I’m in Annapolis, MD this week, as I am every late October in recent years, attending the annual sail boat show.

I love Annapolis.

I am a creature of tall, shuttered, wood-clad houses, their narrow backyards lost in filtered gloom beneath leafy canopies, and twisting byways paved in red brick, crumpling over the roots of encroaching sycamores. The thicket of masts down the hill at the docks sways like a forest of striplings against a crisp, autumn sky. Giant pumpkins squat on street corners, nestled in a cornucopia worthy of some halcyon harvest festival — that first Thanksgiving, which as it turns out is a nineteenth-century construct, fashioned by a young country in search of a mythology.

In search of heritage.

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For anyone who loves the past, Annapolis is pure magic. It’s not quite my heritage, but still strums some deep chord in my memory. It’s the story we were given throughout my 1970s elementary education as we traced the contours of maple leaves with crayons, fashioned pilgrim hats with buckles from construction paper: a New England on the cusp of fall and a fleeting gesture of friendship between one people destined for annihilation and another who were to be the heralds, and agents, of that destruction. And though we didn’t talk about it as a fulcrum moment, I think I felt the poignancy of it even then, a whiff of sorrow lurking around the edges as I contemplated a vanished people, laying down arms to break bread with the strange race of white-faced newcomers who hunkered down, fearing the wilderness beyond their palisades.

We are not a nation steeped in millennia of lore and custom, rooted in our native soil. This is fact, no matter what fictions we cobble together to substantiate our claims. We are weeds, in all our chaotic beauty, taking root in someone else’s garden, tenacious, opportunistic. In the grand accounting of civilizational time, we Americans are wayfarers, importing the traditions of our ancestral homelands to a new place, only to see them crosspollinate with the native flora, with other wild breeds, to create something new. Diversity, then, must be our strength, must, in fact, be in the very DNA of the our national heritage, with all the dynamic, adaptable, hybrid-vigor of our mongrel breed.

I am reminded that some of us came to the new world against our will. The Museum of Historical Annapolis tells the story of enslaved Africans, sold from the decks of a thriving sea port. The story of race seems especially complex in this tobacco-producing state straddling north and south, which sided with the Union, but just barely. Since its founding, a third of the Annapolis population has been African American, a few of whom were already buying their freedom, owning property, founding churches, and leading communities as early as the revolution. It’s a proud but painful narrative, transformative, fraught with contradictions that are still unfolding today.

What do we think of a heritage that contains acts of both courage and atrocity? And when the voices that comprise a nation’s heritage are so varied, and so many, what do we make of that heritage as a whole?

_{Photo attribution: A black and white photo of three men in uniform, Great Depression, FSA/OWI Photograph, Library of Congress.}

My forbears came later, during the mid-to-late 1800s. My German ancestors, on both sides of the family tree, were well-rooted in Bavaria for centuries until hardship drove them seaward, but my Swedish, maternal great-great (and maybe another great?) grandfather headed first to Norway, in search of work to support the family he had left behind. My Irish, paternal great-grandfather was one of twelve siblings, some of whom suffered the kind of tragic, premature deaths that were common among the working class. Like many Americans, the motivating impulse of my heritage seems to have been largely born of hardship and necessity, perhaps more imperative than aspirational.

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Indiana is my homeland, at least dating from the late 1800s, except that it’s not because my parents left for the west when I was nine and have never really looked back. Most of my kin for the last hundred years have remained in the Indianapolis area, so perhaps my parents sprouted a new branch of the family tree in the fertile Willamette Valley of Oregon, and that gives me some sense of kinship with those who ventured westward in covered wagons. Our journey was made in a Honda Civic, the really tiny ones that didn’t survive the 70s, and although we suffered forms of privation, I’ve really no claim to kinship with those hardscrabble pioneers, except in being drawn by the mystique of the west — the wide-open spaces, the fluidity of norms that characterizes a transient population.

I wonder, then, what is our heritage as Americans? Is it like a quilt, a patchwork of traditions, norms, and sensibilities, imported from the myriad lands of our ancestors? Is it a canon of values forged by the act of pilgrimage itself? Is it a sense of identity encoded in our form of government, an ideal envisioned first as a “city on a hill,” then later as Lady Liberty’s torch, enshrined in a working constitution that has weathered a quarter of a millennia?

It’s a good question, and like all good questions, I hope it is never definitely answered, although perhaps this contradicts the idea of “heritage” as something fixed, something that can be passed down as easily as the family china. Can heritage be considered a living thing, an emergent tradition, capable of uniting without excluding? Perhaps, because of our youth as a nation, because of our continued evolution as a nation of immigrants, we are uniquely qualified to investigate this possibility, and to bear its standard into a world that is shrinking by the day, with all the crisis that entails. Messy as our country is, I’d like to think so.

What do you consider to be your heritage? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

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I wrote Arcana when my children were 5 and 7, which is a looooong time ago (my youngest turns 21 TODAY). After subbing it around to agents and getting very little interest, I wrote Vasilisa (which was the book that got me the agent) and decided Arcana was just a learning novel. I had rewritten my first book, Mab’s Gate, so many times, it had become my personal Groundhog’s Day. But by the time Arcana came along, I’d decided it’s easier to write something new than fix something old (which is kind of true).

