When friends of mine set up this Website for me more than three years ago, they did it in such a way that an email sent to me here would be referred to my home email address. I received exactly one email message by that route, from a woman in northeast Ohio who wished to discuss Seasons of the Moon, which she had read.

Thereafter, nothing. Not a single message.

I was not alarmed by this. In fact, I had anticipated that I would likely receive no emails when the Website was set up. Years ago—a generation ago, in fact—I achieved a small measure of notice for writing some sword–and–sorcery novels, but time has moved on, taking all of us with it, and anyone from those days with whom I was still in touch had no reason to try to contact me through my Website.

This is where things sat until about two weeks ago, mid–January 2008. Come to find out that AOL, where my wife and I previously had our email accounts, stopped forwarding the Dave Smith Website email to my home email address. We learned this when we switched Internet providers. My friend Pete at the office told me that all of the email AOL hadn't forwarded for the past three years was still available online at a place called Squirrel Mail.

Squirrel Mail. Jesus.

So I go to Squirrel Mail and, sure enough, there's my mail, one thousand eight hundred thirty-seven separate messages. Far and away, most of them promised me hard-on pills for 70% off, or offered me a special chance to become a millionaire via some dignitary's son in Nigeria, or were for low low mortgage rates. We've all seen these. The problem: in doing my best to delete those goofy, unwanted emails, I managed to remove all one thousand eight hundred thirty–seven of them in one swoop fell. So if anyone at the bottom of the list from three years ago sincerely was trying to reach me . . . well, that email is now in the Squirrel Mail recycle bin, or wherever these things go. The Great Squirrel in the Sky.

To those few persons who didn't know me umpteen years ago and who may have sent me emails that I inadvertently deleted, I apologize. Please send me another email. I will be here on the other end of Squirrel Mail and will reply.

And if the reader in northeastern Ohio would like to know more about the circumstances behind Seasons of the Moon, please write back. I'd be gratified to discuss it further with you.

At the beginning of the 1990s, when I was working as a medical editor on the staff of Neurology, coworkers of mine around the lunch table learned that, at one time, Stephen King and I had had the same literary agent. This caused them no end of amusement at my expense. What happened? they would ask, thinking that they were being clever. Stephen King wound up being this gajillionaire popular writer, and you're working here!

Patiently I would explain that I had given up my pursuit of writing best sellers because I preferred to devote my time to editing medical science papers. I chose my destiny; I didn't allow Fate to just willy–nilly pick me out of a crowd and make me an object of wealth and celebrity. I preferred to do humanity a service by editing important research rather than, you know, writing stories about rabid dogs and ass weasels jumping out of people's butt holes and making millions of dollars doing it. (Stephen King, I mean. It's Stephen King who makes the millions of dollars, not the ass weasels.)

This is the God's truth, but it isn't what my coworkers at the lunch table wanted to hear.

Their comments got me thinking, however. What if I hadn't chosen my destiny and forsworn the quest for literary recognition? What if a different me—let's call him Dan—had continued to try to make millions of dollars by writing books and continued to fail, and became envious of Stephen King?

I don't have any ass weasels inside me (I don't think), but do I have a keen sense of my own destiny. So, continuing to make my own destiny, I wrote "The Man Who Would Be King."

I thought of the title all by myself.

This story dates from November 1993, and I like it a lot. Over the years, I've shown it to friends and acquaintances, and most have thought well of it. I like the idea of the guy in the story—let's call him Dan—stewing in his own juices because he has trapped himself in an impossible situation in commercial America. However, that element isn't what I like most about this story. What I like best is the silly stuff and the bizarre stuff about what it feels like to tap into creativity and immerse oneself in the childlike sense of wonder—and terror, let it be known—when we make things up.

I believe that the urge to tell stories and to paint with colors and to sing and dance and make music are as much a part of our genetic makeup as having stereoptic vision and walking upright. Some of us, of course, are more creative than others, and in different ways, and letting the marketplace decide and editors and agents decide isn't going to work out well for those of us whose gifts don't fit into that narrow definition of commercial appeal. (By the same token, how many of us who eagerly create would have been happy working under a patronage system in old Europe, or putting our skills to use praising the Christian God in the Middle Ages? I suppose these are questions that really have no answers. It starts to get into "Elegy in a Country Churchyard" territory, too.) In any event, a creative approach to cooking, let's say, or for working on automobile engines, or even just to living one's life, is more likely to be satisfying these days than pursuing commercial success is for many of us who write or sing or act or dance. Which, to my mind, brings it around full circle again.

