The just-released first novel of North Fork native Yvonne Lieblein is an expression of two lifelong dreams: combining fiction and music and creating both through collaboration with others.
The Wheelhouse Cafe, a novel and soundscape, was inspired by a single story told to the author by her husband, the singer-songwriter Josh Horton, a former tugboat captain.
“The story got my wheels turning,” Lielblein says.
“I went through all of his log books. Josh wrote song lyrics in them. I spent a lot of time thumbing through the worn pages of his log books, getting lost in his thoughts,” she says.
And that’s how The Wheelhouse Cafe was born. “I wrote the story and retrofitted the songs in.”
Horton performs nine of his songs, plus an adaptation of “Amazing Grace” for The Wheelhouse Cafe soundscape. Its tracks are available on The Wheelhouse Cafe website and Spotify.
The soundscape is offered up by the author as essential to the tale she weaves about a lonely sea captain and an intriguing woman he meets at the wake of a mutual friend and fellow captain who was lost at sea.
Set in Greenport and Manhattan in the mid-1990s, The Wheelhouse Cafe is an adventure and a love story — “not a romance,” Lieblein says.
“Capt. John Raymond has been riding the tides of loneliness for years. Lost in the choppy two-weeks on, two-weeks off rhythm of tugboat life, he feels most alone laying at anchor in New York Harbor because home is so close but seems a world away,” according to a preview published on Amazon.com, where The Wheelhouse Cafe will be available in hardcover and paperback editions.
Anchored in the harbor, John writes and performs his music, singing over a marine radio in the wheelhouse of his tug, never knowing if anyone hears him.
“If you don’t listen to the music — the emotional landscape of the tugboat captain, why he’s drawn to the sea — you miss a lot of the book,” Lieblein says.
Combining books and music has been a longtime ambition for Lieblein who once aspired to start a publishing company focused on books set to music. Fusing the two, she hopes, will inspire some people to read.
“If they experience The Wheelhouse Cafe, maybe teachers will say, ‘OK, Catcher in the Rye — what’s the soundtrack to it?’ Music really affects how you look at a character, even if you’re already a reader,” Lieblein says.
Collaboration is another longtime intrigue for Lieblein and she’s planning to open up her work and her husband’s music to the collaborative efforts of writers and musicians using the tools of modern technology that make such collaboration increasingly accessible.
The prospect excites her. “The book is about being heard, the need to be heard and to connect with another in some way,” Lieblein says. Collaboration seems a natural accompaniment.
Lieblein is inviting musicians to record their interpretations of a song or songs from The Wheelhouse Cafe soundscape and post them to the website. She will provide them with her husband’s sheet music — he gifted the songs to her for this project, she said. (Details are available on the website.)
“We will ask people to vote on what should go on an album and then I’m going to produce an album, both vinyl and digital,” she said.
The Wheelhouse Cafe will be available locally at Burton’s Bookstore on Front Street in Greenport. (Signed copies may be reserved by calling 631-477-1161 or sending an email
Lieblein, who has been involved in collaborative efforts as a poet, such as the annual Poetry at Poquatuck event each winter at Poquatuck Hall in Orient, is excited about venturing into the world of collaborative fiction — her next project as a novelist. “It’s going to be a crowd-sourced collaborative work,” she says. And it will almost certainly have its own soundscape.