So, reading the manuscript 16 years later was a revelation, and I’m excited to puzzle out what needs changing and what doesn’t (you can help me with that).

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Arcana is intended as Book One of the Keys of the Tarot trilogy. It’s set in an undifferentiated past (maybe mid-1960s), and opens in a small, fictitious town that’s vaguely modeled on Amity, Oregon. It’s my homage to Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, with a bit of Davinci Code thrown in.

The blurb: Three small town teens in mid-century America stumble through a portal in a carnival trailer into bygone chapters of history, only to discover they are reincarnated members of an ancient mystery sect who must decode clues hidden in the tarot if they are to defeat the Faustian designs of the dark stranger chasing them through time.

Packed a lot in that sentence, didn’t I!

Here’s the prologue — or a very short first chapter.

Something Wicked

The wind came first.

It came before the black, large-wheeled trucks and aging Studebakers, the trailers and converted buses, painted with fantastical scenes. The caravan skulked down Main Street in the cloud-swept darkness, fenders hunched like shoulders, headlights splitting clouds of radiator steam. But the wind came first. It spun the barber’s pole, toppled trash cans and bicycles, and set the jeweler’s dog to barking. Its call was like a jackal’s, high and wild, as it leapt from awning to awning, ripped fabric and scattered leaves – and all the while the caravan rolled behind it, patient and slow.

Inside, in the apartments above the diner and the barbershop, the drugstore and the grocery, the lawyer’s offices and a handful more darkened shops, people slept, troubled by dreams. But, as always, there were the few who could not sleep, those who had outgrown the town but had yet to leave it, and these now lingered before parted curtains, robes cinched tight against the chill.

The carnival had not come this way in many years.

The last trailer cleared the storm grate at the edge of town, but the wind and the caravan were only the beginning. Already, thunder clapped in the distant hills. Lightning shocked the leafless, autumnal trees. The wind, now savage, tore barn doors from rusted hinges and sent weathervanes spiraling up into an eerie black-green sky. Rain sheeted the trucks and trailers that had circled in Pearson’s fallow field. It drenched the canvas men who labored in the crisscross glow of headlights, hoisting poles and tightening ropes, pounding stakes and unrolling yard after yard of faded canvas. The Big Top rose; lights flickered on the Ferris Wheel, the midway, the side-show annex, then held a steady glow. One trailer stood apart, small and unremarkable, now lit in stark relief as the sky flashed white, but in the next flash – vanished as if it had never been.

The man left the carnival grounds alone. He carried no umbrella and walked erect, never swerving in his path, through ditches and over fences, past grain elevators and filbert orchards and back lawns where dogs howled, straining at the leash. He cut across the grange yard and then bent northward, out half a mile or more until he came to the old Benedictine monastery. Mounting the stair, he took out a hammer. One, two, three strokes, and then it was done, and the man turned back the way that he had come.

The carnival flyer strained and flapped against its five-penny nail, but no wind could tear it free. The monks slept on. But upstairs, in a small room above the calefactory, a boy heard the hammer blows and opened his eyes.

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As luck would have it, I went to a little traveling carnival just last week! The Flynn Creek Circus sets up every year in Avery Park, and we always go to the night show, which is very irreverent and features lots of people doing impossible things like it was no big deal. If you live on the west coast, it could be coming to a town near you!

I’m looking forward to getting back to ACTUAL NOVEL WRITING after a hiatus of (gulp) several years. Hope I remember how. I’d love to hear any thoughts on Arcana’s premise, style, whatever! You can comment or send me a message. And if the prologue meets with your approval, I’ll try sharing Chapter One soon.

_{Image attribution: Vincent van Gogh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons}

The analog value I’ve been focused on lately is resonance, maybe because I’m 57 and in that phase where the echoes of a life lived have started washing over me. We pass a juncture where what’s behind exceeds what’s ahead, and the physics change, driving us deeper into meaning, richness, and complexity.

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Every fall for the last three years, my kids have “gone away” — well, “kids” isn’t exactly right (they’re now almost 21 and 23) and it’s really only my youngest that comes back for the summer. But I’m still letting go, and it’s a process, not an event.

It’s not the same each fall, because with release comes new growth, or vice versa; they are two sides of the same hand. And this time, I experience the echo of not just the last three goodbyes, but all the other ones since they miraculously entered my life from the nothing beyond. Those partings all are there with a bittersweet resonance that I can hear today — the first step, the last breast feeding, friends, school, work, life. Each blossoming of growth is also a small death, the death of a before, and this death is necessary and beautiful in its own way.

The fall with its harvest and bounty, with its falling leaves, is the perfect metaphor for understanding how partings, these little deaths, are our constant companions, holding us as we contemplate the greater partings yet to come. Here’s what it felt like the first time I encountered this particular goodbye:

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It’s autumn and the leaves are changing. Weeding in the garden, I see a bank of clouds roll over Mary’s Peak, darker than the pervading gray. I run inside to get my raincoat and then keep weeding, pulling clumps of grass out by mud-clad roots, thistles, old lettuces, pepper plants now bare of their spicy fruit.

