The ground that you sweated and bled into is the ground you should write about. I need to anchor the work in my home ground, which is something I learned from Harry Crews. A lot of my stories are set in the Merrimack Valley. “No wonder you write about this,” he said. He was a young New York guy, grew up on Long Island, and he was taken with the northern Massachusetts rough-around-the-edges humor, the Boston-esque accent and sardonic humor. That was the first time we met in person, other than when I went to NY when he bought the book. It was at the American Legion hall (laughs, remembering) - my rugby friends came, a lot of the teachers and coaches from high school came. Jay Atkinson: He came to Methuen in 2000 for the original book party for Ice Time. (Atkinson’s r emembrance of Crews for The Arts Fuse.)Īrts Fuse: In his foreword to the new edition of Ice Time, Peter Fornatale, remembering first seeing it, as a junior editor at Crown, writes, “I was immediately transfixed by Jay Atkinson’s clean, muscular prose, and I could tell from skimming the first pages that his blue-collar, hockey-obsessed New England town was going to be an exciting storytelling milieu.” I sat down with Atkinson recently to talk about his book Ice Time: A Tale of Fathers, Sons, and Hometown Heroes, newly reissued in a 20 th anniversary edition, and his friendship with his mentor and writing teacher, Harry Crews. A new collection of stories, The Tree Stand, will be published in October by Livingston Press.

Local writer Jay Atkinson is author of eight books, including the bestselling Legends of Winter Hill and the prize-winning Massacre on the Merrimack: Hannah Duston’s Captivity and Revenge in Colonial America. Author Jay Atkinson - he anchors his writing in his home ground, Photo: Paul Bilodeau for the Eagle-Tribune.

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