Prone to Wander (or, my vanity project that you might also enjoy)

[image error]Last year, one of my favourite musicians went on a tour he titled the “Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour” — the idea being that on this tour he was basically just going to play the stuff he wanted to play, not the big hits but the stuff only hardcore fans would know and care about (no I didn’t get tickets to it and yes I’m still bitter, thanks for asking). This year, with many major writing projects on the go, I’ve decided to release what might be my own Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Book.” It’s not my usual field of historical fiction (don’t worry, there’s more of that coming soon) — but it’s a book I’ve always wanted to write and, after writing, always wanted to share with readers.

But for a long time, I didn’t. Share it, that is.

I’ll tell you a bit about it and then you can decide if you want to read it.

In the summer of 2004 I sat down to write a piece that had been in my head for a long time. It started with a well-known, maybe even hackneyed trope: a middle-aged man is driving on the highway when an out-of-control truck speeds toward him in his lane. As he’s about to get slammed by the tractor-trailer, the man’s whole life flashes before his eyes.

The flashbacks take him back to being a teenager in a very specific time and place: St. John’s, Newfoundland, attending the Seventh-day Adventist church and school there in the early 1980s. Why yes: the very same time, place, and circumstance in which I grew up.

I could never write a memoir; writing the novel that became Prone to Wander is as close as I will ever come. The characters and many of their experiences are pure fiction, but the setting in which they live is absolutely real, and numerous details, experiences, quirks and incidents are lifted straight from real life, though often in a different context than how they happened. Novelists always borrow, and sometimes steal, from their own lives: in this case I ruthlessly looted and pillaged mine.

I have never written anything as quickly, and with as much passion, as I did the first draft of Prone to Wander, which was substantially finished by Christmas 2004. Partly this was because, unlike historical fiction, it required almost no research: I was following the dictum “write what you know” in the purest sense. I wrote about five young people — three women and two men — growing up in the same world I had, and about five lives that go in wildly different directions while the bonds of teenage friendship still hold them together.

So I finished the book in about … four months, maybe? And then I spent a year or two editing, revising, getting people to read it and give me opinions, honing, improving it … and then: nothing. I put it in a metaphorical drawer and didn’t send it to a publisher or anything. Although several of the early readers had really loved the book and connected with it strongly, I didn’t put it out into the world.

Why?

Partly because it didn’t fit with anything else I was doing at the time. In the early 2000s I was developing a career as a historical novelist along two different lines: I was writing fiction about women of the Bible for a Christian press and then, by 2009, I was writing historical fiction rooted here Newfoundland for a local publisher. Prone to Wander didn’t fit anywhere in that universe. Although personal faith and people’s relationship to a church were major themes, it certainly wasn’t a book that would be picked up by my Christian publisher — there was some swearing in it, and some “adult situations,” and it wasn’t going to ever sit on a shelf in a Christian bookstore. And while the Newfoundland setting might have endeared it to some local readers, it wasn’t the historical fiction I was becoming known for. 

The other part was: maybe it was a little too personal. Because even though none of the five characters (even Katie, the one who’s writing a book about the other four) is me — also, all of them are me. And again, that’s true of everything I write, everything most writers write — but it’s much more true when you’re also writing about your own world, your own time, your own place.

A couple of times I tried to use Prone to Wander as a query that might hook an agent, but nothing happened with that, and I wondered if maybe this project was just so personal to me that it was the book I had to write but that no-one else would ever read.

Now, nearly 15 years after I started writing it, I’m putting Prone to Wander out there in the world via self-publishing. Why, and why now?

Well, I still think it’s a good book, and I guess I keep coming back to those few early readers who loved it and found it resonated with them. I wrote about growing up Adventist in Newfoundland in the 80s, but I heard from people who grew up in independent fundamentalist churches in the US, and Roman Catholic in Latin America, and all kinds of other backgrounds, and something in the story touched a chord for each of those readers. Something about being raised in a strong faith and then exploring the world outside of it, which happens in a different way for Jeff, Katie, Julie, Liz and Dave, my five characters. People on all sorts of faith and non-faith journeys have found something in at least some of these characters that they can connect with.

Also, there’s something in this book that I don’t often get to do, which is to write about religion and faith in the way I want to write about it, the way I and people I know actually experience it.

It seems there are two major ways to write about faith in fiction. One is the way you write for Christian publishers, in which faith, while it may have some ups and downs, is always a positive good that will ultimately solve all your problems if you just accept God’s leading. The other way is the way it’s often portrayed in literary (and some commercial) mainstream fiction: faith is a restrictive, backward superstition held only by stupid people, and you’re lucky if you can break away from its abusive clutches and make a decent, God-free life for yourself.

Not every writer falls into one of those two categories, obviously. I love the ones who don’t. My greatest hero in this area is the late Chaim Potok. He wrote about the incredibly specific, narrow world of Hasidic Judaism, mostly in Brooklyn, New York — and yet his stories were completely universal. He wrote with an empathetic understanding that the same religion that was a source of strength and comfort for some of his characters could be a confining cage for others — and that these characters could love each other, and wrestle with their different perceptions of the faith.

I always wanted to write about Seventh-day Adventism the way Chaim Potok wrote about Hasidic Judaism. A story that would be both a love song to my community and a criticism of it. A story that would show how faith can be the lifeline one of my characters clings to even while the structures of that same religious organization are allowing her to suffer abuse. A story that would show how a young woman can be invited and inspired into ministry and then have that door slammed in her face by the church hierarchy. A story that … well, you get the idea. There are five characters and I don’t want to tell you all their stories. But if any of this connects with you at all, or even makes you curious … 

Well, you might want to pick up a copy of my ridiculously self-indulgent, ill-advised vanity book. Because maybe it’s not just for me, after all.

Right now it’s available via Amazon: there may be other channels eventually, and I know Amazon’s problematic, but it is the easiest way for a an indie writer to get a story into reader’s hands. You can order the paperback here or the e-book here.

If you read it, and it does anything for you at all, please leave me a review on Goodreads or Amazon or … I don’t know, write it on a piece of paper, put it in a bottle, and toss it in the sea. I’m trusting this book to find its way to the people who want and need to read it. That won’t be everyone … but if it’s you, now you know how to find it.