A Retired Machinist Published His First Novel at 67. He Says He Was Right on Time

Colin Mercer's writing desk used to be a workbench. The vise is still bolted to one end, and the laptop sits on a square of shop rag so it won't slide. Next to it is a pair of dial calipers he carried for most of his working life. "I don't use them for anything," he says. "I just like knowing they're there."

Mercer spent forty years as a machinist in western Pennsylvania. At 61, a year after he retired, he signed up for a Tuesday night fiction class at a community college because, as he tells it, his wife said he was wearing a groove in the living room carpet. Six years later, Rustbelt Editions published The Last Good Summer on Arden Lane, a novel about four boys and one borrowed Volkswagen Beetle in the summer of 1971, set in the fictional steel town of Arden. It is one of six books on the 2026 RedSquibble Debut Shortlist, chosen from 1,140 submissions. We talked at his kitchen table, over coffee from a percolator older than most of his readers.

The Night Class

What made you walk into that classroom at 61?

Boredom, mostly, and a little fear. When you retire, nobody needs you at six in the morning anymore. That's harder than people tell you. The class met in a room with a clock that ran eleven minutes slow. There were fourteen of us, and I was the oldest by twenty years. The instructor, Gail Pruitt, gave us one assignment the first night. Write a page about a car you remember.

Was it the Beetle right away?

Right away. My cousin's 1966 Beetle, pale blue, with a rust hole in the floor on the passenger side. You could watch the road go by under your shoes. Four of us borrowed it for a whole summer and put more miles on it than he did all year. I wrote four pages instead of one. Gail handed it back with a note that said, "Keep going." So I did.

How much of the book is true?

The car is true. The hole in the floor is true. So is the mill whistle at shift change, and the way the sky over town went orange at night when they tapped a furnace. The four boys are made up, mostly. Each one has a little bit of me in him and a lot of people I wish I'd been kinder to.

Parts That Have to Fit

You've compared writing to machine work. What do you mean by that?

I spent forty years making parts that had to fit to a thousandth of an inch. A sentence is the same job. You measure, you cut, you measure again. If it's off, it's off, and no amount of polish will fix it. Younger writers in my class wanted everything to sound pretty. I wanted everything to fit.

"I spent forty years making parts that had to fit to a thousandth of an inch. A sentence is the same job."

What did the shop teach you about revision?

That scrap is part of the work. Every machinist makes scrap. You don't cry over it, you learn from it and throw it in the bin. I threw out about two hundred pages of this book. There was a whole chapter about a union meeting that I loved, and it had no business being there. Into the bin.

Where does Arden come from?

It's a few mill towns along the river where I grew up, folded into one. I gave it one main street, two churches, a Slovak social hall, and a mill that runs day and night. I wanted a place readers would recognize even if they'd never been within a hundred miles of Pittsburgh. Every town has a summer it never gets back.

Right on Time

How did Rustbelt Editions find you?

I read a chapter at the college's spring reading night. There were maybe forty people in folding chairs. An editor named Walt Kaminski was there because his daughter was reading too. He came up afterward and asked if the rest of the book existed. I said it did, which was only about half true. I finished it that summer.

Do you ever wish you had started younger?

No. At thirty I wouldn't have had anything to say. At forty I wouldn't have had the patience. I needed the whole life first. People keep calling me a late bloomer. I tell them I was right on time.

What would you tell someone your age who wants to start?

Sign up for the class. Bring a pencil. Sit in the front, because you won't hear as well as you think you do. And don't wait for anybody's permission. Nobody is going to come to your house and ask if you've got a book in you.

Mercer is two hundred pages into a second novel, about a machinist in 1989 training the young man who will replace him. He writes every morning from six to nine, the hours he used to give the shop. The calipers stay on the desk.

The Last Good Summer on Arden Lane by Colin Mercer (Rustbelt Editions, 304 pages, $26.99) is out now.