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On Saint Ronan Street
Romantic Affair in a New England College Town
Written by a young U.S. soldier stationed in Cold War Germany: Basis for The Bells of Notre Dame (2017)
 A Young Poet and His Angel in a New England College Town:
This is a nostalgic story written by nights in a Hitler-era barracks now a U.S. Army headquarters in Rheinland Pfalz (Panzerkaserne), FRG. The story still stands as written, but in 2017 morphed into a separatge, new Paris-based novel (also of a romantic affair or affaire) between a starving young poet and a beautiful, lonely faculty wife.
Inspirations included best-selling
New England author John Updike
Coming Of Age Novel. This romantic story—bold and sensual, honest and raw—tells of the passionate love affair between a 23-year-old idealistic, talented poet and a beautiful, neglected young married woman in a New England college town set in 1973. Written by a young soldier in 1976 Cold War West Germany and forgotten for forty years.
"It glows for me as fresh today as when I was stationed in Europe. I composed it in Paris and Heidelberg and other European cities, where I traveled in my old orange VW as a single, adventuresome young man.
Like many soldiers far from home, I was having the time of my life but didn't know it. I was homesick, and spent many evenings going back to our headquarters in an old Hitler-era Kaserne or barracks to lose myself in writing poetry and fiction.
This novel was a nostalgic, melancholy, but passionate retrospection to the New England college town where I grew up. It's fiction—but who knows what tendrils of truth, remembrance, and long ago loves sprang up in the soil of imagination.
The story waited forty years, gathering dust, and is finally (2019) in print along with its companion volume (Cymbalist Poems). It is bursting into blossom, a fine wine uncorked after decades.
Along with its companion volume Cymbalist Poems, the two books have been reunited (twins separated at birth) in the double book titled 27duet. The poems compiled in 1976 represent the natural ending of my lyrical phase as a poet and my transition totally into writing prose. I was a professional author and summer interne newspaper reporter at 17, and a published poet by 18. This is New Adult (20s) long before today's marketing category was dreamed up: fresh, artful, raw, emotionally honest.
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