You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Think of the names of bands and singers having a food tag. (Will Red Hot Chili Peppers or Smashing Pumpkins get your thoughts bubbling?)
Throughout my novel What’s Left, her uncle Barney has rock playing prominently in the restaurant kitchen. Does this provide a good counterpoint to his thoughts and actions? Do you find it amusing? Annoying? Confusing?
Who would you like to add to the food-themed playlist?
~*~
While my novel What’s Left picks up a generation after the final events in my Subway Visions tale, I found myself needing a better understanding of the five siblings’ roots. That meant going back not just one generation but two in this case.
Have you ever done genealogy or looked into your family’s history? Are there stories you feel would make for good fiction? How about the characters, too?
~*~
Growing up in a financially secure family like the one in my novel What’s Left could open your educational and career options, I suppose. For Cassia’s mother, I saw events unfolding along these lines — which I then cut from later revisions of the story:
Manoula, on the other hand, possessed some of her sister’s ability to ask those questions, however gently. And she had some of her brother Dimitri’s practical streak. But she also had an underlying spiritual awareness and a sharp intelligence to match. It’s a potent combination — even intimidating to many potential suitors.
Crucially, both Manoula and Baba knew the vitality of artistic practice and expression. Remember, he was more than a photographer — he may have worked on a daily newspaper, but he profoundly appreciated all the fine arts. On top of that, he had a natural ability in writing that had yet to be encouraged and released.
On her part, Manoula loved literature, in particular, and practiced hours a day on her violin. Realizing early on how difficult it is to earn a living in either endeavor, she followed Dimitri’s advice to pursue a double major — English and music — with a minor in business to fall back on. As she told people, she was open to a career in arts management, and in a way, with the publishing, she’s held to it. She spent five years on her bachelor’s degree — including summer courses — but she was in no race to get out into the world, not once my Baba crossed her path. They were both taking a long-range view ahead.
In a way, you could say she was a Yiayia Dida while Nita was a Yiayia Athina in new guise. Oh, I don’t know — maybe it was the other way around. They were all strong, emancipated women with a bohemian streak. Not all bohemians, I should add, are strong — not by a long shot.
~*~
In early versions of the novel, when Cassia was piecing together her family history from the perch of a teen or 20-something, she might have seen events something along these lines. But in the later revisions, told as she’s seeing them as a teen, this passage was just too much. Way too much. Besides, through much of high school time, she was a lackadaisical student more interested in managing a live music scene.
Looking at her ancestors, though, I doubt that her great-grandmothers had more than a rudimentary education. Her grandmother, Bella, came to town for a college degree but was thwarted in her plans. Cassia’s mother, her Manoula, raised the educational bar.
Fortunately, Cassia’s aunt Nita provides crucial encouragement that leads to college in time.
So what is essential in releasing talent or dreams you have? What kind of advice have you received regarding continuing education and career? How have your plans taken shape? What’s been especially helpful?
~*~
I wish there were a better label than “hippie” to apply to the counterculture explosion that swept the world in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Contrary to popular assumptions, there was no standard-issue hippie, male or female. Not everyone did pot or ventured into acid and beyond, nor did everyone participate in a protest march or have long hair or have sex every night or at least on the weekend. We all came in various degrees of separation from general society yet, somehow, we also recognized a kinship with each other.
“Are you sure you were a hippie,” my wife sometimes asks. So what if I didn’t like rock? Many of my friends had been at Woodstock just down the highway from the milieu I describe in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks. No, we didn’t recite a credo, you dig what I mean?
The only other flash in history I can see similar to this was the mid-1600s in England, with its World Turned Upside Down before the restoration of the monarchy – stresses that would fester until the American Revolution a century later. What we shared was a vision of a more just, equal, and caring society. We didn’t have standard-issue, card-carrying members. Alas, we didn’t have elders or cohesive discipline, either. And the breakdown that followed can’t be blamed entirely on a youth movement crossing over into the dreaded age 30. (Oh, how I’d love to be back there, if only I wouldn’t have to figure out how to survive in the current economy.)
Tom Wolfe, author of “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” pointedly asked why there wasn’t the big hippie novel, overlooking a few notable entries like Gurney Norman’s “Divine Right’s Trip.” The problem, as I see it, is that the scope of the events was too big and too fuzzy to be encapsulated in a single volume. You had the activist side, from civil rights and draft resistance to pacifism, feminism, and the environment, for starters. Add to that sexual revolution. And then drug use, abuse, and visions, as well as new spiritual teachings and practices. All before we even get to the music and its scene. How could you possibly wrap all of that, plus more, into a single volume?
Believe me, I’ve tried with my own Daffodil Uprising and its companion “Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.” Hate to admit there’s so much more that could be added to the, uh, pot. Make that “pan.”
