You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
In the still speculative movie version of my new novel, What’s Left, who would you have portray her uncle Barney?
From my perspective, so much would have to depend on the eyes. Something soulful, at the start.
~*~
In the family, Cassia may have had food like this.
My final revisions of my new novel, What’s Left, heightened the role of her best friend forever and first-cousin, Sandra – short for Cassandra. She’s now active from age 11 on (rather than being central to the final chapter alone) and provides some punchy counterpoint to Cassia’s discoveries and questions during their adolescence.
Some vital exchanges occur when Cassia is railing to be in a “normal” family, unlike theirs, and Sandra points out her own struggles fitting in – her mother’s Japanese-American from San Francisco, after all, rather than from Indiana where she and Cassia live.
Sandra also has a heated perspective on their three great-aunts that Cassia doesn’t quite understand. As for their Barbie dolls? You’ll just have to see.
In my new novel, What’s Left, she’s grown up taking much of her family and its restaurant enterprise for granted. After all, every kid in her extended close-knit family has had to work shifts there. After the death of her father – her Baba – when she’s 11, she uncovers what had attracted him to the home she’s known.
Early on, his input into the expansion of the restaurant must have felt invigorating. Beyond its pure financial calculations came some intense consideration of spiritual values, growing culinary awareness, and out-and-out-sensory delight. Could you put these together as an artistic experience? That kind of thinking.
Among her mother’s male ancestors in my new novel, What’s Left, my personal favorite is clearly Ilias the Cypriot, even if I might hope to be less obvious in my telling. Ari, Perry, and Stavros all have their better qualities, but I doubt I’d get along with any of them for long. There are reasons, though, that Ilias is also known as the Philosopher, even when he’s become a successful construction contractor in Chicago before he and his wife relocate in what they erroneously assume will be semi-retirement.
He’s gentle, curious, generous, and instills in grandson Dimitri and granddaughter Nita, at least, qualities they ride to success in their own fields.
If only he’d been present to comfort Cassia in her grief after her father vanishes in an avalanche halfway around the globe – we would have had a different novel. Is there a point where the elderly are simply too weak to lend comfort or guidance, even when they’re still breathing? In the novel, unlike some of the more dramatic deaths, Ilias and Maria simply fade into a past. I imagine them going off arm in arm, smiling, but leave that to the reader’s discretion.
~*~
Think of the circles around you. Who do you look to as your favorite male authority figure?
~*~
Considering his love of mountains, I am surprised that I didn’t have Kenzie heading off on mountainous trails on more of his days off work. He was certainly living close enough, if he wanted to drive a few hours each way.
Instead, it’s swimming at the secluded lake those two summers as well as riding the underground rails of Gotham one weekend of each month.
Sometimes, then, what happens all depends on the people you’re with or are meeting.
That’s how it worked for me, in a situation similar to Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.
Maybe Kenzie just thought he’d get the mountaintop opportunities later? Or maybe just not quite where he planned?
Admittedly, in my new novel, What’s Left, her family has a lot of good luck – accompanied by enough bad things for balance.
In the early drafts, I liked the fairy-tale, larger-than-life tone – as befits the “best movie ever” or “best novel ever” lists of upwards of ten thousands of listings that I hear from younger voices around me. Still, I’m a bit too Aristotelian to allow more than one as the best of anything, and I’m not referring to Cassia’s great-grandfather Ari here, either.
No, I’m thinking of the fact she’s in a close-knit extended family that’s prospered. In this case we have three brothers who’ve worked tightly together. A more common example in today’s society would be the three brothers who will never again speak to each other after their mother’s estate is settled. And that’s before we get to their children, the cousins who barely know each other, unlike Cassia’s.
There’s her aunt Nita, who’s negotiated a contract to assure she owns her daily newspaper column.
The adults who’ve joined in the family get along well together, something that’s never a given.
And Cassia herself lays claim to a rare happy childhood, up to the point when tragedy strikes when she’s 11.
I never intended this optimism when starting out on this work – it’s just where the narrative wanted to go. If the novel originated, as I think it did, in revisiting the aspirations of the hippie experience, what follows fits well as a foil to directions American society has since taken.
By the way, I do love fairy tales, especially in their more ominous, early, unrefined versions. The kind where Rapunzel’s pregnant or Cinderella’s stepsisters lose their feet.
There are a few of those touches in Cassia’s tale, too, just in case you wonder.
~*~
Put yourself in the story. Or have Cassia stop in your neighborhood for a visit. Where would you want to dine with her? Create something imaginary, if you want, or simply take her (and us) to one of your favorites. (For some of our neighbor girls, it would definitely be the Creperie.)
~*~
The rundown farm that inspired Russet Ranch in my novel Pit-a-Pat High Jinks was real, though no one else probably saw it like this. An author is allowed leeway, after all.
And yes, we did go nude swimming.
Yes, an author is supposed to like his protagonists – and maybe even some of the key villains, in their very devilishness – but lesser characters sometimes privately rise to the top.
Here are 10 of mine, some in upcoming volumes:
~*~
In the books you’ve read, who’s your favorite character?
In the five years since the publication of my Hippie Trails novels and their transmutation into the new and improved Freakin’ Free Spirits cycle now appearing, I’ve learned a lot about the counterculture experience.
Some of it has sprung from comments you’ve made here at the Red Barn, some of it from observations I’ve received after reconnecting with others who shared in some of the experiences I recounted, and some from remarks made by others in casual conversations or online groups.
I’m thinking, too, of how much the nation has yet to learn from the experience.
Despite the emotional devastation of the ill-advised Vietnam engagement, the country went on to launch two wars in Iraq as well as the unending quagmire in Afghanistan. They’re costing us dearly, especially when politicians tell us we can’t afford health care or education – and still insist we can pay for these horrific misadventures.
On a more positive note, there’s much to reclaim in rebuilding community. Cassia’s great-grandfather’s vision of an inner-city village still resonates with me. Are there relationships akin to family we can nurture and sustain? I hope so.
As for her uncle’s guerrilla economix? Quite possibly, especially if you watch were you choose to shop.
Here, then, is to the continuing Revolution of Peace & Love. Cheers!
One of Kenzie’s lovers in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks had long puzzled me. In the earlier versions of the story, I pretty much ran with a set of details mirroring those I had encountered in real life. I refrained from speculating on what she wasn’t telling me – or, by extension, Kenzie.
In the latest set of revisions, though, I ventured beyond that self-imposed taboo. I had learned from two other girlfriends how devastating childhood abuse could be. Yes, in this fictional case, the hypothesis fit. Not that it had to be factually true, but rather that it was a plausible possibility – that was enough for a novelist. As I fleshed out that incident and its impact, I began weeping. If only I had known more of her at the time or more of all three, would the course of our relationships gone differently? The feeling of deep loss and grieving was pervasive, all these decades later.
Likewise, as I was reworked the text that morphed into Daffodil Uprising, the focus shifted from the lighthearted face of the hippie experience to a broader comprehension of its desperation and even destructive fringes – and that sensation also had me grieving. As a deep sense of loss regarding the promise we saw on the horizon but failed to reach and fulfill washed over me, I began seeing the novel as a requiem for the hippie dream.
With Kenzie’s daughter Cassia at my side, though, I started thinking about the way dreams work. They have one foot in the past and the other in the present. And then, even when she was looking at her father’s history, she had her own generation in mind. From where I stand, their situation looks even more confusing than ours had. What can we who did change so much of society, pro and con, offer them now in continuing that vision?
These are dire times, friends. Anyone else feeling some déjà vu and unease?
Jnana's Red Barn 