When I retired a little over two years I go, I intended to make this site more a reflection of a true journal. I meant to write here more frequently in the open and free and unconscious manner that I write in the private journal where I write every day. But I found it impossible to do so. I could not forget the presence of a reader the way I can in the private journal. Another way of saying this is that I could not be as fully honest here as I needed to be. I had to go and stay in that other “secret place.” For honesty is what I craved the most. That secret place consisting not only of my private journal but also of the need to withdraw from public view, is where I can see and discover the truths of my internal world. The seeing and discovering would not be as clear if these were done in front of others where the need for attention and admiration clouds the starkness required by the vision. I would like to think that the self-enclosure, the hiding from public view, is not totally egocentric for it is there in the secret place where the characters and images and thoughts of my novels are born. I don’t go to the secret place with the utilitarian goal of harvesting the discoveries for my public work. That kind of ulterior motive would no longer make the secret place the kind of honest space it needs to be. The priority of the secret place needs to always be a greater awareness of my soul, the hidden as well as the more obvious parts. What is found there may or may not be shared, but if it is, the content that becomes public, is always a byproduct, a gift even, of the primary intent of self-discovery. These past two years, the secret place has been the foundation for my more public work, the hidden bedrock on which I build the structures that I share with others.  I wrote a novel entitled Disappeared during my two years of retirement. Disappeared is the story of Sara, a young journalist from Juárez, Mexico investigating the disappearance of hundreds of young women in that city. It is also the story of Emiliano, Sara’s younger brother, a soccer star, an ambitious young entrepreneur determined to be financially successful in Mexico. Each of them must face the difficult decision whether to cross without documents into the United States in the face of threats against their lives and their souls. This novel was written even as I felt in that secret place the hatred of many Americans for the Latino immigrant. It was in that secret place where my own anger and sadness were seen and allowed to endure without judgment and it was there that they were allowed to transform, slowly and painfully into the creative force needed to write the novel. A creative force that I have no name for other than love.
May 30, 2017
April 20, 2015
New Beginnings
I retired from thirty-three years of practicing law on April 3, 2015. Among the many hopes for the gift of time now given to me is to use this space more as a true journal. When I wrote my first young adult book more than fifteen years ago, my then publisher suggested I create a website as a means of promoting the book (and my self). But I wonder if this space can also be a tool for more than just the selling of my books and my self. Is there a way to approximate here the simple sincerity and open exploration that takes place when I write in my own journal? Writing in a website can never be pure, true journal-writing because there is always the possibility (and expectation) that someone will read what you write and the whole business of wanting to impress and be seen as special seeps in through the written word no matter how hard you try to shut it out. Nevertheless, I would like to try to write as much as possible from my true self. My true self is who I am and not who I often present to others, not the false self that seeks to sell all that a false self seeks to sell in its communications and dealings with others. So my hope is to write here in this space more frequently out of my true self (as much as I can ). Who is my true self? The person I see when I’m alone and I look fully and honestly, the one I do my best to love and accept. My true self is the person for whom you are never a means to an end. I would like this journal to serve as a place where I explore the phase of life I am now entering. Explore what? T.S. Eliot writes in Four Quartets at the end of East Coker:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
March 3, 2013
Dear Diary
Here are a few truths discovered from a life-time of writing in a journal that have helped in the writing of novels. (A journal: a place to write where you don’t lie to yourself; you don’t care what or how you write;you don’t expect any other living person to read what you write)
1. You practice being reckless and bold and playful, which practice comes in handy when writing first drafts of novels later on.
2. You find out how you honestly feel about different things. Later when you write about similar things, you can remember how you felt and write with sincerity and truth. You will write from your true self. You learn to appreciate truth over style.
3.You know what it is like to write without seeking to impress or make money or satisfy the critics. This knowledge, if you can remember it at the right times, comes in handy.
4. You’re writing about things that affect you, that you are interested in, that you love or cause you pain. You are discovering the bones you will chew the rest of your writing life. Your fiction will be deeply personal even if it is not one whit autobiographical.
5. You become a deeper, more reflective person. You exercise and therefore strengthen your ability to attend, to focus and observe. Even if all you write about is actual (internal or external), your imagination develops and is honed.
6.You will recognize the presence of a listener, an “other” you are writing for, even if you are not writing for anyone and no one will ever see what you write. This other is not someone who will be pleased or not pleased by what you write or how you write. The other is simply happy to hear from you. The other will be there again when you write your novel.
7. You’ll find out that the voices that attack your uniqueness or confidence or goodness are silenced as you persist in writing in spite of them.
8.You begin to see your writing as an act of generosity to yourself at first and then to others even if you are only writing for yourself.
9.You become more attuned to suffering, yours and others, and there will be more compassion in your novels.
10. When you write in a journal every day (or as frequently as you can) because you want and need to and for no other ulterior motive, you are honoring the creative impulse and enthusiasm you were born with and now it will be your friend forever and will be there whenever you call it.
