This fall, Unsolicited Press is bringing out second editions of two of my earlier titles. The original publisher moved to a new distributor who felt these titles weren’t selling well enough to keep in print. My short story collection, Our Love Could Light the World, and the subject of the first essay, was published in 2013. My first novel, What Is Found, What Is Lost, was published in 2014. Looking back and rereading these works has been a strange odyssey for me, a look into what my obsessions were over a decade ago.

During the years I spent writing short stories someone would occasionally suggest that I undertake a novel. It seemed impossible. My stamina seemed to vanish after five thousand words. Not only that, I wanted that new start which each story made possible, even if the characters and setting were the same. But things change as things always do and one day I wanted room to roam.

What is Found, What is Lost is built on the theme of religion although I am not a religious person. Organized religion is something that bothers me a lot. Think of the harm that’s been done in its name. The cruelty and torture through the centuries. Now the Republican Party invokes Christianity and the natural order of things to justify letting women die from botched abortions and failed pregnancies. To them, it’s all God’s will. Well, what I say to them is this: no treatment for your prostate cancer, sir, and certainly no Viagra for you. But, of course, that would never happen. When old men write laws about medical procedures, they make sure those procedures only impact women.

Another reason I have issues with religion stems from closer to home. My older sister found God in her early twenties and never looked back. Her devotion was often a way to remind my parents of their studied atheism, though my father was taken to Quaker meetings as a boy by his own mother. Like my sister, one of the main characters in my novel uses her piety as a bludgeon.

The third thread weaving this novel’s tapestry together is a grandmother I never met and for whom I was named. Anna Dominian was born on the Island of Malta. She married a Swiss named Paul Jacob. They met at the American University in Constantinople where Anna grew up. Anna was raised a Catholic, Paul was a strict Calvinist. Yet my mother had a menorah she said belonged to her mother.  Since Catholicism doesn’t rely on menorahs in any of its rituals, this was perplexing. Part of the novel is devoted to a deception Anna engages in where she passes as a Jew to protect her husband who lied about his religion on his application to teach at Huron College. This was easy to portray on the page, because Paul was said to be both a frail man, and a cruel one, while Anna was caring and brave.

Everyone in the book is looking for something they very much want to find. When they do, they hold it briefly before it slips away.

Much like writing, I found myself thinking. But the words do not slip away; they carry me back to the sensibility I favored at that time, one full of inner dialog that in time I gave away for a surface reality I felt sufficed. I still do. I see what I was trying to do, though, way back when, and it’s certainly something I can bring forward now, in the pages I’m drafting. Sometimes the old ways are worth a second look.