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A Few More Inches, One Less Head

March 25, 2011 in Blogger Columnist with 3 Comments

In the five years he served as a halfway house minister, Colin McKay Miller met hundreds of men and women in the criminal justice system. These are their stories. (Cue that “Law and Order” bom-bom noise.)

Xavier almost got his head cut off.

This is not like in the movies, where some eternal man (who has survived centuries, but not the update from Victorian fashion), wielding an ancient sword worth more than your house, cuts his opponent’s head clean off, and then stands in some ridiculous pose as a city block explodes around him with low-budget electrical currents and the awesome power of 80s-era Queen shooting throughout his body. No, Xavier was a drug runner cruising through the wrong part of town. Upon spotting him sitting at a red light, a rival gang yanked open his driver- and passenger-side doors, started swinging their switchblades with as much leverage as an open car door could give them, and Xavier, strapped down by his safety belt, had little mobility to block or avoid the incoming blows. The defensive wounds on his hands kept getting deeper; the light in front of him stayed red, and stream of traffic in front of him stayed steady. Xavier was frantic, pushing his assailants off the best he could. Kept his head thrashing, too, even as the blades tugged across his neck and bashed into his skull. Finally, a gap appeared in the traffic, and Xavier left the gangbangers rolling along the asphalt.

I hear Xavier’s story the way I hear most stories like this—at the halfway house where I teach a Bible study on Thursday nights. I’ve been coming for more than four years now. Seen hundreds of people, most of them more than once. (That’s recidivism for you.) A halfway house is little more than a pit stop. For most, jail pulled them off to the side of the track and this is their last checkpoint before getting out. How they get tuned up is where I come in. I have a lesson planned every week, but if a guy wants to talk, I let him talk. Some want to do this front of everyone; others want to hang back until the room clears out.

Xavier doesn’t care who hears him. Laid up in that hospital bed, the doctors reconstructed his face. Strange thing is, though, you can hardly tell. At 50, the lines etched into his skin could be age. You’d think maybe there’s a funny story attached to those faded scars, those souvenirs of where he’s been and what not to do again, but certainly not that some gangbanger plunged a blade two inches into his flesh.

Still, Xavier’s recovered appearance is not the part that amazes me most. You know those guys who dress up and spin signs at the side of the road?  Xavier, former tough guy that he is (even if he is always in shorts and fuzzy sandals), now dresses up as Lady Liberty for a tax refund place. In a few months, he’ll be living with his elderly father and will have a parole officer nose-deep in everything he does, but Xavier is joyful, full of the belief that God has good plans for him and that there is hope for him yet; because one of those violent swings could have severed his jugular; because he could have hit the gas only to be T-boned and pinballed by oncoming traffic; because after a few more slashes, you could have tapped just above his eyebrows and his head would have rolled right back, hanging on only by the skin and muscle at the back of his neck.

The list of ‘what if’ always has one more entry.

I know the Fight Club mantras of ‘You are not your job, you are not the contents of your wallet,’ at least on a head level, but it’s not until I meet men like Xavier who push that ideal out with far more hope that Tyler Durden ever could have Project Mayhemed into existence that it drops into my heart a little more. This makes me forget about the odds when Xavier says he is excited for the life to come outside of the halfway house. This makes me hope along with him.

I’d like to touch the dents in his skull, run my fingers along the scar across his throat, just to feel the work that God has done, but some intimacies are enough as they are.

Xavier doesn’t see me looking at his neck. I find it interesting that he can’t see the work that God has done—not from inside his head, not without a mirror—and I wonder what people want to touch in my life, even if there is no scar, no physical proof. I can’t always see God’s work in me, but I know it’s there, fading my history, lighting up my future, and that, as with Xavier and everyone else, there is hope for me yet.

***

Colin McKay Miller served as a halfway house minister for five years. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Colored Chalk and Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he now lives in Colorado with his wife and daughter.

Diner Recommends: José Saramago’s Blindness

March 22, 2011 in Blogger Columnist with 1 Comment

José Saramago’s Blindness is now a movie stirring controversy for its portrayal of the blind. Immediately I found myself thinking, Didn’t they ever read the book? It has been out for more than a decade… But then I remember that unless it’s children’s or young adult literature, people really aren’t coming after books anymore. You need to know something exists to take offense to it. So what’s all the hoopla about?

