It began with a phone call to a crowded graduate student office, one muggy New Jersey summer afternoon. The voice mentioned something about an unrobbed sacrificial chamber, then asked for a very large favor indeed.
Two years of writing and five books later, Jim’s life is saved, Tanny has a final baby and the likelihood of tenure on the way, the excavation site near Orvieto beckons, and their two eldest Riverbankers are all but launched into the world.
What is a romance, after all, without a happy ending?
But that search for happiness would take me to strange interior places. Remembered landscapes rose up, but shibboleths of death were there, too. I found myself in the Green Lands, and walking down the hallways of memory to my characters’ interior hearths. I constructed a plausible – and gory – ritual for the banishment of sinister elementals. I cooked up a ridiculous Atlantis cult based upon real obsessions, and followed the sullied trail of my anti-hero to his own brand of redemption.
Mostly I dug deep into my own experience of love, the friction and obsession of it, the teamwork and compromises, and the deep fear of loss. My own mother’s brushes with death, the eventual death of both my parents, and the regrets around those events that time only temporarily removes, all found echoes in the stories.
Ursula K. LeGuin has said that we do not write our lives into our stories word for word. Rather, they are the bits and pieces, the mulch from which our stories grow.
There are other things that arise entirely on their own, the tertium quid when the characters stand up and demand to be heard. When a character reaches out of his own volition and kisses his graduate student, startling not only them both, but me, too.
Then there were the visions, things I know must be in the story, even when so much else is revised away. Of a fighter plane, crashing into a mesa near San Jon, New Mexico. Of a helicopter, pulling away from Aetna. A poem that finally scans. Two children coming to a back door on a rainy night, startling a stern old man. A man falling from a tower.
What of the visions that had no place in the story, like Gesualdo on his scooter, eternally racing along the street on the ridge of Monte Mario, going...where?
It has been a long, strange, rich ride.