Leaving
by Richard Dry
List Price: $14.95
Pages: 464
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312302878
Publisher: Griffin Trade Paperback
Richard Dry is an English instructor for the Las Positas-Chabot Community College District and a former Mental Health Assistant working with emotionally disturbed youth. This novel won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation and Intersection for the Arts and was nominated for the Pushcart editors' Prize. Richard Dry lives with his wife in California.
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In His Own Words
What was the inspiration for Leaving?
The most obvious inspiration for my book was my work as a Senior Mental Health Assistant with severely emotionally disturbed kids, both in a group home and in a residential day treatment center. In the process of working at this institution, I was punched, kicked, spat upon, and had my nose broken. However, after more positive contact, I came to care about the kids who unfailingly had one thing in common: a family history of abuse or neglect. Through my interactions with the children and my study of their personal histories, I came to appreciate the forces that went into forging such frightened and angry human beings. I wanted to tell their stories, and, being that there was a disproportionate number of African-American children in this facility, a story grew from a seed that had been planted in me a long time ago.
When I was young, I had been cared for by a Black woman named Ruby. She was my closest friend and she thought of me, I found out when visiting her siblings in South Carolina years after her death, as her own son. She would literally say to them, "Look at what my son Richard sent me from California." In addition, my mother had a number of Black friends in Philadelphia, where I was raised, and a number of them took a liking to me. I remember, in particular, two men with whom we spent many hours in Ritten House Square: Mellow and Shawn. It was the late sixties and I slowly became aware of the segregation of the races and the economic disparity. I recall becoming acutely aware of certain restaurant and stores that had few if any Black customers. I recall the racist comments f friends and family. This became even more apparent when visiting the wealthier side of my family in Chicago. I was also a long-haired little boy who was often treated like a girl. Perhaps these experiences, and the ensuing divorce of my parents, created in me an empathy for those who were treated unfairly or seemed to be victims of circumstance.
As I traveled the country with my single mother, living in half a dozen states before I was 8, I was always struck by the disparity between Black and White neighborhoods and also fascinated by the cultural differences that seemed to be borne of segregation. My work with the homeless and later with emotionally disturbed kids was no doubt an outgrowth of these formative years. I was driven to understand why such inequality existed and researched the historical factors linking slavery and the present circumstances of many African-Americans - disproportionately living in poverty, in prison, and in pain. By the time I became a college instructor, working in a program with African-American students, I became aware of the large segment of our population, of all ethnicities, with little sense of these historical factors. But I was also aware that textbooks were of no interest to most people. I was driven to dramatize this territory, and by creating composite characters from friends, historical figures, and the children with whom I'd worked, I wove together a story I believed would allow my readers and myself to experience the psychological and social inheritance of slavery and bigotry.
Who are your favorite authors? Which authors have influenced your book?
My favorite authors, all of whom influenced this book in some way - in style, content, or aesthetic - include André Malraux, John Steinbeck, Toni Morrison, Michael Ondaatje, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Ursula K. LeGuin, Richard Wright, Milan Kundera, Flannery O'Connor, Alice Munro, Jonathan Kozal, John Irving, Claude Brown, Richard Bausch, Richard Bach, James Baldwin, Ingmar Bergman, Eugene O'Neil, Sophocles, Harold Pintor, GB Shaw, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, T.S. Eliot, ee cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Sharon Olds, Robert Hunter, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.
Additional authors who influenced this book include Ralph Ellison, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglas, Malcolm X (through Alex Haley), Alice Walker, Elaine Brown, Eldrige Cleaver, Kweisi Mfume, and Léon Bing, among others.
Excerpted from Leaving © Copyright 2008 by Richard Dry. Reprinted with permission by Griffin Trade Paperback. All rights reserved.
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