Sep 15

Why I wrote: Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
From 1978 until 2014, I worked in a New York City agency responsible for providing affordable housing to low-income residents. The housing stock I managed and provided to low-income tenants became city-owned as a result of landlords walking away from dilapidated properties they could no longer afford to own. When landlords abandoned their occupied properties, that meant tenants and supers were left to their own devices to provide essential services like electricity, water, hot water, heat, repair leaks, clear stoppages, and making cosmetic repairs such painting, plastering, and repairing locks and windows. Tenants in abandoned buildings also provided their own security to prevent drug dealers and/or squatters from breaking into vacant apartments and basements, as well as to prevent thieves from stealing heating systems, fuel, and pipes throughout the buildings. One would think, with all the problems, that tenants would run away from their buildings just as their landlords had done. Most tenants would have left if they’d had someplace better to go. But where to go was the question and the dilemma. When I first started collecting information to write this workplace memoir, I did it because it helped ease my anger. I felt so helpless and hopeless as […]
Sep 13

MR. JEFFERSON’S DUELING BOOK COVERS

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
It isn’t often in life we get a redo. Let me tell you about mine. The first edition cover of this book and its interior were a huge disappointment for me. Like a cavity in a sensitive tooth, I felt such pain at how my first book looked and read. At least one reviewer, some of my friends, and a few colleagues also noticed the obvious errors in spelling and punctuation in the book. Nobody was particularly crazy about the original cover artwork either. I decided to show you that cover, but don’t get confused as to which one to buy. They look totally different, don’t they? The cover on the left is the old one. The colorful cover on the right is the current one. Having 26 other book covers and novels under my belt, I think it’s the best one too! Anyway, the pain and embarrassment about my first book stayed with me. For eight long years, I wondered what I could do to change the way the book looked both inside and outside. Back in 2008, I was a newbie to Amazon’s Kindle. At the time, Create Space didn’t exist. With a private publisher doing all the […]
Sep 11

Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories (Part Four)

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Melba’s world seems filled with co-workers and tenants with addiction problems. How realistic is your portrayal of city workers and the people they provided a service? I thought it was accurate for that time and in that field office. I’m not saying that everybody I worked with was addicted to something or that every tenant I met had a drug or alcohol problem. Back in the day, the majority of my coworkers and tenant weren’t addicts. They were as chemically free as I am. In fact, without their help, the Crisis Management Program could not have succeeded in evicting drug dealers and chasing drugs out of the city’s housing. Plenty of upstanding people lived city-owned housing and/or worked in Central Harlem. They still do. I wanted Melba’s world to reflect some of what she saw in the communities and field offices she worked in thirty years ago. If you had to do it all over again, would you take that first job with city housing? Yes, I’d do it again. At the time, the job sounded exciting. Being a property manager for NYC gave me a chance to do something to help folks who weren’t as fortunate as I was. […]
Sep 10

Why I don’t celebrate 9-11

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I’ve had this ongoing argument with myself and others throughout the years, make that fifteen years to be exact about celebrating 9-11. I never wanted to celebrate 9-11. By celebrate, I mean treat it like a special day, a day of remembrance. I’m or I was a city worker who worked four blocks away and two blocks over from the World Trade Center’s twin towers. I went to work on that clear sunny morning. I arrived at my office a little before 8 in the morning. It was the date for the Democratic runoff for mayor, Mark Greene VS Freddie Ferrer. Who knew the beautiful day would turn ugly so fast? A friend called me. We talked as we usually did until she told me to find a television and turn it on or listen 1010 WINS. The urgency in her voice made me do it. It was the second worst decision among many that I made that day. The first one was watching the twins collapse, one after the other, a sight I haven’t been able to forget in 15 years. They looked like dominos except they fell downward and not over. It was almost as if some giant […]
Sep 08

Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories (Part Three)

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Did you actually meet all the characters you describe in your book? Yes, I met all but one of them. But I won’t tell you which one. Aw, come on, tell me. Nope, I’m declaring writer’s privilege. Okay, so tell me which story is your favorite one? I actually have three favorites. I bet one of them is Mr. Jefferson’s Piano, right? Yes, that’s one of them. Visiting those two sisters, 87-year-old Minnie and her big sister, 101-year old Nora, was a delight for me. I’d vow each time I made an inspection to their apartment that I’d only stay fifteen or twenty minutes. But I always ended up spending the entire afternoon with them listening to their marvelous stories of the way things used to be in the Harlem they knew. I also love Desmond’s Roof and Gimme that Derby. I admired Desmond Kenny as soon I met him. He was a go-getter-entrepreneur, an excellent super who went into business with the city. The man had repair skills up the wazoo. That was why I hired him to repair the roof in the story. And who could ever forget Miss Bea, the pistol-packing, 80-year-old mama and her little white […]
Sep 06

Mr. Jefferson’s Piano and Other Central Harlem Stories (Part Two)