It’s autumn, a time for clearing out the old, making way for slumber, then reawakening.

Inside, it’s cozy. I’ve got the fire going with oak, which will burn all day. It’s cozy, but not entirely comforting because I’m missing my kids. Newly 18 and almost 20, they aren’t really kids anymore. They’ve both started college at the same time, a day apart, my eldest in Washington, my youngest, my baby, just an hour away in Eugene.

I’ve been preparing for this moment for nearly twenty years, but still, I find myself sideswiped. It’s the ordinary moments that do it. On my daughter’s first night away, knowing that she’s out exploring with friends, I find myself wondering when she’ll be home. Oh, that’s right, she won’t be home. This isn’t home anymore, not exactly. Not her forever home. Ordinarily, we would have texted about her “eta” as we call it, but now it’s up to her to get back to her dorm safely.

A deep wave of sadness hits me. Something is over, not going to be over, not someday, but now. The quality of the feeling surprises me, the whiff of darkness, as if an accident has occurred. Something has gone horribly wrong. Someone has died, but I don’t know who.

Of course, nothing is wrong. It’s only change, petals falling. Nothing stays in bloom forever.

I realize that I have loved being needed, which I knew, but did not know in quite this way. As always, it is the absence of something that delivers its substance. I’m still needed, of course, but if I’m to do my job right, I must now start to be needed less —and less and less progressively as new resources emerge in my fledged children’s lives.

I must do this work in earnest.

Of what use is it to fight the shortening of the days? If I don’t tear out those weeds, the old plants that have died, the ones that no longer bear fruit, where will the seedlings grow? There are new ways to be relevant, to be a part of things, ways that are in communion with the turning of the seasons. I can watch the weather, cultivate the ground, plant seeds for the next season’s growth.

Even as part of me is grieving, another part of me looks on and marvels. It’s not that all those years spent preparing for this day were for naught. I have a blessed life, a home I cherish, a loving husband. I have my writing, my garden, travel, too many dear friends to make time for. There is no empty nest, there is only my children, flying—or faltering, but finding their course.

And yet, when what you have loved sheds its form, it is a death, even if the love remains intact. And death always surprises. There was no end run around this experience, and once again, I am awestruck by how much larger life is than my limited understanding. This comes as a relief, almost a delight. Death, change, grief – they have shocked me out of my small world as only reality can. And that means that even death brings life, even grief sparks joy, for joy is free, never chained.

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If I were to cast this process in terms of analog and digital qualities, I would say that disruption is digital—discrete, discontinuous, 0s and 1s—while integration is analog, achieved by making connections, by reaching behind to the past even as we stretch forward to the future. Both disruption and integration are essential for growth. We can only integrate what has been broken. And if we never disrupt the status quo, that is itself a death.

In this instance, I like the cyclical metaphor better.

The seasons and I are in accord, and that is itself a comfort. As I give my now-grown children the freedom to make their own mistakes, to falter, to grow on whatever timeline their nature decrees, I am giving myself that freedom too. The mysteries run deep; the mysteries are roots, and we are their flower. As we allow them to strive deeper, into dark places we will never see, we move upwards, our striving toward the sun made possible by our probing of the depths.

So, I’ll bank the fire and head out for another go at the garden, even though the rain is still falling, knowing there will be plenty of time later to be safe and dry, knowing there’s a season for all things.

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I’m not sure if this post is about optimism or about hope. I’m not sure I even know the difference. And I certainly don’t know what these terms mean in a 21st century context.

Not knowing is a good place to start. I might end up there too.

I’ll tackle hope first. Webster says: “to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment.” So, there’s no hoping without wanting some outcome, but there’s this other element too — the belief that it’s obtainable. When we hope, as opposed to despair, we are oriented in favor of fulfillment.

How much do we need to expect our favored outcome? I’m thinking it doesn’t take a lot to tip the balance. Hope is an orientation to the future, an attitude. Let’s say that when we hope, we’re 51% bullish.

How about optimism? Webster says: “an inclination to put the most favorable construction upon actions and events or to anticipate the best possible outcome.” Maybe there’s an element of optimism implicit in hope, then, but on it’s own, it implies greater certainty. I can’t help but think of Voltaire’s Candide: “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

Voltaire was a satirist.

Indeed, optimism feels like a stretch in the face of Armageddon. I just looked up Armageddon too: “the site or time of a final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil.” Sounds about right.

And yet, destruction can be an agent of opportunity. Old systems break down, leaving a vacuum that could, hypothetically, be filled by new, more equitable systems. Perhaps a broken world is easier to fix.

We are litigating the arc of humanity itself, and the jury is still out. Will greed, narrow self-interest, tribalism, fear, and ignorance prevail? Or can the pressures of these times forge in us qualities that foster the preservation, not just of our own kind, but of this precious world we share with a staggering abundance of lifeforms.

