BRATTLEBORO — The ads in the paper started appearing months ago: “Hey, all you former Brooklynites!”
Kelley Murray placed those ads. The Brattleboro resident is working on her first book, about other locals who, like Murray, once lived in New York City.
Although Murray said the project's scope was originally only about Brooklynites who moved to Brattleboro, she has since expanded it to include ex-pats from all five boroughs “because I realized I was being elitist.”
One need not even be a native-born New Yorker. She said anyone who used to reside in New York City and now lives in Brattleboro qualifies for inclusion.
“I changed the book's title from 'From Brooklyn to Brattleboro' by adding an asterisk: '*and the Other Boroughs,'” Murray said.
Murray won't exactly be writing the book.The participants will tell their own stories in their own words. Some, she said, wrote just a paragraph or two, and others wrote essays. Each writer gets their own chapter.
“I don't see it as my book. It's a collaboration,” she said. “I have a very strong need for the writers to think for themselves. That's really the best, the raw stuff.”
The book's participants - about 15, so far - are “a mixed group,” Murray said, but most tend toward what she deemed “past the mid-life crisis” phase of development. “I have a vested interest in getting the words of our older folks” in print, Murray said, because “they won't be here forever.”
When asked why more young people aren't included, Murray said she noticed many young people are making the opposite move: from Brattleboro to Brooklyn.
Overcoming challenges
But what about those with no writing experience? Or no confidence in their writing skills?
Murray offers her writers a variety of helpful hints and devices. She mentors those who need it, bringing her training as an art therapist into play.
“I tell them, 'It's about the process; not the finished product,' and that reassures them,” she said.
She also worked with Everyone's Books to keep a few copies of Judith Barrington's “Writing the Memoir” on the shelves for purchase or perusal. Murray directs those without their own computers to the Brooks Memorial Library.
“I don't want people to feel alone in this,” she said.
Murray first began noticing she wasn't alone in her migration pattern a few years ago. She was working at the Brattleboro Farmers' Market, and in the course of conversation, she and a co-worker discovered they were both from Brooklyn. “He said, 'Oh, everyone's from Brooklyn,'” Murray said.
As she met more locals, she realized her co-worker was right. She also noticed former New Yorkers love telling their stories.
“I said, 'I need to do something with this,'” she said.
When asked if she noticed any common denominators so far in her subjects' experiences, Murray said, “People move for a variety of reasons. For some people, it was a huge relief to move to Brattleboro.”
'A packed subway in the heat of summer'
She gave an example.
“One person was stuck in a packed subway in the heat of summer, and he made the decision right then and there, he was going to leave,” said Murray.
Some of the former New Yorkers she talks to “get very nostalgic,” Murray said. “There's some pretty fierce pride there, which makes you wonder, why did they move at all?”
Murray's move, from Brooklyn Heights to Vermont, happened when she was 15 years old, in the late 1970s. Her father had a love-hate relationship with New York City. Crime was rampant, and he hated his job as an international investment banker, she said.
Then, one day, a traumatic event tipped the scales for Murray's family.
As Murray tells it, one day in early 1975, her dad went to lunch at the Fraunces Tavern, a pre-Revolutionary War-era building in lower Manhattan.
“He saw a guy put a black bag behind a chair,” then a bomb exploded, she said. All of his tablemates died. A beam from the ceiling fell across his body. Murray's father was alive, but the explosion made him blind and deaf on his right side.
“He said, 'Okay, kids, we're heading for the hills,'” Murray said. He worked for a few more years to save up enough money for the transition, then packed up his family and moved to Jamaica. Murray's parents bought the Three Mountain Inn.
Although she said her “first summer was incredible,” and she quickly made friends, she missed New York. A few years after moving to Jamaica, Murray returned to her home state to attend college.
She ended up back in Vermont for graduate school in Montpelier, then returned to Jamaica for a decade before moving to Brattleboro five years ago.
Creating this book “is a cathartic way of coming to terms with moves,” Murray said. “Moves are in the top 10 of life's stressors.”
Although Murray doesn't yet have a publisher for her book, “I'm not too worried about it,” she said, expressing her confidence in finding one, perhaps locally.
And she is actively soliciting more participants. “I want as many people as possible,” she said. “I don't want one of these little quarter-inch books!”