Completed manuscript. No One Dreams in Color is my sixth novel. I never take for granted the completion of a novel, nor do I ever know which one could be my last. It always begins witth a few key ideas or concepts, several core refrains, and from there it becomes an enterprise of faith, intution, trust, consistency of discipline, and curiosity. I relish the process, and have found that each novel, as a soverign entity, demands its own form and set of principles. In the case of No One Dreams in Color, I experienced the joy and intrigue of wandering wide-eyed through a mutable labyrinth; a labyrinth that I was simulatenously creating, and being created by. I am happy, and somewhat relieved to have made it out of the labyrinth, yet I am also feeling wistful and sad that I am no longer there, wandering, with that exquisitely lonely sense of purpose which is my favored bliss. When I was a boy, my dream was to be a writer, to write stories and books that I could share with the world. That little boy in me still burns with the same sense of quest, and love’s labor for the world of story. I am grateful for and to my vocation. Word by word, novels come into irrefutable being. Rock on, creators. Rock on.
Perhaps that’s what every writer, as a fugitive stalker, as a heartsick orphan, as the fool-hero in their own movie is trying to do.
In this respect, the pen is merciful, an instrument of reprieve, and allows for a mortal claim and stake in something that belongs, by nature, to ephemera. That which is solvent becomes ours, even if only in specious residue and filmy imprints.
We take what we can, do what we can, give ourselves what we must. It is the stubby and insistent roots of love. We are all heartsick orphans. What we yearn to fuse and unionize with has a different spin for everyone, a different look or feel or say, different bends in cursive, but in the end, and in the true center, it is all the same. All roads lead to a much larger heaven than our poor, deficient, mirage-making brains can imagine.
Hope is not a thing with feathers. It is a thing completely and utterly outside our caste system of notions and concepts. Its picture has never ever appeared in the gilded corridors of hierarchy, its image has never ever been a cheesecake pin-up on a glossy cover. Hope is a featherless cry, a vamp that clothes itself in light.
I cannot recover time. But as a writer, I am plagued to try. It is a diseased and fevered quest, also a happy and self-actualizing one. It is many things. I am many things. The imagination is a cosmic millipede with an unaccountable siege of legs. It is a cosmic millipede with hallowed pillars for legs and moon-disc lanterns for eyes. That is imagination.
There is always something to mourn. We know this. There is always something to praise. We know this too. Mourning and praise, beauty and sadness. These are the cornerstones of life, of reality, of living. Inseparable tandems that cannot be bested, ignored, exempted, forgotten. They are the lighted kernels of omnipresence, the fibrous ravels. It doesn’t matter what you believe or how you believe or who you believe. Mourning and praise, beauty and sadness, will always be with you as teachers, guides, lovers, catalysts, celebrants, fledglings. Not only can you not step in the same river twice, but you also can never be the same person who steps in that river.
One thing we cannot recover is time. And yet writers, consciously or un, set themselves this impossible task, this grail’s quest, because a sense of purpose dictates our place within our own stories, within the context of a larger narrative.
In the end, it will have been like moving sand from one hand to another, alternating grains between palms in a sort of meditative game or hypnotic dance.
In the summer the sand is warm. In the winter the sand is cold. Sometimes a strong wind will blow the sand out of your hands. Other times you will wet the sand and turn it into mud.
All of this and other phenomena will occur. The sand is guaranteed to slip through your mortal fingers, giving you an opportunity to mourn and praise. Beauty and sadness is your birthright, and a grievous gateway to amen.
For anyone interested in tuning into my 11/12 reading of No Man’s Brooklyn for the SOMOS Literary Salon, below is the link to a recorded version of the event.
NO MAN’S BROOKLYN: From the valentine boneyards of working-class Brooklyn, comes a tale of first love, lost innocence, tragedy, and healing. Daniel Trovato, having left his native Bensonhurst years ago to start a new life in L.A., is recently sober and enjoying cult success through his Sworn Witness series of graphic novels. When he receives word that his childhood love, Anya, has died from an overdose, he is compelled to return to the “old neighborhood.” It is there that he will walk through the ghostly twilight of an unfinished past, and revisit both the romantic lore and shadow life of his youth. The enduring torch he’s carried for Anya, “the girl from nowhere,” who was found in a trash can and adopted by a Russian family; the hazy circumstances of his mother’s suicide when he was fourteen; glacial estrangement from his father; the street-and-concrete beats and rhythms of an urban boyhood. Ultimately, No Man’s Brooklyn is about the mythic journey we take to meet our core self, and a lyrical testament to the words of Dylan Thomas: “The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.”
In conjunction with National Prose Month (November), and as part of the SOMOS Reading Series, I will be reading from my novel, No Man’s Brooklyn, via Zoom. Q & A to follow the reading.
From the valentine boneyards of working-class Brooklyn, comes a tale of first love, lost innocence, tragedy, and healing. Daniel Trovato, having left his native Bensonhurst years ago to start a new life in L.A., is recently sober and enjoying cult success through his Sworn Witness series of graphic novels. When he receives word that his childhood love, Anya, has died from an overdose, he is compelled to return to the “old neighborhood.” It is there that he will walk through the ghostly twilight of an unfinished past, and revisit both the romantic lore and shadow life of his youth. The enduring torch he’s carried for Anya, “the girl from nowhere,” who was found in a trash can and adopted by a Russian family; the hazy circumstances of his mother’s suicide when he was fourteen; glacial estrangement from his father; the street-and-concrete beats and rhythms of an urban boyhood. Ultimately, No Man’s Brooklyn is about the mythic journey we take to meet our core self, and a lyrical testament to the words of Dylan Thomas: “The memories of childhood have no order, and no end.”
