By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

“I'm beginning to think that maybe it’s not just how much you love someone. Maybe what matters is who you are when you’re with them.” Anne Tyler, author

Ethan Joella is like any writer in the history of literature in that every smattering of sentences he overhears and every stranger’s face he memorizes and every hiss and hum of life that he walks through rightfully teeters on the brink of tipping madly into his stories.

In the summer of 2021, within the skinny space of his mind’s eye, he imagined a middle-aged man outside of a well-established seaside restaurant dusty with a marina-like décor, a familiar place that has served generations of residents and beach-combing tourists. He heard the noises – how the key opens the creaky front door to the restaurant and the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen. He felt the exhaustion of ritual that compels the man to return to the same restaurant as its owner, to the same experience every day, year after year.

What was happening in Joella’s headspace eventually found its way onto the page:

From the time he was a child, Rehoboth resident Jack’s life – indeed his time, energy and soul – has been defined by the shore restaurant that has been in his family for three generations and bears his last name. Schmidt’s.

He holds the keys to both its front door and its loyal staff, and in the process, he has allowed the restaurant to entirely consume him, and now, in his early fifties, he realizes what he has been robbed of in the bargain – love and companionship and maybe a family of his own. A dining hospitality group is hot on Jack’s trail to purchase Schmidt’s and add it to its DNA tail of other once family owned restaurants it now operates along the Delaware coast, but the question that pounds away at Jack is this: Who am I without the very entity that has defined me?

Thus begins The Same Bright Stars, the third and latest novel from Joella, a Rehoboth resident and University of Delaware professor, which was published in July (Scribner) and has received stellar praise for the author’s depiction of the novel’s characters, the tender mercies of a family’s legacy and a man’s struggle to define himself. In addition to great reviews, the novel was named as one of People Magazine’s most anticipated reads of the summer and Good Housekeeping’s top book for this past August. 

“I have been hearing from readers in Delaware and beyond about how much they connected with the book,” said Joella, who lives with his wife and two daughters – 16 and 20, respectively – about a mile-and-a-half from Rehoboth Beach. “I like the fact that even if they are not familiar with Rehoboth, they tell me that the sense of place reminds them of Cape Cod or the Jersey Shore or Lake Michigan. While it makes a book more special if the reader knows the area where the novel takes place, it’s not crucial to be aware of the area.”

Between his obligations as an English and psychology professor at the University of Delaware and his other work specializing community writing workshops and online instruction, Joella has carved out time to publish two other novels over the past four years that have reviewers applauding Joella for his ability to merge the human condition against the hardscrabble familiarity of place. 

His second novel, A Quiet Life, published in 2022 by Scribner, takes place in his native Northeastern Pennsylvania, where communities linked by blue highways take collective shelter against harsh winters. It is the story of Chuck Ayers, who mourns the loss of his wife, Cat and is torn between whether to make the trip to Hilton Head this winter without her.

“My wife and I were walking on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach, and we overheard a conversation of a few older men,” Joella said. “I heard one man telling the others that ever since his wife died, he didn’t want to make the trip to Florida alone. I breathed that in and thought that this would be the basis for my next book – about a man who has wintered with his wife for years and now has to make the trip without her.”

Browseabout Books

Joella’s is not the life of a full-time writer but one where writing is relegated to patches of time; in his case, the hours between his classes and grading obligations. For the past several years, he has written his novellas at a time well before his family rises, where during a perfect sitting he can compose as many as four pages. 

“Writing for me is like circling the airport, and I don’t necessarily need to have absolute quiet,” he said. “I keep feeling guilty until something gets done, whether it’s four pages or even a single page. Sometimes it happens late in the afternoon, and sometimes it happens at eleven-thirty at night, but I keep hounding myself, and sometimes it doesn’t happen at all, and I just have to forgive myself and get back on that horse the next day.”
The derivation of every writer’s craft is tainted liberally with the brushstroke influence of his or her youth. Dickens had the teeming alleyways of London. Hemingway had the hills of Michigan; Fitzgerald had the isolation of St. Paul and Joyce had the cobblestone streets of Dublin. For Joella, his writing journey began in Pen Argyl, a town of 4,000 that is wedged between the Poconos and Allentown in northeastern Pennsylvania. 

In the early 1980s, Joella’s parents purchased a beach house in Rehoboth, and it was there during family vacations that the course of his life began to dramatically tilt in the direction of the writing world.