By the way, I think there are worthy nominations in each of the subcategories I’ve just mentioned. I’d love to hear more.
Frankly, I think we, as a nation, have been in a state of denial about the era, with its tension between the war in ‘Nam and the Establishment supporting it, on one side, and the opposition on multiple grounds, on the other. Those rifts in the soul of the nation have never been adequately examined and addressed from either side, much less healed. We could start with the MIA-POW myth, for one, or the ways we might have failed to answer our kids’ questions about pot use, for another. They are definitely exploding in our face now.
Meanwhile, Cassia, in What’s Left, has come along to try to make her own way out of the debris.
And so I humbly or brashly offer my own novels for discussion.
When Cassia’s future father moves in with Nita’s four siblings, their big old Victorian house and its household are practically a hippie commune.
But then, when her parents’ generation begins marrying and having children, things change.
Still, she’d grown up as part of a tightly knit extended family, one that was just about everything his hadn’t been.
Where was your family when you were starting out as an adult? Nearby or far away?
Have you ever lived in a group household?
One of the dilemmas in shaping my novel What’s Left, involves the naming of children. I felt a repetition of first names in successive generations, such a common Greek custom, would have simply become too confusing for readers to follow. Am I right?
~*~
In a passage I cut from the final edition, the unifying influence of tradition or spiritual practice is considered:
Let’s face it, our worst disagreements are insignificant compared to the conflicts that could be erupting within our circle.
~*~
Not all families get along, after all. Even Cassia’s will face some difficult trials.
For the moment, let’s look at names. Cassia, in the novel, is short for Acacia, a tough wood mentioned in the Bible. (In the King James version, though, it’s called shittam. Ugh.)
Do you know what your name means? Were you named in honor of anyone? Do you like them? Would you prefer something else?
~*~
Somehow, in starting from the finale of an earlier novel, my novel What’s Left would have to resolve a gap between the five siblings’ Greek ancestry and their interest in Tibetan Buddhism, along with the challenges of running a restaurant shortly after the loss of their parents. Their view of business is more radical and community-focused, for one thing.
Yes, they were young and idealistic, but would that be enough to get them through?
What would you hope to see change in your surrounding society? Or even your own life?
When it comes to her cohort of close cousins in my novel What’s Left, I don’t want to give away too much. Let’s just say there are a lot of them, and they come to prominence in the last half of the story. You just might have reason to be envious.
As an author, this presents a challenge. How can I narrow the focus for the reader yet maintain an awareness of the scope involved by the time we get to a fourth generation of this family in the New World?
In this case, I chose to concentrate on a handful of Cassia’s cousins, at most, and deal with the rest of them in quick glances, often as part of the pack, sometimes simply a cluster of names in a single brushstroke. I hope it’s sufficient.
Perhaps it also helps that apart from Cassia’s best friend forever, Sandra, the cousins don’t step into the spotlight until we’re well into the story and some of the other earlier characters have already stepped offstage.
~*~
As a passage I deleted from the final version suggests, her upbringing was quite different from her father’s.
He must have been very lonely, always on best behavior, without any of the competitive mischief that runs through my family.
~*~
One of the things that amazed me about my college girlfriend’s family was the number of cousins she had and how often they visited each other — second- and third-cousins included. They seemed to know where everyone lived and what they were up to. Mine was nothing like that.
Do you have any close cousins? Do you find any of them to be special? Annoying?
Or if you’re from a big family, how close are you to your brothers and sisters? Which ones more than others?
Who would you turn to if you were in trouble?
~*~
Writing has been a means for me to investigate the question, “Who am I,” and of recollecting fragments, especially those that might eventually coalesce into a larger perspective. Unlike many adults, I have few vivid childhood memories, but what I am piecing together is often troubling. I grew up in Ohio in a mainstream Protestant tradition, became an Eagle scout, loved chemistry, hiked and camped, that sort of thing. I can blame becoming a hippie on my first lover, and thank her, too, for pointing my life in an unanticipated direction even after she flew ever so far away.
In the years since, I’ve followed a zigzag journey that’s been rich in many ways excepting money. Let’s just say it’s been off-beat.
Now retired from a career in daily newspaper journalism, I’ve married for the second time, live in a historic mill town in the seacoast region of New Hampshire, and am an active Quaker. It’s a full plate. What I didn’t expect was how much of my own “contemporary” fiction is now history – so much has changed so quickly in my own lifetime.
It’s hardly the end of the story, though. Not if we can help it.
My novel What’s Left deals largely with a new generation as it attempts to make sense of its legacy. Yes, the story centers on Cassia, the daughter of a professional photographer and practicing Tibetan Buddhist in Indiana. She’s trying to make sense of how they got where they are now – and what’s always made her extended family unique.
Do you feel you fit in easily with the world around you? Or is there usually some sense of alienation?
Jnana's Red Barn 