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"A heartrending story you won't be able to put down."
--- ForemostPress.com

I just finished reading A Small Harvest of Pretty Days and went right to the computer to find out more about you. I LOVED THIS BOOK!...I read the reviews in the newspaper and put it on my "to read" list which just happened this week. I could not put it down, so you can rest assured that your book made an impact. I was born in Williamsport and now live out Warrensville Road in Montoursville so I felt as if I could be reading about my back yard. I will always think of Clara's trips to Williamsport as I travel Sand Hill. Mill Creek runs close to our home and we often walk along the Loyalsock Creek toward the airport. It was wonderful to imagine all those places...Cogan Station, Jersey Shore, Montoursville, Williamsport, at the time of your story. While lumbering was not the focus of the story, I learned a lot more about the industry from your details.

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New Book Eases Author's Homesickness for the West Branch Valley

Larry Kimport grew up in Montoursville. He graduated from Montoursville High in 1974 where he had been a "terrible student" and never liked to read. Then he served six months in the Army and discovered reading.

Soon after returning to Montoursville and working for GTE Sylvania, he decided there was something to this thing called education, so he enrolled at Mansfield State College and graduated in 1980 as a teacher. After three years in Malaysia where he developed an existing home for abandoned and handicapped children with the Peace Corps, he came home again and looked for a teaching position. It was while visiting a friend in New Jersey that he heard of an opening there and decided to apply for it just to "hone his interview skills." He got the job teaching at a home for boys in trouble with the law and others who simply hadn't been successful in the search for foster homes. In 1985 he married a Jersey girl and he put down roots in Lumberton, New Jersey.

But he never got over his longing for the West Branch Valley. He thinks of it as "one of the most beautiful places in the world." When he gets as close as Bloomsburg, he starts getting "silly happy." That's why, when he wrote his book about a grown up Huck Finn, he placed all the action in Montoursville, Williamsport and Cogan Station. So why couldn't Huck have traveled this way? It's a novel—the author can put him wherever he wants. And writing about the history of this area as the background for the action helped Larry "come to terms with living in New Jersey."

His book, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days, is told in the voice of Clara Waltz, a native of Cogan Station, who had been violated by a group of drunken circus hands and their friends and had been disowned by her father when she was found pregnant with twins. Her church found her a home with a prominent couple in Montoursville where she served as a house girl in exchange for a room for her and her surviving child.

As the book opens, Clara witnesses the murder of one of her attackers and when two more die, she is considered a suspect. Only a drifter named Hank Finley knows how the first man died (and possibly the second and third?). When the drifter gets a job on the farm, her fear of him turns to love and together they learn to trust each other with their secrets.

Throughout the story, Clara refers to the history of the valley, from the disastrous flood of 1889 and its effect on the local economy back to the legends of Madam Montour and the Wyoming massacre. She also consoles herself during times of trouble with passages from the Bible. The language of the narrator and most of the characters is in a "down home" dialect that seems to take the reader back to an earlier time and place. All together, it's a rich mix for fiction readers who love their valley and its past.

Larry Kimport will be at Otto's, 107 W. 4th St., for a "First Friday Signing" June 1, 2007, from 5 to 8.

A review by Betsy Rider
Williamsport Sun-Gazette
Williamsport, Pennsylvania

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Larry Kimport's novel, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days, was fascinating reading, and I could not put it down until I had read to the end. I enjoyed the mystery of it and the love story, woven around and written as a continuation of another great novel.

Doris Gorman, grandmother, and local historian

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Commonly, storytelling in the first person manifests and involves I-ism. The author here strikes a balance between the owner’s pride and the neighbors loved envy. The fiction sketches the heroine as a very detailed person who did not like to avoid or escape any circumstances or situations. Her first ‘kiss’ to the hero could have come much earlier as any reader could guess that it would definitely happen and when her intention was slowly and steadily drawn to that direction. A depiction of her father’s character has the negative side for the reader. Usually father-daughter and mother-son relations are never bitter, rather soft to follow in the human society.

Lastly, it would become a story to be read in one breath had it not mentioned the words from the Great Book frequently, which interrupts the flow of one's light thinking and makes it stop and then starts rethinking deeply in other direction for obvious reasons. Otherwise the contents and narration are extraordinary, the scene of climax was dramatically superb and the style of narration is a thing or two to learn.

Alok Dev
Calcutta, India

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Writing hobby spurred by one Army weekend

By JASON HARRIS
Burlington County Times

Larry Kimport didn't set out to write novels. For that matter, he didn't really set out to become a high school teacher or go to college or join the Peace Corps.

