Notebook
Why these 2nd editions of all three books of my trilogy, The Real and
the Imagined? I seemed to have always understood I would do this, even while writing the 1st editions. Why? I don't know. Process? Evolution of a writer? Something like that. In 2014, when I returned to writing after a long break from it - decades, first spending time as a director, mostly commercials, which I loved, and then later as a producer, which I really did not love, I started exploring narrative fiction with the writing of my novel The Fiddler in the Night. It had been a screenplay - Urram Hill, my first, that I had written in my twenties when I began to explore merging my love of writing with filmmaking.
Queen Street West, Toronto, mid-eighties, a crazy, brilliant time and place that I am grateful to have been a part of. Fertile, and inspiring, Toronto coming of age in the arts. Who wasn't there? 2 a.m. at the Cameron House? Sunday afternoons at the Black Bull? Backstage at the Rivoli? Upstairs at the Senator? Stumbling happily, pretty much everywhere, and through everything, while discovering art, and ourselves along with it.
I was crewing on independent films, and had a pretty steady gig crewing at a commercial house, while on the side starting to make small films, and writing screenplays - adaptations of Canadian literature. I was so damn fortunate, I mean: Alistair MacLeod, Jack Hodgins, Leon Rooke, and Charles Foran. All extremely talented and successful authors that had agreed to work with me. I was in my twenties and really hadn't done that much, yet. But man, did I soak it up. Who wouldn't? I lived with Jack Hodgins and his family for a summer writing Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. - 5 p.m. Thank you, Jack. Thank you, Jack's family. And Alistair, Leon, and Charlie, thank you. The lessons I learned, although not fully realized, or understood, completely at that time, certainly are today. Structure. Discipline. The importance of trusting yourself. This world of words, they helped give that to me. And maybe that's why these 2nd editions are happening? That feeling of having not done enough - been enough, with what I was fortunate to have been granted. I don't know? That drive to be better. It's real.
It was a thirty-minute film I made based on Alistair's short story, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, that launched me into directing commercials, and ultimately, taking me away from writing. To the producer, John Karmazyn, thank you, too.
Working on the 2nd edition of the first book in the trilogy, Torrents of Our Time, was essentially just a question of tightening up a few of the stories, dropping one, and adding a new one. Pretty much the same is true with working on the second book of the trilogy, The Fiddler in the Night. I tightened up a few things. No big structural changes. But I do know they are better books for having done this. And that was the goal. This last book, however, was different. I originally wrote it in a flurry, in different locations, at the end of a journey that had brought me back to writing in 2014. Leaving Oakville in 2021 was the end of that journey. Of all three books, this third one, I probably shouldn't have released it when I did. And so here I am, after all of this time of never fully understanding what was there, dealing with it. Unlike the others, I will pull the first edition down and re-release the book with a new title: One Violent Day: LOVE, GUNS & GOD in America, and with a new ISBN. Am I trying to make the 1st edition disappear? Yes. Am I trying to move forward without acknowledging it? No. I understand process, and I understand the very nature of being human, and of failing, and trying again. Or, perhaps it's this: The books always knew I would be coming back to them to finish what I did not fully understand at the time I was writing them? Either way, it is all about this world of words - not me, and learning to make that enough. No matter what. As I hope it is for you, too.
Montreal Publishing Company has brought out a 2nd edition of my novel THE FIDDLER IN THE NIGHT. If you haven't read it, now is the time to discover why The US Review of Books called it "a work of art in word form."
I hope enjoy it, and consider leaving a review.
#tragic #lovestory
"At times THE FIDDLER IN THE NIGHT is a thriller reminiscent of the dark, intense work of Cormac McCarthy. At times it’s a coming-of-age tale, or a precise portrait of middle America. It manages to be all these things, while also telling an absorbing story. This is a cat-and-mouse tale set in grand, lonely landscapes and peopled with characters that feel achingly real."
- Neon Books, UK
some thoughts on writing
“And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns ... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale ... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.” - Bob Dylan
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” – Albert Camus. And from this we begin to write.
“Writing is always rooted in something beyond language, but develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating.” - Roland Barthes
"The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about." - Bob Dylan
“Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?” - James Joyce
"If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success." - Malcolm X
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” - Leo Tolstoy
"When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education." - Elif Batuman
“Life is too short to read a bad book.” - James Joyce
“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” - William Faulkner
“The days are stacked against what we think we are." Jim Harrison. And so, the less we think we know, the better situated we for writing fiction.
"The word is a flame burning in a dark glass." Sheila Watson
"Write dangerously. - James Joyce
"Imagination is everything.' - Albert Einstein
"Be writing." - William Faulkner
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” - Anais Nin
"Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too." - Jim Harrison
"The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art, and cinema." - Werner Herzog
Mine: “Great literature is written from the pulse of blood running through the veins of thought, and not by the meaning of it.”