Young publishes first novel, 'Michael's Journal'

By Rose Hooper

It all begins on a cold winter night when the homeless Jones wanders into a condemned building in New York City. Inside he discovers a library, fallen on hard times and forgotten. As he browses the dilapidated shelves he stumbles across Holt's journals. For the next two weeks, Jones reads and rereads the journals, captivated by the life and times of its author.

L.M. Young of Jackson County has captured that story in her new novel, "Michael's Journal."

Young will be featured at a Saturday, Nov. 10, at 3 p.m. book signing at City Lights, where she works. The event will also include a workshop on the process of journaling.

Co-sponsored by Metrostat Technologies, the afternoon will include hors d'oeuvres and wine, as well as a hands-on demonstration of various computer and internet-supported journaling resources. It will begin with Young reading from her new novel, written in the form of a journal.

The journal chronicles Holt, who came from a very wealthy family but plunges himself into the horrors of New York's slums and ghettos to write about "real life." Holt befriends a young black boy named Washington, who will later become the legendary preacher, Elijah Broom.

Follow the two misfits as they travel through America, from big cities to small towns, their experiences paint a new picture of American society­plagued with the problems of race riots and corrupt big business, but also full of promise.

Jones, believing "America needs the journals," slipped them under his well-worn coat and out the library doors, claiming, "finders-keepers." Who needs academia when you have such journals, Jones pondered as he tracked down Holt's mother to receive the publication rights.

Holt wrote the journals from 1917-1925, hoping and knowing that someday they would be read.

The reader discovers a brutal look at war when Holt realized only poor boys are sent to the front lines as "potential candidates for slaughter." War is good for the economy, he also discovered, as it increased the price of Doughboy shoes to $11.50 a pair.

"Why would man find glory in war?" Holt lamented. "Does he not know what a trench is?"

Even in his last days when he is "losing his grasp on life," Holt continued writing "so that I shall not go mad by keeping all my thoughts inside." In the end, trying to distinguish between what is and is not an apparition, the reader may wish Holt had kept some of those thoughts inside.

During the journaling exercise, Young will use the senses of sight, taste, touch, hearing, smelling and emotions to help participants capture the essence of their entries.

Young is the author of "The Train to Port Arthur and Other Stories" and has published stories in several journals. She is also the recipient of the 2001 Patricia Painton Scholarship for study in Paris and a finalist in the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition and the Hemingway Short Story Competition. In 1998, she was a participating writer at the Bread Loaf Writers' Program.

Educated as an historian, she combines her fiction writing with her love of history in this, her first full-length novel.

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