Considering the Written Word

In a room in his apartment overlooking shades of blue and green swimming below, Hyattsville novelist Richard Morris thinks.

Although the beauty outside is inspirational—arrow straight trees slice the sky while chirps call the mornings out of their dark shackles—what flows from Morris’s pen comes from inside.

“I had a lot of things I felt I wanted to say,” he said of his books.

Morris’s first novel, Cologne No. 10 For Men, is a satire about war.

“There were a lot of things that were funny, ironic we had about the war,” he said. “[It’s] kind of an anti-war book.”

Between the covers, Cologne recounts the habit of one soldier, who found that a drop of cologne under his nose was all he needed to mask the stench of war. Eventually, the character decides that he doesn’t want it anymore—he wants to smell the odors.

Morris, who lives with his wife Barbara in Ward 4, is originally from Pittsburgh and grew up in Cleveland. He was a custom homebuilder in Garrett County and later moved to where he conducted research for the National Association of Home Builders Research Center in Upper Marlboro and later with the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C. With the NAHB he traveled, wrote articles and books. He retired in 2004 while living in Bowie.

Two years ago, Morris and his wife moved into Hyattsville to be closer to their family.

“I always enjoyed fiction,” he said. “Once I get into writing I space out. The characters become real. Sometimes I put them into boxes and they have to figure how to get out.”

One such box can be found in chapter 17 of Morris’s latest book, Well Considered, which was published last year.

In this situation, Ron Watkins, a black man who recently moved into a neighborhood in “Patuxent County” – Morris’s fictional county portraying Prince George’s County – is researching the 1907 lynching of his great-grandfather on a Maryland tobacco plantation when he finds himself stuck in a 30-foot-deep tube.

While on a daily run, Watkins encountered Jimmy Clay, a racist Neo-Nazi whose family originally owned the plantation that Watkins’s family worked on. Clay and his Neo-Nazi buddies kidnap Watkins and toss him into an abandoned well.

According to Morris’s research, there were 43 lynchings of black men between 1864 and 1933 in Maryland.

“I really wanted to make a statement there,” Morris said. “There was tremendous white flight in Prince George’s County in 1970 when school integration began. It just seems sad to me that we can’t live together.”

Enter: .

“It’s a very heterogeneous place,” Morris said. [It’s] diverse so you’re constantly stimulated by that.”

To familiarize himself with black speech, Morris rode the Metro. It was more difficult, however, for the author, a white man, to learn how black people think and feel.

Morris is currently working on a new book, but he won’t divulge the details of the project. His two published books can be found at the Hyattsville library or online at the Busboys & Poets website. For more information visit Morris’s website and blog.