Author J. Lee Graham

J. Lee Graham is the author of four novels for middle school readers including a trilogy: In the Nick of Time, The Time of His Life and All the Time in the World and The Sculptured Rocks. He is also the author of a young adult novel The Promise of Living. He is currently finishing his sixth novel entitled The Guardians. As a seeker of truth in story-telling, he engages and acknowledges the Joseph Campbell maxim of the hero’s journey and that essence permeates all of his novels. In his words, story-telling and mythology speak to all of us, and a mythic life is one worth living. He resides in Atlanta.

To order his books, either in paper or Kindle versions, please visit: https://www.amazon.com/J-Lee-Graham/e/B0059HRM00/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Or contact the author directly at: authorjleegraham@gmail.com

Music by Manpreet Kaur @manpreetkaurmusic

www.sacred-truths.com

J. Lee Graham: I’ve always wanted to be a writer and for some reason I got it squelched out of me for probably a myriad of reasons and turned to other things. But the writer part was always there waiting to come out. Sort of like a little child or something, so I started writing!

Becoming a writer, especially for that age group, FULFILLED something in me that I cannot describe, but it was like part of some sort of (pauses) sacred obligation, I guess. I know that sounds very highfaluting, but it was a part of my creative expression that wasn’t being met. Boy, once I started, it was so fun. It was so fun to invent people I wanted to invent and have them have things happen to them and just use all my gifts of words, and, and funny expressions, and sad moments, and tender moments, and MYSTICAL moments, and put them into the novels and say, “Here you go world, here are my gifts! Enjoy them.”

To order his books, either in paper or Kindle versions, please visit: https://www.amazon.com/J.LeeGraham

Or contact the author directly at: authorjleegraham@gmail.com

I spoke to him in Ashland, Oregon, in 2020.

Emmy: Hi, Jeff, thanks for joining me today!

J. Lee Graham: It’s a pleasure to be here.

Emmy: What is the creative process like for you? What do you go through in the writing process, and how do you know when you are in your groove? How do you know when your novel is finished?

JLG: Sometimes ideas have to percolate for a long time. I think I’m the type of writer who likes to have the entire plot in my brain before I write the first word. And other writers may disagree and say just start writing something and the rest will come. But I don’t seem always very comfortable with that process. I like to have everything laid out in my brain and then I start writing, I guess because I know where I’m going to go, and I know what the arc of the journey of the whole book is and then I can have fun putting it all together.

In my first nove,l IN THE NICK OF TIME, that actually was a dream that I had which is very telling, I think, because I do a lot of dreaming, and, I think a lot of things get stirred up in my dream world, for however that explains itself, I don’t really know. In my first novel, I had a dream about this. What happened once was many, many years ago, I had a dream about a group of us at a diner in a very cold, wintery place, and I took out an incense stick and I lit it and the smoke twirled us all off and the walls came off and the roof came off and we landed on a beautiful desert island, well tropical island, and full of palm trees and surf and sand and sun and it was warm. And that dream always stayed with me for the longest time. And then, many, many, many years later I decided to make that dream the plot of my novel IN THE NICK OF TIME. So that’s one thing.

Emmy: That’s fascinating! That a dream presented itself and it turned into a story, a NOVEL!

JLG: It is, it is. I think because my dream, my dream state is so vivid at times and there are certain dreams that I have that seem to stay with me because, we’re talking many years between the dream that I had and actually putting pen to paper. The thing with that which was really fun because I’ve always wanted to do time travel novels, is to also realize that it had to have a story with characters and you can’t just slap a dream on a piece of paper, and you had to make things come to life.

So, I’ve always had this lovely, um, idea of creating a historical fiction of time travel, and that was all great and wonderful and I downloaded the entire plot, so to speak, until the very end and I ran into a quagmire and I said, “How am I going to get this finished?”, and then I had another dream and the ending was revealed to me. So, if you haven’t read the book, I’m not going to tell you the ending. (chuckles)

Emmy: (Laughs) Wow, that’s really fascinating! So, you have your plot gets downloaded, how long does that take until you’ve got the story?