By his own admission, he was a terrible student growing up and joined the Army after graduating from high school.

"I never read a book until I was in the Army," the 50-year-old Kimport said.

While restricted to base one weekend, he picked up a book and found—to his amazement—that he actually liked reading.

From there, he went to college and began thinking about writing books. He left college and joined the Peace Corps figuring that he'd be isolated somewhere and would have plenty of time to write. But he quickly learned the hard work of the Peace Corps does not lend itself to such contemplative pursuits.

"I came home with a notebook full of ideas, but no novel," he said. "You have to know how to write a novel, and I didn't."

A friend got him a job working at a summer camp for at-risk boys. That led him to return to college and earn a degree in education.

"I got hooked," he said. "I felt useful."

In his spare time, he worked on the ideas he had floating around in his head. In 2005 he published his first novel, In the Kingdom of the Wilderness.

"It didn't do well," he said. "But it was fun to do."

Milwaukee, Wis.-based publisher Foremost Press released Kimport's second book, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days, earlier this year. It's a project 15 years in the making. "I set out to write a nice little love story," he said.

Well, sort of.

It's a "nice little love story" that includes a gang-rape, the murder of a serial rapist and a murder mystery.

Set in Williamsport, Pa., in 1890, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days tells the story of a middle-aged Huckleberry Finn through the eyes of his wife, Clara Waltz.

Finn has grown up to resent the fame he gained through Mark Twain's novels and changed his name to Hank Finley. Clara first sees her husband-to-be as he's killing the man who, unbeknownst to Finn/Finley, raped her years before.

Kimport said he got the idea for the book years ago after seeing a few other novels that claimed to tell the next chapter of Huck Finn's story.

"They were all doing it wrong," he said. "They were all advancing the story of his adolescence. I said, 'If someone is going to do this, they should pick up the story when he's 50 and see what he's doing.'"

Kimport, who calls himself a writing hobbyist, worked on the book in his spare time. It got better, he said, after he began teaching journalism, which prizes telling stories in as few words as possible.

"I began to see where (the book) wasn't tight," he said. "It was just a little sloppy here and there."

The book has been moderately successful by Kimport's standards. He's sold out book signings in Williamsport and Allentown, Monmouth County, where he is a high school teacher.

He's working on three other ideas that could turn into novels.

"One is absolutely terrible," he said. "It'll stay in my attic forever."

Another, a love story set in Burlington County, is nearly complete. He plans to devote himself this summer to promoting A Small Harvest of Pretty Days and finishing what would be his third novel.

"Some guys hunt and fish," he said. "Some guys golf. I just get a kick out of this."

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Whatever Became of Huck Finn?

Larry Kimport, a Montoursville native, closed the book, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, after having read it the third time and asked himself that question, "Whatever became of Huck Finn?"

He read purported sequels but he wasn't satisfied—they always took up where Mark Twain left off—with Huck as an adolescent. And they fell fall short of capturing Finn as a man. Even Twain tried and failed. But that didn't stop Kimport from wondering...and eventually trying a sort of sequel of his own.

His new novel, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days, shows Huck as a drifter in his 50s whose past is hidden along with his name. He is known as Hank Finley in 1890 when he drifts into the West Branch Valley on a secret, personal mission.

I asked Kimport what made Huck Finn so compelling in Twain's novel and in his own. He said it was because, as a vagabond, Huck seemed to be "absent of any known culture and that made him a striking contrast to both the Midwest, white culture and the poor, black culture of the South." He said he wanted to see a sequel that was written by "someone who loved him...someone who could make him a real person."

Reviewers have called Kimport's book a romance which Larry finds a little disappointing. Although there is a romance and a mystery and a lot of history of the West Branch Valley in the 1890s and before, he thinks of his work as "literary." He probes the motivations and the relationships of his principle characters. The novel is written in a "down home" dialect that easily transports you to the world of the common man and woman—not of the millionaires of our most famous era as the "Lumbering Capital of the World." And he does Huck Finn justice. Who knows, maybe he did end up in Montoursville!

Larry Kimport will be in Otto's this "First Friday," June 1, 2007, from 5 to 8, to sign his book and meet friends, old and new.

By Betsy Rider
The Webb Weekly, Greater Williamsport, PA area

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Larry Kimport, a native of north-central Pennsylvania, uses this setting for his novel, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days. This tender love story is a first person narrative told through the voice of an older woman, Clara Waltz, and opens as she relates the events of her twenty-ninth year, when she and her illegitimate daughter, Emma, lived as domestic help to a prominent Pennsylvania family in 1890.

