THE WHISKEY BOTTLE IN THE WALL

Hello, World.

I've been thinking how, in this age of quick-read novels with thin plots, we yearn for bigger, deeper novels we can sink into, a universe we can enter and be part of. Kathleen Valentine has created such a novel in THE WHISKEY BOTTLE IN THE WALL: VOLUME 1 - 3, SECRETS OF MARIENSTADT.  The town of Marienstadt is fictional, but is based on the Pennsylvania Dutch town she grew up in, populated with fascinating descendants of German immigrants.

Valentine is the author of fabulous short stories and such novels as THE OLD MERMAID'S TALE, EACH ANGEL BURNS, DEPRAVED HEART, and her many fans will be thrilled with THE WHISKEY BOTTLE IN THE WALL, now available as an ebook boxed-set and in paperback through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.  In Volume I, we are introduced to characters named Mulligan Wolfe, Peeper Baumgratz, Wenzeslaus Opelt, and beautiful, lonely ladies who run strudel shops, and fabric shops, shops for homemade breads, sausages and sauerkraut. One shop has the mysterious name, "The Bearded Lady Hometown Treats."

And there are a host of fascinating characters based on the author's memories of her hometown: Nuns who run a snowplow business. A handsome, virile chief-of-police, whom married women fantasize being handcuffed to. A three hundred-pound giant who loves to waltz and polka, a veritable legend on the dance-floor. How can you not be drawn to such fabulous characters? And best of all, the three volumes comprising WHISKEY BOTTLE contain a rotating cast of characters, people we grow to love. So it is not just random, unconnected vignettes that made LAKE WOBEGON DAYS, although a bestseller, a somewhat disjointed and disappointing book.

The first story in Vol. 1, "Peeper Baumgratz and the Sisters' Snowplow,"seems a light-hearted, hilarious, home-spun tale. But each tale in the collection takes the reader to darker, deeper depths, such as the journal found in the second story, "The Whiskey Bottle in the Wall," wherein a character learns the tragic truth of who his grandfather really was. In the third story, "The Great Dumpling War and Dance Competition," there is a hilarious scene where two women argue with righteous indignation over the proper ingredients for a variety of dumplings - knadles, niflies, spaetzles, semmelknodels, kartoffelkloses. Here the author is brilliantly eulogizing the dumpling! The most representative food of Pennsylvania Dutch heritage.  

From her earlier novels Valentine has proven she understands the darkest aspects of human nature, as well as the abiding goodness in each of us. As the stories progress in Vol. 2, she once again transports us to the highs and lows, the hilarious and tragic, aspects of humans, from unwanted pregnancies, and drug-dealing, to bear-hunting, same-sex love, even cross-dressing. Along the way, she gifts her readers with fascinating bits of local history, old Seneca Indian legends, the documented story of the highest viaduct in the United States, and wild elk who protect children lost in blizzards. 

 

In Vol. 3, "The Legend of Father Cuneo's Grave," we learn the tale of a priest wrongfully accused of seducing a young girl, and the story behind his tragic death. "The Reluctant Belsnickel of Opelt's Wood" starts off humorous, with a touch of the erotic (a woman pinning a costume on a handsome, virile man), but then quiets down to a deeply sorrowful tale of Oliver, whose boys were taken from him, and his years of loneliness and grief. The scene where he is reunited with the boys as grown men left this reader in tears. 

The last story in the collection, "A Long Day's Journey into Light," fittingly sums up the beauty and frustration of small-town life: people caring for and looking out for each other, but also trying to keep their secrets from each other. In the search for two elderly lost men, we learn the background of the handsome, virile town sheriff, Henry Werner, and why he is driven to womanizing and living his life alone. Its a humdinger of a story, involving a life-long desire and a murder long-overdue!

Reading Valentine's stories, I realize that this is not just an entertaining collection about a fabulously rich culture. She is memorializng her people, and her town. Thus, this becomes a fascinating and educational look at a region and culture relatively unsung in American literature. THE WHISKEY BOTTLE IN THE WALL, VOL. 1-3, SECRETS OF MARIENSTADT, is a tribute to a people and a place, the Pennsylvania Dutch, and their contributions to American history.

