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.

The jangle of the cellphone—unmistakable, jarring, relentless—enters the slipstream of a sunken reverie, a mishmash of now and then, of events known and impressionistic, of faces presented and obscured, of times endured and never breached. As the tone loops through for a second run-through, then a third, Nate Ray tumbles nearer consciousness. His hand emerges from under the sheet and cuts off the ringer, then slips back into the crumpled bedding left sticky and sour from night sweats.

The light comes in now, defying the inclination toward running down sleep again. Nate’s eyelids flap. He’s on his back, staring into the plastic molded ceiling, fixated on the AC unit that up and stopped whirring a week ago, more maintenance deferred until god knows when.

She’s gone. Nate knows that sure enough even with his eyes closed. It was a jackpot the night before that she’d even come around, and there had been some unspoken--thank Christ—finality to it all, a let’s-have-one-last-hurrah roll together through the night. He’d fallen asleep with his nose in her chest, that much he remembered, and here he is alone, as it should be, no memory of her eventual movement toward the door.

Nate folds himself up to sitting, halfway at least, elbows at his sides like hydraulic lifts, pushing him up. He’s making an inventory now of every ache—the ones chronic, like the left knee Doctor Simmons at the VA says will need replacing, and the ones that come on without warning or an appointment.

Next, he swings his legs toward the floor, cupping the trouble knee with his hands to keep it stabilized. The problem, of course, is that Doctor Simmons, wise though he may be, isn’t the authority on exactly when the knee will be dealt with and who’ll be carrying the freight on it. It’s the latter point on which Nate and Veterans Affairs find themselves at an unbalanced impasse, Nate’s contention being that an unremarkable stint in the navy ought to be good for a new knee, at least, and the VA’s contention being that, well, no. It’s a staredown the bureaucrats can play into eternity—it’s not their knee, after all—and the list of deferred maintenance grows ever longer.

The melodic ping comes, alerting him to a message, and Nate grabs the phone and flips it open to see what he’s missed in the fitful night and early morning. The deliverer of the latest voice mail, Ronnie, can wait--forever would be nice, Nate thinks, but fat chance of scoring that kind of luck this late into things. Karen’s message, dropped in at 6:23 a.m., no doubt soon after she granted her own release from the trailer, bears listening.

I tried to wake you. Figures. You know, I keep hoping you’ll actually surprise me and show up. Guess I’ll know in an hour and a half or so. Listen, Nate, if you don’t, I’m gonna need you to hitch up and get off my property, OK? It’s too hard.

“Too hard for the both of us,” he says, and he deletes the message. It’s a hell of a thing, he thinks not for the first time, to have these get-togethers be a point of such pain when daylight comes around again and reconsideration is put on the table. Everything he’s taken, she’s offered first. The job he never wanted. The pastureland he parked the trailer in two months ago, useful enough but also not as rare as gold. She’s doing him a favor, sure, but it’s not the last one he’ll ever have a chance to call in. He’s parked the rig in other places at other times, and he reckons he can find someplace new if it comes to that, if she’s really had her fill, or if he’s had his. It’s gotten to the point that she wants something he’s not prepared to give and she’s not prepared to say, and this indistinct thing lies down between them at night, taking up most of the bed.

He moves into the living area of the trailer—he’s seen this space called “the great room” in some of the newer models he’s gawked at down at Camping World, but this isn’t that in any configuration. It has a two-burner gas stove, the propone nearly drained, and a refrigerator that runs cold, praise be, but also cultivates mystery flora sprouting from foam boxes holding half-consumed takeout dinners. No microwave. No dishwasher. He’s overdue for a black-water dump. A single basin aluminum sink ringed with gunk from who knows when. Sitting adjacent is a tattered couch, shedding foam like dandruff from the holes in the arms, and it lies aligned with the thirteen-inch color TV he’s strapped into place with old speaker wire and which pulls in two over-the-air channels, and sometimes three if it’s not raining, from the antenna he’s rigged up on the roof. Home.

Nate takes a swig from the open bottle of Canadian Club that sits on the countertop. He cringes and squints and he smacks his lips and savors the washaway of morning tacky mouth, and he takes another for good measure, hair of the dog and all that.

