Several months back, when I accepted an invitation to appear at the inaugural Southern Utah Book Festival, I was excited. My sponsor, Kase Johnstun, has become a good friend these past couple of years, and a chance to do two of my favorite things—travel and talk about books and writing—was not to be missed.

But there was something else, something that had weighed heavily on my thoughts for most of my life. Being in the book festival's host city, Cedar City, would put me less than an hour from a little town called Milford, a place I'd been hoping for decades I might return to, a place that had proved elusive in that it's not really on the way to anywhere else. I've lived in the West most of my life, and save for the summer when I was nine years old, Milford had been vapor trail in my memories, a place I could close my eyes and picture, a place that sometimes slipped into my dreams, and a place that remained out of reach through the 45 years that stood between me and it and our one season together.

I pined for it sometimes, which is strange, because the memories it holds for me are not happy ones. Life that summer in 1979 seemed like the edge of the knife, or a bullet chambered in a gun. The adults in my immediate sphere—my dad and my stepmother and her son and a host of others—were angry and unreasonable, at each other like crazed dogs, wild and vituperative and ugly. And I was just a boy, one who cherished those summers with my dad, away from the suburban life I knew the rest of each year. I sensed the danger around us that summer but didn't know how to escape it.

​We'll get to all that. But first, I had to get to Milford.

Upon arriving in Milford around 8 a.m. on October 20, I spun through town, reorienting my memories—and, truly, it was like an unstoppable rush—and then I found the little gas station/convenience store I'd mined in my memories nearly 15 years ago as I wrote The Summer Son and the bit above. The building frequented by my then-stepbrother and the townie girlfriend he met in Milford was still there; I'm certain of that. But time has its way, even in a place as cast in amber as Milford seemed, and that old store had been upgraded and rebuilt, and perhaps given a sense of humor it had lacked 45 years ago when I had nuked a refrigerated burrito into hard carbon, to the ire of the proprietor.

On this day, I found a bored, talkative store clerk named Dayna who wanted to know who and what I remembered. I pitched her a few surnames, and she said, yep, we have some of those. She assured me I'd get no trouble from the locals while I walked around town, as long as I wasn't from California. I thanked her for her time and took off. I knew what I wanted to see.

​Knew what I was a little frightened to see, too.

We lived that summer—Dad, his wife, me—in a motel room that was clean and tidy but nothing special, exactly the kind of place Dad preferred when he was on a drilling job and whatever his housing cost was would come off his own bottom line.

Problem was, there wasn't enough oxygen in that little room, not with the way the two of them were fighting. It wasn't particularly physically violent—that's the imagination part taking hold of the memory for fictional purposes—but it was, in its way, almost worse, because it was ceaseless. They knew every button to push with each other, and they did so in a way that seemed to me, even then, to be addictively gleeful. 

I spent a lot of time that summer in the parkway strip across the street from the motel, where I stood again 45 years later as I took the picture above, capturing a motel that's neither clean nor tidy nor recommended, Dayna told me.

Dad and his wife's separation from each other—the first one, anyway—came not in Milford but back at their home in New Mexico, during a weeklong break from Dad's work. He spilled an ashtray and told me to clean it up. His wife told him to clean it up himself. A wildly grotesque fight ensued, with each screaming at the other that it was time for divorce, and all the while I thought it was my fault because I just didn't do what I was told fast enough. 

​That's in the book, too. Sometimes a memory is enough and you can just hold imagination in abeyance. You don't need it.

Things turned dark for Dad when we came back to Milford absent a wife and a functioning marriage. His yearning for drink, frequent back then in the best of times, became unquenchable. He began leading with violence in his encounters with fellow drillers, his stepson, acquaintances, hired hands. I've always said the biggest victory in his life is that he never rolled physical abuse downhill at me after suffering it in his own childhood. But I still took it in from the cheap seats.

The first time I saw him punch a man came in Milford, in an alleyway after an old drunken fool who'd been teasing me in the bar followed me outside when I chased after the bar owner's dog. The old man grabbed me by the wrist, and I screamed, and Dad came flying to where we were, uncuffed me from the man's grip, and deposited him on his ass. Justified, I'd say.