Therefore, I wrote "The Man Who Would Be King" (PDF) to talk to myself about creativity and writing in commercial America and to observe a character who absolutely is not me—let's call him Dan—who lets others define success for him and who can't get past that definition.

Interesting side note: A friend of mine in New Jersey sent a copy of the manuscript of this story to King at the time I wrote it. Let's see what he says, my friend said. Any story that opens with the line, "Stephen King is a big whore!" is bound to attract his attention. I received a very pleasant note in December 1993 from Mr. King's assistant stating that Stephen King was no longer personally answering all of his letters and she hoped I understand. Well, I do understand. I know that I myself can't fit everything I want to do into a full day, and I honestly don't know how some other people can do it.

Here, then, is my story from 1993, which many readers don't know what to make of. It is impossible to sell. It is 14,000 words long, a length no editor wants to accept. It doesn't fit into any genre. And it doesn't do anything except go around in a big circle.

Also, regrettably in this story, there are no ass weasels.

There is, however, a two-headed rabbit, although it appears off-stage.

The novel has been available for a little more than a year as I write this (December 2006), and it has generated sufficient comment that I’d like to discuss a few of the ideas I had in mind when I wrote Seasons of the Moon.

Please note that, if you haven’t read the novel yet, the notes below contain what might be considered to some extent “spoilers.”

The structure of the story is a circular or spiral shape to reflect the way in which this community creates narratives about themselves and the world. This is in contrast with a linear narrative, for example, or a hypertext narrative. In the same way that you or I would tell a story in a linear fashion because in our culture events progress along a timeline of beginning, middle, and end, Scott tells his story in the way that his culture, a gynecocentric culture, sees life: as an unfolding or progression of events that move in cycles of birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth, completely in association with the natural world. Life in this culture is not an artificial life dissociated from the natural world and imposed on it, as contemporary life is; it is life that exists in comfortable reciprocity with the natural world.

Seasons of the Moon, in other words, is a story told by an insider who is aware that he could be speaking to outsiders.

Because the story proceeds in a recurring circular motif, a spiral motif, we return to certain elements as the story moves around in a spiral. I deliberately designed the story in this fashion. Examples are passages of Scott’s introspection, passages about the town or the community, about Sophie, and so on. I began with the idea of a quite rigid pattern; not surprisingly, this evolved as the story went through its series of drafts. Still, the spiral motif is in there, and of course this motif is essential to the story for symbolic and spiritual reasons.

The conclusion of Seasons of the Moon is not one of redemption. Neither does the story end, for example, with a heiros gamos, a sacred marriage setting all things right, or with all episodes of confusion and mixed-up identities sorted out, as in a farce. It comes to an end someplace on the turn of a spiral, or during Scott’s reflection on the turns of spirals. We come back to where we’re from.

The structure of the narrative also is based on an aspect of how life is appreciated by this culture: boxes within boxes, as it were—that is, the child in the womb, the seed in the earth, the nut inside the husk, the fruit inside the skin. The older Scott within the younger Scott.

For years I wondered about what I called the dramatic moment. It is most obvious in modern Hollywood movies, but it is found nearly everywhere in entertainment—the payoff, the money shot, the special effects ending. In drama and melodrama, but not necessarily in comedy, it tops everything that’s come before it and is supposed to be satisfying in a visceral way. It’s a conceit and a habit and it is the only way we know how to tell some kinds of stories, apparently. So where does this come from, our desire for the big payoff, for the special effects ending?