The realizations and lines of thought that come to Nate these days don’t lay out in parallels or even perpendiculars. They’re at odd angles, lying crosswise against each other, overlapping, one thought the ignition source for some other bleak firing of the synapses that, sometimes, improves his position but mostly leaves him befuddled and behind the flow of things. The whisky has set his mind on spirits, which oddly, or maybe even predictably, brings into his head the voice of his learned son, the word pusher, who told him once about how whisky, no “e,” refers to the Scottish and Canadian and even Japanese grain spirits but that whiskey, full-on “e,” is for the grain spirits distilled here and in Ireland, and anyway, you shouldn’t drink so much of it, Dad, because you know how you get. “Well,” Nate had said, in another loosing of the tongue that he’s regretted far longer than it ever took him to say the words, “that’s fascinating and all, but I ain’t interested in the vowels. Just the dollar signs and not too damn many of those, thank you very much.”

He needs to call Brandon, he knows, but he needs to call Ronnie first, because that’s the more loathsome chore and the one that might divert him directly back to that bottle and the identical one under the sink, if memory serves right.

Nate flips the phone open again and sets it on the countertop for easy dialing. He roots through the fridge and brings out a couple of eggs, turns on the burner and hopes for enough flame to get them scrambled, and when the works are all up and running, he patches through the number to the old man, who answers on the second ring with “You listen to my message?”

“No.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I’ve missed you, Pop. Couldn’t wait to talk to you.” Nate reaches for the bottle, has it by the neck like a pullet, then lets it go.

“Sure.”

“What do you need?”

“I need you to come over and spring me from this mortuary, which you’d know if you’d listened to me in the first place.”

“Oh. Well, why didn’t you say so?”

Nate says it only because he knows it’ll bind the old man up something fierce, and the sputtering “I goddamn did” comes back as validation. Nate again toys with the bottle of whisky.

“OK, where we going?” A summons from Ronnie isn’t new or notable. The place he calls “this mortuary” is, in fact, a perfectly respectable assisted-living center just north of Fort Worth, which has taken in Nate’s father for the low, low price of his monthly Social Security check, his retirement disbursement, and the keys to a single-wide trailer house that’s long since been liquidated and picked over for cash. When Ronnie gets restless, he calls for a ride, and Nate can usually settle him down with a middling beer or two and a plate of decent barbecue.

“Montana,” Ronnie says.

“No, really.”

“Really.”

“I’m not going to Montana.”

“You damn sure are. Gonna pick me up first, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

The eggs, neglected, run hot, headed for hardness and, eventually, carbon, and Nate splashes them with the whisky. The liquid hisses and bubbles, and Nate scrapes at the mess with a spatula. “Gotta go,” he says.

“No,” Ronnie says. “Wait. I really need your help with this.”

Nate turns off the gas, lifts the pan with a crusted rag, slaps it against the rim of the sink and splatters the contents.

“Why?”

“Your aunt died.”

Nate blinks. “Linda?”

“Yeah.”

“Your sister, you mean.”

“Yeah,” Ronnie says.

“I didn’t know her. Not my business.”

“Look, look,” Ronnie says, and it’s almost plaintive, almost vulnerable, a damn rarity from him. “I need a ride. Come on. Don’t make me beg.”

“I can’t afford to make that trip.” Nate looks around him at the squalor he’s managed to ignore until the moment it all falls over onto him. “Ride the bus if it’s so important to you.”

“I’ll pay.”

“Right.”

“I have some cash squirreled away.”

“How much?”

“Enough. You coming?”

Nate rather doubts his story. A room, Ronnie has. Three squares, ditto. Somebody to clean his linens and buck out his trash, certainly. Even some old coots for games of penny ante, and who knows, maybe he’s taken down a modest fortune there. But he’s cash-poor. They’ve been through this, a year and a half ago after the third heart attack, liquidating everything they could before Ronnie went in. But whatever. If he can’t put the first tank of gas in the truck, it’ll be a short trip. Nothing better to do.

“Yeah, in a bit,” Nate says.

One last note: The book is slowly finding its legs in the retail ecosystem. The hardcover files have been uploaded and approved, but full migration to retailer sites can be slow—a weeks-long process. The e-book file is with my designer and should be uploaded in the next week or so. The audiobook will be several weeks beyond that, but it's coming, too. Such is life when you're a single-batch brewer of books.

If you'd like a signed hardcover, my hometown independent bookstore, This House of Books, would be pleased to send you one. Just be sure to note your request for a signed copy in the comment field.

Want to help me build a marketing effort for Northward Dreams? Check out my Kickstarter campaign. There are some really cool rewards tiers, or you can just toss in a couple of bucks. I'd love to have you on board.

