Gray day,

somber, desolate, dreary

Gray day

Then with a mad leap

Rain

It darkens down the sky

stumbles on green earth ...

So begins Ruth Brin's first published work, a poem published in the 1930s in a posh Minneapolis magazine called "The Golfer and Sportsman." She was Ruth Firestone then, and she was 13 years old.

It was the beginning of a very public love affair with words.

Brin is best known for her poems, one of which recently appeared in a new anthology of poems by Minnesota women from frontier times to the present. Her poetry has been included in Jewish prayer books, and she's written 13 books, including a memoir and children's books.

But she had never published a novel, until now -- at the age of 86.

"The Most Beautiful Monday in 1961" is a tale of six Twin Citians who take a boat ride down the Mississippi River on a stormy July day. Along the way the characters -- two women who love the same man, a rabbi and two businessmen who are sparring over a shopping center -- reveal themselves to Charlotte, a widow and psychiatrist who lost her husband in the Holocaust.

"It's a story about the World War II generation and who we were in our prime," Brin said this week. "It's a thrill for me to get it published. It took a lot of effort to finish it, and it took a lot of effort to find a publisher."

On the shelf for decades

A draft of the novel had been gathering dust since the late 1960s, the sole survivor of a trio of novels she attempted to write. An agent shopped it around then, but publishers weren't interested in a book that included the Holocaust even as a small part of the story. "I put it away," she said. "What are you going to do?"

Thirty years later, one of her sons, an editor in California, asked to see the manuscript. He told her she needed a good editor, but he thought it deserved to be published. For a couple of years she worked on tightening language and rewriting the book. She found a publisher in Lerner Publishing of Minneapolis, which had printed some of her children's books.

Brin was delighted. "It's just something I always wanted to do," she said.

A writer and a scholar