The second time, I didn't see the punch, only heard it. Again, we were back in New Mexico, that same summer, and a fellow rancher with whom Dad had been feuding came to the house to renew the beef. I was in the kitchen with the wife of one of Dad's friends when I heard the slap of an open hand against a soft cheek, then the pathetic sobs of the struck man. I don't know whether he had it coming or not, but I felt the shame that man felt, the emasculation. Dad chased him out of there, into the night, and told him not to come back unless he wanted to know what dead felt like. I'm certain he meant it. I went to sleep that night whispering a silent wish into the air that the guy would have the good sense to stay away.

Again and again that summer, I walked with my father as he plodded to the precipice of rage and violence. Sometimes, I could walk him back without incident. Sometimes, I watched in horror as he plunged in against a world he thought was mistreating him.

​And I never said a thing, to anybody. Whom could I tell? Who could stop it? Had I told my mother in one of our weekly phone calls, there would have never been another trip to be with my old man, and that I could not bear. Little boys love their daddies. So I shut up and took it.

As chaotic and crazed as that summer was, as unhinged from any kind of healthy living as Dad was, he was a worker without peer. I don't recall his missing a single day out in the field, digging exploratory wells. Rides out to work, early every morning, were contented and quiet, with my sleepy head bouncing between the shoulders of my dad and my adult stepbrother as I rode in the middle of the pickup's bench seat.

Forty-five years later, I reveled in seeing that route again, of driving past the ruins of the mining town of Frisco, of looking at and remembering the scrub brush and the rugged peaks, of recounting the particulars of the work at which Dad was so good. He started earlier than everyone else, and he stayed at it later, and that made him valuable to the companies that wrote the checks, until the money stopped flowing. Four years after that summer, in 1983, the drilling economy bottomed out, and by 1985 repossession had come for Dad's drilling rig, casting him into a crisis of work identity that he never managed to surmount.

In 1979, though, he was a deeply troubled man possessed of a work ethic that might have been the one thing that kept him from entirely spiraling away from me. He taught me to drive a stick shift that summer. He trusted me to do it, too, and pressed me into duty after firing a helper in a rage and having no one else to drive the pickup. He sometimes laughed at my jokes. He was usually nice about it when he told me to shut up. Usually.

I deeply admired him. I sometimes feared him. I daily feared for him. And it would be years yet before I felt as though I'd started to understand him, a process that stumbles along even as I lay down these words today. Back then, I couldn't have imagined he'd make it to 45, let alone 85. Sometimes now, I wonder if time has forgotten to swoop in and collect him.

But it hasn't. What's coming for him is coming for all of us.

This terrible, beautiful view. That's Milford at the end of the road there, as seen from the Ely Highway as you're coming back into town. This is what I saw at the end of every workday as we returned to hot meals and hot showers and the many entanglements my father could find, even in a town of fewer than 1,500 souls.

The work was rote, predictable, pleasurable in its way. Dig a hole, move the equipment, dig another. Each return to Milford, on the other hand, came as a wild card. Drunkenness? Maybe. Fighting? Certainly. The worst human impulses, on full display, allowing no escape? Yes. I saw things no child should see. I mourn for the kid I was, to have those hard things visited upon him without a choice in the matter, even as I'm thankful for the fodder. Much was taken from me in Milford. Much was given to me that I've been able to lean on in my life and my work, and for that, gratitude sprouts among the shattered pieces.

Two days after I saw Milford again, I sat in Dad's little dining room and asked him if he remembered that summer. He did, but not with the clarity I possessed. Perhaps that's not surprising, given the gulf in our ages and our divergent roles back then. He had a mind for work and a crude method for blunting his pain. My mind, then and now, sops everything up. Pain is the straw I try to spin into...something. Understanding, in the best moments. Acceptance. Empathy. I need all of it.

I told Dad what I'd seen, the town fixtures that hadn't changed much, the highways stretching to horizons, the memories that whispered from every vista. He shook his head. "I don't remember much about Milford," he said. It's the constant tension in our relationship. He leaves the past where it is. I dredge it, looking for lessons and shiny objects amid the wreckage.

Here's one: Despite it all, I wouldn't trade my summer in Milford for something else. There's not enough in anybody's pockets to shake me loose from it now.

