True Tales Growing Up in a Haunted House

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Ghost Stories, Halloween, Halloween reads, Haunted House, Hauntings, memoir, nonfiction, Supernatural, writing

Have you ever had any ghostly encounters?

Each year around this time, I like to reblog a series of tales about my encounters with the ghostly and unexplained, starting when I was a child, and later full grown with children of my own. The first is printed below with links to the others.

While ”intellectually” I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, and the like, I have experienced such. And I cannot deny that the phenomena which I and others–indeed, all known cultures and societies–have laid claim to, are “real.” The reality they seem to have is unexplained, often unverifiable, and usually fleeting and ephemeral. And yet they persist in haunting humanity.

I can neither explain, verify, nor dismiss the reality of the experiences that I relate here. I can only state that these things occurred as I remember them, or as others I trust related them to me. And most were witnessed by more than one person

Happy Halloween!

Our House on a Haunted Hill

When I was a kid “House on Haunted Hill” was my favorite spooky movie. I first saw it a few years after my own family had escaped, just barely, from a haunted house experience. While living there I was not aware of all the horrors that house contained, and only learned the full account when my mother felt I was old enough to learn the truth.

I was eight years old when my parents rented a home set on a hillside in an older, respectable neighborhood in Omaha, Nebraska. The attic had been converted into two rooms, a tiny room overlooking the back yard and garage; and a huge room overlooking the front yard. This larger room had been recently renovated and then abruptly abandoned, it appeared. The high pitched ceiling and walls were covered in a richly varnished, knotty pine paneling. Finely crafted drawers and book cases had been built beneath the eaves. But the floor, made of rough, unvarnished planks of wood, had been left unfinished. And a large reddish-brown stain that looked like a puddle of blood had soaked into the wood.

This was my bedroom and I loved it. Being an avid fan of Nancy Drew mysteries, the giant blood stain only added to the allure of the room–that and the trap door on the floor of the walk-in closet. While the door had been nailed shut, I could still probe the cracks with a ruler, detecting steps that led downward—to where, no one knew. My discovery sent chills of delight down my back.

In fact, I was thrilled to have the whole second story all to myself. Even though the second smaller room could have easily accommodated my little brother, my mother made him sleep down below in the tiny room at the bottom of the stairs. She claimed the small room upstairs was “too cold” and used it as a storage room instead. She filled it with unpacked boxes and unused furniture, forbidding me to play there—which, of course, made the room seem even more desirable.

I remember entering the room often to play by myself and looking out the dusty window toward the mysterious barn-like structure that faced the alley. The structure, which could easily have accommodated several cars, sat empty nearly the whole time we lived there, and my brother and I were forbidden to play here as well. It too was considered “too cold” for human habitation. The one time I did enter, my eyes were drawn upward to the high rafters where, through the rotting roof, splinters of light filled with ghostly dust motes fell to the floor. I did not enter again. When some teenage boys wanted to use the garage to rebuild a car, they moved out after a couple of nights, never to return—even though they had paid rent for a full month.

I thought it strange when my mother kept wanting to move me out of my lovely upstairs “apartment” to a room below and I refused to be moved. She kept asking if I was afraid up there all by myself, but I insisted I wasn’t. This was true. I knew what needed to be done to stay safe, although I never shared this with my mother. It was a ritual that I religiously followed. Every night after my mother heard my prayers and tucked me into bed, I would pull the covers tight over my head and stay there until I fell asleep. I knew somehow that no harm would come to me if I followed this ritual. And no harm ever did come to me.

I might well have been very afraid if I had heard what my parents heard at night as they slept in the room below mine.

Often my mother was woken by the sound of heavy, dragging footsteps lumbering across room over her bed, and she would wake my father and make him go upstairs to investigate. At first he did so wearily, thinking she was imagining it. But once he woke early enough to hear it himself and went dashing up the stairs—but nothing was there and I was sound asleep in my bed.

We moved shortly thereafter. That’s when the neighbors told us about the horrible tragedy that had taken place in the house before we moved in. They hadn’t wanted to tell us earlier and scare us away. Apparently the previous owner of the house had murdered his wife in my bedroom and then hung himself afterwards from the rafters in the garage.

