Johnstown native to speak at Classic Elements on her book 'Take What You Need'

Reporter

Johnstown native Idra Novey will be doing a reading and discussion of her latest novel "Take What You Need" at 5:30 p.m. Aug. 7 at Classic Elements, 345 Main St., downtown Johnstown.

JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – A Johnstown native and author is coming back to the area to share her latest novel with the community that helped inspire it.

Idra Novey will be doing a reading and discussion of “Take What You Need” at 5:30 p.m. Monday at Classic Elements, 345 Main St., downtown Johnstown.

The Brooklyn, New York, resident said the fictitious town in the novel is a combination of several regional towns where she, her mother and grandmother grew up and where family still resides.

“I have lots of deep connections and it felt like something I hadn’t written about,” Novey said. “As I got older and raising children somewhere else, I started thinking more about how their childhood differs so much from my own. I saw how the people where I live now talk about rural Appalachia and how people in Appalachia talk about where I live now that, in both contexts, people were saying things in ways that weren’t really true to how I’ve lived it. I wanted to write a novel about the rural-urban divide in this country and how it’s not the way forward to be sort of deepening it instead of trying to create art that addresses it.”

Set in the Allegheny Mountains, “Take What You Need” traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood.

In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean or how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind.

What Leah discovers is staggering – Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history.

There’s also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.

Novey said during the writing process, she reconnected with Norman Ed, a Johnstown artist and educator.

“I had an interest in welding and he works with discards, and I wanted to write about a woman who takes scrap metal and transforms it into art,” she said. “I did some work with him and I was deeply influenced in the art that’s in the novel by Norm Ed’s sculptures, which are brilliant.

“It inspired me to figure out my own language for a woman artist from the region.”

Ed will be joining Novey at Classic Elements to discuss his artistic process.

In addition, Novey said Johnstown residents Helen Golubic, Rosemary Pawlowski, Aletha Jones, Dan Neville and Mary Ed also lent their artistic expertise to the novel.

“My conversations with them really deepened the things that I wanted to write about in a way that I felt hasn’t been written about as complexly as it needs to be,” she said.

Signed copies of “Take What You Need” will be available for purchase at Classic Elements.

“When you create a work of art it’s with an audiences in mind, and in a way, I think the audience I had in mind were the people who are making art happen in Appalachia,” Novey said.

“Take What You Need” was chosen for CBS Talk Pittsburgh’s Book Club and featured on ReadAppalachia.

The novel also was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and recently named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 so far.

Novey has written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic and The New York Times, and she teaches at Princeton University.

For more information on Novey, visit www.idranovey.com.

Kelly Urban is a reporter for The Tribune-Democrat. She can be reached at 814-532-5073. Follow her on Twitter @KellyUrban25.

Reporter

Johnstown Magazine is a positive and forward-thinking monthly publication for the people of our region.

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular commented articles.