Bradford NY Central School English Teacher’s novel has local ties
By Sonya Ellison,
Local author Richard Leise is about to release his second book Dry The Rain, two years after his first novel Being Dead was released to critical acclaim.
Both books have ties to our local Southern Tier region. Being Dead was set in Endwell in the 1980s while Dry The Rain is linked to the Ithaca area.
“Yeah. More like Ithaca-centric with regards to….its kind of placeless in a way but it’s set in North Carolina and Virginia. The main character is from Ithaca area, like in the West Hill of Ithaca.”
Leise is an English teacher at Bradford Central School and seeks to write short-form novels about complicated and often dark subject matter like death and abuse in Being Dead, which has elements of gothic, horror and paranormal.
Now Leise explores the theme of PTSD from a survivor’s point of view in his latest work Dry The Rain.
“So the disparate elements associated with the paranormal or mystical also plays a central role in Dry the Rain….” Leise shares.
The story follows a survivor who was kidnapped and psychologically tortured by her abuser as a young girl. She recounts the memories of a tragedy that was sold to streaming media for consumption and without her input.
“It’s voyeurism to begin with and then it’s taken a step further with the streaming component as opposed to just commercial TV. So basically the story is sold to a Netflix type platform and the survivor has no say so they wind up writing Dry the Rain as a reaction to watching each of the episodes air on TV or electing not to watch them.…” Leise tells The Hornell Sun.
“Once the work with Being Dead was done I was able to turn my attention principally to this. I had my character in mind and the general idea that I was uncomfortable that people were consuming other peoples’ tragedies as bedtime pastimes and from there the story kind of took a life of its own.”
Despite the difficult subject matter, Leise doesn’t use language that is graphic or intense and likes to keep his books under 250 pages in length. Leise wants to create novels that are readable for all ages.
“It is written so that, hopefully, savvy high school students through those age of 100 can read it and be interested and think about what the message is.”
Leise says the editing phase of this book was handled with great care for the sake of respecting survivor experiences.
“My editor played a gigantic role in bringing it into fruition.” Leise explains. “Handling the story with care was the chief concern as a guy, not a little girl. I haven’t been through this.I had a bunch of really talented readers who were professional novelists read it and look it through. So, we’ve had some serious conversations.”
Leise is also aware of the influence the work has on his students.
“It’s just as important to me as teaching and I work with middle and high school students every day who I know and love and I don’t want them to pick something up and be totally appalled or turned off by the presentation. I want them to know there was care taken because I teach Creative Writing and for what I put into it , I hope they put it into their own work.”
Leise was inspired after witnessing the indifference we often have while consuming tragic true crime stories:
“With the second book, four or five years ago I was with somebody watching Dateline or one of those true crime shows that’s streamed all the time nowadays….After ten minutes they changed it and went to a different episode and after ten minutes of that, went on to another different story…Then they finally settled on something they were interested in.” Leise explains.
“It struck me as horrific concept that we would take other peoples’ suffering, which has already been packaged and produced. But then to take it a step further and be like ‘This horrific event that happened to somebody isn’t holding my interest so I’m just going to scroll on until I find an episode that interests me.’”
The book illustrates the callous nature that true crime media culture often handles the traumatic tragedies of victims as episodes for consumption.
“These aren’t movies. These are real peoples’ lives so I just felt like if you were to spend time watching, you ought to at least watch it all the way through. That was sort of the genesis for that. There’s a lot of taking on new media and how it’s packaged and how other peoples’ suffering is presented as entertainment and just seems to be escalating as we go through year after year….” he says.
Even though Dry The Rain isn’t in bookstores until October 14th, it has already received strong independent reviews.
Though the hardcover version of Dry the Rain has sold out, people can still pre-order paperbacks at: https://www.picketfire.com/shop/p/dry-the-rain-paperback
“They’re going to do another run of hard covers within the next month or two…but there are still plenty of paperbacks” says Leise.
He says his next book was just sold and will be released sometime in 2027.
In the meantime, he wants to keep inspiring his students to keep writing.
“Working for Bradford I can’t say enough good things about being there and how supportive they are of me being a writer…and allowing me to teach creative writing and developing creative writing electives that weren’t there before me…” “I’m hoping some of these students I’ve worked with have meaningful short stories and longer form works out there before long. I know a couple are already going down the English and creative writing path…So that’s really cool!”
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Sonya Ellison is a Fremont NY writer and reporter who tackles a wide range of topics with Southern Tier ties. You can reach her anytime, ms.sonyann@gmail.com