The big news I've been sitting on awhile is now out. My second full-length play is making its premiere in November, following on the heels of last year's Straight On To Stardust:

I began writing The Garish Sun almost immediately after the final performance of Straight On. Partly, I'd had so much fun writing my first play that I wanted to see if I could do it again. Partly, I wanted to write a play. Yes, yes, we staged Straight On as a play, but in terms of canvas and characters, I'd really written a movie script. The thing sprawls, taking place in four states and involving upward of a dozen characters. I wanted to strip a story down: five characters, max, having to deal with each other on one set. (Side note: Any filmmakers out there interested in taking a look at Straight On To Stardust? I have a script! Call me.)

The Garish Sun is a race-the-clock-and-the-rampant-corruption thriller about the last three people standing at a newspaper that's being put out to pasture. They decide to go after one last important story. The Yellowstone Repertory Theatre cast—led by Chas Llewellyn (editor Sonny Sturgis), Haley Sielinski (reporter Randi Hutch), and Adam Roebling (recent graduate Dexter Collins)—is breathing life into it in surprising and beautiful ways.

How I know they're nailing it: In rehearsals, I feel like I'm back in a newsroom, a place where I spent the first 25 years of my working life, a place where I was most at home, and a place that used to be filled with the people in the world I most admired and loved.

The aggregate effect of these two plays is that I now feel as though the "playwright" descriptor I've taken on legitimately sits alongside two other professional appellations I carry: "novelist" and "editor." I can't imagine sustaining the kind of creative life I want without writing more plays. They're fun. They're affirming, when they work. And I have so much to learn.

So how did I get here, at the relatively advanced age of 54? I've had no formal training in the dramatic arts, unless you're willing to count a few weeks when I was 9 and 10 years old and attended acting classes at Casa Mañana in Fort Worth, Texas. (I'm not willing to count those; I was a ham as a child but had little talent for acting.)

What I have, still, is an abiding love of live performance. Of seeing actors, without a net, spin a world into which I can disappear. Of beholding the magic drawn out by a director and an ensemble who take words on the page—something I can create—and apply their own interpretation to them, thus creating something else entirely. It's so different from the solitary art of creating a novel. Certainly, readers subsequently absorb it and interpret it as they will, but that happens out of the view of the writer. The performance of a play is available to all who attend. And in the case of The Garish Sun, there will be nine such performances, each different from the others in ways subtle and obvious. I can't wait.

It was a YRT performance of The Glass Menagerie that made me think I'd like to try to write one. Beautiful words, beautiful performances, the breaking of the fourth wall. Magic. That's what it was. 

So now I've written two. If there's any regret at all, it's that I didn't find my place in theatre as a much younger man, with more energy, more ideas, and presumably more time to get to them. I envy the theatre kids and what they get to experience, and though I think there's little point in wishing for a return to one's youth—it wasn't as great as it seems in the backward look, and it'd be even harder now—I wish sometimes I'd been one of them.

​But I wasn't. I'm a theatre middle-ager. I got here at the time that was right for me.

The Garish Sun will be staged at NOVA Center for the Performing Arts, 2317 Montana Ave., Billings. Performance dates: Nov. 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23. Please join us!

*--Yeah, yeah, these are supposed to post on Saturday mornings. In my defense: (1) The prompt came on Saturday night, as I lay me down to sleep. (2) I don't want to wait till next Saturday to post it. (3) Time is just a construct.

The prompt came over the transom, flung by a writer for whom I have great affection and respect:

I was chuffed to be asked. I have all of two full-length plays (one produced, one not yet) and a handful of one-acts to my name. Obviously, there are far better exemplars for the form. But I do have gumption and want-to, and those count for a lot when it comes to setting down words with the self-indulgent hope that they'll someday be read or heard.

More than that, I have thoughts. I told my friend I'd get back to him after I bagged some Z's.

Here, then, is my response from this morning (edited for taste):

For me, the fun and the challenge lie in the stripping away of setup, exposition, and backstory: It's an act of propulsion using dialogue and a confined setting.

I think Straight On To Stardust, proud as I am of it, was more a screenplay than a play. My new one is much more minimal: one setting, five people, three of them doing the heavy lifting. It's a lot of damn dialogue, plus the moving around each other in a small space.

When I write a novel, I'm often thinking of the big canvas, the limitless aspects of time, and the freedom I have to get where I'm going. It's often a much smaller viewfinder on stage.