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Why Harlem–what inspired you to write a book about Central Harlem’s tenants and supers? As I say in the introduction to Mr. Jefferson’s Piano and Other Central Harlem Stories, one of my senior colleagues, Ms. Mavis Washington, had died. My coworkers and I were discussing her death. You know how folks are when they start discussing the dearly departed. One thing leads to another and those memories—good and sometimes bad—pop up. Everybody starts telling a favorite story about the departed. Typically, the stories don’t match because everybody has her own version of the same tale. It’s like ten blind women trying to describe an elephant to each other. Each woman has a different description based on what her body senses, her hands touch, her ears hear, and her nose smells. What I’m saying here is that I’m sure another book written by one of my colleagues might put a different emphasis on the same experiences we all shared. To answer your question another way, I looked around Harlem, my adopted home, and I noticed changes. The Army-Navy store across the street or bodega down the block disappeared. And there was no fanfare announcing their disappearance either. One day, I bought […]
Sep 04

MY LABOR DAY WISH FOR 2016

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
I’m sitting on a bench across the street from my house in Riverside Park. It’s a short walk from my apartment to the children’s playground area. I’m watching children run around the yard; swing on the monkey bars; climb up the jungle gym; slip down the slides then run into the sprinkler. On such a sizzling hot and humid day, the shockingly ice cold water feels good to their sweaty, super-heated skin. The streams of coolness make the all the children playing in it, scream, shout, giggle with glee and throw water on each other. They remind me how good it is to be young, filled with wonderment and allowed to act silly. Watching children at play, always relaxes me and I let my mind drift off. I’m still trying to come up with a Labor Day tale worthy of posting on my blog and FB page. Suddenly I had an idea. I’m no great admirer of Donald J. Trump but his rhetoric, “Make America Great Again” has made me rethink the meaning of many things during this presidential campaign. I consider myself to be one of the luckiest workers in America. While I’m retired now, I got a job […]
Sep 02

Mr. Jefferson’s Piano and Other Central Harlem Stories (Part One)

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
How would you describe yourself as a writer? I’m a writer who’s willing to take chances. Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories is anthology, but one could call it a workplace memoir too. It’s organized a bit differently than most short story collections, having not only short stories, but I also used memos, journal entries, and letters to describe some of my experiences in the field. I’m one of those people who writes on anything that’s handy. The back of expense reports, the bottom of memos, appointment books, journals, field sheets, notes, and copies of repair orders. I used them all to express my feelings about what I saw or didn’t understand on my job. I took hundreds of photographs too. After thirty years, I had quite a collection of paperwork, notes, and photos about the jobs I held and the people I met or worked with on those jobs. Now I had to decide what to do with all of it. I could throw all of my stuff away and be done with it. Or I could use it in some way to tell people what working for the city in the field of housing management was […]
Sep 01

Get your free minibook for Mr. Jefferson’s piano & central Harlem stories.

by B.L. in Other 0 comments
Enjoy these 3 advance excerpts from Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories! Contains the bonus blogs “Farewell, President Obama,” “Mr. Jefferson’s Dueling Book Covers,” and More! Order your copy of the complete book, on pre-order now for September 30, 2016! Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories is the second edition of an anthology that weaves together a rich tapestry of 68 short stories, agency memos, and letters of events that take place during the late seventies, eighties, and nineties as seen through Melba Farris’ eyes. Melba writes notes about everything work-related, chronicling her journey into the field of property management as she tries to help her less fortunate brothers and sisters with their housing woes. Here, in a limited edition excerpt, author B.L. Wilson presents three tales that represent some of the delightfully funny, sometimes perplexing, but intriguing personalities the author encountered during twenty-five years as a property manager performing her job duties in city-owned buildings. It’s only at Smashwords. Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/659687
Aug 31

Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories

by B.L. in Latest Novels 0 comments
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AFFORDABLE HOUSING IN HARLEM? BUY THIS BOOK AND FIND OUT. Mr. Jefferson’s Piano & Other Central Harlem Stories is an anthology that weaves together a rich tapestry of 68 short stories, agency memos, and letters of events that take place during the late seventies, eighties, and nineties as seen through Melba Farris’ eyes. Melba writes notes about everything work-related, chronicling her journey into the field of property management as she tries to help her less fortunate brothers and sisters with their housing woes. She meets the oldest woman in Harlem in the title story Mr. Jefferson’s Piano. 101-year-old Nora Jefferson and her kid sister, 96-year old Minnie, enchant her with the story of how their father acquired the baby grand that sits in the middle of their living room. Melba becomes an exorcist when a routine complaint about a broken stove turns into removing an invisible devil from Ms. Johns’ oven in The Devil Made Me Do It. In Neisha, Melba writes a series of memos to her boss asking for help to improve the hazardous living conditions of seventeen-year-old Neisha, an independent minor, her two young children and a teenage brother—all of whom Neisha is responsible […]
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