I Interview the Legendary Editor Alan Rinzler:

If you’ve read any of my series “Better Late Than Never…” you will have heard a little of experience in trying to become a writer.  The biggest part of this education was not trying to write but learning accept others’ edits.  Alan Rinzler was a big part of that.  Alan has worked with some of the best in the business and I knew better than to challenge his advice.  Now that the book is mostly done, I thought it would be interesting to turn the microscope around and ask him a few questions.  In pure editor’s style, he told me that I could ask him whatever I liked and that I was only to post it verbatim.  I guess he still doesn’t trust my edits!

 What was it like working for Rolling Stone in the early days?  Can you share a story?

We were all very young. practically no one out of their twenties and a few younger. Seventeen, eighteen... It was thrilling, since we had no bosses and the lunatics were running the asylum. It was also scary because we had no idea what we were doing on the business side -- no financial planning, no experience with advertising, printing, distribution -- and we nearly went Chapter 11 on several occasions. The daily experience was intense, since we had bi-weekly deadlines to meet that had to be fulfilled. Individual stories are hard to discern since there was, to be frank, a great deal of pot smoking (and more) in the office. "If you can remember, you weren't there." I do recall, however, one day when we heard a shout from the receptionist that sounded like "the cops are coming." In a flash, everyone rushed to our fourth-floor windows and threw bags and bottles of miscellaneous substances out the window and into the street. A few moments later one of our best rock culture critics Jonathan Cott strolled out of the reception area and into the back of our office. The original cry had been "Cott is coming!" Hoho. Luckily we were able to get down the stairs and out into the street to retrieve most of our contraband.

One other story: A few years later (i.e. 1973) one of our art directors, probably under the influence of something, got in my face about graphic decision and I knocked him down, largely in self-defense. He sued me for assault and battery and I wound up settling out of court for the cost of his torn up shirt. Such are the unintended consequences of recreational past-times.

 How was working as an acquiring editor at Simon and Schuster, Bantam, and Wiley (to name a few) different from working for yourself as a developmental editor?

Well... it's the authors who are paying me, not the company, so I feel responsible for doing the very best job possible with no one looking over my shoulder. The lack of supervision requires the opposite of laissez faire. Also the income is unpredictable.

 You’ve been the editor for some of the biggest authors of our times including Hunter S. Thompson and Toni Morrison as well as unknowns like me.  What do you look for in an author before taking them on as a client?  Can you share a story of an unknown author that you helped find success in the industry? 

That's two questions, not one. Everybody needs an editor.

 What I look for in an author is the certainty that with my help, this will be a good and worthy book. It has a voice, a story, authenticity, integrity, meaning and significance. I reject two-thirds or more of those who approach me for editorial consultation or services.

 An unknown author whose had success is David Tomlinson. I edited his first collection of short stories, which was self-published and more recently spent two years working with him on a novel, "The Midnight Man" which was picked up by the stellar agent Eleanor Jackson and sold to Tyrus Books.

For most of its history, the publishing industry has had a bit of a paternal relationship with its readers – they told us what to read.  Now anybody can “publish” just about anything and potentially put it in front of millions of people.  The question is – is this better?  For whom? 

I don't agree with your assumptions here. The publishing industry has tried to publish good books they loved that would also make money. Every decision is without research or market-testing, so 80-90 percent don't sell more than a handful and lose money.  

Also, sure anyone can self-publish, but in fact they can't get their work in front of millions of people, so self-publishing and going around the traditional houses is better only for an author who has a great book and does a lot of work with self-marketing. It's also good for publishers who search for successful independent books and make a deal with the author to publish them traditionally.

Who is your favorite fictional character in literature?  Are there certain winning attributes that you look for in a character that you know will win over readers? 

Phillip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler. A hard-boiled guy who can fall in love, never loses his integrity, and kills bad guys when it's necessary.

I don't know what particular attributes will win over readers, and no one else does either. What wins over readers is a hugely diverse and unique quality of characters that depends on brilliant writing, as with Raymond Chandler, Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, John Le Carre, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Adam Johnson, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Paul Beatty and others.  

