EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

 

Diane: Thank you for dropping in. Welcome to the show everyone. I’m Diane Dewey and I know that busy schedules get in the way of meeting folks we want to meet. Dropping In is a lost art. When I was a kid my parents would sometimes go over to the neighbor’s house or vice versa just dropping in on them or we’d be hanging out and somebody would knock on the door and right away it was a fun surprise. Where I live now on the gulf coast of Florida I sometimes don’t see our neighbor friends. Our digital lives haven’t made it easier instead it’s more complicated. It’s time to drop in and see what folks are up to.

 

We’ll do a deep dive into the subject at hand. We’re dropping in to find out what makes our guests tick artists, musicians and writers who’ve discovered how to make a statement usually one that goes against the grain. Making a contribution to the world is tough. It’s a tough goal but there are people who’ve come at it usually the hard way and won. We will listen to their diverse stories about identity. Identity can refer to biological, nurtured, gender, cultural, racial and spiritual and other labels we assign ourselves insider, outsider, hipster, square or nerd. Sometimes the I in identity gets lost. Everyone wants to become our authentic selves despite the odds against it. We each have a context whether it’s in the family of origin, an adoptive family or a marriage. That makes maintaining identity the call to rediscover and reclaim who we are that much more challenging.

 

For me the call came when at 47 years old I got a letter from my Swiss biological father. Having always known I was adopted from the German orphanage at age one I faced his question. Would I like to meet him? I would I said and why did I agree to that? Maybe I was filling a void. My beloved adopted father who told me how to barbecue by hand had just died six months before. I’d ended a long-term romantic relationship with a man who just drove me crazy. I was ready for a new anchor and that letter started me on a 16-year journey of learning my roots and discovering a new identity.

 

I visited Switzerland with my biological father and went cross-country skiing in the Engadin Valley. He had done 18 ski marathons. I was petrified but I told myself I could keep up. Maybe it was to please him. The Engadin is a special place, very raw, very rural and remote and untouched where the old language Romansch is still spoken. It’s almost extinct. This struck me as being like I was far, far away from who I had become as an art gallery assistant in New York and maybe who I would die off to make way for another personality. My biological identity had been obscured but back there in my father’s homeland I had revelations. Why had I gone to Vermont years before and become a cross-country skier? Had my genetic coding been in spooling all along? What else would I learn about myself that had been hidden?

 

Otto and I visited my biological mother’s family in northern Germany. We learned that Helena had passed away before I could meet her but the family showed me pictures in an old musty smelling leather album. In the photos Helena wore brightly patterned outfits that she’d sewn herself. I thought back to my teenage years when I told my adoptive mother that I had to have sewing lessons in order to make the kinds of clothes I had to have. It was another uncanny connection with biological identity but that’s not all. It turns out that although Helena had actually died in 1987 it was not before she had taken a job in the orphanage to be with me that first year of life. Not before she had met a US serviceman stationed in Germany and had moved with him to America where they settled in Rochester, New York, one state away from where I grew up in Pennsylvania not before she searched for me all her life in both Germany and America and not before she somehow learned my whereabouts in this closed adoption and arrived at my family home near Philadelphia.

 

She was turned away at the door but Helena’s family told me these stories that I was to learn were true. Because I’ve been curious and even obsessive I’d read about adoptive children and how our identities can be forever questioned, stories about our origins abound but are any of them real. What binds us to the truth? I learned that in the foundling homes in the UK during the 1900s if a woman left her infant child she would have also left a small trinket. These talismans might be a ball of yarn, a coin or a shard of pottery, whatever the mother had at hand to connect her to that child. If she returned the token would reunite her with a daughter or son but more often the child grew older with the locket or the stone or the small middle coin in their pocket all their lifetime sometimes as a remembrance of a mother that once was. I’d had no such mementos until now.

 

That late summer day in northern Germany I found out that Helena’s siblings had kept her baby spoon, her pearl earrings and a grandmother’s ring for me. While I didn’t have her and would never have the touch of her hands to my cheeks or the sounds of her lilting voice in my ears through these talismans I felt I had found her love. It was as though an idea took hold that Helena might come back and claim me in another lifetime if I held on to these things.

