Darkness and Despair in my Writing

I sometimes have readers write to me and ask me why my Philosophical Narratives are so gloomy and dark. It sometimes bothers me that this is how people perceive my work. But, if we look at the opening to, say, The Iron Way, I can’t say they are wrong:

I am at the beach now and it is getting dark. No one is here. I sit watching the sea birds circle each other perpetually as the crimson sun slowly burns its way into the ocean. The light is dimming now, and the blue-green ocean has begun to take on an ashen color. The waves roll in, bringing with them a collection of sand, shells, and dirty seaweed. The waves roll back out, returning everything to how it was. The sun is burning out...too quickly. If only I could hold on to the light for a moment longer. If only I could see the laughing face of a friend before that orb sinks below the horizon.

Not rainbows and sunshine, I will admit.

You see, every person has two mountains to climb in life. There is the first one, the one from youth to middle age, where we are trying to figure out who we are, find our place in the world. Often during this period we get into our careers, get married, buy a house, and all that other good stuff. It’s what I did, like anyone else.

That is the first mountain.

And once we have done that, then the crisis hits. I did everything I had set out to do in life. I won the heart of the girl I was in love with, I finished a PhD, and I got my dream job of being a full-time English professor. I had those four kids I wanted, bought that old house in a small town. All of it. I won.

And I rolled off the top of that first mountain and down into a very dark valley.

You see, accomplishing all my goals was the catalyst for the darkest period of my entire life. I am not being melodramatic when I say it was a period I almost didn’t walk out of. There were two main things happening in this dark time for me:

• I no longer had any direction or purpose in life. I felt that I was simply waiting around to die, and that I was too old to really do new things in life or have new beginnings. My life was on rails.

• My PTSD that I had sort of kept smothered for a very long time came back so badly that it almost ended me. This isn’t something I have ever openly talked about or admitted, but there it is. This is part of me being

You can see this idea in the blurb on the back of The Iron Way:

He has everything, they tell him. He should be happy, they tell him. Yet the narrator of this tale is haunted by memories and dreams that won’t let him rest. He should feel fulfilled with a house, a car, a wife, and kids, but every day, he wakes up feeling like a failure—a man who traded the mythic path for the feeding trough. As his crisis deepens, he spirals down a dark road of damnation until a chance passage in Moby Dick reignites his determination to find purpose at any cost. He must cast much overboard to pursue his white whale, but how much is he willing to risk for a childhood dream?

I do want to make clear that these three books are not biography, they are not simply a record of my life. There are many events and characters in them that are fictional. At the same time, of course, they are a reflection of what I was feeling. The blurb for The Iron Way was me at the bottom of the valley. When I started writing it, I thought it was merely a bottomless pit.

Now I said earlier that we must climb two mountains.

I started writing The Iron Way because I felt that I might very well die. Again, I mean that in a very real way. I started writing it as a mode of therapy, in some ways. I began writing it because I wanted to live, I wanted to be happy, I wanted to have hope. But I didn’t know how. But I did remember, just barely, my childhood dream. A dream I had forgotten.

Can you believe that? I had forgotten my dream. And even writing these words sort of chokes me to think about it now. I forgot who I really was. I tried my best to be the noble man and to do what was required of me over the years, and I do love being a professor as a career. But it wasn’t my deepest, greatest dream.

My real dream was to write. To share stories with the world. And I was around 40 at this time and I had never published a story.

So I wrote the Iron Way. And I published it.

It moved me forward on the path of healing, on the path of peace.

But in some other ways, it took the bandages off of my darkest wounds that I had pretended weren’t there, old memories and trauma from long ago.

Despite the darkness that is present in much of The Iron Way, that novel does end on a note of tremulous hope. A hope for hope, you could say. It is not a novel of defeat. I was still fighting, still struggling to survive.

The day I published The Iron Way, I began writing The Babel Project.

This was the book I was afraid of. This was the book that had been lurking inside of me for so very long. This was a book of pain. I knew that the book would either kill me or heal me.

Think what you will of my writing and my novels, but they are real. They are authentic. They represent me ripping open my soul and trying to craft the most artful language around what is revealed.

The Iron Way was prepping the patient.

The Babel Project was surgery:

It began with a poem, with words. Words were all I had, dull echoes in my brain. Fragile cobwebs. Her lipstick words pressed against my memories. “Stop thinking,” I repeated to myself like a mantra. But we do not think memories, memories think us.

Many of my readers write to tell me how deeply The Babel Project affected them. Yes, it ventures into dark places, but it's not a novel of defeat—it’s about survival. I faced my demons and, in doing so, I glimpsed the second mountain. For the first time, I saw hope on the horizon, a way out of the valley.

I am not saying that when I finished The Babel Project I was a bubbly happy person. Far from it. I was still wounded, I was still healing. I was blinded by the light of hope that I saw and I distrusted it. I had been in the darkness for so long, the light seemed false:

It came suddenly like a slap to the face. The light was blinding, more absolute than total darkness. My fists were balled up over clenched eyes, and the veins in my lids lit up before me like corded fire. I wanted to tear my eyes from my sockets, but I knew that even that would not bring relief. I felt naked before a crowd.

I knew I needed to climb that second mountain. I needed to be reborn. I had to let go of the darkness of the past. I had to find the joy of my inner child. I had to find the vision of who I was always meant to be, before the pain, before the darkness.

And so, I wrote Lilacs from the Dead Land, and I tore off the mask that I was still hiding behind:

Have you ever felt an overwhelming longing for something indefinable? Homesick for a place you’ve yet to find? Welcome to the Dreaming.

In Lilacs from the Dead Land, the narrator’s mundane existence is disrupted by a mysterious woman who seems to embody an elusive dream. Drawn from his ordinary life into a mythic landscape that overlays his reality, he hears the call of a distant mountain.

When I published Lilacs, it was the first time I dared reveal myself, my own vulnerabilities to the world. I published it under my own name. I took off the mask.

This is, perhaps, a very long answer to the question, “Why are your philosophical narratives so dark?” But perhaps it needs a long answer. The truth is, these three books are a roadmap of my journey. I had to write them to live. They are dark because for a very long time I lived in hell. The process of writing helped me to get out, to find my way. It took me roughly 7 years to write these three books. It took me 7 years to breathe. Even now, if I read any part of these books, they hit me pretty hard.

Maybe someone who is also in darkness will read them and it will help them to find their way. I don’t know. I was told by one reader who suffered with PTSD that The Babel Project resonated deeply with him and helped him on his path. While that makes me feel nice, in truth it wasn’t why I wrote them. I would have written them even if I had no plans of publishing them. Because I had to.

So how am I doing today?

Honestly, I am doing great. I am writing more than ever before, I am doing things I believe in, and most importantly, I know who I am. I have left the past behind and I am looking to the future. I am going to conventions and promoting my work. I talk to my students about my writing. I am living the dream I had as a very young man. I am doing what I was born to do.

If my work here speaks to you, I invite you to click the image below and explore their pages. They are stories and yet more than stories. Perhaps my journey will resonate with your own.