The original material behind ALWAYS PARTLY BROKEN came from a high school writing assignment in a class called Major Authors taught by Mr. Bob Sauerbray. Bob Sauerbray, unbeknownst to him, was my favorite teacher at La Salle High School. A story that I have been telling myself for years now is that my classmates and I were in our last year of high school and had never been encouraged to write anything remotely creative before the advent of Mr. Sauerbray. Upon further reflection, I realize that this is not entirely true. There was that poem I wrote about Vincent van Gogh in Mr. Owen's class my sophomore year and there was that comparison and contrast of high renaissance and modern cubist art that I wrote for Brother Chris in my freshman year. I guess these were creative too, but neither were as soul-searching as Mr. Sauerbray's weekly journal practice. In the weekly journal practice I was able to process my actual lived experiences, whether I was reflecting on the meaning of the rain beating against the windows of a bus when I was feeling depressed or musing on the implications of the lyrics of Neil Young's song After the Goldrush.
It was in one of these journal entries that the first chapter of ALWAYS PARTLY BROKEN came to be written. I remember transposing the journal entry into the writing assignment given to us by Mr. Sauerbray. We were asked to forget about five paragraph essays and our usual expository writing style and come up with a simple story that was uniquely our own. I entitled my story Running in the Dark, or something like that. The resultant story definitely spoke to my condition, (to use a Quaker expression.) It also acted as a metaphor for all of my life at the same time.
Unfortunately, I don't have that paper anymore, which was composed in the fall of 1981-just weeks after my high school religious retreat to the abbey of Gethsemani. The first scene of my book, published over 40 years later, attempts to recover this same episode. Theoretically, the hand-written document still exists somewhere, but the whereabouts are unknown since I lent the paper to someone who was unable to find it for me when I asked for it back decades later. Yes- always partly broken! But it was a lucky accident really. If the original paper were not lost I never would have tried to reconstruct it and ALWAYS PARTLY BROKEN would never have been born.
I was fairly proud of the original story. Mr. Sauerbray had scribbled all over it with his trademark exclamation points in red ink and notes of praise and feedback. Later, when my high school years were just about over, I had a rare talk with him during which he asked me what I planned to pursue in college. I told him that I wanted to study psychology. Mr. Sauerbray told me, in so many words-but just indirectly enough that I didn't take him seriously- that I should pursue writing. It's one of those conversations I can never remember the exact details of but, at the same time, can never completely forget either. It was probably the last conversation I had with "Bob", as my brother Jerry and I like to call him.
I just didn't have the clarity or the courage to follow a writer's path at the age of 18. So much happened after this, but I eventually wanted to build on that little writing assignment from decades or, really, a lifetime ago. So, sometime in 2004 I started the process of re-writing the now lost story. Something about John Kurtzcamp's “Puuulllllpp—Liieeekkk—Ssuubbsstinncess!” stayed with me all those years without a significant loss of details. As I continued to dig through my memory, stories opened up and a whole sensory world from the past was right there for the taking, or re-birthing.
More about this in a future blog.
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