What is this?

I am Geoffrey Gevalt. I’m in my third life.

In the Early Jurassic Period, I got my first job on a newspaper and for 33 years was a reporter, then an editor and then managing editor. My journalistic travels began in Maine (Lewiston Daily Sun & Portland Press Herald/Express/Sunday Telegram) with later stops in New York City (Institutional Investor Magazine), Baltimore (Associated Press), Boston (Boston Business Journal & Quincy Patriot Ledger), Akron (The Beacon Journal) and finally Burlington, VT, (The Burlington Free Press).

I am lucky. I worked with some great people. In Akron, the paper won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. As a reporter and editor, we won lots of regional and national awards, including the George F. Polk Award for investigative journalism. We changed some laws, sometimes brought humor to people’s lives and put some crooks into prison, too. It was fun. And it saddens me every day that newspapers — and professional media outlets for that matter — have become so inconsequential and so maligned. Support them. Subscribe to them. We must keep them alive.

At my last newspaper job — The Burlington Free Press in northern Vermont — I grew concerned that so many kids in school were learning how to hate writing. So, with a group of writing teachers, we started a weekly feature designed to highlight interesting student writing and showcase different – and better – ways to teach writing.

In 2006, with an unsolicited grant from the Vermont Business Roundtable which shared my concern about student writing, I left journalism and transformed the newspaper feature into an organization: Young Writers Project, a web-centric, nonprofit that helps young people find their voice and confidence, and, oh yes, improve their writing. It is still a site with a one-word rule for behavior: Respect. The organization is still running strong.

I led workshops and teacher trainings in 200 schools, including several inner-city schools in Newark, NJ; trained thousands of teachers to engage students more deeply in writing particularly in digital spaces; and taught 250 teachers in a Master's credit course. In the process, I built upwards of 400 private web spaces used by teachers in their classrooms to foster civility and writing. They were unique. Ahead of the curve.

That was my second life.

Now I write fiction. I recently finished my first novel, Hiram Falls. A lifelong ambition. It took five years. The germ of this novel began more than 20 years ago, but I’ll tell you about that later in The Journal.

It was the Vermont Stage Company that brought the novel to life: it commissioned me to write stories for its annual “Winter Tales” production and these character sketches were so enthusiastically received, I decided to dive deeper and create the novel. So I began with some 3,500 people already familiar with my work — and the town of Hiram Falls.

I am spending the summer trying to find an agent — and a publisher. Conventional publishing is a tricky business these days, so I have a Plan B at the ready — to publish here as a serial and podcast and to also have an audiobook, ebook and paperback. I will let you know the plan in early September.

Regardless, I will begin publishing here this fall The Journal of how I wrote the book which I hope will be entertaining to non-writers and helpful to writers.

Because even The Journal will be filled with stories. Because I am a storyteller. I do it with words and photographs and sound and combinations thereof; big projects and small stories.

I am digitally inclined (think of this: I led the startup of the 13th news website on the Internet in 1995), it seemed logical that Hiram Falls would have a digital presence, a place where you can react and ask questions and tell me what you think — as well as get the book in whatever format you’d like.

I plan to have chats here, informal gatherings as well. And I’m trying to figure out how and where you could leave me some voice messages, because everyone knows that thumb typing is a pain in the ass.

But a word about the book. It is about a small rural town from 1918 to 1974. It’s about secrets and the space between knowing and not-knowing. It has scoundrels and innocents, strong women and, er, a ghost. The characters will draw you in. From those that have read it, comes the observation that the characters stay with you long after you finish.

And another thing. I plan to give 75 percent of any proceeds from this endeavor to three non-profits that I love: Young Writers Project, Vermont Stage Company and Media Factory. At some point, I’m going to switch this to paid in order to raise them more money.

But if you sign up now, you’ll ride for free and I’ll only gently remind you that this book took five years to do, that these days non-profits are struggling to stay alive and vibrant and that nothing good in life is free.

Regardless, I hope you enjoy this. And I hope it moves you to look differently at your neighbor and that it prompts you to leave me word, some reaction, some thing that the book, my writing, has recalled from your own experiences.

Be well.