Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest, author and journalist, Joel Samberg.

Joel began in journalism at age 17 as a stringer for his hometown newspaper on Long Island, and continued training in college as a reporter and arts reviewer

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His first position after college was as an assistant editor on a video trade magazine. He then moved into marketing communications for several firms as an account executive, public relations manager and employee communications writer.

As a journalist his work has appeared in Connecticut Magazine, Pittsburgh Magazine, New Jersey Monthly, Hartford Magazine, Dramatics Magazine, Seasons Magazine, Bergen County Magazine, Moment Magazine and many others. He has also written humor and opinion columns for several regional newspapers and magazines.

Joel is the author of the coming-of-age novel Blowin’ in the Wind, as well as five nonfiction books, most recently Smack in the Middle: My Turbulent Time Treating Heroin Addicts at Odyssey House (co-authored with Dr. Gibbs Williams). His previous nonfiction was Some Kind of Lonely Clown: The Music, Memory & Melancholy Lives of Karen Carpenter.  

Joel had two original plays come to life on stage, including Six Tens from a Fifty, a series of short pieces performed by the Love Creek Theater Company in Manhattan, and The Ballad of Bobby Blue, which was part of a one-act play festival sponsored by the Phoenix Stage Company of Connecticut.

Joel has also produced CDs of the work of his late grandfather, Benny Bell, a comedy singer and songwriter about whom he wrote a book in 2008, called Grandpa Had a Long One: Personal Notes on the Life, Career & Legacy of Benny Bell.

Good day Joel and thanks for participating in our interview.

Norm: Why do you write? Do you have a theme, message, or goal for your books?

Joel: There is only one way to answer that, Norm, and I’ll leave it up to the world at large to decide if it’s simple honesty or naive immodesty.

The thing is, ever since I was a little kid, so much of what I saw, read in the newspaper, learned in school, overheard in the distance, or simply wondered about I turned—in my head, at first—into books and plays and movies. I don’t know why.

That’s just the way it was. So I began to look for signs to confirm that I should at least try to become a writer. There were a few. For one thing, I sent a screenplay called Crooked Dreams to MGM when I was twelve.

Although it wasn’t accepted for production, MGM executive Roger Ahrens said to me in his return note that I have “an imaginative style” and should feel free to contact MGM in the future. (I still have that letter, if anyone wants to see it!)

Then, three years later, my ninth grade English teacher accused me of plagiarizing a book report because she said it was too well written for a 14-year-old. She sent a note home to my parents. I did not plagiarize that report! That settled it: from then on I decided to devote my professional life to writing.

There is no overriding theme or message in my portfolio as a whole. My solitary goal is for my work to be effortless and enjoyable to read, and that after reading it, people feel just a tiny bit better off for having spent time with whatever it is that I wrote. 

Norm: What did you find most useful in learning to write? What was least useful or most destructive? 

Joel: The most useful thing was simply the desire to write. That led me to find a couple of authors to read voraciously and emulate. That, in turn, led me to a level of passion, dedication, and skill that attracted the attention of a few great teachers in high school and college who mentored and encouraged me.

Everyone should learn to be a competent writer because it’s important for business and social interaction—but if you haven’t been dreaming about writing from childhood, and if you don’t have the patience to think about the way every single sentence sounds and how it fits in with the one that comes next, then just continue to write well but please don’t call yourself a writer.

Anyone can write well, but not everyone can be a natural writer. Which brings me to a pet peeve of mine—vanity presses—but I’ll save that for another time, other than to make just one point: Many people who self-publish immediately call themselves professional writers, even though their skill is dubious at best.

To get back to your original question, self-publishing (at least without an editor—and most self-publishers refuse to hire an editor) is by far the least useful and most destructive way to learn to write. It’s least useful for the writer, and most destructive for the writing profession. 

Norm: Do you think about your reading public when you write? Do you imagine a specific reader when you write?

Joel: I rarely if ever think of my readers in terms of any sort of demographics. But as a matter of habit and as a self-directed prerequisite, I always think of my readers in terms of how they’ll get along with my prose.

Toward that end I always reread the last ten minutes of my work as a reader, not as a writer. Is it a smooth read? Will any words or phrases trip up the reader? Does the prose accurately support my characters, the setting, the situation? Is there anything that can cause my intent to be misinterpreted (misplaced modifiers, extraneous commas, mixed tenses and narrative voices)? Am I talking down to my readers? Am I saying anything that I’m familiar with but that my readers will find completely alien?  

Norm: In your opinion, what is the most difficult part of the writing process?

Joel: The most difficult part? Believing you can make a fantastic living doing it to the exclusion of all else. That may sound a bit tongue-in-cheek, but there’s some truth to it.