 

When I asked her siblings what made them think they’d ever meet me. They said we just knew. They didn’t question their intuition. It was something I’d have to reconnect with. Faith in what I knew all along if I were to find inner guidance and stay true to my identity. In every life I believe there are several reincarnations, inner deaths not just externally but death of the soul. There’s a cycle of rebirth and renewal as old beliefs wither away just as in a marriage there may be inward divorces, estrangements and remarriages. There can also be a rekindling and reuniting. I feel as though my story is about finding love after such a death of the soul. I just lost the most important man in my life, an adoptive father but I’d won the lottery with Helena’s biological family and Otto’s. I knew that many others didn’t get that chance and even though it would be years before I pieced together what really happened to put me in that orphanage I’d gained strength and the validation to move forward. Through meeting biological family I realized that love is the strongest force in the universe. People across the globe will find one another especially now with the DNA kits.

 

I’ve also learned that the truth has a special force all its own it will prevail over deception no matter what the costs. It’s a trust in the world, a world that had before been uncertain. I’d been told by my adoptive parents that my biological family were dead. Sifting through the layers of deception that were well intended and for my protection is the subject of my book called Fixing the Fates. Suddenly neither my heritage nor my destiny seemed no longer decided by others. My identity was formed by parts of all these people biological and adopted but I also became aware that I was a person. I had created myself. I had to ask who did I imagine myself to be. After I sift through who I am is who I designate myself to be, the labels I attach myself to. We’re always in the process of becoming and part of this process is to look beyond a traumatic past and push through self-limiting beliefs often to do a reality check on self-love where every dream is attainable.

 

My job was to resist the traps of magical thinking either too positive or too negative and accept that parental love is imperfect and paradoxical part of my arsenal in this fight was knowledge with a Master of Science and mental health counselling I’ve tried to unravel my own story. Now as an award-winning author of Fixing the Fates I help writers get to where they want to go with their manuscripts by analyzing the work, determining whether the intention and the execution match up in the story I investigate writer’s themes and look at how the language carries them out or doesn’t just yet. Writing takes shape in the editing. I’ve crossed out and replaced all the way along. Then I had a years plus worth of content in copy editing in Fixing the Fates. Reviewing the text to make it as real as life as self is an irresistible urge for me. At TruNord Media, I’m aided in this by two ace editors. To light the way we have an on staff book agent to make your book a reality. My fellow writers work to form truths and feelings that we want to polish and share through story.

 

I came out of the art world in New York where for much of the 1990s I worked beautiful Guggenheim museum it was a place of great visual beauty whether it was painting, sculpture or video art. Visual arts relate to how you set a scene in creative writing. It’s the revelation of the senses sight, smell, sound and touch that brings the scene alive. Since we live through our physical bodies and feel instincts there. It’s key to listen when the stomach goes into knots or our breathing gets shallow or our eyes are squinting.

 

Maybe we can’t digest what’s happening or relax enough to breathe or there’s some part of the picture that just doesn’t add up. Writing is a great way to tune in and access what’s happening with ourselves. We make sense of our own thoughts and emotions by laying down words side by side like bricks. There is both left brain logic and if we can articulate the emotion right side feeling brain that forms a whole. It’s what I’ve tried to do in Fixing the Fates which readers say is like a page turning novel. I hope that you too will find the inspiration to define or redefine yourselves from listening to Dropping In. We’re stopping by to talk to take a deep dive and skip the small talk.

 

We’ll meet a musician who’s written a Grammy award-winning song when before his dyslexia delayed even his reading. We’ll hear from a best-selling writer who didn’t believe in his own strength until he found it through bodybuilding, violence and finally sentence building. An author who did things she swore she’d never do traveling in an RV for example. Now she lives full time on the road enjoying wanderlust. An American writer who woke up one day to find that the rug had been pulled out and as a wife living in Qatar she was no longer that person.

