Click Here To Purchase From Amazon The Sex Ed Chronicles

Today, Norm Goldman, Publisher & Editor of Bookpleasures.com is pleased to have as our guest, Stuart Nachbar author of The Sex Ed Chronicles.

Good day Stuart and thanks for participating in our interview.

Norm:

Please tell our readers a little bit about your personal and professional background. How has this influenced your writing?

Stuart:

I had always wanted to write a book and I always loved pursuing “what-if” scenarios in American history. I also have a good understanding of K-12 and higher education because I have done business with schools throughout my working life. There are great real-life stories in education politics, but they have rarely been put to fiction.

I have an excellent education in practical politics. I was an associate at the Eagleton Institute of Politics during my senior year at Rutgers, earned my bachelor’s in political science in 1982 and finished a master’s degree in urban planning shortly afterwards. I also have a MBA; I knew that I would have to treat writing as a business in order to succeed.

I worked five years for a deputy mayor of a large city and helped him represent a city government to C-level executives and government officials, including school administrators and university presidents. I’ve done community affairs consulting for government agencies and non-profits, and was a part-owner of a software business with colleges and universities for almost a decade.

I also lived through some of the events described in the story, including a teacher’s strike where I watched teachers sentenced to jail by a county judge. I’ve also spent a lot of time in newsrooms and at media events during my working life.

I want to build on a body of work focused on education politics. There’s no shortage of story ideas. Readers will find that they can relate to the events such as those I described in The Sex Ed Chronicles.

Norm:

Will you share a little bit about The Sex Ed Chronicles with us?
 
Stuart:

My main character, Greg Mandell, is a young reporter, who reluctantly accepts an assignment to cover a series of public hearings on sex education and also report the local view from his high school alma mater. While on the assignment, he falls for Andi Gilardi, a popular, untenured history teacher, who gets in the crosshairs of a the Parent’s Alliance for Schools and Teachers (PAST); she allowed students to run a sex education questionnaire in their school newspaper. Opposed to mandatory sex education, PAST elects over 300 like-minded parents to school board elections across the Garden State.

Greg’s character is based on my attitudes towards life and politics in 1980, had I decided to become a newspaper reporter. While I had my notions of “truth and justice,” I was not a social butterfly. I was only remotely aware of sex education, but I was a wiseass at times. He’s also single and lives with his widowed Jewish mother to save expenses; breakfast table discussions, evening coffee klatches and coffee kvetches with Mom are a major part of the story line.

Andi Gilardi is a teacher who learned about sex education in college in the seventies; it was a more liberal period in the history of higher education. It was more credible to have her side with her students—and that made for an interesting conflict, between her, her superiors, the teacher’s union and a school board with PAST-backed members

Norm:

Have you had anything published prior to your first novel?

Stuart:

This is my first novel, but I’ve written articles about education, politics and urban planning for professional magazines and journals.

Norm:

How did you come up with ideas for The Sex Ed Chronicles? What methods do you use to flesh out your idea to determine if it’s salable? Is there an underlying message in your book?

Stuart:

I wanted to write historical fiction based on events that happened in my adult life, including some I had lived through personally. I graduated from a school system that went through a long and bitter teacher’s strike in 1977, my senior year in high school. Three years later, parents protested against mandatory sex education and one of the protest leaders, a minister’s wife, was elected to the school board. She was the highest vote getter! I also lost my mother to cancer during this time and wanted to experience how our breakfast table political discussions would have continued had she lived through the start of my working life.

I also found some scary parallels between 1980 and today: conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, economic worries at home, rising gas prices, diminished confidence in presidential leadership at home and abroad, and ‘culture war’ debates over intelligent design (known as Creationism back then), gay rights, and of course sex education.

I read published literature about the seventies, the 1980 elections, and of course, sex education and talked with politicians and educators, some I already knew from my work, and others introduced to me through friends. The most interesting resources were the transcripts of the actual state board of education hearings; there was only one copy on file in the State Archives and you could only take notes from it in pencil. I also read manuals for sex educators published during the 1970s, including a guide published by the National Education Association to help teacher’s unions deal with “extremist” opposition.

I learned that sex education is too important a subject to be taught poorly, or with missing information. Sex education is meant to impart lifelong lessons of human relations, familial and personal responsibility, as well as health. I prefer the comprehensive approach to sex education, including medically accurate information about contraceptives, to “abstinence only” instruction; it best educates children and their parents too.

Norm:

Was The Sex Ed Chronicle improvisational or did you have a set plan?

Stuart:

I chose sex education as the main political issue, because it requires a major investment of time on the parts of parents and educators as well as teachers and money; it’s offered in all grades in my home state; and, requires certified teachers who devote an entire school year to the subject. By comparison, intelligent design has affected a single unit of a middle school or high school biology class. Most important, sex education has always been reevaluated whenever political winds blow in a new direction.

