May-December Affairs, Gay-Straight Friendships, and Just a Touch of ESP
By Diane Wald
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer who revisits particular themes, but recently I received a postcard from an old friend that caused me to reconsider. “I love your new novel,” she said. “It gave me a whole new perspective on your older man/younger woman theme.”
Huh. And then I realized: she must be comparing the relationship Violet, my twenty-six-year-old protagonist in The Bayrose Files has with a man in his forties to the relationship my twenty-something protagonist, Eliza, in a previous book, My Famous Brian, engages in with her professor, who is also forty-ish. Very interesting, I thought. But then I remembered something even more surprising: my first book of fiction, Gillyflower, also featured a relationship between a young character, Nora, and an aging British actor. Good grief. I mean, honestly, I didn’t organize any of that on purpose, and I’d never consciously reflected on this thematic repetition before. I started to feel as if I must really be rather dense.
The more I thought about this, though, the more rapidly things got worse—well, not worse exactly, but certainly more startling. The Bayrose Files had just recently gone to print, and I’d been so immersed in everything that goes into that—the actual writing, the endless revising, the editing, the proofreading, the correcting of several galleys, and all the rest—that I hadn’t thought about the previous two novels in a long time. So—May-December romances, okay, I got that. Fascinating. But I realized there was something more. Each novel also features meaningful friendships between gay and straight characters—deep friendships that involve shared interests, humor, trust, and love. In The Bayrose Files, Violet (straight) enjoys a life-changing friendship with an older gay friend. In My Famous Brain, the divorced main character, Jack, ends up relying heavily on his profound friendship with a gay colleague. And in Gillyflower, the womanizing British actor Hugh forges a friendship that will last many years with a gay man he met in the navy.
You would think all this wallowing in recognition would be enough to send me straight to a literary sort of therapist, wouldn’t you? It might have, I guess, but just when I thought the discoveries were over, I realized my books shared yet another attribute. In each of these books, at least one of the characters possesses a little bit of ESP—or let’s just say a sixth sense. Violet can predict when something significant is going to happen to her through the relative heat of objects she touches; Jack has rather amazing powers, including insight into the future; and Nora and Hugh discover they shared a brilliant moment that transcended reality and prophesied their meeting. It’s true: I had found a third way my characters could walk in the world, or, more accurately, sense their way through it.
Thank goodness, these characters don’t have anything else in common; each is quite an individual, and each story takes place in a distinctive place and time. I’m sure it’s possible that snippets of these characters’ lives reflect experiences I’ve had in my own, but not to any great degree. And yet, I began to look at my work in a new way. Before these three works of fiction, I’d only written poetry, and with poetry, well, we all know you really can’t keep yourself out of it even if you try. I’m not what’s referred to as a confessional poet by any means, but it would be easy enough for someone who knows me well to rifle through my poems and, at the very least, wrestle them into some kind of order following the times and relationships and various fixations in my life. But I’d never thought about the prose work that way at all. Writing prose affects me differently because of the characters, whose lives intrigue me mightily. Now I’ve learned that my own “stuff” inevitably seeps into my prose, and I’ll be on the lookout for it.
What remains, of course is a larger question: why are these things so important to me that they urge me to keep creating plots and settings for characters whose lives revolve around these same themes? It can’t just be the simple fact that discovering them teaches me a few things about myself, because that happens in all types of art. But I think I have it, in one word: connection. I’m obsessed with connections between people of all genders, ages, races, and beliefs. I’m gripped by the idea that connections can be formed in what might at first seem the unlikeliest of relationships, the craziest of circumstances, and the wildest of experiments with time, space, and matter.
The three novels I’ve already written have only begun to scrape away at the outer edges of the possibilities here. I’m already mining some connections between various types of humans, and between humans and animals, that I’m very excited to explore. I’ll have to thank that friend for her postcard and comment about The Bayrose Files because she’s forced me to face the fact that I’ve still got a lot of work to do!
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Diane Wald was born in Paterson, NJ, and has lived in Massachusetts since 1972. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She has published over 250 poems in literary magazines since 1966. She was the recipient of a two-year fellowship in poetry from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, The Denny Award, and The Open Voice Award. She also received a state grant from the Artists Foundation (Massachusetts Council on the Arts). She has published four chapbooks (Target of Roses from Grande Ronde Press, My Hat That Was Dreaming from White Fields Press, Double Mirror from Runaway Spoon Press, and faustinetta, gegenschein, trapunto from Cervena Barva Press) and won the Green Lake Chapbook Award from Owl Creek Press. An electronic chapbook (Improvisations on Titles of Works by Jean Dubuffet) appears on the Mudlark website. She received the first annual Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review. Her book Lucid Suitcase was published by Red Hen Press in 1999 and her book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. Her book WONDERBENDER was published in 2011 by 1913 Press. She has taught at Boston University, The Art Institute of Boston, and Northeastern University. Gillyflower, her first novel, wias released in April 2019 and won first place for Novellas from the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. Visit www.myfamoudbrain.com and www.gillyflowernovel.com.
THE BAYROSE FILES
Ambitious young journalist Violet Maris secures a coveted residency at a prestigious artists’ and writers’ colony in 1980s Provincetown, armed with a file of stories written by a dear, older gay friend. Her intention: to write a captivating exposé based on these narratives. However, Violet’s promising start at the colony takes a dark turn when tragedy strikes— her friend, the true author of the stories, succumbs to AIDS. This loss plunges Violet into turmoil, compounded by the weight of the terrible secret she carries. Compelled to confess, she confides in a member of the colony’s board with whom she has become romantically involved. The revelation of her deception leads to Violet’s expulsion from the program, leaving her grappling with disgrace and searching for a path toward redemption and reconciliation— with herself and those she has inadvertently hurt.
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Category: On Writing
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