A Candid Interview with David Yale

You may think that because David R. Yale, author of Saying No to Naked Women, built a shack in the Ozark mountains backwoods and lived there for a summer, that the main character in the novel is actually him.

"Not true," says Yale. "While the novel is very loosely based on my life, it is fiction. I always wished I had green eyes, so Jack Derritt, the novel's hero, has green eyes. While I did play the flute and the autoharp, I was never able to do jazz improvisations like Jack does.

"I never did buy a rifle in Arkansas, although I sometimes did target practice with my neighbor's guns. I never had confrontations with a cougar, or for that matter, with the town pharmacist. I didn't get a contract for a book called Hometown Heroes, although I wish I had!

"And I never knew a woman named Celia, but I did know several women who had some of her characteristics. "Those scenes and people are fiction, as scenes in a novel should be. But to tell you the truth, I wish Jack were real. He's a great guy and he would be my best friend if he was a living, breathing human being," Yale says. But one thing that isn't fiction: Yale really did build a shack out of used shower curtains in the Ozark backwoods - and he has the photos to prove it!

"This is one thing I did just the way it's described in Saying No to Naked Women. And penny for penny, I spent less than Henry David Thoreau did on his shack," Yale says.

THE ROAD WAS PAVED WITH ASHES

David R. Yale was born in 1944 in Staten Island, New York, the first child of Milton and Vivian Gordon Yale. His father was a registered nurse serving wartime duty in the Coast Guard and his mother was a nursery school teacher. His family lived in Brooklyn, but moved to the West Village in Manhattan when he was three, and back to Brooklyn when he was seven, and two years later, his brother Andy was born.

"My Dad didn't earn much money, even though he worked two jobs, and my mother had stopped working because she was critically ill after my brother was born. Some nights all we had for dinner was potatoes and sour cream," Yale says. He made his first attempt at writing a novel in Junior High School. "I still remember typing it on my Dad's old Remington portable. It had a blue ribbon, so the typed words came out in blue. I remember it was science fiction, and I finished an entire page about a planet named Llema. But something inside me stopped me from going any further." Yale describes the part of Brooklyn he lived in during his Junior High School years as "a dismal place, where the stench of burning garbage drifted on summer breezes, by the side of a treeless park where the road was paved with ashes.

"But one day, the city built a small brick temple, and filled it with imaged gems called library books. I read their entire science fiction collection in a single summer. The librarian swapped collections with another library - twice. And I read all of those books, too. So when the librarian asked me to review George Orwell's 1984 for the Brooklyn Public Library student newsletter, I did, of course."

"Well that Fall the library teacher at school called me in to see her, at the beginning of Ninth Grade. She was holding a copy of my review.

"'Did you write this,' she asked. I braced myself, expecting some sort of trouble."

PROFITABLE POETRY BOOK

"You're the only student in this whole school who has written a published book review. I'm going to see to it that you get a citizenship award,' she said.

"It didn't seem like a big deal to me, but I was pleased to receive the Judge Edward A. Richards Citizenship Medal. Nobody told me anything about Judge Richards, but I was able to find out he was the President of the East New York Savings Bank and active in the community about 100 years earlier."

During his sophomore year at City College of New York, Yale tried his hand at novel-writing again. "But I didn't know how to structure this novel I called The Unsung Cantata, and I wasn't ready to find out. I stopped writing after Chapter 2. At least I got a little bit further along this time!"

During his undergraduate years, Yale worked in the City College library, hand re-binding and repairing books. In 1965, he self-published a book of poetry, which he printed on an old mimeograph machine and assembled by hand. "I actually made a small profit on it, $125 as I recall. In 1965 dollars that was a nice amount of money."

After receiving his B.S. degree in English, Yale packed his bags and set out for Minneapolis, where he enrolled in the American Studies Program at the University of Minnesota.

THE YOUNGEST TEACHER

"It was a tremendous culture shock. There were very few Jews; almost everybody was Scandinavian. They talked differently from me and they thought differently from me. But they were genuinely nice, and even though they were a shocking contrast to the brusque New Yorkers I grew up with, I really liked Minnesotans. I made many friends." After his first year of studies, Yale landed a Teaching Associate position in the Freshman Communication Program at the University of Minnesota, with full classroom responsibilities. At the age of 23, he was the Program's youngest staff member.

After 3 years of part-time teaching and full-time studying, Yale collected his M.A. in American Studies, and went out into the world.

"It was during a recession, and I was having a lot of trouble finding a job," Yale says. "So I went to the anti-poverty program and asked to be taught a trade. They were shocked; I was the first college graduate to apply there. They taught me printing skills - and they swore I'd never work as a printer, because they'd help me find something 'better.' They were true to their word. Although the offset printing skills I learned there have been useful in my career as a direct marketer, the anti-poverty folks referred me to a job at the Minneapolis Parks & Recreation Board.

"I went for the civil service exam, and there were about 100 people in the room applying for 3 jobs. But when they handed out a written essay test, I knew I could write my way into that job."

PUT YOUR EGO ON THAT SHELF!

It wasn't long before Yale was the Director of Recreation for Shingle Creek & Bohannon Parks on the far north side of Minneapolis. "I loved that job, and especially my boss, who was the nearest thing to a saint I've ever experienced. He never told me what to do. But he always helped me understand what would happen if I took a particular course of action and what my alternatives were.

"I worked with kids, and teens, ran programs for seniors and preschoolers, developed a staff of dedicated part-timers - all out of two tiny buildings that were meant to be ice skating warming houses. We did outrageously wonderful things like launching hot air balloons, pie-eating and greased watermelon contests, annual ragweed pulls, and painting the ice skating rink into one giant mural."

