Remsenburg Author Self-Publishes Book Nearly 60 Years In The Making With Help Of Writers' Group

In the 1960s, it was purely an abstract. In the 1980s, it was unsuccessfully disseminated throughout the ranks of Hollywood as a screenplay. And by the mid-2010s, the novel’s prevailing storyline had been scrapped six times.

After a nearly six-decade process, James Gregory Kingston, a Remsenburg resident and member of Westhampton Beach Free Library’s Writers’ Group, self-published his literary fiction novel, “The City Island Messenger.”

“It was mind-boggling,” Mr. Kingston said about the first time he saw his project realized to fruition. “[Amazon] sent me an email saying, ‘Okay, it’s up on the screen.’ All of a sudden, it’s like you’re reading a novel that somebody else wrote. And I go, ‘This is amazing. I love this.’ At that point, I knew it was all worth it.”

“The City Island Messenger” tells the story of Howie, a 12-year-old Western Union messenger of City Island, Bronx, during the summer of 1942, the height of World War II. The bearer of cherished messages from the city’s soldiers, Howie becomes the island’s darling. That is, until the Battle of Midway, when Howie’s role morphs from the lauded letter carrier to the loathed agent of death. Subsequently, he navigates the community’s burgeoning resentment against both himself and his best friend, Kim, a Japanese girl.

Although a work of literary fiction—“which is really about the words and the characters, but not necessarily about the plot. And everything is not tied up at the end”—the origins of “The City Island Messenger” are rooted in reality.

As a social worker in the South Bronx in the 1960s, Mr. Kingston befriended a co-worker roughly 10 years his elder with whom he treated homeless Bronx natives for a local hospital. This co-worker, Howard Rittner, whom the book’s protagonist is named after, and whom the omnipresent narrator, Ivory, is based on, was a City Island Western Union messenger.

“I said, ‘You had to deliver those death telegrams?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I had to,’” Mr. Kingston recounted.

Mr. Rittner was just 12 years old when he held the job. “I just had to do that, ya know?” he had told Mr. Kingston. “Everybody was doing war stuff. That was my war stuff. I had to do it.”

Mr. Kingston recalled thinking, “There’s a story in this somewhere. Some day, somebody’s going to write a story about this.”

Burying that scene for years, Mr. Kingston began writing movie and television scripts in the 1980s, most notably the 1985 drama “Turk 182!” starring James Gregory Kingston. After honing his writing prowess, he returned to “The City Island Messenger,” crafting a screenplay of the same title that was picked up, but ultimately dropped, by Hallmark.

Eventually, Mr. Kingston revisited the project, using his previous screenplay as a framework and attempting to convert it into a full-fledged novel. After a stint as a member of a writers’ group in Sag Harbor, in which the novel underwent its preliminary transformations, he found a home in the Westhampton Free Library Writers’ Group.

“I moved over to Westhampton and started from scratch again. They just kept getting thrown out and thrown out,” Mr. Kingston said. “If it’s bad, then they’ll tell you it’s really bad. If it’s good, they’ll say it’s okay. It’s expected to be good—so if it’s not good, why are you bringing it in? You really need a really honest critique group who’s not going to tell you, ‘I love your work.’ They’re going to tell you, ‘I love your work because of these three things, but I hate these four.’”

To suffice this expectation, Mr. Kingston wrote three hours a day, nearly every day. Under the unabashed roundtable of fellow writers, the novel was edited, overhauled and criticized for the better part of three years.

“We’re very truthful with each other; we’re not just patting each other on the back,” said Donna McGullam, the moderator of the Westhampton Free Library Writers’ Club, who helped found the group five years ago. “We believe our friends and family do that for us. And we’re among other writers. We all take this seriously, but we have a good time doing it.”

Mr. Kingston said, “It forces you on a deadline to keep on turning pages out and out and out. The deadline is not to finish your story; the deadline is to produce good pages.”

And this intensiveness took its toll.

“My wife would say, ‘Why are you sitting there sulking? Can I put food under the door? What can I do?’” Mr. Kingston joked.

Sometimes discouraged by the unending heaps of trashed paper, Mr. Kingston took a break from his novel to write its literary antithesis: the play “Priapism,” a campy sexual farce debuting at the East End Fringe Festival in Riverhead in the late July.

Although “The City Island Messenger” takes place in the Bronx—allowing the story access to New York City and paying homage to Mr. Rittner’s upbringing—the ethos of 1960s Hampton Bays, the hamlet in which Mr. Kingston grew up, is ingrained in the book’s tenor.

Taking drunk fishermen, stray dogs and local phraseologies from his boyhood, along with the soul of “strange little things that were just part of growing up: skinny-dipping off the bridge, crazy stuff,” Mr. Kingston “just transferred Hampton Bays to City Island.” Many of the characters in “The City Island Messenger” were initially conceived with the members of Mr. Kingston’s family in mind.

Inspired by a self-publishing instructional held at Westhampton Free Library, Mr. Kingston bypassed traditional publishing methods and opted to self-publish through Amazon, an increasingly popular two-month process.

“I said, ‘I’m getting older. It would take me a year or two to get an agent, and then another year to get it published,’” Mr. Kingston said. “I don’t want to wait that long. It’s a literary fiction book, so it’s not going to be a big seller.”

And, after more than half a century of adaptations and revisions, amendments and rewrites, “The City Island Messenger” was finalized in print.

“If I could kind of have a star pupil, Jim exemplifies what everyone would hope to have at the writing table,” Ms. McGullam said. “We’ve had four, five, maybe six published authors in the last five years, so people are really setting goals and seeing their projects through to fruition: going and getting them published.”

James Gregory Kingston will host a public reading and discussion of “The City Island Messenger” on Friday, June 2, at 6:30 p.m. at the Westhampton Free Library, 7 Library Avenue, Westhampton Beach.