JLG: With the time travel series, I knew that I wanted to do certain books about certain historical events that I wanted the characters to time travel to. So, it’s sort of like my ‘bucket list’ of time travel destinations. So, the unfolding of the plot, once you found the places I wanted to go back to, it was very clear how the rest of it was going to unfold. How much time? I don’t know how to answer that, within a few months I would say.

For example, in the second book, I was in Montana one time at a small museum, and I looked at a whole bunch of pictures of an old convent and other buildings, of the school, the Catholic School and the church and there was a group picture there of a bunch of nuns and I got physically sick when I scanned the picture, and I said “something awful happened here!” Later on, I did research and most of those nuns had died in a convent fire. So, there was something very compelling about that and I thought wouldn’t that be a great way to have Andy Mackpeace time travel, be a reason to time travel back to a boys’ camp---

Emmy: Because of a photograph.

JLG: Because of a photograph. So you see, sometimes it’s something that happened in my life in the past, that I kind of keep in my memory file and never forget that experience and say, “Oh, if I have a bucket list of time travel destinations this would be one of the places he would go.”

Once you get out of the time travel genre, with my other novels of that ilk, with that age group, THE SCULPTURED ROCKS and my upcoming novel THE GUARDIANS, again, a lot of it is based on something more real and personal in my life.

When I would go for the summers and live in to Cape May, New Jersey, if you’ve ever been to Cape May, the place is so filled with history, and for me, ghosts and spirits and energies and other things, that I said this is the perfect place to create a story and then the rest of the story just downloaded. It was just a matter of a couple of weeks and the whole thing downloaded into my head. It was so much fun. Then you just take it and write with it.

Emmy: I think what’s so amazing about your writing is your characters are very believable. And that you download these individuals who are like real people.

JLG: Good. I hope so. A lot of them are based on certain people I know, or at least the basic outline of people I know. Not always. Not always, because that’s what make fiction so much fun. You take sort of a basic ingredient or a smile, or a certain face, or the blond hair, and then you fill in all the rest of the gaps.

Emmy: Right. So, you know when your novel is finished because you have it in your head and it’s a matter of getting it onto paper.

JLG:. It is, I don’t…have yet, have not run into a thing where I think I’m finished and I’m really not. I feel like I have got the beginning, the middle and the end and it tells a great story and that’s where I flesh it all out. And that’s when I know I’m done.

Emmy: You are many things: musician, choir director, interpreter for the deaf, astrologer, and reiki practitioner. Then, right about the time you turned 50, you started writing fiction and since then you’ve written five novels. Can you describe that process for you? How did you turn to writing fiction?

JLG: I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I realize that now in hindsight, which is probably the easiest way to, to acknowledge something, I’ve always wanted to be a writer t and for some reason I got it squelched out of me for probably myriads of reasons and turned to other things. And all those things that you listed are all valuable and lovely and I’m proud of all those accomplishments and they are part of my passion, and part of my life but the writer part was always there waiting to come out. Sort of like a little child or something, and so I started writing!

Part of it was because of that dream I had, YEARS before that. I said wouldn’t that make a great fill-in-the-blank. But it’s very different than writing a screenplay, or trying to turn it into something else, even a poem. Becoming a writer, especially for that age group, FULFILLED something in me that I cannot describe, but it was like part of some sort of (pauses) sacred obligation, I guess. I know that sounds very highfaluting, but it was a part of my creative expression that wasn’t being met. Boy, once I started, it was so fun. It was so fun to invent people I wanted to invent and have them have things happen to them and just use all my gifts of words, and, and funny expressions, and sad moments, and tender moments and MYSTICAL moments, and put them into the novels and say, “Here you go world, here are my gifts! Enjoy them.”

Emmy: And so maybe you had to be 50, because maybe you had to arrive someplace yourself before you were ready to put this out into the world?

