ATTENTION: Owing to some kind of error in the huge, unresponsive bureaucracy of Kindle Direct Publishing, part of Amazon, many of my outstanding small-press publisher’s books are no longer listed on Amazon.com. This includes my Amazon Best-seller immigrant saga The Price of Passage and also the heartwarming coming-of-age story, Izzy Strikes Gold!
FORTUNATELY, we do not rely on Amazon to get our books in people’s hands. You can purchase either or both of these books direct from the publisher by clicking these links: Izzy and Passage.Thank you for your unwavering support of fine literature from small, independent presses.
Not my lower back, but someone’s. Image by Jmarchn, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0.
I am an aged writer now recovering from a major surgical project on my lumbar spine. They re-aligned and fused the L3 and L4 vertebrae through a seven-inch incision, in a six-hour operation.
Ouch.
Recovery is not so quick and easy.
I used to make my own breakfast, because I like it a certain way, and my wife does not get hungry as early as I do. Now, she cooks the oatmeal, and I just sit at the table and spoon on the berries.
After breakfast, it used to be: shower, shave, dress, and go about my day. Now, I totter from the table to the recliner and stretch out for my first rest period. Breakfast is tiring, you know.
In the recliner, blissful relaxation takes over. My whole body feels happy except for some minor discomfort in the back—you know, where they did the construction project. To relieve the boredom, I check the email on my cell phone, and maybe look at the day’s news headlines. But, you know, holding up the phone above my head wears me out, so I have to take it in stages.
Eventually, I make my way to the bathroom for the shower-shave-and-dress routine. It takes longer than it used to. By the time I present myself, fully dressed and smelling good, it’s time for lunch.
And lunch—well, you know—lunch can be exhausting. I need a time of rest after lunch.
On a good day, there may be an hour, or half an hour—between post-lunch rest and mid-afternoon nap—to sit at the laptop, focus, and achieve something. It may be only re-arranging medical appointments. Or puzzling out the meaning of a significant email. Or tending to something that needs advance planning, like marketing events several months in the future.
Maybe I can write a page or two on one of several works in progress. But not much progess. It goes by inches, not yards.
Then it’s time to rest again. You get the idea.
The thing is, Dear Reader, I have, at this moment, three or four good books in me—fun books, interesting books, useful books—but it’s hard work to get them out of my head and onto paper. It takes time. Your New Favorite Writer’s time at this point, like J. Alfred Prufrock’s, is being measured out with coffee spoons.
But one must endure.
I discovered I am not young anymore. Some wag long ago minted the lines:
“How do I know that my youth is all spent? Well, my get up and go has got up and went.”
And it’s true, Neighbor. It’s true.
Shakespeare portrait by John Taylor (1585-1651). Public Domain.
the lean and slipper’d pantaloon, With spectacles on nose and pouch on side; His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, Turning again toward childish treble, pipes And whistles in his sound.
Some old men move as if they were made of Waterford crystal. I fear I’m starting to walk that way.
At eighty, when you are blindsided by something your body has been saving up for decades, you can be forgiven for wondering what else might be in store. You can’t help turning a kind of mental corner.
Life will be different now, maybe wildly different. At the very least, adjustments must be made.
But it’s early in recovery yet. I’ll be back, Dear Reader.
I pray the good Lord will give me the time I need to get what’s in my head out onto paper.
Dear Reader: A writer friend recently asked, “What are the benefits of having a blog?” One could turn the question around and answer, “One of the benefits of having a writer friend who asks about blogs is that it may prompt the production of a blog post.” Read on.
“In my dotage, I am reduced to bloggery.”—King Lear, Act VII, line 4,926. Painting: King Lear and Cordelia, by Benjamin West (1793) / Folger Shakespeare Library, Wikimedia Commons.
When I was young, I did not know what “blog” meant. It didn’t mean anything, yet. Nobody knew what a blog was, because the word hadn’t been invented. The thing hadn’t been invented.
Aw, shucks—computers were giant machines in huge buildings, fed and monitored by teams of scientists in white lab coats. They were used only for Big Problems, like calculating the complete value of π as it will be revealed on the Day of Judgment.
I did know I wanted to be a writer, but that’s as far as it went: wanting to. It may strike you as crazy, Dear Reader, but I had not the slightest idea how to be a writer.
As far as I knew, you would shut yourself up in a room with a typewriter and a ream of paper, and SHAZAM!, something would strike you, and you would write it down, mail it off to Bennett Cerf, and get a million dollars.
Well, it worked for Melville and Hemingway and Louisa May Alcott—why not for me? Never mind that Melville could barely support his family, Hemingway killed himself, and Alcott wrote girly stories: the point was, you had to do your writing all alone, and it was a divine gift, not something that could be learned.
I now believe that writers do NOT produce great works in isolation. Homer’s epics were no doubt recited over and over, to many different audiences, giving him an idea what worked and what didn’t. Shakespeare’s plays, like all plays, were molded line by line as actors spoke those lines and played the parts. The great American pantheon of writers—Emerson, Thoreau, Longellow, Holmes, and the rest—all knew one another, read one another’s work, and functioned as a little New England-based Algonquin Roundtable.
I’ll bet even J.D. Salinger learned something from somebody. He was just too much of a jerk to admit it.
