Moving Forward

The second book in my series, “Fit Company for Oneself,” has 28 chapters. This week I put the eighth chapter up as a Google document where my “early readers” can get at it, teasing it out of many half-formed ideas onto the page. Once again, it doesn’t feel like writing. It feels like I’m sitting with the work, listening, opening myself to what it can tell me. When I begin, I know what I need from a chapter, what I want to work with, but I leave it wide open, inviting in what comes. “Writing,” working with sentences one at a time, comes later.

This openness happens whether I’m in front of a blank page or not. While I’m doing the dishes or on my way to the market, things that are important to a chapter surface. It means that nothing is ever finished, that it can always be made better, of course. But somewhere along the line, it takes form. Last year’s work on “The Pastor’s Kids” is currently gestating. It will get another vigorous edit in August and September this year, based on the comments its readers give me, before I finally try to find an agent to assist in its publication.

My sister Solveig said to me, in a recent phone call, “I didn’t feel little when I was little, and now I don’t feel old.” I certainly have that feeling as well. The nub of our selves which we are given to work with doesn’t change much. That bit of consciousness of our selves gets more comfortable, adapts to situations and makes itself a home somewhere, interpenetrating the consciousness of “others” around us as we grow older.

But as kids we know a lot more than we can express. We watch things happening around us and wonder about them, often having only part of a picture that will sharpen later. Our understanding of the reality around us must ripen, in some cases become fruit. The questions and wonderings raised by the times we live in, the experiences we go through, the culture that surrounds us become the work of our lives. Doing this work, finding the meaning in our lives makes us into grownups.

Line, Marty and Paul Mikkelson must leave what Auden called the “closed society of tradition and inheritance” for “the open society of fashion and choice,” one hundred years after Poe and Baudelaire, in whom Auden first discerned the Modern Age. It took that long for it to penetrate the pocket of Scandinavia in the Midwest, wrapped in cotton wool like an old-fashioned Christmas ornament, where the Mikkelsons grow up. The material elements of their lives are shared with post-WWII Americans everywhere, but the culture, tradition and inherited values came direct from an earlier century.

The transition for my characters happens in about 1966, in this book, “Fit Company for Oneself”. Line, Marty and Paul make the leap each in their own way, though it is many years before the painful change is assimilated. Born close in age, in 1944 thru 1948, they are dragged into the Twentieth century in the turbulent wake of their peers. It is not insignificant to their development, however, that they come from whole cloth. An intact nuclear family, a large extended family, a religious and intellectual culture which, though torn and much patched, retains its value and usability. Throughout their lives, the Mikkelsons can reach back and feel its sustenance as they move steadily forward.