So there, I think more about how what people say to each other moves things along, the triggers in the speech, how things can turn on a word. What might come gradually in the pages of a novel is often like flash paper on stage. It's really cool when you can catch that ride.

Now...

If I wished to pull apart every sentence above, I could launch into endless digressions. About how writing a play isn't limiting at all, that the bounds exist only in the imagination of the dramatist. About the endless ways of pulling the marionette strings. About the fixation of place and the ceaselessness of time.

The timing of the prompt was interesting because I'd just had an evening of drinks with one of the finest actors in my town, and we'd spent time talking about these things. I was primed to provide an answer when my friend came calling.

In the end, all I really know about any kind of writing is the composition of the intrinsic gifts found only in the doing. I have fun writing plays; it is pure joy. When you have that, in anything, you want only one thing: to experience it again and again and to get better through those experiences.

Onward.​

*--I used this phrase in my most recent newsletter, and one of my dearest friends wrote me a wonderful email with it as the subject line. Consider this a case of virtuous recycling.

It has been nearly two months since I put something new up here. Sorry/not sorry, as the saying goes. So much has happened, and I have so little to say about it, and that's a strange combination. Confronted by this dynamic in the past, I've found it best to turtle up and wait until something worthwhile comes to mind. If you're seeking mindless blather, surely there's a high-frequency, low-content Substack site out there for you.

And yet, enough has changed, and enough good intentions have been met with poor follow-through, that an accounting is in order. Let's do this scattershot style:

Elisa covered this beautifully in her own newsletter, so I'll neither say a lot more nor take issue with any of it. She now lives in New England, her other heart earth, and I still live in Montana, mine.

I'm renting space in a lovely old rambling house in my favorite Billings neighborhood, pushing on with life and art. I have a beautiful office setup that is a joy to pile into each morning. My primary work, which I find interesting and fulfilling, continues apace (you can read a piece I wrote for PaymentsJournal here). Fretless and I take walks, sometimes alone, sometimes with my roommate and her dog. I tend to my dad. I have lunch with friends. It's a good life but also a different life, and I think Elisa would say the same thing.

Once I decided to spring Northward Dreams loose from its intended publisher, spring became a blur as I pushed out a retitled, re-jacketed version of the book and embarked on an ambitious series of appearances. Those have largely subsided as summer has come on, and it will probably be fall before I rev up again. The paperback comes out in November, and that's a good opportunity to hit the road again. I had so much fun with the hardcover.

What hasn't been fun—and I'm only being honest here—is going through the wringer of publishing, which can be a heartbreaking business. Writing is the best kind of joy—challenging, yes, but also a test of self, of the quality of ideas, of endurance. Publishing...Well, if I can't say something nice, and I can't, best not to say anything at all. It's not like my travails register as important in the larger scheme of things; hell, they're not even all that interesting to me given all the ways the world is on fire (literally).

But if I'm going to write stories—and I am—I will have to resolve my attitude one way or another. Right now, I feel three impulses:

1. Forget publishing altogether.
2. Find another partner like the one I just dispatched, something I never wanted to do, and approach the altar again.
3. Do with every subsequent book exactly what I did with this one.

Until my heart settles, I'll do nothing.

After the final curtain closed on Straight On To Stardust last fall, I set about writing a new play and turned it around quickly. It's called The Garish Sun--know your Shakespeare—and I hope to have some interesting news to pass along soon. #deliberatetease

At this juncture, I'm much more interested in and satisfied by working as a dramatist than I am in writing another novel. These feelings, of course, are subject to change (and always do), so I wouldn't read anything into that declaration. Just something I wouldn't have predicted, say, three years ago. Life, man.

At the beginning of July, I joined at the speaker roster at Humanities Montana. I'm thrilled about this, as a longtime admirer of and sometimes participant with this organization that advances the humanities in Montana's public life. 

My program, titled Where Memory and Imagination Meet, draws on subjects that have long held fascination for me—the roles of memory as an ignition point and imagination as the building blocks of fiction—but expands the idea to take in such diverse topics as family, background, community, even citizenship. When we talk about our memories of the things that shaped us and marry those with imagining different ways of talking and connecting, great things can happen.