The novel is about blindness, yes, a white blindness that spreads through the city from a single man. Soon the group is quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum, guarded by armed soldiers who will shoot them if they try to escape. No one has any names. They are referred to simply as the doctor, the doctor’s wife, the girl with dark glasses, etc. Thing is, the doctor’s wife can see (but has to pretend she cannot to stay with her husband). Soon though, she’ll wish she couldn’t see at all.

The soldiers are antipathetic to the quarantined. They do not care about the filthy conditions, how the blind stumble over one another in pain, or how the group splits with one side stealing all the food. Though they are blind, the group still rapes and abuses. Is this an indictment of the blind as critics of the movie believe? No, it’s an indictment of the dark side of humanity. That’s what Saramago does best. Further readings of his work only drive this point home more.

Blindness is a bleak novel, but the injustice and wretchedness of the situation is successfully conveyed from the page to the reader, even when they wish it wouldn’t be. One more caveat when it comes to Saramago: There are no dialogue tags (though this style makes a point that if the dialogue is good enough, it doesn’t matter who’s saying it) and commas replace standard periods, so sentences run on for pages. When it comes to Blindness, this style adds to the story, but it certainly takes more effort on the part of the reader. (Be sure to avoid The Double; Saramago’s style fails in that effort.) Still, as a whole, the pieces of a fascinating premise met with skillful storytelling lead Blindness to be worthy of the awards and praise (and now unfortunate criticism) it has received.

***

Colin McKay Miller served as a halfway house minister for five years. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in numerous publications, including Colored Chalk and Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, he now lives in Colorado with his wife and daughter.

There Was a Man…There Was a Lady…There Was a Dragon Lord…

March 21, 2011 in Blogger Columnist with 0 Comments

Matthew Quinn Martin

Matthew Quinn Martin talks Toto and Tradition

Recently, in no small part thanks to my writing partner and fellow Diner editor Libby Cudmore, I’ve become obsessed with vinyl records. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how I managed all these years without them…I almost feel like the music I’ve been listening to up until now has been nothing but a grainy photocopy of the real thing.

Now, while the joys of vinyl are legion––better sound quality, richer listening experience, more interesting cover art, the ability to buy an entire album for the cost of a single download––for me, the best part is hunting for used records. Of course, one can find just about anything on ebay, but the real fun is in digging through endless musty stacks at the Salvation Army, or picking through street vinyl to find a real gem.

Better watch yourself...St. George is on his way

Toto’s Hydra is just such a gem. For some reason I’ve never been able to pin down, in high school my friends and I were huge Toto fans. We’d drive around in my friend Chip’s Dodge Colt just blasting “Africa” as loudly as the single dashboard speaker would go, all singing off key the lyrics that still make no sense to me.

Just check out Hydra’s titular track––the one whose lyrics inspired the heading of this blog post. It’s a surreal tale that, had it been put in prose, might have become a slipstream darling.However, it’s the second song of the album, “St. George and the Dragon.” That really grabbed my attention.

People have asked (especially people who are unfamiliar with The Diner) just what the heck kind of stuff we’re looking for. Well, for my part, I’d like to see something that gives me the same feeling I get when I hear that song. You really should listen…but here’s some of the lyrics:

For our younger readers...THIS is a Dodge Colt

Can you tell me where I might find the Hydra?
Is he wearing a familiar face?
Does he still live below Seventh Avenue
With the princess dipped in lace?

Does he know that I’m a soldier of fortune
And not a victim of circumstance?
We drew lots for his soft underbelly.
Now his fate is sealed with my lance.

The church in the working class ghetto where I grew up was what one would politely refer to as “old school Catholic.” Not quite Inquisition-era, but, being so far from genteel suburbs that the upwardly mobil had fled to in the ’60s and ’70s, it retained a certain rough-edged charm that even Vatican II was unable to whitewash. We didn’t have acoustic guitars like my friend Cody’s church in Milford did––we had a pipe organ and Gregorian chants. No stadium seating for us––straight-backed pews. And instead of puffy wall quilts embroidered with doves and rainbows festooning our vestibule, we had…the saints.

...for example...

