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.

*--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.

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...

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.