: Yup! But I think you go faster than I do.

HG: And I was fast and I was pretty fast, and here I don’t feel fast at all.

VL: How many times do you read a manuscript and how many times do your eyes look over it before you hand it in?

HG: Fours! I treat each chapter like a short story, I do lots and lots of outlining. For my second Waldo book and again this will be true for my third, Ill outline for almost half a year before I am writing page 1, chapter 1.

VL: Wow.

HG: But then I have an outline that is almost 50% of the word count of the final book. Because of all those callbacks and complex plotting (?). I just sort of start typing and go. I can’t imagine how they do it. How they hold that much in their mind. Maybe in some cases the story is simpler. But then once I have that outline I take each chapter. I’ll write it once on the computer, unlike the movie—I don’t know about your MO—but I would try and write it as fast as I can the day that I have to just to have a draft. So I have to write a draft in about a week or two and then sit there with a red pen and go over it over it until I was happy with it. With this  you can’t really do that so I’m really working in each sentence each paragraph taking two or three days to write the first half of a chapter, then I would do another half on the computer making it as good as I can, print it out and get a red pen—

VL: This is all on the same chapter?

HG: This is all on the same chapter. So you know whatever that is—

VL: You got to divide into 30 different files or something?

HG: No, it’s all one file.

VL: In Microsoft word?

HG: In Microsoft word

VL: Did the software behave?

HG: The software is great. And something that I pat all the time is my unique ways of I just don’t stay stuck in my writer’s block because of the outline that’s always up. So I set up an index card program and I use it to write a theme. You know all the pieces of a theme and then I just move it around until I have something and start writing.  You know sometime I write a chunk of it and sometimes I write the whole thing. So why have to rewrite it.

VL: So when you think about your chain of artistic command for a novel, it’s you, it’s the typesetter, whoever chooses the paper, whoever does the cover art  and I mean That’s the whole ball of lap.

HG: But I don’t even know those people. The editor is sort of like a hub for all those things.

VL: Whereas when we make a movie or a show, there are hundreds of people that are contributing to that.

HG: The reason why it’s so different (?)I think is that I have found—not so much on the first book because I already a screenplay and people knew it but starting with the second one where I didn’t want people to know what’s happening like cherry my wife. I wanted her to be able to read the second book as a total mystery not knowing what she’ll reach in chapter 1.

VL: Well that means a year later.

HG: So there’s some points at about nine or ten months in where I started thinking about Lindbergh and there he is too far too turn around and hoping this trance is where it’s supposed to be and you kept your ego from what could end really badly.

VL: That’s wise right there. You’re Lindbergh hoping that you’re heading in the right direction because you’re too far to turn around.

HG: And then people can hate it. You finish a book and then you really worry if you got something terribly wrong.

VL: Was it hard to find that prose voice after 30 years of writing dialogue of film direction.

HG: I was surprised that it was. That was the biggest surprise of all of this considering that I didn’t think I had such input.

VL: Yeah. But of course you do. I mean you’re a wonderful writer it’s just a question about what it is because you haven’t exercised that muscle. Before so it’s got to be a process of discovery you know. You look at the end of your first chapter and go, “oh that’s how I write fiction”

HG: That’s exactly what it was! You know I went over and wrote my first chapter then went over it four or five times and then I went down to my wife to tell her and that’s really what I did.

VL: Were you surprised by your own voice?

HG: Yes! I had no idea because for thirty years I didn’t think I had it.

VL: well what would you have expected your voice to be?

HG: Stage direction

VL: Was there any temptation to write it first person? Did you always feel like third person limited omniscient was the way to go? 

HG:  I’m sure that I thought about that for a while but not for very long.

VL: Because it does tend to bring one closer to one’s own voice and things to keep us honest.

HG: Third person or first person?

VL: First person. It’s very hard to maintain a fake first person that isn’t actually close to what your brain is saying. But with third person, you can run off the rails almost immediately if you’re not careful.

HG: You know my third book jumps around from 8 different points of view. And that let me play with these questions but by that time it had been two years writing the wild book so I knew something was right.

VL: Right it’s like when you’re in episode 50 of a series, you sort of know what you’re doing.

HG: Right!

VL: Well, novel 1 is a great success. Now you mentioned Chandler you know I think at his best he was an incredible insightful philosopher as well an s a great teller of stories. And I would like to know how much of the experience and the goal of writing this book had to do with expressing a point of view about the world as oppose to just pure entertainment?

