Usually I say it started with a scene I saw through my car windshield one morning in late October. It was a cold day and raining and I was parked behind the library, waiting for my daughter to finish a vocal audition at the high school next door. As I sat watching the rain coming down, I had a sort of waking dream in which the car\u2019s windshield changed into a farmhouse window and I was peering through it into a large kitchen. Inside the kitchen, sitting across from one another at a table were a husband and wife. No doubt because of the rain and the chill in the real air and the dark sky above my car, I sensed the air in the day-dream room was thick with tension and the atmosphere, melancholy. I needed to know, of course, what was going on in that kitchen and knew there was only one way to find out. I would have to write my way inside it.<\/p>\n So that\u2019s what I say, that\u00a0Lights on the Mountain<\/em>\u00a0began with this scene I saw through the rain. But just like the person telling that dream, as soon as I\u2019ve said the thing, I begin to doubt it. There is after all, my own memory, confirmed by a photo my brother sent me, of a bleak, wintry-looking day on the farm of my childhood.<\/p>\n And there are the memories I\u2019ve kept of the multi-colored splendor of the Pennsylvania hills in autumn and the people, with their various accents and religious faiths and their rich-tasting foods, that lived within them. Looking at the photo, pondering my recollections of the Western Pennsylvania landscape and its people, there is a question of how I knew, as I began to set the story down, to put the couple on that farm (or something like it) and in those hills. I begin to wonder which came first, my memories of the photo and the hills, or the couple and the scene. The chicken or the egg.<\/p>\n Also like a dream recounted is the way I realize, while trying to explain how it happened, that it\u2019s entirely possible to lie about it without being dishonest. All I can really say is that after two drafts in which my farmer\u2019s problem was unsatisfactorily (to me) written, I was working on a third and happened to spot Walker Percy\u2019s\u00a0Moviegoer<\/em>\u00a0on my bookshelf. That book, if you haven\u2019t read it, is about a worldly man who lives in what some people say is the real sin city, New Orleans. In the midst of his everyday, city-dwelling life, Binx Bolling embarks on an somewhat loosely organized, but definitely existential, quest, what Percy has his character call \u201cthe search\u201d. Suddenly I had my \u201cwhat if\u201d? What if I took a natural man, a quiet-natured farmer who loves his land and his work and his wife, and instead of the stereotypical salt-of-the-earth simplicity, gave him a deep, yearning heart and a wondering mind. Oh, and an otherworldly experience. And once that was done and I had given him a past and put some challenging characters in his path, I set him to working out the world\u2019s oldest mystery, the great, divine Who-done-it. What if I did that? I asked myself. And then I did it. And that\u2019s the somewhat true story of how this particular novel\u00a0came to be written.<\/p>\n Come November 13, 2018, you can read the story for yourself. Feel free to share your thoughts on it here, or on Amazon and Goodreads. I look forward to reading them!<\/p>\n paracletepress.com\/products\/lights-on-the-mountain<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cheryl Anne Tuggle is a librarian, a freelance writer and a novelist, the author of\u00a0Unexpected Joy: A Novel\u00a0(Anaphora Press, 2011). She is a member of the Good Seed Writers Society and a featured writer on the blog Orthodox in the … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Screen-Shot-2018-10-30-at-8.00.02-PM-192x300.png\")
<\/a>It\u2019s a thing people ask when you\u2019ve authored a novel: how and why it came to be written. Answering the question, though, is a bit like trying to relate the dream you had last night.\u00a0You<\/em>\u00a0know how it went, but just try and tell it that way.<\/em><\/p>\n