If some other tragic event took place in the small room next to mine upstairs—the coldest room in the house–we never learned. Whatever haunted that room did more than drag its feet across the floor or blow cold air down our spines. During our final days in that home, my mother, to her terror, found this out–with no one but my three-year-old brother at home to save her.

More about this in my next post.

You can read the full series of true ghost stories at the links below which were first posted in 2013

• True Ghost Stories, Part II – Attack of the Poltergeist
• True Ghost Stories, Part III – When the Dead Refuse to Leave
• True Ghost Stories, Part IV – Resident Evil: In the Belly of the Beast
• True Ghost Stories, Part V – A Demon on My Chest
• True Ghost Stories, Part VI – Evil Incarnate
• True Ghost stories, Part VII – Do I Believe This Stuff?

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The Poetics of Place: Redwood Speech,Watershed Prayers

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deep ecology, Francis Weller, humanity, inspiration, Language, music, Nature, quotations, The poetics of place, writing

“I want to see our words jump off the ground, erupt from a sensual earth, musty, humid, gritty. I want to taste words like honey, sweet and dripping with eternity. I want to hear words coming from my mouth and your mouth that are so beautiful that we wince with joy at their departure and arrival. I want to touch words that carry weight and substance, words that have shape and body, curve and tissue. I want to feel what we say as though the words were holy utterances surfacing from a pool where the gods drink. . . . .

My language must be redwood speech, watershed prayers, oak savannah, coupled in an erotic way with fog, heat, wind, rain and hills, sweetgrass and jackrabbits, wild iris and ocean current. My land is my language and only then can my longing for eloquence by granted. Until then I will fumble and fume and ache for a style of speaking that tells you who I am.”   – Francis Weller

One of my first blog posts in 2012 featured a speech by Francis Weller that captures so eloquently how the earth, our natural habitat, speaks to us and inspires us to speak. How it shapes our language and the way we express ourselves, not only in literature but in art and music and dance.

You can read his whole speech at his website Wisdom Bridge – Modern Pathways to our Indigenous Soul. The excerpt above, my quote of the week, hopefully will whet your appetite to do so.

As you read his speech, you might want to listen again to how nature inspires and shapes music, here in Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, one of my favorite pieces.

Recipe for a Painting: Durrell on Venice at Dawn

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art, inspiration, Lawrence Durrell, painting, travel, Venice, writing

Twilight Venice, 1908, Claude Monet

Quote of the Week

“These thoughts belong to Venice at dawn, seen from the deck of the ship which is to carry me down through the islands to Cyprus; a Venice wobbling in a thousand fresh-water reflections cool as a jelly. It was as if some great master, stricken by dementia, had burst his whole color-box against the sky to deafen the inner eye of the world. Cloud and water mixed into each other, dripping with colors, merging, overlapping, liquefying, with steeples and balconies and roofs floating in space, like the fragments of some stained-glass window seen through a dozen veils of rice paper. Fragments of history touched with the colors of wine, tar, ochre, blood, fire-opal and ripening grain. The whole at the same time being rinsed softly back at the edges into a dawn sky as softly as circumspectly blue as a pigeon’s egg.”

Excerpt From: Lawrence Durrell. “Bitter Lemons of Cyprus: Life on a Mediterranean Island.”

I found this exquisite quote on another favorite blog, The Depth of Now, by the lovely Martina Korkmaz. Immediately I was seized with the urge to paint his words, to capture in paint all the shimmering color and effusive joy.

Instead I found this painting of Venice by Monet that captures some, but not all of what I would paint.

More and more I find myself wanting to paint the things I read that move me, like the poem Love After Love that I blogged about earlier this week. Paint a woman greeting herself in a garden on an island home.

I suppose it’s an urge to put into tangible form what I feel swirling around me when I read, what I see splashing against the walls of my mind. Something that will remain long after the words fall silent.

 

Five Debut Novels Worth Sampling

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authors, book review, books, Entertainment, fiction, literature, Novel, novels, Reading, writing

I’ve been putting together a reading list of recently published debut novels that have been making a splash in the publishing world. Perhaps not surprising, given I’m looking for a publisher for my own debut novel.

What is surprising is how many there are, and how intriguing they all sound. So much so I’ve had a hard time winnowing the list down to a readable top five. What helped was being able to download free sample chapters from Amazon onto my Kindle.