It’s easy to despair. Each day, I open my laptop on a new crop of disasters. Rogue computers, climate catastrophe, authoritarianism, war, famine, recession, habitat destruction, ocean acidification — take your pick.

So what does hope, let alone optimism, mean in the face of the apocalypse-of-the-day? How do we walk that line between hope and willful ignorance, between realism and despair? How to be realistic but not fatalistic? To take meaningful action when meaning has all but broken down?

It’s the conversation we’re all having, one way or another. My husband and I are big fans of live theater, and recently I saw my first play in the legendary West End, which has something to say about the question at hand.

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Hadestown at London’s Lyric Theater

I could write a whole post about how good Hadestown was, and I still wouldn’t be able to do it justice. Let’s just say the play’s eight Tony Awards and the Grammy are well deserved. Clive Rowe in the role of Hermes was phenomenal, as was Rachel Adedeji as Persephone and Alastair Parker as Hades. But to single them out would be to slight the rest of the extraordinary cast.

It’s the old, Greek story of Orpheus and Eurydice, reimagined against the backdrop of a mining town that could as easily be in the coal fields of England as Appalachia. The play hits all the modern marks, from weather gone mad to corporate greed to irrational consumption. It is both classic and astonishingly timely.

Most of us know how the original myth goes. Orpheus goes down to the underworld to rescue his love, Eurydice. Orpheus is blessed with the gift of song, and he sings one for Hades that is so true, so real that even the lord of the underworld is undone. Returned to love. Returned to himself.

This is what a true song can do.

So, Orpheus sings his way out of hell, only to suffer a crisis of faith of the cusp of freedom. Hades has imposed one condition on their safe passage — Orpheus must never look back to see whether Eurydice is following. All through the long, black hours, he must trust that Hades has kept his word. And truly, what does he have to lose? If he looks back to test Hades’ good faith — she will be lost to him anyway. The facts are so inarguable, the way so clearly defined, it stretches credulity that Orpheus will fail.

And yet, he does.

And it is credible because — look at us. When faced with clear evidence of self-destruction, we simply aren’t capable of making rational decisions. And not just en masse. I can’t seem to stop shopping at Amazon. I can’t even remember to bring my reusable bags to the grocery store.

It’s also a story about faith, which by nature does not rest on verifiable premises. And how do we act in the face of the unknowable? To what do we adhere? It’s a story of obedience, of Adam and Eve in the garden and that one damn apple. It spans cultures and traditions, and in many respects it’s the first story, and seems to go right to the heart of the tragic, flawed, idiotic beauty of being human.

So, we know what’s coming.

Don’t ask why, brother, don’t ask how
He could have come so close
The song was written long ago

Resonance is one of my favorite analog values. Resonance amplifies, enriches and intensifies an existing tone by adding vibrations. It requires an original backdrop to achieve new expression. I like to think it’s why music played on vinyl will always sound warmer, deeper, and more alive than that played on a compact disc.

We know that Orpheus will look back, literally seconds before he enters the light at the end of the tunnel, and this resonance has me squirming in my seat, hoping the play will depart from the tale, but knowing it cannot. What tale will it tell then? How will this spectacular betrayal of hope be framed? And in the aftermath of categorical defeat, what will be said.

It’s a sad song
But we sing it anyway
‘Cause here’s the thing
To know how it ends
And still begin to sing it again
As if it might turn out this time
I learned that from a friend of mine

Those are the words, but what do they mean? That human beings are divorced from reality, hopelessly doomed to act out past failures, incapable of devising new endings for old, self-defeating tales? Maybe. But I think the actual message is more fundamental, and more subtle. And I think it’s something along these lines:

The human spirit is not dependent upon outcomes.

We try again, even knowing how it turned out, how it turns out. We will be trying right up to the end, if there is one.

The human spirit is not dependent on outcomes. The statement itself is ambiguous. It does not promise that we are capable of transcending our worst impulses. Perhaps we are doomed like Orpheus to annihilate what we cherish most through a failure of reason, faith, and action.

It does tell us something structural about the spirit animating our humanity, though. This spirit is not determined by the world of living and dying, of creating great art and perpetrating atrocities, of smiling at babies, and taking one’s own life. Our animating spirit contains all these complexities and contradictions, and yet is not defined by them. It is contextual. It adheres to itself.

It tells us about our essential nature, even if it doesn’t give false assurances about the future. Karma unfolds in a mysterious dance. Past conditions create future outcomes. Our actions have consequences, and to believe otherwise is magical thinking. Our collective future will be absolutely consistent with our collective actions. The onus remains on us.

And yet, there is something real here, something to validate and rely upon. We extricate ourselves from the wreckage of past failures, spectacular in their carnage and scope, and once again, we raise our voice. What tale will we sing? What tale will I sing, even when I know how the last song ended?

Yes, we are Orpheus. We fall prey to fear and doubt, and this causes us to act irrationally. But the tale begins again —and again, and again. What are we if not a tale unfolding? We are both the singer and the sung, and we can no more help this than we can help drawing breath.

