In my big writing projects, landscape and geography have formed a major thread.

It’s most prominent in the novel that became Nearly Canaan, which is outwardly more about tensions with an unstable spouse, the trials of career ambitions, and a sequence of three locales that culminate in volcanic explosion on all fronts. Perhaps raising a personified landscape to the fore would have been too melodramatic, but it was an option I’m now seeing I overlooked. You know, the fantasy genre.

Even so, places are a primary ingredient in my fiction and poems.

My four years in the desert of the Pacific Northwest were a revelation. I felt myself on the brink of everything I had hoped for. It seemed embodied in the landscape, including the ways the Indigenous presence resonated in the earth itself.

And then everything exploded and I was, essentially, exiled from Eden.

By the time I could hunker down to collect the debris, I was on the East Coast. I had also lost the extended elation of feeling that my big breakthrough as a poet was about to happen.

I’d say I’ve leaned toward celebrating the good and lovely sides of life – a hopeful optimist, though I loathe that term – but I finally recognized in later revisions the importance of acknowledging the ugly, too, and the overwhelming desecration that’s occurred across this land and the globe despite what I saw in the better sides of the hippie alternative.

~*~

I am a visual person and even considered a livelihood as a painter or graphic designer or architect back when I was in high school. Being named editor-in-chief of the Hilltopper ultimately changed all that. Well, much of my journalism career included selecting and cropping photos and designing newspaper pages. My visual art training wasn’t neglected altogether.

From early childhood on, I loved maps. Hiking and primitive camping in a rogue Boy Scout troop abetted that awareness. Growing up in flat Ohio, I imagined mountains. Even a bump on the horizon, say Mount Saint John in neighboring Greene County, seemed vast, at least on our bicycles. An ocean was inconceivable. The mountains I experienced were the Appalachians, especially a stretch of the Appalachian Trail we Scouts backpacked between my fifth- and sixth-grades. Those magnificent and dreamy heights didn’t have the craggy snowcaps that had captured my imagination, but they did introduce the sensation of being somewhere near heaven and looking down on the world, the way God would. (At least as I would have seen it then.)

Add to that history and historic places. Old log cabins and their unique smells are among the memories imprinted within me. I probably read the entire shelf of Landmark Books’ profiles of famous people in sixth grade, if not third.

In the middle of my sophomore year of college, I transferred from my hometown to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, where I had hiked and camped in the surrounding hilly forests, but this was a more distinctive locale than I realized in my leap toward a degree.

I mention all this because I’m seeing how much a specific spot on the map has been an element of my poetry and fiction.

An important twist came when I was living in the yoga ashram in the Pocono mountains of Pennsylvania and our teacher, an American woman, returned from her first trip to India. She said the reason Hinduism has so many deities is that many of them reflect the unique vibrations – as she said, vibes – of the different locales.

Thus, it’s not just how a place looks but also how it feels with your eyes closed. Maybe even how it smells.

I hope I’ve conveyed that in my writing.

Subsequent relocations took me back to Ohio and Indiana, on to the mountains and interior desert of Washington state, and then, in exile as it felt at the time, eastward to Iowa, another corner of Ohio, and finally Baltimore and the year of intense keyboarding I’ll describe later. After that, I headed north to New Hampshire and now an island in Maine.

So here we are, wherever.

Most of my literary writing has been done on the fly, amateur work on the side while pursuing a professional career in newspaper journalism. Early on, I was shunted from newspaper reporting to editing, with the advice that writers were more numerous than good editors. Was I really that good?

I can see now that stepping away from reporting allowed me the space to develop as a writer in ways I find more fulfilling.

My dream had been to be a fine arts columnist along the lines of Hub Meeker at the Journal Herald when I was growing up, or even as a more general columnist, as I was my senior year at Indiana University, but the reality was that such openings were few and far between. As I see now, I could have written freelance columns in my free time and offered them to my employers, showing them what I could do, but I needed to grow on other fronts as I worked myself through those early years. Much later, as one of my bosses said somewhat wistfully, “You have a life,” a very full one outside of the newsroom. Or workroom, in a wider perspective.

Besides, had I been writing a column, there would have been no energy for what I poured into the literary efforts instead.

My personal writing arose as an attempt to make sense of what was happening within and around me, often in chaotic times and remote locations. A college English teacher had left me with an appreciation for abstracting a detail to make it more universal, and thus more available for a reader to connect with personally, and I’ve seen that as a challenge for anyone writing literature. Unlike a news reporter, who is required to maintain an anonymous tone even when is or her byline is on the story, a literary writer has to be a more fully human presence.

In revising Quaking Dover, I discovered how difficult inserting myself into the text could be after one early reader suggested I develop the tone of a gently laughing curmudgeon narrator she sensed.

If only that weren’t my last book, one based on historical facts, I might have extended the perspective to my earlier novels.

In retrospect, I must admit that failing to concentrate on one stream of writing rather than many has been a mistake. I don’t lament writing poetry and fiction, but trying to span them can be seen as diluting the energy. Was it mistake, too, to not try breaking through as a columnist on the side when I was laboring as an editor? And ditch all the rest?

Nonetheless, my novels hew closely to what I encountered over a half century at fringes of American society or social consciousness, or how I’ve navigated through that to here. They also reflect my vision that a better way of life is possible, call it the Kingdom of God, if you will, but still more peaceful and just than the clasp of empire slash consumerism today.

In fiction, my stories are not just “me” who’s the protagonist. Sometimes, it’s “her,” instead. And sometimes that “me” is off to the side. As for others in the scene? They’re often composites of folks I’ve known, hopefully so disguised they won’t recognize themselves. How do you protect and respect their privacy, anyway? I’ve never wanted to be one of those authors whose family and friends hate what’s been done to them.

In the long run, you can tell me if that was a smart move or rather chicken.

~*~

Four of my eight novels spring from the first one that was published, though it’s no longer necessarily the starting point for readers, nor the endpoint. Another three are now also interwoven into one sweep. As for the eighth? Despite all the abstractions and switched genders, they’re ultimately semi-autobiographical and originate in an attempt to comprehend and remember what I could of some profound upheavals I’ve experienced. As has America and the rest of the world, in the background.

Here I am, about to reflect on those books over the course of this year and to share with you some of the personal encounters that underpin those stories.

While my poetry was written largely while having a full-time and often demanding job, the fiction came bursting forth largely in a break in Baltimore but then underwent huge revisions during weekends and vacations once I was back out in the workaday world based in New Hampshire.

My work was seen as experimental, though I now retranslate that as experiential. And once the novels appeared in ebook formats, I’ve welcomed the flexibility for revision and evolution, even if nobody else was noticing.

My self-imposed sabbatical in Baltimore was the source of a first-draft lode I revised intensely over the following decades. Hunkered down out in a suburban apartment for a year in my mid-30s … hmmm, a time that felt like midlife crisis or impending defeat … but with some unexpected savings I could live on for a year. (Having a company car turned out to be a huge benefit in the two years leading up to this.) And then?

I was newly divorced and then abandoned by my subsequent fiancée, laid off from a job that had exposed me to the emerging struggles of the American newspaper industry as a whole, and in the midst of a spiritual exploration that was leading me to unexpected frontiers.

Now that the novels have been out there for any who are interested, I’m feeling free to talk about many of the personal experiences that underpin them.  Surprisingly, though, I find the process is far more secretive emotionally than I ever would have admitted.