I have
been to Vancouver, BC only twice. I was there in November of 1999,
and that visit was only twenty-four hours. Admittedly, I did so much
during that visit that it seemed like a much longer time. And, as the
case was, I was alone during the road trip to and from, so I had
ample time to think. Also, I faithfully wrote everything down upon my
return to Portland.
The
second time I went to Vancouver was a year later in November of 2000.
That trip I was with my girlfriend at the time, and one of my best
friends and the three of us visited another friend once we got there.
The second trip to Vancouver, needless to say, was vastly different
than the first. I found myself taking everyone around to various
sites of my first visit, but I did not tell any of them why.
The
real advantage to waiting as long as I did to rewrite this manuscript
is that I was able to make a nightly visit to Vancouver from my desk
in Longmont, CO via the internet. I looked at maps, and I looked at
Google Street view. As ersatz as it is, it was a remarkable thing for
me to see.
I
found myself getting very nostalgic for a place that I really never
spent much physical time in. The amount of mental space Vancouver has
taken up over the last two and a half decades is sizable, it really
is. The city and my place within it never really left me, it’s weird.
And the people I met there, Kelly namely, have also been with me for
all these years.
What’s
different now?
After
I left Goddard in January of 2009, all I knew was that I wanted to
write. In January of 2009, I only really had my graduate school
thesis, From Ansbach to Color
as a completed manuscript. Sure, I had a few older pieces, and at the
time I really held them as valuable assets. I had The Exile
which I wrote in 1993. I had Twenty-four Hours in Vancouver
which I wrote in November of 1999. And then the other two: Mascaras
y Munecas and The
Cataract which I wrote in 2000
and 2001 respectively. These are very old manuscripts, and even if I
had once thought of them as novels, they never were. They were just
stories that I wrote, or pieces of stories that I hoped to make
(remake) into novels some day. Some day came this year.
The
order in which I have done these has been appropriate, I think. I
rewrote The Cataract
in April after immediately leaving Astoria, Oregon the month before.
And Exile I rewrote in
July, which means I gave it a full thirty years between drafts. And
as I have said earlier, I knew as Exile
was winding down how I needed to rework Twenty-four Hours
as a story for Sam Foley.
I
think it’s worth noting that when I wrote Undertakers of
Rain in 2009, I did so because I
was feeling nostalgic for my friend Chris, and for our time in
Portland, Oregon. When I began to write the novel, I decided to write
two characters, Sam and John. I wanted to take all the worse
qualities of Chris and my personalities and put them into one
character and take all the good and put them into the other
character. Although I had wanted the novel to be about both
characters, it was ultimately John’s story. So, I was glad for the
opportunity to write in Sam for this one.
Incidentally,
John and Sam have been in every novel I’ve written that has been set
in Portland.