No More Frontiers, No More Discovery

I’ve been researching the history of my hometown and county: Fairfield, Iowa in Jefferson County. I know it’s a myth, the idea of pioneers and settlers “discovering” the land, when people have been living here since 10,000 BCE. And, of course, what happened to the Native Americans was freaking tragic. But the settlers themselves didn’t really think about that. To them, this land was new, and they were effectively the first people on it. The things they did – build a cabin, apply a name to an area, survey an plot of land – was the first time, for them, that anyone did these things. The names they used still apply today, the groundwork and structures they constructed have lasted over 200 years. In this day and age,...

Fiction as Real as My Breath.

I’ve been writing so much serious non-fiction I’ve forgotten how to write fun, lighthearted fiction. Or non-fiction, I guess. I don’t really have any stories to tell. Some people, I’ve seen them, they have stories. Characters, plots, rich new worlds of imagination…. I don’t. My aborted novel is testimony to that – it’s awful not so much due to lack of writing as a lack of clarity. I don’t own the world or the people in it. A half-baked idea without the passion to bring forth real creatures. To be fair, I don’t care that much. That lack of passion for storytelling goes all the way down – I don’t care so much for it OR for the fact that I don’t care. I imagine some day I’ll have some stories...