So much to do, so much to say, but not all of it right now...

A week ago today, I was headed to Arizona for the Tucson Festival of Books, hands down the best festival experience I've had in my career. But this ain't about that (I'm saving it for the newsletter, and you should subscribe if you don't already).

This is about something I came across in my decompression from travel and a little head cold I brought home with me.

I'm listening to the album Chappaquiddick Skyline, which I've known note by note for more than 20 years but only recently bought in vinyl. It's almost a whole new sonic experience. And as I perused the liner notes by Joe Pernice, I was struck by what he had to say from the vantage point of two decades on from making the album:

The haphazardly circled part there—sorry, kids, but my hands aren't so steady now, even less so with a mouse—is, to me, just about the most on-point description of the creative sweet spot as I've ever read. I don't know squat about making records or painting frescoes; those art forms are for my enjoyment and enrichment, not my indulgence as a practitioner. But I know a thing or two about creative writing and what it feels like when the work sings. I wish I knew more about how to make that happen, again and again, but I suppose the game lies in chasing it, sometimes coming up short, and occasionally capturing it.

​Which brings me to Jane...

Jane, Divided, which I read one final time in the past week, sings. She does. I'm fairly flabbergasted, because I spent 10 years writing her, and those 10 years brought profound changes to my life and, I presume, to the manuscript I kept returning to. Somehow, I kept the beat with her.

This isn't to say she'll be a hit. She probably won't. She'll be widely available* but not widely known, a byproduct of the limitations brought on by her small-press launch. But she'll be out there, and discoverability can be forever. I'll give her the best push I can. I'll be proud of her, always. I'm proud of everything I've put out there, my one hedge against the vagaries of popularity, interest, critical esteem, apathy, etc.

And for the rest of my days, I'll be able to look at her and say, "You know what? Sometimes, you find the vibe. And it feels awfully good when you do."

*—paperback, ebook, audiobook. Details coming soon. Hang in there.

Interestingly enough, it was a conversation at my job that got me to thinking about fine art, even though those words—"fine" and "art"—never came up when my colleagues and I were batting around the notion of work-life balance and what it really means to each of us.

I'm always doing this, by the way. I'm always rocketing off from one topic to another, with little connective tissue, as my mind stretches one thing into another. This elasticity largely serves me well—the entirety of my career as a fiction writer can pretty much be accredited to this tendency (or this tendency can be blamed, depending on your view of things)—but I sometimes end up in choppy waters when I blurt out where my head goes without giving the person I'm talking to some kind of road map.

So here, in the confines of this little blast of words, I'll try to reconstruct how one thing led to another. "Work-life balance," to me, is a moving target, subject to the tides of age, interests, location, current events, etc. When I was in my twenties and never turned myself off from my career, I thought I was supremely balanced. I worked, I slept, and I road-tripped in almost perfect proportions. (I also moved a lot, having not yet figured out that wherever you go, there you are.)

Thirty years down the line, I'm a different guy. I turn off work—my job, my writing, the many other things I do to make a buck—when it's time to step away. I'm not idle, though. I rarely watch TV. On evenings and weekends, I'm reading, or having lunch with friends, or exploring, or attending events. Sometimes, all of that.

This is where fine art comes in. I have, in all surprise to myself, become a collector of paintings. Not an investor; I'm not buying low and selling high. I'm buying and holding, forevermore. I'm dressing my walls with work that moves me emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically. I'm learning everything I can about the creators of the works I buy—how they work, how they think, what moves them, why they answer the call.

I'm learning what I like and don't like, what speaks to me and what doesn't. I'm learning to articulate those things, lacking any sort of background in technique or criticism. I look for beautiful things. The definition of "beautiful"? That's all on me. I'm figuring it out as I go.

So here's the thing: When I was a younger man, paintings didn't interest me in the least. I'm not sure why, except that I was always in such a hurry to get to the next thing that I never stood in front of one long enough to let it sink into me.

