Feast your eyes on this photo of “Little Fenway” in the backyard of Pat and Beth O’Connor’s house in Essex, Vermont. If this place had been around in 1970, when me and my friends spent our summers playing Wiffle ball about three hours south near Springfield, MA, I may have journeyed north and never left.
The Porch Roof Classic is my 16-episode “podcast-novel” currently running on most podcast networks. It’s a nostalgic, PG-13 coming-of-age yarn geared for many ages, but especially for the guys in that photograph: longtime baseball fans who yearn for the days before steroids, social media, endless strikeouts and Rob Manfred.
My original intent was to lure an agent and publisher to get the novel out to the masses, but with the current book market—particularly for young adult fiction—heavily filled with female and “underrepresented voices”, it was going to be a long, brutal search. So then I thought: With our country in such a dark, dysfunctional place these days, why not do the novel first as a serialized fiction podcast, a quick and easy escape to the more innocent summer of 1970, when overnight camp, mosquitoes, the town bully, budding romance and Wiffle ball games were everything? Hell, I had some acting experience in high school and it would be fun to do all the voices. Plus building an audio audience for it might even help sell the book down the road.
A few listeners have asked me if some of the bigger events in the story actually happened. Some did, but many did not, and the characters, inspired by people from my past, are largely reworked creations. My aim was to capture the humid, languid days of a Western Massachusetts suburb in the year after Woodstock. The political and cultural climates may be entirely different now, but with narrator Joey Tosh recounting his summer, the dreams, laughs, and anxieties of being fourteen shine through as universal truths.
Hopefully you can give The Porch Roof Classic a listen. Beginning this week, new episodes will appear on Wednesdays and Fridays at the links below, and other places.
Jeff Polman 