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How does this help us? I consider it to be a call back to the present moment, which is the only time in which we actually exist. Past, present, and future conditions are constantly in motion, and they have their own physics. But the quality of the present moment, like the human spirit, is not dependent upon circumstance.

When we fall prey, like Orpheus, to doubts and fears about what we will find at the end of our long, dark sojourn, it is good to remember that these are phantoms of our minds that will lead us astray. If Orpheus loses his one, true love, what do we lose when we fail to experience the treasures we possess for fear of what may one day come to pass? To cherish this moment in its fullness is not the same as hiding one’s head in the sand. It doesn’t insulate us from accountability. It’s an exercise in discrimination.

It is also a call to own our song. We cannot help but sing our lives, even if they’re tales of death and failure and woe. But each day, we begin a new song. And that song is the story, not of the future, but of the present moment, where we live. If you look, if you pay attention, you will see that this is true.

We sing in the face of cruelty and greed and hatred. We sing even though we don’t know how the song ends. Like beads on a string, if we attend to the song of each day, who knows what world might emerge from the tangled chords? It will surely be a different world than that which is forged from fear and avarice and doubt. And at the very least, our moments will have passed in the light, and our songs will have been of our own choosing.

So, hey, if someone accuses you of being a Pollyanna just because you have the temerity to hope, you’re in good company. My response would be — why not?

Is this a way to think of optimism, then, as a song sung for the moment you’re in? The 21st century can feel like the harbinger of unprecedented times, and it is. But it’s also an old, old song. And somehow, weirdly, that brings me comfort. We stand, shoulder through shoulder through the ages, singing our idiot song. But the singing itself has its own nature and reality, quite apart from the song. Perhaps it will all be snatched away, right at the end, just when we think we’re through the worst. One bad choice too many, and the whole thing goes.

But who knows — maybe, if we keep attending to the song, moment by moment, some day, we’ll get the ending right.

_{Photo attributions: orpheus and eurydice a painting by edward poynter, public domain; photo gallery, https://thelyrictheatre.co.uk/tickets/hadestown/}

The following post is a reprint from my previous blog, Positively Flummoxed (and yes, that’s another Hobbit reference). Just how have our technological revolutions marked shifts in our conception of society, humanity and reality itself? Here are my thoughts:

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First, me

I was born in 1969.

On July 20th, when I am eight days old, Neil Armstrong becomes the first human being to set foot on the moon. He manually pilots the Eagle past strewn boulders, amid the sounding of alarms, to land in the Sea of Tranquility with 30 seconds worth of fuel to spare. 240 thousand miles away, his voice reaches through the television sets of half a billion people, including ours, to proclaim: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

I was born straddling two worlds.

I have heard it said that context is decisive. I take this to mean that all our impressions of reality — the world we see and touch, the thoughts that occupy our minds, the feelings that swell our hearts — do not exist absolutely, in and of themselves. They are manifestations of deeper premises. It is not just that context is the lens through which we see the world, nor that context shapes content, but that together they form a discrete whole. They are, quite literally, one. It follows, then, that all creation happens not at the level of content, through a change of circumstance, but perceptually, through the shifting of context.

Armstrong later said, of seeing the earth from space, “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

He had experienced a shift in context.

The Western Civ class some of us slept through

I am not the first person to observe that technological revolutions transform our perceptions of reality, our values, and our understanding of what it is to be human. Consider, in admittedly broad strokes, the evolution of Western civilization.

Feudal, agrarian societies experienced life as cyclical, like the seasons, and reality as immutable, fixed in a hierarchy between peasant and God. One did not rise above their station. Authority was conferred by one’s position in the hierarchy, which was codified in scripture and administered through the church and feudal state. Morality was quite literally written in stone, but its import could only be reached by resort to the hierarchy’s interpreters: the priests. The dominant metaphor was world as organism, in which each organ must fulfill its function for the whole to survive. Wealth was land; conquest was its agent; God was a king.

The industrial revolution introduced the idea of progress, of unlimited, directional, linear growth. The value of the natural world, and that of a human life, were reinterpreted in terms of their utilitarian value, as were the norms and morals of the time. The end justified the means; the exploitation of resources became an end in itself, and its own justification. The fixed, centralized hierarchy, validated by a universally accepted script, was replaced by a Darwinian hierarchy in which the winners were presumed to be the fittest. Predestination was reinterpreted as self-determination, and yet the rich still enjoyed the whiff of divine approval. Rationality usurped God; and the dominant metaphor was world as machine, hypothetically knowable, if one only had the blueprint. Wealth was capital; competition was its agent; reason was God.

And the digital age? No longer fixed, nor even linear, time and space proceed exponentially; shifts are immediate and tectonic. One image, one statement, may intersect with unknown variables to produce wholesale changes in the global mindset. Experience, divorced from both natural cycles and indeed physical reality, is mediated; one knows what one thinks, feels, and is through the process of packaging it for others. Form defines substance; the message is the meal. Gratification is instantaneous, stripped of both time and effort. The power structure is again subverted; authority is now conferred by influence. Self-determination is reinterpreted as self-invention. In this new game, perception trumps factual reality, and truth itself becomes irrelevant. Fame, be it notorious or meritorious, is its own accomplishment, stripped, like gratification, of its underpinnings. Knowledge is global; mystery, like God, is dead. The dominant metaphor is world as, not computer, but the computed. It is world as soundbite, world as meme. Wealth is display, influence its agent, and God is a new kind of machine, with digital, rather than analog, capacities.

