A Year and a Half of Fiction on Substack: The Water is So Wide
The Water Is So Wide
During the last eighteen months, I’ve serialized two of my novels here on Substack; two more are upcoming. Before starting the next story, Four Months in May, I want to step back and review what’s gone before, and give readers a chance to catch up on posts they may have missed. This week: looking back on The Water Is So Wide.
The Water Is So Wide is a novella about the resilience of art and love, an episodic story told in three parts, tied together by the involvement/voice of the first-person narrator interwoven throughout. Its theme questions how love and art can survive the ever-present forces of destruction and not be permanently extinguished. “Everything beautiful gone extinct. Extinct like the rhinos.”
Art, simply by its existence, invariably attracts forces bent on its destruction. The same holds true with love. The world labors under this dynamic and is ultimately weakened by it: almost ninety percent of Cambodia’s artists perish under the Khmer Rouge; a train built with love and longing no longer runs, standing rusted and still; the Lipik Lipizzaner horses are kidnapped and lost during the war in the Balkans. And yet, the gestures of Khmer dance, the history and power of one man’s love, and the horse stables of Croatia survive to this day. How this can happen, how what’s most valuable is not lost, is often the most fascinating story to tell.
Part II of The Water Is So Wide is dedicated to my Uncle John. This is not his story, but he was a master storyteller.
One inspiration for me during the writing of The Water Is So Wide was the music of Mark Knopfler. The title of this novella, as well as my newsletter as a whole, was drawn from a song off his Golden Heart album: Je Suis Désolé.
We are leaving, leaving Leaving on the tide. Come and stand beside me, love The water is so wide.
Je Suis Désolé
Words and Music by Mark Knopfler
Copyright © 1996 Straitjacket Songs Ltd.
International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
Would you like to listen to audio recordings of The Water Is So Wide? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below.
Up next:
Four Months in May. Starting here on January 13, 2023.
“I dreamt I was walking in the rain, the sky alive with thunder and lightning so far above me.” A quarantine fever dream. Claustrophobia and vastness. Love endangered by impossible circumstances. Loss, belonging, and a love letter to resilience. An ode to energy, optimism, and a future as bright and scary as the unknown.
Top Image: The Little Blue Horses, Franz Marc, 1911. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Yes, audio recordings of each chapter would be great.