May 7, 2022
Literary Titan Interview - An Ontological Thriller
The Deep Translucent Pond follows two students that go on an extremely emotional journey led by their mentor, The Black Magus. What was the inspiration for the setup to your story.
In literature, emotional journeys are usually between two people in a relationship. I felt that journey could be made even more powerful if taken on by three people---in effect, three people locking arms and trying to get to a higher place together rather than just two. So how do you create a setting to make that happen? The weekly meetings of the poetry fellowship unexpectedly provide that catalyst, the Black Magus, shaman-like, entwining the cords of the physical with the meta-physical to create a dynamic that continually expands into spaces that were not there before, taking the three characters with it.
The Black Magus is characterized as philosophic. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?
At one point an old friend of the Black Magus’s characterizes him as a cross between Jean Paul Sartre and Jim Morrison. Such a crossing of a “disciplined philosophic approach” with “unpredictable ecstatic leaping” is going to create a huge flexibility in terms of where that character can go, what he can say. Add some history of mental illness and a kind of religious intensity and you have a character who---if he can hold it together---will burn at a very high temperature. Although it can’t last for too long. In the case of the novel, the Black Magus makes it last for the ten intensively transformative weeks of the fellowship.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Most novels struggle between surface action---plot essentially---which is fast moving and lurid and keeps you reading, and the probing for deeper meanings through character development or insights into the human condition. That second part is almost always secondary, because the book has to sell. I felt there was a way to focus primarily on the latter, the deeper parts, while at the same time giving those parts a “surface action” which will keep reader’s avidly turning the page. An ontological thriller, if you will, with a transcendent climax even more resonant than if a horrible crime was solved.
What is the next book that you are working on and when will be available?
Since The Deep Translucent Pond focuses on a poetry fellowship with the three characters transformed by that fellowship, the novel includes poetry produced by the three characters, used to drill deeper and faster into their interior lives. In a surprising way, the three characters in the novel---Jerome, Natalija, and The Black Magus---have continued writing poetry beyond the book. Their book of new poems is my intended next book.