Here’s what I came up with.

 There, There – by Tommy Orange

This one is first on my list because I’m already 2/3 through it. And I have to say, it’s living up to the hype, and a lot of it there is: “Orange writes the way the best rappers rap, the way the finest taggers tag. His is a bold aesthetic of exhilaration and, yes, rage.” (Claire Vaye Watkins, Poets & writers, July/August, 218)

“Let’s get this out of the way: Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, should probably be on reading lists for every creative writing program in this country. It is a master class in style, form and narrative voice. Orange, who is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, utilizes first, second and third-person narration to incredible effect, creating a multi-voiced novel that effectively reflects an entire community. . . .” (Alicia Elliott, The Globe and Mail)

There, There is about urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who know “the sound of the freeway better than [they] do rivers … the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than [they] do the smell of cedar or sage…”

Each of its many characters are heading to an annual powow, which promises to be explosive, according to another reviewer: “[T]he plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. Technically, it’s a dazzling, cinematic climax played out in quick-cut, rotating points of view. But its greater impact is emotional: a final, sorrowful demonstration of the pathological effects of centuries of abuse and degradation.” (Ron Charles, Washington Post)

Despite this, “even amid confusion and violence, there is the possibility for decency to assert itself,” and novel ends on a note of hope. Or so I’m promised (The Guardian).  I’ll let you know.

  Song of a Captive Bird by Jazmin Darznic

I was drawn to this book because it’s about the life of the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad who “endures the scorn of her family and society to become one of Iran’s most prominent poets and a film director.” According to the Kirkus Review ” this novel is a “thrilling and provocative portrait of a powerful woman set against a sweeping panorama of Iranian history.”

“Song of a Captive Bird is a complex and beautiful rendering of that vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out.” (Dina Nayeri, New York Times)

  The Incendiaries by K. O. Kwon

Laura Groff calls this novel “God-haunted.” It is a love story set on a contemporary college campus that “explores faith, religion, and the dangers of fundamentalism” (Poets $ Writers, July/August 2018) An escapee from North Korea who becomes a cult leader is another major character, with disastrous consequences, it seems.

Despite the fact this novel promises another explosive ending like There, There, which may have put me off, it was the prose from that sample chapter that drew me in and made me add it to my list. These intriguing bits added to its allure:

“Kwon’s novel is urgent in its timeliness, dizzyingly beautiful in its prose, and poignant in its discovery of three characters fractured by trauma, frantically trying to piece back together their lives. (USAToday)

“It is full of absences and silence. Its eerie, sombre power is more a product of what it doesn’t explain than of what it does. It’s the rare depiction of belief that doesn’t kill the thing it aspires to by trying too hard. It makes a space, and then steps away to let the mystery in.” (The New Yorker)

  Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin

“A fugitive from a Mexican cartel takes refuge in a forest preserve in the wilds of Virginia. . . .  An intense, visceral debut equal to the best that country noir has to offer.” So begins and ends a Kirkus Review of this debut novel.

I chose this as my fourth debut novel to read in order to get out of the city and into the wild. And also, I suspect, as a serious Justified fan, to get back into the hills of Appalachia with a soft-hearted and hard-fisted alpha male like Raylan Givens. I don’t know if the protaganist of Bearskin, Rice Moore, will live up to Raylan, but the sample chapter I read gives me hope.

Then there’s this: “Bearskin is visceral, raw, and compelling—filled with sights, smells, and sounds truly observed.  It’s a powerful debut and an absolute showcase of exceptional prose.  There are very few first novels when I feel compelled to circle brilliant passages, but James McLaughlin’s writing had me doing just that.”

  Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marsha Pessl

“Sharp, snappy fun for the literary-minded,” so deems the Kirkus Review, and that’s exactly why I chose this to be the last novel on my “top five” list, even though it doesn’t quite fit my criteria for “recent’ debut novels. This came out in 2006.

“Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna Tartt (then invites the rest of the Western Canon to the party) in this novel—with visual aids drawn by the author—that has won over readers of all ages.” (Amazon)

I tried a sample chapter and decided this quirky, fun novel is just what I needed to top off this list, which is decidedly heavy in “not fun” topics.

