How life experiences have contributed to The Summer of the Ennead

Introduction.
At the end of the Afterward and Acknowledgments section of The Summer of the Ennead, I wrote, “This story is the result of the life I have lived. It would not have happened had I not lived it the way I did with both its successes and its failures, and I could not have imagined it at any other time in my life.”
In that short passage, I acknowledged the power of failure in my life; failure can be a great teacher whereas success tends to make us complacent. I am sorry for my failures, but I am grateful for what I have learned from them. I also know that I could not have imagined it at any other time of my life because I had tried and until January 2022, it just was not ready to come out. It is true that most of the life experiences that contributed directly to the story were well in the past by 2022, but perhaps a story is like a fine wine; it must mellow and evolve over time. For those of you who are not fans of alcoholic beverages, chicken soup might be a suitable metaphor.
Where does this mellowing take place. In the brain of course. I have published five books now, but only two have been fiction, and it is with them that I have noticed the great power of the brain to blend aspects of a story, even when I am asleep, and thank goodness for that. Four am wake-up calls, from the brain solved several of my blockages in this latest story.
I will now discuss how eight different life experiences contributed to The Summer of the Ennead – four in this post and four in the next.
Being a reader.
The first is reading. Over the last fifty years I have read over 2500 books or an average of 50 per year, and I have them all listed and rated. Lots of people are even more voracious readers than I. In fact, I read slowly; I wallow. Indeed, it seems to me unlikely that a non-reader could write a novel. Reading shows us how words fit together. It helps us recognize a good plot. It implants turns-of-phrase and new words into our brains. Reading is a writer’s sustenance.
Being a teacher.
Another life experience factor was my thirty-five years of teaching. Although, I was primarily trained to be a history teacher, I spent about half my career teaching English, so it is not surprising that I love words and the art of putting them together on a page. However, the most important thing I learned as a teacher was that students are often not respected or listened to. Our educational model is still primarily about doling out information deemed necessary by the powers that be – politicians, religious leaders, and those who govern the economy. When my career began in 1967, I realized, early on, that so called education was about creating believers in and acceptors of the way things were done. Luckily, there have always been a few rebels who have believed in respecting their students’ thoughts and that critical thinking and problem solving are vital to a young person’s education. You will see the fruits of these experiences in The Ennead in the way the elders respect and help their grandchildren become who they are capable of being.
Compiling my family history
From my mid-thirties until about five years ago, I worked, when time allowed, on compiling my family’s history. As of now, I have almost five hundred names on our tree, some dating back as far as the late 1400s, and I have learned lots of amazing survival stories. What this activity has done for me is to help me realize how fragile my existence is. Had any one of those five hundred people taken a different path, I would not exist, and I am grateful that they did not. How does this activity affect my book? As a show of respect for, at least a few of my ancestors, I have borrowed names from my family tree for all but one of the good guys in my story. Some I actually knew, since when I was young, I had three sets of great grand parents living within 10 kilometres of my home.
Growing up among old people.
I was fortunate, as hinted at above, to live in close proximity to grandparents and great grandparents. In fact, my father’s mom and dad lived on the farm next door, and my grandfather’s parents had a home on a corner of his farm. I was subjected to sweet old people until I went off to university. They told me stories, gave me cookies, made me laugh, but most important was the fact that to a person, they listened to me and tried to answer my questions although I was told I was asking too many. Usually this means that the answers were unknown or perhaps unknowable. The elders in my story always listen.