Better Late Than Never… (Part Three)

If you would have told me in the tenth grade that I would sit down one day and write something, anything, for the pure satisfaction of it, I wouldn’t have believed you.  Writing was paramount to things like cutting the grass or changing the oil in my 1979 Ford Fairmont – dirty, difficult things that were only done to avoid being evicted from my parents' house or to keep my meager social life going.  It was that very year that I had Mrs. Smith for English Literature.  Back then, to graduate, we had to take one semester of American Literature and one semester of English Literature.  Considering that I had pledged to never read a book, this was more than a challenge.  The American Literature class had slid by without incident because the teacher, my track coach, had a fondness for reading each of the assigned books aloud.  This was not the case with Mrs. Smith.  To call her a shrewish old lady would be putting in mildly and I think she relished in punishing anyone that wasn’t born with a book under his nose.  She sniffed me out right away.  My reviews of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Canterbury Tales each came back with more red ink than black.  I thought she was particularly unfair because I had gone to a lot of trouble to read those Cliff’s Notes and chapter summaries.  I had even used a thesaurus to find some big words to throw off the scent of my plagiarisms.  She saw through it all and seemed to relish in scribbling the large C- across my prose.  I had fancied the girl sitting next to me and she was way out of my league.  Not just in looks but brains.  She was one of those strange beings that actually liked reading all the assigned books and wrote her papers effortlessly, always getting an A+.  Mrs. Smith missed no opportunity to let the class know who had received a good grade and who had not.  She may as well have posted the grades on the chalk board.  I did my best to hide my poor grades from this girl and I even went out of my way to discuss the books with her.  I think my ruse was mostly working until the day that Mrs. Smith left my red-ink-stained paper on my desk while I was in the rest room.  The girl tried to act like she hadn’t seen it but all was lost.  Let’s just say that my ambitions were not fulfilled.  She went on to be the valedictorian and not my prom date.  Since that little run-in, I’ve been a little shy about sharing my work and deathly afraid of people with red pens.

After I finished One Step Ahead, I spent weeks editing it.  My method was to print it on three-holed paper, put it in a binder, and re-read it with a red pen.  The red pen was OK if it was my pen.  I would mark up each page until I got to the end and then sit down at the computer and fix it.  Then, I’d re-print it and do it again.  After about three rounds of this, I had perfection.  Of course, I hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do next.  Send it off to a publisher?  I was pretty sure there was an agent involved but I wasn’t quite sure of whether the agent did the editing (not that there was anything to edit of course) or the publishing house.  I just needed to get it in front of someone.  I spent some time surfing around on the Internet and realized that I was in way over my head.  I found a least a dozen books on the subject and purchased them all from Amazon.  When they arrived, I knew I was out of my depth.  People, it seemed, spent their lives unpublished!  There was an entire industry built around just trying to GET an agent, let alone getting to a publisher.  Well, I’ve never been one to let this sort of thing get me down, so I sat down with my copy of Guide to Literary Agents.  I put little stars next to the ones that sounded like people that I’d like to get a beer with and figured that I’d write them a letter.  Not a “query letter” mind you, because I had no idea of such a concept.  I guess I just figured that they were simply waiting to hear from me.  Imagine my surprise when nobody wrote back.  When I purchased “the Guide,” it came with a free membership to Writer’s Digest.  I was now on the other end of their marketing machine and getting emails daily about “How to Succeed in Picture Books” or my favorite “Break into Copy-editing!”  I was about to permanently relegate them to my spam folder when the offer came declaring “Have Your Novel Critiqued by a Real Agent and Lean to Write a Perfect Query Letter.”  Well, sign me up!  I was so excited that I took a day off work and sat in the nearby public library with headphones just to sit through the live webinar taught by literary agent Kimerley Cameron.  To make a long story short, I quickly learned that I was doing just about everything wrong.  She gave all sorts of helpful hints about how to find an agent, how to write them a proper query letter and most importantly – what not to do.  At the conclusion of the class, we were permitted to write Ms. Cameron a query letter, which she would read and critique (a privilege I was learning) and submit the first ten pages of our manuscript for critique.  She would give us some tips on the letter and if she thought the ten pages were any good, she reserved the right to ask for more.  I think I spent more time going over that letter and first ten pages than I had in all of my last edit.  Imagine my surprise when I found more mistakes!  Anyway, after holding my breath for nearly two weeks, she asked for the next fifty pages!  Ha!  I was on my way baby.  I changed the font and margins to cram in an extra ten pages.  I figured that the more she read, the more she’d want to see.  A week later, the response came; polite and curt.  Thank you, but no thank you.  Actually, her direct quote was “you have talent but your work could use the gentle hand of a good editor.”  An editor?  I had edited it!  Not a spelling error in there!  I replied and asked her if she could suggest any, which she did.  I got a short list of five editors and at the top of the list was Alan Rinzler.

