Tag: helen cox

The Pearl Diner, Pearl Street NYC

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Extract from my journal November 2016

I remember my last day in New York. It was spent managing a familiar but unwelcome churn in my stomach. The pain that always pinched whenever I thought about leaving the city behind. Though it was late November, the skies were endlessly blue so I’d spent the day wandering the East River Promenade. I’m always at my easiest beside a river, and while walking by the East River you wouldn’t guess you were on the periphery of a glitzy metropolis swarming with some 1.6 million residents, and who knows how many thousands of tourists. There’s an unexpected stillness there and all the honking and rumbling and screeching of daily New York life seems to be happening in some other universe.

I’ve been in love with the rough and the smooth of New York City for as long as I can remember. It’s inexplicable, really. I was born and raised in Yorkshire and can count on one hand the number of times I’ve visited the place. But for whatever reason, I just feel at home there and am always scrabbling around, trying to find ways and means of going back.

My last excuse for crossing the Atlantic was to research the setting of my Starlight Diner books. I saved for a year to be able to make the trip. I’d written the first draft of Starlight in New York but I didn’t have a book contract when I reserved the flights. Consequently, my family were convinced my ‘research trip’ was just an excuse to gallivant around America for a few weeks eating more cheesecake than was proper.

And I’ll admit, cheesecake wasn’t in short supply.

I visited more than my fair share of diners on that trip and, following my river-side walk, my final few hours in Manhattan were spent in The Pearl Street Diner, an eatery not far from the tip of the island.

Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree played out over the speaker as I walked in. Festive music had followed me from the East Coast to the Mid-West since my plane had touched down in October, such is the American love for the holidays.

Inside the restaurant, the silver-backed seating was upholstered in blue pvc and ‘fresh baked cookies’ were piled up along the counter.  I’d been to so many diners by that point I didn’t even pause for instruction from the waiting staff. I just walked up to the counter and dropped down into one of the high stools.

‘It’s cold outside,’ the waiter said to me.

I gave him a wry smile. ‘I just came from Chicago.’

The waiter almost snapped himself in half with laughing. Chicago wasn’t exactly known for being clement at this time of year and in the few days I’d spent there the whole city had been lost in a merciless blizzard.

‘That is…’ the waiter managed to reduce his hysterics to a chuckle. ‘That is a little different.’

I ordered a Diet Coke and watched him work, notebook and pen in hand. He knew what every customer wanted before they even ordered but one regular surprised him. Changing her usual cream cheese and tomato bagel to an omelette and reveling in the opportunity to take him off guard.

Watching him go about his day to day routine, I grappled once again with the same question in my head: why was saying goodbye to the city so difficult every time I had to leave? Why couldn’t I bear the thought of New York once again fading away; falling away from me as my plane took off?

In the four weeks prior, I’d flown three and half thousand miles with nothing more to get by on than the cash I had in my pocket. I’d taken buses and trains out to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and back again to better understand the places my characters hailed from. I’d been raved at by random strangers on the subway late at night, I’d chatted merrily to a young woman on the Greyhound bus service who was traveling to see her boyfriend on his first day out of jail and narrowly dodged a confrontation with a gang in a Cleveland parking lot. I’d done all this because I believed in the stories I was writing.

And so, sitting there in the Pearl Street Diner during the final days of November 2015 I decided to keep writing my stories with or without a book contract. My plane home beckoned and if I couldn’t stay in New York in person, then, I decided, I would stay there in my mind. Living vicariously through the characters of the Starlight Diner.

Three weeks after my plane touched down in Heathrow, I got an email from HarperCollins offering to publish my first novel and by January 2016 I had signed a two-book deal. There are a lot of people who helped me on my journey to whom I will always be grateful but it was my unconditional love for New York that kept me on my path.

Becoming a Poet: My Journey from Source to Mouth

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Yesterday, I took this photograph by Cod Beck, a small river that runs through my home town of Thirsk. Twenty years ago, at the age of seventeen, I used to sit by this river and fill notebook after notebook with poems. The flowing of the water aiding the flowing of the ink.

The poetry was terrible. I can assure you this is not false modesty. It was the typical stuff you’d expect from a Sixth Form poet about death and the fleeting nature of youth. But I enjoyed writing it. It was a safe space, a blank space, set apart from the rest of my somewhat stormy life.