There is a point to this, I promise, but I can't get there without first telling a sweet little story. So just bear with me, please...

I've been contacting old friends on Facebook and other social sites, collecting mailing addresses. I'm having a literary reading and book signing this May in Texas, my first one in my home state in many years, and seldom does one get a chance to gather his foundational friends and acquaintances in one place and say thank you, for everything. I'm going to take that shot.

The address search eventually led me to a man named Jim Fuquay, and that's where both the sweet little story and the point come in.

Jim, an avid gardener, told me he was fighting the doldrums of February by reconnecting with old friends, that it had been a nifty little coincidence that I had reached out when I did. He asked me to give him a call, and I did, and let me tell you, it's been a long time since I enjoyed a half-hour as much as I did that one.

​But that's not the point.

Jim was the first person to give me steady work in my first chosen field. It's been many years since that happened—thirty-five of them as of November of last year—and we both are, to state the obvious, much older now. We established on the call that he's eighteen years my elder (I honestly never knew the age gap, only that when we met, he was a fully mature man and I was...not). Eighteen years doesn't seem like that many now that I'm breathing heavily on age 54, but when I was eighteen years old and standing in his office, asking to be turned loose on writing newspaper articles, he sure seemed like an elder. An exceptionally kind and accessible elder, yes, but an elder just the same.

​Here's how I described Jim's decision to hire me in a public lecture I gave several years ago:

The month before, I’d answered an ad in the Star-Telegram seeking correspondents for weekly community sections of the newspaper. I was eighteen, and the hiring editor wasn’t much interested in me until he read my clips. ... He gave me a job: the lowest-level, worst-paying, crappiest-assignment kind of writing job there was, but a job. Our deal was that I’d keep plugging away at school, he’d feed me a story opportunity every week or so, pay me $50 per, and let me build up a body of work. By late December...I had a story on the front page of the main newspaper. I was 18 years old, and I’d climbed a mountaintop of sorts. I wasn’t in the place I’d wanted to be, and I hadn’t made much headway into my half of the bargain with my boss, but I was getting somewhere.

So many somewheres, as it turned out.

During our phone call, I couldn't help reflecting on something that has crossed my mind plenty of times in my long working life, when I've considered how I got from there to here (and all the destinations in between): Jim didn't have to hire me. He could have given me a cursory look and sent me on my way, and his life would have been continued apace.

Mine changed that day.

A life has some number of true turning points, and that was one of mine. What Jim did that was so kind, so basic, and yet so uncommon is that he took a good look at me and imagined what I could be rather than fixating on what I was not. I was eighteen; I had no track record. I had only potential and gumption.

Jim said yes to a kid who badly needed to hear that word.

This is my point.

And this is my plea: If ever you're in a position to take a gamble on someone, to surprise someone with a "yes" when you could save yourself time and aggravation with a brush-off, breathe that "yes" into the air. It could be the break that unlocks everything else for the recipient of that welcome word.

I talk about this a lot with a friend with whom I lunch regularly. Where is the ladder anymore? What's a kid who doesn't emerge from the traditional mold supposed to do? What is a career and how does anybody get one?

When I was eighteen years old, in 1988, I was audacious in seeking a job, but at least I knew where to look. I had my eyes on a journalism career, and the procession into one was fairly well established at that point. You went to college. You gathered some experience. You did an internship. You caught on somewhere and started swimming.

​If you didn't read my public lecture, linked above, perhaps take a look now. I inverted that formula. More than that, I yanked it up by its feet and bounced it off its head. I bombed the college part, eventually. Internship? Never had one, at least not in a traditional sense. Experience? Not so much, no, not at that point. I came to Jim that fall bearing clips of stories I'd written for my high school paper. Not exactly a bastion of journalistic excellence. I came to him with chutzpah because chutzpah was all I had.

​Still, he said yes. He knew where the ladder was, knew he'd climbed it himself, knew the responsibility he had to make sure it was in good stead for someone else. He'd gained some latitude in his profession and spent some of it on me. A simple word, "yes," with fraught possibilities and potentially difficult outcomes. But what's the good of having a "yes" in your pocket if you're not willing to draw it out and slap it on the table?

As we rang off, I thanked him for taking a chance back then.

"I've never regretted it," he said.

​Neither have I, Jim. Neither have I.

I moved to Texas when I was three years old. No one consulted me, and I wasn't happy about it, but Texas and I, we found our way. In time, I came to view that move as the most consequential event in my life.

