Kansaw

If Arkansas is Arkansaw, why isn’t Kansas Kansaw?

Writing – words and how they sound and make us feel and are arranged - is a peculiar Art form in which to be able to participate.

For the first time in weeks, I am not terrified by the novel formally known as N3 and now as Never.

This comes about by way of the simplest of realizations: while in my first novel Lostine, I knew in advance the environs of a swamp called Coffin Marsh, in Lostine’s sequel Never, I have to design entirely my stage plus “furnish” same.

To the casual observer, the above seems obvious, but to me, through whom the novel Lostine was channeled, there is startlement; there is an element of shock in that as if I were building a wall, I have to “finger” it out – I have to specify all of Never’s stage’s dimensions; this is “A Study in Lostine.”

Certainly, part of Lostine’s success is the microcosm that is Coffin Marsh and the school next to it and the ballfield closer yet - a mixture of wetland flooded by the reckless pavement of a 1950s shopping mall, a child’s amputated finger found, and boys imagining Vietnam.