“Yes, my children died that day…”
The Gift
A few years ago, sister writer Sheri Summers Hunt presented me with a Christmas gift—a copy of her published collection of poems, Journeys In and Out. Shortly after the holidays, I made time to begin browsing through the poems, savoring and digesting them, one at a time. Well into the collection, I came upon one which unsettled me—”Escaping Atlanta: A Mother’s Perspective.“
I read through it several times in a single sitting, but could not put it away. I could not consume it. The piece consumed me.
At first, the language continued rolling around in my brain, its words ricocheting inside my skull. But as the art of the poetry finally faded, the story remained. A young mother, devastated by recent news of her husband’s death in battle, flees her home in Civil War ravaged Georgia, her two small children in tow. Forced to witness events that desecrate the innocence of her son and daughter, her flight from horror devolves into a flight from sanity.
A few days later, I met with my weekly writing critique group—Sheri among their number. After we completed our business of thrashing through the pieces we brought, Sheri said, “Before we go, I’d like to read you something from my collection of poems.”
I was stunned as she began performing the piece which had so captured my attention the past few days. Five minutes later, I was wrecked. My own private reading of the poem did not adequately prepare me to hear it spoken aloud by its author. For the next two days I could think of nothing more than this woman’s story and the desperation of her plight.
I suspected the means of relief from these thoughts might lie in writing about it. But what should I write? What could I write?
The Response
Being a man, I wondered about the woman’s dead husband, and his story. Having only a highschool history-class knowledge of the War Between the States, I began immersing myself in the vast collection of extant personal letters, from these soldiers to their families back home.
Primarily addressing their wives, these men all wrote of the same core things. Whether Yank or Reb, similar threads wove through their correspondence: long stretches of boredom and tedium interrupted by moments of stark terror; sickness, deprivation and hunger; a longing for their families; and faced with death, either a bolstering of their trust in God’s Providence, or a decline into utter despair and hopelessness.
As I read through hundreds of letters available online, I captured snippets, phrases, and sentences that piqued my imagination. With a hundred such fragments in hand, I started piecing them into a whole story, stitching and weaving them together by another narrative which revealed itself as I proceeded—the story of this woman’s husband.
Within two days, I narrated the man’s life, in his own words, via fourteen letters he composed to his wife. The completion of the task gratified me and I felt my obsession with the story had ended. I sent a copy of the letters to my poet friend, as evidence of what her piece had provoked in me. It pleased her, knowing that her own work had made its mark, deep in my creative innards.
No Relief
I woke early the next morning, with scenes from the lives of this man and woman projected upon the blank screen of my imagination. The stories continued to unfold, becoming more complex and detailed as I followed them. I believed I was done with the project, so why did the story continue developing, at the expense of my peaceful slumber? Perhaps it would evaporate within a day or so.
It did not. The stories rolled on, unabated, even accelerating and deepening in richness of detail and vividness of characters.
Our critique group was composed mostly of members who had either published books, or were well into the process. My own connection with the group was for the purpose of fine-tuning weekly articles I published. I personally entertained not a whiff of interest in writing a book myself—and certainly not fiction.
But I knew I had to start writing these stories down, to relieve myself of their intrusion upon my life. And I suspected by the time I finished with them (or they finished with me) it might, indeed, be something like a book.
It Begins
After merely a week into the process, I finished writing four chapters of the book. Though this project began by viewing these tragic and difficult events from the man’s perspective, as the story developed it rapidly became the story of the girl, who grows up to be the woman, whose story is the poem. And the stories started not at the beginning of what would become the book, but seemed scattered throughout the first part of the woman’s life, as she grew up on a small farmstead located somewhere in the hills north of Atlanta, Georgia—near a sandy creek.
After the first week I began questioning my decision to start wandering down this path, ultimately leading to a novel. How, in the world, could I ever finish such a daunting project? One writer friend recently published his own novel—after ten years of sweat! Could I really devote myself to something of that magnitude? Perhaps my recording of these stories would not be a relief, but a curse.
On Monday morning, I began inquiring of the only Creator of all creation what the point of all this was, and whether I should even continue writing this story.
About an hour later, I pulled my ringing phone from my pocket and checked its screen to see if the caller was someone I knew. It was not, but it displayed the origin of the long-distance call as “Atlanta, Georgia.” What?—Atlanta, Georgia was calling? I have no acquaintances there.
It nearly took my breath away to know that “Atlanta was calling” me. I continued holding the phone as it rang, marveling at what this might mean. Without answering my phone, it eventually fell silent.
I snapped out of the reverie and wondered whether or not I should return the call. Instead, as I often do when receiving calls from unknown sources, I checked the number against lists of known nuisance-callers. It did not appear. I did find it registered, however, to a private party at a home in Atlanta, with an address on “Sandy Creek Drive.” Now I was doubly intrigued.
The Sprint
During the next few months I sprinted through composing the eighty chapters of the story, which became the novel “A Peculiar Darkness”. From time to time, thoughts of abandoning the effort seemed best, but quickly those concerns evaporated in the context of yet more timely and extravagant ”coincidences.”
The process of writing this story has been a singular experience. I would not have chosen this path simply from my own free will. In some unexpected, inexplicable way, the story forced itself upon me. Something either outside of me, or hidden deeply inside, compelled me to tell the story.
Although a certain amount of my own sweat and skill were required in its completion, I believe it was not of my own invention. Perhaps this is the case with most creative endeavors—we do not so much create the work, but rather, discover, uncover, recover it.
Lissy Daniels Brandt (protagonist of A Peculiar Darknes) wrote something like this in her poem, “Mining”—
In epochs lost to dust and mist did rare
and lustrous gifts exist in earth’s hot core.
The adamant and ruby red, green emerald
and sapphire fed a hunger old.
Earth’s open maw of gloom amassed, down
darkest shaft to drill and blast her stony bowels.
Swing pick and bar to chip her womb and pry
from some abandoned tomb her sacred gems.
In blackest jet the jewels appear as pitch
and coal to eyes that near their surface draw.
She gives no ease to such a quest but fights
and growls without a rest ‘gainst all who dare.
By greatest force of flex’ed arm the gems
are raised midst threat’ning harm to daylight’s realm.
In rays of sunlight cast upon these diamonds bright,
they gleam like dawn’s unshaded beam.
Now raised to bask in morning’s light these crystals,
clear and colored, smite the eye with glare.
They shine and shimmer as the sun, delighting
eyes of anyone who cares to look.
Their beauty blooms from facet not, but substance
formed of dearly bought and treasured dross.
All value lies in drops of sweat, and tears from eyes
to cheeks they wet with wrestled cost.
‘Bove tears and sweat from labored grief soars Blood
that’s shed for our relief from fatal debts.
Our truest worth is counted by His drops of
Blood that dripped from high upon that Tree.
From cankered crypt to highest sky His Wounds
and Blood entrained on high our wretched mess.
He yielded Life for life to give a Gift
above and Love to live for ever more.