This month ChiZine Publications (CZP) published my second novel,
The
Indigo Pheasant, the sequel to 2009's
The Choir
Boats. The characters in both books concern themselves
with finding a place outside our maps, a place called Yount.
Whether they satisfy their longing is something I will let readers decide
for themselves. In this short essay (thank you again Charles for
inviting me to guest-post at
Bibliophile Stalker), I will instead
talk about my own search for Yount. You can decide for yourself
whether I have succeeded in overcoming what Baudelaire named "that
fever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia for
some land we have never seen."
I began to seek Yount in 1969, when I read
The Hobbit. I was
just old enough to hear the first cold voices bidding me leave what
Ursula K. Le Guin (speaking of Sleeping Beauty) calls “the wilderness
within.” One is thrust out of Faerie and the path of return
is barred by briars that grow to the sky. For long years I did what
we all do: I worked in the Here and Now, gaining experience of the
practical sort, and sticking (for the most part) to the quotidian and
conventional.
The melody of Yount never left me. I have worked all my life to
keep my passport to that realm, to explore just a little more. Bits
of Yount cropped up in the notebooks and folios I filled from 1970
forward with stories, maps, and drawings. I have held with me specific
lines of dialogue and descriptive passages since college in the late
1970’s. For as long as I can remember, I have woken up before dawn
to scribble down the vestiges of dreams, and drafted stories late at
night and on the weekends.
Then, one Saturday in May of 2002, suddenly and without any plan
whatsoever I wrote parts of what are now the first two chapters of
The
Choir Boats. No one was more astounded than I was when Barnabas
and his calicosh vest appeared in the counting-house on Mincing Lane,
followed by the laconic Sanford…and then Tom, my dear Sally, and soon the
mysterious Maggie.
“Why now?” I wondered, and I wonder still. I have decided Barnabas
and the rest of the McDoons came knocking when they did because I had
gained four nephews in the 1990’s (a fifth joined us in 2003). As
the King says to Smith of Wootton Major, some gifts are not for keeping,
but must be passed on. My nephews and their fathers (my
brothers) all know something about Yount.
In the beginning and in the end (regardless of what we do in between),
our stories to one another matter most. From the shortest but most
powerful story - “I love you” - to the Mabinogions and Mahabharatas, the
Kalevalas and Sundjiata Keitas and Shahnamehs that define nations.
Jean Rhys put it best: “All of writing is a huge lake. There
are rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And
there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is
feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You
must keep feeding the lake.”
Telling a story is a humbling exercise, especially when the teller is the
smallest of droplets hoping to feed the lake. The story informs you
that it is ready but that you are too slow, too weak, too confused to
capture it. The author never measures up to the story’s
expectations. Even our greatest storytellers acknowledge that they
are capable only of presenting us with a fragile approximation of an
underlying original. To take just one example, here is Jorge Luis
Borges:
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“No one can
write a book. Since
Before a book
can really be
It needs the
dawn, the dusk, centuries,
Arms, and the
binding and sundering sea.”
The McDoons found me but their story is elusive. Imagine strangers
appearing in your living room. More than that: strangers who aren’t
really strangers, but who claim to be kin, who know more about you than
you know about yourself, who make themselves free with your larder, and
who then order you to find out what comes next. That’s the slightly
sinister part, that you are compelled to discover and capture the
story. The path is a dangerous one. Margaret Atwood says all
writers “must descend to where the stories are kept.” Seamus
Heaney, writing about violent epiphanies, blood, and shards of bone,
enjoins us to:
“Lie down
in the
word-hoard…
Compose in
darkness,
Expect aurora
borealis
In the long
foray
But no cascade
of light. …
Come back past
Philology and
kennings,
Re-enter
memory…”
So I descended and found the gate to memory. I hope you will join
me as together we pass through the gate, to find ourselves back home at
last in the place Octavio Paz describes:
“Willow of
crystal, a poplar of water,
A
pillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
Tree that is
firmly rooted and that dances,
Turning course
of a river that goes curving,
Advances and
retreats, goes roundabout,
Arriving
forever:
The calm course
of a star…”
Or, as Frodo experiences it at the very end of the trilogy: “…the grey
rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he
beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift
sunrise.”
One big lake (a sea really, binding yet sundering), many different rivers
and streams. One Yount, many names, many roads."
Biography: Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology
in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other
Realm.
ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The
Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012
brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant:
Volume Two of Longing for Yount.
Daniel's short fiction and poetry have appeared in
Sybil's Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet,
Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope,
and Scheherezade's Bequest. He has presented at Arisia, Readercon,
Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had
twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects
ranging from fairy tale to finance.
A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in
18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in
northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce
development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife
and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided
cover art for both Daniel's novels), along with the requisite two cats.
Novel preview links:
Book page links:
Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats
