Edward Flaherty's Blog: flahertylandscape, page 40

Beta 03 Edition: The 23 Club

I have had fantastic help from three Goodreads Beta Readers: Dani B, Lin, and Lynzie. I want to thank them publicly, great contributions from all three.

With their help, I have begun polishing my first story, a landscape story in the literary fiction genre--The 23 Club.

You may wonder, what is a landscape story?

It is a story about people, plants, gardens and landscape.

I use landscape as more than a setting. I enrich it through perception and experience. The plot and characters become threads that give a linear structure, an outline structure through which the reader enters the worlds of plants, gardens and landscape.

Please consider to give it a beta read. Thank you.
The 23 Club

Zainab and Om Khaltoum

I started reading "the first Egyptian novel", Zainab by Mohammed Hussein Haikal, translated into English by John Mohammed Grinsted.

I was amazed by the language of the first chapter. It spoke about people in Egypt who were field workers, from families who had been working fields for generations. Their relationships with the landscape were described in terms that people in the "West" usually save for loving relationships between people.

The only thing similar that I have ever read, were English translations of songs by the world famous Egyptian songstress, Om Khaltoum…her roots also in the Egyptian countryside…a countryside rich in agriculture due to the Nile river.

In the second chapter, the story gets into males and females, workers and property owners, in early 20th century Egypt.

Wisteria Nook

It is mid-spring in the northern hemisphere.

Wisteria is blooming, the flowers ahead of the leaves.



The flowers of the wisteria are characters of a story, a story whose plot is in the twining wisteria stems, stems stretching up the sturdy columns and over the solid trellis of a pergola, the pergola itself the landscape setting for the story.

Look at that image above. Don't you just want to be there!? …sitting in that chair, at that table, inhaling the fragrance of those flowers, and appreciating the details of that plant's beauty! There is a story in there somewhere, no?

Landscape Journeys

Inexorably, by the force of gravity alone, everybody is required, to experience landscape…to travel a singularly personal landscape path. Landscape is thus, not a marketing option. Landscape is inextricable from life. It is essential to life. Discover it, uniquely, on this blog…and in my first book…The 23 Club.

Please share with me, your unique landscape journeys…your unique experiences on your path through the landscape.