Joseph Nicolello GSAS '21 Publishes Novella with Brooklyn Press
Joseph Nicolello’s (GSAS ‘21) novella, A Child’s Christmas in Williamsburg, was published last month by Angelico Press in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The book follows Caitlin and Sarah McGrady in the midst of their first Christmas together without their husband/father. It is about childhood, parenthood, the steadfast rejection of rampant materiality, and a vindication of life and letters. Here, Nicolello, who is in his second year of the English MA program at Fordham, answers some questions about his new book.
Joseph Nicolello GSAS ‘21
What was the inspiration for the story?
My idea was on the one hand, a tetralogy of novellas modeled on the four seasons and the four boroughs of New York (I have nothing to say about Staten Island) in something like the present moment, concerning what Maxim Gorky called “The lower depths.”
What was your writing process?
This book is a singular case in that it took me three days to write it and five years to publish it; by the time I was offered a contract I had recovered from an illness that had rendered me bedridden for four years, finished with being homebound, finished with writing literature, and decided on a life professing it, studying it, writing about it. What began as a Proustian process ended up as an Arthur Rimbaud sort of thing in more ways than one: writing, turbulence, writing, retiring – Rimbaud went gunrunning or something in the mountains, Verlaine, guided by absinthe, became a Catholic, and I just resumed studying. It is about a mother and her daughter at Christmastime in Brooklyn in the same way that Moby Dick is about a whale. Let us imagine a symphony that is one-hour long: this is perhaps the first fifteen minutes.
What was the publication process and do you have any advice for Fordham students and aspiring writers on how to get published?
There are infinite rudimentary precepts and maxims that one can gloss from professional storytellers, books on writing, blogs with advice, but I am much fonder of a maxim of Moshe Gold’s than I am anyone’s advice on writing, and I say this as someone who wrote seven books and then quit fictionality altogether: “Rules of thumb are meant to be broken.” Thus, if you are religious, abandon yourself to divine providence rather than letting the pendulum of immersion oscillate between fear and trembling; and if you are not religious, understand the world as your will and representation: time and space begin and end with mind – thus let your books be guided by invisible, albeit moldable forces, rather than rigid sets of subjective rules; let your art pour forth at the cost of everything, as though you were going to die, because you are. The heart, for all its innumerable metaphoric dimensions, is essentially a time bomb. Life without literature is not worth living, and one who makes literature sees something lacking in the puzzle of literary history as it stands; as Lars Von Trier once had a wolf say: Chaos reigns. Come on in.
Do you have any other literary projects you’ve been working on?
There is another much bigger book - in size and subject matter - undergoing final edits out west that should be out early 2021. That is a three-volume Kuntlesroman coming out of Wipf and Stock (Eugene, Oregon).
You can hear more about Nicolello’s new book in a podcast with the publisher and in another interview. He has a book on Flannery O’Connor and medieval philosophy being published in Brooklyn in Spring 2021, as well as a novel written entirely in syllogisms about a famous scholar losing his mind while writing a book on Hegel. He encourages all budding authors and secret authors to write to him to discuss novelistic and poetical composition anytime: jnicolello[at]fordham[dot]edu.