Delmarva Writer
Gerald F. Sweeney
Our community is blessed with scores of talented artists—visual artists, photographers, actors, musicians, poets.… There aren’t many things I enjoy more than diving into the work of a member of that collective body of creativity, and through a bit of kismet the writings of author Jerry Sweeney have been brought into my life.
Gerald F. “Jerry” Sweeney is a native of the Midwest, though most of his time on earth was lived on Long Island. An army veteran and graduate of Michigan, his career was in Manhattan’s “madcap magazine world” where he worked in various capacities including, publisher. He retired to the Eastern Shore in the early part of this century and has devoted himself to writing full-time. Sweeney is the author of seven novels in the series The Columbiad—tracing the life of a family through the twentieth century—as well as serving as the book review editor for the Delmarva Review.
Doug Yetter: You’ve been a busy man since you retired!
Gerald Sweeney: One of the many good things about retirement is that it gives you time to indulge your creative energies. Over the past 20 years, since I left the magazine business, I’ve published eight novels. I have remained in the writing community as president of the Eastern Shore Writers Association and by joining several writing critique groups, where I offered a new short story every month. Last fall I collected my favorite stories in a book called Down Broadway—New York Stories.
DY: Where do you find inspiration?
GS: I’m a strong advocate of perspiration over inspiration. I believe authors should write every day and glue their bottoms to a chair.
DY: Do you have a favorite time of day to write?
GS: Mornings are best for writing because your creative powers are closer to your nighttime sub-conscious. I know one famous playwright who goes directly from his bed to his computer.
DY: How do you define success as a writer?
GS: Success as a writer means you have done your best work. Everyone has a creative streak in them; the proof is in your wild dreams. If you can dream such fantasies, you can write them out.
DY: What’s your favorite part of being a writer? Your least favorite?
GS: The best part of writing is to resolve your own inner conflicts; the worst part is the same. I wrote my first novel back in my early 20s. It took me two years to write, two years to find a publisher, and two years to learn they weren’t going to publish it!
DY: You have yet another new book I’d like to hear about! The press release for U.S. Composers and Poets was my introduction to you and your work.
GS: Music must surely be the favorite art of our better angels. I’ve always been interested in classical music. From listening to the Met opera broadcasts, hearing Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra play at Ann Arbor’s May Festival, watching Lennie Bernstein conduct in Carnegie Hall—all have been wonderful experiences. Collecting records and CDs and attending concerts has always been a treat.
As someone even more tuned into literature than music, I have enjoyed relating American writers to native composers. The more I listened, the more connections I found, so the impetus for the listings in U.S. Composers and Poets—The Intersection of American Classical Music and American Literature is basically to help tie the two together. I think I first noticed the many musical references to the poetry of Walt Whitman.
The relationship between American composers and American writers has always been close. Creating the music to accompany and enhance the prose and poetry of our greatest writers has given us a treasury of musical masterpieces, including Ives’s Concord Sonata after Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts, as well as Copland’s Poems of Emily Dickinson, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with DuBose Heyward, and Lukas Foss’s The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County after Mark Twain.
DY: I downloaded your rather remarkable compendium and learned things I never knew—after a lifetime in music. Over 350 pages, and it’s only the first half?!?
GS: This is a partial collection of composers (Abels-Ives) and writers containing the musical offerings of 300 American composers who have embellished the literary creations of over 150 American writers, including 35 musical versions of poems written by Walt Whitman and 25 by Emily Dickinson. It makes clear the devotion shown to our favorite poets by American troubadours.
DY: I wish Jerry all the best as he works on K through Z! ▼
Jerry’s books are available at www.booklocker.com, Amazon, and other online book providers. His website is sweeneygf.com.