JLG: Maybe. Yeah, maybe, it isn’t like I tried, like it wasn’t like I had a whole stash of unfinished novels and you know, half done short stories sitting in a file somewhere, not at all, it was nothing. It just suddenly started.

Emmy: And so there isn’t anything that instigated it, that you can think of, astrologically or otherwise?.

JLG: I don’t know, nothing that I can think of, I’m sure there’s probably something astrological, (Emmy chuckles) but I can’t put my finger on it. It just felt like, now is the time, if I’m not going to do it now… but it was also the feeling of that’s something I have, that’s something I can do! Fulfills a great creative need! That’s what I love.

Emmy: Do you feel like a writer, now?

JLG: I DO. I am a writer. So that’s why I thought when I do become a writer, and when I DID become a writer, I changed my name, not legally, but I go by the name of J. Lee Graham, and that sort of gives me my twin identity, so to speak, that’s my writer.

Emmy: Your writer identity, yeah!

JLG: Yes.

Emmy: How is expressing yourself through a story or through the novel different from say, expressing yourself through playing a musical instrument?

JLG: I think in many ways they are exactly the same. You’re exposing your soul, you’re opening up your outer shell to let people see inside you. And that happens whether you’re playing n musical instrument, or presenting your art work or being on the stage; it’s a very vulnerable place to be. So, I think the vulnerability of it and the opening up of your soul is the same no matter what medium you’re talking about. The difference, I think maybe is simply in the love of language vs the love of music, and I do both. So, it’s a great question. And one thing that sticks out in my mind, is when I’m playing a musical instrument in front of people, if you make a mistake right there you can’t go back and delete a word or fix something, you’re stuck with it, and you have to present it. Same with a play, as you would know.

Emmy: Yeah, you are in the moment.

JLG: Completely in the moment and whatever comes out, comes out, and it can be the most glorious thing in the world or it could be pie in your face. With a novel, I guess, you do the same, you express yourself through words and literature and you certainly don’t want to present something that you think is horrible writing; you do the very best you can and you present your soul. But I think it’s because you make both of them vulnerable, there’s a vulnerability act that is very exciting but very personal and sensitive and you go on that ride and see what happens.

Emmy: …and with that ride, you’re touching someone!

JLG: Absolutely. You hope so! (laughs) You hope they’re not sitting in their chairs falling asleep.

Emmy: Yeah!

JLG…looking through their program! (Emmy laughs) Whatever it may be!

Emmy: You have a gift with creating a good story. You do. Your stories, just for story lines, alone, are good!

JLG: Thank you.

Emmy: But it’s more than just writing a good story. Through writing a novel – there’s a need to connect to others, perhaps even share some of your wisdom. In particular, you’ve chosen the young adult audience or the middle school audience. Have you ever received feedback from young readers and how does that feel? I guess my question is, WHY this audience, this age group?

JLG: I LOVE this age group! The age group you’re referencing in Literature parlance, is called MIDDLE GRADE or UPPER middle grade because we’re talking about grades 5, 6, possibly 7. My one Young Adult novel, THE PROMISE OF LIVING, is more, obviously, for an older crowd. But the other ones, I’m particularly drawn to that age group.

There is still such a sense of adventure and magic and imagination with this group. And I love…when I was that age, I loved to read and I had so much joy in reading about adventures or time travel or scary places and people and friendships and loyalty. It was all very powerful for me to read about that and I said to myself, if I ever were to become a writer, I would write for that age group.

I don’t get a lot of feedback, I have to say, YET, from that age group about my books. I’ve done some SKYPE classroom visits with that age group and they ask a lot of questions. They love to ask a lot of questions very similar to these, so that’s kind of fun and they do get excited about the cliffhanger construction that I like to put in my stories a lot. A lot of my chapters end with a cliffhanger I put a lot of cliffhangers in my book--

Emmy: They do! Wonderful cliff hangers. You can’t put the book down and you have to read the next chapter!

JLG: Thank you! In a couple of my bookstore visits, I’ve had people come back, after buying one book, they come back and buy the other books because they love the first book so much.