In 1980, New Jersey was the first state to mandate sex education in all grades in all public schools. At that time, approximately half the school districts offered some form of sex education and half did not, so there was no standard curriculum or guidelines from the state. It was ironic to me that New Jersey was the first state to mandate sex education during a high tide of political change in the nation and state. In 1980, our senior senator and a senior member of Congress, both Democrats, accepted bribes from FBI agents posing as Arab sheiks. It was realistic to expect the state to move from Democratic to Republican control. Ronald Reagan won New Jersey by over 400,000 votes in the presidential election. President Carter was unpopular in the state; he not only lost New Jersey in the general election, he also lost the Democratic primary to Edward Kennedy.

I was curious to learn how a well-organized opposition group could have successfully defeated mandatory sex education, what they had to do right and what they could do wrong.

Such a group would need to be inclusive of all faiths and races; New Jersey has a more diverse population than most states. It would need a charismatic leader, like Ronald Reagan, who had the communications skills and resources to devote full-time to the cause. Lastly, New Jersey is a state where school politics are local. A statewide organization would need representation from locally elected officials, as well as parents, if it were to become as powerful as the state teachers association, so, I had my opposition group fund local school board races.

Norm:

In fiction as well as in non-fiction, writers very often take liberties with their material to tell a good story or make a point. But how much is too much?

Stuart:

It depends on the writer’s orientation to the story. For instance, I love historical political fiction that might have an “alternate time line,” where I’d be curious what happened if, say Lincoln finished a second term and unified the county, or Kennedy survived the assassination attempt in Dallas. A writer has to get the true facts straight and do original research to make a compelling read.  When I worked on The Sex Ed Chronicles, I had to understand the activities of political opposition groups in other states to develop a credible fictional organization in New Jersey, a state that has little recent history with grassroots opposition groups at the state level. You can’t pull ideas from thin air, unless the story is meant to be a fantasy, not a play based on real life.

My second novel, Defending College Heights, takes place in 2007, so it’s not a work of historical fiction, but I still needed to do research and get my facts straight. I inserted a totally fictional event, the murder of a U.S. Army recruiter, into the context of many real events concerning military recruiting and the war in Iraq. Defending College Heights is also a “what-if” story; during the anti-war protests of late 1960’s and early 1970’s, there were civilian deaths and injuries, as well as attacks on military and government property, but no reported incidents of a civilian attack on a military recruiter. There are protests against military recruiting today, but the climate for them is different because there is no draft and parents have joined students and veterans as activists on the front lines of those protests. Defending College Heights had to reflect the times.

Norm:

How do you approach the work of writing?

Stuart:

I love history and research, as much as writing, which helps me think of “twists” or plots to a story that might not appear in other works.  The Sex Ed Chronicles is partly a work of historical fiction, so history helps provide some of the details. I also love to ask the ‘what if’ questions with experts who know the subject. For instance, with The Sex Ed Chronicles, I already understood the positive arguments for comprehensive sex education, but I had to speak with people on the other side to learn the negatives and present them fairly in the story. It was fun, for instance, to sit with a professional acquaintance who had formerly served as a legislative director for the Republican Party in the New Jersey State Assembly; we discussed the framework of an opposition group over a very enjoyable lunch.

Norm:

Do you feel that writers, regardless of genre owe something to readers, if not, why not, if so, why and what would that be?

Stuart:

I’ll speak only for me. All of us are consumers of education, as students, parents, alumni, employers and educators; we all have a connection to schools, positive or negative. My obligation is to provide an entertaining and insightful look at education politics to people who are not politicians. There are very good academic studies and news accounts out there, but they don’t get the readership they deserve.

Norm:

What do you think of the new Internet market for writers?

Stuart:

I could not have done The Sex Ed Chronicles without the Internet. This is a work with niche appeal to parents as well as educators. The Internet is the best tool to reach out to those niches. It also gives me a manageable one to one relationship with readers and contributors; this is so important to building a readership base. I don’t want readers who liked The Sex Ed Chronicles to forget me when the next book, or a circulated article comes out. It’s amazing that we’re working a paperless world to bring good stories on paper to the world.

Norm:

How can we find out more about your book and Stuart Nachbar?

Stuart:

I have a Web site and blog called Educated Quest at www.educatedquest.com. There are profiles of The Sex Ed Chronicles and Defending College Heights, my completed manuscript, as well as first chapters.

Norm:

What is next for Stuart Nachbar and is there anything else you wish to add that we have not covered?

Stuart:

I have completed a manuscript for Defending College Heights, a crime novel based on a veteran political reporter’s investigation into the murder of an Army recruiter within a corrupt college town and started a new story, tentative called The Tip Off, that is focused on women’s high school and college basketball.

I would also like to do non-fiction work in education politics, through the Educated Quest blog, as well as a profile of two high schools, one urban, one suburban, that are facing managerial, education and political challenges due to No Child Left Behind. Such policies have had equally serious impacts on urban and suburban schools, and I feel the suburban school impact is under-publicized.

Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.
 

The above interview was conducted by Norm Goldman, Publisher and Editor of Bookpleasures.com

Click Here To Purchase From Amazon The Sex Ed Chronicles