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Jan Goldstein was two books into his career as a self-help author before he gave voice to his dream.
“I turned to my agent and said, ‘You know, what I really want to do is write stories. I’m a storyteller,’ ‘’ Goldstein recalled. “She said, go for it.”
He did, and chose midlife change, appropriately, as the theme running through his two novels and counting.
“I believe you can do many things in your lifetime and you can reinvent yourself,” Goldstein said in a telephone interview from a mountain getaway in California, where he is working on his third novel, a “mystery-romance.”
Goldstein, 56, has reinvented himself many times since graduating with degrees in theater and communications from the University of Vermont. He grew up in New England but became a Californian in 1980, when he moved to Los Angeles and began an 18-year career as a junior high school teacher.
Goldstein became a human rights activist in the 1990s in the aftermath of riots sparked by the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles. To foster dialog between races, he started the Asphalt Project, a multicultural theater group.
Goldstein has lived in Israel, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont. He has written movie scripts, poetry and, in college, a rock opera.
“But telling stories in novels was always my dream,” he said.
Goldstein comes by his creativity naturally. He grew up in Vermont, the son of a poet and an actor. His mother, Roberta Goldstein, was Vermont’s poet laureate. She took her young son along to many of her poetry readings and writer’s conferences.
“It was a great education,” Goldstein said.
His father owned a restaurant and in mid-life became an actor, performing in summer stock. Maybe that’s what gave Goldstein the courage to leap from teaching to writing, he said.
Nantucket, the setting for Goldstein’s second novel, “The Prince of Nantucket,” is a special place to Goldstein. His first visit was immediately after a painful divorce. He was awarded custody of his three young children, but needed time alone first to regroup. His mother watched the children for two weeks while he found peace on the island.
“I really went there to heal. It became a touchstone place for me,” Goldstein said.
Placing a character with Alzheimer’s disease on Nantucket seemed appropriate.
“I thought Alzheimer’s is like being on an island itself,” he said.
Goldstein knows about the disease from experience. In the last three years of her life, Goldstein’s mother was afflicted with Alzheimer’s, and his experience caring for her in the closing days of her life became the template for his treatment of the subject in “The Prince of Nantucket.” Like the mother in the book, Goldstein’s mother could be reached through her art – the literary mother through painting, and Goldstein’s mother through her poetry.
Goldstein was amazed that even through the mental fog of the disease, his mother would correct him when he missed a word while reading her poetry.
Goldstein still visits Nantucket, but his trips are no longer solitary. He has remarried and now goes with his wife, Bonnie, and their 7-year-old daughter. They love Nantucket as much as he does, Goldstein said.
