RIO GRANDE — “I realized if I’m gonna do it, I gotta do it now,” Eugene DeGeorge said about the moment he knew he couldn’t put off publishing his work any longer.
He had just left northern New Jersey, moving to Rio Grande with his wife after 17 years of battling cancer.
“Once I got down here, something clicked,” he said.
That something was a lifelong desire to tell stories, describe the world, even create poetry — all of which he had spent years stuffing down to do what was expected and practical.
“Let’s go back,” Eugene said, beginning to talk about his life like it was one of his short novels. “I was an English major in college” — Montclair State — “my family were all based up there.”
DeGeorge was born in 1953 in Belleville, a small city perched in the hills between Newark and the Passaic River, home to the largest collection of cherry trees in the country and ringed by iron, stone and steel.
“My family were all in construction, they had buildings all around up there,” he said.
So he did the obvious thing: after graduating in 1975, he sent a mountain of story proposals to the New Yorker and the Atlantic, and when they never ran a single piece of his, he took a job as a property manager so he could support himself.
So far, this short novel appears to explore themes like the American Dream and those years in the mid to late 20th century when a man could still expect to find stability but rebelled against it, longing for the artistic life even as he married and became a father.
But real life doesn’t always behave like novels, so a rather large plot twist arrived in 1999: Eugene was diagnosed with cancer.
“Sarah was still a young girl,” he said of his daughter. “And I had two months of radiation, which really screwed me up.”
DeGeorge’s wife, Susan, was a nurse, and she kept the family going while Eugene worked to recover from both prostate cancer and the drugs to fight it.
Too weakened to continue commuting to Belleville every day (the family was living near Hackettstown), DeGeorge threw himself into volunteer work near their home: Meals on Wheels and the local hospital, trying to spend what doctors predicted would be his last days doing good for others.
And then … he kept on going. Year after year. Well past the five years his doctors had given him. Tentatively at first, he went back to his first love: writing.
DeGeorge took a job as a freelance writer for the Warren Reporter, a newspaper in Warren County. As fun as the assignments of a small-town reporter are, they didn’t scratch the itch entirely.
He worked quietly on stories and poems that meant something to him, finishing a short novel but never showing it to anyone. Years passed, retirement loomed and Eugene and Susan relocated to the shore, as the northerners call it, moving to Rio Grande in 2016.
“I’m a Jersey boy, born and bred,” DeGeorge said. “I’ll be buried here, too.”
He wasn’t prepared for the effect the move would have on him, or the freedom actual retirement granted.
“I had no job to worry about, one book written but not published.”
Of course, Eugene did what used to work: he sent his manuscript to publishers. There were no bites.
“The year we moved down here permanently, I read about digital publishing. I wasn’t feeling well, and the doctor said the cancer was spreading. I published ‘Reaching the Plateau’ myself in 2016. Then they told me I had stage 4 cancer. I started writing again. I figured as long as they keep me going, I’ll keep writing.”
Since then, DeGeorge has published three more books, all of poetry. He is currently working on another short novel.
“I love short novels; they get to the point. My novel is about the length of Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ about 75 to 80 pages. The poetry books are a little shorter than that. I was inspired by Steinbeck — I’ve always liked the classics. In poetry, I’ve been inspired by Bob Dylan, Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost … My next book is inspired by the Spoon River Anthology.”
He hopes to have his next book out next year, and immediately after that, another book of poetry.
Writing isn’t his only creative outlet; he also plays guitar and performs at open mic nights at Cold Spring Brewery or End of the Road Theater, when his arthritis allows it.
But the late start gets to him. “They start at 9 or 10,” he says, “I want to be in bed by then!”
Eugene sees his life as a series of fresh starts.
“I was a professional volunteer for a while, then freelancer, then I thought, ‘well, I always wanted to play guitar,’ so I did that. Then I got to thinking about how I always wanted to write. Digital publishing made that possible.”
“You know, you’ve always got to reinvent yourself or you’re just going in circles,” DeGeorge says. “It’s like Dylan said: if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy dying. I think that’s a good line to follow, one of my bits and pieces of philosophy.”
He boasts he had help, albeit from an unexpected quarter: his daughter Sarah, now a grown woman and also a writer, has her own publicity firm.
Thanks to her efforts at publicizing her father’s book, Eugene has enjoyed a certain amount of local fame and the thrill of being a published author.
“I’ve done some readings at the Cape May County Library,” he said. “And they’ve got my books in there. So I’m in the Dewey Decimal System!” He starts laughing. “And every once in a while, I get a $5 check from Amazon.”
Don’t worry that the fame has gone to DeGeorge’s head: he’s got plenty of practical advice for writers afraid to take the plunge.
“If I only knew back then what I know now,” he said, “but the first step is to get everything together, that gets the ball rolling. You know, I’m not gonna write this just to stuff it in a drawer, so take it out and see where it takes you. A certain theme might appear.”
He adds: “I can’t paint or sketch, but I can write. You’ve got to — to keep yourself going, you’ve got to create.”
All four of Eugene DeGeorge’s books are available on his website, EugeneJDeGeorge.com, and on Amazon. He was also recently featured in a compilation of stories about parenting called “The Art of Parenting Your Own Way,” which just came out in October and features the work of 10 authors. He continues to write at his home in Rio Grande with his wife and their cats, defying the odds with art.
By VICTORIA RECTOR/For the Star and Wave