A wide-open world in which everything is up for grabs, everything is at stake, and everything is possible, for better or for worse. May you live in interesting times.

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The fulcrum generation

My fellow Gen X-ers may feel this shift more keenly than any other generation. We passed our formative years in analog time, before the rise of the personal computer, came of age with the internet, and entered our productive years with the smart phone, navigating realities essentially foreign to our upbringing. We have more in common with the Boomers before us, yet share sympathies with the Millennials who came after, sensing our complicity in a disaster not quite of our making. We were latch-key kids, the fulcrum generation, and if we didn’t believe in anything, it was because we sensed the old world had died, but the new one had not yet been born.

My heart still lives in the old world, even while my imagination is captured by the new. Perhaps that’s why I feel compelled to dig its treasures out of the trash bin and hold them up to the light, share them with others, chase people down the street and force them to look up from their phones. I sense there is something important to remember, even if I cannot remember quite what it is. We articulate in order to know; we share in order to have. And if I go searching for the spirit of the analog age, perhaps the search itself will be the finding. For context is decisive, or so I’ve been told.

Like Neil Armstrong, gazing at a world I’ve left behind, perhaps I will discover it for the first time.

Next time…

Hope you enjoyed this bit of food for thought. Next time I’ll share what I mean by analog and digital values, and then it’s back to unpacking observations and inquiries from my trip to Scotland.

I’m looking to grow my publication, so if you know someone else who might enjoy this post, please share it!

_{Photo attributions: From “Space Colony Art of the 1970s” NASA ID NUMBER; Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F079012-0030 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons}

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Going Away and Coming Home

Do you remember your first book?

This is a variant of that age-old question about your first love. For me, it was Little House in the Big Woods, followed by the entire Little House series. I was seven years old at the time, living in San Francisco during a time of upheaval for my itinerant family, and I can still recall the dawning of wonder and comfort, the epiphany that I could, at will, enter a new world – a place of adventure, but also one of refuge, set apart from all the vulnerability and change of my real life.

Was I going away or coming home as I stepped across the threshold of that house that Pa had built with his own hands? The answer, of course, is both.

Astonishingly, this new superpower was always within my reach. No matter where I went, or what difficulties awaited me – I could always enter a book. The covers of beloved ones were old friends, but others hinted at relationships I had yet to encounter. I would come home from the library and lay my armload of books out on the floor, trying to decide which to read first, each cover shimmering with possibility.

No adult can read quite like a child reads.

And yet, the whiff of magic endures. This paradoxical sense of going away and yet coming home is central to the fiction experience, no matter your age. All novels are “fantasies,” not just because they are “made up,” but also due to the peculiar quality of adventure and homecoming that the activity of entering a story evokes. But I think the genre of fantasy literature distills this quality into its purest form. Fantasy worlds are obviously (and sometimes lavishly) invented, and so often the plots involve quests and journeys and, at the end of it all, homecomings.

When Gandalf knocks at Bilbo’s door with his wizard’s staff, and the dwarves follow by twos and threes, casting shadows on the walls of his hobbit hole that are fraught with strangeness, we feel the call of the unknown, but we are also touched by a far more distant shadow, a longing for the homecoming that lies at the end of a journey not yet begun. And it is only in leaving the comfort of his hobbit hole that Bilbo can ever experience the poignancy of that beloved return. The journey itself is part of the homecoming.

Which makes me wonder – are we always simply journeying homeward?

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All Aboard

All this came to my mind when I spied the darling little Keith-Dufftown train depot, looking much as it must have back in its 19^th century heyday. We stood on the platform as the train shuddered into the station amid the cries of the conductor and the scream of the whistle. The line still runs on weekends, for tourists like us, and the conductor plays his part. But we know that we can never actually enter the past. We are – all of us – bounded in time and can no more extricate ourselves than we can stop the passage of time itself.

Nostalgia is the yearning to return to pasts both real and imagined, but this homecoming is impossible, and it is this that gives nostalgia an emotional resonance of longing, wistfulness, and thwarted love. Perhaps it is that quality which reminded me of the books of my youth, as much as the fairytale setting. Journeys of the imagination will always be just that – imaginary. And therefore, they will always be imbued with nostalgia.

Context and content arise together as an inextricable whole. We must go away in order to come home, and so how can we separate the journey from the homecoming? In a similar way, at the moment of our birth, our death arises as well. This too is a journey and a homecoming. The space between birth and death is marked by time, passing with all the appearance of a linear progression, day to day, year to year. Yet, in some sense, we are simply living out a drama that is already written, if not in its contours, at least in its conclusion. And this largely subconscious awareness of being bounded in time is fundamental to the human experience.

Nostalgia whispers of these mysteries to us from the deepest strata of our being, mirroring our essential nature. That’s why the longing cuts so deep.