But Yale won't go into further detail, at least not now. "My next novel will be set in a recreation center in Minneapolis. And I'll be posting excerpts from it just as soon as I can write them."

From Minneapolis, Yale moved to Arkansas for the summer and fall of 1974, and then set out for California. "I got a part-time job as an on-staff consultant for the Oakland Parks & Recreation Department. One day my boss called me in and asked if I would fill in for a seriously ill Public Relations staffer. The head of PR would train me. It would be a full-time position. I jumped at the chance.

"My mentor was a crusty ex-newspaperman. High on his wall, there was an empty little shelf. 'OK, kid,' he said. 'See that shelf? Every day when you come in, put your ego on that shelf. You do that, and I'll have no problem training you.'"

Yale learned how to write news releases and develop news stories. "One day, shortly after I started in the PR Department, I was driving across the Bay Bridge on my way home to San Francisco. Suddenly I saw things from a new perspective: 'Oh my God! I'm being paid to write! I did it!' I yelled inside my car."

But in 1975 he was transferred to the Oakland Public Library's PR staff, and soon after that his position was de-funded. He used his time to set up a series of seminars on media publicity and graphic design which were co-sponsored by the University of California from one end of the state to the other.

HOMESICK FOR NEW YORK

And once again, he tried his hand at writing fiction. He had short stories published in Midstream, Response, and Jewish Braille Review. And still another of his short stories won an award in a Writers Digest short story contest. The story that appeared in Midstream has been incorporated into Saying No to Naked Women, although in modified form.

But his efforts at writing a novel were frustrating. "I wrote about 100 pages of a novel based on my Arkansas summer. But I got stuck at a certain point. I didn't understand why at the time, but now I know that I had not worked out some of the personal issues involved, and I still wasn't willing to study the structure of novels," Yale says. Nonetheless, he had enough material to give readings from his works at Claremont College, UCLA, San Francisco State College, and the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, among others. He also found a literary agent, and wrote a proposal for a book on media publicity.

In 1979, Yale realized he was homesick for his hometown, so with a contract to write The Publicity Handbook in hand, he moved back to New York. "I found a studio apartment in Sunnyside, just 15 minutes from Manhattan. One main room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a 36 foot long hallway ideal for pacing back and forth.

"At that time, there were only one or two media publicity how-to books for non-professionals - and they were really mediocre. So I took my admittedly limited experience, and mixed it with material from telephone interviews with almost 100 journalists and PR people. I worked at it full time, 6 days a week. It took a year; I spent my advance, borrowed money from friends, and ran up credit card bills that took several years to pay down."

But the result was a classic. The Publicity Handbook was a Fortune Book Club selection, and with 4 revisions, it's still in print 26 years later.

NEW FREELANCER LANDS BIG CLIENT

Once the book was finished, Yale opened a freelance writing practice, working out of an 8 foot by 10 foot office on lower Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. "If I leaned to the left, and craned my neck a bit, I could see a corner of Madison Square Park out my window," Yale says. "The office was essential because my apartment was so tiny, and in those days clients considered home-based businesses to be suspect."

He quickly built a roster of clients, including Canon Computers, BMW, and AT&T. sometimes working with them directly, and sometimes through their advertising agencies. "The AT&T account was a turning point for me. They brought me in to market management seminars by direct mail. It was a huge amount of work, and I had to hire an assistant and other freelancers. But the biggest discovery was that I loved direct mail marketing more than any other type of writing. And I've been a direct marketer ever since," Yale says.

Yale continued to freelance, but over the years he took several client-side jobs, including Senior Copywriter at Publishers Clearing House and Creative Director at Lindenwold Fine Jewelers. "I learned a lot from these jobs," Yale says, "from writing strong sales copy to developing graphic designs that sell the goods. I learned how the cost of goods is related to the selling price, how orders are packed and shipped, and how merchandise is sourced and selected."

After several client-side jobs, Yale decided to return to full-time freelancing. But despite developing a wildly successful international freelance practice, with clients on 3 continents, Yale was not satisfied.

IT CAME OUT WAY TOO LONG

"Every so often, I'd go out to the garage, where I kept the Arkansas journal and the 100-page novel attempt. I'd open the beat-up gold binder and leaf through it. And then I always put it back and told myself it had to wait until I had the money to tackle it full-time.

"But September 11th changed all that. 'There will never be enough time or money. And I'm not getting any younger.

I have to do it now,' I told myself. I moved the gold binder to an honored space in my office. "I started working on it in stolen time, often late at night after my freelance work was done. For a long time, I didn't tell anybody, not even my family.

"I was determined to tackle my structure problems, so I read a stack of books about plot, characterization, conflict in the novel, and novel structure. I studied fiction-writing with Grace Paley at the University of Massachusetts Juniper Institute and with Joe Caldwell at the 92nd Street YMHA.

"Once I resolved my structure questions, the writing went well. But the first pass was way too long at over 210,000 words. I re-structured, re-wrote, and cut it down to 147,000 words. The whole time I was writing and re-writing I battled the two demons of fear and doubt. Would anyone really want to read it? Was it any good? But I kept on working on it anyway," Yale says.

Now that Saying No to Naked Women is finished, Yale plans to spend much of his time promoting it. And as soon as he has some more time to steal from his freelance practice, he'll start work on his next novel, Ask Me Not This, Little Child if You Love Me.

"I've been carrying this one around in my head over 6 years now, and I'm eager to get started on it. The story takes place in North Minneapolis, it involves people who work at a recreation center, and like Saying No to Naked Women, it is a book filled with hope. I'll be posting excerpts from it as soon as I have them written." Yale says.