Where Do Novels Come From?

This piece first appeared in the Rappahannock News, June 27, 2024

William Wordsworth said, “The child is father of the man.” William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” William Brown - my father - said, “Get up, boy. We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

At some point in our lives, most of us experience a dissonance between the forces that drive our decisions on a daily basis and those that push and pull at us, more subtly, perhaps, but persistently, from the reaches of our childhood. They’re usually good for a chuckle or some quirk that our spouses tease us about, but they can also be the stuff of important reflection.

When Rappahannock County and its people came into my life, I was on the far side of fifty, with thirty years of international travel, boardrooms and committee meetings under my belt. I had realized most of the dreams that launched me into adulthood, and the rest had been reworked to the point that they were no longer very interesting. I was pretty good at running the bases in my life, but I had begun to wonder what the game was all about.

I found myself thinking about events that I had paid too little attention to over the years - Vietnam, Kent State, civil rights…. I thought about people whose lives had crossed paths with mine and disappeared in the wake of my own pre-occupations. What drove me to make the decisions I had taken? How might things have gone if I had made different choices?

Like so many ‘came-here’s, I was initially drawn to Rappahannock by its natural beauty, by the way its farms and villages nestled into the land without breaking its spirit. But there was something else: Day-to-day life in the county is closer to the realities of nature and necessity than it is in the buffered existence of mainstream America, and there is a sense of continuity among the past, the present and the future. The past isn’t an envelope to be opened when it suits us; it’s an active ingredient in everyday life.

That sense of being connected and that continuity in time spoke to the gaps I had been feeling in my own life. I had fled farm labor and the jack-of-all-trades chores of rural life as a youngster to become the first person in my family to attend college, and now the memory of those activities returned with a sense of nostalgia. Blisters and a sore back soon fixed that with a dose of reality, but returning to the land ran deep, and being welcomed into the county came with a sense of coming home that had little to do with geography.

I wondered how contemporaries of mine who grew up in Rappahannock in the sixties might have dealt with the issues that surfaced as I reflected on my own life. How might the setting they grew up in have influenced their choices?

To explore such questions, I created a couple of fictional characters. I set them up in their senior year in Rappahannock High School in 1965, and then I took a seat in the stands, as it were, to watch what happened over the next forty years.

Jerry Fletcher’s family had been evicted from their home in the mountains to make way for Shenandoah National Park. They were successful in re-establishing themselves as part of the county’s economy, but Jerry’s bitterness about the eviction has given him a defiant attitude toward authority.

David Williams is the oldest son of a local preacher whose literal interpretation of scripture left little room for intellectual curiosity or for the possibility that values could exist beyond the doctrine he preached. That became the unspoken challenge of David’s foray into the world of the sixties and seventies.

The only thing these two have in common is their love of the Blue Ridge, and the knowledge of who they are, gained from their time in the mountains, is a touchstone in the pursuit of who they will become.

So, the result of all my midlife reflection wasn’t a divorce or a new convertible. It was a series of four stand-alone historical fictions: The Morning Side, Fletcher’s War, Out of Eden, and The Purpose Breaks. There were a few thousand hours of research and editing in there, too, but never mind that. I had a chance to relive some of the challenges and opportunities of the mid to late twentieth century, and to explore how the vestiges of who we were play a role in who we become.

I think it might have been John Fowles who said, “I believe in absolute fidelity to the truth, and to the facts insofar as they support the truth.” I hope readers will find some truth of their own in these stories.

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