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.

*--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.

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.

So I hear what you're saying: "Craig," you're saying, "just how much of this thing is memory and just how much is imagination? You're hinting at both, but you're not really giving me the scoop. Is Northward Dreams mostly memory or mostly imagination?"

Yes. That's my answer.

OK, OK, so as we dive deeper into the characters and their breakout chapters, here's where the imagination definitively comes in. Erica Stidham--Charley's eventual wife, Ronnie's former wife, Nathan/Nate's forever mom, a woman with her own power dependent on no man—is no longer with us. The woman whose life provided some inspiration for her—remember the great gift I talked about in the previous installment—is most assuredly still here. She's my mother. I ought to know.

​You happy now?

A minor bit of craft talk: When I start writing something new, I usually know little about what is going to happen but much about who will be in the middle of it. That was mostly true for Northward Dreams, save for one character:

Electra. I always knew she'd be leaving early, mostly because I deeply knew the pain her son was in, and would have to be in, and would spend the story fighting against. And sure enough, when the structure of the story began taking shape, we eventually got to Electra, and her busting loose from the established timelines had to happen in a way that fortified the loss of a little boy who grew to be a good, flawed, troubled man:

It's one of the cruel jokes of the universe, that he'd come to you not a year and a half ago and said, Am I going to die someday? ... You'd had to sit him down for one of the Big Talks that's in all the child development books, and you'd had to explain that, yes, he will die someday, we all die after all, but not for a long, long time. Are you and Charley going to die? Yes, but not for a long, long time. Daddy? Yes. But again...

More craft talk: I mention empathy a lot. It's an essential ingredient. When a memory prompts an idea, imagination sweeps in and leaves you with characters whose defining characteristics and subtleties are yet to be discovered. Empathy—understanding them and their thoughts, choices, and motivations—is the pathway to realizing what you wish to do with the work.

I found empathy with Electra, and found her to have surface-level commonalities with my mother but also to possess qualities that were uniquely hers. I didn't have to imagine my mother's death—and good, because I would have hated to contemplate that. I had to feel what losing Electra would be like—her own sense of it, yes, but also, and especially, what it would do to her child.

It was a gut punch, both ways.

Onward we go into primary, secondary, and even tertiary characters from Northward Dreams who break away from the main narrative in a series of chapters that exist beyond the boundaries of the book's four established timelines.

My role is not to play favorites with characters. My job, such as it is, lies in achieving empathy with all of them, listening to what they have to say, and, at least in the case of these chapters, talking to them. But if I were inclined to play favorites, Charley might well be my choice.

You don't have to know a lot about me to know why. The most consequential male role model in my life is my stepfather. That my mother imagined something different for our lives and took us to him remains the single biggest gift I'll ever receive. That's well-covered ground. One could argue—I certainly would—that without that gift, this novel wouldn't have come to me. I would further surmise that the writing life itself might have been beyond my reach without that gift's presence, but that is an unknowable for which I am grateful.

As I often say, though, there is memory (what actually happened, or what we perceive happened in our faulty hindsight), there is imagination (the fanciful stuff of world- and character-building), and there is what comes where the two meet. Charley Stidham won't tell you a thing about the life of the boy I was (and why should you be interested?). He'll tell you much about what it is to love, and to yearn, and to find gifts in the unexpected.

As Charley's chapter dawns, he is arriving at the concluding paragraph of a life spent with words. Retirement. It's 2005, and he has seen a lot. There have been losses along the way, as there are for anyone with the audacity to live long enough to see them.

He also has a whale of a surprise lurking at a public event he reluctantly attends:

You're struck by something. You can still hear her when his mouth flies open, can see her inside his eyes and the small of his mouth, remember the way she would sometimes throw herself between the two of you in a fraught moment, until she learned to trust, and until you made your own way with him and all of you became a three-legged family and learned how to lope along together. And then...

And then? You'll have to read the book.