I have to say that Alan’s bio was more than a little intimidating.  This guy was the editor for Hunter S. Thompson!  Toni Morrison!  Now that I was starting to realize that I was in a little over my head with this whole writing thing, the last thing I needed was another slap-down.  I went on and explored the other editors and even sent one of them a query letter that got no reply.  Feeling frustrated, I decided to fire off a letter to Alan.  What the hell?  I might as well get ignored by the best.  I sent it in the morning and got a reply that evening.  I couldn’t believe it.  I had put a brief synopsis in my letter and his reply was “sounds interesting, send me the whole manuscript.”  The whole thing?  My Writer’s Digest had told me that they nearly always wanted it in pieces and it might take weeks to get back to you – if ever.  I sent the whole file that night with high hopes.  High hopes of hearing from him eventually.  Imagine my surprise when I woke up the next day with another reply in my inbox.  “… I've read the draft with interest and respect. I can see, however, why Kimberley suggested you work with a developmental editor, since you're having major problems with character development, structure, narrative arc and literary style.”  Yikes.  He went on to suggest a Skype session and laid out his terms.  It was basically a take it or leave it scenario.  I took it.  He made me essentially start over.  He even made me write an outline before beginning again and he edited the outline! 

About midway through this process I was feeling the anxiety that I hadn’t experienced since Mrs. Smith’s 10th grade English Lit class.  Except this time, it wasn’t the girl at stake, it was the thought I may never get this done and that it wasn’t that good to begin with.  I had a bit of a breakdown and wrote him a long letter.  I don’t know what I was thinking or what I expected in return but he was rather kind and reassuring.  I told him that I really just needed to know one thing.  I wanted to know, I needed to know, edits aside, whether he thought any of this was any good.  He sighed (we were on Skype) and said that he only takes on about twenty percent of the requests that he gets and asked me if we were proceeding or if I was quitting.  I decided that was all the reassurance that I was going to get - I proceeded.

Over the next several months I came to realize that writing a manuscript is like making a blue print of the house that you’re going to build.  Editing it is building the house.  You really have to get your hands dirty and it both takes longer and costs more (of your soul in the case of writing) than you had budgeted.  I don’t know if One Step Ahead will ever see a publisher or that glorious front rack at Barnes and Noble as you walk in, but I do feel really proud that I’ve done something completely.  If I could find Mrs. Smith or that girl from class, I’d like to send them a copy.

Better Late Than Never… (Part Two)

I grew up in the magical world of nineteen eighties American suburbia.  There were bicycles and beaches, bonfires and mischief.  Lots and lots of mischief.  This is neither that tale of surviving Compton nor being down and out in Beverly Hills.  We were right in the middle.  Middle class defined.  Neighborhood after neighborhood of families with a working dad, a homemaker mom and no electronics.  We got our first VCR when I was half done with high school and our single phone stood in the middle of the kitchen causing more than a few embarrassing conversations with girls that called.  Things like air conditioning and cable TV were for the rich kids that lived a few miles away in the other school district.  We weren’t poor either (though my kids might dispute this).  There was a beach that our subdivision shared and we also had a park.  My parents had two cars and we never missed a summer vacation.  Again, my kids would be horrified at the idea of camping as a money saving tool on the way to Disney rather than a novelty in itself, but still, we had it pretty good.

My little cohort within the interconnected subdivisions collectively known as Highgate, liked to push the envelope a little.  There was Mike across the street, Jeff down the street, and my brother Craig.  This was the inner circle, surrounded by a larger group of about another ten boys and girls that may or may not have been there from one day to the next.  If soccer was fun, why not play it on the roof the local elementary school?  If diving off the local swimming platform was fun, what not do it naked in the middle of the night with girls?  And on it went.  These little hijinks of adolescence had a way of inflating themselves every year.  We discovered the forbidden fruits of alcohol and tobacco around the seventh grade and it wasn’t long before the stolen beer had given way to the half-gallon of whiskey.  Stealing cigars from a local store led to a lifelong affection for them but drugs and alcohol really had their consequences.  It wasn’t long until we could steal a whole fleet of golf carts or were taking our parent’s cars to parties while they slept.  This is before we had driver’s licenses.

