FAQs?

Temptation is for a writer to talk about intentions, etc., which then get conflated with the work itself. I am firmly in the camp of read the book itself. I don't want to try to explain further or bias anyone who wants to make up their own mind. Thus the following will look like I have gone AWOL. Not exactly, and the reason is this. I have found this experience so interesting and so intellectually engaging that I want to talk about it, if only to myself. So this is more my internal dialogue without a mask. You need read no further, and I'm warning that if you do, read the book before proceeding.

Second warning. I am no intellectual, just interested and curious, engaged in the project. But I suspect my involvement with it will fade with time and all of this mere academiae.

Third warning. DO NOT READ MORE. It will ruin your experience of the thing itself.

Liberec, Czech Republic

31.10.14

The metafiction of it

David Foster Wallace is said to have thought: Conventional realistic fiction is the way it is, but this is not the case. It imposes an order and sense and ease of understanding that's never there in real life. The point is, A Puma in the Tree is just a counter-conventional example, although not nearly as good or clever as what David Foster Wallace and others have contributed.

The protagonist in Puma reports what he did while reintegrating himself. He moves, meets people, finds friends and companionship, reflects a bit on what he is doing, starts a relationship or two, he dies and a friend publishes the only story he wrote, so forth. The book thus ends a story of things that happened, or mostly or might have happened--remember, part of what Paul writes he says are his imaginings. 

A second reading, I propose, begins and ends with things that didn't happen, the imaginings, that is the whole book. Paul's lone reader and publisher adds at the very last this, which strongly points to questioning all that precedes.

I offer this minor critique, which amuses and redeems much for me as self-authorized publisher. We have an odd situation. Paul Eh-em writes a story and he is a character in his story. Because of a disassociative disorder, I suppose, he writes for the most part in the third person. He admits to fiction and fabrication while using the names of real people. Now and then he breaks the spell with a first-person disclosure. Weird. This lexical puzzle leaves a reader, I imagine, with work to perform. How much of the story is true and how much the product of license? Or is this story perhaps really a book about something else?

Under this chaos is a writer in search of a voice. First, it is Paul's voice, which then divides into the story he tells and an interior monologue, another story or voice. This whole is then wrapped in the voice of a so-called reader (authorized publisher, Russ), who is a character within the narratives themselves. This last voice asks what is true and what is not, leaving open the question of final authority--who can only be the author of record for the book as you have it. 

What then can be his--the author of the book you read--what can his view in these matters of appearances, reality, and imaginings be? Just that. The book is about appearances, reality, and imaginings in roughly linear story streams which together suffice as a statement of theme. The theme of first impressions not being complete or accurate is taken to the level of the whole work, its voices and all the characters. The lexical puzzle must resolve in a somewhat impressionistic, mono- and multi-chromatic medium like the images painted on canvass, or depicted in black and white and grays, or with evanescent words we can but hold onto and then let go. 

We are left with ambiguity, but one which points to alternative understandings and outcomes. As far as the story goes, we hope, I presume, all will end or proceed well. As far as what we have been given, it will continue to evidence an unraveling as we work out the bits, and hopefully the pleasing parts.

From Foreword through Afterword, we have the fabric of the above first reading, the story or book, if you will. That the foreword and afterword are written by a character in the story itself should raise a conventionalist's eyebrow, as would the question that the book may be about something else. 

The first matter that needs to be settled is whether the publisher is real or another character in a made-up story. It stands to reason that if someone is writing, that thing-written is for someone to read. If there is no audience, what is the point? Mere expression, we get that, but this book has been published twice--by Brian Russel Johnson and J. K. Mactavish. If the book comes out under the authorship of the latter, who is the former but a character in a fictional tale? There is no indication that he or Paul's story is biography or autobiography, and so all that is contained within is suspect. The one who brought out the book in, shall we say, consensual reality had a license to lie, and so he must have, right? Writers are liars and this one has tried to sustain a conceit.

In short, Paul, like other writers, needs a reader, or proofreader. J. K. supplies one for him and weaves that reader's story into the larger one that Paul supposedly tells. 

Among the key subjects talked about in the book are photography, painting, impersonal and personal subjects, getting an accurate fix on who people are and what happens, bringing something into existence in detail that wasn't there before--all of these point to presenting an image, and the primary vehicle for conveying that is writing, Paul's and Russ's. 

Russ is both amused and redeemed by the suggestion that a second reading is a possibility. And why wouldn't he be if he knows he is an imagined character?

To point out another example of the lie. Silla asks to be taken out of the story and Paul resolves to take care of this as soon as is convenient. He--writer--kills her in Chapter 15, half way through the book. Best way to take someone out, of an imaginative story that is. How is it that a character imagined can have a hold on how the imagined story is written? 

