An IPPY Award for The Water Tower Club

The 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards were recently announced. My new novel, The Water Tower Club, was awarded a Bronze Medal in the Popular Fiction category.

Thank you, Independent Publisher, for this honor!

See a list of all the award winners here.

Fiction as "Experiments in Life"

Nineteenth century novelist George Eliot characterized her fiction as “experiments in life.” In my high school days, Eliot’s fiction was required reading. If I remember correctly, I had to read Silas Marner, and for me it was an experiment in life all right—an experiment in the agony of writing a book report.

But I’ve always liked George Eliot’s characterization of fiction as “experiments in life.” I like it because I think it comes as close as anything to describing what fiction writing is all about. Fiction writers create a place in time—that is, a setting. They populate that setting with human characters or creatures with humanlike characteristics that they prod into action. Then they keep the action going by giving their characters problems to solve, goals to meet, obstacles to overcome, stakes to play for, crises to face. And along the way, the characters reveal themselves to the readers. Through their words and actions, the characters show who they are. They show who they are in the same way that we inhabitants of this so-called “real world”—show who we are through our words and actions.

That’s my sense of what George Eliot meant when she characterized her work as “experiments in life.” Fiction, at its best, reflects the essence of the human experience. For me (and, I would say, for all of us) every day, every moment of one’s existence, is an experiment in living in a particular setting—that is, in a time and place and circumstance that is unique to the individual. Good fiction mirrors life. That’s why it can be said that a good story allows you to experience life vicariously—because you put yourself in the place of the characters. Fiction and life become intertwined.

I’m often asked “How much of your fiction comes from your own personal experience and how much is ‘made up’?” The answer to that question for me—and I think for all fiction writers—is this: Some of the fiction I write comes from my own personal experience, but all of it is made up.

If that sounds like a contradiction, consider this. In his novel The World According to Garp, John Irving has his protagonist, Garp, who is a writer, say this: “Tell me anything that’s ever happened to you . . . and I can improve upon the story; I can make the details better than they were.”

That’s what fiction writers do—or, at least, try to do—make their stories more compelling, more emotive than real life. When you read a book or see a movie that says “based on a true story,” it means that the writer has taken the story and enhanced it by filling in the details and giving the storyline a dramatic arc. The writer has taken dramatic license with the story; he/she has fudged the facts to make the story more compelling.

Because, unless one is writing autobiography, one’s own personal experience is merely a launching pad for storytelling that should eventually soar well beyond the limitations of personal experience. George Eliot’s “experiments in life” are a perfect example of this.

A Love Poem

I set out to pen a love poem for my wife for Valentine’s Day. Nothing so mundane as flowers or chocolates would I give her to convey my love. I would instead present her with phrases flowery and rhymes as sweet as any Ghirardelli treat. I would give Shakespeare a run for his money and relegate Keats to sophomore status with the rousing lilt of my words and the nuanced expression of my adoration for this woman I am fortunate to call wife.

I would avoid the cliché trap and assiduously decline to label her as “soul mate” or “woman of my dreams,” although she carries the distinction of being both. No Thomas Hood-inspired Hallmark claptrap (“Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!) would invade this immortal verse of mine. Verily, the passion of my cantos would inhabit that immaculate air between the sun and the sea that Icarus failed to attain.

But, alas, herein lies the rub: The last love poem I authored, sixty years ago, began “Roses are red, violets are blue” and ended with a couplet so juvenile as to make a toad blush. And although I have since developed a more mature and practiced manner when it comes to setting down my thoughts on paper, the bald truth is my pen bleeds prose. Poesy, in all its condensed beauty, in the fine raiment of its figurative language, in its power of self-expression and its ability to penetrate to the deepest recesses of the soul, has remained for me as cognitively dissonant as someone speaking in tongues. It is like a diamond whose beauty I can marvel at but whose character and true value I have not the jeweler’s eye to appraise.

This is why more recently, when seeking a vehicle through which to express my admiration for my wife, I turned not to the sonnet or the ode. Nor did I deem a thing as pithy as haiku or clever as a limerick to be the appropriate mode. And in considering free verse or rhyme, it didn’t seem the place or time. In the end, I simply did what I do best; I penned a prose narrative titled “Why I Love My Wife: in 50,000 Words or Less.”

So while I am convinced my wife “walks in beauty, like the night” and is “more lovely and more temperate” than a summer’s day, I must confess I do not have the poet’s sensibility such sentiments to convey.

Then, again, as life is wont to come full circle, I could resort to …

To Karen, on Valentine’s Day, 2019: 

Roses are red,
violets are blue,
my love for you
is tried and true.

Hey, you do what you can.

BookBub Recommendation

I recently got a boost in the profile of my fiction from BookBub. Here’s a copy of the recommendation they sent in an email to fans of Crime and Mystery fiction:

Thanks, BookBub!

Ripples in the sand

The report of my death was an exaggeration

Imagine my surprise when I learned that I have been dead for nearly 40 years. I thought back, trying to recall what I had been doing on December 1st, 1978, the day of my reputed passing, but drew a blank. I guess death does that to a person, blots out the memory of an unpleasantness.

Notification of my deceased status came to me in the form of an email from a high school classmate. Our 50th class reunion was approaching and he had gone to the reunion website to see who had signed up to attend. The website also included a list of deceased classmates, with their photos from our senior yearbook and dates of death, a kind of digital wall of remembrance. He was surprised to see my name and likeness posted there, especially since he recalled reading a short story of mine that had been published in a literary magazine nearly 30 years after my supposed demise.

Perplexed, he did some online research and discovered more of my posthumously published work, including a guest column printed in the November 22, 2013 edition of The News-Review of Roseburg, Oregon. The column’s tag listed my email address, which he promptly used to send me a missive. “I’m glad you’re not dead,” he wrote. “But if you wish to remain dead, I won’t tell anyone.”

It is a strange feeling to know that people with whom you were once well acquainted think you are dead, and have been for some time. I wonder what their emotions were when they heard the news. I wonder HOW they heard the news. They certainly didn’t hear it from me.

For some time, I pondered how to respond to this circumstance. As my former classmate intimated in his email, I could simply stay dead by staying silent. Or, I could do as my wife suggested, tongue in cheek I presume, and simply show up unannounced at the reunion. It would be one way to turn some heads, but it could also be hard on some old hearts. In the end, I decided to follow Mark Twain’s famous example and let it be known to all concerned that “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

But all this got me to thinking. What if I had died nearly four decades ago? Would anything of significance during those intervening years have turned out differently? Certainly my family and close friends would have mourned my loss. But would my absence have altered the course of anyone else’s life?

We would all like to think our time on earth, our physical existence, has meant something—has counted for something, if only in a small way. We would hope that somehow we’ve been able to make a difference in someone else’s life—made someone’s burden lighter, eased someone’s suffering, put a smile on someone’s face or a bit of joy in someone’s heart.

I am not a mystic by any stretch of the imagination. But I do believe that we are all connected in some transcendental way, and that, as our lives intersect, what we do impacts other lives positively or negatively, often in ways that send out far-reaching ripples of effect. And as I look back on my life, including the years of my alleged absence from this world, my only hope is that my interactions with others have engendered more positive than negative effects.

How else can one justify having lived well beyond the time of one’s presumed passing?

(A version of this essay was previously published in The News-Review of Roseburg, Oregon)