New Nano focus 10-29-12

I’ve been away from writing for the last few days. Work and energy spent packing out of the Red Feather has been distracting. I feel a surge, though, as I get ready for the month ahead of Nanowrimo. 

I’ve decided to use this year’s endeavor to breathe some much needed life into Drum. There has been too much downtime on this project, and frankly there is too much riding on it to suppress it any longer. More on this later.

I went to Kim Stafford’s book release last night at Powell’s for his new memoir, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do. In his usual humble manner, Kim talked about arriving at the subject of his book, his brother Brett’s suicide, and how the book came to be titled. It’s a work of great, open-hearted stories that speak of Brett and Kim’s brotherhood and deep companionship, of their childhood and of their growing distance, and of the path Brett chose. It is a work, as Kim puts it, that was a release, a catharsis. He had been carrying Brett’s memory around for so many years that he felt it was something he no longer could keep buried: the book is an act of inevitable writing, a principle maintained by his own father, the great William Stafford. It strikes me that while Kim never mentioned this last night, it was at the very heat of his talk, the heart of his book.

When I decided to write about Michael, it was less from pain or grief than from the sense that here was a story worthy of inspection, fertile territory. More than this, though, I chose to write it out of a sense of entitlement. Michael has become as much my story as it is his, and it is this that returns me to the moments that stand like beacons, the moments I had with Michael that my mind has maintained in their Truest form. I capitalize the word because I am speaking here of honoring memory, raising it high for the benefit of all that was, is, will be.

So what is it that I would like to raise high. I suppose it has to do with my answer to my buddy Dave, who asked me recently if I wanted to tell the world about Michael, introduce him, give the reader something to carry away. “Of course,” I said. Of course. how long it’s been since I realized this simple fact. There is in Michael something that encapsulates the essence of post-sixties afterglow; the idea that anything is possible with the right attitude, and not only that, it is necessary to exercise the freedom entitled. Entitlement. That is what M&C claim: ts the journey away and the journey within is theirs alone.

If it were left to him alone, Michael would have brought them both home. But it wasn’t up to him and their entitlement had worn out. Whether Drum fell prey to hijacking, and accident at sea, or something more mysterious, the truth is the same: their time had come. It is Jade who must arrive at this notion in tandem with her own revelation. The longer she waits to pull the story out of the sea, the longer it festers and eats away at her life.

Now I am thinking of Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. The fish is at once his prize catch and his undoing. Mike loved this novel and read it several times in his high school days. The premise of the book, that nothing we do can save us from our doom, that everything we try is mere folly in the face of the universe, is very near to where Jade lives emotionally. She has conversations to this effect with her brother, friend, lover, all of whom leave her in a darker place than before.

Jade’s story must take hold. This will be the push for Nanowrimo this year.