Author Suzanne Jones signed copies of her new book “From the Flood” at the Osterhout Free Library on Monday night. Jones, who lived on Birch Street in Wilkes-Barre with her family at the time of the Agnes flooding, wrote a book based on her experiences during the flooding as a child.
Kevin Carroll | Times Leader
Suzanne Jones reads excerpts of ‘From the Flood’ at Osterhout
Click here to subscribe today or Login.
WILKES-BARRE — Suzanne Jones was 6 years old when she and her family evacuated their Birch Street home in Wilkes-Barre to get ahead of Hurricane Agnes as the storm arrived to devastate the city.
Now, on the heels of the 50th anniversary of Agnes, Jones has recently published a memoir detailing some of her recollections and experiences during the weeks and months that followed the flood, and she held a book reading and signing at the Osterhout Free Library on Monday night.
Entitled “From the Flood,” Jones read a couple excerpts from her book and led a discussion into the 1972 disaster with her parents and other interested readers.
Jones also shed some light on her writing process, and what it was like to dig into some of those old memories, with help from her mother and father.
“This was very hard to write,” she said. “What I didn’t expect was that, a lot of people I knew from that time have passed away. … This kind of brought them to life for me. I got to spend time with them.”
The book begins in 1970, two years before the flood, and takes readers through the days where Jones and her family were evacuated from their home, through their many relocations and eventual two-year stay in a FEMA trailer provided by the government.
As a child, Jones used the stories of her parents to lock in time frames and specific memories, while telling the tale of Agnes from the point of view of someone who, at the age of 6, didn’t quite understand the scope of what was happening around her.
A big idea present in the book that Jones discussed at length was how the children would incorporate Agnes into their daily playtime.
“We used the flood as a base for all of our play, it was part of our games,” Jones said. “Play was a part of this recovery process that we weren’t even aware of.”
That idea is evident in the dedication at the beginning of “From the Flood,” written by Jones to her parents: “To Mom and Dad, for making the worst years of your lives the best years of ours.”
Jones said that her father “nearly fell on the floor” when she showed him the dedication.
The author, now living in Boston, held a similar reading and signing at Barnes and Noble on Sunday. She said that the idea for this book came back in 2012, and it was then that she started piecing it together.
“I ended up putting it down, and I had my first book published in 2019,” Jones said. “COVID changed things for me work-wise, and I said to myself ‘maybe it’s time to write this second book’.”