When I left Texas for the first time, I was fifteen years old, about to be a sophomore in high school, and I made a snap decision that I'd like to live with my father in rural New Mexico. He'd just been through a divorce, a particularly bad one, and I thought maybe he needed me. It didn't take. A lot of lessons in that, some that got under my skin immediately and others that steeped for many years before I understood. Among the latter group, probably one of the most important lessons: You can't fix for someone else what he must mend on his own. By the end of December, I was back home in North Texas, where I belonged, even if I still felt the fit was a little tight.

When I left Texas for the second time, I was twenty-one, and I pointed my nose toward just about the farthest-away dot on my map. I went to Kenai, Alaska, for a sports editor's job. That didn't take, either--though some vital friendships did—and I came scurrying back not six months later.

When I left Texas for the third time, I was twenty-three, and it was a job I left behind, a fairly miserable nine-month stint in Texarkana. Texas and I, we were living together uneasily amid irreconcilable differences. I worked at night on the Texas side, then hustled back across the line to Arkansas to set down my head. When I had a chance to leave Texas, off to Kentucky I went.

When I left Texas for the fourth—and, as yet, final—time, I was thirty years old and adrift, in the midst of one of those Worst Years Ever that seem to surface every decade. I'd bounced from San Jose to San Antonio, and I'd found Texas to be what it always had been: inscrutable, beautiful, alluring, interesting, and not for me. Back to San Jose I went, but first with a three-month misdirection in Olympia, Washington, and it's like I said: bad year.

This is all to say that I've left Texas a lot. But Texas has never left me.

The math doesn't lie. Texas had me for most of eighteen years, then nine months, then eight months. Nineteen and a half years, let's call it. Add in various visits over the years—can you really leave a place that harbors your parents and your siblings and your formative memories and some of the best friends you've ever had?—and the total still falls short of twenty years, but let's round it up. Fine. Twenty years of Texas.

I'm fifty-three, and on the cusp of the next number up. The scales tip heavily toward everywhere else. Here before too long, Montana will sink its years deeper into me than Texas ever did. It already has more of my heart, more influence on my creativity, a bigger share of my identity.

Still, Texas abides. Still, Texas claims me. Still, I claim Texas.

Those holds are coming up through my work first, which means they're coming up in my memories. My latest work is drenched in Texas, even if most of it unfolds farther north. There was no way to imagine Nathan Ray, the central character of the ensemble, without first cozying up to the Texas I knew as a boy, then conjuring a backstory where the Texas he knows is a backdrop of pain and disillusionment and gifts he cannot yet see.

It's in the next book—the one with a title in flux, the one that may emerge in 2025, or maybe '26—that Texas takes a star turn, a place both abandoned and returned to.

Here's a snippet:

Texas was gone, falling behind us a mile a minute, and I was relieved and scared all at the same time. You leave Texas little by little and then all at once, yes, but Texas is also a magnet—a big, southerly magnet pulling at everyone else in the country with myths and manufactured romance and jobs and cheap living and low taxes. You can get away, but can you ever really leave?

My answer, beyond the bounds of fiction? It's complicated. You can leave, sure. But you come back. The only thing is, I've never made a return stick. But it's early yet. I'm still upright and breathing.

In the foreseeable term, of course, I'm not going anywhere. I live in Montana, I love living in Montana, and the father with whom I couldn't live in 1985 really does need me now. He lives in Montana. As long as he draws breath, and probably longer, here I'll be.

But I can't quit Texas, and unlike the answer I'd have given you twenty years ago, I don't want to. It's in my head and my heart and my memories, and the last of those is the most essential ingredient in doing this thing I do. That, I believe, is why Texas seems so insistent these days, like a song that I can't get out of my ears. It's having its say in my work, and I'm making room for it there. Perhaps, in some future I cannot yet see, I'll make other accommodations for it, too.

Occasionally, either not knowing my history or not caring, a friend or acquaintance will say something cutting about the place that shaped my boyhood, and thus my life. And I'll cringe, because the cuts are easy enough to administer when Texas serves up such ridiculous stereotypes, such a bloody history, such casually cruel politics. On a day when I can find patience and indulgence for a friend's carelessness, I will say, OK, yes, but Texas is also a vast and beautiful place, full of beautiful people who contain multitudes.

Texas isn't made for anyone's tidy little box. It's destined to spill out from whatever attempts to contain it. In short, it cannot be seen in simplicities when its complexities abound.