When I finally began aspiring to be a writer seriously, after retirement from other gigs, I knew that I needed to seek out those who could teach me. They included actual writing teachers like Christine DeSmet and Laurie Scheer, but they also included a great many fellow writers. Comrades in arms; sufferers from the writing disease. People who, like me, spent their time down in the trenches of storytelling—looking for ways to make our efforts stand out and attract readers.
I learned that writers like to form little clubs—groups for mutual critique and support. In one of the writers’ groups I joined, Tuesdays With Story, blogs came up in conversation. By this time, blogs had become a thing.
“Blog” is a shortened form of “web log.” But that derivation hardly suggests what they really are. A blog is what happens when somebody gets an address on the internet and starts posting short or extended statements of his or her point of view.
Blogs may be very specific, devoted to one craft, hobby, or special interest. But on the whole, they tend to range a bit wider. A blog can be a window into a writer’s soul.
It was rumored in our group that if one was writing novels and wanted to get them published and read, it was essential to have a “platform”—a basis for public recognition of one’s work. And a blog was a great way to build a platform.
But, Fair Reader, please be advised Your New Favorite Writer did not just fall off a turnip truck. Oh, no. It was immediately apparent that a blog, if it was to be any good, would be just as much work as any other form of writing. If I wanted to have a blog and have that blog represent my work fairly to the world, I would have to put as much time and effort into it as into my novels and short stories. And what would be the point of that?
“Well,” said my friend Jerry Peterson, then the convener of the Tuesday night group, “you might think of a blog as not just a way to promote your work. It might be your work—or at least a significant part of it. After all, you can write whatever you want, and as owner of the web address, you are in a position to present it to the world, without an intervening gatekeeper.”
Oh.
That.
Jerry was suggesting that a blog is essentially a form of self-publishing. In those days, only a few short years ago, self-publishing was not as respected as it is today. Still, it was a way to get my work in front of people. People who might like what I’m doing and hunger for more. Books, for example.
I could see where this was going. I resolved to plunge in, give it a try. That was over six years ago. What you are reading now is the 317th installment of this blog, titled “Reflections.”
BUT WHY THIS BLOG?
Why this, particular, blog?
When I started writing it, I did not know what I was doing. But people whose views I respected said, “Your blog should have a theme, a brand. It should be identifiable as something. You should have some idea what you’re trying to do with it.”
Well, it was to be a means of presenting my writing to the public. Well, that was all to the good. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had something to present to the public. I wasn’t qite sure what, but I was on the trail.
Did I mention, Gentle Reader, that there was a gap of sixty years or so between when I first knew I wanted to be a writer and when I actually started learning how?
I now recognize that long hiatus as being merely the most obvious symptom of the fact that, when I started out, I didn’t have anything to say. But as we age, we acquire experience and even, we hope, wisdom.
Now, I do have something to say. It’s just hard to figure out what it is, and how to say it. But not impossible. And the figuring out is best done by actually writing. Somebody said you have to write a million or so words of bad writing before it starts coming out good. So I’m working on that.
I’ve got something to say. I can say it in writing. It’s just hard.
By the time I launched this blog, I had already figured out that everything I have to say comes out of my deep attachment to the past—my commitment to re-experience the past, to plumb its depths, and to refashion historical knowledge into historical fiction: writing that says, “within an understandable historical context, here is what life may be, at its best or at its worst, but definitely life as best apprehended in the living of it.”
If this is what my writing is about, it’s what my blog should address. I knew that, with a weekly deadline, I would wind up rambling a bit and imprinting my own personal take on what it means to dig into the past and relate it to the present. So I decided to call this blog “Reflections”—a very general kind of label—but to further qualify that with the catch-phrase “seeking fresh meanings in our common past.”
That’s what Your New Favorite Writer has been trying to do every week since then.
What has surprised me is how ccreativity is like a well. In a good water well, you may have to prime the pump, but once you do, it brings up fresh stuff. The well never runs dry. Almost every Tuesday for the last six years I’ve found something to write about, to the tune of a thousand words or so.
Sometimes I miss Tuesday and post a day late (like this week!). Once in a while I have not had time to do a new post and so have re-run an old one. But not very often. It’s just a matter of tweaking my brain a bit, and out it comes.
Some posts are more consequential than others. Some more literary, some more wry, some more snarky. But all have to do, in one way or another, with the passage of time and what that means in the living of life.
They are not full novels, like The Price of Passage or Izzy Strikes Gold!, but they’re well-meant installments in a writer’s quotidian encounter with the stuff inside and the stuff outside. I hope you find some merit in the reading.
This is a repost of an item that originally appeared November 19, 2024. Although the information is six months out of date, the emotions are still true. Hope you enjoy it.
I’m creeping up on eighty.
At such an age, one ought to have something for the world. Something to leave behind when you go. Wisdom.
Not just any old wisdom, you understand.
Not just: “Treat people well on your way up, because you might meet them again on your way down.”
Or: “Don’t neglect to floss; ignore your teeth and they’ll go away.”
Comic Henny Youngman. Public Domain.
Good nostrums both, but I mean something deep. Something universal, touching one’s inner life.
Take emotion. I say that in the Henny Youngman sense: “Take my emotion . . . please!”