There’s more to say here, for limitation is such a foundational, paradoxical, and as it turns out, bountiful subject, that it could fill a book (and maybe it will). Turning towards, investigating, and eventually embracing the structural limitations inherent in our nature and reality gives us access to, well, our nature and reality. It like that old joke about who’s buried in Grant’s tomb. Yet so often, we attempt to hide from that truth, both as individuals and as cultures – to thwart it, forestall it, or overcome it. These efforts are, of course, doomed to failure, but more importantly, they rob us of a complex sense of reunion with ourselves, and the power, resourcefulness, and peace of mind that such a reunion makes available.

I said I’d keep it (kind of) short, so I’ll leave you with nostalgia for today. We’re heading to London as I write this on another train – a modern one with all the conveniences. And in a few days we’ll be flying back to the states, to the place I call home, at least for the time being. But I’ll be unpacking the analog treasures of our trip to Scotland for the next few weeks, so stay tuned, and as always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Stone Houses

The post title is a quote from a fictitious William Wallace, compliments of the movie Braveheart, and I’m telling myself it’s connected to my subject matter here, but it’s possible that it just sounds cool. You decide.

I’m in the Scottish highlands with my family for two weeks, which feels a lot like my Oregon home. Maybe it’s the trees and green things, the friendliness of the people, or the lurking DNA of my Scottish ancestors. There is one big difference, though: stone houses.

I love stone houses.

Stepping inside a stone house is like stepping back in time. We’re staying in the stone Victorian pictured above, which is both homey and grand, not busy or fussy like an American Victorian (which I also love). I say it’s like stepping back in time, which is as close as one can get. Those of us who read historical fiction, fantasy, and other nostalgic literary genres, will feel my pain.

If I had a superpower, it would not be flying or mind-reading or being able to speak any language at will (although this is a close second). I would transport myself through time. Imagine it — you pick a spot, say on a sidewalk in Edinburgh, with the cars whizzing by on the wrong side of the road, but suddenly, it’s the 15th century, or the 6th century, or the iron age, or even Jurassic.

The only way this works is if one is impervious to harm, so maybe my superpower involves me being a sort of ghost, but I can walk around and explore, and be inside the moment, just as it was in days of yore. These were the books of my childhood: the magic of parting those fur coats at the back of the wardrobe and stepping into a snowy forest lit by a single lamppost, or picking up a coin on the sidewalk that transports you into Arthurian times. The lure of the past is deep, instinctive, and it can tell us a lot about what it is to be human.

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Analog Values

There has been an explosion of interest in analog practices and technologies in recent years, which is not at all surprising. With the world spiraling forth into the digital age, fueled by its own mysterious mechanisms, all of which seem to be out of our control, is it any wonder we long for the past?

I approach analog reality in a slightly different way. There is something foundational that shifts with each technological revolution. The way we experience the world and our humanity is invisibly and inextricably tied to how we manipulate the world. Maybe it has something to do with opposable thumbs. Fire changed us, farming changed us, machines changed us, and now even our conception of intelligence is proven to be malleable. The digital age comes with hidden cargo, a submerged, perfectly intact structure lurking below the visible part, that proverbial tip of the iceberg. Digital reality functions in a way that is fundamentally distinct from analog reality.

That is what interests me.

When we understand that difference, we know what to keep and what to discard — or more to the point, we know how analog values can anchor and enhance the disruptive and transformative power of the digital age. In the following posts, I’ll be talking about things like limitation, effort, resonance, physicality and even nostalgia.

If you’re coming to my work through my books, maybe you’re thinking this is not really your thing. I promise, I’ll continue to share content and opportunities from my novels — past, present and future. But if you like my books, there’s a good chance you’re already interested in analog values, in history, folklore and myth, in human relationships, and in thinking deeply on what’s possible in being human.

If you’re already interested in an analog lifestyle, I hope these conversations can enrich your experience and your practices. If you’re a digital enthusiast, I think you’ll find that I’m equally fascinated by the raw, exponential power of the digital age. And if you just like reading books — well, books are inherently analog, and there will be plenty of conversations about those too.

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What does this have to do with stone houses?

To travel is to encounter the past, especially in places like Europe where the hardscape still lingers in the form of stone houses and castle ruins, and the occasional decommissioned train depot. In the next few posts, I’ll be sharing some insights inspired by my surroundings, from the analog qualities of fantasy literature to the commercialization of nostalgia. I’ll examine the counter-intuitive tensions that connect effort and satisfaction, limitation and value, and even progress and deterioration.

I’m going to keep it short — if your inbox is anything like mine, it can take up your whole day. But I hope to deliver a little bit of value each time, and if I’m lucky, once in a while, I’ll make you see the world in a new way.

So, stay tuned, and if something I’ve touched on interests you, please tell me about it! Conversation is an analog value too.

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Starting over

Hello to all my old Mailchimp subscribers! I think I’m going to be very happy here on Substack, and I hope you’ll stick with me. And hello to all the new friends I hope to meet! I moved every year until I was ten, so I’m used to being the new kid on the block. That’s me in the picture above, dining at a little restaurant somewhere in the south of France last summer, and butchering the language between bites. I don’t know why I picked it exactly — if a picture is worth a thousand words, what exactly am I saying?

