It’s my story and I’m sticking to them

Looking back, I am surprised to realize how much of my fiction remains, at heart, reporting. Yes, despite elements of surrealism, fantasy, even absurdity.

Do I regret all the time and effort that have seemingly gone nowhere?

Sometimes, yes, but there’s also a sense of pride and a better sense of identity because I have these in hand. The sense of loss would have been greater otherwise.

Along the way, family and friends were slighted, along with public service or political activism. Even outings to the mountains or beach became less frequent. From what I’ve seen, writers make lousy spouses or partners. Consider yourself warned.

I am surprised by the amount of labor that took place in my odd free hours after my sabbatical. Also, by what a bold and risky move taking that year off had been. It did nothing to enhance my resume, for one thing. And I’ll return to the lack of health insurance but spare you the rant about how the current system, even with Obamacare, inhibits entrepreneurial advances. It’s something I couldn’t have done if I weren’t single, not unless I had a very supportive partner. (And then I would have felt guilty. Go figure.)

Let me confess my obsessive (Pollyannish?) looking for natural beauty, wherever; my need to have a connection to soil and water while overlooking the obvious ugliness. Applicable to the hippie thing, too.

And then there was the emotional pain buried in my psyche, a deep well to tap.

I’ve said nothing of the years of therapy since leaving Baltimore or the ways they’ve enriched the writing. Here I had thought such “healing” would impair my writing, but it’s not so. Both long rounds instead opened emotions to me, not just the intellect.  

I’m still baffled by the lack of novels by others closely reflecting the places and experiences I encountered.

Jeffrey Eugenides has come closest, though he was still off in the future. Not just his Greek-American perspective, but his Midwest roots not that much different from mine.

Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and Norman Gurney’s Divine Right’s Trip catch other corners. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Acid Kool Aid Test misses altogether, and, besides, it wasn’t even fiction. Or was it?

Well, I can go back to Richard Brautigan, at the outset of the ‘60s, including his Pacific Northwest flavor.

Beyond that, though, I turn to the poets.

Also, what if I had recast my novels more as a genre? Or even taken the big books apart for shorter series?

Well, it’s still one writer’s life. Make of it what you will.