On Being a Foreigner--The Subject of My Novels

In the last month, I've finished publishing two novels on Amazon, a feat that has been ten years in the making.  Both novels look at the experience of being the stranger, either to oneself or in a different country.

I spent two years teaching in Kuwait, and all I wrote at the time was a blog.  A novel about it seemed too close to my experience.  Most of the day I worked, and the rest of the time I drank coffee with my friends or we trudged around the city on foot for hours.  There wasn't a lot else to do there.

A few years later, after returning home from a stint in Turkey, I wanted to write a novel but I hadn't found my subject. I decided to join a writing class taught by Laurel King at the Worcester Art Museum in which we participated in a nation-wide writing contest. The requirement for National Novel Writing Month was to produce 50,000 words in the month of November.  The result of producing so much in a short time pushed me into writing about Kuwait.  The book I wrote was too disjointed as I tried to create characters back in the states who intersected with my two American women living in Kuwait City.  It didn't work, so I put the book aside. Finally  I decided I needed to  leave it all in the one setting, the Middle East.

The novel is about a mother and daughter who live in Kuwait during the daughter's senior year of high school.  Since the girl has been out of control at  home in the states, Kathryn, her mother, decides the strict mores of the Muslim country will be a cure.  Instead of keeping Taylor out of trouble, however, the daughter cross boundaries in a culture that maintains strict ones.  Her mother manages to create trouble as well.

The second novel, Falling from the Ladder, is about a private school director on Cape Cod who justifiably expels ten students at once for bullying or using drugs.  Since the students' parents are very powerful and wealthy people, they demand the firing of the director even as their kids stay in school. The gutless board bows to the parents and the director is on the street, suddenly without identity, a foreigner to himself.

I find the theme of being the stranger has not disappeared in a new novel I'm writing.  It's about a female border patrol agent who feels like a stranger and intruder in a world of ex-Army men and very few  women. The main character lives right on the Mexican border in Nogales, AZ with a foot in both countries.  Despite the fact that her job is to hunt down illegals and send them out of the country, she believes in open borders.  Border Patrol Babe is a work in progress.

I hope you'll follow along as I write about writing on this blog.  I particularly enjoy comparing novel writing to cartooning, another interest of mine.  Oh, and if you have a novel sitting in your desk drawer, get it out and publish it.  You'll be surprised at how satisfying it feels.