 

Gender questioning persons for whom birthright is a starting point for the conscious choice of deciding who we are. Important truths about diverse identities always worm their way out. By listening to others get a foothold on who they are and learning about their process is to become more ourselves. I hope you’ll take away clues for how to do this yourself. You may find the person you’ve always known or imagined yourself to be. Dropping In guests are people like you and me but who’ve shown the world what it means to be an individual, fight the odds, sift through, create, discard and reclaim and to listen to their intuition. Not always easy with all the noise of our busy lives, yapping brains and our self-judgments.

 

Now we’re empowered to tell our diverse stories. Authors, writers, musicians and artists have been my teachers on how to arrive at a place that centered and even brave especially when the facts around me were collapsing. Their creativity is contagious. When we listen to their stories it’s easier to recreate ourselves the way we had intended. We might have gotten derailed by something shiny or focused on something that turned out to be false. The distractions are not failures. They’re proof that we’re still growing.

 

Jim Carrey said that depression occurs when your avatar no longer identifies with who you’re trying to be. The psyche knows what’s real and what’s not. Its signal is to become whatever is vibrant to you, an inexplicable affinity with African drums, a textile or a poem. When we construct identity constantly through an organic process of binge and purge, accepting and rejecting. At Dropping In we’ll explore diverse stories what makes people unique and even fascinating. We’re done with shoehorning ourselves into preconceived notions of who we should be, being told who we are. Dropping In stories are stories of self-discovery. They enable us to find our truth, reconfigure ourselves to that and imagine who we want to be becoming stronger for it. By listening to others talk about their own path ours becomes less fearful. We’re always supposed to know what we’re doing but often we don’t and there’s no shame in that. We need a compass. Drop into the conversation, create a new dialogue. You’ll get the answers you seek or even the questions you want to avoid. The adventure continues on Dropping In where unique stories become part of the fabric of diversity.

 

We’re going to take a short break now and when we return today’s guest is John Shore, author of the novel Everywhere She’s Not. He’s a man who discovered self-love the hardest way possible by being abandoned by his mother, the person that you think will never leave you in life. Even though this was a character he created David. I think you’ll find this is closely hewed to the author himself. You won’t want to miss this story. We’ll be right back on Dropping In.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: And we’re back thanks for dropping in. Today we’re with author John Shore, author of Everywhere She’s Not. He’s going to tell us how to stitch together a broken heart. Having endured the unthinkable, the abandonment of his mother at an early age. Thanks so much for being with us John Shore Jr.

 

John: Sure, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

 

Diane: I want to get right to it here. You created this really fantastic read of a novel. I loved this character David but we must glean that he’s based on you and your real life experience. Can you tell us a little bit about what had happened to you when you were a young boy, you and your sister?

 

John: When I was eight years old and my sister would have been 11 maybe 12. She’s three and a half years older than I am. Our father left. We just had a regular nuclear style family. Went to work every day. Mom stayed home and took care of us two dogs, cat, guinea pig, regular structure. I’d never seen my parents fight. It was a surprise when one day my dad sat us down and said I will be leaving here tomorrow. Tomorrow, I won’t be living here anymore. I was like what? Because this was in 1966 and at that time divorce just wasn’t around. It wasn’t in my neighborhood. I didn’t know anybody whose parents didn’t live together anymore but the next day he left.

 

He just moved into an apartment about 10 miles away but you look around at your dinner table that night where he usually sits is there’s nobody there. My mom, this is in 1968. My mother very quickly morphs into a full-on hippie radical. We were living in Silicon Valley at that time specifically in Cupertino. My mom started going to San Jose State University which was part of the Berkeley and San Francisco State and San Jose State, kind of triangle of colleges that were very active in the protestations against the Vietnam War and chemical companies. This is when the rise of feminism was really happening and civil rights was really a powerful movement in the country. My mom just dived in 100%. She’s basically out of the house going to college all the time which is pretty great but she’s a single mother.

 

Two years into that one day she goes well, I’m going to go to the store, the Saturday afternoon. I’m going to go to the store. She picks up her keys, purse from the table and says I’m going to go out and get some, just run to the store for some milk and bread. She doesn’t come back. She just gets her car and drives away. She’s gone. She’s gone for two years so we don’t hear from her at all. I don’t hear a word from her not a message for two years. That was on a Saturday. She’s not here Saturday night. She’s not here Sunday but Sunday morning my dad comes home. He’s back. He’s home. So anyway that’s the way that little bit of my childhood unfolded.