Well, one thing led to the other and we all slowly grew up.  By the time I had graduated from college, it seemed that we had all gotten away with it.  We had pulled off the caper without any consequences.  You can spend years of your life getting totally wasted, smoking whatever you like, lying, cheating, and stealing and nothing bad will come of it.  Nobody died anyway. 

I had secured my first “real” job after college and was renting a house with another guy and two girls (growing up was a more of a progression than an event).  By real job, I mean that I actually wore a suit and tie and was working in a field that I had actually studied in college.  It was not real enough to support myself yet, but I was on my way.  I had gone upstairs to change out of the suit before looking for dinner when the phone rang.  Now mind you, this was the early 1990s, so still no cell phone.  My roommate answered it and yelled up the stairs for me to pick up the cordless that we kept on a table in the hallway.  It was my mom.

“Honey, I need you to sit down” she said.

This was a first and my heart skipped a beat.  I sat on the edge of my still unmade made and asked her to go ahead.

“Jeff killed himself last night” she said.  Then she waited for it to sink in.

I didn’t say anything because it didn’t sink in.

“Honey, are you still there?  Are you ok?  Did you hear me?”

“Um, what happened?” I managed.

“I just heard the news.  I got a call from the neighbor.  I guess it happened last night.  He shut himself in the garage and started the car in the middle of the night.”

“Could…”  I couldn’t get the word out.

“It wasn’t a mistake.  I guess he left a note.”

“Did he say why?”

“I don’t know Honey, but I wanted you to l know.  I guess he was struggling with depression and had been drinking.  Are you going to be alright?”

I told her that I was, though there were already tears welling up in my eyes.  I hung up the phone and went down the stairs and out the door, still wearing my suit with the tie untied around my neck.  I got in the car and started driving.  And driving.  I wound up at a McDonald's of all places, about twenty miles away.  Throwing my tie in the back seat, I ordered three cheese burgers and sat in my car for a very long time taking turns weeping and eating.  This was the first real thing that had ever happened to me.

Going through the motions of the viewings, the funeral, and meeting up with the old gang several times seemed like a blur to me.  All that I could think about while I sat in that pew of the Orthodox church was I wanted to write it all down.  Not just the absurdity of this immaculately ordained church that we had tarnished years before (in a summer job they had hired us as janitors and we blared Ozzy Osborn music from the organ speakers), but the full cycle.  The cycle of this son of immigrants that had come our crazy neighborhood and got wrapped up in a mess that had led to this.  I wanted to tell all the stories.  I suddenly wanted people to know about Jeff and I dancing on the hood of my parents’ car at a Beach Boys concert with girls we had just met and how on another time Jeff had demanded we row him home in the middle of the night while we camped on an island.  People needed to know the story.  Well, that’s how I felt, but I didn’t know where to begin.

In my last piece on reading, I mentioned that I skated through most of my youth without reading.  Well, my track record with writing had been about the same and I didn’t know where to begin, so I just started.  The book was called the “Highgate Chronicles” and told the story from the point of view of a boy growing up.  There were thinly veiled stories of sleepovers that led to police chases, and parties of epic proportions.  I say point of view, but frankly I didn’t know anything about it and found it frustrating.  I just wanted to tell my story and kept getting fouled up in the rules and mapping of the whole thing.  I found it very frustrating and after notebooks full of attempts, I gave up.  Who wants to hear the story of a bunch of self-consumed brats anyway?  Years went by.  That was my first attempt to write.

