Author: SteveBernsteinAuthor.com

I am a writer because of Wolf. I fell in love with Wolf in 1968 when I was fourteen. That dog saved my life, but I couldn’t save his.

Twenty-five years later, in 1994, even though it was still hard to think about how he was taken from me, I had to write his story. His story was my story.

The next thing I knew, I was in Office Max buying a Brother WP-1400 D word processor, ready to write our story.  “Wolf” is the first story I wrote. “Wolf” is the first story of my memoir, Stories from the Stoop.

In 1994, at the age of 40, I finally told myself the story of Wolf. I liberated myself from my childhood, a childhood that for a long time I didn’t want to remember.  The first person I shared the story with was my sister, Amy. “Wow Steve, who knew you could write!” Next she said, “This is an important story. What are you going to do with it?” What I did was I went back to Office Max, again, and made fifty copies.

Since my mid-twenties I have been helping at-risk teens become successful at life. That is my mission, my joyful mission.  As I began to share “Wolf” with my teens, a funny thing happened. “Wolf” was an invitation for them to open up and tell their stories. And most often, these were some really tough stories. In opening up, young people were able to free up, as I did. Best of all, they listened to each other’s stories, with empathy and compassion.

“Wolf” didn’t make me a writer. That happened another twenty years later in 2014 when I noticed a classified ad about a local writing group. I clipped the ad and put it on the fridge. There it sat for two months until I woke up one day and said to myself, “Today’s the day.”  I showed up at that group once a week. I wrote six other stories about growing up in the Bronx in the 1960’s. A year later I announced as much to myself as to my writer friends, “I’m writing a book.” A year after that I published Stories from the Stoop.

Writing “Wolf” showed me the way to freedom; writing my memoir set me free.

Today, I call myself a writer.

I’m happy to announce that I have been chosen as Author of the Month by the Northampton Senior Center where I will be doing a reading. I’ve attached an article introducing my memoir, Stories from the Stoop, and announcing the reading.

Saturday, Sept. 21^st, 2:00 to 4:00 PM, Write Angles Flash Memoir Reading, Forbes Library, 20 West Street, Northampton, MA I’ll be reading a flash excerpt of “Order on the Court,” from Stories from the Stoop. The story describes an early evening on April 4th, 1968. I was shooting hoops on a basketball court at a Bronx housing project when Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. As usual, I was the only white kid on the court.

Tuesday, Sept. 24^th, 1:00 to 2:00 PM, Author of the Month Reading, Northampton Senior Center, 67 Conz Street, Northampton, MA I’ll be reading “Wolf,” the opening story from Stories from the Stoop, about a dog who saved my life but I couldn’t save Wolf’s life.

Today is the day that for the last 18 years I slow down and remember my best friend Joe. I remember our childhood. I remember how he never gave up on me through all my twists and turns, even when I didn’t show up for our friendship like he always did. 

And then I remember Ground Zero. That night, a week after the planes, when I was allowed to go on the site because I was family.

The eerie desolation, the smoke, the building exo-skeletons leaning and just hanging on to themselves, the gas masks, the bright lights, the haze, the workers scurrying around, the giant equipment–cranes and bulldozers. Every time they chipped away at debris, balls of fire erupted. 

I remember his cop buddy pointing to where Joe was last seen. I climbed up the seven stories of smoky debris, stopped, looked around, panting through my gas mask. I felt like I was on a different planet. 

And then I prayed.