HG: I knew you’d have good questions! Nobody has asked me that! Well it is interesting. There are a couple of ways to come at that. Somebody wrote to me through my website, “I can’t put your book down but I’m halfway through and I have to ask you, how much of this stuff do you do?” like I like Waldo I guess this is a measure of success and it feels real enough to them to have to ask these questions.

VL: Absolutely.

HG: Waldo is sort of problematic that way because everything that his thinking and his reasons for doing these things are right but you can’t just live like that. Which I probably can’t deal with the comedy wording. But when you live in that claustrophobic place for a couple of years with those books it does bring you face to face with those questions a lot.

VL: And not just those literally but the philosophy behind those questions. For example, I very interested by the fact that at the end of the story, Waldo turns his back to some degree on the environmental obsessions which had occupied his psyche for some 270 pages and I wondered if what you were saying here is that these obsessions fill a void caused by unhappiness and when that void is filled with something healthier they no longer exist.

HG: Yeah. That was definitely what the feel of that moment was as a screenplay and what I wanted to recapture in the book. And then one of my first challenges as I started the sequel was, “what the hell am I going to do now?” right because you have to buy some of that back. And figure out who he is and I just handled that by owning it. Have HIM have to figure out who he is.

VL: It’s like when they brought Spock back for the next movie it was very wise.

HG: The other thing is —the more life side of it — is that by setting this in the world you and I live in, This LA world with these schools with $30,000 parking spaces. You know there’s plenty to write about.

VL: For sure, and I tip my cap to you for making sure that those philosophical elements to the book as well because I think the book is very much about the pursuit of happiness. I think it’s very much about how we torture ourselves in shaping this dream about being at peace, all the things that you know serves as obstacles in that case but also the self-deluding way in which we pursue not really knowing what’s best for us and therefore making a lot of grotesque mistakes. So you know to be able to do that in the context of a page turning murder mystery is pretty good. But to go back to the original question, that’s where you crossover and in my view from pure entertainment pure commercial fiction into serious fiction.

HG: This is what I love about doing these and it’s what makes them very very challenging for me but I hope I do it successfully for readers but I now I am trying to do more things than most people in this category. I think about it like juggling four balls because you do have all that thriller stuff that there are people who do that more purely and better than id o but you want to do it well enough, there’s pure comedy right, the fun of it, there’s this character arc of the stuff you were just talking about which is not a staple of these books. I mean Philip Marlon comes into each book jaded and comes out a little more jaded basically. But that’s kind of the arc. Here we starting with a hermit who wakes up not a hermit. And then you do have the larger and smaller social target and I’m trying to do all of things at one.

VL: Because you feel a responsibility to do them you feel a sense of loss opportunities if you written a book that’s been published and you haven’t at least tried to do that.

HG: Well because they were all there somehow as I was trying to do the same thing that was so difficult with the first screenplay, that later became the first book and the biggest question that came up when it was time to write the second book was, “do I need to do all this crap again because that’s a lot! That’s pretty hard” and the answer ended up being yeah, I kind of do because if people liked the first one that’s what they’re going to like in the second book.

VL: And they have to each be taken as their own experience you know you have to assume that one’s experience reading the second book should not depend on the experience of reading the first book.

HG: But you want it to be satisfying in the same way.

VL: Exactly! This year’s beach vacation should be just as good as the last beach vacation. I mean what I’m hearing is that you feel a greater sense of responsibility as a writer of fiction than as a writer for screen. Which I understand it really is a different kind of spotlight isn’t it. You can always hide in towards the director or the production or the actor as a writer in those other medians but not writing fiction. I mean it’s all you essentially plus an editor, plus those other artists we discuss along the go, but 98 percent you. So it must be a very nervous making thing.

HG: It is when you’re stuck and you know by book four I’m probably going to get unstuck and have faith but I know I’m going to have that bumper in a few months.

VL: Did you have proposed all of this? Were you aware of being a part of an Amherst fiction writer tradition? When we look now at our friends you know the immensely talented Chris Bohjalian late brilliant D.F Wallace I didn’t know him but he was not far from our year.