With compassion and satire, and beautifully detailed writing, Valentine has delicately chiseled out of these seemingly ordinary lives, the unique, profound, and quixotic traits that make each character memorable, even epic. Read these stories slowly, then read them again: while we are reading about life, love, birth and death, we are also learning the culture and traditions of one of the most fascinating communities in our United States.

I've asked Kathleen to chime in and tell us where she grew up in Pennsylvania, and how the region influenced her, leading her to become the well-loved author that she is today.

Thank you, Kiana. The town I grew up in, St. Marys, Pennsylvania, in the Seneca Highlands, was founded by Bavarian immigrants and is the home of the first Benedictine convent in the United States and Straubs Brewery, the only pre-Prohibition micro-brewery still in operation. Growing up in a mostly Pennsylvania Dutch family, I was surrounded by story-tellers. Sharing stories was central to every gathering of friends and relatives. Whether it was picnics, birthday parties, or just sitting on the porch on a Sunday afternoon, everyone always told stories and, as a kid, I loved them. My dad and uncles told hunting stories. My grandmother told stories about her parents coming from the “Old Country.” My mother and her friends told stories about their children. I loved those stories and kept a mental collection of them.

There is a scene in my first novel, The Old Mermaid's Tale, in which the heroine, Clair, attends a harvest party where the old men sit around telling stories and she realizes that those stories have formed her destiny. She goes on to study folklore and oral tradition and eventually meets Baptiste, the musician who writes songs based on the lives of the people he knew when he was a mariner. I didn't realize it at the time but now I know that Clair's profession has also become mine. The Whiskey Bottle in the Wall is my contribution to the folklore of my people.

Now that I think about it, my second novel, Each Angel Burns, also grew out of a story my mother told me about a man she knew when she was a girl who went on a mission to find two missing statues of angels. If I hadn't listened to story-telling all my life I wouldn't have had much to write about.

I have loved your Pacific Island stories, which I suspect grew out of your people's story-telling traditions so we got our starts as writers in similar ways. Thank you for that.

Kathleen Valentine writes of her people with great PRIDE. Her very heart is in her words. I predict the entire collection of THE WHISKEY BOTTLE IN THE WALL will become a classic.  What a wonderful Xmas offering to the German descendants of St. Mary's.  Thank you, Kathleen Valentine!

Links:

The Whiskey Bottle in the Wall-

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/The-Whiskey-Bottle-Wall-Marienstadt/dp/0978594088

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/The-Whiskey-Bottle-Wall-ebook/dp/B00A6YESVM/

My Web Site: KathleenValentine.com

My Blog: ParlezMoiBlog.blogspot.com

PHILP ROTH: AN EMERGENCY

Hello World.

 Recently I've been chastised for calling Philip Roth a misogynist. Yet, I think most women agree with me.  Show me a female character in one of Roth's novels who is not a misfit, a dropout, or someone to be stalked by his male characters with the forward-swimming determination and energy of sperm.

  Still, through the decades Roth has been brilliant, a dazzling wordsmith. Starting at university, I devoured each of his books through the 70's and 80's, and early 90's. But finally, a reader wants a female character with depth, someone teetering on the knife-edge of grit and hope.  We want a woman who matches, even surpasses, the 'heroics' of  the men.

I  recently brought up Roth's name because, once again, he was mentioned for this year's Nobel Prize.  Then I discovered an interview with Roth that fills me with unleavened admiration...and a little fear.  His work ethics, his daily discipline, though jaw-dropping, are an object lesson for all serious writers,  and interesting insight for readers, too.

First, the facts: all writers have a DIRTY SECRET. Added up, we waste YEARS of precious time.  We tell audiences that most days we write from dawn to dusk. That we have no other life, no love, no money, no dreams. (This is partially true.) So readers tend to think of us as semi-saints, engulfed in the long swoon of inspiration, obsessively tapping out our stories day after day, year after year.

