Author with local ties sets novel in small town of Black Walnut

Author Samuel Gailey grew up in the Wyalusing area, attending grade school and high school there, even exploring a cave or two in his spare time.

But he never felt that he truly belonged, because unlike the majority of his classmates, he hadn’t been born there.

“I always felt like an outsider,” he said in a telephone interview.

Maybe that’s at least part of the reason why the author, who set his recent book, “Come Away From Her,” in the small town of Black Walnut, along Route 6 in Wyoming County, prefers to write about people on the outskirts of society.

“I’m definitely drawn to marginalized characters, outsiders,” he said. “It’s a nice character arc for someone who’s underestimated to have to overcome a lot of odds.”

Read “Come Away From Her” and you’ll meet several characters who are facing tough odds.

There’s Cap, the local pastor, struggling with his faith and with doubts about his career choice — actually, with so much pressure from his family, he felt he had no choice but to enter the clergy.

There’s Robin, working part-time at the church when she’s not caring for her three small children or enduring blows from her abusive husband.

There’s Maggie, worried about her son’s eventual departure for college because that will leave her alone with her husband, Wade, from whom she’s grown so far apart.

And there’s Tess, the mysterious woman who skids into town on an icy road. Soon after Cap rescues her from her crashed car, he realizes she is deaf.

“I didn’t start out to make her deaf,” Gailey said. “But as I was developing the character, I wasn’t satisfied. Something felt off. With all these other characters I knew what their voice was, but I couldn’t hear her voice.”

So Gailey decided Tess would neither speak nor hear. But she would be able to communicate, and comprehend.

“I see her role of silence as her greatest strength,” the author said. “She is able to communicate in a more dramatic or more important fashion.”

Asking direct questions by writing them in a notebook, Tess is able to become “the perfect listener,” not only for Cap but for others in this small town where everybody knows everybody else.

“Definitely with Cap,” Gailey said. “Cap’s role is to listen to other people’s woes but he doesn’t have that resource himself. When Tess arrives she becomes the perfect listener, and also gives him a lot of guidance. Maggie, who judges Tess at the beginning, finds she needs to confide in her by the end.”

Each of the major characters has secrets, and a primary one for Tess involves the reason she was trying to escape from her old life.

The title of the book refers to the hardships Tess has faced, Gailey explained. “Come Away From Her” is a message that “all the bad, awful things that have happened to Tess, they need to leave her.”

Fans of Gailey’s fiction will recognize some of the characters who live in the Black Walnut of “Come Away From Her’ also appeared in his previous book “Deep Winter.” The sheriff reappears, as do the mechanics Scott and Skeeter, and Danny, the man who has the mind of a child in the hulking body of a large adult.

Area residents may also recognize the names of various local businesses, which Gailey remembers from his growing-up years in the 1980s.

And, if you wonder why the characters spend so much time tapping cigarettes out of packs and pouring drinks for themselves and each other, Gailey said that also was part of the culture he remembers.

“Growing up in that area in the 1980s, it was kind of a hard-drinking, smoking society,” he said. “In all of my books there are themes of addiction. It’s something I’ve grappled with over the years and my own family has some history. It’s been cathartic for me to write about it.”

“Addiction, or infidelity, or lying to your spouse — it’s all of these flaws people have that make it interesting,” he said. “I think many can relate.”

The author left the Wyalusing area after high school graduation to attend college in North Carolina; he later worked in the film industry in California, as a line producer and a screenwriter.

With encouragement from his wife, Ayn, he eventually made the leap into writing books.

The couple and their daughter make their home in the Pacific Northwest, on Orcas Island, which Gailey describes as “very beautiful and very isolated. You have to take a ferry to get here.”

During the off season the island’s population is about 3,500 — still much larger than the town where he grew up.