“Perhaps someone reads the words I write and finds something which they can walk away with that gives something of value to them.” – Michael Seyfried, The Word Pimp
All his life, Secaucus native Michael Seyfried has been putting his thoughts on paper. He couldn’t bear the idea that his musings might disappear into the ether, unrecorded.
“It’s something I’ve always loved to do,” he said last week. “It’s a hobby. I love words; I love playing with words. When I think about words or feelings, I have to write them down.”
What others capture on camera, Seyfried captures on paper.
“I love words. I love playing with words.” – Michael Seyfried
________
He did just that in is recently self-published book, The Word Pimp.
Secaucus boyhood
Seyfried, a laboratory service representative, was born and raised in Secaucus, though now he works in nearby Teterboro and lives in a place called Lackawaxen in rural Pennsylvania.
“You never really leave Secaucus if you were born here,” he said. “It’s a special town. For a kid growing up in the ’60s it was a wonderful place to be, with open land and swamps where you could play and be a kid.”
Of course things have changed. “During the Korean War,” he related, “there was an Army camp down the street where they trained soldiers to operate tanks.”
Then there was Butterfly Hill where Sefried and his friends – what else? – caught butterflies. On Butterfly Hill, the kids dubbed one tree “the climbing tree.” They’d climb to the top “and do our scouting of the area,” Seyfried said.
Among the things that distinguish Secaucus are the river and the marshlands. “We’d play down by the river under Meadowlands Parkway,” Seyfried said. “We’d play pirates or go to Snipes Beach behind Channel 9. We spent a lot of time on the old piers. There were boats and guys drinking and fishing down there.”
In winter, he said, after school they skated on the Duck Pond. “We built fires to keep warm,” Seyfried remembered. One of his friends at the time would become mayor of Secaucus: Michael Gonnelli.
The word pimp
In high school Seyfried was on the yearbook committee, but, he said, “I never had any real interest in writing in school. Literature was my favorite class, but I had no great sense to be a writer.”
He welcomed the digital age. “I got more involved with writing with the advent of computers,” he said. “The word processor made it easier, giving me the flexibility to be more creative.”
The Word Pimp is a compendium of musings, poetry, and memoir. “I was kicking around titles in my head,” he said. Titles like Dance of Words came to mind. “Then it came time for me to write the intro. I was just winging it. I had no idea what was going to come out as I wrote one sentence at a time.”
At the conclusion of the short intro, he wrote, “Just think of the author as a small-time word pimp.” He’d found his title.
“A light bulb went on over my head,” he said. “Bells were ringing.”
Seyfried describes the book as “just a consolidation of a lot of things in files that I’ve written over time. Some I like more than others.”
Regardless, he said, “I decided I wanted to put them in a bound volume.”
He worked through the self-publishing operation, lulu.com. The book sells for $24.95 on the internet and he gets about $3.50 for every book sold.
“I’ve made nothing so far,” he said. “I did it for fun and for myself. Before, I wrote just for family members.”
He never tried to find an agent or conventional publisher. He even designed the book himself. “It’s photo-generated,” he said. “I produced it on a computer. I’m not much of an artist, not with a pencil or art brush.”
Nature as muse
Seyfried left Secaucus when his son was born in 1987.
“I wanted to have a nice home with land around it, reasonably priced,” he said.
He got what he wanted in Lackawaxen, a recreational community near a snowboarding and ski mountain with a lake and pool.
The rural life influenced his writing. “The country is about sitting on the porch with a nice glass of Kentucky bourbon and listening to sounds of the tactile night and watching the dusk,” he said. “You get a feeling for what’s about.”
But one place he practiced his writing is in the Secaucus Reporter and other newspapers, where he is an inveterate letter-to-the-editor writer. When he characterizes his book as “a combination of poetry, opinion, and diatribe,” it’s those last two that were honed on the editorial pages of various newspapers.
Opinion and diatribe
“I’m kind of conservative in my views,” Seyfried admitted. “I’m opinionated and feel compelled to write about things. I’m the ultimate narcissist.”
The Word Pimp notwithstanding, one of Seyfried’s favorite pieces of writing is a letter he wrote about radio talk jock Sean Hannity to John Mainelli, former program director at WABC Radio.
Seyfried said, “I can honestly say that my writing abilities are responsible for Sean Hannity being known as an icon today. When he was just a little talk show host, I listened to talk radio addictively on the job.”
One day a particular Hannity segment drove Seyfried to the keyboard. “It was such an exceptional show,” Seyfried recalled. “It was so good that I wrote to Mainelli. He was so impressed with the letter he xeroxed it and sent it to Rush Limbaugh.”
Limbaugh was effusive in his praise.
“No one knows how to write a good, passionate letter anymore,” Limbaugh lamented.
Limbaugh read the letter on the air and then made the unprecedented move of allowing Hannity to fill in for his entire two-week vacation.
And the rest is history.
“Everyone fell in love with Sean Hannity,” Seyfried said, “and he became syndicated.”
Seyfried has his own opinions about opinions: “No individual should ever offer more than advice to another, for to impose will upon someone is to assume responsibility for the life of that individual.” – The Word Pimp
Kate Rounds can be reached at krounds@hudsonreporter.com..