Today, I begin a change to "Letters from Garcia" and go from these long-winded, painfully constructed mini-essays to more informal and timely--and possibly just as winded--postings. The reason, or at least part of it, is that I have been able to say much of what I wanted to say about formal writing and scholarship already, and now I simply want to write and talk about where I'm going with my own writing, providing samples of it, discussing the experiences--triumphs, setbacks, doubts, biases-- that frame the works I jot down, all with the hope that it's useful to others who write and engage in the intellectual pursuit.
At the moment I find myself at a crossroad. With a book project to advance and three conference presentations to write, I find myself more than adequately committed up through the end of spring. Yet, I just submitted my memoir to a press, have a novel--actually two--that are demanding equal time, and an opportunity to co-author a screenplay based on my upcoming book (January unveiling) on a basketball team duirng the World War Two years.I've also got friends at the local church wondering when I will finish the much promised Christmas play.
In a way unimaginable a few years ago, all my work seems to be coalescing into one giant pool of ideas and information that makes writing "just scholarship" or "just fiction" seem limiting. I've reached a point where I am neither just a scholar or fiction writer but someone whose intellectual pursuits transcends boundaries. Now, before anyone gets the wrong idea, I do believe there are boundaries that keep scholarship for the most part on one side and literature on the other, though I have written in this blog of the applicability of the same writing skills for both.
I've concluded that what I really want to do with the rest of my life is to tell stories, engage ideas and create characters that reflect life, and do it through different mediums. So, I want to finish the biography on Octavio Romano, co-author the screenplay on the basketball players, write novels on complicated themes, and possibly seasonal plays, a book of psalms, finish the Christmas play and a book of sermons. The last idea comes from having read, many years ago, a book of sermons by Peter Marshall who once served as Chaplain of the Senate. How I will actually justify the latter is still uncertain, though I could simply titled it "Sermons I Gave or Should Have as a Mormon Bishop". It would go well with the idea I had a few years earlier to write a book of lectures and titled it "Harvard Lectures that I Never Gave at Harvard".
The goal is not to experiment or become an intellectual bohemian of sorts but rather to find the avenues, venues, and mediums with which to get all those ideas in my head out into the public square. The last thing I want do is start over. It would go contrary to the idea of becoming a mature scholar and intellectual that I yearn to be. I want to build on what I've done and to maintain the particular style that I've constructed over my life but to apply it to different forms of writing. It will mean learning new techniques and engaging in unchartered waters--for me--but it will not mean leaving behind who I am or what I have been.
I have done some of this in the past, but I have not embraced it a way that defines who I am not only to myself but to others. I've simply been the scholar who occasionally writes nonacademic work, dabbles in fiction here and there and possibly full time when he retires. Instead I want to be the person who writes all kinds of literature, crossing boundaries, coalescing styles and formats but respecting those principles that maintain the differences between fiction and nonfiction. I want to construct a larger narrative that provides my view of the world, and endorses my values but in the messy, complicated and nonlinear way that is life.
It is the last frontier (final?) for a man who has been truly blessed by a writing and academic career but who at times has been restricted by his adherence to rules and the playing of "appropriate roles". Now, I believe in rules and even appropriate roles but I believe that people earn the right to transcend and even expand them. I think I have waited long enough to do both. So let's see where this takes me.
