Books rarely begin where we later say they began. Jack & Ray has a beginning, but that beginning has its own beginning.
For years I had been accumulating fragments of childhood without thinking of them as a book. A creek. A trailer. A storm rolling over the fields. Ray doing something reckless. Me watching him,
For a long time, Jack & Ray existed mostly as a private project: a place to gather memories, scenes, family stories, and the strange emotional weather of childhood. Lately it has begun to feel less like a manuscript in progress and more like a book that is approaching publication.
That changes the way I look
I keep calling Jack & Ray fiction, but I’m not sure that’s quite honest. Nearly everything in it grows out of real people, real places, remembered incidents, family stories, and the emotional weather of childhood. The creeks are real. The houses are real. The storms, the farm work, the dangerous games, the people
[One night before I started building this site: a re-creation]
I just had a brainstorm — let's give the work away! Short stories, novels, essays, memoir, all of it! Put it all online. Let people read it for free!
This seems to be a eureka moment. Like an obvious solution to my problem.
If others want to use those minutes to actually do something to achieve that promise, that’s great, too.