In truth, most of us live in a state of near-paralysis, wondering if we have enough brain-cells left to write another book, if our house will be foreclosed, if the dog will die from starvation. We waste hours triaging the mail, sweet-talking creditors, staring at strewn carcasses of manuscripts we never finished.  We tap our fingers, waiting for our Muse, that moody broad who shows up late, or not at all. Or, we dilly-dally over a single, mediocre paragraph then sit back, stretch, and call it a day.

For  serious writers, these are days of famine. We don't produce because we don't bear down, we've grown soft and  distracted by what's outside our sphere of concentration: The Arab spring,  the global climate,  the Harvey Wallbanger of digital doodads. We've lost our hubris. Our Spartan animus. We've forgotten that barnacled, old word DISCIPLINE.  

So here is Philip Roth to remind us what Real Drive is, what unalloyed discipline is. His regimen may scare the hell out of you, but it may fire your pistons, and inspire you to knuckle down again with blind determination. (Credit to David Remnick from his book, REPORTING.  Knopf, 2006.)

From "Into The Clear: Philip Roth"  
          "He wakes early and seven days a week walks fifty yards to a two room studio [beside his house.] There's a lectern where he writes standing up, the better to preserve a bad back. There are free weights, a lifting bench, an exercise mat. He had quintuple-bypass surgery eleven years ago and is determined to keep in shape.  He stays out there [writing] all day and into the evening. No telephone. No Fax. Nothing gets in. In late afternoon, he takes long walks, trying to figure out connections and solve problems in the novel that's possessing him."

           "I live alone," Roth says, "There's no one else to be responsible for, or to. My schedule is absolutely my own. Usually I write all day. If I want to go back to the studio in the evening, I don't have to sit in the living room because someone else has been alone all day. I don't have to sit there and be amusing or entertaining. I go back out and work for two or three more hours.
            "If I wake up at two in the morning...and something has dawned on me, I turn the light on and  I write in the bedroom. Then I read till all hours if I want to. If I get up at five and I can't sleep and I want to work,  I go back out [to the studio] and I go to work. So I work.  I'm on call.
             " I'm like a doctor and it's an emergency room.  And I'm the emergency."


A  selfish life?  Of course.  Artists are, by nature, selfish.  A solitary life?  For serious writers, solitude is   considered a sacrament.  Roth is over eighty now.  Rumor has it he still follows the same daily regimen.  One can only sit in awe.  Or, one can be inspired.

Imua!  Onward!  And thank you!

FAULKNER'S NOBEL ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

Hello World.

My prediction for the 2012 Nobel Prize Recipient  in Literature was a resounding dud. Kalamai! Apologies!  Mo Yan, the Nobel  recipient, has written several brilliant novels, RED SORGHUM, and THE GARLIC BALLADS, about life in repressive China, which I highly  recommend. But I still iterate with conviction that Haruki Murakami is the writer who is leading us with unabashed inventiveness into the 21st century.  He should have won.

Reading one of Murakami's novels (listed in previous blog) I am often apprehensive, not sure  I will fully understand him. His words are booby-trapped. He abounds in non sequiturs and trilingual puns, and launches readers into science-fiction, futuristic theories, classical music, calculus and contemplation of modern man's abyssal void. His intelligence burns the fat off our brain and makes us really THINK. I am always exhilarated and inspired. Plus, his body of work is larger than Mo Yan's.

Some writers are ahead of their time. Perhaps this is the case with Murakami. Maybe the Nobel Selection Committee Members found their aging body chemistry couldn't  tolerate his stimulation.  No worries, his time will come! Meanwhile,  I am posting William Faulkner's Nobel Acceptance Speech from 1949.  Sixty-three years ago!  He was another visionary/renegade who stood literature as we knew it on its head. His speech, now compared in its eloquence to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address,  is brilliant and prescient.  A speech for us in 2012.

"Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question:  When will I be blown up?  Because of this the [writer] writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict  with itself, which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

"The writer must learn this again, leaving no room for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart,  the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he relearns this he will write as though he stood among, and watched, the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this.

"I  believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The writer's duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The writer's voice is not merely the record of man, it must also be the  pillar to help him endure and, thus, prevail."


Amen!  And thank you, William Faulkner.  May we all be inspired.

HARUKI MURAKAMI... NOBEL SHOO-IN

Hello World.

Its that time of year again.  For those of you who care - which should encompass everyone  except  those  indentured to dragon-lore and vampires -  the high-stakes boys are placing their bets on who will be Thursday's recipient of the NOBEL PRIZE in LITERATURE.   I'm placing my bet on HARUKI MURAKAMI,   the favored author, with odds 2 to 1. Here are the other odds for nominated authors.

The Chinese author Mo Yan and Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom are tied (12 to 1.)   Britain's Ian McEwan (50 to 1.)   Bob Dylan (33 to l.)   Philip Roth (16 to 1.)   Cormac McCarthy and Amos Oz are tied.

 I am not that familiar with Mo Yan,  and have only read one book by Nooteboom  Ian McEwan writes so seamlessly and effortlessly,  he puts me to sleep.  It's like hearing one of Chopin's more stately etudes played over and over.  Bob Dylan is our aging premier troubadour of Hippiedom, Vietnam and  joint rolling-paper.   But,  the Nobel???

Philip Roth was brilliant in his day. But he never liked women, not on the page, and not in real life.You have to love humanity to be a great writer.  His male characters have always regarded women as mere prey.  Cormac McCarthy's 'Blood Meridian' was brilliant, but so utterly, unrelentingly violent,  I felt eviscerated, sodomized and dismembered all on one page. Yes, he writes in the grand manner with Biblical sweep, but time and again  I found myself  physical backing away from the pages of his books.

 Amoz Oz is lovely.  A brilliant and international writer.  I marvel at the ingenuity of his thinking, and his prose.  He would be my second choice.  But MURAKAMI is my first  choice because....

He has taken literature out of the doldrums, the worn-out end of the spectrum. Even back in the 1990's he was  ushering literature into the 21st Century, pulling readers out of the strait-jacket of  20th century writing (which  by now seemed left over from the 19th century.)  Well, yes, we had  innovative writers, think Faulkner, but by now even he seemed dated.  Occasionally a renegade author surfaced, one of    unabashed gristle and shocking concatenations. But where did they go?  Where did their books go?

I loved  Kurt Vonnegut.  He was one of those brilliant alchemical artists who gave us Art as Magic,  rather than Art as War.  I'd like to think he fathered Murakami, whose genius is that he keeps digging down and taking risks, re-inventing himself with each book.  Whether its about war,  mass gas attacks, our human sexuality,  or hunting sheep, Murakami  throws everything at us:  music, fantasy, science-fiction,  particle physics,  futuristic fairy tales, and especially ethical inquiry.  He constantly shocks, turning literature as we know (or knew ) it into an implicit rebuke of the complacency of the officially known and accepted.   When I finish one of his novels, I feel smarter.

Here are some of  his best works.  The Reader's Guide into the 21st century.   (And I promise your thinking will be changed forever!)

1)   WILD SHEEP CHASE
2)   NORWEGIAN WOOD
4)   WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE
5)   KAFKA ON THE SHORE
6)   HARD-BOILED WONDERLAND & THE END OF THE WORLD.

Thank you.  And Happy Reading.










 

CHINESE SOLDIERS... CIVIL WAR HEROES

Hello, world.

I have been thinking how, since the dawn of civilization,  women have always been the throw-aways of war. Victims of rape, kidnap,  murder.  Ironically, as man became more 'civilized,' the throw-aways came to include anyone outside the tribe whose language, or skin-color, varied from the accepted  norm.  In my new novel,  THE SPY LOVER,  about the American Civil War,  I address the issue of racism, especially toward Chinese soldiers,  in both the Confederate and the Union Army.