Which leads me to…

Who I am. I’ve been writing novels for 20 years, or rather, “learning my craft,” a euphemism with which most writers are familiar. I have found that the process of becoming a good writer consists mostly of being a bad writer for years on end. It requires a special kind of dissociation to do this. If you really knew how bad you were, would you continue, day after day, to pound those keys? If you’re a writer, the answer is yes, because you were too caught up in what you were writing to notice how bad it was, or too interested in how to make it better. And then one day, miraculously, it is, only now there’s a whole new mountain to climb.

Here’s the short version of my writing life. I started my first middle grade novel when I was pregnant with my son, who is now 22. I was already a writer of lawyerly briefs and unpublished literary short stories, and I decided I wanted to become the author of other unpublished things. So, over the following years, as my children grew before my eyes, so too did the amount of unpublished material in my computer database. I was a success! This, my friend, is the power of context.

Eventually, after much rending of the hair and gnashing of the teeth, I obtained a very good agent at a very good agency who had exceedingly good authors on her list. I am not ashamed to tell you that I cried, right there in the coffee shop, as we discussed representation and I saw, shimmering before me, my long career, punctuated discretely by prestigious awards and bestseller lists who would crow my virtues, shortly before they fell prey to the vicissitudes of the digital age.

But it was not to be. Mirages are fickle things. After shopping around two of my books to no avail, my agent decided she was not right for me. This may have been a euphemism too.

And then, disaster struck! I mean… more disaster! The pandemic was upon us. Do you remember? The zoom calls? The empty streets? The house littered with empty potato chip bags? And… the infamous pandemic project. My family and I installed a pond, built a deck, and played way too much Dominion. And having done all this, I did what anyone would do. I started my own author imprint, Starr Creek Press.

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Believe, a middle grade mash-up of my 70s/80s childhood, came out in 2020. It won the Eric Hoffer Book Award for Best Middle Reader, which (again) made me cry. Because it had been a long haul, you know? It also won the Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for Debut Books, and the Best Book Award for Children’s Literature from American BookFest. It’s been my best seller at about 15,000 copies. But I think what I may be most proud of is that I reduced a 32-year-old woman to tears at 1 a.m., somewhere in the U.K., someone I’ve never met but that somehow I had reached. And after years of writing for agents and editors, all very lovely people, mind you — how miraculous it was to reach across the world and make contact with a reader, and deep contact at that. Each reader is like that for me, the fulfillment of the whole thing in one person. Each and every time.

But don’t get me wrong. I’d like to reach more people. Isn’t that why we write?

In 2021, I published Vasilisa, featuring the fantastic witch Baba Yaga, and in 2022, the sequel, Elena the Brave, which is based on the byliny, oral ballads of an idealized 10th century Kievan Rus. Both of these were BookLife Prize Semifinalists, and Elena also won the Writer’s Digest Best Self-Pub YA and nabbed a Kirkus star and write-up in their magazine. This too felt good after years of faceless toil. But even as I released Elena, Russian troops were invading Ukraine — literally, boots on the ground during my release week. And the planned sequels became more complicated for me. I know I will return to it some day — there’s still The Alatyr Stone to be written, and maybe the prequel, Pushkin’s Ring. Ahem, I think I still have some fans of this series out there? Yes? No? Maybe?

Lastly, in 2023, I released The Starlet Letter, a tongue-in-cheek mystery featuring twin 18-year-old female sleuths in 1930’s New York City. They belong to this eccentric, black-sheep Knickerbocker family who has taken in boarders to make ends meet. It pays homage in equal part to Nathanial Hawthorne and Wes Anderson. I hope you’ll read it because I’ve had a hard time getting eyes on this one, even though it was shortlisted for some awards, and it’s really funny, if I do say so myself. I’ve tabled the rest of the Canary House Mysteries until I can develop a readership for the series. So… um… if you read The Starlet Letter… um, let me know.

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Now what?

I’m excited to be part of the Substack community. I expect to post once a week or so, and I’ll be exploring the work of others on Substack as well, so if what I’ve said here resonates with you, please reach out. I write a blog about analog values in the digital age entitled Positively Flummoxed, and I’ll be sharing some of those essays here, along with musings about my writing life, my characters and worlds, and whatever else has captured my fancy, with plenty of opportunities to be involved if you’d like to be a beta reader, comment on prospective cover art, or just talk.

I’m working on a new book, Arcana, and I look forward to sharing chapters as I revise. Here’s the pitch: Three small town teens in mid-century America stumble through a portal in a carnival trailer into bygone chapters of history, only to discover they are reincarnated initiates of an ancient mystery sect who must decode clues hidden in the tarot if they are escape the dark stranger chasing them through time — and protect the balance of good and evil in the world. Think Something Wicked This Way Comes meets The DaVinci Code.

If you’ve gone this far, thank you for reading! I’ll check in next week… from Scotland!