Stephen King has advised novelists to have only one Big Idea in a book, but I came across that way too late to put it into practice. (Maybe if I ever tackle another novel?)
As I hunkered down in my self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore – or was it self-incarceration or even cloistered? I did little else – my attention eventually turned to a more recent span of my life than the Kenzie novels covered. It was time to consider my nearly ten years of marriage and its breakup. If only I really knew how to star in it.
I thought that this next book would be about the most heavenly time and place imaginable, but as I typed and would eventually see, the real story was about a deeply troubled marriage, with me holding the debris after it blew up and a whirlwind romance afterward left me in a fog where I was.
So courtship, marriage, and relationship per se were one big subject. (Idea, in King’s expression, feels too refined.)
The other was the Pacific Northwest as seen from the other side of the Cascade mountains in Washington state, a land that is essentially desert rather than rainy gray Seattle.
One was something many people had some familiarity with, but the other was what I found more enticing as a writer. Besides, I had written many landscape poems I could draw from. Swami’s insight from her first visit to India, that the reason Hinduism had so many gods was a reflection of the ways each locale had a distinct vibe. The Yakima Valley and the Cascades were unlike anything I had experienced in the eastern half of the U.S. Especially the vast spaces you never see in a movie or read about in a book. And there I was with my new bride.
My inner drive was to better understand – and remember – the events leading up to what I thought was near perfection, my Promised Land. Except that it all blew up after four heady years, and we retreated eastward in haste. Now, six years later, I was trying to make sense of everything, and writing is my primary tool of thought.
One big hurdle was that I still had too many unresolved issues to provide clarity on the relationship struggles. I couldn’t see that the darling I thought every reader would find fascinating was, in a wider view, dislikable.
The plot – and the manuscript – kept growing by the proverbial pound.
Baltimore for me was so many lonely nights broken periodically by sex that wasn’t with my beloved. The whirlwind who came after the marriage. The one others have called my one true love. If only she had been true.
~*~
I really should go back to my journals to get a clearer sense of what I was going through both as I drafted it and also during its revisions. I suspect the reality would be painful, even embarrassing, and as I write this, those volumes are wrapped in plastic under the house renovation. Maybe that’s for the better.
What was I even originally calling the manuscript?
What coalesced for me was the many dimensions of the word “promise,” including the wedding vow, potential, and what I saw as our Promised Land. And then I had the flash of ending the book on a shocking note.
Well, so had much of my life.
I suspect that I spent far more effort than I’ve thought on the novel that now stands as Nearly Canaan.
Somehow, I even had a round with a real literary agent, who ultimately passed on the project.
During later revisions in New Hampshire, the big blob of material I had in hand turned into three parallel volumes – Promise, Peel (as in apple), and St. Helens in the Mix. And I was wondering about my subsequent engagement and the young woman I thought was a perfect subject for later. (I now see how banal that would have been.)
Would the project have been any easier if I had all the facts rather than empty denials and evasions? What if I had steered this more into the fantasy realm, perhaps having the earth magically speak directly to Jaya? Or broken it into a sequence of short books, each with a sharper focus?
A very bruised journalist, alas, was still at the helm, one still engaged in a difficult, painful exile and trying to report on the facts before me.
~*~
I’m trying to recall books and authors I was reading at the time, especially ones that might have nurtured this project. What comes to mind are Ann Tyler (I can smell the back entry of some homes in her Roland Park section of Baltimore); the Random House Vintage Contemporaries series edited by Gary Fisketjon and writers like Jay McInerney (Ransom more than Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz; beyond that, Larry McMurtry, Tom Robbins, and Joan Didion; as well as Calvin Trillin’s U.S. Journal letters from here or there in the New Yorker. I also had John Nichols (Milagro Beanfield Wars), Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion), Edward Abbey, and Ecotopia.
~*~
Promise came out as an ebook at Smashwords but went nowhere. Rather than pay for covers for two companion volumes, I released them as PDF freebies at my Thistle Finch imprint, only to find nobody was downloading anything that big. Ditto for the full-length poetry collections. There would be a major refocusing of the offerings.
Jnana's Red Barn 