Emmy: Let’s talk about this idea of sharing your wisdom because you’re at a place where you have something to share to this young audience. Is that part of the drive in writing a novel, you have something to say that perhaps young people could benefit from?

JLG: It’s easy when you’re writing a novel for this age group where you suddenly become pedantic, and you preach a little bit, too much. I like that question about sharing my wisdom; I don’t know if it’s my wisdom that I’m sharing it’s just my sensitivity to that age group which I resonate with and I like watching them explore their lives at that age because it’s so full of imagination.

So, I don’t think so much of myself as imparting wisdom into it, but there is something that the characters learn which I HOPE is so universal, and so it resonates with every child no matter where they’re coming from because of the kind of the hurdles the characters have to go through and come out of it that is so very, um, enlightening for them. It’s like the Hero’s Journey, they have to go through certain trials and tribulations, but they come out the other side with more insight into who they are. That’s sort of the theme of a lot of my books.

I like to think that when they read the book, through the cliffhangers, and through the ‘oh what’s going to happen next?’, and turn the page that eventually they get to the point where it’s not just an adventure story with a beginning, middle and end, but also, they say, “Oh, that character Andy, or Danny, or any of these people, that’s me. I understand that’s also me.”

Emmy: I think in fact your themes are universal and I think your messages are universal which is what makes your novels so compelling and so moving. And clearly very vulnerable to write. There’s something about this age group that you GET, I would say, yes?

JLG: I think so. Because times change and media changes and… but the love of a good story and being that age where everything is still wide open and new, is so exciting!

EMMY: Yes, and these characters that you create, they make mistakes. They make mistakes! And life can be hard sometimes.

JLG: Yes, and sometimes I think I’m drawn to these main characters because they do make mistakes. But they’re not stupid! They don’t just make mistakes because they’re clueless and I have to find some way to keep the plot going. They make a mistake or they also are people with certain wounds, and they have certain woundedness in them. They may feel insecure or lonely, or friendless, or feel stupid, or feel less-than, or not part of the group, and then they somehow slay their dragon and they come back and they’re stronger and more empowered. And I think that is fascinating to read about.

EMMY: Do you remember your favorite authors of that age for yourself?

JLG: I don’t remember if they were time travel, some of them were. But I liked the writings of Edgar Eagar, Edward? Eager. I think it was him. E-A-G-E-R . And he was a great novelist for that age group. And they were all about something to do with time, every one of them. Sometimes the kids would travel somewhere else. And then by the end of all his novels, the time travel became a metaphor for growing up, or getting wiser or putting away childish things.

Emmy: Hmmm.

JLG: And that’s what I loved about them. It was no longer about a magic coin or a wish, or a magic toy. It became something else. I remember that so vividly, going, “wow, that there really isn’t any magic element anymore, but there was magic in the fact that they were discovering themselves!”

Emmy: Can you describe how it feels when you share your work with others, now outside of children, but friends or people you know who are adults who have read these books and share their response with you.

JLG: Well I find people, if I’m looking for people to read my rough drafts, they are people I trust people who know me. . and I can kind of take most comments, no problem. Give my your feedback; I like it.

Emmy: I guess what I’m getting at is your novel becomes something different when you share it. It’s one thing to write a novel and just keep it private, but there is a need to share it, I think, for all us to share our artistic expression. Can you describe that for yourself?

JLG: There is, there is. I think, I think when adults read my stories and novels they get something different out of it; I just don’t always get a lot of feedback but there is that vulnerability factor again, this is what I’ve written, this is what I worked…“I made a hat where I never made a hat!” All right. But there’s also a part of me that says this is what I HAVE to do. And I have to create these things. And, I hope you like them and if you don’t, if you don’t resonate with it, it’s fine. It doesn’t make me want to tear up the manuscript or anything. I have to write; I have to create.