As in, “You can have it. I don’t want it.”
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With me, a little emotion goes a long way.
In old age, I’ve become a writer of fiction. (See Izzy Strikes Gold! and the soon-to-be-republished Price of Passage.) What we fiction writers principally strive for is to pluck emotional strings in the reader.
Sure, we want to entertain, we want to inform; but the brass ring on this carousel is moving the reader. Emotion is the gold standard of art.
Ansel Adams, who obsessed over the minute details of photography—lens aperture, depth of field, developer time, characteristic exposure curves of different films and papers, the tonal scale of the finished print—that Ansel Adams, the supreme technician, said: “A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” (My italics.) He wanted to express emotion.
Adams also said, “I give it to you as a spectator, and you get it or you don’t get it, but there’s nothing on the back of the print that tells you what you should get.” He saw that what he strove to express might not strike a resonant chord on another person’s emotional keyboard. But the possibility of doing so was the whole point of his art.
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, one of Ansel Adams’s most famous photos. Photographed on November 1, 1941, 4:49:20 p.m. local time, as subsequently determined through independent analysis by amateur astronomer Dennis di Cicco. Public Domain.
I show my stories to quite a few people for critique—colleagues, friends, so-called beta readers—before turning it on the public at large. The feedback I most often receive is that my characters seem to lack emotion. They need humanizing.
Why am I reluctant to inject emotion?
I happen to like my characters flat and unaffected. Only after several colleagues tell me that a character is too calm and phlegmatic—only then will I revise my work to develop an underlying core of fear, joy, or throbbing pain.
Once I give in and do that, the work gets stronger and more interesting. From long experience, I know that.
Yet I resist doing so.
The fact is, Dear Reader, I dislike emotion.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t hate emotion. I don’t despise it. I don’t abhor it. That would be emotional, which is the last thing I want to be.
I distrust emotion. I look upon it with suspicion.
Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins. Fair use.
I’m like Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady, as voiced by Rex Harrison: “. . . a quiet living man . . . who likes an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb . . . a pensive man . . . of philosophic joys who likes to meditate, contemplate free from humanity’s mad inhuman noise.”
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Is it possible to live life free of emotional upset?
Tilt-a-Whirl. Fair use.
Could it be that life is a teeter-totter, after all? Or maybe a Tilt-a-Whirl?
One Thursday night recently, I dreamed a dream: I drove through pleasant countryside. In the seat beside me was my wife. Only we weren’t married yet. We were still the young people we had been many years before. I sincerely hoped she was enjoying the ride, and liking my company enough to want to do it again.
But the windshield turned opaque. It grayed out. The car hurtled along the road, but I couldn’t see where it was going. I was terrified.
I woke up , and it was Friday.
I dismissed the dream and drove off to Onalaska, about three hours from home, to attend the Wisconsin Writers Association annual conference. There I saw some old friends, made some new ones, and learned a few things about writing and marketing. It was a good conference.
On the way home Saturday afternoon, I stopped in Mauston for dinner. When I came out of Denny’s half an hour later, night had fallen. I drove south on the highway, into the black.
Strange optical effects vexed the darkness. The sky ahead—which should have been black stippled with small points of light from farms or vehicles—was instead a uniform sheet of gray. It looked like I was approaching a raised concrete overpass, one which kept receding as I drove toward it.
But the overpass was illusory. In fact, when I did drive under an actual overpass, it caught me by surprise. I didn’t think it was real until it passed overhead. And there, splayed across the windshield before me, hung another overpass—one that I was almost sure was a phantom.
The sides of my vision seemed to be lined with vertical concrete walls, as if the road were passing through a tunnel. You could say I had tunnel vision.
What I actually have, Dear Reader, is macular degeneration—an insidious condition that robs me of sight inexorably, by tiny degrees. These night-time illusions were just the latest symptom.
Before reaching Sauk City, I decided I will no longer drive at night. At least, not at speed, on rural highways. It’s the first clipping of my wings due to old age. A curtailed freedom.
A day or two later I remembered my odd dream the previous Thursday night. It seems prophetic now.
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Only minutes after my momentous decision to give up night driving, I struck a deer that leapt in front of my car. It was purely coincidental. Because of how it happened, I can say for sure that the deer strike was not caused by my night vision problems.
Still, it shook me up. But you would hardly know that, Gentle Reader, from the flat, just-the-facts-ma’am, report of it which I posted here last Tuesday.
At any rate, within a space of three days, I had received a fateful prophecy, made a dreaded decision, and incurred major vehicular damage.
Some people might call that a tough weekend.
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One week after the collision with the buck, I traveled to Washington, D.C., in the company of eighty-six fellow veterans, and escorted by my much-loved daughter, Katie, on Badger Honor Flight Mission 57. I’ve posted that in some detail here and here, so I shan’t belabor it further.
Stunned by the reception. Photo by Kari Keunzi Randall. Used by permission.
Only: It was something I had never expected to do, an opportunity offered me as if to make up for a decades-old slight from the nation, which I did not grieve at the time. Now that this honor was virtually thrust upon me, I felt such a catharsis of long-withheld gladness—such a glorious rush of love—that I now question the value of this lifelong habit of stuffing my emotions into my back pocket where I can ignore them.
That’s all.
