"Zeppelins Over Denver" due out by summer

Just finished reviewing the galley proofs of my first novel. My first published novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was in my 20s. I actually started earlier, as a kid writing letters that were rarely answered. My first readers were disinterested friends and family members. Maybe that’s where I learned how to hold an audience. Most of my early writing had an audience of one. I discovered journaling and keep up that written practice with this blog. I registered with the original Blogger from Pyra Press in 2001 and posted my first weblog in November 2005. I began blogging regularly in January 2006.

But back to the novel. The title is “Zeppelins Over Denver” and it will be out in May from The Ridgeway Press of Michigan in Detroit. Publisher and friend M.L. Liebler helped me get the ball rolling and I am forever grateful. Small presses rule! Big presses are great too but they have spent a lot of time ignoring me. C’est la vie! I was learning how to write all of this time, from the early 1970s until now. I’m still learning. Always will be.

“Zeppelins” is a historical novel set in 1919 Denver. Its origins lie on the yellowing pages of my paternal grandmother’s diary from her time as a U.S. Army nurse in France, 1918-19. She kept one diary in her lifetime and it was lost for decades, existing only as a rumor that faded with each passing year. It was rediscovered in my sister Molly’s basement in Tallahassee. She’s a nurse like our mother and my father’s mother. Eileen, another sister who also was a nurse, took the diary and transcribed it. She asked me for editorial assistance. As writer and editor, I gladly provided it. I whipped it into shape, working more as a conservator than a fiction writer. I corrected spelling and punctuation. I changed no contents, censored nothing. It was lovely just the way it was.

Eileen asked me to put together a little book for the family. Along the way, I researched the service of army nurses in the Great War and the Great War itself. I thought I knew at least some of the history. I had read war novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The Good Soldier Schweik,” “Soldier of the Great War,” and “Winter Soldier.”  I had read “The Guns of August” by Barbara Tuchman and Paul Fussell’s excellent “The Great War and Modern Memory.” I’ve read the poetry: Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. I have read some of the celebratory war poetry, too. Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees" was my father’s favorite poem. I wondered if Dad had contemplated the shattered trees in the Bulge battlefield in the Ardennes in 1944. Kilmer’s reputation lives on at Columbia University’s annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. The Columbia Daily Spectator once ranked the contest as number one among the “Best Columbia Arts Traditions.”

The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew. I dug deeper. In the end, I decided to absorb everything I knew and let it come out in what I see as a historical novel colored by the darkly humorous war novels of Joseph Heller, Juroslav Hasek, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And there you have it. Ten years of work poured into almost 400 pages. I hope you enjoy it. If you are inspired by the characters, some of them will return in the sequel, “Patrick of the Mountains.” The draft manuscript is complete and it will be published once the edits and revisions are complete. I have roughed out a plot for a third novel but we will see where that goes.

Lately I’ve been having dreams, Train Dreams w/update

For decades, I kept a copy of “Fiskadoro” by Denis Johnson. I liked the idea of the book more than the book itself. It was an early post-apocalyptic novel set in the Florida where I grew up, the Keys, way south of my youth in Daytona Beach, but still, Florida. With my brother Dan, I was writing a post-apocalyptic novel set in the Central Florida I knew. It was the 1980s and we wanted in on the post-apocalyptic scenario that Reagan’s anti-Soviet MX Missile plan engendered. Dan, Air Force veteran and air traffic controller, was a Reagan man and I was not. There was energy in that – and we were brothers. I miss him still. Today is his birthday.

But back to Johnson. I read “Train Dreams” a decade ago when I still lived and worked in Wyoming. It’s a novella and I read it in two days. It touched me. I didn’t think it would. I did my best to read “Fiskadoro” but failed to finish -- I just couldn't get inside. Is this the same writer? My heart ached by “Train Dreams” end, much as it did last night when the credits rolled for “Train Dreams” on Netflix. It’s set mostly in Idaho, my old neighbor, and in the tall-timber forests I grew to love in my 40 years in the Rockies. Most of that time, the timber industry and environmentalists waged war. I wasn’t in the fight, but my location in the cities of the Colorado/Wyoming Front Range made me suspect.

I put that aside as I watched Robert and other loggers in early-20^th-century Idaho and Washington cut 500-year-old trees. Robert worked for his wife and daughter. He traveled to jobs by train, the most efficient form of transportation then. This was a love story featuring Robert and Gladys and little Katie. The couple planned and built the cabin themselves and did all the work. Tragedy came and some resolution followed. The ending is breathtaking yet somber.

It's a beautiful work, Johnson’s novel and the Netflix film directed by Cliff Bentley. The credits roll to a song called “Train Dreams” by Nick Cave. He was the right person for the job. I have it on my playlist now: 

Lately I’ve been having dreams, crazy dreams I can’t explain; A woman standing in a field of flowers, a screaming locomotive train; Crazy dreams that go on for hours and I can’t begin to tell you how that feels.

Robert doesn’t have the words.

I keep searching for them.

UPDATE: The Dec. 1 New York Times carried a review of a new biography about the late Denis Johnson. The book, "Flagrant, Self-Destructive Gestures," is by Ted Geltner. He assembled it through interviews with family and friends and fragments of notes left behind by Johnson. The writer spent his last years living in a cabin in north Idaho. If you live in the West, you can picture the cabin and know what it feels like as December snow swirls outside.