The Unreliables

Something pure and true - fiction from life

It’s been a rough week. I confess I’ve never had such a visceral emotional response to an election. There are neighbors I’d like to punch in the face. But don’t worry, I won’t do that. I realize they are the same people today as they were the day before the election. It’s just that I feel like I see them more clearly now, a blurriness has washed away, and their Confederate flags, demands for “reparations” from Democrats, and all the rest of it are impossible for me to view with equanimity. That’s why there is no essay today. Still too raw to write with a sense of cool distance.

Instead I’m offering something special to my one paid subscriber who deserves something no one else gets — an opportunity to be an early reader of my current manuscript. Her job, should she decide to take it on, is to read a few pages and respond to the following questions:

• Does it maintain interest? Would you keep reading if these were the first few pages you read in a sneak peak on Amazon or browsing through your local bookstore?

• What do you make of the narrative voice?

• Which characters arouse the most interest? Why?

• How do you visualize the setting, if at all?

• Even though all great fiction is specific in its story telling, it also expands towards a truth that exists beyond the page. Do you get a sense of a greater truth from these early pages? What is it?

First, a little background. After my father died I wrote nothing for two years.

I’d been working on a novel whose early development began when I did my PhD in Creative Writing. A chunk of an early draft of that novel sits in the bowels of the Barr Smith Library at The University of Adelaide along side an exegesis on the social novel. Together these formed my dissertation and they were sufficiently academically powerful to pass and allow me to take the title “Dr.” But the novel itself was nowhere ready for a commercial audience. I plugged away at it after I moved to Seattle until it was in good enough shape to workshop at the Community of Writers 2015 annual conference held in Olympic Valley, California (formerly known as Squaw Valley).

Barr Smith Reading Room. University of Adelaide. Possibly the most beautiful reading room in all of Australia.

Then my dad died. The grief overwhelmed me and I saw a therapist who had experience working with blocked creative types. During my time working with her I wrote two personal essays that were published in the literary journal, Meat For Tea: The Valley Review. The first essay was about my mother and our relationship with food. The other was a very long Father’s Day letter to a man who had many flaws, but was always my number one fan. In his weird, neglectful way he was my greatest champion and writing without him in the world had seemed pointless for a while.

Since then I have worked on a new manuscript, very slowly. In the process I’ve accepted that that earlier novel isn’t the one I’m meant to write. That’s why I can’t get it to work.

The current novel is a work of fiction rooted in a desire to understand my family and why I am the way we I am. I took my inspiration from Michael Chabon’s ficto-memoir, Moonglow, based on his grandfather’s life.

In preparing this memoir, I have stuck to facts except when facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Wherever liberties have been taken with names, dates, places, events, and conversations, or with the identities, motivations, and interrelationships of family members and historical personages, the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon. — Michael Chabon.

He didn’t let the facts get in the way of an honest story, and I pledge to do the same.

I also take inspiration from Emile Zola, an early practitioner of the social novel.

“If you shut up the truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.” — Emile Zola

Take none of the following text as fact, though all of it true.

iStock. Matt La Vigne

Chapter One - Lake of The Woods

It’s amazing how death can bring two people together with nothing else in common, or so they may think.