An Agent's Inbox #10

Dear Ms. Jeglinski:

I am contacting you because in an interview in Women on Writing, you said you are looking for something fresh with a great voice. In Breakfast With Neruda, eighteen-year-old Michael Flynn of Rooster, Ohio, is spending his summer cleaning up the high school--his community service sentence after being expelled near the end of his senior year for hiding explosives in his locker. He had planned to blow up his now ex-best friend’s car, but that plan backfired, costing him a friendship, a girlfriend, and his high school graduation. But these are the least of his problems.

Only Michael’s immediate family knows he lives in a 1982 Ford LTD station wagon he calls the Blue Whale. That is until Shelly Miller, a mysterious girl also working off community service, catches him sleeping in the Whale on school property one morning.

One of Michael’s secrets is he chooses to live in his car rather than with the uncontrollable filth inside his mother’s home. Michael’s half-brother Jeff has already moved out, and his half-sister Annie now lives on the back porch.  Michael fears Children’s Services will find out and place Annie in foster care, making his mother’s already tenuous grasp with reality more precarious.

Michael’s other problem is he has no idea who his real father is, and his mother won’t tell him.  With Shelly’s help, Michael discovers answers to the riddles in his life.

Breakfast With Neruda is contemporary YA of approximately 72,000 words, and the novel will appeal to fans of John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, Maureen Johnson and David Levithan.  If you imagine a twenty-first century Huck Finn meeting a hard edged Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice, you get a sense of the dynamic between Michael and Shelly.

I have more than twenty years as a high school teacher/librarian and have had poetry and prose published in anthologies and journals including Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Devices, 5AM, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Book Report, andWomen’s Words, and hold an MFA from Goucher College in Creative Nonfiction. Over the years I’ve honed my speaking skills by presenting at educational conferences and poetry readings, and I’ve done standup comedy, so having a platform which includes public appearances does not scare me. Working with high school kids requires bravery, a sense of humor and flexibility.

I hope you enjoy the first page of Breakfast With Neruda and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Sincerely,

L.M.

BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA

“Green was the silence, wet was the light, the month of June trembled like a butterfly.”

Pablo Neruda

The hallway is dark, and looks abandoned except for the clanging of metal against tile. Earl, the head custodian, fills a giant bucket near the janitor’s closet. He looks up at me, nods, and keeps filling the pail.

“How come it’s so dark in here?” I ask.

“We all look better in the dark,” Earl says. He laughs and reveals a gold front tooth. He’s a raggedy guy of about sixty who always has a cud of tobacco in his mouth. “Power’s still out from the storm.”

“Oh yeah,” I say, nodding, pretending to know anything about the power outage. It had stormed as if the apocalypse arrived last night. I hold out my hand. "Michael Flynn, reporting for duty."

"I know who you are.” Earl shuts off the hose and looks me over. "Listen, kid, I know what you did to get stuck here all summer, and I don't put up with any crap," he says. "We clear on that?"

"Yes, sir," I respond.

He wheels the bucket into the hallway and I follow. “First thing you’re gonna do is start cleaning out the lockers.” He snorts. “Kind of ironic for you.” My face reddens, and Earl gestures to the end of the hallway. “Start at that end and work your way back. Take a big trash can with you.”