Some strong runners-up on the lighter, fun side are:

The Ensemble

The Kiss Quotient

The Pisces

Let me if you’ve read any of these yet, and if so, what you thought. Also, if you know of any other debut novels I should add to my list.

 

“The Raw Nerve of the Universe”

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art, inspiration, quotations, Ursula Le Guin, Wassily Kandinsky, writing

Wassily Kandinsky

Quote of the Week 

“We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Because they are numb. Because we have forgotten.”

Ursula Le Guin, from class notes by Luis Alberto Urrea

 

Following the Yellow Brick Road to Publishing

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books, Novel, Publishing, writing

So far I’ve heard from nine publishing houses, all complimentary, all passing on my novel.

Highlight the word “complimentary.” I do. We writers are like that, or so I’ve heard and found to be true in practice. A particularly complimentary rejection letter can keep us smiling for weeks.

It’s all part of the publishing process, those mounting rejections while waiting for that miracle, or what feels like a miracle in the waiting, the hand of god reaching out of the sky to bliss our work, to name us, oh holy of holies–a published novelist.

In the meantime I print out the rejection letters and mark with yellow highlighter all the praise large and small. A sunny bulwark against disappointment, I suppose.

“It only takes one to fall in love,” says my agent. “The right one, for the long haul.”

Finding the right publisher is like finding the right marriage partner. We can fall in love with someone, or some book,  and yet still not be ready to commit. To slip a ring on a finger or offer the ultimate pledge, to death do us part.

So I’m still waiting for “the right one” to come along, to be so swept away by my novel they cannot bear to pass on it.

In the meantime, I gather Toto in my arms and happily follow that yellow brick road of sunny highlights on my way to see the wizard and find a home for my novel.

Keep your fingers crossed.

 

 

 

Tasting Life Twice – A Traveler Returns

Tags

Europe, life, memory, photography, travel, vacation, writing

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anaïs Nin

I’ve just returned from a whirlwind romance with Europe, visiting five countries and 18 cities in 30 days. I wasn’t with a tour group but with 3 traveling companions, one of whom was on a grant-based mission to tour the castles of Europe.

We traveled by plane, train, bus, ferry, car, taxi and subway, and the wear and tear of the trip happened mostly during those transitions, lugging bags and suitcases up and down hotel stairs and elevators, across cobblestone streets and busy thoroughfares, up narrow escalators and down crowded corridors to throw our luggage through train doors before they closed on us. One terrifying and, in retrospect, hilarious moment I’ll never forget was standing on the platform watching my lone cousin on the train surrounded by all our luggage as the train doors are closing and her husband comes running up behind us shouting that it’s the wrong train.

That “in retrospect” is so important. It’s what filters raw experience into meaningful moments, pushing some moments into the background while highlighting others. It allows us to filter those experiences through our past, to find the similarities and disconnections that help us to place it within a larger context. It allows us to reflect on what was seen and felt in a deeper and more comprehensive way.

Even going through the hundreds of photos I took, deleting the inconsequential and cropping others to highlight and foreground what was seen in a new way, allows me to “resee” what I might have missed in the moment, allows me to re-experience the moment in a new way.

I’m fascinated with how layered, how open to revision, our experiences are. While travelling I had little time to record my thoughts and perceptions, but as soon as I returned home, I began to do that. Here’s what I wrote:

“Currently, as I write this, a day after my return home, I see that month of travel as a huge, largely undigested meal, too rich and powerful to fully absorb, to unravel, to comment upon. I mix metaphors because even how I cannot fully or precisely articulate what I’ve not yet had time to fully grasp.

But I’m looking forward to the time I have now to reflect back upon those raw experiences and to shape it into meaningful expressions, whether through writing, blogging, sketching, painting, poetry. The best is yet to come, I feel, for bringing the past into the present, into a slow-motion re-examination, pulling it under the microscope of the mind, filtering it through past similar memories, or things I’ve read about it, or read afresh, read anew–experiencing it more thoroughly through the lens of history I had not had the time to read in the raw moment . . . 

I see this trip as a treasure trove of experience, largely unmined, to draw upon. My life is deeper now, richer, more varied, than before, because of this experience.”

