Tag Archives: author

Excerpt from Stunted

With graduation party season in full swing, I thought I would share an excerpt from my recently released memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. The excerpt covers the time period after I graduated high school from Rome Free Academy in my hometown of Rome, New York, and prepared to enter my freshman year of college. Warning: Adult content follows.

From Chapter Ten:

I graduated high school in June 1987 as a shy, sexless adolescent unprepared for the social landscape of college life. Decked out in my cap and gown, I stood a half head shorter than my mother and sister as we posed for a picture in our backyard on graduation day.

And here’s a catalog, a list of experiences I failed to check off before finishing high school, departing Rome, and heading to the campus of St. John Fisher College, a small, liberal arts college (now renamed St. John Fisher University) in Pittsford, New York, a suburb of Rochester:

I never went on any one-on-one dates.
I never bought flowers for a girl (except for one Valentine’s Day in elementary school).
I never drove a car to a girl’s house to pick her up and meet her parents—getting their permission to take her out for the night.
I never had a serious girlfriend.
I never put my arm around a girl at an RFA football game or held hands in a darkened movie
theater.
I never kissed a girl on the lips.
No fumbling with bra straps in the backseat of a car or feeling a warm breast while sitting on a couch at a house party.
I never made love in a girl’s bedroom while her parents were out of the house.

And at age eighteen, even if a girl had offered me the opportunity to have sex, I would not have known for sure where to put my penis during intercourse.

My inexperience with the opposite sex weighed on me as I spent my final summer at home. During one weekend in late August, my friend Billy and I went to McDonald’s to hang out in the Uptown area (a section of Rome where teens congregated).

On a warm, humid night, we stood in the deserted parking lot under the glow of the illuminated golden arches, talking with our friend Chad, who had ridden his bike to the area from east Rome. He was leaning on his handlebars, dressed in a white concert T-shirt, and we were talking about me going away to school. I said, “I’m a little nervous. I don’t know how it’s gonna be. I don’t know if I’ll fit in.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it, Franny,” Chad said. “You’ll get your helmet polished by the girls there.”

I had a sense he was referring to blow jobs, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. I gave a good laugh to cover my lack of knowledge, and said, “Thanks, Chad, I hope you’re right.”

From Chapter Eleven:

Although my parents must have sensed my unease about attending college while looking like a fourteen-year-old boy, my father offered me no advice on how to deal with it, and my mother lacked empathy for my situation. She told me to stop being sensitive when other people questioned my age. In conversations with family members, co-workers, and restaurant servers, she would say, “He gets so upset if someone asks him about his age. He has to learn to accept it.” But Mom exhibited compassion through her actions by taking me shopping in New Hartford and buying me sheets, towels, toiletries, and other essentials for college life. She taught me how to do laundry, informing me about the basics of temperature cycles and the importance of separating colors from whites, and she also made sure my financial aid paperwork was submitted on time.

As I made my final preparations before departing Rome for the fall semester in 1987, my sister Lisa allayed my fears with sage advice based on her experience as a student at Hartwick College in Oneonta. When I told her how I knew the other kids would question me because I looked so young for my age, she said, “What you have to realize about college is that everyone has something that they don’t like about themselves, something they want to hide. Some girls are fat. Some guys have acne all over their faces, or they sound effeminate. Everyone has something. You look young for your age, but so what? Don’t think you’re the only one who is different.”

It was exactly what I needed to hear. She also told me, “You’ll be fine once you make a few friends.”

##

If you have read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. Reviews make a big difference for indie authors, helping readers to discover our books. And if you are a blogger or book reviewer and would like a digital ARC to review, please use the contact form to reach out. Thank you!

Standard

Book Release and Giveaway

Today marks the completion of a dream with the publication of my memoir, Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood. To celebrate my publication date, I am running a Goodreads giveaway. It ends on June 1, and I’ll be giving away two signed copies of the book.

