On Writing & Storytelling: The Facts Behind the Fiction in ‘Reunion: A Story’

Five summers ago – seems like it was a lifetime ago – I decided to self-publish Reunion: A Story, a novella I wrote in stages between 1986 and 1998, through Amazon’s CreateSpace Independent Publishing division (now Kindle Direct Publishing).

It wasn’t my first self-published work; that would be my collection of movie reviews originally written for the late and lamented Epinions website, Save Me the Aisle Seat: The Good, the Bad and the Really Bad Movies: Selected Reviews by an Online Film Reviewer. It was, however, my first published work of fiction – unless you count a Vietnam War story, The Green Car, that I submitted to my high school’s literary magazine, The Phoenix, back in 1981 – and the more successful of my two “available on Amazon” titles.

Reunion has been well-received. Of my two books, it has the most ratings and reviews on Amazon – 16 ratings and 14 reviews, most of them five-star. It also has sold a few more copies, though I am nowhere near rivaling Stephen King’s success either critically or commercially. And, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know that not only have I been striving to improve it by fixing its flaws since the first week of March, but I’m also writing a continuation titled Reunion: Coda.

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – I am asked if Reunion: A Story is a thinly -disguised account of an actual crush I had on a girl at South Miami High School between August of 1980 and June of 1983. The answer is “No, it’s not,” although some of the elements of the story (such as Jim’s getting a kiss from his crush somewhere on campus, plus his reluctance to tell any girl that he has feelings for her) are based on some of my experiences in Cobra Country.

Writers always mine their past for the details in their stories, and I am no different. In this post, then, I address the question of how much my real-life experiences in high school inform the story I tell in Reunion.

ALEX DIAZ-GRANADOS, ON THE VERISIMILITUDE OF “REUNION: A STORY’

But even though I gave Jim Garraty some of my experiences (we both joined the South Miami High boys’ chorus in 1981…we both loved someone from afar but never got anywhere with our crushes…we both have a passion for writing and history), he is not me, and Martina Elizabeth Reynaud, aka Marty, lives only (rent-free) in my imagination, although she is a composite avatar for almost every girl – including Cheryl Thigpen – I have ever loved or been attracted to.

Writers always mine their past for the details in their stories, and I am no different. In this post, then, I address the question of how much my real-life experiences in high school inform the story I tell in Reunion.

The Premise

It is June 1983. 

Jim Garraty is a senior at South Miami Senior High. He’s a staff writer for the school paper, a college-bound scholar who plans to become a historian and author of books on military history. He’s well-liked by his peers and teachers, and his future looks bright. 

But as commencement draws near for the Class of 1983, Jim must deal with unfinished business. The girl he loves from afar is also graduating, and rumor has it that she is going away for the summer before starting college in the fall. Worse still, Marty doesn’t know how deep Jim’s feelings for her are – unless he tells her. But when an opportunity arises on the last day of classes at South Miami High, Jim hesitates…and the window of opportunity closes.

Now, 15 years later, James Garraty is an up-and-coming history professor whose literary career is on the rise. Respected by his fellow faculty professors and recipient of popular and critical acclaim, Jim seems to have it all. 

Except for one thing. True love.

Q.: How much of Reunion: A Story did you base on real life events at South Miami High? 

A.: Well, the story is mostly confined in time and space to roughly one-third of a single day (June 15, 1983, which was the last day of the 1982-1983 school year) and one location (South Miami High). When I wrote it, I decided to keep the story tight and focused on the protagonist and his dramatic need. So, I didn’t describe, for instance, Jim Garraty’s last day as a high school student from Home Room/final exam to the last bell of the school day. That would have resulted in a short novel, and in 1998, I just didn’t have the writing chops to tackle a project of that scope. 

That having been said, aside from the various conversations between the story’s troika of main characters, quite a few of the anecdotes about that day and those mentioned in Jim’s flashbacks to past events are based on real events, including:

1. The retirement of Mr. Rhea Farthing, one of South Miami Senior High’s assistant principals, at the end of the school year. As mentioned in Reunion, this noteworthy event was front page news in the June issue of The Serpent’s Tale, the school’s student paper. (As the outgoing Entertainment Editor, I was there when my fellow editors were trying to come up with headlines for that story. At one point, one of my fellow seniors suggested Lights go out at SMSH as Farthing announces his retirement, a waggish reference to the assistant principal’s nicknames of “Light Bulb”/”Bombillo.” Fortunately, decorum and cooler heads prevailed, and we went with something less cheeky…)
2. The events that led to the cancellation of the Spring Concert, which had been originally scheduled for May 1983. Though I changed the names of South Miami High’s chorus teacher, Joan Owen, who left SMSH to take another choral directing job outside the public school system, and the substitute teacher who replaced her, Jim’s flashback is as accurate as my fallible memory allowed. 
3. The exodus of students from campus after the last exams were administered, the “clearing out of the lockers” mise en scene, and the different reactions to the “end of the school year” were also faithfully recreated, especially in the story’s pivotal dream sequence. The details in that section of the story are particularly vivid because I set them to paper just three short years after my graduation from SMSH.

Since Jim’s experiences were mainly drawn from my memories of that day, most of the little slice-of-life details are described as accurately as I could manage. I’m sure that I got some things wrong; the three-year gap between the Class of 1983’s commencement and the first iteration of Reunion blurred once-sharp memories enough to make me forget the revised final exam schedule; the even longer span between 1986 and the story’s publication in the summer of 2018 makes it even harder to gauge the historical accuracy of my tale.