Consider multi-voiced reading as a book about a book, or about writing and process. I did. The success of the effort only you can judge. Thanks for taking the time . . . 

I am this or that! So there, world.

"Apple CEO Tim Cook's decision to tell the world he is gay feels a lot like his company's much-anticipated product launches: The public already knows the news before the event, but the event is momentous nonetheless." This from a news aggregator on 31 October, 2013. And yes, I suppose it does matter, if we can say that we are much interested in and anticipate declarations about identity despite foreknowledge or strong suspicions before declared and confirmed facts.

The attitude of Paul Eh-em and other characters in the novel is that they too are interested in the matters of their own, but not very much other people's, identities, but the novel presents and permits them to proceed with their paths toward that movable feast, individuation. If anything, the book doesn't make a big deal about it other than the fact that it happens incrementally over time, that is if we read Paul as exemplar. And the path of one may intersect with that of another, to wit Paul's and Johnnie's final or initiatory embrace.

Although the matter of novel as autobiographical or public stance on a matter it can be discussed ad nauseum. I have to say that my position in regard to revealing more about myself is made clear by Patta--I don't much care what genetic or other differences we have, the paths we take toward becoming is what interests me.

I guess if pressed I would have to say that Eh-em's arrest in development based on a fear of the consequences of real or imaginary encounter out of his comfort zone, well, it is what we do with who we think we are more than who we are that matters. And really, can one in a novel or not say who they are? I am black and all that that means. I am a hermaphrodite and all that that means. I rather like to feel and hear that I am me trapped within this body, this world or specific context in it, with or without this disability or whatever, "Hear me. Listen to me. I am just as you essentially." 

Okay, I am in a minority and may not have met my most daunting test yet. But consider this. Isn't the proclamation that I am this or that really an ego-centric appeal to please, or you must, know this about me? I would rather have or not have that information because of the light it sheds on what you are doing and why you are doing it. The emphasis is on these things rather than your claim to an individuality that is shared among a group you choose to identify with . . . therefore, not much individuality. The individual comes in the form of the singular and your actions with and for others. 

It's all about me.

As the book progressed and when it ended and still to this day I ask myself whether or not Paul or another character is actually me. The answer in process was who cares? I don't. Just keep writing as long as you have the steam. The answer at the end, committed to writing to be as clear as I could about the answer netted a no, no one in the book was me. I even concluded the project by writing in About the author that effectively these characters were/are fictional, although the things they dealt with were on the order of "universals." Now as I look back and the book is indeed out there in the arena, I can see closer ties between biography and fiction, but the fiction is so strong as to mask any details in my life. I say details. So I would say at this point that life experience including enhancements such as education and reading and consuming other media for the vicarious that I cannot afford as a finite being have all gone into the book. And can't that be said about all writing, that it is a product of everything and everywho the writer is? Isn't s/he always already the subject of whatever word they speak or artifact they produce? Rhetorical question.

So sure. This book is from me but not to be confused with a book as in about me.

SUPPLEMENT 23.01.15

How many degrees of separation between the story and the writer's biography? This is the question I have approached and re-approached over the months since I finished the manuscript in the summer of 2014.

The first answer was, after careful reflection, a great distance, no parallel, not in details but in "universal themes." This "insight" came from looking at the plot and events. I claimed and still claim there is no hidden or half-hidden personal experience that I have had that I took and incorporated in the story. (The one exception I have referred to earlier, and it is still a minor development in the life of Paul Eh-em. Although psychological analyses of the book might contradict this, something having to do with Paul's unconscious stuff, or guilt, re women.)

The second answer, the one that claims recognizable patterns of behavior and themes in personal and interpersonal relations, those seem now quite close to my biography. I didn't think so at the time while writing and just afterwards, but now feel those come out in relief given time and distance from the act of creating. But not in every case.

One mystery is all the gender-related stuff. This matter, recurrent throughout and touching almost every character, comes from nowhere I can pinpoint. It just came out and kept coming out. As far as my personal development is concerned, I have had no major concerns or confusion in these things. Thus this theme, not well developed in the book I admit, comes from reaches unknown. It just seemed interesting to play with as in the cases of Russ and Johnnie and Janie and Silla and her San Francisco friend. Not being a woman and having only observed ever so infrequently girl-girl relations, I claim no understanding of same-sex gender relations, and thus the book may seem woefully shallow in this regard. This weakness or missed opportunity I easily accept and don't regret. The gender stuff is only a part of a large array of influences in a developing identity.

I collected quotes as I wrote and I tried to assign one each to a chapter. The final outcome of that futile task is handled more or probably less well in the book itself. In any event, it was not until Paul gets a palpable sense of his mortality in San Francisco that the point of the whole comes out explicitly. Life is about kindness and leaving something pure and good for others. I surprised myself that this is where it all was leading, as well as to the final scene, which had a protracted yet climactic birth.