I don’t have much experience with signing books, but I have never understood the practice of authors crossing out their printed name when they sign their books. To me it feels like defacing a work of art.

Standard

Silly Little Adventure of Earth

I finished reading Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums and I wanted to share one more passage that stood out to me. In this scene, during a massive going-away party for the character Japhy, held in Berkeley, California, the narrator, Ray Smith (Kerouac), reflects on people and existence:

“Then I suddenly had the most tremendous feeling of the pitifulness of human beings, whatever they were, their faces, pained mouths, personalities, attempts to be gay, little petulances, feelings of loss, their dull and empty witticisms so soon forgotten: Ah, for what? I knew that the sound of silence was everywhere and therefore everything everywhere was silence. Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought was this and that, ain’t this and that at all? I staggered up the hill, greeted by birds, and looked at all the huddled sleeping figures on the floor. Who were all these strange ghosts rooted to the silly little adventure of earth with me? And who was I?”

My battered copy of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac.

Standard

My Books Arrive

My first shipment of books from McFarland & Company arrived yesterday. I’m so glad to see this book become a real thing—not just an idea in my head—because the project took more than 10 years to complete.

“Stunted: A Memoir of Delayed Manhood” is a coming-of-age story about identity and self-acceptance, told through the lens of my journey to adulthood after being diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was 15 years old.

The contains about 40 black-and-white photographs, medical records dating back to 1984, and diary entries from the early 1990s and beyond. It’s also loaded with sports and pop culture references from the ’80s and ’90s (e.g., Doug Flutie and The Cure).

I’m scheduled to give a reading at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 23, at Jervis Public Library in Rome, where, as a youth, I discovered my love of books and was introduced to authors such as John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others. I hope I won’t be so nervous that I ramble and babble.

A certificate for my participation in a summer reading program at Jervis Public Library in Rome in 1976.

Standard

Jenna Finds A Dog

My former Metro Networks’ colleague Terry Rousseau has written a middle-grade novel entitled Jenna Finds A Dog.

Jenna Finds a Dog cover.

I’m looking forward to reading it. In the biography, Terry mentions residing in an isolated village in the New Mexico mountains. And he cracked me up with this line: “His most recent hobby, not by choice, is cutting down the hundreds dead trees on his property with his electric chainsaw thanks to prolonged drought and bark beetles.”

Standard

Praise for Poecabulary

I’m not a fan of the promotional aspect of writing, but I want to share this positive review of Poecabulary because the Reedsy Discovery reviewer, Stephen Dudas, summarized exactly what I was trying to achieve with my wacky experimental book project. Nearly all of the time, I’m tossing words in the dark, hoping they find their way to readers. So it’s nice, and rare, when my stray verbal arrows hit the mark.

Poecabulary front cover.

Some of my favorite pull quotes:.

“Francis DiClemente’s Poecabulary is a stunning example of that now all-too-rare book in our contemporary poetry landscape: a genuine, focused experiment with specific elements of the English language.

“… Poecabulary is fully intended as a collaborative experience (all reading is, of course, but collaboration is at the forefront of this particular collection). To read the collection is to be brought into a creative and intellectual game. What is similar? What is different? What does one word mean to the other? What arguments, stories, commentaries, dreams, songs, etc. might spin out from where these words meet?

“Poecabulary does what any good poetry collection should—it offers itself up as the site of interactive play between a poet’s invitation and a reader’s interpretation.”

—Reviewed by Stephen Dudas, Reedsy Discovery

 

Standard

Poecabulary Book Released

I am excited to announce the publication of my new book, a minimalistic, experimental poetry collection entitled Poecabulary.

Here is the description:

Poecabulary is a minimalist poetry collection that blurs the line between vocabulary and verse. Words appear in unexpected pairings, creating connections that surprise, challenge, and invite reflection. Each combination is a deliberate act of linguistic play, where alliteration, sound, appearance, randomness, rhyme, and meaning collide.