Some were chipped and pitted. All were plaster. A lot were downright gruesome. Saints with arrows sticking out of them. Saints with their eyes torn out. Saints with leprosy. Saints with their heads and other body part splayed out on platters. Thinking back on it, it looked a bit like the set of a Rob Zombie video. Yes, they were terrifying to a small child like me, but also fascinating. And in a very real way, beautiful. I especially see that now. These decidedly non-abstract depictions of the heroes of our faith remind us that we are not alone here. That our shared experience forges a chain going all the way back to the upper room.

Heading into my second round as an editor at The Diner, I can tell you that I’ve read a lot of stories that invoke the Bible––directly, abstractly, literally, symbolically…you name it. But our rich Christian heritage and tradition encompasses so much more than just the Bible. G.K. Chesterton probably put is best, ”Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”

Neil Gaiman's "Four Motorcyclists of the Apocalypse" ...just for inspiration

I’m not saying everything I want to see needs to be about the Catholic (or even Orthodox) saints. But I would love to read more stuff that brings to bear the nineteen hundred and some odd years of Christian experience since St. John the Divine signed off at Patmos. There is so much material just waiting for the right author to mine. How about a Christian answer to the Da Vinci Code? Or a Gaiman-esque story about St. Francis in Central Park? Or a zombie story with voodoo set during Jim Crow? Or one where a Quaker family is attacked by murderous crows? Or…well you get the picture. I hereby challenge you to put some of that in my slush pile.

And, while we’re at it…

Can you tell me where I might find the Hydra?
Is he wearing a familiar face?
Does he still live below Seventh Avenue
In the slums of Satan’s grace?

• • •

Matthew Quinn Martin would like to be quirkier than he is…but alas he is allergic to fedoras and he lacks the spare time required to drag a plastic alligator around Greenwich Village by a piece of twine. He can be found at www.matthewquinnmartin.com

Blinded by the Light: Spotlight on Brian J. Hatcher’s “The Clockworks of Hell”

March 17, 2011 in Blogger Columnist with 0 Comments

Jeff Chapman

Jeff Chapman comments on Brian J. Hatcher’s “The Clockworks of Hell” and asks Brian a few questions about the story.

In “The Clockworks of Hell” (The Midnight Diner, Volume 3), the gift of a well-meaning parishioner proves a pastor’s undoing. Gary Waid is the new pastor at a small Baptist church. He is also a workaholic, prone to obsessiveness and perfectionism. As Waid’s father complains, “Now you’re a Christian and want to be a martyr. When will you realize your best is good enough?” (p. 33). While visiting Sister McCaughy, an ailing parishioner about to undergo a very dangerous surgery, Waid receives a gift from McCaughy, a gold pocket watch. McCaughy explains that her father made the watch in response to a sermon about “the number of lost souls who die every day” (p. 35).

“Papa called it his ‘Brimstone Timepiece’. Every tick represents a soul dying and going to Hell. Papa kept it with him until he died” (p. 36).

Waid initially refuses the gift but at McCaughy’s persistence agrees to keep the watch until she recovers from surgery.

The ticking awakens Waid at night and he has trouble sleeping. Afraid of losing it, he carries it with him and feels the vibrations in his pocket. The ticking is a constant reminder to Pastor Waid of the vast number of souls falling into Hell. Sleep becomes more and more difficult for him. He begins to feel responsible for each loss. Each tick adds to his burden of guilt for not doing enough to save those souls from eternal damnation. Like the protagonist from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Waid becomes ever more fixated on the relentless ticking. He loses all sense of perspective. He gets into a fight at a hospital when a son refuses to let Waid talk to his dying mother. He neglects his duties at the church, choosing instead to begin a street ministry.

I hate to give away the ending, but it’s essential to understand the story. Waid has a nervous breakdown in front of his congregation and is hospitalized. McCaughey recovers from her surgery and comes to the church one day to thank Pastor Waid for his prayers. Brother Roger, who has taken over Waid’s duties, tells her that Waid will be in hospital for some time and that he will likely give up the ministry. Roger returns the Brimstone Timepiece to McCaughey who insists that Waid should keep it for the comfort that it will provide. Roger is confused at her choice of the word “comfort” and cringes when she starts the watch ticking. McCaughey explains:

“Every tick says, God is still on His throne and evil is punished. What a comfort that is to know, don’t you agree? I listen, and with every tick I say, amen” (p. 46).

