Sandy Gingras’ newest book, I Love You Long Beach Island, which Ray Fisk of Down The Shore Publishing describes as a “prose-poem-prayer with thoughts and feelings stripped down to the most deeply felt elements,” is the epitome of simply gorgeous. The story is a beautiful tribute to some of LBI’s best-loved qualities, with whimsical hand-drawings by the author.
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| Photo by Jack ReynoldsThe author hosts a signing at How to Live for another one of her many books. |
“Writing this book was very personal for me. But all of my books are personal,” said Gingras, who has also published short stories, poetry, creative nonfiction and novels. “This one is special, though, because LBI is my home. I felt like this book needed to be written. Love needs to be expressed.”
Now a local resident and business owner, Gingras had been visiting the Island since she was just 1 year old. Growing up, she spent her summers with her parents in a rented cottage in Holgate.
“I have a long history here,” she said. “The best parts of my childhood took place here. I think the best parts of me are the LBI parts, the parts born of simplicity and freedom and wild out-to-sea-ness.”
The local author, best known for her charming How to Live gift book series and Beach Haven and Surf City stores, created her latest book in response to Superstorm Sandy. Like many others, Gingras and her family were hard-hit by the hurricane. After riding it out at The Engleside Inn in Beach Haven, and realizing “how fragile it all was, how lucky we were that the eye passed over us, how we all could have easily died, how the whole Island could have been swept away,” she recounted, she and her family fled to Lawrenceville to stay with relatives.
“I started writing then because, when I need to make sense of things, I write,” she said. “I started writing a letter to Long Beach Island, and ‘my old friend’ was the address. The minute I wrote that phrase, I knew exactly what I wanted to write. It all just flowed out of me. And it was a love letter.
“My writing process can best be described as ‘turning myself inside out,’” she added. “I just write what I need to write to make sense of my world, and I doodle all the pictures to accompany the words. It is what I do most naturally.”
After she returned to the Island, the story, which Gingras titled “Love Song for Long Beach Island,” was painted on a piece of plywood and propped up in the window of her emptied-out Beach Haven store, next to bottles of mold spray.
“People came to read it and have their pictures taken next to it. It struck a chord with people,” she said.
The design was made into a card and print, which she sold in her stores. All the proceeds were donated to victims of the storm. Then, one day, she looked at the design and thought, “This could be a book, and I know just the person to publish it,” she remembered.
Fisk also published Gingras’ first book, How To Live on an Island, and seven more as well as a calendar all related to the shore, before the prolific author moved on to various national publishers. The two met “long ago,” when Gingras was working in a used-book store in Surf City.
“We had a great run ... but the storm brought her focus back to LBI, and I was happy when she re-connected last summer and shared her enthusiasm for a heartfelt, poetic, post-Superstorm Sandy book about our Island and everything we almost lost in the storm,” said Fisk. “So, it’s full circle: back home to LBI and back home to her first publisher.
“Sandy’s work shines, even rough works-in-progress,” said Fisk. “She’s also (unlike many) open to tough criticism and hard edits. Her talent makes what seem like very simple books more than just that. She writes and re-writes and scraps ideas and thinks about the value of each sentence and word, as a poet does.”
Although Gingras had never thought of herself as a creative person, she said, her writing began to blossom after she attended her first writing course through the Southern Regional Adult School, when she was 30 years old. She later became a student of Stephen Dunn (one of this writer’s favorite poets), who wrote a short review for another one of her gift books, Reasons To Be Happy At the Beach, which Fisk published not long after Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
I Love You Long Beach Island is Gingras’ 26th book.
“I’m blessed that other people care to read it, and that it resonates with them,” she said. “I’ve always felt alone in life, on the outside of things, and having people read my books always surprised me – and made me feel less alone. It still does. I’m always touched when people come in my stores or write to me and tell me what my books have meant to them. I feel like they connect with me somehow. And that connection is precious to me.”
Although the story was inspired by Sandy, and the initial draft of the book had a long afterword about the storm, Gingras and Fisk decided they did not want it to be a “storm book.”
“We felt like it was more timeless than that, and we felt that the storm story, although interesting, was not the essence of the book,” Gingras explained. “We wanted it to just stand alone as a love story.
“I hope people feel that I captured the essence of LBI even though I couldn’t get all the sweet individual places and connect with everyone’s personal experiences of the Island,” she added. “I hope they feel that I ‘got’ the Island – the soul of the place, and I hope they recognize themselves in it. Because it’s for all of us.”
Gingras will host a book signing at the Surf City How to Live store, located at 8 North Long Beach Blvd., next to How You Brewin', on Friday, Aug. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m. A similar event will take place the following Friday, Aug. 14, from 5 to 7 p.m., at the Beach Haven How to Live store, located at 7 South Bay Ave., next to Murphy’s Market. Refreshments and live music will be provided.
— Kelley Anne Essinger
This article was published in The SandPaper.
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