I decided to give up the Highgate story, at least until I figured out was I was doing.  I reasoned that I had plenty to write about and that I needed to give up this notion of finishing my original idea before I started the next.  I started a novel about a local American Arab kid (there are a lot in Detroit and Jeff had been one of them) that gets swept up in espionage after 9/11 (see how now it’s 2001 already?).  I got pretty far with it, but it fizzled and I got frustrated.   All the while, my reading obsession (see the last piece on that) continued and started to branch out from classics to just about everything that I considered “smart.”  Subjective I know, but to this day, I cannot read pop fiction.  It was around this time, now in my thirties, that I found and fell in love with David Sedaris.  No, not that way.  I just couldn’t get enough of this guy that actually made a living out of just writing these fabulous essays about his world.  I wanted to be like him!  I even dragged my wife to go see him speak at an event where I got him to sign my copy of “Me Talk Pretty One Day.”  I started writing essays on everything I could think of.  I would pen a whole piece on my last haircut or how I felt about running and don’t even get me going on skiing.  I started filling up notebooks and I think I finally started to get a little (I said little) better at the craft.  I carried around a little pocket notebook and wrote down ideas of whatever popped into my head and then I would stay up late composing anything from a poem (not so good) to short stories.  Somewhere in here – I got distracted.  Life just sort of got in the way.  A change of job, parenting, and next thing I knew – I hadn’t written in a couple of years.  Years!

I’m not really sure what happened, but one day I started again with One Step Ahead.  I just started to type.  And type and type and type.  It became an obsession for me.  I would do it in our guest room, in the library on the way home from work, and in hotel rooms on business trips.  I would sneak back to my room during meetings or skip the cocktail hour to type, type, type.  The longer the flight – the better.  Anytime I wasn’t actually with my family (which I value) or physically at work (which I need), I was finding an excuse to type.  The crazy thing grew to 350 pages.  When I finally came to my conclusion, I spell checked it and was ready for publication!

And then my lesson in writing really began…

Better Late Than Never... (Part One)

I hated reading when I was a kid.  I’m referring to the span of time that for most men that extends from birth to the early twenties.  You can’t blame it on my parents.  My mother was a school teacher and knocked out at least a novel a week and my dad would spend his evenings in a book-lined den reading his biographies and newspapers.  They tried their best, plying me with Hardy Boys books, Sports Illustrated and even MAD Magazine.  If it was more than a paragraph, I’d put it down.  Maybe it was some rebellion to my parents’ efforts or maybe I was just lazy.  Probably the latter.  In my defense, I wasn’t a very good reader and I’m still not.  I read really slowly and I have to stop myself from mouthing the words while I read silently; a strict no-no in every speed-reading manual. 

I knew it was important, but I never stopped seeking a hack (we didn’t have that term then) or way around the hard part.  For about twenty years, I prided myself in just that.  I got through high school and undergraduate studies by mostly reading chapter summaries, Cliff’s Notes, watching the movie, and generally winging it.  I thought I was getting away with something.  It wasn’t until my senior year of college, when my dad was driving me home from school that something happened.  We were stuck behind a car with the curious bumper sticker that asked the question “Who is John Galt?” 

“Now, what is that supposed to mean?” I asked my dad.

“Ah, now that is a true intellectual” he said.

I sat there for a minute, not wanting to take the bait, but I took it.

“That’s great Dad, but what does it mean?”

“Well, I can’t tell you.  It’s from a book.”

“What book?” (the tractor beam starts the pull).

“Atlas Shrugged.”

“Atlas, what?”

“Shrugged” and he shrugged his shoulders as the light turned green.

“Atlas Shrugged?  What kind of book title is that?”

“It was written by Ayn Rand.”

“So, who is John Galt?”

“Well, I can’t tell you.  You have to read the book.”

“Seriously?”

He didn’t reply.  In fact, he changed the subject.  No attempt to convince me to read.  That was it.  He mentioned that it was on the shelf at home if I wanted to find it and then he just turned up the radio.  This just about drove me crazy.  When I attempted to broach the subject later, he wouldn’t answer my questions.  When we finally got home, I waited until he had gone to the store – there was no way he was going to see me looking through his books.  It took a while to find it, stuck between Adam Smith and Thomas Edison.  A battered paperback with yellowed pages, and… eleven hundred pages.  Oh, no.  No, no, no.  I’m not going for this one.  I put it back.

My mom was cooking dinner when I dropped it on her.

“Who is John Galt?”

She slowly turned from the kitchen sink, drying her hands with a curious smile and a tilted head, but said nothing.

I repeated the question, “Who is, or was John Galt?”

“Why do you ask?”

What the hell?  This was all a déjà vu moment from the time when the ten-year-old me had stood in the same spot and dropped the “what does fuck mean” question to her.  She had dropped the plate she was washing into the sink.  Slowly turning around and drying her hands on her apron, she had simply said “why do you ask?”