“Browseabout Books in Rehoboth Beach was my first exposure to authors and books,” he said. “There was this elevated platform that would take me to the young readers books section, where I started to read authors like Judy Blume and Beverly Cleary. I would never say that our parents spoiled my siblings and me, but they spoiled us with books, and if we finished one while in Rehoboth, they encouraged us to get another.”

Inspired in part by what he was beginning to read, Joella began writing poetry and short stories – even a rejected script for the TV show “Growing Pains” when he was in the fifth grade -- and by the time he reached his late teenage years at Muhlenberg College, he was absorbed by the works of Alice Walker, John Cheever, Michael Chabon and Anne Tyler he began to read in the Norton Anthology of Short Stories. During a fiction writing seminar in his sophomore year, he attended a public reading event with the Korean American author Chang-Rae Lee, whose first novel Native Speaker in 1995 rocketed him into the literary spotlight.

“I didn’t know much about public readings and author events at the time, but I just remember thinking that is exactly what I would like to be doing,” he said. “I want to be up on a stage reading my work to an audience. I would like to answer questions about my work. I would like people to read my writing and see how it resonated with their own lives. 

“I was 19 at the time, and I began to see that path. I thought that maybe by the time I graduate college I will have my first book published so I wouldn’t have to worry about a career.”

Inspired by Lee’s visit to Muhlenberg, Joella took his first cracks at novel writing, tapping away at his Smith Corona and polishing his early craft, but as it does with every writer, the pursuit of other destinies intervened. He began his teaching career at 21, acquired several graduate degrees, married his wife, Rebecca, saw the birth of his two daughters and started teaching at the University of Delaware in 2014.

His gift of imagination, however – of inventing stories from overheard conversations and inanimate things – never slept, and little did he know that the inspiration for what became his first novel came from one of the most important people in his life. 

‘I discovered that grief is about surviving’

In March of 2015, Joella’s mother-in-law Ann was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away in January of 2016.

“When she was diagnosed, I looked at my wife and her sister and I thought, ‘There’s no way they can lose their mom. It’s impossible,’” he said. “When she passed, I experienced this strange dichotomy. We were in a New York City hospital and as we left, we found that the world was still moving. People were catching cabs and stepping into restaurants, and we came back home and we were still expected to cook dinner and pay the bills.

“I discovered grief is about surviving, of still being able to move on.”

In the fall of 2016, he began what became his first novel and in 2021 at the age of 44, he published A Little Hope, a sweeping story that follows the residents of an idyllic Connecticut town over the course of a year as they confront everyday desires and fears: a lost love, a stalled career, an illness, and a betrayal. One character – Greg Tyler – is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer and over that year, he sees the once-unbroken power of his life slowly evaporate.

Writing A Little Hope gave Joella a lesson that all writers eventually gratefully accept as a gift: that the sadness and fragility of our life’s experience can be a transferable and permanent imprint; that writing is a way of continuing to honor loved ones when they are gone.

The novel earned rave reviews. 

“Immersive and illuminating,” wrote Booklist. 

“A quietly powerful portrait of small-town life…told with wisdom and tenderness,” wrote author Mary Beth Keane. 

“Forgiveness and redemption are the soul of this novel, but it’s the love you will remember long after you put it down,” wrote author Adriana Trigiani.

“Poignant and quietly powerful...Joella is particularly deft at deconstructing quiet moments in small-town life and amplifying their significance... more than a tad hopeful,” wrote the New York Times Book Review.

After spending several years writing in the quiet of his Rehoboth home, Joella suddenly went from literary anonymity to having his book mentioned on “The Today Show.”

Joella is now at work on his newest novel, as part of a two-book deal with Scribner - a novel he has been writing since 2021. There are no spotlights, no journalists, no interviews and no publicity agents in the privacy of a writer’s space. It is a catacomb of thoughts and paper scrap ideas, inky notebooks, deleted paragraphs and magnified bouts of self-doubt. 

“Readers get to see our finished version - our best intentions where everything is smooth and flows - but they don’t see all of the struggles we as writers go through in order to get there,” he said. “I have easily thrown away a dozen attempted novels over the past several years, because a character doesn’t come across the right way, and I realize that I cannot work with them.

“But I keep returning to the belief that writing is about achieving some sense of communal understanding that’s about making connections. It took me several years to know that not everyone can create characters. There are so few things I am good at, so I love that I can create a world that wasn’t there before. Writing is about getting across to readers the truth that they are not alone. In small ways, writers do try to change the world.” 

To learn more about Ethan Joella, visit www.ethanjoellawriter.com.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].