Anthony Valerio

About award-winning author Anthony Valerio's Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer, Professor Ellen Nerenberg says:

"These confessions, mine, Walter Michael Gregory's, center on the interstices between soft and hard literary porn as they were known in the 1960s and 70s."
This is the kernel of Anthony Valerio's salty and sweet, romping short book, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer. Trying to survive as a writer in New York City, Wally joins Ern Billions, Bonita Guggenheim, and Tad Browning as a staff writer at Porn/Prose, where, on spec and on commission, they write porn for hire. And "for hire" is part of the title of the pseudonymous Wally's best-known effort, This Body for Hire, which also has a place within the pages of Valerio's Confessions. Things are hard and soft in so many ways and directions. Among the hard are the winter of 1979, the rules of copyediting that Wally learns at Ern's knee, the lead of the Number 2 pencils he uses to ply his trade as a writers and editor, the concept of one-way staircase that disappears behind anyone who climbs it, the black laces of Sister Morisella's hard-soled black shoes. Among the soft we can group the heart of Anonymous, the hooker Wally invents as the first-person narrator of This Body for Hire, the pillowy arms and bosoms of the women his single mom Caroline surrounds herself with, the rounded characters of the notes Caroline the wordless uses to express herself. Pastiche reigns supreme as genre in this book that pivots between hard and soft, between first and third person narrator, between the writing hand and sober, dignified copyeditor's font and type. Delightful and witty, Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer is unafraid to own its Times Square-in-the-1970s setting.
Prof. E. Nerenberg, Wesleyan University

About award-winning novel Confessions of an Aspiring Pornographer

more great photos by Dave Barry found in BEFORE THE SIDEWALK ENDED

GREAT PHOTOS BY

great photos by Dave Barry found in my latest BEFORE THE SIDEWALK ENEDED: A WALK WITH SHEL SILVERSTEIN

great new cover design by Dave Barry

great new cover design by Dave Barry

image caption--young Semmelweis, graphite pencil by Aharon Gluska 2019

young Semmelweis, graphite pencil by Aharon Gluska 2019

Read Past Newsletters

The Grieved Angel, Protestant Cemetery, Rome. photo by AV

so vain, never before on a best-seller list--

#3 in Amazon's Two-Hour Biography & Memoir Short Reads. It changes day to day but proud for a fleeting moment.

For me, a quiet little book about good friends, including Toni Cade, Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Harold Brodkey. Thanks.

great new cover by Dave Barry

appreciated sustained support over time with this one by Ellen Nerenberg and Rebecca West.

https://www.amazon.com/Bambaras-Sicilian-Anth…/…/ref=sr_1_4…

also, SEMMELWEIS. the Women's Doctor hit Amazon's #1 & #3 in Medical biographies and Teen & Young Adult Biography eBooks respectively. The hope is that this work will remain in the public consciousness. thanks, AV

great new cover by Dave Barry

great new cover by Dave Barry.

Added as a epilogue to Toni Cade Bambara's One Sicilian Night is the essay Water for Toni Morrison. Here is the beginning of a rememberance of that great American author. The rest can be found at the end of the memoi Toni Cade bambara's One Siclian Night.

WATER FOR TONI MORRISON

I met Toni Morrison through my friendship with Toni Cade Bambara in the early 1990s. Toni and I had a brief, grand ole time, companions and lovers, playing Scrabble till the wee hours, at her place in Philadelphia and some of the time at my place down the road and in New York City. We accompanied one another to special occasions and engagements, one of which was the showing of Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust in a relatively small theater in Philadelphia. "Small" comes to mind because Toni Cade and I sat together and who should come sit beside but Toni Morrison. I can still feel her magnificence, her grandeur. Sitting still, straight ahead….The two Tonis, they often joked, and over the years discussed and read their books in progress to one another over the telephone. Toni Morrison was one of Toni Cade's editors. They knew the roots and toil of one another's great works of fiction. Toni Cade had not published in quite awhile. She was, as she termed it to me, "stuck." She had a novel she'd been working on since living in Atlanta, several years before, about the murder of children there. My considerable experience as a book editor arose, and my sense was to tread lightly in regards to the great writer of my company who was "stuck." I said, softly, "So where is the manuscript about the Atlanta murders?" I asked matter-of-factly, and she answered, "In the trunk beside the bed in the back bedroom."

"Why don't you take it out and we'll have a look."