EMMY. Yeah. Your themes are deep and touch on some of the difficult aspects of being human such as: betrayal, disloyalty, bullying, death, self-acceptance, forgiveness…to name just a few. Describe how these themes present themselves to you as you write and how is it you feel compelled to write about these subject matters.

JLG: I think it always goes back to that Joseph Campbell model that I love so much about the Hero’s Journey. And we all are heroes; and we all have journeys. And we have to go and look at the dark side of ourselves, and slay the dragon or deal with all sorts of metaphysical images. And I know that sounds very heavy, but I think children run into these themes all the time without it being pounded onto their heads. For example, THE WIZARD OF OZ is a great example of going on that journey.

And all those themes of betrayal, or death or friendship, and loyalty: they don’t feel like ingredients to me, it isn’t like a book has to have all these ingredients or else it’s not worth writing.

I think for this age group you can have it full of adventure, and cliff hangers, and wonderful funny moments, and, and, and things, but if it’s not grounded in something that a reader can relate to, it just becomes a fluff story and it doesn’t mean anything.

Again not that I’m trying to teach anybody anything, but I think the, the reality of betrayal and friendliness, or friendLESSness, and death and loyalty are things that this age group sees a lot, maybe not the death part, but a lot, all the time, they see it every day in their lives and they experience it. So to have characters that experience these things, they can say, ‘Yes that is me.’ And when they watch the character do battle with the dragon and come out the outside a little wiser, a little more grounded, a little more secure of who he is, that’s the beauty of it. Because they come back to the tribe, and they come back to their friends with something to give and to share and that’s what makes that whole journey worthwhile.

Emmy: Yes, it’s very powerful. We’d love to hear something from you. Would you like to share something from one of your novels?

JLG: I would be happy to. Let me read to you from my very first novel, IN THE NICK OF TIME which is a time travel novel about a young boy named Andy who has a very strong relationship with his grandmother and even after she dies in the novel, he still has a strong relationship with her in the sense that he “talks” to her.

He and his two friends have been time traveled back to plantation in antebellum Georgia, and with a lot of details that don’t necessarily need to be addressed here, they don’t have any way of getting back and they are kind of stuck there. And they are trying and figuring and plotting and figuring out how they’re going to get back to the 21st century It has been many, many days.

So Andy is up one night looking up at the moon from his bedroom window in this antebellum plantation and this is where I want to read.

Chapter 17

The Full moon awoke Andy at a quarter to one. The light streamed through his window and onto his face, much like the street lamp outside his home used to. The Main House was ghoulishly quiet. No hum of a refrigerator or microwave or a computer monitor. No dishwasher running or dryer tumbling. Electronic sounds that would sometimes jar him awake back home now were completely absent. He slid off the poster bed and walked in his bare feet toward the open window. The moon made the plantation look blue: as if it had snowed. The smells of the horses floated by, he heard the trickle of the stream and the sound of an owl. Cicadas. Other than that, there was nothing. There were a few stars on the farther side of the sky, but the moonlight reminded him of summer nights at home.

It’s the same moon, he thought. It shone on them as it shines on us.

It had been six days. Six days with no new discoveries.

Andy figured that someone at home by now has got to have missed him. When he traveled back to Boston, his trip was brief and the present time hadn’t been affected.

But what about after six days?

Andy didn’t have an answer for that. How long does time stop before it starts to pick up again? He could picture his father coming into his bedroom and seeing the opened door and the little pile of matches and the incense stick. His father would think he’d been smoking dope or cigarettes, and he’d be walking around talking to his mom. “I didn’t think we’d have to worry about this with our Andy,” he could hear his father say.

Worse yet! What if his father came into his room, saw the incense, and then lit one! He could end up here! Well, that would be fine as long as he had some extra in his pocket!

Oh Grandma, Andy thought as he gazed out over the beautiful land and smelled the sweet, country air. How are we going to get out of here? What’s this all about?

Sometimes, in the summer, or on a crisp, windless winter night, Andy and Grandma Geri went out into the back fields and stargazed. Grandma Geri had a small telescope, and she taught him the names of constellations and the brighter stars.