It goes on, much of it rambling, repetitive–the free writing that allows us to get our feelings and perceptions down on paper uncensored.

So while I’m still mining this treasure-trove of experience, or to mix metaphors again, digesting this rich meal, tasting it twice, I’ll leave you with five fleeting moments forever stilled from the five countries we visited.

Detail from Gaudi’s Cathedral, Barcelona, Spain

The Louvre, Paris, France

Bruges, Belgium

Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany

Varenna, Lake Como, Italy

 

Virtual Love-Making, Why We Blog

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Blogging, Deborah J. Brasket, Entertainment, inspiration, Louis Armstrong, Love, Love-making, Science, writing

Often when I leave comments on a blog posts that moved me, I write “I love this post” or “I love the way you do [this]” or “I love that quotation.” Lately I’ve been wondering if I’m overusing the word “love”.

Am I really feeling this strong emotional attachment, or am I just being lazy, unwilling to take the time to precisely articulate what strikes me about a particular piece?

After reading an article in The Atlantic on the science behind love, I’m inclined to believe that, more often than not, I use the word “love” because that’s what I’m actually feeling– a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.”   That’s how Barbara Fredrickson defines love in her new book Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do.

In The Atlantic article “There’s No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science), author Emily Esfahani Smith writes:

Fredrickson, a leading researcher of positive emotions at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents scientific evidence to argue that love is not what we think it is. It is not a long-lasting, continually present emotion that sustains a marriage; it is not the yearning and passion that characterizes young love; and it is not the blood-tie of kinship.

Rather, it is what she calls a “micro-moment of positivity resonance.” She means that love is a connection, characterized by a flood of positive emotions, which you share with another person—any other person—whom you happen to connect with in the course of your day. You can experience these micro-moments with your romantic partner, child, or close friend. But you can also fall in love, however momentarily, with less likely candidates, like a stranger on the street, a colleague at work, or an attendant at a grocery store. Louis Armstrong put it best in “It’s a Wonderful World” when he sang, “I see friends shaking hands, sayin ‘how do you do?’ / They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.”

So when I say I “love” Louis Armstrong’s song, now I know why—because I feel such a strong positive connection to what he’s saying, as well as with how he says it, and the music he says it with, that I experience a triple love-whammy!

What I feel when reading things by fellow bloggers, or see the images they’ve created, is similar—a deeply-felt resonating connection, often on several levels.

In “Tao and Creativity” Chang Chung-yuan describes this connection between poet and reader as a “spiritual rhythm.”  It is the means by which the reader participates in the inner experience of the poet. He writes:

In other words, the reader is carried into the rhythmic flux and is brought to the depth of original indeterminacy from which the poetic pattern emerges.  The reader is directly confronted with the objective reality which the poet originally faced. The subjectivity of the reader and the objective reality of the poem interfuse . . . .

This is very interesting because Fredrickson discovers a similar phenomenon when she compares the brainwaves of a storyteller and listeners. Smith describes this in her article:

 What they found was remarkable. In some cases, the brain patterns of the listener mirrored those of the storyteller after a short time gap. The listener needed time to process the story after all. In other cases, the brain activity was almost perfectly synchronized; there was no time lag at all between the speaker and the listener. But in some rare cases, if the listener was particularly tuned in to the story—if he was hanging on to every word of the story and really got it—his brain activity actually anticipated the story-teller’s in some cortical areas.

“The mutual understanding and shared emotions, especially in that third category of listener, generated a micro-moment of love, which ‘is a single act, performed by two brains,’” as Fredrickson writes in her book.

Fredrickson also discovered that the capacity to experience these daily love connections in our lives can be increased through simple loving-kindness meditations, where, as Smith describes, “you sit in silence for a period of time and cultivate feelings of tenderness, warmth, and compassion for another person by repeating a series of phrases to yourself wishing them love, peace, strength, and general well-being.”

“Fredrickson likes to call love a nutrient,” Smith writes.  “If you are getting enough of the nutrient, then the health benefits of love can dramatically alter your biochemistry in ways that perpetuate more micro-moments of love in your life, and which ultimately contribute to your health, well-being, and longevity.”

