In the eighties I was trying my hand at science fiction and science fantasy. “Covenant” was submitted to a very good mag, Owlflight, its editor Millea Kenin. She wrote me how she was taken with the natural history of my Gruff. Encouraged, during the summer I took out about a dozen or so manila folders and each week I wrote a story or two of the continuing adventures of my creature. By the opening of school in the early fall, in essence, I had a book.
Menanwhile, if memory serves me well, I was in a psychoanlytic training institute with a heavy Freudian outlook. I attended the school between 1984 to 1987. Inevitably, my learnings seeped into the fiction I was writing so that it reflected issues of loss, abandonment, attachment and separation,nurturance, all the analytic stew that I was learning about and dealing with in seeing clients. Additionally, I had been reading Krishnamurti. “Gruffworld” became a meeting of two major waters, Freudianism and Krishnamurti’s spiritual investigation into awareness.
Life, raising our children, work, made me lay aside my work except for the publication of “Covenant.” So, for all you writers out there, I return after a quarter of a century to Gruffworld. After Sojourner, the book I am working on now, it will be next. I am the tortoise. Gruffworld needs editing and polishing, but it still works. Read “Covenant,” for it is the opening chapter.
When it comes to writing, I will prevail, I never quit. Don’t ever quit — life does that to you, in due time — but continue in the rich cream of self-creativity.
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