The writing itself, like any job or art or hobby, has its good times and bad, its ups and downs, its tranquility and challenges. You either accept it or you don’t. Sure, some difficulty is built in, but that’s normal. And if you learn how to handle the difficulty, it just adds to the richness of the final result. So it’s tough to call the difficulties difficult, as counter intuitive as that may sound.

That said, the business of writing is an often uphill, frequently frustrating, always highly competitive, often sadly de-valued, and miserably underpaid professional endeavour. So if there’s nothing else you’d rather do, well, you either deal with that or you decide to be a miserable S.O.B. for the rest of your life.

Norm: How do you deal with criticism?

Joel: By believing in and concentrating on three things all at once: 1) That I tried my best, 2) That all readers and reviewers have their own preferences, likes, dislikes, tolerances, and even backgrounds which sometimes play into why they like or don’t like something, and 3) that I’ve been legitimately publishing in one way or another for more than forty years, so a little criticism really isn’t going to prove anything one way or another, or for that matter change me in any significant way.

If anything, it can help you improve (if it comes from a skilled, professional source).

Norm: How do you choose the names of your characters?

Joel: Two things come in play here. The first is that I seek character names that will provide the least amount of hesitation or confusion on the part of the reader—names that in the most important ways fit the characters, demographically, emotionally, and in various other ways.

Secondly, I think of a name that means something to me, even if it means nothing to the reader. If I can sufficiently justify a name in my own mind, I like to believe that it translates to a subconscious justification on the part of the reader. I’ll give you one example.

In Blowin’ in the Wind, the main character’s name is Daniel Hillman. He’s the youngest child in a Jewish family on suburban Long Island. First of all, I wanted a first-and-last name combination that sounded relatively conventional but not overbearingly common, and one that was passable as being Jewish without hitting the reader over the head with it, since that wasn’t the most important theme.

I remembered back to when my wife and I were having our third and last child (in other words, our youngest). We, too, wanted a first name that was conventional but not overbearingly common. We named him Daniel. (There were only two other Daniels in town at the time.) So I borrowed his first name for the novel.

For the last name, I researched Samberg, since the family at the heart of the novel was a slightly-more-than-marginal imitation of my own family. There is one school of thought that says the name Samberg is derived from ancient Yiddish words meaning People of the Hills. So Hillman became Daniel’s last name. (I should also note that the town he lives in is called Westbrook Hills.)

I use the same methodology for all my fiction writing, although the specifics change wildly from project to project. Of course, there are also instances where the tale dictates the name, such as a short story I wrote called “Funny, You Don’t Look Dead,” in which the two characters are called Mr. White and Mr. Black, who turn out to be God and Adolf Hitler.     

Norm: How do you deal with the loneliness that comes with writing?

Joel: It’s never been an issue. When I’m writing, my characters keep me company. When I’m thinking about what to write or the potential aftermath of anything I do write, my daydreams keep me company.

I’m fortunate to have an active enough social life, a big enough family nearby, and plenty of other responsibilities (so that the mortgage can be paid) to guarantee that I will never be left alone with my writing for too long. It’s not exactly like “The Shining,” where I’m stuck in an empty, remote hotel for the entire winter with a weird family. Almost, but not quite. 

Norm: What do you consider to be your greatest success (or successes) so far in your writing career?

Joel: I’m proud of all the writing I’ve done on Richard and Karen Carpenter, from the Seventies group, the Carpenters. Over the past seven years I’ve been involved in a series of projects that were interesting, educational, fun, well-received, and even a bit instrumental in adding to the overall Carpenter scholarship.

It began with a report I wrote and narrated for NPR’s All Things Considered. That led to a lengthy feature article for The Downy Patriot, the newspaper in the California town where the Carpenters lived when they broke out as superstars. The theme of that piece provided the basis for my own book on Karen, called Some Kind of Lonely Clown: The Music, Memory, and Melancholy Lives of Karen Carpenter, which has moved fairly well.

I felt honored that Neil Sedaka and Petulia Clark agreed to read the book and provide testimonials. After that, a few other magazines asked me to write articles, most recently a Connecticut quarterly called Seasons, for which I did a piece on the lack of memorials, monuments and tributes to the Carpenters in New Haven, where they were born. I was also asked to be a contributing commentator for a coffee table book called Carpenters: An Illustrated Discography, by Randy Schmidt.

It’s a gorgeous book, and I’m pleased to be a part of it. 

Norm: Can you tell us about your newest novel, Blowin' in the Wind?

Joel: Blowin’ in the Wind is a suburban saga about a musical prodigy named Daniel, and his family, as they navigate the baffling decade of the Nineteen Sixties, beginning with President Kennedy’s assassination.

Daniel struggles with what many in his orbit consider his preordained destiny as a professional musician, while his shy sister Lori—the story’s narrator—discovers a surprising spiritual path to her own self-fulfilment.

It has several incidents mirroring my own childhood on Long Island, and a number of intriguing cameos that include Hillary Rodham, Don Rickles, John Gotti, Karen Carpenter and, in the book's most dramatic episode, Bob Dylan.