 

Diane: Two things at least that we can glean from that. One is John has a terrific sense of humor and views this is a sort of tragic comedy because for us listening it just tears at the heartstrings. There’s no easy way to say these things but it sounds as though your parents did a royal job of reducing it to the least palatable way one, by just flying the coop on the proverbial grocery run and the other just in the most matter of fact way. I think at that point I’m going to dive into your book for a second.

 

You started on I would say the path of resilience because you talk about I’m going to quote your book page 33. When love enters your life everything changes. When love leaves your life nothing does. Love flies away today and tomorrow you’re exactly where you were before you left it. You wear the same clothes. You drive the same car. You watch the same television shows. You eat from the same dishes while sitting in the same chair at the same table by the same window you did before all the oxygen was sucked out of your life relentlessly and inexplicably. Life without love continues.

 

I heard it even in your telling of it that there was the empty chair at the table. When you were absorbing all of this did you did you take that in as a mystery, a big question? How was it as a kid to have that experience?

 

John: For my dad it was a mystery as to how relationships just suddenly and inexplicably are erased. That was a mystery in that how do you just leave like I didn’t understand marriage or relationships. I didn’t get that. My mom’s disappearance was a true mystery. I didn’t know if she’d been murdered, abducted by aliens, she’s laying in a ditch somewhere bleeding. Maybe I’m young for all I know people spontaneously combust. People maybe just disappear. I didn’t know where she was. That was an actual mystery. Do you see the difference?

 

Diane: Yes, absolutely because…

 

John: I don’t know where she is.

 

Diane: You had no clue.

 

John: The one thing I did know is that she would contact me. We were close. We were a little too close in so far as she is a pretty erratic personality. I had learned as a kid to just manipulate her kind of emotionally like really be deeply attuned to what her mood is so that I could learn to sway it one way or another. In that sense we were close and she treated me like an adult. She’s not a good mother obviously but she was good the way she talked to me as if I were an adult. I really appreciated that as a kid and it made me feel like we were closer than we might have felt maybe I don’t know how. I think all kids feel close to their moms but I was definitely close to mine. I didn’t think she would just not contact me. That didn’t seem really feasible at all. Clearly something was profoundly wrong. I just had no idea what it was.

 

Diane: You kind of became precocious. You had found a way to kind of become enmeshed with her through manipulating her emotions almost like an adult would. It wasn’t really a child relationship because that would have required a kind of automatic uncompromising love kind of relationship but you kind of earned your way into her sphere. Then of course you thought well, it’s just a matter of time. If I were a little kid maybe she wouldn’t bother but I have this head partnership with her. We’re head-to-head and she’s going to get back to me like real soon. What’s your thinking?

 

John: I definitely waited. I definitely waited every day, every minute of every day I’m looking. It’s weird the way your brain operates like I took to the idea that she was trying to communicate with me but just I wasn’t able to read the messages well enough. Any little pattern of things that I saw, rock strewn a certain way on the street or a little piece of paper that I would pick. I read every little piece of paper I found because maybe some way she’s magically laid this message in my path. If I pick it up and I can read it. If I could just decode what she’s saying she’ll be telling me something or you really end up kind of going a little bit crazy because you just look. I was just so desperate to know what had happened to her that I kind of established this sort of language with the world that really wasn’t happening at all. I was just hoping to find some sort of sign. That was not fun.

 

Diane: You were kind of reading the tea leaves or are reading the sky or looking at clouds for messages but I think that there’s something very beautiful and almost transcendent in the pain of that because clearly you shouldn’t have had to be doing that, deciphering the world that way. She, in some way allowed for you to internalize that it was your fault that you couldn’t read the messages clearly enough, that you somehow were deficient in looking at the way the fish swam in the tank or what the guinea pig ate or didn’t eat and all the things that might be a sign. To me it’s just unbelievably tender.