In that War,  men and women 'of color,' nurses as well as soldiers,  were always the last of the wounded to be carried from the battlefield. And they were the last, if ever, to be treated by medics.  In my research for THE SPY LOVER, I discovered that white orderlies in field-hospitals (usually huge complexes of filthy tents) referred to soldiers of color as 'skins.'  'Redskins' (in those days referred to as Indians) 'Yellowskins' (Chinese) and  'Brownskins' (in those days  referred to  as Negroes.)

 Unless their wounds were superficial, these 'skins' were usually left to die unattended. My Chinese uncle, Ayau Kam,  used to talk about his ancestor from China, who emigrated to Hawaii, then the U.S. mainland.  When the War started,  this ancestor, John Tommy Kam,  had enlisted at Staten Island, New York,  and fought valiantly for the Union Army, after being promised U.S. citizenship if the North won the War.

One of the many little-known facts about the American Civil War is that fifty-two Chinese are documented as having served in that War, fighting for the Union side as well as the Confederacy.  It is astonishing to me that, until now,  no book has been written about these incredibly brave soldiers, fighting for a country that essentially scorned them.  Many were immigrants who arrived in ports like Charleston and New Orleans,  then gathered in small farm settlements up and down the Mississippi River.  With no women of their own available, they intermarried with Creole women, Native Americans and African Americans,  and produced broods of beautiful,  mixed-blood children.

When the War began, some of them were  kidnapped by the Confederate Army and forced to fight for the South. Many defected to the Union Army, rather than fight for slavery.  In real life, John Tommy Kam was believed to have perished at the Battle of Gettysburg.  But other Chinese soldiers survived the War.  And when it was over,  the  U.S. government  broke its promise, refusing these  brave soldiers U.S. citizenship and the pensions they were due.  They were unilaterally cast off.  Forgotten.

The hope was that they would go back to China, and leave America 'pure.'  Instead, the following decades saw a great influx of Chinese immigrants  into America, fleeing their own country which for thirty years had been engaged in its own civil war (that reportedly cost 30,000,000 lives.)

Chinese laborers  helped build America,  they laid most of the tracks for the first railroads going east to west and west to east.  During that time they died in the thousands  of fever, starvation, outright murder. Their bones are buried beneath those tracks. Still, more Chinese immigrants arrived.  They proved to be hard-working,  honest, and - with a shortage of their own women - continued intermarrying with white women and every other available race,  and proved to be  excellent husbands and fathers.

Their  growing numbers, hard work and perseverance threatened white America. Just as they had been denied citizenship after the Civil War,  anti-Asian sentiment grew, culminating in the Naturalization Act of 1870, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (both enforced by the U.S. government until 1943!)  And worse, Americans reacted to their growing numbers with the heinous Chinese Massacres that spread across America in the 1870's, 80's, and 90's.

Even after the slaughter of Chinese was made illegal, punishable by imprisonment,  it continued  in the back alleys of cities where they were creating their own small  Chinatowns.  Astonishingly, it continued until 1965 when all restrictions on national origin and race were abolished. ( Still it continues in these United States: the demonizing and victimizing of each new immigrant group.)

  But, what of the brave Chinese heroes of the American Civil War? Those who perished, and those who survived?  Were they ever to be  officially acknowledged? Only in April, 2003,  was  the House Joint Resolution #45 introduced to Congress, to posthumously proclaim all U.S. Civil War  soldiers of Chinese descent to be honorary citizens of the United States, in recognition of their  honorable services.  But, their pensions were denied to their descendants.  2003.  One hundred and thirty-eight years later.

