Meet the Author
http://www.youtube.com/user/jamaicawaybooks
The author talks about MILKWEED, how she came to write
the story, and a bit about the current climate of care for
veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
From the Ipswich Chronicle
Berrini sets vet novel in Ipswich
By Bll Wasserman
Fri Jul 10, 2009, 03:44 PM ED
IPSWICH -
She dug clams commercially. Her sister shucked clams for
Ipswich Shellfish. And, referring to her Greek background
growing up in Ipswich, she said, “It’s in the water.”
That’s how novelist Deahn Berrini explains the setting of her
first published novel, Milkweed, now available in area
bookstores. Ipswich is where the tale of a 21-year-old
community college student and her troubled Vietnam veteran
boyfriend unfolds. The clam business is where Cassie, the
novel’s central figure, works as office manager. Her friend lives
on Town Farm road. Her mother is buried in the Ipswich cemetery. And she regularly goes to the beach. For an Ipswich reader, there is a visceral contact.
Berrini is the daughter of Bette Tsoutsouras, a retired teacher, and the stepdaughter of Ipswich’s well–known cobbler, Charles Tsoutsouras.
She moved to Ipswich when she was six and graduated from IHS in ‘79. At Brown, where she majored in history, Berrini met her husband, Russell Leblang, and they both went on to law school, she at Boston College, he at Harvard.
After law school, Berrini quickly found that law was “not a good match,” and she became a teacher until she had children. Raising her young children, she found she had a chunk of time during their afternoon naps when she could turn to her persistent interest, writing.
First there were short stories, then a novel that has since been “shredded.”
Milkweed was published this June, and another novel, also set in Ipswich, is finished and awaiting publication.
Berrini and her husband now live in Swampscott. They have two children: Alexander, 17, and Charlotte, 14.
Berrini’s interest in the problems of a returning vet began when a college paper on post-traumatic stress disorder led her to interview a Vietnam vet. His story gave her a profound feeling that in terms of reintegrating those veterans, “We did that wrong.”
How that “wrong” plays out in relationship to a waiting girlfriend is the focus of Milkweed.
Reviewing this novel, author Richard Currey writes, “Although set in 1971, this compassionate tale of a community trying to welcome back one of its own has relevance today as families welcome home a new generation of veterans.”
Swampscott author pens book on Vietnam War homecoming
By David Liscio / The Daily Item
SWAMPSCOTT - Swampscott novelist Deahn Berrini vividly recalls the fateful business dinner she attended in the early 1990s as a guest with her husband, Russell LeBlang, an attorney and foreign investments specialist.
"I really wasn't looking forward to going, but I went and that's where I got the idea for the book," said Berrini, whose novel, Milkweed, was recently published by Boston-based Somerset Hall Press.
A woman seated next to her at the dinner was a widow, her husband a combat pilot during the Vietnam War. "The woman's husband was still missing in action after all that time. His body was never found," said Berrini, who claims that conversation provided the nugget from which the larger literary work emerged. After all, despite the passage of time, the widow was still waiting for resolution.
A self-described Air Force brat, Berrini's family moved around during her early years, but by the time she was six, they were settled in Ipswich, a quaint New England town where many scenes from the book are set. Both she and her husband graduated from Brown University and then law school, she at Boston College, he at Harvard.
They moved to Nahant as newlyweds. LeBlang, whose law firm is in Boston, served the community as a Nahant call firefighter. A few years later they bought a home on Gale Road in Swampscott, where they are raising a son, Alexander, 17, and a daughter, Charlotte, 14.
For the past four years, Berrini has been working on the novel from her home office as well as teaching creative writing classes at North Shore Community College and at the Senior Center in the Swampscott High School. "I wrote a couple of other novels, but they weren't so good," she modestly acknowledged. "But I've been told this one is much better and so far I've had a great response."
The book takes a look at how returning war veterans often have difficulty readjusting, as do those around them. The subject is particularly poignant these days as soldiers return from the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"I wasn't going to attempt to write a book about the combat because I obviously wasn't there, but I knew I could write about what it was like when these soldiers came home," said Berrini. "The book is actually a metaphor for change, which is why it's called Milkweed. The monarch butterfly depends on that particular plant for survival. Some people depend on certain things as well - another person, a place, a job - and, when it's taken away, they struggle."
Richard Currey, author of Fatal Light and Crossing Over: The Vietnam Stories, said this of Berrini's book: "Milkweed reminds us that war stories are still the oldest, hardest, and most telling and compelling tales we share."
Donna Moreau, author of Homefront to the Vietnam War, said, "Milkweed is one of the rare stories about the Vietnam War that tell the tale of the women who wait for their young men to return from the battlefield."
Berrini's friends tossed her a launch party last Saturday. The author also gave a reading and signing at The Swampscott Senior Center and at the Cornerstone Books in Salem. She has scheduled similar appearances at Borders Express Books in Vinnin Square on June 13 from noon to 2 p.m.; and at the Spirit of '76 Bookstore in Marblehead on July 15 from 6-8 p.m. For more information, go online to www.deahnberrini.com.
http://www.thedailyitemoflynn.com/articles/2009/06/10/news/news04.txt