 

I want to ask you another question though because in the passage that I read the first sentence when you fall in love everything changes. When you lose love sort of the bottom line is nothing changes but I really wonder about this premise because when you fall in love okay, your innards become radiant. You become exuberant and that’s an acceptable emotion. When you lose love maybe because you’re still driving the same cars, you’re still at the same place when you fall in love as well but you’re allowed to be who you are. I wondered if your discomfort and this cruelty of the way life goes on when you’ve lost the primal love of your life, your mother. I wondered if it was that those emotions were simply unacceptable when you were a boy going to school.

 

John: Well the passage about love, the difference between when you have love and when you’ve lost love is not about him and his mother. That’s a statement that happens later in his life when he’s in love and he’s lived with this girl, this woman, this young woman for two years and she leaves. He drives her out. He destroys the relationship because essentially he’s replaying that sort of dynamic that he grew up with. That’s more of an adult’s perception of tragedy. As we know when you’re an adult and you suffer a monstrous loss it’s almost shocking how much the world just keeps going. Essentially nothing changes that’s what that refers to.

 

As a kid that loss that I suffered collapsed me and here’s the thing. It was that I was wondering what happened to my mother but at the same time the woman that my father married who moved into our house who was basically my new mom was a deeply troubled person. I mean really problematic so not only was I trying to figure out what happened to my mom but this new woman in our house who to give her all, what happened with her is she was raised extraordinarily poor.

 

Diane: I remember. She was a titan.

 

John: She was just crazy about money.

 

Diane: The even crazier part was how you were supposed to be calling her mom I think the day after she moved in which is another violation. That’s nutty but I’m going to take you on  what you just said because the main thrust of the book which I think is a gorgeous one is that David, the character. He breaks off a relationship, a very meaningful relationship with Kate which is where that passage followed. It’s almost like an intergenerational pattern of cut offs where you just enact a cut off. You’re going to prevent yourself from having that pain so you’re going to preempt it.

 

Anyway but I do believe because then further, a little further along you’re talking about yourself. It’s a flashback. It’s a beautiful flashback. You’re far up the street. Your dad signaled, braked and turned a corner and was gone. This is when your dad is leaving. Then he was just a kid standing in an empty street waving at nothing. He thought maybe he’d keep standing right where he was until a car came running over him. No car came though. One step, two steps, three steps the door there, the door opened and then he couldn’t move. He just couldn’t.

 

I felt like okay, there’s an unresponsiveness from the universe. He’s trying to just, he wants the car to come. Even the car won’t come to end his misery. That indifference of the universe I think you did a lot with it. As a person you’ve done a lot with it. Maybe could you just talk a little bit about humor and what you think humor, what role it played as you developed then from these break offs.

 

John: I don’t know where my humor comes from. All I know is it’s the most precious part of my life. It’s always been a kind of and I’ve never wanted to look at it too hard because it’s how I lived. I’m mostly a humorist even though you can’t tell from this book. I’m not and it’s also true that I’m not. I feel like ultimately humor is the only response to tragedy. In the end it’s the only thing that makes sense because in the end we are living in a system which demands you give up. Giving up is kind of funny because it’s like well here we go. We are born into a system that about which we only know one thing and identity being the theme of your show. Another way of saying that is we are born into a system in which we will never, the only thing we really know about what will happen to us is we’re going to die. That’s the only thing we’re sure of. We don’t know what came before. We don’t know what’s going to happen after but we know we’re going to get blanked out. The chances are it’s not going to be pretty at the end. We all know that and so we’re stuck in this farce really in a way.

 

Diane: There’s a comedy to it because in between the birth and the death that we know nothing about why they exist is our life which we don’t know why it is.

 

John: We’re all just kind of, we’re all just kind of out here going well this is weird.

 

Diane: This is weird right?

 

John: We’re out here going, I should probably and it’s all so real. I don’t mean to at all minimize people’s pain. Life is terrible. It’s hard. It’s brutal. It shortens that famous and it’s also delightful. It’s everything all the time. It’s a little overwhelming.

 

Diane: It’s kind of great that there…

 

John: It is to me.