I told her the story of the bumper sticker, leaving out the part about my dad insisting that I read a book.  Right on cue, she merely said

“Well, you would need to read Ayn Rand to answer that” and when back to preparing dinner.

Did they rehearse this or something?  I was so annoyed that I went out and didn’t mention it again – and neither did they.   It wasn’t until the end of the break, when I was packing to go back to school (raiding their pantry), that I had my moment.  I was taking my old beater of a car back to school (it had been in the shop) so they wouldn’t see what I packed.  Each time that I came in and out with armfuls of stuff, I had to pass that den.  On the last time to the car, I looked both ways for my parents.  The coast was clear.  I put down my bag and went in.  Facing the book on the shelf, I looked at it for a minute and grabbed it and put it in the bag.

When I finally got up to school I practically couldn’t stand it.  Leaving my luggage all over the floor, I sat down on the couch to read “Who is John Galt?” in the opening line.  I scanned the page for some sort of explanation, and then the next, and the next and found myself scanning hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of pages for the answer.  Nothing.  It was at this moment that my hippie roommate walked in, glanced at the title and asked “Who is John Galt?” as he went into his room and shut the door.  Infuriating.  I was going to have to read the damned book.

That book changed my life.  Now I know what you might be thinking.  Maybe you don’t like Ayn Rand or her philosophy.  Maybe you don’t think she’s that great of a writer.  That is not the point here.  This is how I began reading.  That damned book took me almost year to read.  The transformation wasn’t immediate.  It was only my pigheadedness that kept me going.  Well, that and the apparent conspiracy of all Ayn Rand fans to withhold the identity of John Galt.  Though my opinions aren’t what they were at twenty-one, I was persuaded by Ms. Rand and will never quite see the world in the same way.  Again, this is not the point.  After this (I had graduated by then), I found a list: “The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written.”  I think it was from an ad for the Easton Press trying to sell me leather bound books that I could not afford.  It was also about this time that I discovered books-on-tape.  I know, “he said tape.”  Very funny, but it was 1991.  I started double-timing the list; reading at night and listening to another book in the car for my one hour commute each way to work.  By the time I got married in 1996, I had vanquished the list and moved onto “The Greatest Books of the 20th Century,” “The Greatest Science Fiction of All Time,” and “Books That Changed the World.”  Thanks Easton Press.  I will say that I eventually did start buying their books when I finally had a positive bank balance.  After I would read the library version or listen to the tape and I felt that I could not live without it, I would buy the leather bound version.  Unfortunately for my new wife, this meant most of them.  We didn’t have room for all the books in our first home and it wasn’t until we built our next house in 2002 that I finally had bookshelves.  Somewhere during these years, I had also developed an old bookstore fetish and the crusty old books lined every surface.

It wasn’t a genre thing either.  It was biography, vampires, and history.  It was Don Quixote, Dune, and Benjamin Franklin.  Sitting next to my Stephen Hawking was the Tao Te Ching.  My poor wife (God bless her) would try in vain to organize them, but it was no good.  Much of them simply stayed in boxes in our crawl space but I would just keep pulling them back out to look something up. Somewhere in there I had decided that it was cool to have multiple versions of the same book and cross reference the different versions.  I would have five bibles arranged across my desk so that I could “compare” them.  I was amazed by the differences.  The infection had metastasized. 

Through all this, I had never really thought of actually writing myself until Jeff died….

(to be continued….)

Leonard Cohen Can’t Sing

I never much liked the singing voice of Leonard Cohen.  This is ironic because anyone that knows me would tell you that he is one of my favorite artists of all time.  Leonard died yesterday.  I suppose if you clicked on this post you know this and you were probably annoyed at the impertinency of such a blog title.  Leonard Cohen first came into my consciousness in 1991.  I had just graduated from college when Atlantic records released a compilation of Leonard covers titled “I’m Your Fan” and included performances by everyone from R.E.M to the Pixies.  It was actually a redub of an overseas version put out by the French publication Les Inrockuptbles.  I don’t know what provoked me to pick it up.  It certainly wasn’t played on the radio and these were the days of record stores.  Maybe it was the R.E.M cover of “First We Take Manhattan” (which did get some play).  I fell in love with Leonard Cohen that day, listening to the CD over and over again.  I couldn’t get enough of James’ “So Long Marianne” and Lloyd Cole’s “Chelsea Hotel” and I started picking up other pieces and scraps of Leonard’s music.  Imagine my surprise when I actually heard the real Leonard sing.  I loved listening to him sing the way I’ve grown to love the burn in first sip of scotch whiskey or a bitter cup of piping hot coffee.  Not sweet but satisfying and stimulating.  His biblical references interweaved with feelings of passion and despair - all backed by a zippy beat and sometimes gospel singers and even a “wall of sound” at one point.  I don’t think the man who sang “I’m sorry for smudging the air with my song” would be offended by my title to this post.

