Last night the Small Press Center kicked off its reading series, Emerging Voices: Writers Published by Groundbreaking Independent Presses, with a talk from Lee Stringer, author of the acclaimed memoir, Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, and now of a second memoir, Sleepaway School: Stories from a Boy’s Life.

Published in 1998, Grand Central Winter tells the story of Stringer’s 12 years of living homeless - in the tunnels of Grand Central, no less - and addicted to crack, and how he basically wrote himself out of that life. He was also a writer and at one point the editor of Street News (”Turnover was high,” he said, “eventually everyone got to be editor”), a publication written and sold by the homeless.

I’ve bought the publication maybe once - back in my bleeding heart college days - and Dan Simon, publisher of Stringer’s books, serendipitously bought one as well. Stringer tells the story.

“It probably would have ended up in his trash can,” he said. “But fate stepped in.” The train entered a tunnel and stayed there for 20 minutes. Simon had no choice but to read the paper and was especially taken with one particular writer.

“When Dan called our office,” Stringer continued, “and I heard that he had asked about me, it was like I was a struggling actor and Louis B. Mayer had just stepped into the room.”

So began Stringer’s relationship with Simon, who at the time was with Four Walls, Eight Windows, a well-known indie press. “He had the simplest desk imaginable,” Stringer recalled. “Two file cabinets and a wooden plank. Dan said, ‘Do you think you’d want to do a book?’”

At the time Stringer was still addicted to crack and so thought, Book = advance = more crack, and immediately agreed. Soon, however, he discovered that he wasn’t able to write and get high at the same time, and that he “wasn’t even getting high anymore, [he] wasn’t having any fun.”

So he entered drug treatment. “It was at the best time,” he said, “which is when you’re ready. When, as other people put it, you hit bottom, but as I think of it, when you have a head-on confrontation with your soul.”

Kurt Vonnegut was an early advocate of Stringer’s work. Simon, also Vonnegut’s publisher, showed him the manuscript, and after reading it Vonnegut reportedly said, “You guys are gonna make a fucking fortune.”

After Grand Central Winter was published, CNN picked up on it, concentrating on the backstory, ie, Stringer’s rise out of homelessness and drug addiction to write this book, or as Stringer himself put it, “Homeless man speaks in full sentences! Freak of nature!” (which by the way didn’t stop a nitwit of a woman from asking later how he achieved “this miracle of articulateness and literacy”).

Stringer’s new book, Sleepaway School, chronicles his time at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, a school for “at-risk” kids in Mamaroneck. But, “everyone’s at risk,” Stringer reminded us. “Not just poor kids.”

Stringer found this book more difficult to write than Grand Central Winter, not only because it focuses on events from 40 years past but due to his efforts to both not repeat what he had done in his first book and to prove that he was more than his backstory.

Stringer’s a funny guy. Regarding a trip into Grand Central Station, he said “it was the newly refurbished Grand Central, not the one I lived in. But they fixed it up so nice, I was thinking of moving back in.”

When another nincompoop suggested that he do a self-help book - Addicted to crack? Homeless? This book can help you for just $24.95! - he answered smilingly, “I’d slit my wrists before doing a self-help book.” But he went on to say that self-help books with their prescribed step-by-step solutions “deny the fact that we each have our own personal journey.”

Stringer waxes spiritual at times, emphasizing that recovery from drug addiction involves both clinical and spiritual recovery. He recalls a dinner he had with Vonnegut shortly after 9/11 when Vonnegut asked him to tell a story about God (when Kurt Vonnegut asks, you do).

Stringer says he made something up on the spot, imagining “God as Leona Helmsley,” having created Eden and coming down to show off the trees, flowers, etc., and upon leaving says she has one command: “Be happy.” But that’s not good enough. Someone asks, “What’s happiness?” and so to understand happiness, she introduced pain.

If all the Emerging Voices talks are like this one, I’m going to every one.

Related posts:

1. Above and Below
2. Imaginary geographies
3. Putting the “grand” back in Grand Central Station
4. Homeless in New York
5. homeless man of the week