Kevin St. Jarre’s new book, Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle has nothing to do with any of those things. It is the story of Tom Tibbets, who takes a job at a small weekly newspaper in the fictional town of Portage, N.H. He moves into an apartment in the old Cooper Building, where the residents form a kaleidoscope of the odd, interesting and bizarre.
“One believes in aliens, another is a pothead philosopher, while still others play with illegal explosives for fun,” said St. Jarre. That is just a few of the eccentric characters the reader meets in this amusing tale of Tom’s self-discovery and an awareness of what is truly important in life.
St. Jarre wrote much of this book sitting near the windows of the Chase Street Market in Plymouth.
“I lived for a while in Plymouth, where I basically wrote this book,” said St. Jarre. “My favorite time to write is between 5:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. I also love to write outside with my laptop, but a small sandwich shop is also ideal, like sitting at the high tops in Chase Street Market.”
St. Jarre believes some of his inspiration for Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle came as a result of being the new guy on the block. He had recently moved to Plymouth.
“I knew only a few people, so that feeling of being a newcomer played into it,” he said. “I had just finished an as-yet-unpublished historical novel, and wanted to break out into a modern story that was more about emotional growth, and questioning what society finds important,” St. Jarre said.
The author began his writing career as a young lad in 1974.
“I sold my first book to my dad for 10 cents,” he reminisced. It wasn’t until 2004 that he actually published his first novel under a pen name. He has three original military action thrillers to his credit, which he wrote them for Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin. The first was titled Night Stalkers, followed by Night Stalkers: Coercion and Night Stalkers: Homefront. Again, he used a pen name, Michael Hawke.
“I was never a reader of those types of novels, and didn’t really want to be known as a military thriller writer,” said St. Jarre. “But I served in Desert Storm, and my agent at the time asked me if I’d be interested in writing a series like that, using a pen name, so I took on the challenge.” He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a short story, which appeared this fall in Solstice Literary Magazine.
When not writing, St. Jarre keeps busy with travel, hiking, oil painting, and sports. He also likes to fish.
“Before the pandemic, I tried to find time to travel alone somewhere to write,” he said. “One summer, I spent a couple weeks in Prague, and in 2019, I spent a week in Lisbon, Portugal.” Even though he doesn’t speak Portuguese, had never been to Lisbon, and knew no one, he found the experience to be perfect. “I rented myself a small apartment with a view of the rooftops, did a bit of sightseeing, and worked on the novel in progress,” he said. “It’s fun learning to get around and go to market, etc. I also did some sketches of a small, nearby park.”
St. Jarre now lives in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and is a member of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.