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Being the Alert and Perspicacious Reader that you are, you will no doubt have noticed an underlying theme to these ruminations: Your New Favorite Writer is getting older. He is tripping over events that may spark strong feelings of a kind that he has little experience of, and little taste for, welcoming in an honest and open way.
You might say a prayer for him, if you’re so inclined.
I’m looking forward to an inspiring weekend, a time of meeting new friends and learning new things, at the Faith Forward Writers Retreat near Sparta, Wisconsin. I’ll be a panelist in the open-to-the-public “Meet the Authors” event Thursday night.
It’s billed as a retreat for “Christian-faith based writers.” It makes me wonder, this Easter week: What qualifies me to speak at a Christian writers’ conference? Am I a Christian writer?
I am Christian; I am a writer. Therefore, I’m a Christian writer. But the term calls up an image of one who writes “Christian books”—Bible explorations, for example. Or inspiring essays. Or Christian romance, meaning romance novels in which the heroine’s Christian faith plays a pivotal role in the development and outcome of the plot. Some of my good writer friends, like Barbara M. Britton and Deb Wenzler Farris, write with excellence in some of these genres.
My books feature fictional characters—Anders, Maria, Daniel, Izzy—who live in a Christian world and whose faith is conventional, largely unexamined. Faith plays a role in forming their personalities, and it influences their actions, but it’s seldom at the front of their minds.
The Christianity in my books is like an iceberg, or like an old tree trunk that has floated in a lake or river long enough to become waterlogged. Only a bit may appear above the surface, but mariners: ignore it at your peril.
Since I’ll be billed in a public event as a Christian writer, this is a good time to inform you about the particular Christian faith that undergirds my doings, writing included. Though Your New Favorite Writer’s books are neither Bible commentaries nor theological treatises, Dear Reader, you may wish to learn the spiritual identity of their author.
Who knows? It might be catching, and you deserve fair warning.
So here it is.
Credo
I believe there is a God, and I know it’s not me.
I think we are all creatures of a Great Intelligence far beyond our imaginations, exempt from our own limits of history and finitude.
I believe in Science; I believe God is its Author. The greatest scientists—the Keplers and Newtons and Einsteins and Hawkings—are its imperfect annotators.
Whether or not I know God is not as momentous as the fact that God knows me.
It is wondrous that, despite my imperfections, despite my dual nature as saint and sinner, God loves me wholly, forgives my transgressions, and showers blessings on me daily. God seems to ignore my just desserts. That is why God is called Love.
Photo of a painting of Jesus healing the paralytic from the wall of the baptistery in the Dura-Europa church circa 232 A.D. It is one of the earliest visual depictions of Jesus. It was excavated by the Yale-French Excavations between 1928-37 in present day Syria and now resides in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT. Public Domain.
Jesus Christ is the avatar of that Love.
As a Christian, I ought to be wholly on Christ’s team. But in our complex world, it’s often unclear to me whether I am batting for Jesus or the Other Guy.
I have come to rely on God’s forgiveness, because I so often need it.
A Few Corollaries
The Bible says God commanded us to “go and make disciples of all nations.” I am choosing to use the method of drawing them to Christ through the attractiveness of my example. I know this seems a forlorn hope, but it’s what I’ve got.
How can I convert you? I have a hard enough job converting myself.
Maybe that’s only my recessive personality speaking. For example, I also don’t wish to baptize you into my political views or my sports team. In fact, I’ve never hankered to run your life. You need to figure things out for yourself.
Yet, if I have the salvation power of Jesus Christ, and if that is the Greatest Gift in the World, should I not want to share it with everyone I meet?
Well, of course I should. But I’m a writer, not a miracle worker.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
Paul the Apostle.
I’m still working on the love part. Once I master that, we can talk about the rest.
Amen.
P.S.—You may still be able to attend the Faith Forward Writers Retreat. The sign-up is here.
Answer: When it’s Open House Imports, 308 East Main Street, Mount Horeb, Wisconsin.
Open House Imports, an elvishly decorated Queen Anne-style house on the right as you enter Mount Horeb from Madison, is really a gift shop devoted to all things Norwegian (or even Swedish or Danish). But it’s one of my favorite bookstores!
Here’s why: The owner, Janice Christiansen Sievers, embodies the Norsk concepts of velvaere (well-being) and koselig (coziness). It’s natural for Janice to help out a struggling author by buying and displaying his works, in case any of her customers are interested.
Your New Favorite Writer with Janice Sievers.
That kind of hospitality and openness is a theme we’ll explore repeatedly, Dear Reader. This is the first in a series of posts on bookstores Your New Favorite Writer knows and loves. What they all have in common is owners who care—who relate to authors, and to readers, whole-heartedly and with the joy of the human touch.
Fine examples of Norwegian rosemaling (flower painting).
How did Open House Imports get to be one of my favorite bookstores? Well, my first book, The Price of Passage, is about Norwegian immigrants navigating the social, political, and military challenges of the Civil War era. For years, my wife and I have shopped at Open House Imports, mostly during the Christmas season, when all its lovely wares seem especially relevant to our needs. So I knew that—right along with the rosemaling, Norwegian sweaters, and cooking utensils—the store has a robust display of Scandinavian-themed books.