My program, like all the others sponsored by Humanities Montana, is available to schools, libraries, civic groups, and other such gatherings. Information at the link above. If you have a group in Montana that would benefit from this conversation, let's talk!

Oh, you mean Craig Reads the Classics? The Saturday craft talks? General keeping in touch?

What can I say? I've been quiet lately. But I'll be back.

That's a promise.

I wrote about my home* state several weeks ago. It was a wide-angle, pulled-back view, and I thought I'd unloaded what was in my heart and my head. But here I go again...

No, really, here I go. It's a quick trip this time, not my usual two-day drive down, weeklong stay, and two-day drive back. I'm going for a reading and signing at a bookstore in Keller, the once-sleepy town just north of where I grew up. Like other parts of the North Texas I once knew, it doesn't really match up with my memories anymore. It's bigger, more congested, more diverse, more interesting.

The book I'm taking with me, Northward Dreams, is the most personal piece of fiction I've ever written. The best thing I've ever written, too, not that anyone should trust me to judge such a thing. I'm proud of it. I'm proud of how I willed it into existence. And I really, really want to share it with the people who underpin it, in ways subtle and overt. They're in the book, all of them, whether they would recognize themselves or not. They're in it because they're in me, in the memories I carry around.

To that end, I sent out about 100 postcards earlier this year, addressed to people from across the years I spent in Texas: classmates, old neighbors, former bosses, teachers, colleagues, friends, former lovers. I asked them to come out and see me and to meet this book, to renew acquaintances or to prolong friendships that never ran dry. 

I'm hoping to see a constellation of faces I recognize come Saturday, but I've also put this event squarely in a holiday weekend, so who knows? I haven't always done a wonderful job of staying in touch as I've wandered the country, looking for the place I'd call home. 

I found it, years ago. But I've also come to realize that the place I'm from—as much as I'm from anywhere—is also home and always will be.

When I say Northward Dreams is my most personal book, I'm thinking, among other things, about this snippet from one of the four timelines the novel covers. Here, in 1972, Electra and her little boy have arrived at their new home in Texas:

After they’ve gone downstairs, after Electra has made her assessment of the pantry, after she’s pictured the days stretched out before them, after Nathan, red-faced and watery-eyed, has come down and asked for a glass of water, after Charley has fetched the rest of their things and stacked them by the door for sorting out later, after they’ve come back up the stairs, quieter, the three of them lie askew on the king bed. Charley is on his side, head propped up by an angular arm. Electra lies far opposite of him, attentive to her son, and Nathan sleeps in between, curled like a kitten’s paw and under a loose blanket.

Electra reaches across the distance, and Charley takes her hand.

“Probably not what you expected.”

“It’s everything I expected,” he whispers. “You?”

“It’s what I want,” she says.

“Me, too.”

“He’s really a good boy,” she says.

“I know.”

“It’s a lot to deal with.”

“It is.” Charley sits himself up, careful not to jostle the boy. “Kids are resilient, though. I ever tell you about when we moved from Vernon to Wichita Falls?”

“No. I’d remember.”

“You went through both towns,” he says.

“I know.”

“I wish I could have been there.”

“I know,” she says.

“Fifty-some miles, might as well have been moving from earth to the moon. I was nine. Everything I knew, every friend I had, they were all in Vernon, but my dad, he was a history teacher, and the high school in Wichita Falls, they offered him $15 more a week, so we moved. I didn’t have any say.”

“Had to be hard at that age.” She’s thinking now of Nathan’s best friends, the Miles boy two doors down and the Fletcher kid, the one she doesn’t much like but whom Nathan adores, and how she plucked him up and took him away without his getting to say goodbye. She hurts for him in a way that she hasn’t allowed herself to think about until now.

“Hard at any age,” Charley says. “But the thing is, in the end, I made new friends. Wichita Falls became home, every bit as much as Vernon had been. I adjusted. He’ll adjust, too.”

“Tomorrow,” she says, more thoughts she’s held at bay rushing toward her now. Enrolling Nathan in school. Finding a job. Learning where the supermarket is.

“It’ll all get done,” he says, as if inside her head. It’s a talent he has.

She leans across and kisses him for the first time.

