Community Corner

Former Mineola Resident Publishes First Novel

A. Louise Robertson pens first part of planned Mineola trilogy.

The following article was posted by Geoffrey Walter. It was written by Matthew Romagnoli.

A. Louise Robertson would like to welcome you to Mineola, but not in the literal sense. She won’t be giving you a walking tour down Mineola Boulevard. Instead “Welcome to Mineola” chronicles the life of a family moving to the village post-World War II and is the first part of a planned trilogy based on her experiences.

Robertson moved to Mineola as an infant and lived here until just before high school. Her siblings attended Chaminade and Mineola High School but all of them feel strongly about their Long Island roots, particularly to the village in which they grew up.

“Our memories are so wholesome and they form the basis of me and all my siblings’ lives,” Robertson said, noting a conversation with her sister that really dictates what Mineola offers to growing youth as an experience that is both unique and everlasting in its own right. “We were in our 30’s and me and my sister looked at each other and said ‘oh I guess not everybody had that’.”

The book, “Welcome to Mineola,” follows the story of Rachel as she – like Robertson – moves out of New York City to Mineola. The ensuing 50 years is full of events and “some are tragic and some are horrible and some are wonderful like what everyone goes through,” Robertson said. “Rachel is my heroine but there are other heroes and heroines in the book. There are issues addressed that are personal to me. How Rachel handles these issues, it made her who she was and someone I would admire. I was able to give Rachel a strength she needed from my own strength I didn’t ask how, I just did it. She doesn’t ask how am I going to get through this, she just does it.”

Some of those issues the book, and Rachel, tackle include anti-Semitism and race.

Robertson had based some of the book’s climaxes on historical events that took place on Long Island, including an LIRR train collision that affects her characters’ lives and researched the actual historical events.

“One of the things I always look for in a book is to learn some things, not just have a story told to me,” she said.

Some of the advertising that the protagonist’s husband worked on were actual ads running on television at the time. Robertson used several methods to research but also relied on memory and first-hand experiences of people who lived then, which lends a more authentic and genuine feeling to the novel.

“The sights and sounds of the area, I not only relied on memory but spoke with people who are older than me from the area that lived there then,” Robertson said. “There’s research and so forth that’s involved with those historical events that would make anyone who lived back then feel very comfortable reading this book.”

There is clearly an equal joy when she recalls the process of returning to Mineola in her research, physically making the trek back to her home town right before she started the writing process.

“The thing I was trying to get into that book, I think the people that live there should be aware of, I went back there about three years ago with my family for like a reunion, we just went back to the street we lived on and stuff and I have to say I still that wonderful family feeling to that neighbor and if I just closed my eyes a wee bit and squinted I could see myself roller skating and chasing the ice cream truck,” she said. “The families all had kids our age and the nostalgia of that. I could picture myself on that sidewalk with my aunt taking the training wheels off like go ahead you can do it. On that same sidewalk, it is unbelievable that it’s still there. Most people can’t go home again but I could.”

Encapsulating that genuine family oriented feeling of Mineola was a driving force in part of the book and a the title according to Robertson.

“The feeling of the place. And the ‘yeah we’re still here, we’re still family, we still have an ice cream truck’ that’s why Mineola is in the title of this book,” she said.

Robertson has previously published some poetry and short stories. Currently in her sixties, she states that she is unfazed by how long it took to finally write and publish her novel.

“It doesn’t even matter how long it takes,” she said. “This has been a dream of mine since I was 12 years old and first picked up “Little Women.” I knew I wanted to be Jo March and I have. I’ve been a writer, It doesn’t matter how old you are when it happens, it’s still exhilarating.”

The novel is actually a product of NaNo, the National Novel Writing Month, which is held each November and challenges writers to complete a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Robertson described the challenge as “a month of coffee at 2 o’clock in to 4 o’clock in the morning.”

Her first draft though was admittedly “raw” but did receive some positive feedback from those she allowed to read the manuscript.

The novel is the first part in a planned trilogy. The next two books, “Chained in Mineola” and “Farewell to Mineola,” are currently in the works. She is currently editing the second book, which she says has been a much more enjoyable process than the first.

She realized it was going to be a trilogy “in the middle of the second one…the second one just came out of the first one to a degree and then I realized, ‘Oh my, there are all these other characters, that’ll be the third book’.”

The second book will be released digitally as the first comes to print sometime around the 2013 holiday season.

Robertson admits that the entire process has been a bit surreal.

“Since the book has been out on Amazon and people have been writing reviews and I’ve been receiving fan mail, when you have something inside for so long, it is just amazing to hear a public reaction,” she said. “I keep expecting someone to knock on the door and go ‘just kidding, this is not real’.”

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