Guess whose books you can buy there?
So I took the book out to show Janice. I told her the story of how The Price of Passage came to be, and what it means to me. I admit I choked up at one or two places, because the book’s themes are personal with me. I got a grand, koselig hug from Janice to help me through my spiel. She purchased several copies right on the spot, displayed the book in a prominent place, and even ordered more copies through my distributor.
Janice continues to promote my literary career. The last time I stopped in, I mentioned my second book, Izzy Strikes Gold!, a nostalgic trip back to 1957 from the viewpoint of a 12-year-old. Apologetically, I said, “Well, there’s not really a Scandinavian theme or connection in this one. ” Because her store is all Nordic, all the time, and Izzy is just an American kid with no particular national background. Didn’t matter. She wanted Izzy. So now he has a place on her shelves beside The Price of Passsage.
Scandinavian yummies.
Fair Reader: If you don’t yet have your copy of Izzy Strikes Gold! or The Price of Passage, Open House Imports is a great place to get it. While you’re there, you might also pick up one of many other books, fiction and nonfiction, with a Scandinavian flavor. Not to mention Scandinavian cookbooks—or receipe books, as Janice calls them.
By the way, if you’re going to do any cooking out of those cookbooks, you might need utensils, or place settings—or ingredients! Don’t worry, Janice has you covered. Open House Imports has a full range of the things you need for breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner, and snacks that will really ramp up your velvaere in a big way.
Norwegian sweaters.
Did I mention the Norwegian sweaters? And clogs. And tee-shirts. And all manner of essential housewares, from fine crystal to authentic wooden serving dishes decorated with sumptuous rosemaling.
And cards, calendars, knicknacks, figurines of trolls and elves (nisser), postcards, maps, et plenty of cetera. Chances are you can find a great gift for almost anyone you are buying for.
I could go on and on, Gentle Reader, but remember: Best of all, it’s a great bookstore!
Even if you aren’t in need of anything mentioned above, drop in the next time you’re near 308 E. Main Street, Mount Horeb, and introduce yourself to Janice. Have a nice chat. You’ll be delighted. Tell her Larry sent you.
“Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.”
But rest assured, Dear Reader: It is no part of our purpose here to paralyze you with platitudes.
Edward Gibbon. Public domain.
The fine example shown above has been attributed to Winston Churchill, George Santayana, Edward Gibbon, and Mickey Mouse.
Just kidding. Nobody ever attributed it to Edward Gibbon. The best candidate is Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, who in 1905 wrote:
Robespierre, with head. Public domain.
. . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Santayana could not have meant that literally—at least, not in detail. For example, there will never be another Robespierre. Yet over the years, any number of Robespierre avatars have goaded their nations downward, in circumstances reminiscent of the French Revolution.
Maybe that’s what Mark Twain—or was it Theodore Reik?—meant when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
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Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot, Study for a Fresco in the Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome. Perino Del Vaga (Italian, 1500-1547). Public domain.
Ah, Fair Reader, what Gordian knots of human concern attend the passage of Time!
Consider Time’s chapters: past, present, and future.
One night long ago, Your New Favorite Writer happened on a passage in Huai-nan Tzu, a Taoist text, that made him think of a rug being unrolled. The part already unrolled, lying flat and thus fit for examination, is the past; the part still wound in a tight coil, impenetrable, is the future. Exactly which part is the present I cannot say.
Caveat: If you search through Huai-nan Tzu for this rolled-rug metaphor, you won’t find it. It’s only an image in one reader’s mind, which was triggered by some obscure Chinese phrase describing the way events flow through their course.
I was about thirty years old at the time, and impressionable. Since then, I’ve seen the past as actualized, whereas all the contents of the future are merely potential. The past is real, whereas the future is theoretical.
Gracious Reader, if you grew up in the same Modern Western Civilization where I did, you may envision past, present, and future as a giant map over which we are creeping, making our way toward what is already there but we haven’t encountered it yet. This is the basis of all time travel stories: There is a future somewhere that already exists, a place you might get to through a newly-developed mechanism or a wrinkle in the fabric of the Time-Space Continuum.
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Well, it turns out that Huai-nan Tzu didn’t know the half of it. The latest version of physics calls into question whether Time itself is real. Isn’t it, rather, just something that happens as a result of unprecedented events, like the Big Bang? No Time, no Space—but everything explodes, and by some interaction of matter, gravity, and the Quantum Field—Time and Space are bent into being. And they’ve been hurtling outward ever since.
Milky Way and night sky. National Park Service image by Jacob W. Frank. Public domain.
One might imagine the starry cosmos to be a visible record of the past, constantly receding into an inconceivable void where the future might be said to reside—if, for example, the future had to list its place of residence on a form to get its Real ID-compliant driver’s license.
Your New Favorite Writer is hardly one of those who believe a thing is true because somebody called a scientist said it. But Time fabricated by the unfolding of real events has a certain attractiveness to it.
In that kind of Time, the past is not just a dusty page upon which a moving finger has writ. Rather, the past is woven through everything I or my ancestors, human and otherwise, have ever done or experienced.
I can’t know what will happen next year, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now. But I am free to search out and ponder all the curlicues and lateral arabesques of any and all events that have happened.
