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Former Journalist, W&L Professor Pens Coming Of Age Novel
Brian Richardson was already a veteran journalist before he began a 30-year second career in teaching. But even before he retired from Washington and Lee University in 2015, he made himself a promise about a third.
“I enjoyed the classroom every day,” Richardson said. “I used to tell people I would have been a teacher even if they’d paid me in carrots. But I always told myself I would try to write fiction when the time came. I didn’t want to die regretting that I hadn’t.”
The result of his promise to himself is his first novel, “A Place You Can’t Escape.” It’s available on Amazon under Richardson’s pen name, Nat Richmond.
“One of my early reviewers calls it a coming-of-age story with uncommon purpose,” he says.
For the protagonist, Brad Edwards, adolescence is not about proms and Homecomings and sweet, clumsy first romances. It’s about coming of age on a Southern military base in the turbulent 1960s, as the country plunges into the Vietnam War and endures the agonizing birth of the Civil Rights movement. It is a time of fear, confusion and selfdoubt, at once absurd, darkly funny and desperately real, as Brad learns that youth is anything but innocent, and that sometimes you make choices, but sometimes they make you.
“A Place You Can’t Escape” follows him as he learns how to be popular, but not popular enough; resilient, but not resilient enough; brave, but not brave enough. He turns away from a faith that both comforts and tortures him, yielding to a hopeless crush on Mimi Petrycha – beautiful, manipulative and cruel. He is alternately befriended, snubbed and bullied by others, while he discovers that the adults in his life can offer no help.
When Denise Hawthorne, with a wisdom born of insight and kindness, shows more faith in him than he has in himself, he embraces her love but then abruptly turns her away, lured to a forbidden place by a promise from Mimi. In a single night he sees his life and the life of another spin out of control. Five decades later, he still can’t escape the consequences of the choice he made.
Richardson used his upbringing in a military family to inform the setting of the book, and Brad’s experiences.
“When I tell people that, they always ask, ‘So how much of the book is true?’” he says. “It’s certainly a fair question. The analogy I make is to the old mockumentary ‘This Is Spinal Tap.’ There’s a scene where the dim lead guitarist is proudly showing off an amplifier with an unusual feature on the volume knob. ‘This one goes to 11,’ he tells the interviewer. The phrase is so apt it’s come into common usage.
“In ‘A Place You Can’t Escape’ I made some stuff up, but for other stuff I took events or characters who were sevens or eights, and cranked them up to 11.”
As a longtime journalist and teacher of journalism, Richardson was familiar with the writer’s tools and the discipline of writing ‒ and rewriting ‒ every day. But still, there was a lot to learn.
“It was humbling, every time I sat down at the computer,” he says. “For one thing, there was the elephant in the room. Journalists aren’t allowed to make stuff up. They write about real people involved in real events and real issues, in an effort to tell their audiences the truth.
“Novelists do make stuff up -- characters, dialogue, sometimes entire worlds. But by making stuff up, the best novelists help us see abiding truths.”
There were other learning moments as well. The book’s working title was “Wipe Hands on Pants.” That came from a scene that anybody who ever encountered a gas station men’s room in the ‘60s will recognize: when you turned away from the sink, hands dripping, and were confronted by one of those anemic old blow dryers. Beneath the instructions stamped on the machine, somebody with a pen knife invariably scratched a final step: “Wipe hands on pants.”
Richardson initially thought it would work as a title.
“I thought it was pretty clever,” he says. “The problem was that it promised whimsy. A couple of my reviewers have called the book laughout- loud funny in places. But it’s gritty and dark as well, with some strong language, and it’s set in a time and deals with events and issues that were – and remain ‒ anything but whimsical.”
In a 15-year journalism career before he became a teacher, Richardson published thousands of stories under his own byline. So why adopt a pen name for fiction?
“Nat Richmond is easier to remember than Brian Richardson. And when I look around at some of the people inhabiting the Whacko-verse now, I thought it might be a good idea for my family’s sake to have a different name on the mailbox.”
Early reviews of the book have been positive.
“A Place You Can’t Escape is a book you can’t put down,” wrote Lisa Getter Peterson, who has twice shared the Pulitzer Prize. “Nat Richmond’s coming-of-age novel grabs you by the heart and doesn’t let go.”
“A compelling chorus of voices,” local writer Laura Brodie, author of the acclaimed “The Widow’s Season,” says. “These characters are passing through a crucible, and Nat Richmond handles their stories with warmth, wisdom and compassion.”
“Richmond’s dialogue crackles with authenticity,” Pulitzer Prize-winning editor Pam Luecke writes.
Depending on how others receive the book, Richardson says he and Nat Richmond might not be finished.
“Russell Lynes, the former managing editor of Harper’s magazine, once said, ‘Every good journalist has a novel in him – which is an excellent place for it.’ Well, this one happened to escape. And a few more might, too.”
“A Place You Can’t Escape” by Nat Richmond is available on Amazon. The Kindle version is $9.99; the paperback is $15.99. It is available to bookstores, libraries, classes and book groups for readings, discussions and Q&As. Contact him at natrichmond.com or [email protected].