Shortly before my eighteenth birthday I stopped going down to the river to write poetry. I had my heart broken for the first time. It was broken cruelly and with very little room for closure on my part. After that, I couldn’t bring myself to write poetry. I couldn’t find the path back to the vulnerability that poetry demands, and I grieved for the precious, unquantifiable thing I knew I’d lost.

I still wrote. Nothing could prevent that, it’s a compulsion. But I wrote other things. Surface things. Articles. Blogs. Reviews. Non-fiction books. Nothing that risked revealing too much about the person behind the pen. Eventually, I wrote two romance novels that were as dry and sarcastic as I was. I was proud of them, and I still am but there is a certain evasive nature to them. My characters are all rather insistent on dodging precisely the same thing the author had dodged for many years: true intimacy, being seen by anybody for who you really are.

Ushering the characters in my romance novels back into an open-hearted lifestyle however, was the first step in me changing my own course and achieving the same. True healing began in the writing of those books, along with a conscious decision to start trusting others in a way I hadn’t for two decades. Within the safety net of a deeply supportive relationship, I was able to explore my romantic and sensual life again and through that self-exploration, I found inspiration for new stories, and the desire to write poetry once more.

In the year just gone I have had my poetry published in several journals and magazines. I’ve performed my poetry, out loud – my whole body shaking with fear – at several poetry events and I stepped in to lead a Poetry Masterclass at Keats House as part of my role at City Lit college. I have allowed myself to be seen. This stepping out of the shadows culminated last week when I published my first poetry chapbook and to my great surprise it topped two Amazon categories in the first few days and has settled itself at the top of the chart for hot new releases in Women’s Poetry.

The reviews have been dizzyingly positive. Did these readers somehow know, somehow see? That the page was a veil and behind it I was just a human woman at once both terrified and exhilarated? Did they sense that publishing this book was the bravest thing I’ve ever done in my life?

Last night I returned to the river. To watch the ducks paddle and squabble over nothing in the early dusk. There, I thought about how the last twenty years had led up to this moment of becoming and how even though life’s river winds and bends in ways we would not choose or expect, there is hope to be had in the idea that all those many currents are carrying us to the place we’re meant to be.

My first poetry chapbook Water Signs is available now. To purchase your copy, click here.

To listen to me read some poems from this and other collections, click here.

Westway Diner 9th Ave, NYC

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Whilst researching my novels Starlight in New York and Sunrise in New York, I reveled in a two-week tour of New York City’s finest diners. It was important, you understand, to make sure I had the details just right. The sounds, the smells, the tastes of everything that was bad for me on the menu.

What follows is an extract from my travel journal written on November 2nd 2015 when I visited The Westway Diner.

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The Westway Diner on 9th Avenue, just north of 43rd Street, is a neat oblong decked out in shades of rhubarb and custard. The lighting fixtures look 1970s by design. Large, circular bulbs, the colour of terracotta and mustard, suspended from the ceiling tiles. Liquor bottles and upturned Martini glasses are stacked behind the cash register, and all the staff wear black.

Faux leather booths promenade down the centre of the restaurant. They’re filled with families and friendship groups who laugh, and tell stories about their day-to-day lives.

I sit in the corner on a table for one near a man who mutters show tune lyrics to himself.

Though Halloween came and went three days ago, spiders still dangle from the ceiling and the spooky drawings graffitied across the front window in the spirit of All Hallows Eve have

yet to be washed away. There’s a pleasant buzz in the air but this isn’t a tourist extravaganza like Ellen’s on Broadway. Here, locals loll about, chomping on omelettes and pancakes. Dressed in tracksuits and sneakers; jeans and sports T-Shirts.

One older man in a baseball hat and lightweight anorak joins another. The fella already sitting at the table doesn’t even look up to acknowledge his companion. He waves his hand, holding it up, while his eyes and his pen stay fixed on his paper. The guy in the anorak starts talking but still his friend doesn’t raise his head. He offers only the occasional side-ways glance to make it clear he’s listening even if he is, at the same time, scratching the side of his jaw over some headline in the news.

A band of off-duty cops enter the diner. They order fried breakfasts while Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell plays out in the background.

If you’d like to read the books inspired by this travel journal, you can find them here.