Maybe that’s why I write historical fiction. I don’t know what my ancestors, or other people’s ancestors, went through that caused mid-19th-century America to fight with itself, and conquer itself, over the question of slavery. But I had a kind of notion, based on a real acquaintance with historical facts, and I wrote that notion in an imaginary way until it became The Price of Passage, a novel about Norwegian immigrant farmers and fugitive African American slaves. It’s not factual, but it’s plausible. The tiny details are factual, the great movements are made up. In a strange way, time has been re-bent to serve my narrative purpose. Try it, you might like it.
Likewise, I took things that I really, personally knew, from my very own childhood experiences, and invented a story called Izzy Strikes Gold! It’s about a 12-year-old boy struggling to find his way through the problematic year 1957. All the details are real, but the lives of the characters do not exactly match the actual lives of anyone I ever knew.
But that’s okay. God has made billions of people, each with an individual story. If I add a few more to the pot, I don’t suppose it will hurt anything. There will just be a few more stories. Time and space will have been bent to new and interesting purposes in the realm of the imagination.
Rod Serling would approve.
Right now I’m working on a World War II novel, in which two brothers from a small Midwestern town wind up in the Southwest Pacific, the continent of Africa, and other places to fight the Axis Powers and their own demons, which arise from their troubled relationship. You won’t want to miss it, but it’s only halfway done, so you won’t be able to read it for a while. In the meantime, Dear Reader, knock yourself out on the Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!
I may have mentioned before now, Dear Reader, that the writer’s life is a lonely one.
Oh, sure, we are celebrated among our friends . . . if we have friends who are kind enough to celebrate us.
Gerrit Dou, Scholar Sharpening a Quill Pen. Public Domain.
We also confer among ourselves at writers’ conferences. We sit at the feet of masters and learn, if we can, a kind of self-mastery. We even may tip a tumbler or two, on such occasions.
We have the usual allotment of spouses and children and dogs.
So writers, as a group, are not existentially lonely. Most of us are not, at any rate.
But when it comes to writing—when we need to plot and craft and draft and re-plot and re-craft and re-draft a novel or any large work of fiction—that we do all by ourselves, in mental if not physical isolation. We may share a work in progress with colleagues: give glimpses, get feedback, gain perspective. But the actual doing of the thing is a solo gig. It’s just you and your keyboard in a room somewhere.
Thus, any victory merits a celebration.
So it is with pride and joy I announce: Your New Favorite Writer has reached Mid-point on his current WIP (work in progress). Sorry to burden you with technical jargon, but nonetheless—HUZZAH! Please feel free to huzzah along with me.
What’s the Big Deal?
Thanks, I thought you’d never ask.
Aristotle. Public Domain.
Mid-point in a work of fiction is not merely halfway. It does not mean fifty percent of the work has been done. Perhaps the second half of the book will be much easier to write, or much harder, than the first half.
Rather, the Mid-point, which always falls very near halfway through the pages, is where Something Momentous Happens. There is a major plot turn, visible or invisible, that makes the whole thing deeper and more important. The story shifts, the way a batch of fudge changes color in the pan just before it sets up into a new, delicious thing.
This is not my imagination, Gentle Reader. You could look it up. Any number of gurus have told us about it, from Aristotle onwards. Pick up a copy of Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field (1935-2013). Mr. Field was one of the first to put the how-to of screenwriting into a book, so that anybody could do it.
Charles Dickens. Public Domain.
Well, not just anybody. You have to also be a certifiable lunatic.
Actor-director Roberto Benigni, creator of Life Is Beautiful. Photo by Harald Krichel, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
But I digress. The point is, there is a fundamental dramatic structure that almost all good stories have. A beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes we call them Acts I, II, and III. There are vivid plot points that kick off the action (Inciting Incident), shift it into gear (Break into Act II), change the whole picture (Mid-point), set up the final confrontation (Break into Act III), and resolve the story (Climax). There are numerous lesser turns as well.
The all-important Mid-point signals a shift in tone, emphasis, and import of the story. That shift can be quite stark, as in the Italian film Life is Beautiful (1997), or more subtle, as in Charles Dickens’s novella A Christmas Carol (1843). But it has to be there, or the story resembles an uncooked fish, several days old.
Therefore I celebrate the conquest of the Mid-point.
So What?
Your New Favorite Writer has written two novels that are currently in print, The Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold! Both were very hard to write. I have been at work for some time on my third—a twentieth century historical novel that goes by the working title Brother’s Blood. It’s about two brothers who find themselves at odds but have no opportunity to fully reconcile before the Second World War sends them off in different directions.
This one is hard to write, too. But writing the first two, as well as several unproduced screenplays, taught me a few things. Especially how important the first act is. Famed writer-director Billy Wilder said, “If you have a problem in the third act, your problem is in the first act.” What he meant is that you need to set the stage fully and exquisitely in the first one-quarter of the work (Act I), so that all kinds of situations and relationships established at the start can then pay off in satisfying ways as the rest of the story (Acts II and III) unfolds.
Writers often talk about a character coming to life and taking the story off in an unexpected direction. It is delightful when this happens. But in a way, it’s even more satisfying when the underlying logic of the story—the line of development that flows from all the details you have packed into Act I—forces an unavoidable realignment of meaning at the Mid-point, and the rest of the story snowballs to an irresistible end from that point.