I came across the answer, not in a book about crafting fiction or playwrighting, but in a history of warfare—in fact, A History of Warfare by the redoubtable John Keegan. In the fourth chapter (p 244 of the Vintage paperback edition), Keegan writes:

During the sixth century BC, war for the Greeks was largely a war between Greeks, as the city states perpetuated their quarrels over land, power and control of trade. It became in the process a new form of warfare, fought with iron weapons, affordable by many more men than had composed the armies of the Mycenaean world, wielded by small farmers who were equal citizens, and used to wage battles of an intensity and ferocity perhaps never seen before. The battles of earlier and other peoples—even those of the Assyrians, though we lack exact details of their conduct on the battlefield—had continued to be marked by elements that had characterized warfare since its primitive beginnings—tentativeness, preference for fights at a distance, reliance on missiles and reluctance to close to arm’s length until victory looked assured. The Greeks discarded these hesitations and created for themselves a new warfare that turned on the function of battle as a decisive act, fought within the dramatic unities of time, place and action and dedicated to securing victory, even at the risk of suffering bloody defeat, in a single test of skill and courage.

. . . an intensity and ferocity . . . within the dramatic unities of time, place and action . . . in a single test of skill and courage. Right there we have a succinct description of what we anticipate in a dramatic moment, the build to some ultimate confrontation that allows for no quarter and that ends irrevocably. It does not seem much chastened by two millennia of Christian piety or by some few hundred years of post-Enlightenment rationalization. We play with guns, we attack the fort, we know how it is going to end. As with nearly everything else in our culture, it goes back to the Greeks.

What, then, would be the method of storytelling in Weyburn, Ohio—one branch of a tree going back much further than the Peloponnesian Wars, its roots in the soil of a culture rich with matriarchal or gynecocentric paganism? It is one based, not on a linear, intractable, or inevitable “single test of skill and courage” but instead on a cyclical, spiraling rhythm of birth, life, death, rebirth, and rejuvenation. This explains why the book ends as it does, and why it satisfies the requirements of the way the book is told by Scott, but without any artificial posturing or invented clash of an ending. It ends on the arc of a spiral, on the curve of a circle, in the middle of an endless cycle.

Also, I have long thought that the elements constituting drama in a culture such as this would be things having to do with nature, women, childbirth, and food. So rather than story arcs about heroes going on a quest, or about conflict that must end decisively, we would have stories about animals and nature, achievement in the face of natural disasters, or stories that end with childbirth. Rather than a million pulp stories that ended with a shootout, such a culture would have given us a million pulp stories that end with a successful and happy childbirth. Rather than stories about sinful straying corrected by redemption, we would have stories about sacrifice and rebirth, about going into the earth and coming back out of it, of leaving some place that is artificial to return to some place that is natural and genuine—literally a place, perhaps, or more likely a state of mind or a way of life.

Will is a continuous presence in the book, from the very start, when Scott looks out the window at night and wonders whether Will looked out the window at night when he was Scott’s age. Because the book is a coming-of-age story, it is a long tug of war about what is means to be male, to be masculine, in this culture or in any other sense.

The philosophy of the book is made explicit in the paragraph on the bottom of page 128. I debated not including this paragraph when I was revising the manuscript; my concern was that it is too explicit in summarizing what the book is about:

Nothing is hidden; we just have to learn to see. Nothing is revealed; everything is here with us. The mystery is a mystery because it is a wonder, not a secret.

The first two sentences in particular reinforce Scott’s using his mother’s camera to learn to see as his mother did; by the end of the story, of course, he has learned to do just that for himself (assisted to a large degree by his going through his own underground initiation, almost literally, when he and Will are hiding in the ravine). The first sentence also is a comment on the boxes-within-boxes imagery in the book, which reflects how reality is put together.

The second sentence of my paragraph is a direct refutation of revealed religion, which I consider to be thoroughly strange and thoroughly fabricated, and essentially dishonest. The idea of sin, in particular, is an evil notion and degrading to human beings.

Finally, the mystery is not a secret because there is no secret. Nothing is hidden; nothing is revealed; there is no secret; life is hiding in plain sight, as it were, all around us. This is the so-called mystery of natural or earth-based faiths. This sense of wonder and kinship with the natural world is worthy of human beings because it allows us to engage in our birthright to partake as fully as we can in life. By and large, this should be about the best we can do as human beings. Nevertheless, as we know, a great deal of human history shows us, not as partaking as fully as we can in life, but shows us to be mainly pack animals that prey upon one another. And the society in Weyburn, Ohio, understands that we are basically animals, not fallen angels.

