Home Street Home: The Virginia Beach Chronicles

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Synopsis

  At 60, Ella Migliore, a gentle soul from a middle class background, finds her security wiped out by the 2008 market crash.  Long estranged from her nuclear family, she is thrown into the brutal world of homelessness - a shadowy hell that swallows people bit by bit, even in the well-manicured streets of the Virginia Beach Oceanfront.
 
      Bravely trying to make the best of a bad situation, she downplays the dangers until she learns firsthand just how vicious street life can be.  Menaced by ex-cons at a free dining hall, bedding down on drenched church steps  after a Tidewater tornado-watch storm, and terrified by lawless men in a homeless camp, she digs deep to find strength to carry on.
  
      Her terrors are compounded when Ella is physically attacked by much younger campers while onlookers refuse to get involved.  Her fear of being beaten to death drives her into the arms of a predator who takes control of her camp and her life.  When he asks the unthinkable, she escapes, only to battle the worst threat of all - the thirst for revenge that twists her soul as she plans violent reprisals against those who've bullied her. 

Interview With Georgia

JWB: Hey Georgia! Welcome to DTTLA. We met on BookBlogs.ning if my memory serves me. I found your book and, just having finished Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London," I was immediately drawn to it. Can you tell us a little more about it?
 
Georgia: Home Street Home was born out of my three years of homelessness.  I discovered I could stand the deprivations, the constant crowding in with too many human beings in various stages of unraveling, if I focused on trying to write descriptions of the conditions I was seeing.  When I decided to turn it into a novel, I invented characters that embodied the personality types I witnessed and sometimes interacted with.
      My work belongs to the literary fiction genre, though it has some elements of urban fiction.  I think it is best described as being in the tradition of socially conscious literary works such as Oliver Twist and Grapes of Wrath.  While it is fictional, it describes conditions all too real; a life of desperation that most middle class people don’t even imagine exists within a civilized country.
 
JWB: Wow. I can't imagine what you must have gone through. Exploring that topic some more, what are 3 things you'd want someone to know about you as a writer?

      I guess the first is that I have lived and/or witnessed the things I write about in this novel and the accompanying two volumes of the Home Street Home Trilogy.  If the story carries passion, it is a passion born of real suffering.  The second is that I’ve always been in love with the classics, so I am more interested in writing good literature than in turning out a best seller.  At the risk of sounding like a “snob”, I’ll say there is a big difference between the two.  What makes writing sell in the popular market isn’t necessarily what makes for good literature.  (I see certain prolific authors on the bestseller list, whose novels are little more than hack formula stories.  Popular taste is not exactly living its proudest moment.  Therefore I cannot accept the bestseller list as my gauge for successful writing.)  What I’ve learned about writing has come from reading the best, the top shelf literature, and immersing myself in that standard of quality.  Whether I have succeeded in rendering a fit candidate for literature or not is a judgment only readers and critics can make.  But I worked on this manuscript until I felt satisfied with it, and can truly say, “I am that”.  Third: As they say, a true writer has to write.  I write every day, even if it is just jotting my thoughts down in a journal.  Writing has become as much a necessity for me as my morning cup of coffee.

JWB: That makes me smile - that writing has become a necessity. What exactly inspired you to write this book?
      I was inspired by the little elderly Asian woman who sleeps sitting up on the benches on the boardwalk, all her possessions in a couple of paper shopping bags.  Year after year she is out seen in the streets, someone’s grandmother walking with halting steps, and always toting big shopping bags.  One night as she slept, her few valuables were stolen from her.  I was inspired by the middle-aged man whose face is a spider web of scars from a baseball bat beating; and who, after hearing a reading of my opening scenes, told me with an emotional knot in his voice that I was writing his story. And by the young man just out on parole – one condition of which was that he stay in the shelter, but who could not get into the shelter because of overcrowding.  I gave this young man refuge in my car so he would not have to spend every night evading the police.  Had he been found sleeping, he would not have simply had a ticket for sleeping in public like the rest of us – he would have been taken back to jail.   I was inspired, too, by the multitude of homeless women who stay with men who ill-use them because it’s better than being out in the streets alone, facing rape.
      So many stories of people falling through the cracks, so overmuch sorrow, that when lined up end to end in a non-fictional account, the telling numbs the brain with the endless litany of suffering.  Many are the non-fictional accounts of homelessness available.  This is, to my knowledge, the first attempt to depict this vicious parallel universe as the subject of fiction.  With all the newly homeless coming from the middle class, I felt the topic to be very timely.  Fiction can draw the reader into a character, creating a virtual experience of all that the imaginary ego goes through, in a way that non-fiction cannot. 

JWB: Your book deals with the homelessness in our time as a result of the economic recession - what about this issue would you most want our readers to know?
 
      I don’t think enough has been said about the personality change that the homeless person goes through, a spiraling down into a new identity that is a shadow of the former self.  The most civilized, mild-mannered people, the most talented and educated citizens; all go through this change if they are treated like refuse long enough.  When you see a homeless person who doesn’t seem to know how to act right anymore, it is likely because of this dehumanizing process we go through that is multifaceted but results in one and the same thing – the loss of a normal sense of self-worth, and therefore, the sense of the worth of others.  Few are the spiritual giants who live in this crucible with human kindness still flowing.
 