 

Diane: I mean it’s that duality of tragedy and comedy all at once. The way that love and like resentment and confusion all just gets mixed up in one. I also want to say that a response to trauma. Okay, just from a sort of clinical viewpoint even though I do believe that you’re a humorist in this book. One who has a profound sense of the seriousness of life? I think sort of like Jim Carrey, the same kind of thing. You can’t have one without the other but you switch when you have a trauma that thing that cannot be processed to the right side of your brain which is creative and intuitive and where humor resides and spirituality resides.

 

I just have to say John Shore that the laughter in the spirits is the faith responds by our spirit god’s victory. There’s all the laughing gods for heaven’s sake. I mean it is a spiritual aspect to be funny and laughing at life. So maybe you even it’s a faith thing.

 

John: Absolutely. I mean ultimately the best thing that you can do at any given moment really is have fun. If you’re not having fun something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong. I do tend to feel like finding the funny just became an instant instinct for me. It’s not pleasurable because I make other people laugh. I mean I am that guy but just internally it just cracks me up. Most things crack me up if I turn my mind that way in a second. I do do that because I do feel like what else are we really ultimately here for but pleasure. I mean but fun. I want to have fun in life even though I understand life is not really fun for a lot of people all the time.

 

Diane: Neither for us but I think you’ve asked the basic question why not? Why not laugh? I mean it’s not just a coping mechanism. Sometimes it’s a way of creating a little bit of distance okay. Maybe sometimes it’s a way of getting a little bit of approval and love but at the same time it’s a real response to life and the absurdity of it. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh is one of these quotes. I just I think it’s a gift that you’ve given us in this book.

 

I wondered about residual let’s say pain and whether or not as an adult you’re still reliving some of the anguish from these cut-offs. I’m not going to give a spoiler alert. I do know how the book ends but I want you to just frame it for us how has it been to write the book positive or negative and to top it all off we’re going to take a short break. Overall can you give us a thumbs up, thumbs down and then we’ll hear more about that when we come back but you have about a minute to let us know if it’s been positive or negative.

 

John: It’s been completely positive. I waited literally my whole life to write this novel which I always knew I would write. I’ve been training myself as a writer, a professional writer for 20 years waiting for this book because I knew I wouldn’t write another novel before I wrote this one but I basically wanted to wait till all the principal characters, the three parents had died. I didn’t want to write it where they were still alive and I didn’t want to write any other novel before that. It’s been awesome. Is that about a minute?

 

Diane: It’s touching. You did great. Your timing is great just like a comic. When we come back we’re going to find out if there’s more to come from John Shore, author Everywhere She’s Not. Stay with us. Don’t go away.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: And we’re back with N. John Shore, author of Everywhere She’s Not. One of the most poetic titles everywhere, anywhere I should say. John, you’re an authority on loss, abandonment, rebounding, rebirth. For you going forward I just want the listeners to know. You’re a long-time magazine and newspaper writer. You’ve edited in ghost, written several fiction and non-fiction best-selling books. In 2014 in order to start writing Everywhere She’s Not you put on hiatus your personal blog which since 2007 had been among the most read blogs in the country receiving upwards of 300, 000 views a month.

 

You had a column for the Asheville Citizens Time, Citizen Time Ashes to Asheville where you lived. The first real-time serial novel ever published on the website of a major daily newspaper. I want to then ask you and we’ll delve back into the story but since we are about rebirth what do you think will happen next in terms of your writing career because now we’re hooked. We want to hear more from you.

 

John: Well that’s sweet of you to say. Thank you. The blog that I ran did those numbers 300, 000 views a month for about five years there right around from 2009 to 2012, 2013. In the course of that I generated a pretty large, I had a lot of people that followed my writing. When I did this novel I was able to publish it myself because I funded it through a Kickstarter campaign. When I did a Kickstarter campaign for it it actually raised more money for a debut novel than any debut novel in Kickstarter’s history which was like thirty three thousand four hundred dollars. Great, I had a way to put this book out that I could be that way to make sure it got done properly. I did that. Now the book’s been out there and people read it. It seems to be going well.

