"Dear Lucky Agent" Contest

I was excited to hear about this contest for young adult novels: tinyurl.com/pcmopmq and am going to enter my novel, The Jyotisha. You have to submit the first 150-200 words, but winners get an agent's critique of the first ten pages and a free one-year subscription to WritersMarket.com.

More Stories We Carry

I am thinking more about  how some stories have informed my own  young adult novel with a teen protagonist. My book’s about survival and does feature a dog (Call of the Wild). But there was a Chekhov story I kept going back to and re-reading all through high school. “Grief.” It is about a man who drives a horse-drawn carriage for hire in a Russian city. The man’s son has just died and all through the evening’s “cab-driving,” he tries to share his grief with passengers too caught up in their own worlds to pay any attention. Finally, the evening’s over and as the man rubs down his horse, he pours out his heart’s grief to the patiently attentive animal. It's so sad, yet beautiful. You can read the story (with the title sometimes translated as “Misery” here: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/achekhov/bl-achek-misery.htm)

There was something in that insensitivity of the world to one person’s condition that resonated with me then and now. The deep need for connection in an insensitive, self-centered world is something I tried to bring out in my book. e.e. cummings’ poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town,” which I loved as a teenager, has the same theme.

My main character, Dara, has lost her mother and found a silver armlet with the power to heal. She hides her light under a bushel, so to speak, and the first ones she heals are a maimed dog and a homeless woman. When she heals the homeless woman, there are echoes of her own mother, and the world passes by without taking any notice of the miracle. Dara's plight goes under the radar of the world, and Dara must learn to exercise her own power, let that light shine for others to see.

What are the stories that continue to resonate for you and how do those stories manifest today?

The Books We Carry

Some stories stick with you and you carry them around inside for the rest of your life. One of those for me was The Call of the Wild, Set in the Yukon, it tells the story of Buck, a sled dog. The author, Jack London, takes the reader inside Buck’s experiences of human cruelty, as well as human love and kindness.

When I was in the fifth grade, our little school library sponsored a contest, to be judged (as I recall) by the librarian. To enter, you had to draw a picture of your favorite book. I am a terrible artist when it comes to drawing anything realistic. But The Call of the Wild made such a deep impact on me, I wanted to represent it somehow. The book had choked me up. So I drew a tube with red and blue pastels. It was supposed to be a human windpipe, although there was no way to tell that from my drawing. Instead, it was basically two parallel vertical lines with a circular blockage in the middle (like an Adam’s apple). Half was red, half blue, representing the powerful emotions the book generated in me.  I suppose that it might have stood out simply for being more abstract than any other contest entry. I mean, I was competing with amazing pictures of horses in meadows, race cars. And then there was my pastel red and blue picture of . . . something.

The results were read in class and I’ll never forget it when the teacher said, “And the first prize award goes to—I’m so surprised!—Philip.” I think my powerful feeling for that book must have been communicated with my rough abstract.

I’ve carried a compassion for dogs throughout my entire life. I just finished writing a novel, and a dog is one of the main characters in the story. I never connected that back to The Call of the Wild—until I started thinking about it while writing this blog entry. But the dog in my own story, Linc, has been maimed and abandoned. Cruelty. He’s healed and adopted by Dara, who possesses a special healing armlet. Kindness. It’s also a story of survival and that’s one of the main themes of The Call of the Wild.

The stories we carry  inside us come out in all sorts of unexpected ways. They resonate and can last a lifetime. 

What books or stories do you still carry inside you?