So remember, fellow readers, as you go meandering from one blog site to another like busy little bees, making those “micro-moment” connections with people whose work you admire, that you are engaged in a kind of virtual love-making.  You are distributing a pollen-like “nutrient” that nurtures others, as well as yourself.

As Louis says, “what a wonderful world” we live in!

This essay was first posted in a slightly altered version in 2013.

Within the White Hot Flow of Writing

Tags

books, Deborah J. Brasket, fiction, Flow, Novel, revolution, Romance, This Sea Within, writing, writing process

That’s where I am. Where I love to be.

I began a new novel almost as soon as I finished the last. An idea I had entertained years ago kept coming back to me. You may remember a blog post I wrote a while ago about wishing I could find a really good steamy novel that was also a novel of ideas, that had substance and depth. Some of you encouraged me to write one if I couldn’t find what I was looking for, and that stuck with me. You should write the novel you want to read. I’ve always believed this.

I also love long novels set in exotic places that reveal the political unrest of the times. And having spent so much time in the tropics when we were sailing, I’m drawn to that kind of locale.

It all fit perfectly with an idea I had played with some years ago about a young naive girl from California who travels to Central America to find her missing mother (I must get the bottom of all these stories I write about missing mothers!) and gets swept up in a political struggle and the revolutionaries fighting to free their country.

As I began preparing to write, I noticed how similar the process of writing this novel is to the one I wrote last time.

First there’s a germ of an idea, and then the need to anchor it in reality. The need to immerse myself in some aspect of the history, the setting, the geography, the larger ideas that underpin what I’m aiming to write: Research.

I went of a shopping spree and bought Salman Rushdie’s memoir of traveling in Nicaragua during the Contra wars, Smile of the Jaguar. I also bought Blood of Brothers, Life and War in Nicaragua by Stephen Kinzer, a journalist for the New York Times during and after the revolution; The County Under My Skin, A Memoir of Love and War by the poet, Gioconda Belli, who fought in the revolution; and The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems. I already had Tom Hayden’s The Long Sixties, a signed copy I got at a fundraiser I organized years ago. Although my novel will be set in a mythical country along the isthmus, studying the war in Nicaragua would help me get a better understanding of what was going on in the region during those turbulent times.

Next in the process comes the need to discover the names and voices of my main characters. I cannot write a word without that.  This  almost happens simultaneously. The voices must have names to embody them, the names must have voices to bring the alive. The names evoke the voices, the voices evoke the names: Lena and Raoul.

Once I have these, there’s not stopping them. They take over my life. They start telling me their stories and I run and grab a pen. I keep on writing, pages after pages in my notebook and on my computer. I look up and morning has turned to nightfall. It doesn’t matter. They follow me to bed. I sleep with them. I dream them. I wake up writing love poems in their voices.

Then I need at least a vague sense of how the novel will open, how it will close. It may change along the way, but I need this parenthesis to contain my writing and to show me where it’s moving. They tell me.

When I have the beginning and the ending, keys scenes in between emerge. I write them down quickly before they disappear. They may change over time, but at least I have key points upon which to hang my novel.

By then my characters have become real to me. They have flesh and bone, names, voices, histories. They have deep, deep urges, conflicting desires, inner and outer struggles, a sense of transformation.

It’s like watching a miracle unfold. How they seem to come from nowhere, out of thin air, then suddenly they are breathing bodies, passionate, possessed.

This miracle of the white, hot flow of words.

Next comes the need, for me at least, to discover the title for this novel, something that embodies both of their stories and what happens to them.

I need a hook, like I did with From the Far Ends of the Earth. Whenever I felt I was becoming lost, a bit overwhelmed, unsure about where the story was going, how to proceed, if this fit or that should be cut, I went back to the title, which embodied my main theme. Then I knew.

The title was a thematic blueprint for what I wanted the book to be. The impact I was after. A book about gathering up and bringing home all the lost parts of ourselves and our families.

So I searched for something like that, some touchstone that would lead me back to that germ of an idea I began with. The point around which all else revolves. And I found it: This Sea Within.

Lena, a California girl, a surfer in love with the sea, restless, passionate, caught up in the turmoil of her times, the Sixties, travels to a mythical country in Central America where her mother was born, searching for the woman who abandoned her, but finding instead a people and culture and land that feels like home, like a part of her lost self. And there she meets Raoul, the leader of a band of revolutionaries whose base camp is on a remote stretch of the sea. And well, you can imagine the rest.