There is, I suppose, a fourth sentence or sentiment that could be added to this discussion, and that is something that Sophie tells Scott late in the book, after his adventure with Will: “The body knows the truth.” With our growing awareness today of the benefits of nutrition and exercise, the knowledge that we are mind-bodies or body-minds, and scientific advances that clearly illuminate the importance of our genetic makeup in everything from susceptibility to heritable diseases to gender identity, we have come more and more to realize that we are not personalities carried around in a brain case and looking out at the world through eye holes but that we are, in fact, our bodies and our body processes.

Scott’s progression to awareness is marked by specific kinds of trees. Each kind of tree has a distinctive meaning, although I didn’t explicitly provide the meanings of the trees each time one is mentioned. But the twigs and sticks Miss Gardner uses for her readings, for example, are specifically oak for strength, beech for the past, fir for sight, willow for continuity, ash to balance what is hidden and what is apparent, and so on. Sophie’s mother was buried under an oak tree, and Sophie herself under an ash tree. The shelter where Scott and Will hide in the ravine during the rainstorm is surrounded by beech trees; both of them, there in the underground, are confronting elements of their past, elements having to do with their mothers. (Nothing is hidden; we just have to learn to see.)

Is Seasons of the Moon a feminist book? I don’t think so. I say this because I see feminism as an awareness of and a reaction against patriarchy. The society in my book was never subordinate to patriarchy; it has existed alongside patriarchy for thousands of years. The patriarchy knows this and keeps a safe distance, as the two little boys are warned to do, early in the story, when Diana and Scott find them after they’ve knocked a bird out of a tree. The people of Weyburn, Ohio, follow their own customs and engage in activities that clearly would be regulated or outlawed in other communities—the manner in which they bury their dead, for example. So, as Scott points out, although they are exotic and interesting because of that, they are largely left alone by the people around them.

No one in the book has a name traceable to a Hebrew name in the Bible; in other words, there are no Davids, Michaels, Johns, or Samuels. All of the character names are Celtic, or Anglo-Celtic, or Germanic, or even Greek—rooted, that is, in something other than our Judeo-Christian culture. Sophie’s full name through many drafts was Sophie Geist—literally, translating from the Greek and German, the wisdom spirit, or spirit of wisdom. But as it turned out, in reworking many drafts, the name or word Geist doesn’t appear in the final story.

I find myself thinking that if the general sentiments of the people of Weyburn can be found anywhere in popular culture right now, the television show Medium seems to get it about right.

My friend Joe Bonadonna recently read the book for the second time and found it to be a much richer experience than the first time he read it. To my mind, the book should indeed reward a second or even third reading. After all, it is a continuous spiral. Boxes within boxes should be found within it, connections should become apparent that may not have been obvious on the first reading, and the events should elicit deeper understanding and stimulate reflection. That is, if I have done my job satisfactorily.

With that in mind, it is worth mentioning that I cut the story to the bone, pared it down as much as I could, because I wanted that sense of spareness, of so much left unsaid, to contribute to the tone of the book. I still wonder, however, whether I cut too much. There is a short scene near the end that, as I much as I wanted to, I couldn’t justify including; it had to do with Scott finding the body of a dead dog by the roadside, a dog that still had its identification tags on it, and Scott drawing a parallel between that dog and Will. In the same vein, I provide very little in terms of the spiritual outlook of the men in the community, although it is very rich; perhaps I should have included more. A number of readers would like to know more about the community itself. Perhaps down the road I’ll write a second book about Weyburn and explore its history.

Nonetheless, the story works so well as it is that I can honestly say that it reflects the work I put into it, shaping it into what it needs to be.

Every major character in the story is defined by loss. For most it is a death—Scott and his father have lost Scott’s mother; Sophie is dying; her daughter, Paige, and her husband, Owen, are in the process of losing Sophie, who is dying. Diana is introduced as having lost her husband and children. Earl, Scott’s friend, loses his father; so does Deirdre, Earl’s sister. Dierdre also, of course, is introduced as having begun to lose her innocence in the sense that she has had her first period and so has begun her initiation into womanhood. So each of these characters is in a moment of passing change.

Copyright ©2006, David C. Smith