I’ve been laboring mightily over Act I: Writing, re-writing, changing, re-adjusting to get a number of rather ordinary yet secretly powerful ingredients into the story. And I’ve launched into the wilds of Act II, grinding away at just marshaling the facts of the characters’ lives, when ALL OF A SUDDEN, SHAZAM! A major plot event, one which I did not see coming, elbows its way into the story. Right at the halfway point. It’s an event I’m not at all happy with—and you Dear Reader, may not like it either—but it shoves the invisible river of narrative into a swifter and deeper channel. There is no help for it. We must go there.
I can’t wait to write the rest of the book.
Note: It would be very helpful at this point, no doubt, to give you a more specific idea of what happens in the book. I can’t do that. Major SPOILERS would be involved. All I can say is: look for it in a year or two, possibly by a different title, wherever fine books are sold.
Finally, it’s here. I refer not to the Trump second term, however you may feel about that.
No, I’m talking about something of epochal importance: The re-publication of my historical novel, Price of Passage, in a new edition, re-titled The Price of Passage.
The re-emergence of this monumental work, its light hidden under a bushel by the collapse of its original publisher, has been a rocky road indeed.
Some rocks still lie in the path ahead.
How It All Began
I had a gripping Civil War story, which had taken most of five years to write. Its title was Freedom’s Purchase. I did not really like that title, but it was the best I could come up with.
After a lot of folderol, I found a traditional publisher, Dan Willis of DX Varos Publishing, who was willing to take a chance on it. While bringing it to publication, we hit upon a new, improved title: Price of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation. The title and subtitle echoed themes and plots in my book, which is about Norwegian immigrants and fugitive slaves.
We released Price of Passage on August 23, 2022, with a fabulous launch party at Mystery to Me Bookstore in Madison. Then I began making the rounds of libraries, bookstores, book festivals, and craft shows to sell and sign copies, in person, with real book-buying customers.
Meanwhile, I was working on my next book, a coming-of-age story called Izzy Strikes Gold!
And Then What Happened?
Besides direct sales at public events, we were selling Price of Passage on the internet through Amazon or the publisher’s own website. These sales generated royalty payments, which the publisher owed me on a quarterly basis. But in July 2023, less than a year after the book was published, the royalties ceased.
The publisher, Dan Willis, had died.
This was terrible news: First, because Dan had been a straight shooter in his dealings and a valued partner to me and other authors; second, because it turned out that nobody was up to the job of taking his place, and the DX Varos publishing company soon stopped functioning as a normal publishing company.
Not to bore you with sordid details, Gentle Reader, but Your New Favorite Writer barely managed to get his rights back. It was a close call.
So now it was back to Square One. I was the sole owner of a great literary property but needed a publishing partner to put it back into the market. I was up a creek with no means to propel my craft.
Kira to the Rescue
The hero of this story is Kira Henschel. Kira, who owns and operates HenschelHAUS Publishing of Milwaukee, heard about my plight from a guardian angel, Christine DeSmet. Kira met me over coffee and agreed on the spot to re-publish Price of Passage and also to publish the next book, Izzy Strikes Gold!
Because of logistics, Izzy came out first, in July 2024, from Kira’s Three Towers Press imprint, and it has been well received. Now, Price of Passage is being re-published, also by Three Towers. The release date is next Saturday, February 1. The book is already up on Amazon, where you can lodge a pre-order.
Huzzah! Huzzah!
It’s Always Something
If it isn’t one thing, Fair Reader, it’s another.
The book has a wonderful new cover, designed by Rony Dhar. It also has a slightly new title: The Price of Passage: From Norway to America, From Slavery to Freedom. It’s close to the old title—which would be wonderful if we were pitching horseshoes.
Only we’re not pitching horseshoes, we’re pitching a book. Because the title of the new edition is slightly different from the original title, Amazon won’t carry the book’s 28 positive customer reviews over to the buying page for the new edition. This is a major hindrance, since Amazon customer reviews in the listing greatly influence the buying decisions of new customers.
We need to get new reviews for The Price of Passage, even though the entire content is exactly the same book that already garnered 28 good reviews.
“How Can I Help?”
This one’s kaput.
If you’ve never read the book, Dear Reader, you don’t know what you’ve missed. And now it’s back on the market. Buy it; read it; and when you like it, post a positive review. It’s simple. Just go to The Price of Passage: From Norway to America, From Slavery to Freedom. Scroll way down the listing to where it says, on the left, “Write a Customer Review.” Click on that button and follow Amazon’s instructions.
You don’t have to write a book report. Just a sentence or two about why you liked it will suffice.
Read this one instead.
If you’re one of those who have already read Price of Passage but have not yet left a review, please do so. You can honestly review it at the page shown above for the new edition, even though what you read was the old edition—because the books are the same, word for word. Only the title and cover have changed. But please do leave a review. You’ll be helping a lot.
Finally, if you already did read the book and already did leave a review, please go to the page shown above and leave a review again under the new edition. It can be a brand new review, or you can use the same words you did before. If you don’t remember what you wrote before, email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com, and I’ll send you the text of your previous review.
By the way: Reviews may be posted on or after February 1, 2025—a week from Saturday—but not before then.