This is how I will leave this subject again--for now--except this question: Have you ever found yourself strongly attracted to someone you hardly knew and misjudged at the beginning, and then made a move or commitment which led you to life experiences and learnings you could never have imagined? Paul and I have . . . 

Meta-fiction encore

I wrote a story where my main character writes a story where he, from time to time, reflects on it, constituting in effect a kind of phenomenology of writing/experiencing. And all of that, except the fact that I wrote the book, is fiction. 

This is what I mean by meta-fiction, or meta-fictional. The conceit is sustained, I hope, from Foreword through Afterword, just to underline the fact and the point.

Is the book then more Hitchcock, as in I'm creating puppets and pulling the strings and attempting to craft the images and feelings you get from reading, or more organic, that is personal and closer to the bone, a personal journey that we would take with this rather dull (I find him so), everyday person?

Separate the product from the process. The process was to let it all come out as it would from day to day "channeling" without much plotting and forethought. (In fact by about chapter eighteen or nineteen I did not know where this would end.) Once I had a sense of an ending (a la Kermode) and had written the last paragraphs, I began fiddling. Through editing and proofreading I tried to make sure that the images, feelings, movement, nuances, and so forth were as they would support the end (conclusion) and all the parts leading to it. I wanted an integrated whole of a certain something, and I worked hard trying to get just that. In this sense, I was the puppeteer.

The product, from the point of view of reader experience, should be--I hope it is--organic and complex and seamless. And in fact, that describes the channeling process I experienced.

I remember the day I killed Silla. After writing for three to four hours, and having had lunch, I was out walking with the dog. I usually went over in my mind what I had done that day and where the story took me. I wondered, but not for long, on where it would or should go next. At chapter fourteen or fifteen I said I either have to get these two together and end it right there. It has gone on long enough, and I and any possible reader would expect this. The whole story was leading up to this. But I didn't want such a ho-hum tale. I wanted to keep the project going. So I killed her and felt very satisfied with myself for having done so. (One of the benefits of writing fiction. You can be as bad as bad can be and not get caught--except by your readers. And at this point, I never intended to publish the then fifty or so thousand words.)

So there was an architectonic emerging from some deep place within me, and I would refine that as much as possible once putting out there to friends and possibly others became a decision, but it all felt organic in production. Because of the subtle complexities of the characters I was meeting and describing and enacting, anyone else should find their learning about them and following them rather natural, emergent, recognizable. This is tough to talk about. The best is to stop talking about and have the direct experience of these people. You can judge for yourself. 

Channeled writing

[to be added]

The women, dialogues, ending?

I wrote this to an early reviewer.

As for the women, they were there to highlight what Paul Eh-em was ready and able to commit to and, kind of, stop hesitating--a delayed-living artist. Unfortunately for him, he will have his work cut out with an abused beauty. That you like the dialogues is interesting. You are the second reader to have commented on them. In fact, they were the most fun to write, and for the most part they came out the way they did in their first draft. Funny thing was I never knew at the start, the characters just spoke "through me," and I just wrote down what they said. Daddy Ron, by the way, had to almost die in order to bring Johnnie to her knees, so to speak--she had so much about her relationship with him to resolve that it brought on a crisis, and Paul's need to hug and help, which will probably get him into trouble this time. Funny stuff, this psych business. That is why she might be interesting to develop further, but the book had to end somewhere. Best leave the new lovers to sort themselves out in the reader's mind by this point.

This same reviewer hated the fact that I had killed off Silla. But I think he missed the point. I didn't. Paul did. The meta-fiction frame was perhaps not clear to him, which means maybe it is not clear. Sorry.

This same reviewer didn't much like Johnnie, and in the end and on second reading preferred Natalie. I guess different people read books for different reasons. Puma is not about which woman you would choose, of course. 

Missing ingredient

Anticipating this criticism, or weakness, I have only this to say. Eh-em and the other characters are innately ethical; in Eh-em's case, we can see this in his kindness. All characters presented have human issues they deal with, and they deal with them in the ways they are capable of dealing with them. Yet no one in this idealized place is evil. That they are as good as they are, or bad, is not attributable to religion or a book or beliefs in that which is other than themselves. And this is the ethical stance of the work, the socially and personally redeeming message. If the characters make or will make mistakes, that is presented as part of the human condition, and in dealing with these things is living what they implicitly, or in the case of Eh-em, explicitly express. If it should be otherwise, then that world is not this one. The stronger influences of childhood, personal history, and/or religious or spiritual clutter . . . no, this is not the import in the main "explaining" the quality of these characters.

