I’m digging deep, again this week, as I work on the new novel. I’m like a kid in a candy store, again, as I sort through ideas and memories. I used to think I knew how to write, and then I attempted fiction. And now I’m hooked. Some of what comes up is quite dark. I was never much of a Halloween person, but that is changing.
The dark side is seductive, and it reminds me of how much I loved Edgar Allan Poe stories when I was a kid. There is truth in the macabre—at least as Poe practiced it. I remembered that one of my favorite professors at Wake Forest, then-chairman of the English department Elizabeth Phillips, earned her credentials with research into the literature about Nineteenth Century mental patients and how those documents served Poe as he shaped his plots.
There is no use denying it. I resolve to celebrate the dark, the mysterious, the frightening, the hidden, and the different. And if we embrace them strongly enough, we can bring them into the light.
Bruce
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