 

Because it was such a concentrated effort that took two or three years to write I am now in a phase where I’m writing short stories. It’s really been nice. I’m just putting them up everywhere. I’m sending them out on my newsletter. That’s the best way for people to get them because it comes in cleanest in that or I’m putting them up on my blog, also a

Good place to read them because I don’t have any ads on my blog. It’s just a clean interactive experience. I’m putting them up on my Facebook page.

 

Diane: Where can people find you? Just give us the tags on the blog and the Facebook page.

 

John: Johnshore.com. J-O-H-N-S-H-O-R-E. That’s me and you can sign up for my newsletter there. I’m sending out these stories. I’m doing one a month. Sometimes I’ll send out one that has more than one story in it because I’m writing one about every three weeks it looks like. That’s just free. I’m just giving those out to the world because I just think there, it’s just nice for me to be able to drop into that slightly different form than all novel. Then what novel I write next I’m going to kind of wait and see. People really want a sequel to this one.

 

Diane: I can tell because I certainly did. That sated my appetite. I’m a recipient of your newsletter and I love getting the short stories so it reintroduces me to your writing.

 

John: Thanks.

 

Diane: My pleasure. I’ve alluded to you’re a great humorist who also has a pretty good handle on the absurdity of life so not to diminish it but to put a spin on life that’s filled with a kind of comic tragedy. I want to read a passage from Everywhere She’s Not. You’re walking down the west coast highway, headed to the Surf Motel where you’ll be staying for some time following your breakup with Kate, the self-instigated, unknown in origin break up with Kate except that you don’t really know how to handle intimacy. That’s a fair enough situation given your past but you’re on foot. You’re walking to the to the Surf Motel where it’s run by a friend of yours, a dear friend and acts as a kind of refuge for you.

 

Here’s what you say. You’re imagining that you’ve written a brochure for this experience that you’re having which is very cold, very foggy, very miserable but you’re going to write a brochure for the West Coast Highway. Tired of chasing people down who aren’t frozen, whom others can easily hear screaming, tired of trying to attack people who you can’t see and who can see you. You’re envisioning yourself as an axe murderer and how the west coast highway would be just the ideal scene for this. Of course you are and that’s why we’ve just the three words for you, you deranged maniac great, coastal, highways, come, live the dream.

 

I mean I’m in stitches. I just want to say that it’s an act of imagination. It’s humor that takes you somewhere else out of your reality into another place, the self-created world. I wondered if you felt as though humor had done that for you on other occasions.

 

John: I mean that guy at that moment when he has that he’s just basically talking to himself because he’s so cold. That’s a low point in his life and he just breaks. He’s so cold and it’s so dark and it’s so foggy. He feels so vulnerable that he just kind of snaps into a place where he’s imagining that this would be the perfect place for him to get murdered.

 

Diane: Why not?

 

John: Yes. I mean you know I don’t think in terms of I’m going to use humor to escape pain. I don’t think that at all. I feel like I have too direct a relationship with pain. It’s just that at some point it’s just we are in an absurd system because all we want is identity to get back to your theme. That’s really all we want. We want to know who we are and why we’re here and what we’re doing and we would like some consistency to our self-image and we would like to feel pretty good about who we are.

 

We just want a basic identity and generally identity is connected to context. I’m a husband when I’m with my wife. I’m a father when I’m with my child. I’m an employee at my job but ultimately when it comes to who we are in the largest possible context we have no idea because we don’t know what’s going to happen to us after we die.

 

Diane: Where’s the directory on this? Where’s the guidebook anyway? Where’s the instructions here? I mean we’re supposed to know what to do next.

 

John: It’s so final.

 

Diane: Yes but I think you make the most of it being an empath and sensitive as you are and having this close relationship with pain I agree. That was an eye-opening statement you just made. You’re actually feeling more. That’s why it strikes these chords of elusiveness. We’re searching for an identity. Who the heck knows how to get that and secondly, we’re looking for love and where is that all the time. Where is it exactly? We go looking for it.

 

I want to just allude to a later section of the book where you have even a more complete, what I would call a more complete reckoning, day of reckoning, a more complete kind of breakdown right on the beach. Can you talk about, you’ve now re-encountered your mother. She does come back into your life but she’s kind of a phantom. What happened when you re connected?

