Charles blackwell

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due to an earlier incident

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is the true story, with embellishments (and outright fabrications), of a middle-aged man (the author, but exaggerated) who, on a holiday in New York City, finds himself heading uptown on the IRT Broadway-Seventh Avenue line. He is going to the opera. He is wearing a cape. (Not really with the cape.) Somewhere between Times Square-42nd Street and 66th Street-Lincoln Center the middle-aged man looks up and notices an ad for an alternative teacher certification program called the New York City Teaching Fellows. This is where his troubles begin.

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He applies to the program, gets accepted, moves to New York, and for the next four years has a fairly harrowing (but often funny, sometimes sad, mostly bittersweet) experience teaching English Language Arts at an officially-designated “school in need of improvement," located uptown in Inwood, located way uptown in Inwood...

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Praise for  DUE TO AN EARLIER INCIDENT

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“Funny and heartbreaking novel/memoir/musing/rant/romp...a picaresque journey through the maze of the narrator’s brain. Almost every page is a detour into new territory, whether a closet full of clothing options catalogued with hilarious precision or a rant on the moral and intellectual disgrace of the American educational system. The thread propelling us through the maze is the singularity and erudition, the rage and hilarity of the narrator’s voice—a happy-go-lucky rhythm imposed on chronic dismay. And there is plot, too, having to do with a failed attempt to achieve meaning and heroism as a New York City schoolteacher; the narrator’s ill-begotten escape from Wisconsin, where the story begins and ends, is a kind of zany and baroque parody of Nick Carraway’s loop through New York from and back to Minnesota. Toward the beginning of the book, the narrator describes the way he wanted to write, ‘I wanted it funny, but I wanted some heartbreak in it too, like in François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player.’ Fortunately for the reader, he got what he wanted.”   —ADA W. LONG    

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“Self-effacing, challenging at times, erudite...funny, sad, and very, very genuine. For those of us who live with self-doubt it is worth the read to hear from someone who is willing to say out loud what many only quietly think.”   —LEE WILLBANKS  

 

“The authorial voice is so distinct, so different from anything I have ever read before—and I mean that in the best possible way. The word play is overdone, overwrought, and overthought in such a way as to be spellbinding. The handling of time and pacing of the story is masterful. The way the author lays bare his own vulnerabilities and mercilessly skewers them until he himself is roasted to a crisp is breathtaking. But he saves the best, most deliciously exquisite criticism for the various dysfunctional systems he encounters along his life’s path. The U.S. education system comes in for some particularly vicious (and well-deserved) lambasting, but there is plenty of derision to go around.”   —JULIE CAPELL    

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