Now, as I’ve said, this was the early 1990s and no iTunes or Google.  Imagine how happy I was to stumble across “Tower of Song: The Songs of Leonard Cohen,” another tribute album in 1995.  This time, I had the treat of Willie Nelson singing “Bird on a Wire,” Peter Gabriel singing “Suzanne,” and Suzanne Vega singing the “Story of Isaac.”  About the same time, I came across “The Future,” which actually had come out a couple of years earlier, this time by the real Leonard.  By this point, I was indoctrinated to his bass voice and dead pan delivery – talk about biblical apocalyptic imagery.  I ate it up.  Since these early discoveries, Leonard had remained one of my favorites, leading me to make my own compilation CD (read: mixed tape) of every cover that I could find of “Hallelujah,” I think there are 13, with Brandi Carlile being my favorite.  Leonard Cohen is part of a very small cohort; so talented in their craft of song writing and poetry, they actually outpaced their ability to perform their own work.  Anyone can tell you of the brilliance of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, or even Burt Bacharach.  In other words; people known for their verse, not their honey-coated voice.  I have followed Leonard, with his plunge into Buddhism and revival back into art.  You will see his influences in my writing (that is if I ever get published) and I even named one of my characters after him.  See if you can figure out which…

I’m listening to Tower of Song as I type and again the irony burns through:

“Now I bid you farewell, I don't know when I'll be back

They're moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track

But you'll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone

I'll be speaking to you sweetly from a window in the tower of song.”

Author and Editor Christina Henry de Tessan interviews Marc DeRoche about One Step Ahead:

1.      What compelled you to write this story?

It sounds funny, but this story sort of wrote itself.  I guess it’s a composite of the many books that I’ve read and loved over the years.  Growing up (for me, this was late 20s), I loved the stories of Patrick O’Brian.  Of course this book has nothing to do with the Napoleonic Wars, but that’s not really what those books are about either.  They’re about two friends trying to find their way and going about it very differently.  I guess if you take that and mix it up with my own spiritual journey (question everything), and love of travel, you get One Step Ahead.

2.      How did you first learn about the Kumbh Mela?

Just like Michael, I read about it in National Geographic.  There is also a mention of it in “Autobiography of a Yogi,” by Paramahansa Yogananda, which is one of my favorite books.  I named one of the characters in One Step Ahead from this book.  Can you figure out which one?  After this, I sort of became obsessed with it, ordering books, watching videos, and tracking it online.  There are actually pictures of it from space.  It was featured by National Geographic in 1921 and again in 2014 but here’s a short video on a show that they did. 

3.      Why did you decide to write a book that featured it?

Frankly, I didn’t put the idea of the journey of the two friends and the Kumbh Mela together right away.  I had this idea of two friends taking a journey.  A sailing trip?  Africa?  Then it occurred to me that my recent obsession with the Kumbh Mela might have a place…

4.      How do you think travel changes a person?

Anyone that has traveled out of their front door knows that things are not in your control.  The traffic jam, the line at the ticket counter, the TSA, and other travelers all have a way of getting in your way.  You have to just let go.  It’s a liberating experience if you can see where things take you.  My wife and I ended up out of gas in a rented Jeep in the Yucatan at the other end of a border guard’s gun when we tried to ask for help.  We still laugh about it but it puts things into perspective when people can’t handle a delayed flight.  We ended up begging $20 from a Mexican family. 

5.      What is your favorite place in the world?  The most surprising?

It’s probably surprising but it’s my home state of Michigan.  We have all four seasons and I just love the Great Lakes, the fall colors, the snowy winters, and the Midwestern manners.  Sometimes the best part about travelling is coming home.  I backpacked through Yosemite last year and this year, I’m just going to Michigan’s own Porcupine Mountains instead.  No people…