In the course of five long years of research and the writing of THE SPY LOVER,  I discovered the war records of John Tommy from Canton China,  and Hawaii. (Along the way he had dropped the name 'Kam,' perhaps to sound more American. In the novel I renamed him Johnny Tom.)  His records show  he had  fought in six different battles with the famed New York Excelsior Brigade.  He had also suffered long, debilitating  months in two different  prisoner-of-war camps.  He had  saved lives, and was promoted to corporal. He fought valiantly, and perished at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In time, I found John Tommy's place of burial in  the Soldiers' National Cemetery at Gettysburg National Military Park, amongst the 'unidentifiable' soldiers of the New York Excelsior Brigade who died at the Battle of Gettysburg.  This man who had no country, no family to mourn him, and who died 'unidentifiable' is  at peace with his comrades.

 I have laid flowers there  for John Tommy.  For all of them.  And I have written this novel, THE SPY LOVER, to memorialize him, and to memorialize  another ancestor, Warren Rowan Davenport, who fought for the Confederacy.  In the end, I believe I wrote this  book to memorialize  all the valiant boys of the North and South who perished, many who were too young to shave.

I hold the novel in my hand,  and think of an old Chinese proverb:
"War has always been the same.  Old men talking, young men dying."

  I hope you are moved by THE SPY LOVER.  Thank you.

THE SPY LOVER...AT LAST.

Hello, world.

At last.  THE SPY LOVER, my long-awaited U.S. Civil War novel will finally be published!  I am happy to announce that it will be available on August 28, on Amazon.  Being half Native-Hawaiian and living mostly in the islands, my novels and story collections have always been set in the Pacific, so a novel about the U.S Civil War is a brand new departure for me. Why such a radical change?  Because THE SPY LOVER is based on my family history. A story waiting to be told.

  My mother, Emma Kealoha Awa'awa Kanoho Houghtailing  was a full-blooded Native Hawaiian, while my father, Braxton Bragg Davenport, was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired Anglo-American from Talladega, Alabama.  (So I am part-native, part-Southern redneck.)  For years my Alabama cousins have urged me to write about our ancestor, Warren Rowan Davenport, a cavalryman who rode for the Confederacy in the Civil War with a famous unit known as the Prattville Dragoons, out of Prattville, Alabama.

 They fought and died valiantly in the bloody battles of Shiloh, Chickamauga, Vicksburg and many other battles. Those who survived, including Warren, eventually served under General "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler, the indomitable Confederate cavalry leader who drove his men to many victories, in spite of being wounded repeatedly and having seventeen horses shot out from under him. ( Wheeler was only 5'4" tall, but he was called a giant in the saddle.)

  Thus, I began my research on Warren Davenport, which would eventually entail reading over forty books on the Civil War.  During this time, my  Hawaiian cousins reminded me of our late Chinese uncle, Ayau Kam, Sr., who had often talked about HIS ancestor, John Tommy Kam, who had emigrated from Canton, China, to Hawaii, and finally to the East coast of the United States.  In 1861, at the start of the Civil War, he had enlisted at Staten Island, New York, as a fighting soldier with the Union Army, after being promised U.S. citizenship if the North won the War.

I had at my disposal old tattered correspondences and documents  from Warren Davenport,  but there was nothing in writing from John Tommy (who had  dropped "Kam,"  perhaps to sound more American), only Uncle Ayau's vague stories of his ancestor, handed down through the generations, who had fought with the Union Army. But in the course of researching and writing THE SPY LOVER,  I uncovered  articles about  Chinese soldiers who had fought in our Civil War.

Two of the articles were about John Tommy, from Canton, China, and Hawaii, a brave soldier who hardly spoke English, yet  fought valiantly in many battles, including Gettysburg,  saved comrades lives, was promoted to corporal, and  imprisoned twice by the Confederates.  Eventually I uncovered his war records, and the grounds at Gettysburg where he is buried among the 'unknowns' with his comrades of the famous New York Excelsior Brigade.  I have even laid flowers there for him.

And so in my novel, his character was resurrected as Johnny Tom, who serves with the Union Army. And my ancestor, Warren Davenport,  was resurrected as the Confederate cavalryman, Warren Rowan Petticomb.  There is a third and pivotal character in the novel, a woman named  Era, born out of my imagination. A beautiful part-Cherokee, part-Chinese woman who searches for her father, Johnny, in the carnage of war.  Era is patterned on a nurse who tended Warren Davenport,  after he was wounded at the Battle of Shiloh.

