I wanted people to read this story. That’s made me think a lot about the life of the writer. Not necessarily or not very often famous and certainly not, as I once imagined, very often the turbulent, outrageous life of drinking and sex, drugs and manic depression. Before I had a taste of sadness and learned the damage true depression could do, I think, no, I knew that it would be romantic to be a drugged up, wined out writer courageously struggling against “the darkness of the world and in himself…” That’s really a great idea for a novel, but a horrible way to live and not a very practical way to write either.
The truth is mine is a very calm life. There is little external tumult. I’ve got to look for the events that occur in my day. But this is what storytellers do. We look, we observe. My days are sedate enough to more than amend for the upheavals, scandals and mistakes in the lives of these characters.
Since the story’s gone up on the web, I’ve had to describe it several times. I thought it would be a lot easier than it is, but the trouble is when writing I never really think about what the tale is about, I just write it.
The story’s about high school. Some people think high school was heaven. Others believe it was hell, I tend to place it somewhere near purgatory. Tina, Vaughan and Mackenzie are finding out who they are and refusing to be who others have made them out to be. Madeleine and Ashley are fighting who they have become. Ian Cane if finding love and friendship in strange places.
You could say it’s about love, especially self love and self acceptance. Mackenzie admits he is gay and has to learn how to begin living with that. This means Vaughan has to learn his best friend in the world is gay and learn how to live with that. Cedric Fitzgerald has been learning—fifteen years now—how to love a wife who has died, but not left him alone.
Primarily it’s a story about friendship. Cedric, Ida and Ralph who have been friends for forty years; Vaughan and Mackenzie, Tina and Madeleine, who have been friends since the womb. Luke, Roy and Ian, the new guys in the circle of friendship. This is a story about how friendship takes many forms, the best of which are unconventional. It takes place within the frame of one high school year in one town called JAMNIA, Ohio.