On the launch of Green River Saga
I begin this Blog at 2:27 PM PST in Seattle, WA on Thursday, February 18, 2021.
Two hours ago, the rover Perseverance landed on Mars in the midst of the treacherous Jezero Crater. NASA has engineered a scientific miracle, arguably unsurpassed in the annals of human exploration. The rocket that carried Perseverance to Mars traveled for seven months across 193 million miles, all the while remaining “in contact” with NASA Mission Control through absolutely astounding technology. Further, Perseverance is continually receiving directions from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and now, two hours after landing, is sending back to Earth pictures of the Martian surface. What humankind hath wrought! Wonders never cease. If I am fortunate enough to live another ten years I will be able to read about rock samples that one of Perseverance’s robotic arms has collected and then stored in immaculately clean vials that will have been brought back to Earth by the next rover. Can walking on Mars be far behind? Will one of my grandsons be involved, somehow, in such a mission? And one wonders: is there a strange, black obelisk nestled in Jezero Crater waiting for its human visitors? As Paul Simon sings in “Graceland”: “These are the days of miracle and wonder, this is a long distance call.” Long distance, indeed!
The occasion for this blog is more earth-bound and certainly far less technological than landing a machine on a distant planet. I decided to create this blog as part of a website intended primarily to advertise my newest publication, Green River Saga, a historical western published by Sunstone Press in April, 2020. My co-author is Rick O’Shea, a brilliant former student at South Puget Sound Community College in Olympia, WA from which I retired in June 2006.
When I posted a publication notice on Amazon I wrote the following:
Writing Green River Saga with Rick O'Shea was equally invigorating and challenging. The process took seven years, which now seems insane, but we faced three major difficulties: agreeing on the arc of the main characters; securing the necessary historical material, including maps; and merging our different writing styles into as singular a narrative voice as we could. The expectation of the next image, symbol, metaphor; the next, more incisive path into the mind of Jeremiah, my main character; the pull of delving deeper into what this novel could be; all led me from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter. It was infectious!
Like building Perseverance, completing GRS was a long process, and perhaps begs the question of its value. A historical western seems disconnected from the rover’s landing on fiery Mars and the turmoil in America today. Who wants to read about cowboys and Indians and a mad Confederate deserter when horrific images of police violence are on the nightly news? However, when, at the urging of my publisher, Sunstone Press in Santa Fe, NM, I began contemplating a website I realized that GRS bears a striking “relevance” to contemporary America. For at its heart is the systemic racism of America’s history: Brent Tompkin, a cattle baron who defies Indian treaty rights and common decency to graze his animals on sacred land.
I thus propose Green River Saga to my readers as a novel about this nation’s “original sin”: blatant, violent racism. It’s much else, of course, but Tompkin’s bigotry drives the narrative, and raises a version of the age-old question: why do so many Americans fiercely denigrate those whom they label “the other?”
And so back to Mission Control. After Perseverance touched down on Mars, a NASA administrator said that this spectacular feat showed “What Americans can do when they work together.” How astonishing that scientists of many nationalities and faiths could work together to land a rover on an alien world and we still cannot work together to solve major social and environmental problems on Earth. Why should that be so? The irony is truly terrifying.
Finally, I invite serious, thoughtful responses to this irony. I also welcome chats about whether, and how, Westerns are still relevant in contemporary America. Most members of Western Writers of America would certainly answer, “Yes, of course.” However, I am interested in “how” such historical novels are relevant. Westerns take us back to earlier eras; can going back help us go forward? Do such books hold up, as Hamlet would say, a mirror to our nature, and what might we learn by gazing into that mirror?
Perhaps reading Green River Saga will prompt some responses. Thanks for tuning in!
Cheers,
-Michael
