Using skills and connections he acquires working in a shipyard in Greece, Aristotle relocates to Indiana in my novel What’s Left.
How did your grandfather wind up pursuing the work he did?
Tag: Relationships
Overly Georgia
fittingly ends spooky summer mostly continuous deluge (four Yuppieback novels and a collection of essays) a Labor Day weekend reading binge as its best of thee often . hoping for all perfection, write sometime, OK? I never could keep up with developments / Everlastingly
What if there were a sequel?
Let me repeat, What’s Left is my final novel, even though it’s appeared before several earlier ones — or their later revisions. That doesn’t mean I might not rework some more of my earlier books, but I have no intention (at this point, ahem) of undertaking such an ambitious project.
Still, if it’s ever successful, there can be a demand for a sequel. There are many possibilities that point to further development.
One plot twist I considered was this:
A handful of the Erinyes’ grandchildren rebel by returning to attend college across the street from Carmichael’s. Perhaps it’s inevitable that they apply for jobs in the restaurant.
Can they work? We’ll let them decide about becoming cousins.
This could have opened considerations about rebalancing the ownership, for one thing. Or more dimensions to our understanding of what it means to be a family. Or even their own reasons that parallel those of Cassia’s father in moving way back in the early ’70s.
~*~
It’s a big book, admittedly. But it could be a lot bigger.
Where would you take the story of What’s Left from what’s already there? What would you like to have answered?
~*~
The woman I married
more complex than I’d suspected / morally rigid but sensual: her garden a clue, not straight rows but clusters and clumps with small surprises inserted wherever, all kinds of colorful dimensions, some of them tasty or sweet along with some bitter /
Maybe it simplifies things
In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s great-grandmother and her sister marry two brothers. One is named Aristotle.
Do you know of any brothers in one family who marry sisters from another?
What gives, Karmen
about it, except for an annual holiday trek up the railroad tracks along the river and brisk swim before the pool closes with Labor Day as ritual with a list of things to do filling four pages feeling depressed half the time even overwhelmed would be natural, too much I lose balance, lose focus, lose center then need to get back into the room by myself relating her entire summer rather beat
A culminating novel
It’s is not my debut novel. Rather, I have the feeling it’s the opposite — the final one. I could never do this again. What’s Left is a big novel chock full of surprising turns, deep thoughts, and lively details. Unless Cassia starts speaking to me again, there will be no sequels. For me, at least, the story condenses so much into its pages I’m feeling completed.
Unlike my earlier novels, this one was not written on the fly while working full-time as a journalist. Like them, though, it’s undergone extensive revision.
Woven through the book are themes I’d explored in my earlier stories, now seen in a new light, while investigating others I’m tackling for the first time. Family and family enterprise, adolescence and childhood, death and divorce, and Greek-American culture, especially, are new while counterculture, romance, spirituality, community, nature and specific place, livelihood, journalism itself all run through my previous work.
~*~
Think of this bit as going into the compost rather than being served on the plate:
All I’m doing is asking you to apply your new comprehension to the rest of your life.
~*~
Of course, you’ve heard somebody blurt out, “I’m never going to forget this as long as I live!” Or some such. And sometimes it’s true.
Me? I have trouble remembering nearly everything. Could it be one reason I read so widely is to help me remember? Of course, writing gets it down on paper, once again so I don’t forget.
So while I read to help me remember and to gain insight on the world around me, it’s not the only reason by any stretch.
What do you look for most in a novel or poem?
~*~
How do those mixed identities add up?
Like most of us, Cassia finds herself carrying a host of identities. She’s Greek-American, on one side, and Midwestern WASP, on the other. She’s been raised with both Tibetan Buddhist and Greek Orthodox religious influences. She’s a female, of course, and an entrepreneur. She’s part of a large extended family, a Hoosier, a bohemian, a college graduate, a devoted sister, a daughter. And that’s just for starters.
What are your most prominent identities? How do they shape your life?
Straw hat
Jacob rather frowns on swimming, but Bleu and Ohio Boy love it while Swami just grins “Om” before a letter from South Carolina says they’ve named their farm Bee Riddle Farm, which I find wonderfully poetic yet if the buzzers proliferate, shouldn’t it be Bee-Riddled Farm? ending with Love and God’s Peace, no doubt, but who ate all that sweet corn?
As for that question, ‘Do you have a sister?’
In my novel What’s Left, Cassia’s great-grandfather and his brother marry two sisters. One is named Athina.
How do people in your circles discover each other as couples?