 

John: She comes back. She suddenly reappears in his life when he is 12. She’s just a deeply problematic person. I don’t spend time in the book talking about why she might be the way she is. I’m just very clear about the way she is. The way she is what anybody would recognize as just a profoundly complete and clinical narcissist. She’s incapable of relating to him or her daughter the way like you would expect her to. She’s a problem but he continues to be canine loyal to her because it’s his mother. He spent so long without her that he just continues to try to treat her in a way that he just wishes that really she would treat him.

 

Finally, there is a scene in the book where as a young adult, as he’s 22 and has broken up with Kate and is living in this motel that’s run by a friend of his, this gay man who’s actually a mentor to him. On a side note one of the reasons I wrote this novel is because I wanted to show what a friendship between a straight man and a gay man actually looks like in real life. That’s kind of a side note but the guy who runs that that motel by the sea is a gay man who’s essentially David’s mentor, his spiritual mentor really.

 

He goes to his mom’s house for thanksgiving. It’s a bad scene. Something in him snaps and he just heads for the ocean. He finally kind of realizes, I mean he finally definitely realizes that she’s never going to love him, that she never has loves him, that she never gave a crap about him and neither did his father and neither did his sister and he’s really been alone in the world. He really is alone in the world and he shuts this fantasy that he’s had, that he’s part of a group, that he’s part of a family. He realizes that he’s not and that’s a very low moment for him. As you know at that moment he almost drowns in the ocean. He just gets slammed by a wave and has a long way to walk to get back to the motel in the dark. He has to take off all of his clothes because the sand is just wrecking his body. He can’t walk so this is the low point of this guy’s life. He’s walking naked. Go ahead, I’m sorry.

 

Diane: What a great metaphor that is right. You’re finally naked. All your clothes are off. You get hit by the wave of truth. I think there’s double edge to it. It’s not just that these people will never love you. It’s that you did nothing to deserve that cutoff or that rejection or that perceived rejection. You in fact were always worthy and as every child is innocent. I think that this sort of redemptive moment where you come to grips with that is incredibly liberating even though you’re really cold, really sick. You come out of it and you are stronger for it. This is something I think like a rebirth. I keep connecting you to the character of David but I feel as though this is something that’s happened to you. Do you feel you came away as another person that a kind of a revitalized person from all of this?

 

John: I will say this. I think that ultimately the only force in the universe that can really change you is love. If you love somebody hard enough, strongly enough I think that that’s the only thing that will make you change because there will be things about you that will bring pain to the person you love if you don’t change that way. In this guy’s case he is not good at intimacy. He doesn’t understand it in a long-term way because the effect of what happened to him as a kid. This did happen to me and it’s something I struggle with to this day. I don’t know if it’s a struggle. It’s just a way my mind is set up. I don’t think in terms of the future.

 

That’s why I’m a good writer. I’m super good at right now but I’m not good at looking ahead because in my brain however things are they’ll change. Don’t invest in the future because you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s what I learned as a kid. Well, that doesn’t work in a long-term relationship.

 

Diane: Where you have to make a commitment but it does work in writing. For that we’re grateful because we have a truly immersive novel here. In the time that we do have left which is getting rather short I really feel as though you’ve touched on a kind of self-love too where you’ve drawn boundaries around yourself by not allowing the people who have hurt you and reject you, not allowing them to do that anymore. You’ve said no.

 

Give us one final thought with the minute that we have left. It’s been a joy John Shore Jr. having you. What do you want people to know?

 

John: Oh well relative to that dynamic that you just suggested I would say that generally forgive people their dysfunctions. In other words if you go through life don’t try to really keep people in any particular space relative to you. Just let them be in the space they’re in and as long as they’re not trying to harm you or harm others just let them be. I find that as I get older especially, the amount of damage that people are can do to me is pretty minimal. I mean unless you’re coming at me with a two by four I’m pretty comfortable just to let you spin around. You know what I mean. I mean I just think that we can hang on to our peace if it’s informed by love.

 

Diane: That’s right. Thank you very much John Shore. It’s been a beautiful experience being with you. Thanks so much for dropping in with us.

 

John: Thank you.

 

Diane: See you next week.

 

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.