Clara, whose daughter is the product of a gang-rape some years earlier, witnesses the murder of one of the rapists one wintry morning. With the subsequent murders of two more of the rapists, Clara becomes the prime suspect. Concurrently, an aging drifter, Hank Finley, appears and is hired on the farm where Clara works as a house-girl. Clara bears mounting suspicion that he's the killer. At the same time, she finds herself falling in love with him.

When she learns his true identity—Huck Finn—she unravels a man mired in a world far stranger than her own. She relates Finn's story as an older man having forsaken his name, illustrating the damage unsolicited fame might put upon a spirit such as his. Finn's now fifty years old; a victim of Twain's successful publications. He's been driven from the south as racism has hardened into Jim Crow laws. So he's wandered north, to happen upon a distant revenge, and, at long last, true love.

Kimport skillfully weaves central Pennsylvania's folklore into the tale. You will also enjoy the telling of lumbering and seasonal rambling circus shows, which were part of life in that era. One can easily feel as if they themselves are in the rugged rolling hills and beautiful Susquehanna Valley.

This story is Miss Clara Waltz's, as she reflects upon a harrowing time of her life, when her own Hank Finley came to her as a loving companion, in from the cold of an unwanted life cast upon him.

A Small Harvest of Pretty Days will tug at your heart.

ForemostPress.com

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Williamsport Sun-Gazette
Lifestyles
By RYAN D. BEARDSLEY
rbeardsley+sungazette.com
(Change + to @)

This summer, why not try a book by a local author?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain is a classic novel that is enjoyed by countless individuals all over the world, whether it be in classrooms or on a leisurely day by the pool.

Readers of the novel, however, are left to wonder what might have happened to Huck Finn after the story ends. What was his adult life like?

Larry Kimport of Lumberton, N.J., who grew up in Montoursville, takes his spin on what Huck Finn’s adult life might have been like in his novel, A Small Harvest of Pretty Days.

The novel is told through the eyes of Clara Waltz, a native of Cogan Station, who had been raped by a group of drunken circus hands. Disowned by her father when she was found pregnant, her church finds her a home with a prominent couple in Montoursville where she serves as a house girl.

The book opens with Waltz encountering one of her rapists, who is murdered after a scuffle with a tattered-looking man. When another of her rapists also is found murdered, Waltz becomes the primary suspect in the case. Although she suspects the tattered man to be the murderer, she can’t help but be drawn to him.

Kimport said that he didn’t initially start out to write a sequel to the famous literary work, but he remembered coming up with the idea one night while walking his dog. He had been re-reading "Huckleberry Finn" just for pleasure, and began thinking of what a sequel might be like.

Although others had attempted sequels, Kimport knew that he wanted to find a different way to do the sequel—a sequel that would not necessarily pick up right after the end of "Huckleberry Finn." He also knew that he wanted to tell the story through a different character—the woman who would eventually fall in love with Finn.

Kimport initially had his doubts on attempting a sequel to such a classic novel, written by such a great writer. Those close to him said to be bold, and he took their advice.

"I was thinking, ‘I’m a nobody—how could I dare do something like that?'" Kimport said. "But then I thought, ‘Why not? What do I have to lose?’ So that’s when I sat down to write the second part of the story."

Writing the novel wasn’t easy for Kimport, however, and he recalled that it took him about 15 years when all was said and done to complete the book. He began writing while in the Peace Corps and rewrote the story when he returned home.

"I gave up on it because it was absolutely terrible," Kimport said. "But halfway into another story I got hit with the idea for this one, and I was really fired up about it. After that I just kept rewriting and rewriting it—I was really learning to write along the way."

A Small Harvest of Pretty Days became a tender love story that is Kimport’s dedication to the beauty and wonderful history of the West Branch Valley. All of the action takes place in Williamsport, Cogan Station and Montoursville.

"Kimport skillfully weaves central Pennsylvania’s folklore into the tale," said Foremost Press, publisher of Kimport’s novel. "You (readers) will also enjoy the telling of lumberings and seasonal rambling circus shows, which were part of life in that area. One can easily feel as if they, themselves, are in the rugged rolling hills and beautiful Susquehanna Valley."

So far, Kimport has heard nothing but positive remarks about his novel—primarily from an older audience that he said the story mainly attracts.

Kimport is thrilled with the feedback, considering this story holds a special place with him.

"This particular story, I really love this one," Kimport said. "This is sort of my special one."

A Small Harvest of Pretty Days retails for $12.97 and is available at Otto Book Store and www.amazon.com.

Section: Posted: 6/10/2007

"Literature's beloved Huck Finn walks again; this time as an older man." --- ForemostPress.com

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