Show Daily: Interview with Carl Lennertz
From Marketer to Writer
by Lucinda Dyer -- Publishers Weekly, 6/11/2004
To booksellers, Carl Lennertz, v-p of independent retailing at HarperCollins,
is certainly one of the most familiar faces at this year’s BEA. Many worked with
him during his tenure at ABA, where he was senior marketing consultant, created
Book Sense 76 and began the Book Sense bestseller lists. Others know him from
his time as associate publisher at Little, Brown or from the years he “fell
upwards” at Random House, rising from a St. Louis–based sales rep to v-p and
marketing director for the Knopf Group.
While Lennertz has attended
ABA/BEAs since 1978, this year marks his first appearance as an author. “I’m not
a real writer,” he protests. “I don’t have a novel in me or a nonfiction book
that requires research.” But Harmony Books brushed aside his doubts, and so his
Cursed by a Happy Childhood: Tales of Growing Up Then and Now [click here to read the review] is due
out this month. He autographs today at table 6, 12–12:30 p.m.
Lennertz
began writing the night after George Harrison’s death in 2001, inspired to
record memories from his growing-up years for his then-11-year-old daughter,
Savannah. He wrote of friendships and cliques, music and books, first jobs and
first loves: gentle lessons he wanted to pass along to his daughter, lessons
about being a child and dealing with the milestones she would soon be
approaching as a teenager. Writing, he found, was the easy part. “It’s the
rewriting that’s hard. I had no idea how many edits and rewrites are required,
how you have to let go and cut things you love in order to make it a better
book.”
While his daughter will have memories of a city childhood,
Lennertz was raised on eastern Long Island. “I grew up not talking about being
from a small town with 98 kids in my graduating class. I always said I grew up
near the city. But now I’m proud of being from a small town. Ironically, because
the potato fields have been turned into vineyards, it’s now become a chic place
to go.”
Recently, Lennertz took his daughter to visit the library in his
hometown. They discovered a shelf proudly displaying the works of local writers.
Perhaps sensing some small regret on her father’s part, she had just the right
encouraging words: “Maybe they can put a shelf below it for authors who once
lived here.”
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