Author Nick Zwirblia
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
My Story
Author Nick Zwirblia was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he still resides. He is most reliably found at local thrift stores and garage sales—buying $2 pieces of “costume jewelry,” which, properly assessed, end up being $300 hunks of gold that other people didn’t have the vision to “see.”
For more than a decade, Nick lived in rural Vermont, where, among other jobs and pursuits, he worked in food services at Dartmouth College—where he was known as The Happy Hop Guy—ran a successful home-cleaning business, and was the owner of “The Enchanted Toy Box,” where he specialized in antique toys and collectibles.
Nick’s uncanny “eye for the old” imbues The Bramford Chronicles with a level of got-it-right detail that brings readers back to a time that—perhaps now forgotten by most—tells us important things about “who we are” and “where we came from.”
Personal Life
When he was drugged and raped by an art teacher—after being molested in early childhood by not one but two priests— author Nick Zwirblia made himself a promise: if he was going to be sexually targeted, he was going to make it profitable. And he did.
A lover of the finer things who grew up partly in public housing, he swore he would fill his life with antiques and art. And he did, stealing more than a million dollars worth before he was thirty. And by the age of thirty-three, he was back in Worcester—and where he’d sworn he’d never be again—in public housing. Nick’s life story is a complicated, upsetting, and inspiring look at what it was like to come out as a gay man, in the 1970s.
“I want people to be hopeful. The book is set in the Great Depression, but I don’t think it’s depressing. One of the three boys at the heart of the book is African-American; that friendship is very important to me. .“
Nick Zwirblia on his debut novel, The Bramford Chronicles Book 1: Johnny and Baby Jumbo
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