      However, the ultimate message of my trilogy is redemptive.   Even the most hardened street person can be turned around and used by the Powers that Be to help others pull out of the hell of Home Street Home.
How do you develop your characters?
      My characters are composites of personality types I’ve known or observed.  I tried to represent all the distinct types in the homeless community.  In fact,( in anticipation of the next question) making a list of the character types that make up the population was one of my first preparations for making decisions about what characters to include, which to bring forward to main character status, and which to use as background ambience.
      I finally settled on a middle-aged-going-on-elderly woman who is new to the streets as the main character of volume I because I found so many of this category who were especially impacted due to their unfamiliarity with the street, their advanced age that kept their employment opportunities minimal and chances to escape homelessness through latching on to a well-heeled man quite nonexistent.  It is a particularly vulnerable segment of the population, and one most hit on by the many predators in the street, especially if the woman is receiving some kind of pension or disability check.
      I tried to describe Ella obliquely by having her see herself in the shop windows of the beach as she walks up to the Oceanfront to bed down on the steps of the church.  I’ve been told since at a writing workshop that this is something of a cliché, but my readers seem to enjoy it.
      I gave Ella a voice called “unreliable narrator”, which simply means that the way Ella thinks about things and explains them is not always the way they obviously (to the reader) “really are”.  I find that an excellent way to clarify a character without resorting to explaining her personality.  I’d rather think the reader is engaged enough to pick up Ella’s quirks by the slant her thinking puts on what goes on around her.
      Blondie, a woman with two years under her belt, is brought forward as the main character in Volume II.  She is crazy about her knight-in-tarnished-armor boyfriend, Gabriel – a long time hustler who’s been on the streets off and on much of his adult life.   I let Blondie’s unreliable narrative about her life with Gabriel do some of the work of revealing her personality.  Blondie sees her relationship with Gabriel as something ordained by her Protective Power, so she talks herself into turning a blind eye to the infidelities that everyone else seems to be sure Gabe is involved in.  Her fretting about leaving Ella out in a tornado-watch storm while she shelters in her van, waiting for the rain to subside so she can run into her hotel, also shows her flaws rather than telling about them.  We also see her from Ella’s viewpoint and through the eyes of her rival, Cutie Doll, to give a more rounded picture of who Blondie really is.
      In Volume III, Cutie Doll tells us her story in first person street style, mincing no words to explain her part in the Gabriel rumors and her bad girl past in Las Vegas and on the Oceanfront: running through boyfriends, drinking and drugging, and sleeping under the pier with her friends.  Even the format of the third novel is adjusted from that of the other volumes to reveal Cutie Doll better.  I used a double-spaced, extra white space layout to enhance the “pull no punches” quality of Cutie Doll’s speaking style.  She’s been on the streets over a decade and has a rep as a “Queen Bee”, a personality type found in abundance among the more hardened long-time street women of the Oceanfront.  She is first described in Volume I chapter 3 as she sits boozing by herself in a cheap hotel room after a day of turning tricks.  In chapter 7   Ella describes Cutie Doll through her eyes as she recounts the rumors about Cutie Doll.  But it is Cutie Doll’s part in various dialogues that reveal the nuances of her personality most succinctly.
JWB: These are such important stories to tell. And they are so contemporary. I really admire you for your work to shed light onto such a difficult topic. Switching topics now. What's the writing process like for you?
      In the Home Street Home Trilogy, I started with a detailed list of what types needed to be included.  Then I chose my main characters.  Each main character had to have a journey, and I made the journeys intertwine.  I think all writers start out with some scenes in their heads they envisioned when the idea for the novel struck them.  Here is where I may be different in my process than other authors.  I wrote those scenes first, even though I didn’t know exactly where and how they were going to fit into the story.  After I had my “inspirational” scenes written, I went back and created the structure of journeys that would display them best. (I think of a diamond needing a setting)

JWB: If you were asked to compare your work to one other author, who would it be and why?
      In my promotions, I often compare my novels to Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  I’m sure that sounds pretentious as hell, but let me explain myself a bit.  Within the literary fiction genre, I see novels that take up social issues of the day as having a niche of their own.  I would like to attain the high craft of a Dickens or Steinbeck, and would much prefer that achievement to being on the bestsellers list, if a choice had to be made.  But even realizing how short I fall of such a lofty goal, I do classify my work in the same niche of socially conscious novels as these greats of literature.

JWB: I really think you should get into Orwell - particularly "Down and Out". On this topic, what are your favorite authors or books? Why?
      Dickens, Steinbeck, Twain, London, Jane Austen, Somerset Maughan, Edith Whorton, Hemingway, Faulkner, Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoyevsky, Balzac, Cervantes and many more.  These authors helped to raise the standard for literary expression.

JWB: Many of our readers are other writers. What is the #1 tip you would give to an author trying to promote their work online?
      I would caution any author seeking to promote a novel online to develop relationships with other writers and with readers within social media first.  There is a tendency after finally publishing a work one is very excited about to expect everyone else to share that excitement.  But one must realize that the other writers are more excited about their own works, and many readers have books they would like to tell about to a good listener.  It reminds me of that homily about the people in hell who were sitting around a table full of food, starving, because they all had spoons with handles too long to reach their own mouths.  The people in heaven were in the same situation, but had learned to feed each other.
      I believe the secret is there – reaching out to help other authors promote their books and discussing books with readers who may not yet be your fans.  Building a community of fellow writers and avid readers is where you want to go.

JWB: Great advice! Now it is time for the interviewee's choice: For this last question you can either answer: Is there anything else you would like to add? or come up with a question you wish I asked and provide an answer for it. :)
      I’d just like to add that I feel very lucky to be visited by the writing muse.  Literature is my first love among the fine arts.  I can’t imagine a better outcome for myself than to write quality novels.

JWB: Thanks Georgia! I thank you for being on the blog, for talking about a topic that sadly you know intimately, and for sharing this intimate look with DTTLA readers. I wish you all the success with this book. It is such an important topic to be tackled and I do hope that through your work you are able to bring it the attention it deserves. I also hope that you have success as a writer!

If you'd like to learn more about Georgia's work - visit her site here.

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