The author explores how similar or opposing words interact, encouraging readers to discover their interpretations and associations. Both a playful exercise and a meditation on language, Poecabulary celebrates the power and flexibility of words.

This collection will resonate with language lovers, poetry enthusiasts, and anyone curious about how words shape meaning. Sample pairings include Autistic/Artistic, Diffident/Different, Lonely/Lovely, Perfection/Perception, and Reject/Respect.

Poecabulary front cover.

The book began with my obsession with vocabulary and discovering connections between word pairings.

As part of my compulsive, lexical behavior, I check four different online dictionaries daily for their “Word of the Day” features:

TheFreeDictionary.com
Dictionary.com
Merriam-Webster.com
WordGenius.com

This project is an example of how the crazy ideas that percolate and fester in my brain are the ones I need to chase, since they are the ones that elevate my creativity and spur risk taking.

Here is the author’s note from the front of the book:

Obsessed with vocabulary, I created this work as wordplay—an exercise to incite imagination and elicit connections in the reader’s mind. I consider the word pairings a hybrid of vocabulary and poetry—which could be labeled as “Poecabulary” or “Voetry.”

Quite honestly, I don’t even know if you can call Poecabulary a book, but I do believe some “word nerd” readers may enjoy it. And it’s a quick read. Although it’s 190 pages long, the word count is less than 650.

I would also love to collaborate with a visual artist who could make large-scale paintings featuring select word pairings from the collection. I could see the text-based works hanging in a gallery space.

Here are a few of my favorite word combinations:

Autistic/Artistic

Diffident/Different

Lonely/Lovely

Perfection/Perception

Reject/Respect

Standard

Oh William!

For habitual cheapskates like me, you can’t beat Little Free Library. Today while out on my run/walk, I picked up a perfect condition hardcover copy of Oh William! by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout (who is also a Syracuse University College of Law alum). The book had been languishing on my Goodreads “want to read” list for years. But now I’ve become the Fred Sanford of books, stalking the different Little Free Library sites in my surrounding area for literary steals. I do contribute some of my “read” books to the drop-off sites (but nowhere near as many volumes as I claim). Happy Sunday reading everyone.

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.

Standard

Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)

I recently finished reading the novel Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster. The work was published in 1905. I won’t give a review or provide a plot summary. You can look that up online or watch the 1991 movie starring Helen Mirren and Helena Bonham Carter.

Here’s an excellent description of the book I found through the Modernism Lab at Yale University.

What I want to share are a couple of excerpts that struck me. The first is from the third-person omniscient point of view (if my high school English reference is correct):

“For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.”

Angel in Asheville, NC. Photo by Francis DiClemente.

In the second quote, the character Philip Herriton is talking to Miss Abbott:

“Miss Abbott, don’t worry over me. Some people are born not to do things. I’m one of them; I never did anything at school or at the Bar. I came out to stop Lilia’s marriage, and it was too late. I came out intending to get the baby, and I shall return an ‘honourable failure.’ I never expect anything to happen now, and so I am never disappointed. You would be surprised to know what my great events are. Going to the theatre yesterday, talking to you now—I don’t suppose I shall ever meet anything greater. I seem fated to pass through the world without colliding with it or moving it—and I’m sure I can’t tell you whether the fate’s good or evil. I don’t die—I don’t fall in love. And if other people die or fall in love, they always do it when I’m just not there. You are quite right; life to me is just a spectacle, which—thank God, and thank Italy, and thank you—is now more beautiful and heartening than it has ever been before.”

Standard

A Small, Good Thing

I am currently reading Raymond Carver: Collected Stories, published by the Library of America, and I wanted to share one story that I found devastating on an emotional level. You don’t have to be a parent to appreciate it, but being one heightens the intensity of the story.

I won’t go into plot summary of the story, other than to say it’s about boy who falls into coma after being struck by a car. Here’s a link to the full text.

Or, if you prefer, here’s an audio version:

Standard