Rereading "Prophet Song" and Thinking about Writing a New Story

I first read Paul Lynch's Prophet Song about a year ago, and I wondered if it would be a different reading experience this year, with all the geopolitical changes across the world that have happened in the past year.  So I decided to find out.

Even though I know how the novel ends, it was still a gripping read--another reason I returned to the book because I am in need of books that are compelling.  It is a book centered on a question that has intrigued me since my earliest years as a reader:  how do we know when it's time to go?

This time as I read, I noticed other elements:  the father's slow slide into dementia, for example.  It was such a skilled depiction.

And now I am listening to this interview between Paul Lynch and Ron Charles, whose reviews in The Washington Post I always admire.  Wow!

It's the kind of interview that makes me want to write a novel.  My first reaction to that thought:  this is not the summer for writing a novel.  But what if I carried a legal pad with purple pages with me throughout my summer?  What if I returned to the writing process of my pre-computer days?

I don't want to write an apocalyptic novel like Lynch's.  I return to my thoughts of a few weeks ago (captured in this blog post), the idea of capturing a woman at late-midlife.  My younger feminist self declares that this phase must be captured, that so few writers have captured it.  Lots of writers look at younger women:  women leaving adolescence, women with children, and recently, women in perimenopause.

Another thought that I want to capture:  lately, I've been experiencing this feeling of time folding in on itself in strange ways.  Often my brain returns to the idea of the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time.  I'm at the campus of the liberal arts college where I currently teach, in 2025, but it feels like I'm much more in touch with memories from my own days as a college student at a liberal arts college in the 1980's.  I'm driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway now, but I'm remembering mountain vistas from decades ago, the same mountains.  I can't quite explain it in factual words--perhaps fiction is the medium.

A woman in the audience of the interview just asked about diaspora communities.  Diaspora Community--an intriguing idea for a title, for a unifying concept, for inspirations.  

Another question prompted Lynch to talk about failed novels and the ones who come together.  He talked about not finishing what you start, about knowing when to quit, about knowing when you've got a book worth writing:   "A really great story . . . is going to be thsvehicle.  It's going to be a vessel that you can launch into the sea.    . . .   It will move like a story, but it will carry all your obsessions in that vessel.   . . .   What you're chasing and what you're telling--when the alignment comes, it takes on its own momentum."

I hope that I've found a vessel!