Guest Blog: Seeking the Distant Hills Within by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

This month ChiZine Publications (CZP) published my second novel, TheIndigo Pheasant, the sequel to 2009's The ChoirBoats. The characters in both books concern themselveswith finding a place outside our maps, a place called Yount.Whether they satisfy their longing is something I will let readers decidefor themselves. In this short essay (thank you again Charles forinviting me to guest-post at Bibliophile Stalker), I will insteadtalk about my own search for Yount. You can decide for yourselfwhether I have succeeded in overcoming what Baudelaire named "thatfever which grips us in moments of chill distress, that nostalgia forsome land we have never seen."

I began to seek Yount in 1969, when I read The Hobbit.  I wasjust old enough to hear the first cold voices bidding me leave whatUrsula K. Le Guin (speaking of Sleeping Beauty) calls “the wildernesswithin.” One is thrust out of Faerie and the path of returnis barred by briars that grow to the sky. For long years I did whatwe all do: I worked in the Here and Now, gaining experience of thepractical sort, and sticking (for the most part) to the quotidian andconventional.

The melody of Yount never left me. I have worked all my life tokeep my passport to that realm, to explore just a little more. Bitsof Yount cropped up in the notebooks and folios I filled from 1970forward with stories, maps, and drawings. I have held with me specificlines of dialogue and descriptive passages since college in the late1970’s. For as long as I can remember, I have woken up before dawnto scribble down the vestiges of dreams, and drafted stories late atnight and on the weekends.

Then, one Saturday in May of 2002, suddenly and without any planwhatsoever I wrote parts of what are now the first two chapters of TheChoir Boats.  No one was more astounded than I was when Barnabasand his calicosh vest appeared in the counting-house on Mincing Lane,followed by the laconic Sanford…and then Tom, my dear Sally, and soon themysterious Maggie. 

“Why now?” I wondered, and I wonder still.  I have decided Barnabasand the rest of the McDoons came knocking when they did because I hadgained four nephews in the 1990’s (a fifth joined us in 2003).  Asthe King says to Smith of Wootton Major, some gifts are not for keeping,but must be passed on.  My nephews­ and their fathers (mybrothers)­ all know something about Yount.

In the beginning and in the end (regardless of what we do in between),our stories to one another matter most.  From the shortest but mostpowerful story - ­ “I love you” - ­to the Mabinogions and Mahabharatas, theKalevalas and Sundjiata Keitas and Shahnamehs that define nations. Jean Rhys put it best:  “All of writing is a huge lake.  Thereare rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  Andthere are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.  All that matters isfeeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters.  Youmust keep feeding the lake.”   

Telling a story is a humbling exercise, especially when the teller is thesmallest of droplets hoping to feed the lake. The story informs youthat it is ready but that you are too slow, too weak, too confused tocapture it.  The author never measures up to the story’sexpectations.  Even our greatest storytellers acknowledge that theyare capable only of presenting us with a fragile approximation of anunderlying original.  To take just one example, here is Jorge LuisBorges:

“No one canwrite a book.  Since
Before a bookcan really be
It needs thedawn, the dusk, centuries,
Arms, and thebinding and sundering sea.”

The McDoons found me but their story is elusive.  Imagine strangersappearing in your living room.  More than that: strangers who aren’treally strangers, but who claim to be kin, who know more about you thanyou know about yourself, who make themselves free with your larder, andwho then order you to find out what comes next.  That’s the slightlysinister part, that you are compelled to discover and capture thestory.  The path is a dangerous one.  Margaret Atwood says allwriters “must descend to where the stories are kept.”  SeamusHeaney, writing about violent epiphanies, blood, and shards of bone,enjoins us to:

“Lie down
in theword-hoard…
Compose indarkness,
Expect auroraborealis
In the longforay
But no cascadeof light. …
Come back past
Philology andkennings,
Re-entermemory…”

So I descended and found the gate to memory.  I hope you will joinme as together we pass through the gate, to find ourselves back home atlast in the place Octavio Paz describes:

“Willow ofcrystal, a poplar of water,
Apillar of fountain by the wind drawn over,
Tree that isfirmly rooted and that dances,
Turning courseof a river that goes curving,
Advances andretreats, goes roundabout,
Arrivingforever:
The calm courseof a star…”

Or, as Frodo experiences it at the very end of the trilogy: “…the greyrain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and hebeheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swiftsunrise.”

One big lake (a sea really, binding yet sundering), many different riversand streams.  One Yount, many names, many roads."


photo: © Kyle Cassidy, all rights reserved

Biography: Daniel A. Rabuzzi studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and keeps one foot firmly in the Other Realm.   
ChiZine Publications published his first novel, The Choir Boats: Volume One of Longing for Yount, in 2009, and in 2012 brought out the sequel and series conclusion, The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount.  
Daniel's short fiction and poetry have appeared in Sybil's Garage, Shimmer, ChiZine, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Abyss & Apex, Goblin Fruit, Mannequin Envy, Bull Spec, Kaleidotrope, and Scheherezade's Bequest.  He has presented at Arisia, Readercon, Lunacon, and the Toronto Speculative Fiction Colloquium. He has also had twenty scholarly and professional articles published on subjects ranging from fairy tale to finance. 
A former banker, Daniel earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, with a focus on family, gender and commerce in northern Europe. He is now an executive at a national workforce development organization in New York City, where he lives with his wife and soulmate, the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel's novels), along with the requisite two cats.
Novel preview links:
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/media/choir-boats/TheChoirBoats-Preview.pdf
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/media/indigo/indigo_preview.pdf
Book page links: 
The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/books/choir-boats.php
The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/books/indigo-pheasant.php
Daniel's web site: www.danielarabuzzi.com
Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats
Deborah's web site: http://www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com/