What is the proper response to the damnation of fellow sinners? Love or smug callousness? And if the answer is love, what is an individual like Waid to do, for certainly his mortal psyche is not big enough to absorb the world’s sorrow.

I asked Brian a few questions about “The Clockworks of Hell.”

JC: I hear echoes of Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart” in your story. Did Poe’s story inspire or influence “The Clockworks of Hell”?

BH: I think it would be nearly impossible, given his contributions to the creation of the weird tale, to completely escape Poe’s influence. And I’m not sure that I would want to. “The Tell-Tale Heart” might not have influenced me on a conscious level, but it undoubtedly influenced me on a subconscious one. The Hell Watch in my story is a metaphor for the heart of Pastor Waid’s problems, dredged up from the dark corners of his mind where he tried to hide them. Both he and the narrator in “A Tell-Tale Heart” are trying to paint a version of reality they’re more comfortable with, but reality comes crashing down on them. The parallels are certainly there.

JC: The son of the dying woman in the hospital is Mr. Beausoleil, French for beautiful sun. Did you intend the pun on sun and son?

BH: Anyone who knows me will tell you, “With Brian, all puns are intended.” I like putting little items like that in my stories for the reader to discover. Mr. Beausoleil’s name also subtly associates him with the Son of God. Whether he is a parallel for Jesus or a metaphor for the Antichrist, or perhaps both, that’s up to the reader to decide.

JC: The characters who express an opinion on religion tend to be Christians or confirmed atheists. Why no agnostics?

BH: I would say, in a sense, it is the reader who takes on the role of the agnostic. I tried to explore the extremes on both sides of the equation. It was not my intention to promote either Christianity or atheism. I wanted to demonstrate both the good and the bad in both views. I was very mindful of the representations of Christianity in “The Clockworks of Hell”. It would have been so easy to paint Christianity as the villain in this story, and I didn’t want to go that route. Both sides of the argument have their heroes and their villains. That’s part of what I wanted to explore in this story.

JC: The story hinges on the different interpretation that Sister McCaughey and Preacher Waid attach to the clock’s ticking. Please comment on their interpretations and the ramifications?

BH: The watch that brought terror and madness to Pastor Waid brought comfort and peace to Sister McCaughey. They believed the same truth, but both interpreted that truth in different ways. As much as we like to believe that truth, morality, and faith are black and white issues, they rarely fall that way. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see God or nature or the universe in a purely objective way. We all must approach our faith, or the lack thereof, through the filter of our own experience.

JC: What questions do you hope readers will take from “The Clockworks of Hell”?

BH: I think it’s enough if they are asking questions . There will always be questions, or at least there should be. As we grow and change through the course of our lives, our truths and beliefs must grow and change with us. What I believed at 20 has little value for me now at 40. I’m a different person. My needs are different. What’s important to me is different. It’s the same with everyone. A faith which cannot grow with us, we will invariably outgrow.

***

Jeff Chapman writes fairy tales, fantasy, and ghost stories and hearing the expression “just a fairy tale” rankles him. His works have appeared in Golden Visions Magazine, The Midnight Diner, Mindflights, and Residential Aliens. He lives with his wife and children in a house with more books than bookshelf space. To learn more, stop by his blog at http://jeffchapmanwriter.blogspot.com/.

Blinded by the Light: Spotlight on Eric Ortlund’s “A Thousand Flowers”

March 10, 2011 in Blogger Columnist with 1 Comment

Jeff Chapman

Jeff Chapman comments on Eric Ortland’s “A Thousand Flowers” and asks Eric a few questions about the story.

I’m not a fan of stories about zombies, those creatures that go around mindlessly eating any flesh that comes within their reach, so I plunged into Eric Ortlund’s “A Thousand Flowers” (The Midnight Diner, Volume 3) expecting to be grossed out. My stomach never turned. “A Thousand Flowers” is a different breed of zombie story. There is a bit of gore: a zombie chews off part of a man’s arm and the protagonist blows off part of a zombie’s head with a rifle, but Ortlund dishes the gore tastefully and, in the case of the zombie head, beautifully. Ortlund’s story is not about violence and running for your life but forgiveness, redemption, and the nature of our society.

