PORTSMOUTH — “I’m not the only weirdo from eighth grade who feels alone in my experience. I felt the same way as a kid as you do,” Ethan Gilsdorf told a group of eighth-graders in Jim Murray’s class at Portsmouth Middle School last Friday.

Gilsdorf, the author of “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms,” was one of more than a dozen writers who took part in the school’s All-Day Audible with Authors event, which allows students to engage with those people who are usually known to readers only from a book jacket.

“We have 600 students here and this year we have 13 authors, and most of them are doing multiple sessions,” said literacy coach Tanin Longway. “It was made possible due to a grant from the Portsmouth Public Education Foundation, the Portsmouth Prevention Coalition, and the PTO.”

The annual event was a popular one at the school for three years before getting derailed by COVID in March 2020. Friday marked its triumphant return, and appropriately its theme focused on how writing can help improve a person’s overall wellness. 

For Gilsdorf and some other authors, putting your thoughts down on paper — whether it’s in a private journal or something to be shared with others — is a cathartic exercise than can help one process their feelings.

“You may have a great relationship with your parents, or you may not,” he told students. “But writing that story and sharing it makes you feel more empowered, and I think that’s why we read; you want to feel connected with somebody else and not feel alone.”

He read the prologue to his “Fantasy Geeks” book, which he described as a story about when he went down a “good rabbit hole” of fantasy and science fiction. The prologue is called “The Monster,” but it’s not about what you’d probably imagine.

“This is a true story about my life — not fiction. This is about when I was 12 in the summer of 1979.”

He writes about the “kitchen dragon” that confused and scared him and his siblings — a monster they tried to avoid. “She hobbles around like an extra in a horror movies,” he wrote. “Her left arm is bent at the elbow, stuck fast at a right angle.”

Surprise revelation

It turns out the “monster” was none other than his mom, Sara, who suffered a brain aneurysm at the age of 38 and was never the same. Gilsdorf wrote about how “the kitchen monster” replaced his mom after she returned home from nine months in the hospital. Instead of taking care of the kids, they had to care for her. Dad was out of the picture.

“She never drove again, she never had a job again, she never worked,” Gilsdorf said, adding his mother lived 19 more years before dying in a nursing home at the age of 57.

He then asked students what they thought. “It’s scary because she’s not what she used to be,” one boy said.

Another student said Gilsdorf must have written the story to help himself heal.

“Bingo — you get an A-plus,” he told the student. “That’s why I write — for connection, for personal reasons. I try to make them dramatic and immersive as I can.”

Students then took part in a short writing exercise in which they shared something troubling from their own lives — and what they learned from it. “I want you to think about a difficult experience you had — when you felt scared, when you felt alone, when you felt the world was falling apart. It’s all for you and you alone; you don’t have to share this,” he said.

Afterwards he urged students to keep writing about their experiences. “You just vomit it out. It doesn’t matter what it looks like on the page. You can always change it.”

Homicidal mermaids

Over in Sara Straube’s seventh-grade class, Heather Rigney — “author, artist, and underwater fire-breather,” as her bio says — talked to students about her Amazon bestseller “The Merrow Triology.” 

Rigney explained that her motivation to become an author was partly fueled by sibling rivalry. “One day I was in the car with my younger brother. I said, ‘I’m going to write a book someday,’ and he said, ‘You’re never going to write a book,’” she recalled.

When her dream became reality years later, she rubbed it in her brother’s face. “Spite is a great motivator in writing a book,” Rigney said.

The author said she’s always been drawn to dark subjects. “My home looks like a funeral parlor. I like taxidermy and I like dead things,” she said. “As a kid I was fascinated with Grimms’ Fairy Tales because they’re super dark and good cautionary tales.”

Not surprisingly, the first book of her Merrow Trilogy, “Waking the Merrow,” depicts an alternate history of both modern and colonial Pawtuxet Village (where she lives) featuring homicidal mermaids, a functioning alcoholic funeral director/mother, and a dark sense of humor. She even pulls the 1772 burning of the HMS Gaspee into the story. Rigney acknowledges she wrote the trilogy for adults, not children.

Now she’s working on a zombie book, which will feature a storyline about a zombie apocalypse on a fictional island off the coast of Rhode Island where the government has been conducting secret experiments. “It’s complete; I just need to clean it up,” she said.

Rigney shared some of her favorite literary devices, such as the unreliable narrator. “What if the stuff you read was written by a killer? That gives you an entirely different perspective,” she said.

She also reminded students of a tried-and-true maxim. “Everything has a beginning, middle, and an end. Yeah, duh,” she said. “But every sentence and paragraph also has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Whenever you get stuck, remind yourself what the beginning, middle and the end was. It helps tell you where you are going.”

Besides Rigney and Gilsdorf, the other authors who participated in last week’s event — either in person or virtually — were Sarah Haley, Tina Crane, Ben DeCastro, Gary Ghislain, Katy Hunt, Steven Krasner, Greg Lato, Alfred Martino, Sibylla Nash, Mike Squatrito, and Youme.