 In his  correspondence,s there were hints that the nurse, whom he fell in love with, had suddenly disappeared from the  hospital where she was tending Confederate wounded.  It had been rumored that she was a Union spy, and fled for  fear of being detected. In the novel the character, Era, lured into spying for the North while searching for her father, becomes torn by her love for Warren Petticomb. Still, she is forced to flee.

Warren Davenport  wrote of spending the post-War years  searching for this nurse he loved, eventually following her trail across America and up into in the Pacific Northwest Territories where so many Chinese men and women fled to, during the Chinese Massacres of the 1870's and 80's.  I do not know the ending of their story.  So here, I took authorial license with the novel.  I will not spoil it for readers.  

Sometimes writers gets so entrenched in a book, so buried in great themes of war and love and loyalties, we lose our way.  I did.  So I fell back on research, digging and delving, looking for clues and answers.  Research is seductive. You read and while away the days, the months, and ignore the  half-finished novel palpitating in the dark. Years passed as I delved deeper, discovering aspects of the War that I hoped would fascinate readers.  I read about Southern women collecting urine from which to distill niter for making gunpowder. And I read of the planting and harvesting of poppies, the scoring and gathering from  poppy pods the sap known as opium. I researched how opium was dried and mixed with chemicals and pressed into powdered tablets for the Confederate wounded when the South ran out of medicine.

Next,  I researched  books on spy-codes used in the War, what spies were paid, and how they were executed when caught by the enemy. I  researched the colloquialisms  of the South,  the vernacular of  the mid-1800s,  the language of prostitutes, and fighting men, and dying men. And on, and on. Now you know why THE SPY LOVER took five years to complete.  In the end I forgot how to hold conversations, unless they were about the Civil War. I lived and breathed the War, it engulfed my life.

Eventually, I slogged my way back into the actual writing of the book, and scenes and characters became real, thanks to the research I had done. When I finally reached the end, I was then shackled through twenty-four mind-numbing rewrites of the novel.  Every page. Every word.  I worked and slept in a metaphorical sweatsuit. I dreamed of Shiloh and Chickamauga and woke in the dark, hearing wounded soldiers crying out.  I wept for the women who were raped and slaughtered in that War, and for  the brave nurses who perished from soldiers' diseases. And I wept for the wounded soldiers known as 'skins' -  redskins, yellowskins, brownskins - who were carried last from the battlefields, then ignored and left to die unattended.  

I never planned to write an historical novel, or a love story, or a spy thriller, or a story about how brave Chinese  soldiers were used as throw-aways in the Civil War. I simply set out to tell the story of my ancestors, who fought on opposing sides of that War.  But as the book grew bigger and deeper (at one point,  1200 pages) I felt less and less confident. I wasn't sure who I was writing for. There were days when I wondered if there would be ANY readers for the book.  But there were better days, when I felt that the book would cause the RIGHT readers to materialize. Readers who cared about loyalty and love, moral choices, and redemption.

 I even began to believe that THE SPY LOVER might  alter the nerves and marrow of  readers because of  the naked horror of the War,  the unfathomable sacrifices, brother slaughtering brother,  the rampant racism, and inconceivable grief of women who were left to bury their dead.  But mostly I wanted to believe  that readers would hold the book to their hearts because the quality of the writing astonished them.  Thus do authors live on illusions,  believing  that the book we are working on is the best thing we have ever written, and that possibly it will change people's lives. Writers are children, eternal dreamers.  Dreams are our redemption.

I  sincerely hope you enjoy THE SPY LOVER!

Thank you!    

DEPRESSION AND WRITERS...

Hello World.

 Depression and writers.  How true it is.  We seem to go hand in hand.  We're joined at the sterum, closer than lovers.  Whether we're  genetically predisposed to depression or not, I think the writing life seems, well...inauthentic, without  occasional periods of the deep, deep blues, the  Mood Indigos.

