Reading old work

One of the joys of "being a writer" is to go back to work written years or even decades ago and to discover, as a reader, that it speaks to you. This doesn't happen with every work, of course, but it happens periodically to me.

My first memory of this experience was in the 1980s at the height of my (traditional) playwriting career. I read some literary stories I'd published in the late 60s and early 70s -- and on several occasions was blown away. I especially remember reading The Thing At 34 Degrees..., published in The Colorado Quarterly in 1969, and thinking, Man! did I write that? The story moved me and I was especially taken by its unusual form, which of course was welded to its meaning. I couldn't write a story like that today, I thought, I'd changed too much, and probably that was part of the attraction and awe I felt.

This week I felt the same thing reading my novel Emmett's Gift. This novel marked my return to fiction after many years. In form it's very traditional, a sprawling story in a small Oregon town told from an omniscient point of view, about the underbelly of small town values. As I started it, I again was blown away. I had forgotten I could write a novel so traditional in form! The characters grabbed me and the central story thread early on had me hooked.

Then, not quite half way through the book, the major characters take a trip to Portland and I felt a release of tension and interest in the story. I understood why this was happening: the landscape was growing. But I wanted to stay with the smaller story embedded within it, a central focus early on. I stopped reading. (I've had readers tell me they love the "larger" version.)

But I'll pick it up again because now I am looking at it differently. I wonder how much work it would be to extract the smaller story to which I responded, letting it stand on its own. I thought of it as a short novel. I even thought about its cover. Whether this comes to pass remains to be seen, but my response -- in awe early on, disappointed when the narrative expanded -- interests me in this context.