Is it age, a moderating temperament, a need to stand in silence for a while, something that would have rattled me in those days when I equated frenetic activity with being alive? I'm not sure. What I do know is that it's a loud world getting louder, and so many of the people populating it are moving through their lives with their attentions divided, as if their brains are spread out over eight dozen browser tabs. I'm not above that. All too often, I'm right there with them.

Art is my shelter from that, a place I can slip into and let my thoughts settle. No pleasure these days is richer than the one that comes from standing in front of a painting and letting it work me over.

​I wasn't always in this place. But I'm here now. Balance has been redefined.

I also know this: Putting up art in the the place where I create has a real, if immeasurable, effect on my work. It opens the creative pores, if you will. I want to contribute to a world that, amid its many horrors and bafflements, also contains such beauty. It makes me want to be better at what I do, not for aggrandizement or fame or riches, but because I can think of no higher calling than to brighten the corners of dark places with art.

Not a bad way to find balance, eh?

In some quarters of the art world, sentiment is mocked, derided, downgraded, disdained. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe, whom I would follow to any frontier of creation he cared to visit (and I did!), once said, "I despise nostalgia and I’m a naturally sentimental person so of course I abhor sentimentality." (He also said all of this in a highly nuanced way, so please read the interview.) Reviewers of serious literature—whatever that is—often take away points when sentimentality is present or even sensed.

What's a sentimental guy—a lover of It's a Wonderful Life, someone who cries when Rocky calls out for Adrian, a music lover who mists up when a McCartney song reminds him of when he first heard it and what life was like then*—to do?

I was thinking about this during the past week as I re-read a novel I'm calling Jane, Divided (those who remember the song I poached it from will recognize this as a sentimental title). The story is set in near present day (well, 2016), with a main character who is back in her Texas hometown, which just so happens to be my Texas hometown. She is pushing forward, as we all should, and grappling with her past, as we all do. Jane comes from my generation, if not my specific year of vintage, and thus some of her memories are mine, or at least from the same vicinity.

I'm not sure how sentimentality is to be avoided, in this case. And that's fine, because I'm also not inclined to avoid it.

What I am inclined to avoid, however, is the laziness that often accompanies the sentimental lookback. Who among us hasn't said "times were simpler then"? But were they, really? Simpler than now, certainly, but the versions of us who existed back then had no way of knowing that. In those bygone moments, the times were as complicated as known time has ever been, technology was on the cutting edge, attitudes were shifting in dizzying ways, etc. If you're in 2025—and you are, if you're reading this—and you pine for 1975, just remember that each day and each development, each heartbreak, each triumph was new to you fifty years ago. The times, man, they were crazy. Not like they were in 1965 (yeah, they were crazy then, too) or 1955 (ditto) or 1945 (are you kidding me?).

If we don't strive to see the fuller picture of where we are and how we got here, that simple yearning for a simpler time can be corrosive to a thoughtful consideration of matters.

Sentiment, however, is not the problem. If one strives for art—and I should say here that I don't, at least not as the driving motivation for doing the work**—the manner in which sentimentality is conveyed can be the problem. It can be clumsy and cloying, but that's a fault of the writing, not the sentiment. I could pull every book I've ever written off the shelf and find you some sentence, paragraph, or chapter that causes me to cringe in the face of its bald-faced sentimentality. (I won't, but I could.) But what difference does that possibly make now? If I've been true to myself, if I've written the best thing I can write at the time I've written it, I'm good. The only thing that matters is the next thing.

In this sense, I'm with John Irving (In Defense of Sentimentality, 1979): "When we writers—in our own work—escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters."

*—That's the thing about the past. I don't have a full picture of what life was like then, because I'm relying on memory. The lens aimed backward is attached to an unreliable camera. Interestingly enough, it's the malleability of those memories and the transformative power of imagination that often combine for good fiction.

**—I consider myself a storyteller, not an artist. On occasion, if I do my work well and faithfully, art emerges.

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.

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.