We feel morally bound to brood, because that's what 'serious' writers do. We  live by our wits, and sometimes live too close to the  poverty level.  And so we isolate, which deepens the blues.  We envy the thriller-writers who rake in  big royalties.  Sometimes  we  hate them.  We stop feeling attractive and lose our lovers, even our spouses.  We become loners because socializing, even conversation, has become an endurance test.  Oh, enough.

We chose this life.  No one drafted us.  Let's jolly up and admit we LOVE this writing-thing.  When we are creating, our juices are flowing, our brains are kicked into high gear...don't you feel the  rush? It's like a snort of cocaine. Two snorts. Doesn't your heart palpitate, and your very follicles sizzle?  Mine do. There is nothing that compares to it. Isn't that worth occasional depression?  (I'm not talking about clinical depression. That is more serious and calls for medical supervision.)

Perhaps the next time the 'blues' descend, we might want to sit back, take a breath and compare someone else's life.  I guarantee you, afterwards you'll feel extremely blessed.  You will feel grateful.  I'm talking about the life of Roald Dahl.  A genius who wrote thrilling and absurd and fabulous books for children.  Remember 'Willy Wonka?'  'James and The Giant Peach?'  Or 'The Sound Machine?' (In which a man could hear plants screaming.)  Or how about 'The BFG,' the giant who went around at night, blowing dreams through a tube into kid's bedrooms.  Dahl was a brilliant storyteller, a magician.  His books are still read around the world in many languages.

  He made $$millions from his books, and  died 20 years ago.  Finally, his personal history,  his private life, was made public.  It was horrendous.  Absolutely grisly. His father, as a child, had his arm amputated thanks to a drunk doctor.  At three, Dahl's older sister died, and shortly after,  his one-armed father died.  Several years later, still only a boy, Dahl's nose was completely severed from his face  in a car accident. A near-sighted doctor sewed it back on. Slightly off-center.

In WWII  Dahl  joined the RAF, became a pilot, and crashed on his first official day of flying, in the Libyan Desert.  His skull was fractured, spine broken, his  face burned, his poor nose driven back into his face. Stoked by the heat, his plane's machine-guns started shooting at him.  Miraculously, he managed to survive the crash, was somehow patched-up, fought others battles, and survived the war.  Then he was diagnosed with cancer. (Are you still with me?) During treatment,  his doctors recommended he have all his teeth pulled. Who knows why? So, he did. Dahl was only twenty-one!

After the war, he began writing stories to ward off depression. Thus began his illustrious and lifelong career. Then he married and had children. His 4 month-old son was hit by a taxi, shattering his skull. The child survived, but damaged. Two years later, Dahl's 7 year-old daughter contracted measles and died of a brain inflammation. Then his 39 year-old wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered an aneuryism and fell into a coma for weeks.  He coached her through months and years of grueling rehabilitation.

All his life he suffered pain from his war wounds. And all the while, he wrote.  He wrote magical and fabulous stories for children, that they still quote from as adults. Of course, Dahl was notoriously  impatient and rude to people (can you blame him?) He picked fights at book parties,  slugged editors, sold out friends, repeatedly and  publicly insulted his still-rehabilitating wife.  In the end he  proved to be a racist, an anti-semite, an all-around  stinker. No one liked him. No one. But he never stopped writing.  I think writing was how he had survived his life.

 Perhaps its best to forget the man, and remember the genius. But when we writers are feeling depressed, unloved, unpraised, it might be worth another look at Dahl's horrendous, nearly inconceivable life of tragedy.  By comparison, I think most of us are lucky.

So let's gather  our inspirations and energies - our mitochondria, and centrioles, and genomes, all those marvelous ecosystems that contain and define each of us - say a little mantra of thanks for what we have,  and then get back to work.

Happy Writing  and Imua! (Press On, no matter what.)

Thanks!