I’ve been drawing all my life and painting since middle school, so it should come as no surprise that my goal was to become an artist. Yet in college, where I studied art, I took all the history courses I could and came to enjoy writing term papers. Yes, you read that correctly. I suppose those 20-page dives into the past became a ‘gateway drug’. Though over the years my creative focus remained on art, specifically painting and selling through galleries, I began to develop a growing ‘writing problem’. It started with articles about gallery and museum shows. Then came artistic interviews and bios of local artists that tried to explicate their work. Some of these pieces can still be found on my art website: www.jacksonpointart.com.
Nevertheless, I considered writing about the arts and other artists as a sideline to my work as an artist. Then I hit the hard stuff — fiction. Oh, along the way, I’d flirted with it. I’d attempted a couple of novels in my salad days, but they remained suitably unfinished and forgotten. Then, sitting in a coffee shop in Mobile, Alabama, my wife and I sketched out ideas for a novel set in Atlanta in 1866. After years of work and many drafts, An Uncertain Peace will be published this fall. Jennifer Chesak, my editor at Wandering in the Words Press, played an indispensable role, prodding me for changes, calling for rewrites, pushing me along as a good idea was shaped into a novel worthy of it.
But frankly, I would have abandoned the project without my wife. Indeed, I did abandon it more than once, but she believed during the times when I didn’t. You see, I saw myself as a painter, and when the frustrations grew too great, I could flee to the studio, confident I was making the right choice–a man running from the opium den of fiction back to a more sensible way of life. My wife always gently nudged me back to the den.
Once you’ve managed a novel, there isn’t any literary thrill that’s out of bounds. Courses on the short story and flash fiction have come and gone. Indeed, I’m currently working on a book of short fiction. A largely completed novel set in Italy and France has been discussed with the good Ms. Chesak. A follow-up to An Uncertain Peace is banging around in my brain. But still the painting goes on. I need that. Art and I have been lovers for too long for me to walk out the door forever, and she always understands and welcomes me home.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the book launch for An Uncertain Peace will be held on Friday, October 10th, at In-Town Gallery in Chattanooga, the gallery that represents my art. Two of the loves of my life (my wife and kids, excepted) will be there, sitting together for a change, sharing the evening.