It was like a long-lost friend paying a welcomed impromptu visit. And then Toni Cade went into the back bedroom, knelt beside the trunk and withdrew pages a little at a time. I recall sitting at one of our work spaces, and I'd leaf through them, slowly, carefully, aware that I had only the time that Toni allowed for this initial stage of getting the entire manuscript out of her trunk and into the open air. Little by little, she took all of it out and we looked at it the end of it, a tall, powerful pile. She went on to work on it soon after.

At some point unknown to me, Toni Morrison found out that the other Toni not only finished that great work but was willing to publish it.

We were at a cocktail party and Toni Morrison sidled up and said to me, "How did you do it? We've been trying to get her to finish it and get it out for quite a while." And we exchanged the kind of glance, an almost imperceptible smile, which two people share who have lived, and loved.

Certain affairs no matter how they end corporally never really end. Absent physically from my life, the two Tonis, for one, this memoir of an everlasting beginning, and the other a warm remembrance upon watching her, after the fact, in a fleeting television appearance.

Newsletter

cover for CONFESSIONS OF AN ASPIRING PORNOGRAPHERDESIGNED BY Dave Barry

COVER FOR CONFESSIONS OF AN ASPIRING PORNOGRAPHER

DESIGNED BY Dave Barry

This project now is in the process of becoming separate volumes as a consequence of Amazon blocking an episode. Look for Volume 1 in the near future. thanks. AV. Nov. 2021

EXCITING ABOUT NEW WORK FIRST SIX EPISODES PUBLISHED

CONFESSIONS OF AN ASPIRING PORNOGRAPHER

GET YOUR TOKEN AT LINK SITE AND CLIMB ABOARD.

https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-of-an-Aspiring-Pornographer/dp/B09B1KPPC8/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=anthony+valerio&qid=1630094916&s=falkor&sr=1-1

THE EXCELLENT PROF WILLIAN CONNELL OF SETON HALL U.

Great article by Prof. William Connell of Seton Hall U -

https://webmail.wesleyan.edu/src/download.php?startMessage=1&passed_id=115355&mailbox=INBOX&ent_id=2&passed_ent_id=0

Coming Soon. BEFORE THE SIDEWALK ENDED: A WALK WITH SHEL SILVERSTEIN.

Long awaited, rightfully so. The great artist: writer of books & songs & plays, we were friends, collaborators & confidantes. This work will compliment his legacy in a real, I hope, illuminating way. AV

NEW REVISED EDITION OF SEMMELWEIS by Anthony Valerio.

new revised edition of Anthony Valerio's SEMMELWEIS

Great cover design by Dave Barry

photo of Dr. Joseph Skoda, first and formost of Semmelweis's mentors and teachers.

Jospeph Skoda, first and most foremost of Semmelweis's mentors and teachers. Physician to the crown.

I wrote SEMMELWEIS two years before our present pandemic. Pleaseed that I did not capitalize on the moment, as if that is a bad thing. But it tells me that Dr. Semmelweis's life & work held up till that time when I was writing it in South Florida and I hope his exemplary life & work that saved many will continue on after this pandemic passes. Thanks to all who contributed. Anthony

In this time of widespread pestilence I want to send love to my family & friends and to those visiting these pages. I recall my work on the life & work of Ignaz Semmelweis, informaiton about whom is contained in these pages. He never gave up, working against great odds and in the process, at the expense of his own life, saved countless lives of pregnant women, new mothers and their offspring.

Also, for your entertainment, I hope, here are linkis to radio shows on which I appeared over the past few years.

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms08-25-2017

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms04-06-2017

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms02-16-2017

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms12-15-2016

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms01-12-2017

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms01-25-2018

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms03-01-2018

https://archive.org/details/RiverValleyRhythms12-07-2017

new cover - ANITA GARIBALDI, a Biography

in honor of Black History Month - two great black women revolutionaries, Anita Garibaldi & Toni Cade Bambara.

ANITA GARIBALDI, a Biography

TONI CADE BAMBARA'S ONE SICILIAN NIGHT, a Memoir

SWITCHING!

Semmelwies arrives in Vienna to study law. He audits a demonstration by the famous physician Joseph Skoda. Without telling his father he switches from law to medicine. Switching in this project the recently completed book Semmelweis, the Women's Doctor is thematic. Switching from his small town in Buda to big-town comparatively intolerant, racist Vienna. Switching studies. And then the first major step in discovering the causes of childbed fever, the H.I. V. and cancer of his time, switching midwives of the Second lying-in clinic with the medical students of the First. The death reate was higher in the First. Semmelweis wa sout to discver why.

in memory of my primos Vincent Robert DiGregorio & Vincent DiGregorio - photos of Grieved Angel., Protestant Cemetery, Rome, by Anthony Valerio