But this is also meant to be a story of ideas, of the tension between a life of contemplation and the life of an activist, the urge to save and savor the world at the same time. It’s about the tensions between a huge, powerful county and what it sees as its smaller vassal states below its border. It’s about the need to find purpose and place in one’s life, to serve a cause greater than one’s self. And it’s about how poetry and art can keep the spirit alive when the world we live in is bathed in blood, figuratively for some, and literally for others.

It’s also about the cycle of time, this never-ending (r)evolution that creates the ever-changing world we live in. It’s about the slow march of history, whose arc is indeed long, but hopefully, must, must, bend toward justice.

This Sea Within. The restless times from which great movements and revolutions are born, and two lovers caught up in that turmoil. That pretty much sums up what this book is meant to be. For now.

It’s all subject to revision.

Pinch Me! Writers House Accepts My Novel

Tags

From the Far Ends of the Earth, literary agent, Novel, Robin Rue, Writers House, writing, writing process

Writers House, New York City

I’m so excited. Robin Rue, a senior agent at Writers House, one of the top 20 literary agencies in the nation and the largest in the world, will be helping me find a publisher for my novel, From the Far Ends of the Earth.

I never expected it to happen this fast. I’d planned on giving myself six months to a year to find an agent and/or publisher for my book. If it didn’t happen by then I would turn to self-publishing. I really didn’t want to go that route. All the work involved sounded exhausting, but it was important to get the book out there, one way or another.

I had been working on it, on and off, over the last several years. It went through dozens of revisions, two sets of readers, a period where I absolutely hated  it and was tempted to quit, and a long 18 month period where I didn’t work on it at all when going through some major life changes.

It was time to put this baby to bed.

So I created a list of about 20 agents who I thought would be a good fit, and created a list of about 20 publishers who would accept manuscripts without an agent. I worked and reworked my query letter a dozen times. And then the first person I sent it to, Robin Rue, asked to read it. A week later she wrote to say she loved my novel and would be proud to represent me. Yesterday she sent the novel out to a dozen top-tier publishers.

But I had help, and a foot-up in the process. A writer friend who had read and loved my novel offered to refer me to her agent. So that’s where I sent it first. And that’s where my search ended. I am so grateful to her and humbled that I lucked out in such a wonderful way. I’m still pinching myself.

For you writers out there, and those who want to know what my novel is about, here’s the body of the query letter I sent to Robin:

From the Far Ends of the Earth is a 100,000 word literary novel with strong upmarket and book club potential. It tells the story of three family members left behind when the mother at the center of their lives mysteriously disappears. How they cope with her disappearance, learn to reconnect with each other, and forge new relationships in her absence create the heart of this novel.

One day Fran heads toward the grocery store and keeps on going till she reaches the tip of South America. Meanwhile she leaves behind an empty hole in the lives of her family: Kay, a cranky grad student studying archaeology who adores her mother but distrusts men in general, her father and brother in particular; Cal, a heroin addict living in his parents’ home when his mother disappears, left with a father he fears and no other means of support; and Walter, a dedicated  husband but distant father whose random bursts of temper have always set the family on edge.

Adding to the mystery of the mother’s disappearance are the “gifts” she sends her family: The breathlessly elated messages she leaves on her daughter’s answering machine, but never when she is there to pick up. The strangely distorted photographs she mails her son, who studies them like hieroglyphs he must decipher to save her, and save himself. The credit card bills she leaves for her husband to pay, allowing him to continue caring for her as he always has, while he uses them to track her journey across the continent with push-pins on a map.

Except for the beginning and ending when we hear the mother’s voice, the story is told from the perspectives of the three family members left behind. The mother remains an absent presence that permeates the novel without inhabiting it. She is seen only through the filters of her family’s memories and perceptions of her.

Ultimately the novel is about the journeys of self-discovery each protagonist takes to piece back together their fragmented lives and make themselves, and their family, whole again.

Writing this novel was certainly a journey of self-discovery for me as a writer. After some time to celebrate, and a long-awaited trip to Europe, I’ll be starting a new novel.