In a way, the book had been in the making for more than fifty years—since I was Daniel's age when the story begins. That’s when a classmate insulted me at a school talent contest, an event not unlike the emotional one Daniel experiences in the novel.

Then the popular rabbi at my temple was fired for infidelity, as is Daniel’s beloved rabbi in the story. Following that, I received a rejection letter from MGM about a screenplay I wrote when I was twelve, as I described before, not dissimilar to the note that Daniel gets from MGM about his own screenplay—although Daniel doesn’t take the disappointment nearly as well as I did.

Norm: How did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

Joel: When I was six or seven, one late afternoon in the winter, I was down the block at my best friend Scott’s house. We were playing outside. But I wasn’t having a great time. Things seemed to be changing. Scott and I were growing apart.

We suddenly had different interests. Our families pushed and pulled us in different ways. Dealing with people and emotions was getting harder. I wanted to go home, because I was confused about my feelings.

Scott begged me to stay. I relented and said I’d stay until it got “one more darker,” meaning that I’d stay until it seemed like the sun went down just a little bit more. Well, many years ago I wrote a book called One More Darker, about a boy who realizes that each year gets a little harder than the one that came before—a little darker—and that nothing ever stays the same. That book eventually morphed into Blowin’ in the Wind. 

Norm: What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?

Joel: My goal was to create a family who could lead readers on an interesting journey through a fascinating decade, while at the same time addressing the age-old question: how do we decide what we want to do with our lives?

Although it’s almost impossible for a small independent publisher (and a writer with limited funds) to do the kind of marketing and promotion necessary to make a nationwide impact, I can’t help but be pleased with the reactions, feedback and support I’ve gotten, and in that way I have to say that I achieved my goal.

Don’t get me wrong: I’d be far happier if I could achieve a broader impact nationwide through marketing, promotion, word-of-mouth, and increased reviews. But at least the book is published and will be out there somewhere for all time. There’s comfort and satisfaction in that.   

Norm: Did you write the novel more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process.  

Joel: The only logic, really, is the effort to make the story seem logical—not necessarily to write always-logical scenes or even create always-logical characters. That’s because sometimes there’s not much logic in the world, in why things happen, and what motivates people to do the things they do.

In that regard, I never depend on pure logic. As with most of my fiction, I already had a beginning and an end when I started. So, with a beginning and an end, I don’t know if it’s logic or intuition that helps bridge the two. I guess I’d call it creative mechanics.

My job is to find a way to get from the beginning to the end while keeping it fresh, engaging, surprising, and revealing. The only way to do that is to build scenes and situations one after the other, take them apart if necessary, rebuild them in a different order, replace some people and some dialogue, add other people and other dialogue—that kind of thing. It’s engineering, really. It’s physics. It’s mechanical. But it won’t work without creativity running through the process.     

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Blowin' in the Wind?

Joel: You can type the name of the novel into Amazon’s search bar for books, or into the publisher’s search bar at  BEARMANORMEDIA.COM

You can also visit my own AMAZON PAGE  which lists all my nonfiction work, too) or the novel’s DEDICATED BLOG

The blog features the entire first chapter (to help you decide if they want to really get into it), images from the story, and more. I think it’s a fun visit. The book is also listed on the Barnes & Noble website and other online booksellers.  

Norm: What is next for Joel Samberg?

Joel: I’ve completed two other novels, Almost Like Praying and Remember Me to Herald Square, and right now I’m shopping both around for agents or publishers.

Almost Like Praying is about the family that lives across the street from the Hillmans in Blowin’ in the Wind, and concerns a devout Irish-Catholic mother, her relationship with her illegitimate half-Puerto Rican granddaughter, and a startling revelation that comes to light about the past.

Remember Me to Herald Square is about a young newspaper reporter in New York City in 1984, his beloved high school sweetheart who is also in town trying to become an actress, and the unexpected collision course on which they find their careers.

I also have a book of short stories, collectively called Weinerface (that’s the collection with the story about God and Hitler) for which I’m trying to find a home, and a proposal for a nonfiction book called Always: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Marriage, which is about my parents.

When they met, my mom thought my dad was rich, and he thought she was rich. Neither was rich. Finally, I purchased the theatrical rights to Bernard Malamud’s classic 1957 novel, The Assistant, and wrote a play version.

It’s completed. I’m very happy with the result, but the pandemic has stalled theater nationwide, and when it’s over I fear everything will be backed up and producers will play it very safe. So The Assistant seems to be in a bit of jeopardy, and that’s one of the saddest things to report about my professional career. On the other hand, nothing will ever stop me from writing. Writing is optimism.   

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, if you could invite three writers, dead or alive into your living room, who would they be?

Joel: Pearl S. Buck, Chaim Potok, and John Steinbeck.

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