Illustrated

In writing this story I picked some pictures off the internet and manipulated them so that they would look like Eh-em's paintings, showing a progression of subjects from things and scenes to people and portraits. They dropped out in the final version because I thought that if I had to get permission to use each of them, that foolishness would break the bank . . . and I never wrote the story to be published. I did it out of, well, other motives. 

So what to do with all the picture/paintings? Well, here they are, and if someone complains I will take whichever down. Some effort went into giving each a title. They appear here in the order in which they appeared in the penultimate version.

Click on the image to see greater detail and quality.

What have I unleashed?

I have tried to leave this book alone, but with some feedback from its first readers, issues have come up which in turn have led to reflecting again on the story and its qualities and defects. On one hand, my defense says that I dealt with that. Didn't you catch it? On the other, maybe the story has flaws great enough to warrant taking it back and reworking it.

The first thing to note is that the book is as it is, and no major revisions are on my agenda. The details, even single words, which prefigure later events and that a few have missed on first reading--I don't want to point out or to highlight or develop these further. My belief is that this would take the nuance, and therefore space away for the reader's imagination to work its magic. The next thing that suggests itself is to describe the book differently so that once a reader takes it up, they will be ready to see it as it is. Ignoring the possible error in my own assessment of what it is, I can only try to work up another description or two to see if that helps. The publishing advice is to make it so that a reader wants to pick the book up and read. The critic in me wants to point out qualities which make reading the work worthwhile. These two views I have not yet combined satisfactorily, at least I am not satisfied yet.

Here is a sketch of why I think Puma might be a good read.

This story is most obviously about identity and character or personality change and development. The main character's name alone and the structure of his story--vacillating between the first and third persons--point clearly to a divided, one might even say dissociated self. The blend is of so-called autobiography and biography of the creative non-fiction variety. Arguably the end of the story is when the internal author/narrator finds himself whole within his narrative. After that, there is nothing more to report. The story, it follows, ends there. That is if the plot is boy finds the girl at the right phase and stage of development to match his own and his needs. Given this reading, Silla is too mature a soul for Paul. Natalie is too powerful and limited in her own stuff to make for a satisfactory match for Paul. Johnnie and Paul intuit(?) that the other has had sexual and related traumas and they have complementary personal needs, etc, and so there, with that union, their life can begin together. Thus, again, the story, this one, ends and another begins beyond the confines of this book.

Puma is also about other themes. Here are a few. Knowing the other, who s/he really is; sexual orientation and ambiguities; acceptance of others even without biographical details; art as representation and/or expression; starting over; growing up and second chances; Freudian and Jungian bits; friendship; mortality and grieving; the inability of traditional religion to comfort; kindness trumps all . . . which one would you like to explore? Unfortunately, many of these and others I could name are mostly just questions posed for the reader to recognize and, if interested, think about--beyond the book. Only so much can be brought up and resolved in the space of an average-length novel, it seems.

However, there are more readings to the number and variety of these themes. For example, Paul is reticent to disclose his personal history, and one character admonishes him for his silence and others note his evasiveness. The fact that he doesn't disclose in a traditional and direct sort of way and the literary device that he is writing his own story reveal in effect that story in both first and third persons, with all of its thoughts, conjectures, and imaginings, is his biography. It is he who is concerned about knowing the other, the nature of different art forms, mortality, etc. And so, the array of ideas/themes becomes inroads into what and who he is about. He even says as much. Now where did he say that? I leave you to re-read if you wish to explore this dimension of the book.

I haven't forgotten about the one theme most obvious, and that is the role that animals and symbolic animals play in the story. Because this is so fertile and elusive a topic, or theme, I will not comment except to say the watcher, the watched, and the imagined-other--however treated, in words, photos, paintings, art and artifacts, etc.--are at the same time acknowledged directly and suggested. That philosophical and sophist-like bits appear within the text and outside of it (I refer to the collected quotations) should alert the keen reader to something else going on. What is that? I have already alluded . . .

I think again that Puma is about writing. As a story about a story about a story (author-me, Paul's story, Paul), the postmodern or self-consciousness or meta-nature of the whole boils down to a question of what is this that I, reader, am presented with. This question a reader will eventually ask if s/he too reflects and has an internal or external conversation about the book. Or so goes my thinking. But this step is no requirement to enjoy some of the better parts of the book and the overall happy ending.

Enough said, and I am sure all of this spoils it. I will continue to resist commenting and thinking about all of this. It is only just over a year since the writing of this book started. It is still too close to judge or comment on beyond what amounts to too much already. But I must be about marketing the thing, and that will take another swipe at trying to catch readers with words and maybe a better picture.

Benano, Italy
February 2015