The Author’s Reflections on His Newly Published Novel
Poet-playwright-novelist-scholar, and member of the Globe Creative Writing Group will be holding his book launch at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18th at Šternberkova 11, Praha 7 (the future kavárna L’Objet trouvé).
After more than 10 years of work, my novel A Demonology of Desires has been published by Sul Books. Writing this book has been a journey. During a period when I rarely strayed very far from Prague, it took me back to places lived years before (from Chicago to Ecuador and the South Pacific). It let me dwell in places I’ve only passed briefly through (Venezuela, Transcarpathian Ukraine). It enchanted my more recent haunts (the Slovak mountains and urban Prague). It also sent me wandering through places I’ve never been (eastern Indonesia; the vicinity of China’s Great Wall). It allowed me to imagine loves I never had and am probably better off not having, but also to think again about the love I have and want to keep.
In the beginning, I had no idea where I was going. I started after setting aside another novel that was going nowhere. And because academic work was draining and unpredictable, never allowing me extended periods to focus on anything else, I decided it would be more reasonable to write short stories. But I have a penchant for ordering and collecting and rearranging, and soon I wrote two and then three stories that had the same format and the same narrator: a PhD student named Joseph sets out to write a scholarly dissertation about varieties of demon beliefs, but every stint of fieldwork gets him more seriously caught up in the lore he’s supposed to be analyzing. In looking for forgotten lines from a Western-Ukrainian folk song about sorceresses, he wanders into the cabin of a botanist who makes him delirious on the fumes of her strange tea. When he goes to China to research a wave of alleged demon sightings, he falls in with a wandering guerrilla theater troupe that dress up as demons as they agitate around the countryside. When he starts a fellowship at the Demonography Institute in Prague, he runs into an old friend with a peculiar obsession with building new golems. Those three stories begat others; Joseph met a woman I’ve never met, named Lucy; then he kept meeting women named Lucy; then he got embroiled in an academic spat between professors from the University of Chicago’s Department of General Demonology and its breakaway Department of Applied Demonology. Then he started going a little crazy, trying to find a woman who, as his friends suspect, was maybe never even there.
In other words, the text began to grow, taking on demonic proportions I hadn’t expected; it needed a lot of taming and—a bit like an Arabian djinn—it needed some coaxing to squeeze it into the contours of a book. (Unfortunately, I don’t promise it will grant any wishes when you open it again; but who knows?) For help with that editorial coaxing, I have many readers and commenters to thank (Jo Blin, Danielle Bodnar Alyssa, Melinda Reidinger, Rhyd Wildermuth, Tereza Reichelová, Scott Alexander Jones, Zoheb Mashiur, Daniel Lamken, Mark Stroup, Ashley Melucci, and many others).
Apologies to my professors and classmates and friends who may wrongly see themselves in the book. I’ll admit that I did allow myself to be inspired by the best parts of some of you and your work (especially Adriana Kábová, Max Bohnenkamp, Luděk Brož, and William Mazzarella), but all the exaggeration and melodrama surrounding the demons and magic that I borrowed is the product of my own inappropriate imagination.
Obviously (I hope), the book’s protagonist Joseph Geistberg is not me. But on the other hand, what protagonist is ever completely independent of his author, whom he ends up taunting in parody?
I hope the book speaks to anyone who’s ever been a passionate student, or who’s ever been afraid of getting too embroiled in what they study, or who’s just been afraid of having to study, or who’s ever just been afraid of anything at all. Or desired anything at all. Especially what you, and we, fear.
Some, who know me as an overworked academic, may be inclined to ask: How did you find time for this? For me the more important question is: How did I let myself spend so little time on this for so long?
Order the book here.