HG: In Stearns, when I was freshman, room 105, on the fourth floor—I didn’t realize until recently— Harlan Coben lived there next to? So there’s something kind of liberating about this. I mean no matter how well I do with it I can never be even close to anything better than two of third most successful writers who lived in my dorm. And the two of them were stunningly successful in opposite direction that you just go, I’m just going to do my little thing here.”

VL: I mean who else are talking about I mean, Harlan and Dan Brown, and Scott Turrow, I mean people are writing their heads off.

HG: In our area too. I mean Susannah Grant, Bill Amend

VL: I mean, Bill Amend was nationally published 15 seconds after getting out of college.

HG: You were published in college! I was impressed.

VL: Thank you, so now you’re part of this Amherst College tradition you have thrown your hat into that you have placed your own psyche into the public record in a way that is very hard to do in movies or TV. You can do it in movies as a director but as a writer it’s hard to do. But now you’ve down that, you’re in the record you’re in the library how does it feel?

HG: It feels great. I mean I was frustrated. I spent much of the last—well I mean ten years ago I directed a movie and it went badly off the rails. It was about very shady people on the finance side who all ended up suing each other. It derailed my career and we both have been in this business for about thirty five years—you should see our faces right now *laughs*—striving to get that one piece out which is so difficult and then when you get to that moment where you know it’s a very ageist business and I’m not saying that critically but I did hit this point where I said  “jeez I’m not going to get that body of work to share that I wanted to have” and that for me was very, very tough for me. That was the toughest part of the list for 5-10 years.

VL: meaning that there wouldn’t be enough snow period to show your shows or movies.

HG: That if you looked at my IMDB page id look ridiculous.

VL: Because no one understands, unless you’re in it, how beastly hard it is.

HG: And you know to have the hot script that everybody is talking about or the two or three hot scripts that everyone is talking about. And 5-10 years from now that doesn’t mean anything and the idea that that was what I did for 25 years and now I’m going to have some books that changes everything because the way I made my piece around that before was that I should of almost everything. And there’s very few of us who’ve gotten to do everything. And you too, you’ve gotten to do theatre and movies, and I don’t know if you did any animation.

VL: Not yet

HG: But you know I got to work on one of the Shrek for a long time and that was fun and different and it’s another thing I can say I did.  You know we also did advertising. So we both have been very lucky in that diversity of things but to have so little to show you know I mean a badly chopped up movie, you’ve got a couple of movies you’ve made now, somebody can look at that and say you know this is what you did and they can connect with this or not but some people will have the movie. I spent 10 years primarily as a feature writer and to have the only sole credit I have on  a movie get written and directed and it got chopped up and released in all the wrong order so that meant a lot.

VL: I’m sure it does and it did and it will. And you are trying to put a point of view out there and say what you think and you spend a lot of time thinking about what you say before you say it and you feel like part of your job is to make some sense out of stuff and toss a thought or two out there in the hopes that someone else has a thought or two in response right. I mean that’s basically what we do but you can’t do that if those thought are jumbled by powers greater than you or if they never make it to the market in the first place. They just become piles of paper in your room and that is a very sad thing. So you know to be able to say at the end of the day that your 30-40 years of skill have been brought to bear on a series of novels incorporate both great ailments of entertainment and a philosophy or point of view about the world that’s been groomed in your own brain since 1985 and not before is pretty good. I think that’s the way you have to look at it. You know you are getting your day in course un-affected by the many forces out there that change what we do and that’s a massive thing. And I will say also that you know too many people that are published novelists, have written and directed and had their plays produced at the highest levels ,in addition to winning CLIO’s, you know, I will say you’re a mini Jewish version of Quincy jones. That’s how I feel. Well it’s been an absolute delight to speak with you Howie, the book is called Last Looks and I’m looking at the cover now it’s a Helvetica heavy.

HG: They made it look great! I love everything they have done!

VL: It’s very bold black and white and has sort of you know German movie from the 70s kind of cover. Okay so Howard Michael Gould’s Last Looks , the publisher is Dutton, it is available everywhere, and electronically, and the audio book read by John Michael Higgins Class of 85’ and I spoke to him about it and he said he had a wonderful time doing it and he thinks the book is fantastic and he was all smiles when I saw him at your book signing and that’s an  extra special thing I think for the Amherst literary community is this idea that you know the pioneer  valley is so heavily involved in every aspect. There’s a blurb on the back from (Harlet). So Last Looks, Howard Michael Gould, the third best writer in Stearns in 1980, Congratulations!