“See that one?” she said one time, pointing to a gorgeous red star in the Southern sky. It was the middle of August when Andy was about ten years old. “That’s Antares, one of my favorite. It’s in the constellation Scorpio; you can see that it looks like a Scorpion. With a flashlight, she traced in the sky, from star to star, a giant “J” swerving off to the left. There, about halfway down, was Antares. “Antares is six hundred light years away from Earth.”

“It’d take six hundred years to get there?” Andy asked. How could he see that red star so clearly when it was so far away?

“Well, sort of. First, you’d have to be traveling the speed of light, which is 186,300 miles per second. Per second, Andy! Can you imagine whirling through space that quickly?” She took the flashlight and swooshed it across the night sky like a meteor. “Then, if you’re really going that fast, it would take you six hundred years to get there. And who knows what planets would be waiting for you when you arrived?”

“I can’t imagine that far,” said Andy.

“I can’t either, honey,” she said, “but it’s a wonderful feeling trying. Oh, the things out there!” She put her arms around his shoulders and together they surveyed the heavens. The night was full of the sounds of crickets and frogs. “There are galaxies, and moons, and planets, and billions and billions of stars. We’re so tiny sitting here,” she breathed in the hay and the fresh air, “but how precious and magical that is.”

Andy sat on the windowsill in the moonlit, timeless, plantation house. The sounds of the night swirled around him, and the minutes of the hour traveled onward. He was Andy and he was Drew.

After a moment, he caught himself dozing off, and he jerked his head awake. A shooting star caught his eye. Andy felt completely connected to all that he saw. It was the most peaceful feeling he ever had, and as Andy breathed, the universe breathed.

He was now and he was then. The trees are planted and people are born; the trees are cut down and people die. It could be the 21st Century, it could be the 19th. “The time doesn’t matter, Andy,” he heard Grandma Geri say. “We’re in the rhythm of the stars and the tunes of the planets, and always shall be.”

Emmy: Have you got another one for us?

JLG: Yes, I do, I have another one for Middle Grade readers. It’s called THE SCULPTURED ROCKS. And the main character’s name is Dan and he lives in a very strange, funky little town full of Victorian houses. And, it’s a small town on the ocean in New Hampshire and often when he goes out to a local watering hole for lack of a better word, it’s this gorge that’s about 5 miles outside of town which is called The Sculptured Rocks. These giant cliffs, so to speak, that the river has forged over time and so a lot of people like to go out there and jump off the rocks into the water and the stream because the water has made these little pools and you can jump into one little pool and come back out and all that.

But Dan has had a lot of problems in this summer and he’s being hounded by a bully name Curt Krenshaw, and he doesn’t know really what to do about this bully who keeps pestering him all summer. Out at the Sculptured Rocks he strikes up a friendship with a guy name Nate who is a little bit older than Dan, and who works as a farmer nearby, and they strike up a nice friendship and Dan starts to confide him more and more because Dan’s father is missing in action in War, in the Vietnam War. Dan is also very perceptive and has a lot of ah, intuition as well.

In this part of the story, he, Dan is really at his wit’s end about what to do and he feels so lost and he sees Nate there at the Sculptured Rocks.

Then, like an unstoppable surge of water, I told him how I sensed things when I zeroed in on other people too, and all about Curt Krenshaw, that bully, and how he picks on me and about my best friend Tom Erlwein, and how even though I’m on the baseball team and have a paper route, I feel incredibly lonely and I’d give anything to sit with my dad and I don’t think he’s ever coming back and I just started bawling.

Nate leaned over and wrapped his arms around me. At first, I didn’t know what to do, but then I hugged him. He was warm and his shirt smelled like horse manure and sweat and hay and summer and his beard scratched my face for a minute but I didn’t care. He held me and let me cry. He didn’t say a word. But his arms felt strong and big and solid and I wanted someone to tell me that everything would work out just fine.

