Meet Senior Columnist Tom Cosentino!

The Author of "The Art of Looking for Trouble" Is Working on His Next Book

I was born on a rainy Monday in Syracuse, New York. Being born in Syracuse you have a fifty-percent chance of being born while there is precipitation. From April to October it’s rain and the rest of the year is snow. I bring this up because the lack of sunshine does have an impact on a person. You either go crazy or develop a good sense of humor. To the best of my knowledge, I’m not (that) crazy.

I am second generation on both sides of my family. My father’s father arrived at Ellis Island in 1903 and went to work for the New York Central Railroad in Syracuse. Then at some point went back to Italy. He arrived again in 1908 with my grandmother following three years later with my Aunt Vera in tow. I mention this because of one unusual fact: my grandfather chose Syracuse twice.

My mother’s family was French, tracing roots back to the 1600s in Quebec. My French grandfather also chose Syracuse. Of course, that wasn’t such a crazy decision because he was moving south.

My father was born in 1924 which meant he turned eighteen in 1942, not a great year to turn eighteen. He was drafted right after he graduated from high school. He fought in the European Theatre, seeing action in major battles across the continent. He liberated concentration camps and never talked about what he did until he was very old.

My parents met after World War II and did something that no one out of the over twenty siblings on both sides did; they had a house built across town in the mostly Jewish neighborhood.

I came along ten years later, right before a sequence of events would dramatically change the neighborhood and my life.

Johnson’s Great Society, the first signs of rust on the Rust Belt, and the building of Interstate 81 through Syracuse, combined together to reshape my neighborhood. Public housing was opened up, immigrants arrived in the city from all over the world, and there was a seismic demographic shift as a result of all of these factors.

Throughout all of this I had the steadying force of a group of friends from grammar through high school. We all still remain friends over fifty years later.

During the recession before I was in high school, my father lost his job and struggled to find something permanent. I had attended Catholic school until my freshman year, where I went to the neighborhood public school. All my friends went to the Catholic high school in a safe suburb. I knew that the public school was not for me the first week when a kid was arrested in my English class. I got a job at a neighborhood grocery store so I could pay for the Catholic high school myself. I started at $2.10 per hour and it took me nearly the entire year to earn enough for the tuition.

Besides my job, I played basketball, baseball and excelled academically. My junior year I had a very kind English teacher, Sister Sylvia. She was getting on in years and because she was a little too trusting, she started the spark that would help me become a writer. We had a heavy load of books to read and report on for her class. When I procrastinated and hadn’t read an actual novel, I made one up. The title, author and plot, were all from my imagination. She never caught on and the rest of the year Sister Sylvia had my made-up books in my reports. 

Through my hard work, I earned a full Army ROTC Scholarship and chose to attend Syracuse University where I majored in Political Science. I also took several English courses and was just a few credits away from a double major in English.

While at Syracuse I met my next group of lifelong friends when I pledged Pi Lambda Phi Fraternity. While in high school I saw the movie Animal House and knew that once in college I would join a fraternity. When I am asked what my fraternity was like I tell people to watch the movie, it wasn’t far off. I still talk to some of those guys on a weekly basis.

After college I went into the army as a Field Artillery Officer. It was a great experience that I didn’t appreciate at the time. I left the army after my obligatory four years of active duty but was called back for the First Gulf War where I spent a year and a half in the reserves.

I met my wife of over thirty years while I was stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. My wife and I were married at Hendrick’s Chapel on the Syracuse University campus. We moved to Atlanta where we lived for ten years. Our daughter was born in Atlanta and when she was two and my wife was pregnant with our son, we moved back to Syracuse.

While in Atlanta, before kids, my wife and I had a Friday night tradition of stopping at the video store and renting three movies for the weekend and ordering a pizza. I was homesick for Central New York and rented Nobody’s Fool starring Paul Newman. It was set in North Bath, New York but it could have been Syracuse or any of the many, once great cities from Albany to Buffalo.

I rewound the credits and waited until I saw what I wanted, “from the Novel by Richard Russo”. I was at Barnes and Noble the next day buying the book. As I read it was obvious that the “other” part of New York had had the same influence on Russo as it had had on me. The closeness to the people, the pain of watching a city decline and the importance of friendship. I saw that spark in Russo that made him write Nobody’s Fool in myself, I knew I could be a writer.

I went to graduate school upon our return to Syracuse, driving a two-hundred-mile roundtrip to the Rochester Institute of Technology for two years, obtaining a Master of Business Administration. I still thought about writing but was too busy and all the other excuses that you can always come up with. After I finished my MBA, I began writing a novel about a young man that returns to Syracuse after World War II. All of his best friends had been killed and he sets out on a journey right before Christmas to visit their families. At his first stop he is embraced by his friend’s family and falls in love with his best friend’s sister. It is a story about forgiveness, love and redemption. It was terrible.

We moved again, to Safety Harbor, Florida. While we were visiting the Safety Harbor Library with the kids, I happened to pick up a calendar of events that had the first meeting of the Safety Harbor Writer’s Group. I knew that I had to go even though I was very scared and unsure of my writing.

At the first meeting I read a chapter from my World War II novel. The feedback was nice, better than I deserved. I read all of the comments and made the changes. I saw how much better the chapter became, but I knew I wasn’t even close to the novel I knew I could write.

I pivoted to another novel about living in Syracuse based on a Russo quote. When asked what his life would have been like if he never left upstate New York he said, “I’m sure there is a ghost version of myself there.”

I began writing another terrible novel that went nowhere. I pivoted again to short stories. A different one for each meeting. This was the right strategy. It forced me to write, I got immediate feedback and my writing improved. I entered a local short story contest and won. I submitted other short stories to Liberty Island Magazine, and they were all accepted for publication. I now had the confidence to write my novel.

Writing The Art of Looking for Trouble was a true pleasure. The characters were part of my experience growing up in Syracuse, which I fictionalized into the city of Genesee. It is a novel about friendship and loyalty. Neighborhood and love. The main character owns a well-established Pub in the formerly Irish section of the city.

Here is a brief description of that novel I finally wrote:

From his post behind the bar at Quinn’s Pub, Mike Lee holds together the Genesee neighborhood where he grew up.  When his friends throw him a surprise 50th birthday party, the festivities are interrupted by ill-advised felons that come to rob his bar with explosive results. Mike knows he must take action to protect his community. He decides to run for mayor of Genesee against a callous incumbent that is running unopposed. Mike and his team of crusaders take on the established order the only way they know how, with determination and a lot of pints. He is thrown into an uproarious world of retribution, espionage, vendettas and eventually into the national spotlight.

I am absolutely amazed at the reception The Art of Looking for Trouble has received. Since publication I have received almost sixty, five-star reviews on Amazon. I have been flooded with emails and messages about how much readers have loved the characters at Quinn’s Pub.

I was honored to have a book signing at the Barnes and Noble in Syracuse where I had a line for the entire two hours and sold all fifty copies I brought and signed about another fifty that people brought in. People turned out that I hadn’t seen in forty years and I met many new friends. Everyone spoke of the strength of the characters and their story of friendship.

I’m far into the first draft of my next novel, The Summer We Almost Painted the House, based on the true story of the summer that my friends and I were paid with a keg of beer per side to paint the house where we all hung out. It will be another cast of characters that will make you laugh and maybe shed an occasional tear.

I hope to engage with everyone who visits here. I’d love to talk to you about writing, life, cooking, how great it is to be Italian or anything else.

Take care, hope all is well.