Award-Winning Playwright/Screenwriter Makes a Book Sense Debut

Nina Shengold Michale Weisbrot

Though Clearcut (Anchor) -- a Book Sense Notable Pick for September -- is Nina Shengold's first novel, the New York State author has been telling stories skillfully for two decades: first as an award-winning playwright, then as an award-winning writer of television screenplays. One might think her leap into prose fiction would have been worry-free.

But when Shengold began her novel -- encouraged by her long-time attendance in a writers' group whose other members over the years have included Scott Spencer, Laura Cunningham, Rebecca Stowe, and Da Chen -- she found the freedom afforded by long-form fiction somewhat daunting.

"Everything you do as a playwright or a screenwriter is very literal-minded," the author explained recently, from her Hudson River Valley home. "It has to take place in real time and place; actors have to be able to speak it; you have to be able to shoot it. But in a novel, there are no boundaries about what's feasible: how are you going to build that set, where are you going to find that location, how will you cast that part? You can cut through time and space, just through somebody's memory. You can do anything in a novel! It's very intimidating!"

Shengold's book, then, which is set in the mid-1970s, includes some spectacular budget-be-damned scenery from the Pacific Northwest, where the author herself worked in Forest Service jobs over 20 years ago.

But, true to her playwriting roots, the story focuses on a trio of closely watched, emotionally volatile characters entangled in a complicated and surprisingly overlapping relationship. The plot turns on the shifting friendship between a 29-year-old loner-woodsman named Earley Ritter, a privileged Berkeley dropout named Reed Alton -- and Reed's good-looking girlfriend, Zan, an intense and daring young woman who soon has the two men involved with her in a fragile, passionate menage a trois.

As Shengold describes it, her own progress from stage to screen to page is really the result of a rather straightforward journey: "With plays, I started out writing dialogue. Then I sort of added in description and more of a narrative sense, writing screenplays. What's most different in writing prose, is adding the element of interior voice.... I realized at some point that I'd been a professional writer for over 20 years, and I had never used the words 'I thought' or 'he thought' in a sentence."

Still, the new novelist acknowledged, "I think I used a lot more dialogue [in Clearcut] than many people do. And I think that I'm more comfortable writing in a scene-and-dialogue format, writing description and dialogue, than I am with a truly interior monologue."

Shengold's abiding interest in speech and stories had its early origin, it would seem, in her upbringing as the middle child of a sometime-journalist mother and a psychiatrist-author father, Leonard Shengold, who liked to read aloud, dramatically and inventively, to his two sons and one daughter.

"My father is a wonderful ham actor," Shengold said, "and we had family readings out loud: in front of a fireplace, in the winter; and on my parents' bed, in the summer. It's one of my big memories, of having stories read to me." Her dad's repertoire included long Dickens novels -- "the same book would go on for months and months: probably very much the way Dickens wrote them, as newspaper serials" -- and children's books with which the senior Shengold would sometimes take interpretive liberties: "He had a habit of inventing off-the-page; he would spin out and eventually get so outrageous that somebody would say, 'Dad! That's not in the book!'"

Shengold and her siblings were encouraged to be creative, too: "He had a couple of invented characters, and we would as a group make up stories.... It was definitely a houseful of readers -- a houseful of books."

Not until a college playwriting course, though, did Shengold consider writing as a career option. And it was during a year-long, post-college, solo "walkabout" in the Northwest, during which she kept a journal "in a kind of frantic and enthusiastic way," that Shengold "really fell in love with writing."

A lot of the passionate spirit of that old journal found its way into the pages of her new novel, Shengold said -- though the books' characters and sometimes tempestuous events are all made up, as the author took pains recently to explain to her mother and father.

"This is an odd book to show your parents," she said, "as I'm sure you can imagine! I did have to give it to them with about 17 disclaimers that it was not in fact autobiographical, and that these characters were a hell of lot wilder than I ever was. But -- they both liked it very much."

Now Shengold, a single mother, continues her family's creative story traditions with her own 11-year-old daughter, a "pretty eclectic reader" who "likes all kinds of things."

And, Nina Shengold said, "She loves to write. That makes me very proud." --Tom Nolan