He waited until I stopped crying. He fished out a handkerchief from his side pants pocket and told me to blow my nose. I did. He never called me a baby or stupid or anything. His green eyes understood everything I was saying. I calmed down and felt extremely foolish. He never noticed and if he did, he didn’t care.

“Did you ever think about how this little river and these rocks have been circulating and intermingling for 25,000 years?” Nate asked me, but it was as if he was talking to the stream itself. “They’ve carved out a really nice relationship.”

“Yuck, yuck,” I smirked.

“I know, bad pun. But here are two elements on our planet that just don’t get along. Water wants to flow and rocks want to stop it. Over time, the two just surrender and accept each other.” He pointed to the carved out walls. “And look at the beautiful things they leave behind.”

The hikers had put away their cameras and had woken the man up and I heard one of them say, “Come on, Alan, time to go back.” The sleeping man roused himself and followed the pack across the bridge.

“The Pennacook tribe, specifically the men, took their boys here for certain rituals,” Nate said. “One was a great rite of passage for bravery. They’d come here to see if they were brave enough to jump into the pools.”

“I think kids have been doing that since forever,” I said.

“Yep, you’re right, but think about it. For the Pennacook, the object wasn’t whether or not a boy could survive the jump, of course he’d survive. The point, for them, was could they face the fear that lived within each of them? Could they stand on that slippery, grassy edge and look down into that dark water and knowing they were terrified, could they jump in spite of it? And if they could, they’d have crossed a bridge. They’ve have expanded their soul.”

“So, you’re like Brian, Tom’s brother,” I said, getting excited. “The next time I see that Krenshaw, I should face my fear, not wait for an invitation or a reason, and smash him one right in the face.”

“Water and Rock,” Nate said. “That’s you and Krenshaw. No, I don’t advocate a pop to the jaw. I say, forgive him because he doesn’t see life the way you do.”

“Forgive that son-of-a-”

“Even that son-of-a.” Nate turned to me. “Forgiveness isn’t about saying, ‘it’s okay what you did to me’. Forgiveness is saying, ‘what you did has no power over me. What happened, happened, but it is not going to affect my life, because deep inside, like those pools, I know who I am and that doesn’t change, ever.’”

“But that makes me a sissy,” I said. “He wins!”

“You don’t blow up the Sculptured Rocks because they scare you, do you?” Nate asked. “You don’t hate the water because it’s cold. You don’t slam your fists into the rock walls because you never know if they’re going to cave in on you or not. They’ve been around for 25,000 years; they’re not going to change too much during our lifetime. The pools and the rocks give you an opportunity to be stronger, to take a risk and watch how you survive.”

“I don’t want to forgive anybody!” I said, “That moron gets what he deserves!

Emmy: A lot of your stories take place in New Hampshire!

JLG: Yes, they do, I set ALL my stories in New Hampshire. I love-

Emmy: (overlaps) Why is that?

JLG: I love that state! I don’t know why, it cracks me up. I fell in love with it years ago. And I’m sure it’s sort of my version of Shangri-La, I’m sure New Hampshirers would agree, New Hampshire people.

Emmy: Have you ever lived there?
JLG: No, I’ve never lived there, (Emmy chuckles) but to me, it’s my Shangri-la. I know, a little corny, but that’s how I feel.

Emmy: THE PROMISE OF LIVING is a very compelling novel. It’s your first Young Adult novel; it’s for an older audience and I might say the subject matter is more serious. What prompted you to write for this age group as opposed to your other books.

JLG: Part of it was the subject matter would never be in the middle grade genre, I guess. You wouldn’t have something that mature or adul- themed in that sort of level, so you bump it up to the Young Adult level, because the setting is in a small town in New Hampshire and it’s two high school students, so automatically we’re jumping i to something higher up. The themes are darker and the dragon that Ryan slays is heavier and bigger and it takes a little bit more maturity, perhaps, to read something of this ilk. It also can push buttons for some people. It could also be a trigger point for some people for the things that happen in the story. So, it’s for that age range. And older. I’ve had many adults read THE PROMISE OF LIVING and really enjoyed it. A lot of them have contacted me and said it reminded them of their childhood or their small town, or their small town “Peyton Place” gossip-filled, you know, pot of stuff where everybody knows everybody’s business.

