Themes

I like to add what I call a thematic overlay for my stories.  I believe for the story – short story, novel, etc. – to be interesting and well-written there needs to be more than just the action involved.  Simply writing a story – Joe does this, Joe does that – there should be something to give guidance and add interest.

In Fear of Normal the protagonist, Winters Macklin, is a Christ figure.  Throughout the story there are references to this image.  I also play with the good vs. evil concept, white and black, but twisting them to be the opposite.  I also bring in the theme of an inability to escape, a concept of being trapped, with country roads that really don’t go anywhere and double back to the town, characters unable to depart from the town.  There is also the concept of local knowledge which excludes outsiders, something I have become familiar with after leaving my hometown of about 60,000 residents and spending the past 15 years in small towns of 400 residents, 1,000, and 1,400.

For A Voice Heard in Ramah, the protagonist, Alliana Terry, represents fertility.  Throughout the story she is involved with water (rain, streams, pools, rivers) a symbol of new life.  She decorates her office with iconic images of fertility, fertility gods and so on, and of course, her work involves pregnancies and birth.  Toward the end of the book her journey becomes a descent into hell guided by the skeletal Charon, blocked by Cerberus, all represented by lesser characters in the book.

As I work on a future novel – Fear of Home – a continuation of the Winters Macklin/Sydney Sharp narrative, I am making Sydney part of the “weird sisters” from MacBeth.