This is a continuation of the look at various characters from Northward Dreams and how they're presented outside the four established timelines in a series of inserted chapters.

If Opal Knudsen, the subject who opens the book, is the master key to the story, Ronnie Ray is the rippling thread that runs through it: a sixteen-year-old runaway in search of connection in 1952; a man being run from twenty years later, one who feels as though something has been taken from him; and the elderly puzzlement to his troubled adult son in 2012, when at last all the timelines converge.

Ronnie was fascinating to write, not least of all because I both understand him on a cellular level—the pain, the incompleteness, the inability to rise to the needs of someone else—and because I've spent a lifetime trying to connect with an older man (my father) to whom I'm tethered, to whom I give love, and whom I'd never, ever in a million years choose to know if he hadn't come to me in the bargain that comes with being granted life.

How's that for a tease?

Ronnie's broken-out chapter takes place in the early 1960s, roughly a decade after his boyhood reaching out and roughly a decade before he loses his wife and son to his inattention and the call of a better life. He's just out of the Army, he has undertaken something he was once warned not to do, and he's thrashing about.

Excerpt:

So you tell Electra that you've had your fill, that it's not working, that you want to go, and you know she's happy with that, because she wants to go, too. The occasional night out in Great Falls, some dancing and too much drink, just isn't cutting it. And here, on this lonely bench, she knows both too much and not enough. She's restless. She wants a baby, and you can't even begin to picture that, but she tells you there's a time coming when it'll happen and it'll be right, and that time won't come as long as the two of you are here.

Want to know more? I hope so.

Now that Northward Dreams, at long last, is out in the world and available in hardcover and e-book (with the audiobook on the way!), I'm enjoying the payoff for all the lonely work of writing it and preparing it for delivery: the idea that there are people out there reading it. (Thank you!)

If you're one of those people, you didn't have to go far—the very first words—to encounter one of the book's devices, for lack of a better word. Spread out among the 32 numbered chapters of the book, which encompass four timelines (1952, 1972, 2002, 2012), are nine chapters that focus on individual characters who inhabit the book. These chapters—which I've heretofore been misnaming as intercalaries—exist outside the story's established timelines and illuminate aspects of the characters that inform the whole of the narrative. They're also written in second person, a choice I expanded on in this interview with Chérie Newman:

​I think I went with the second-person point of view initially just to talk to them: Here's what's happening to you, what you're feeling, why it has gone the way it has. Any notion I had about changing that up went away once I saw the effect. There's an immediacy to the POV. Those characters are illuminated in ways they couldn't have been even in close third person.

So that's why I did it, but this isn't really about that. (It's not expressly a craft talk.) Instead, I want to dig into who these characters are and why they spoke to me—and why they allowed me to speak to them—without giving away the essential plot, so to speak.

​(Before I get too far into that, about the errant use of intercalary: These chapters don't quite fit the accepted definition because they do involve main characters and are less about theme, I think, than they are about backstory. For a more traditional view of the intercalary, think of the turtle chapter of The Grapes of Wrath. I certainly do—I referenced it many years ago in a short story.)

Opal goes first because...she goes. She dies, right there on Page 13:

You kneel, the knees of your jeans in the mud, and you take the clipping shears from your apron pocket. You size up the job, and you pitch forward into the bush.

Two crows, languid on the telephone line above, bear witness. Across the way, the hammering goes on, beating out a rhythm, a simple song for the dead and gone.

Here's the thing about Opal, though: She is, in a significant way, the master key to the story, the connector of 1952 and 1972 and 2002, when she leaves us, and even 2012, when she's a full decade gone. Without Opal, the connections among Ronnie and Cherie and Nate and Electra—the four primary characters of those timelines—lack resonance. And without those four, Oscar and Anna and Charley and Brandon are four characters in search of a story. In subsequent installments of this series of posts, I'll introduce you to all of them. You'll just have to believe me that they all fit, eventually. Or read the book, please!