Paul

Paul

When I was ten I had two ambitions.

I wanted to play shortstop for the Chicago Cubs, following in the footsteps of my then and forevermore hero, two-time National League MVP Ernie Banks.

And I wanted to be a novelist.

I only played baseball through high school (I did practice for a couple of days with my college team before I decided to play soccer instead) but over a recent fifteen year period I’ve written four novels, had three published, and I’ve written a book on creativity as well.

So I guess I’m hitting .500…not altogether shabby?

The unpublished novel was written to complete The River of Lakes trilogy; ‘The 53^rd Parallel’ and ‘Worlds Between’, the first two books, are stories inspired by my time working on the English River in NW Ontario wilderness as a teenage fishing guide in the mid to late 60’s. The river is the site of the worst mercury poisoning event in North America, discovered in 1970 when the indigenous Ojibway began showing frightening symptoms. It’s a tragedy for the Ojibway of Grassy Narrows and White Dog to this day.

These were stories I wanted to tell, that I had to tell—I lost the first two completed manuscripts, totally lost them, and so I wrote them again—and am proud to have shared these stories and am pleased with their reception.

My unpublished novel was rejected by the publisher about two years ago, just as I was finishing up ‘Becoming a Creative Genius (again)’. And I haven’t been able to write since.

That’s not fully accurate, because I have spent a good bit of time writing. I immediately set to work revising the rejected novel but after a month I lost the narrative and became confused about where to find it; each time I revisited it my confusion only grew so I decided to leave it alone for awhile. It’s become quite awhile.

I play around with ‘For Grandkids and their Dogs’, a collection of adventure stories about the dogs I’ve cared for since I was a boy—like when Gracie saved Sassy’s life—and I have lots of fun for a day or two working on it but then I don’t revisit it for weeks.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time outlining two more creativity books—one for entrepreneurs and one exploring how we can apply the creative forces and strategies found in the natural world—and I have been writing and re-writing something of a political philosophy designed to discover and describe a productive common ground, one as attractive for those on the left as those on the right, as useful for those who have as it is for those who have not yet, and that just might support us creating some sort of sustainable abundance.

And I have fun with an overview for a time travel cable television series based on Fibonacci patterns ruling the universe but….

….but after fifteen years of writing at least five days a week for hours at a time I’ve lost the focused and driving force that carried me and my books to completion (two of them completed twice).

Lately I’ve been thinking that what’s going on is that I do have something that I need to write but I’ve been looking away. I don’t want to see it. I’ve been avoiding it because I’m afraid that what I need to write next must come from the collection of personal stories that I am cautious about sharing with strangers and it’s frightening to think I would share them with friends.

But since great artistic work is often deeply intimate—Life will be sweet like a rhapsody when I paint my masterpiece—I’ve decided it is time to discover which of these stories to share with you, and how much fictional fabric need be woven in my telling of them to protect the innocent.

So here’s a first very short sketch, something I wrote all of a sudden sitting under a poplar by the side of New Hope Creek a couple of months ago. When working on my novels I obsessively re-write but this is as it came, each sentence finishing itself and surprising me time and again.

And it’s as true as I can make it.

It’s titled ‘Paul’.

“Parents are well served, or at least I was, by the biological fact that a baby born dead has no warmth of his own. Though he spent nine months growing in his mother’s womb, alive and by all appearances thriving, only to die just hours before he would emerge fully formed and lovely to behold, the child is not just lifeless but stone cold dead and sooner than later the parent realizes what a blessing that is, so there is no room for the last false hope that holding a warm baby’s body would demand. A parent is well served by this cold brutality, I think. 30 years later I know I was.”

Now I confess, I did make one change…“this brutal fact” is what I first wrote.

It seems a die is cast in the posting of this sketch, though I am uncertain to what end.