“A Thousand Flowers” begins with the protagonist/narrator and his traveling companion speeding along a road in the prairies of south central Canada or the north central United States. The zombies have already taken over and the towns the pair come to are all deserted. Other than the search for supplies, the pair have no destination. The protagonist finds his companion annoying and pathetic. He assumes the man would not survive without his guidance and he has no other friends available so he tolerates him. The companion tells a story about seeing a field of sunflowers with all their heads tracking the sun. The narrator associates the sunflowers with the zombies whose faces are round and edged with tentacles like starfish. Their mouths are also round, lined with bony teeth and four tongues. Ortlund repeatedly employs sea imagery in his landlocked setting. The narrator associates the zombies with starfish, describes fluid spurting “from the coral of the cartilage making up [a zombie’s] face” (p. 10), and talks of “yellow fields swarming around the barn like sharks surrounding the last survivor from a ship” (p. 12). The zombies and sea imagery seem out of place on the prairies, or is Ortlund suggesting that the narrator is out of place, a remnant from a civilization whose time has passed. The narrator notes that the zombies follow paths that he cannot see and that they have destroyed all the road signs.

The protagonist’s annoyance with his “friend” reaches a head after a brief standoff with a zombie. The narrator strikes his companion in the face with the butt of a rifle. The next day, the zombie’s take the companion or does he join them.

“Yes,” he said, his face still broken. “Yes, you go now. Iss is right.” Then he pulled his arm away, the stump already writhing with things uglier than maggots.

I turned and ran (p. 12).

The protagonist wanders aimlessly then decides to follow one of the starfish zombies. When he arrives at their meeting place, he finds something wholly unexpected, ritual and transformation.

I asked Eric a few questions about “A Thousand Flowers.”

JC: What was the inspiration for this story?

EO: Randomly enough, I was moving through my day, half-thinking about zombies (not sure what that says about my psyche).  I found myself wondering what it might be like if zombies started to regain consciousness without losing their zombie “nature.”  After all, zombies can be pretty scary, but they’re also one-dimensional: they stagger and moan and eat and that’s it.  But what would it be like if a ravenous animated corpse started talking?  Then it occurred to me that that would be an awfully interesting parable about what St. Paul calls the law of sin and death.

JC: Why zombies? On what issues does writing about zombies give you insight?

EO: I find zombies uncanny and oddly revelatory because they are simultaneously unlike and like us.  What could be more different from me than a walking, hungry corpse?  On the other hand, any good zombie movie won’t waste much time collapsing the difference between the zombies and the remaining humans, who will act in increasingly selfish, ravenous, and thoughtless ways.  And noticing this dis/similarity raises, in turn, huge questions: what does it mean to be alive?  So my heart’s beating and the thing shuffling toward me is clinically dead: how much of a difference is that?  What does it mean to eat and consume in a non-zombie-ish way–in a way that is meaningful and (for lack of a better term) sacramental, instead of mindless and unsatisfying and endless?  What does community look like, outside of preying on each other?

The attraction (for me) to this kind of world is that it makes death palpable and ubiquitous, forcing the question of what it means to live (in some meaningful sense) in a world like that.  And I can’t help suspecting that, for all its dissimilarities, the world we live in is actually pretty similar.

JC: What sort of reaction do you hope readers will have to the story? Do you want it to make them uncomfortable?

EO: I’m not interested in gore or producing nausea in an audience. There’s plenty of other ways to be nauseated, if that’s what you want. I was aiming at a certain sort of atmosphere–I was hoping the hopeless and lostness of the normal world falling apart would come through.  And I was hoping the feeling of death would come through.  I tried to keep the details to a minimum, but I did want to create the feeling of death, its depth and totality, surrounding you–and not just for its own sake, but because, when we confront death, I think we’re very close to the secret of life.  As a Christian, I claim to be following someone whose most significant action was dying!  I remember C. S. Lewis saying that one of the things he loved in George MacDonald’s writing was the theme of Good Death–a death which liberates and transforms.  But it’s death, all the same, unmitigated in its horror and coldness and finality.  I wanted to evoke that as strongly as I could, and hint that death is the only way to (true) life.

JC: Please talk about the connection you make between sunflowers and starfish.

