South Philly Review

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Photo by Steve Langdon

There are lots of expressions of love. A ring or roses are a few ways people might get the point across. Perhaps even a flirtatious push on the playground is the first sprouting of that overwhelming feeling.

For Susan Barr-Toman, love is clean underwear.

“It was actually my sister who came up with [the title]. In the end of the first chapter, [the main character] says love was clean underwear, not hugs and kisses,” Barr-Toman said of her debut novel “When Love Was Clean Underwear.”

The 27th-and-Dickinson-streets native started working on the 165-page book in the 1990s, spring boarding the idea from a true story told to her.

“The inspiration actually started from a story of a couple that moved into South Philly and they weren’t from the area. They moved into this house and it was really affordable and it needed a lot of work,” the 42-year-old author said. “It had been owned for generations and they were real excited and doing heavy restoration.

“On either side were two sisters, and the house they had bought was the third sister’s. Every time they did something, they came over and asked, ‘What are you doing?!’”

With the influx of close friends to the desirable properties south of South Street, Barr-Toman set out to crystallize their experiences in the story of 30-year-old Lucy Pescitelli. After helping her mother commit suicide, the part-time funeral home employee moves out on her own for the first time and into a South Philadelphia neighborhood.

“I probably started writing in the late ’90s, ’97, maybe,” Barr-Toman, who set Lucy’s story in the same decade, said. “I had just been working on short stories. I just kept taking notes and the ideas kept coming to me. I had about 80 pages of notes and I realized it wasn’t a short story anymore.”

After penning the manuscript, Barr-Toman sent the pages to the Many Voices Project, where the entrants were read and chosen by Ann Hood, author of “The Knitting Circle.”

As the contest winner, Barr-Toman had her novel published by the Minnesota State University’s New Rivers Press and her stories were able to reach a larger audience.

“While I hadn’t gotten published, writing had really enriched my life and [an editor] calls on April 15 and he just leaves a message and he says ‘I need to talk to you and I have some good news,’” the mother of two said of the notification call of her selection that fell just after her 40th birthday. “I have ideas that come to me and I want to make them good compelling stories and when something comes together it’s a great feeling. It’s addictive.”

Barr-Toman’s father still owns and operates the Grays Ferry bar Bailey’s Place, though the Barr family moved to the Northeast when Barr-Toman — the fourth of five children born just seconds after her twin sister Sarah — was age 3.

“I went to Fordham in the Bronx and studied English. When I moved back, I moved to Pennsport. My friend found the house and it was a great house, three bedrooms,” Barr-Toman, who teaches creative writing at Temple University, said. “I really love Philadelphia. You can afford to live here, you can walk here, you can afford to buy food here.”

With her undergraduate degree in hand, Barr-Toman was met with the same struggle of today’s post-grads and bounced around to jobs ranging from administration for the Cancer Society to a job with MTV that brought her back to New York and saw the show cancelled — and her out of a job — before her first day.

“When I had my son, it prompted me to have a plan,” Barr-Toman said of son Ian, born in 2000. “I was working at U. Penn managing computer support. I was going to go back to school part-time, but I just couldn’t see not being with him.

“I didn’t want to be a stage mom, where I was like, ‘I was going to be a writer and you have to be one now.’”

Barr-Toman enrolled in a low-residency program, which consists of a 10-day stretch on campus at Vermont’s Bennington College and then six months of self-directed coursework at home before another 10 days on campus in June. Graduates earn an MFA by completing five of the residency cycles.

“I took a year off in between, so I graduated in January of ’05,” Barr-Toman, who took the hiatus for the birth of her daughter, Oona, in ’03, said.

Her time at Bennington gave her the push to put the final touches on her manuscript that was about a decade in the making. Reading about the Many Voices Project competition in a magazine, Barr-Toman sent out her fledgling novel two years after she had put down the final draft.