Not that I really noticed the parallels until now.
- Counterculture is central, leading to an awareness of an underground community or at least kindred spirits.
- Both have meant learning to write differently than my neutral third-person journalism. Emotion, for instance, over fact, is the rule in the fiction. And the history opened a similar vein as creative nonfiction.
- The role of a narrator in both. In the history, that meant developing the gently laughing curmudgeon as he pored over historical data. In four of the hippie novels, it was the snarky daughter reviewing her late daddy’s hippie experiences.
- Both veins are self-published, falling under the shadow of being “not commercially viable” by publishing houses. That places an additional burden on the author.
- Marketing is a huge challenge. Apart from Subway Visions, none of my stories take place in a big city or address a big audience. How many hippie novels can you name, anyway. As for Quakers?
- Spirituality and religion run through all of them. In the novels, it’s often yoga, though Hometown News runs up against a puzzling array of churches. In Quaking Dover, though, it’s often the clash between the upstart Friends and what I first saw as rigid Puritans before both traditions begin to, uh, mellow.
- There’s a strong sense of place, even if these locations are far from the mass-media spotlight.
- I go for the big picture. I really would like to have a simple book – something, as Steven King advises, having only one big idea – but that’s not how my mind works.
- They’ve all undergone deep revision. Much of the fiction actually got new titles and new characters after their original publication.
- They were all labors of love.
Jnana's Red Barn 