EO: Well, the experience described in the beginning about seeing an entire field of sunflowers, all looking at the sun, and being a little freaked out by it, actually happened to me, when my wife and I were driving through North Dakota.  The image always stayed with me, and wound up being useful in the story.  The starfish image is used only to be descriptive–just trying to make the monsters vivid without being too gross.  The connection between the two is mostly for convenience in description.

JC: What is the nature of the protagonist’s redemption at the story’s conclusion?

EO: That’s a good question.  The main character’s redemption–and that of his companion, as well, now that I think about it–is a re-adjustment to the world around him.  He gradually has every option cut off; the new, dead world is constricting him ever more tightly.  But through an unusual experience, he stops running and confronts what he sees, even though he still essentially has no options and will probably soon be dead.  But I think God often (always?) calls us to something literally impossible.  Again, the more the world of the story differs from the “normal” world, the more the two resemble each other–in my mind, at least.

***

Jeff Chapman writes fairy tales, fantasy, and ghost stories and hearing the expression “just a fairy tale” rankles him. His works have appeared in Golden Visions Magazine, The Midnight Diner, Mindflights, and Residential Aliens. He lives with his wife and children in a house with more books than bookshelf space. To learn more, stop by his blog at http://jeffchapmanwriter.blogspot.com/.

Writing Beyond You

November 30, 2010 in Blogger Columnist with 0 Comments

 

“It’s easy to have a hard life,” my Reverend said in his sermon last week.  “Just make it all about you.”  This isn’t just good advice for those of us prone to bemoaning our sad fates (I have so much grad school debt, I lost my job, my sister is annoying me, all the people I know in this town are idiots) but it’s also fabulous advice for writers.

Nothing is more transparent in fiction than a “me” story.  In the “me” story, the main character, a stand-in for the author, is utterly flawless and is wronged by everyone around him, who just don’t understand what a fragile perfect specimen of awesome he is.  The level of awesome can range from being a perfect lover betrayed by her boyfriend, an immortal half-fallen angel assassin with perfect aim, giant bat wings and a magic power which allows her to decide who is innocent and who is guilty, or the last man standing in a zombie battle because he is just so strong and manly. These are very common in undergraduate fiction classes and unfortunate in graduate level work. 

Tommy Weiseau’s film The Room is a perfect example (for those of you who haven’t seen it, DO NOT, I repeat DO NOT watch it without the downloadable Rifftrax commentary).  Written by, directed by, produced by, starring and most likely catered by Euro-weirdo Tommy Weiseau, the story revolves around Johnny, who, as every character likes to point out, has a very good job, is very stable and loves his cheating wife Lisa very much.  He buys her red dresses and roses, he fends off a drug dealer attacking his adopted son Denny, he is absolutely perfect.  Watching the film, you just know this is how he views himself, and that some woman somewhere along the line hurt him.  If this is true, The Room is no longer a tragedy (and an accidental comedy) but it is a story of revenge . . . just a poorly done one at that.

Writing about oneself—even thinly veiled as a barbarian with a leather loincloth and well-oiled pecs—makes not only the writing process difficult, but it makes the editing process near impossible.  The writer gets more defensive as usual because you are no longer critiquing the piece, you’re critiquing the person.  In a creative non-fiction class, no one would dare say, “The part where your dad died you wasn’t working for me . . . can you change it so that he recovers from cancer and takes you to the zoo instead?”  But in a fiction workshop (or as an editor) we say these things without knowing that the protagonist is actually the author, even if it is as clear as cheap cellophane.

We all tap into ourselves when writing.  It’s part of the process because we can only write what we ourselves understand.  If a writer has never known hunger or cold, how can they truly capture the experience of a homeless woman huddled in a church doorway?  We can put words down, words like “growling stomach” and “frostbite,” but those words will just be hollow, empty sentiments.

In “Preacher Man” (vol. 3) Derringer’s abandonment issues are not solely the product of my imagination.  But having learned from a long, painful series of “me” stories (some of which I cringe to think about) was to let a character stand on their own and not be an avatar for the writer.  I gave her traits—good and bad—I don’t come anywhere near possessing (her maternal instinct, for one).  I let her develop naturally, informed by my experience but not locked into it . . . because each character has her own experiences and his own story to tell.  It’s selfish not to let them tell it.

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