Saugatuck Scribes: Fun and Game

Westporters write books on a wide variety of subjects in all sorts of genres. Authors Aline Weiller and Tim Manners will share their new books — with our community. Saugatuck Scribes is a series that showcases Westport writers and their newest books.

FUN: Essays on a Life Embraced is a collection of humorous and hopeful slice-of-life stories. Full of Aline Weiller's signature wit, poignancy, and zest, FUN offers readers a front row seat to Weiller's World: be it performing stand-up comedy, prepping for a middle school swim test, or waxing poetic about discontinued bank pens. Both observant and clever, the author's wordsmithed pieces are all heart: whether she's spilling family tales that resonate, paying superfan homage to celebrities, or riffing on her decade-apropos hairstyles, she's all in.

is based on a trove of New York Yankees legend Waite Hoyt’s writings and interview transcripts, in which Tim Manners has reanimated the Hall of Famer’s untold story, entirely in Hoyt’s own words. A friend and teammate of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and others, Hoyt’s odyssey is about more than baseball alone. He was also a vaudeville star, an oil painter, an undertaker, pioneering radio voice of the Cincinnati Reds, and an early advocate of Alcoholics Anonymous. Schoolboy dives straight into the Roaring '20s and the birth of modern-day baseball, as well as Hoyt’s defining conflict: Should he have pursued something more respectable than being the best pitcher on the 1927 New York Yankees, arguably the greatest baseball team of all time? It's a question that resonates with anyone who has ever pondered the road not taken, and for "Schoolboy" Hoyt, the answer was both elusive and haunting.

Aline Weiller is an award-winning essayist, publicist, and stand-up comedian. Weiller’s creative nonfiction and public relations work has been recognized nationally, and her essays have been tweeted by The New York Times. A nine-time Connecticut Press Club award-winner, Weiller’s essays are also contest-winners and have been chosen for dramatic readings. She’s been published in print and online to include Brain, Child Magazine, Grown & Flown, and Erma Bombeck’s Writers’ Workshop, among others. Weiller’s also the founder of the PR firm, Wordsmith, LLC, and she and her husband share two young adult sons. FUN: Essays on a Life Embraced is her debut book.

Tim Manners is a writer, communications consultant and baseball fan. After casually asking his friend Chris Hoyt why his legendary father had never written a memoir, Manners found eight boxes of Yankees legend Waite Hoyt's papers sitting on his front porch. Four years later, University of Nebraska Press published "Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero." A magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University with a BA in history, Manners is a former FM-radio disc jockey, publicist and magazine publisher. Currently an essay specialist with Westport-based Manners Group, he is also author of "Relevance: Making Stuff That Matters" (2008), published by Penguin/Portfolio.

Host or Publisher The Westport Library