Emmy: Right. And this book takes place in the ‘70’s I think it is, it’s before cell phones and before the internet and that was intentional, I gather?

JLG: It is! It was. I find that it’s harder for me to find conflict with things if everybody has a cell phone right in their back pocket. If everybody can be connected all the time,

Emmy: Where’s the mystery?

JLG: Where’s the mystery, yeah, where’s the not knowing ‘what’s going to happen around the bend’, if you always have an easy exit out of everything so it’s a fun time to write about people involved in things because humanity is humanity but when you take away all that technology it brings it to the surface so much faster.

Emmy: Yeah. Would you read something from THE PROMISE OF LIVING?

JLG: Yes, I’d like to read a bit from THE PROMISE OF LIVING. THE PROMISE OF LIVING takes place in New Hampshire in a small town in the ‘70s and Ryan, the main character, and his best friend Dave, work on a farm. And they also, obviously go to high school, they’re about 16 years old and they’re in the band. Ryan plays trombone and Dave plays percussion, and they are very good friends. And in this part, it’s graduation for the senior class. Ryan and Dave are both juniors so they are playing at the graduation ceremony which is held outdoors on the commons on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. And this part is when the band gets to play a particular piece of music for the occasion.

They were playing Aaron Copland’s “The Promise of Living”- the most popular piece from their Spring Concert. The novice band members didn’t play this but stayed in their chairs and followed the music. They looked over the shoulders of the older students like watching pro athletes at a baseball game.

Mr. Anderson surveyed the band until the entire ensemble looked at him. He scanned the sections, emitting a silent, “Are you ready? All okay?” prompting small, tight head nods from the leaders. When he raised his arms, everyone inhaled together, and Mr. Anderson released the music at the downbeat as if it were a helium balloon.

The introductory chords of the woodwinds floated through the crowd in a languid, unassuming manner. The oboe started the peaceful melody like a small stream of water on a summer evening. The families in the audience, the fathers and sons, the mothers and daughters, looked up with an eased surprise. The music of Copland weaved its magic. Women with polite smiles soon dropped their façade. Fathers with arms folded and grim impatient eyes, relaxed.

The chords continued to expand. Mr. Anderson cued the low brass as the beauty of the melody increased. The harmonies embraced and moved, disengaged and embraced again, and the music rose skyward clearing the four majestic oaks and drifted beyond the Commons. It flowed down the main streets of Wilson’s Ferry and glided among the buildings along the river. It floated up to the school on the hill and to the great hills beyond.

Copland’s rising melody wrapped its arms around the rural audience, a melody that expressed the full array of the celebration of life with all its joy and all its sadness, and that time, like these graduating Seniors, was elusive and momentary. Some women had tears in their eyes and the men unfolded their defenses in a gesture of openness. Others looked past the band and saw reflected in the hills their own lives full of achieved substantiations and unfulfilled promises.

Mr. Anderson increased the tempo, and the band’s crescendo opened and filled the air until Dave’s cymbal crash culminated the tip of the wave. Ryan felt the goose bumps on his arms as together the band created a work of art that transcended their souls.

After the final chord, after the cut-off, the sound of the ensemble echoed out of the park and there was silence. For a moment of suspended grace, Mr. Anderson held their breaths with his baton still raised. When he lowered it, the audience went wild. The young conductor looked out over his musicians, mouthed the words, “thank you”, then turned toward the shining faces, the increasing applause. He bowed slightly, acknowledged the brilliance of the band, and bowed again. Flushed mothers burrowed into their pocketbooks seeking a Kleenex.

Emmy: J. Lee Graham, thank you so much for joining me today.

JLG: Thank you, Emmy! It was a pleasure to be here.

Sacred Truths

Author J. Lee Graham

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