The literary world embraces your willing, cooperative spirit. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart, you wonderful person.
You can be born in Amherst, live in Amherst, and die in Amherst. You can go to your grave unheralded.
And then some interfering busybody will publish your poems, and you’ll be famous. Even rich, though only in absentia because by that time, you’ll be . . . elsewhere.
Dear Reader, I am no Emily Dickinson. I find it necessary to promote my own writings while I am still here.
Not that it will make me famous or rich. But I would like somebody to read what I have written.
This is especially true of a little book called Izzy Strikes Gold!, published in July 2024. My second novel. The one nearest my heart.
If you wish to dismiss it, you may call it a middle-grade novel, because that means only pre-teen children should read it.
But here’s a news flash: I wrote it for everybody.
Izzy Mahler is a bright and inquisitive lad, age twelve, the class shrimp in a small Midwestern town. Not everything is going well in his life, but he’s accumulating friends—one by one, almost without being aware of it. And he has private knowledge of a hoard of shiny metal. That could be gold, and gold could help.
The story is set in the Sometimes-But-Not-Always Fabulous Fifties, which lends it a certain charm for those who remember the era, or a sense of wonder for those who have never been there. The kids who inhabit the Fifties are just like kids now—only in a gentler world.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a charming, sometimes sad, but always honest look at growing up in America, then or now.
It is what we used to call a coming-of-age story.
Did I mention it builds to a Christmastime climax?
This story is too good to be restricted to middle-schoolers. You can read it too.
Izzy Strikes Gold! is a book for anyone who was ever twelve years old, or ever will be. You can read it with your grandchildren.
Izzy Strikes Gold!, my middle-grade coming-of-age adventure set in the wilds of 1957, is already proving popular with readers ages 9-12 and with their parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Modesty prohibits my mentioning the fabulous review recently received from Diane Donovan, Senior Reviewer for the Midwest Book Review, but you can read it for yourself here.
Don’t miss out—get your copy now! If you savor the independent bookstore experience, wander into Mystery to Me, 1863 Monroe Street, Madison, Wis., or Literatus & Co., 401 E. Main, Watertown, Wis.—both of which have signed copies available. Or order it online and, if you’d like it signed, email me at larryfsommers@gmail.com, and we’ll get it done one way or another.
We now return to regularly scheduled programming:
Whither, Whence, or Howcome Peco Yeh?
If you’re a longtime reader of this blog, perhaps you will recall that in May 2019 I mentioned a lovely oil painting, a waterscape, that I had the good fortune to acquire more than fifty years ago, at a scandalously low price, directly from its source, Chinese painter Peco Yeh. In February 2023, I reposted the same piece, just as a remembrance.
My Peco Yeh painting.
Peco was a strange man—a sort of nebbish, to use a dated term—and I sometimes feel guilty about paying him so little for what is, in my eyes, a fine work of art. It’s too late to make amends, for Peco would be long since dead, but in a fine bit of poetic justice, this blog site has become—without conscious intention on my part—World Headquarters for the Retrospective Appreciation of Peco Yeh by Owners of His Scattered Canvases.
It came about in this way: In August 2023, six months after my repeat post displaying my Peco Yeh canvas, I got an email from Earline Dirks, who was in possession of a much different painting by Peco. Then Joshua Lowe of West Virginia chimed in with his own Peco canvas. And after several months’ silence, I heard from Jane Upchurch, who has a different work altogether.
Earline’s Peco Yeh painting.
Joshua’s Peco Yeh painting
Jane’s Peco Yeh painting.
Look up Peco Yeh, Dear Reader. I dare you. All you will find is a rather cryptic, 56-word thumbnail bio that bounces endlessly around the Internet, completely unattributed. It paints a rather romantic picture of the soft-spoken little man’s life and background, but who is to say whether it is true?
What is indisputable is that Peco lived—I met him in person and have heard from others who did also—and painted a number of canvases. The more of his paintings I see, the more I am struck by the variety of his works. In style, in manner, in subject matter, and in quality, they seem to be all over the map. One might even suspect the name “Peco Yeh” got attrributed to several different artists, but I don’t think so. I think he was simply interested in different approaches at different times and was, in general, an enigma.
A number of his paintings are available at online art sites. And for better or worse, I seem to be the repository of a fair number of images by, and stories about, Peco Yeh from private persons who own some of his works.
So it seems that duty calls. Far be it from me to shirk.
The Latest Report
A couple of weeks ago I heard from Michael Tomczyk, who said, “I was dating a Taiwanese girl in 1972 who was a friend of Peco Yeh. He had a small gallery where I met him several times and selected and purchased these 3 paintings which are I think are some of his best.”
Here are Michael’s paintings, so you can judge for yourself.
Michael also sent along the following poem, which he composed:
IN MEMORY OF PECO YEH
There once was an artist named Peco Yeh,
Who painted scenes in an extaordinary way;
He lived in Taipei and his art was well known,
He always painted using sepia tone.
The scenes he painted were classic Chinese;
When we view them today they put our spirits at ease.
–by Michael Tomczyk
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All I can say, as a sort of informal custodian of a Chinese artist’s memory, is, “Peco, where will you strike next?”
Thanks, Gentle Reader, for letting me get that off my chest.
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