On the other side of this blog

I’m really proud of The Person on the Other Side of This Book. A best seller? No. But a weird and wonderful book. At least I think so.

I started writing the book when I was in my thirties staring at my forties. Strange little vignettes spun themselves into a work the blurs magical realism, science fiction, memoir, and all sorts of other genres. Some readers liked it. Some didn’t. I liked it.

I imagined a version of myself that taught at a university in New York. That version of Sam was older than the person who wrote the book. Middle forties. And now here I am in my middle forties. And some of the writing feels prophetic. Encountering anxiety. An associate professor of English Education, PhD. I’m even writing this blog in a class about writing. The Person on the Other Side of This Book opens up in a class about writing. It does this after introducing an amorphous blob at the bottom of the Europan Ocean. I told you it was a weird book. A wonderful one, in my opinion. But I’m biased.

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One of my former students sent me the picture at the top of this blog. They were at an art museum and saw a painting that reminded them of the creature in my book. I’m lucky to have a handful of former students who connected with me through my writing. Better than no audience, for sure.

Anyway, they sent me this picture and told me it made them think of the creature.

In the book, the creature is a divine being. Not the divine being, just a divine being. I was reading C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy during the time I wrote the book. In those three books, Lewis plays creates allegorical, celestial beings intended to, in my opinion, reflect the powers and principalities mentioned in the Bible. Some are good and some are bad. The creature, in my opinion, is good. And the story of Sam and his students connecting with the creature is about the three of them coming into closer relationship with the spiritual forces at work on us here. Where is here? Reality. This reality, anyway.

I don’t know that I predicted this difficult moment I find myself in, but the book certainly pointed in this direction.

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I have something of a sequel to the book in the works. It’s a mess of memoir and fiction. It’s me writing about my father. It’s me writing about this moment. It’s me writing about getting older. It’s me writing about decay. The body giving way. It’s me writing towards a peace that surpasses all understanding. It’s some of the most personal writing I’ve ever done and some of the strangest. That’s saying a lot. I don’t know what form the book will take or even if I’ll finish it. I’m 50,000 words into a weird and maybe wonderful manuscript. We’ll see where it goes.

We’ll see where all of this goes. There’s no telling what will happen next. But there can be peace despite the complexity that seems so much a part of what it is to be a living being. A being that is aware. A Sam. Or a you. A human being.

We’ll see where all of this goes.