Where all of that comes from is both imagination and memory, little snippets that I heard, others I conjured, all of it front and center in my brain, ready to be accessed when I got hold of a story that needed it. This story. This place. Another time of life, forever salient because the decisions that were made had such gravity to them that their effects radiated out to lives yet to be launched.

​It's powerful stuff, fiction. Often more powerful than the real life that informs it.

We've been headed here all along, haven't we? The book's first full chapter begins with Nathan. The book's last interceding chapter ends with Nathan. He stands as the pivotal character in an ensemble, the one who can still change his course, if only he has the courage. Others have made their choices and lived, or died, with them. A lot is behind Nathan. More could yet be ahead.

There's not much else I want to say, except this: For me, the suggestion of future change is the most satisfying part of literary characters. I'm far more interested in the idea that they could change than the actual shape and scope of that change. It's why I like open-ended endings so much: Presumably, life goes on, until it doesn't. While we're sentient and breathing, it's within us to deviate our path.

Thanks for reading.

Of these nine timeline-busting chapters—just one to go after today—this one is the anomaly. It features a character who never appears on camera, as it were. Brandon Ray, son of Nathan, grandson of Ronnie, interacts with his father in phone calls that are clipped, distant, and loaded up with tension.

And yet, he's essential, in that the book traffics heavily in fathers and sons and what gets passed on and where the fault lines lie.

Brandon and his father are mirrors and opposites, a dynamic that also follows daughter (Cherie) and mother (Anna) in another timeline. Brandon was largely raised by another man—quite successfully, Nathan knows, and that's a source of pride and an unwanted memory, given his own path.

And there's something between them—something bigger and more immediate than their shared past—and in this chapter Brandon lays out the choice the older man has in the matter.

It's in the book.

One of the interesting things about human development—to me, at least—is the occasional alignment with physics in the equal-and-opposite-reaction sense. Cherie, the centering character of the 2002 timeline in Northward Dreams, is uncommonly wise and strong for her age. Her mother, Anna, provides some of the underpinning for these qualities through her frailty and failures. Together, they make for a compelling pair. There's love and genetic bonding and deep care and frustration and exasperation. 

Cherie exists because Anna created her. Cherie is who she is, in part, because she must compensate for her mother. That's a hard road.

Anna's inserted chapter arrives fairly late in the entire span of the book. She has made a fateful decision, the kind we don't get to walk back once it's in place.

There's not a whole lot more to say without saying too much. You should read the book.

Ah, Cherie. The youngest member of our ensemble, perhaps the wisest, certainly the one whose searching heart sets in motion the denouement of a book and, perhaps, beyond the page, the resetting of a troubled family.

I so enjoyed writing this character, the only one central to the book who was also conjured from whole cloth. When the timelines at last converge, just beyond the pages of this inserted chapter, it's Cherie who brings them together.

Cherie comes a long way in the 316 pages of this novel. When we meet her, in her 2002 timeline, she is a recent high school graduate with the onerous task of helping her emotionally feeble mother, Anna, settle her grandmother's estate. Cherie, just 18, has already experienced how the vicissitudes of life can undermine the best-laid plans. She's tired. She's also indomitable.

By the time her inserted chapter rolls around, she's 10 years older, a bit more beaten down, carrying even bigger losses than before. She's ready for a change. She gets that, and so much more.

Now we come to a man in Northward Dreams who's misunderstood, misjudged, and taken too lightly. He's also a ghost and a whisper in time. He's the father sixteen-year-old Ronnie, in the 1952 timeline, reaches faithfully toward. He ends up being the car bumper in the dog's teeth. You've got him. What are you going to do now?

When Oscar's timeline-breaking chapter comes in, roughly halfway through the book, it's the dawn of the 1970s, and he's far afield of where we discover him in the main narrative, working his handyman schemes. In an episode of Rich Ehisen's Open Mic podcast, I described Oscar as walking unwittingly into the teeth of his own demise.

An excerpt:

That's the thing about rooking people out of what's dear to them. It doesn't always work—and when it goes wrong, it's sometimes spectacularly so—but the cops almost never get called. The shame of it all is too great. How could they be so stupid, so naive? It's what you count on—that they are, in fact, so stupid, and that when the deed goes down, one way or another, their primary concern is making sure nobody else finds out.

Isn't it pretty to think so, Oscar, you fated man? Read on...