I’m delighted to welcome author David B. Seaburn back to Thoughts in Progress to talk about his latest release, Chimney Bluffs, a gripping story that will tug at your heartstrings.
Here’s a brief synopsis:
When their four-year-old son, Danny, dies suddenly, Mitch and Kate’s grief overwhelms them. Conflicted about going on with their lives, Mitch and Kate decide to leap from a cliff at Chimney Bluffs. When the couple is found by park rangers, Clancy and Bobby, Kate is still very much alive. What follows is a poignant and powerful story of three strangers, each facing a tragic loss, who together find friendship and healing.
David has graciously answered some questions for me about his book and his writing.
Mason - Why write this book? What made this story so compelling to you that you had to tell it?
David:
When I was in the final months of writing the first draft of my last novel, Charlie No Face, I read an online news item from England about parents whose young son had died unexpectedly. They were so bereft that they jumped to their deaths from a famous cliff. They carried two sacks with them; one had their son and the other had his toys. I couldn’t stop thinking about this story. I wondered what motivated them to take their own lives. Why did they have the sacks with them? I also wondered what would have happened if one of the parents had survived.
I moved the location of the story to Chimney Bluffs State Park on Lake Ontario about an hour from where I live. Mitch and Kate Duncan are the parents of four-year-old Danny who dies of meningitis. Mitch and Kate resolve to go to Chimney Bluffs to jump from one of the cliffs. Their reasons are very different. Mitch believes in an afterlife and feels this is the only way for the family to be together. Kate doesn’t believe in an afterlife, but feels she should die because had she acted sooner perhaps Danny would still be alive. At the last moment, Kate decides not to jump for reasons that I will leave to those who read the book.
She is found at the bottom of the cliff by Clancy and his assistant, Bobby, who work for the state park. In time, they will become unlikely friends, learning about each other’s losses and together finding both healing and a way forward.
Mason - How did you go about doing research for this book? Was it a process you enjoyed or just a necessary part of writing?
David:
I read a lot about the actual incident that occurred in England, but, in the end, didn’t use any of that material because I wanted to tell a different story about loss and healing. I did considerable research about Chimney Bluffs, which are glacial towers that were formed during the Ice Age. This was fascinating, but as I often tell audiences when I do readings, all of the research was encapsulated in a single paragraph in the first chapter.
Since Danny dies of meningitis, I had to research childhood bacterial meningitis, its causes, symptoms and course of treatment.
Danny also has a surgery at the age of two for a PDA (patent ductus arteriosis). I was able to draw largely from my own experience since our youngest daughter, now twenty-seven, had the same surgery when she was a young girl.
Since there are medical concerns throughout the book, I had to hone my ear for how physicians might talk to the parents about Danny’s illness. Luckily, much of my career in family psychology was spent in a university medical center where one of my roles was to teach physicians how to interview patients and families. This involved observing physicians seeing patients with a variety of problems.
Mason - With the book’s release, as you look back what was the biggest surprise that occurred in writing the story?
David:
I don’t know if there were any “surprises.” The biggest challenge, though, occurred when I sent the first draft to a freelance editor that I trust very much; her feedback called for considerable restructuring of the story and massive re-writing. I took out almost 60,000 words from the original text, replacing much, but not all of it, with new material. In the end, this made Chimney Bluffs a better story, one I felt more confident in when I sent it to my publisher. But, at first, I thought, “Oh my God!”
Mason - What message, if any, would you like readers to take away from this story?
David:
I think the key message is about how relationships in our lives play the most important role in how or whether we will heal when we experience loss. It is connectedness, however defined, that makes the greatest difference. There is a place in the story where Bobby has an amazing experience that helps him understand a loss that occurred when his family was in an automobile accident. He talks to Kate about it and, I think, captures something important for anyone who is struggling with the tragedy of loss:
"Sitting there in my truck after the deer had made it to safety, I thought about that accident so long ago. And I realized that while I got to go on living, I was left with a great big hole inside. And that hole bled and hurt and ached for years, and I couldn't figure out how to get rid of it. And people told me that it would go away, that time heals these things, but they were wrong. Time didn't close it up. I mean, it just wouldn't go away no matter how much I wanted it to." Bobby took a deep breath. "And after a while, because you've lived with it so long, it's like you say to yourself, 'You know, that hole isn't going away; in fact, maybe it shouldn't; because if it did, you'd stop remembering your brother'—and you don't want that to happen. And then you think, 'Life doesn't go away either, and you want to keep living, you know, because sometime you might be in the right place at the right time to see a buck jump over a car—or, even better, you might see yourself jump over that hole, even if it's one time out of a hundred. And you think, 'That just might be enough to keep me going.'"
Bobby wiped tears on his sleeve.
"Kate, I hope you don't take this wrong, but I think you have a hole inside you. And I'd like to tell you that's it's going to go away, but it isn't. You can't love someone and lose them and not have a hole for the rest of your life. But, you know what, you can learn how to jump over that hole; you can learn how to jump over that hole when you need to; you don't always have to fall in. It may take ninety-nine tries before you can do it, but once you do it, you'll be all right—not all better, but all right."
Mason - What can readers look forward to next from you?
David:
I am well into my next novel which has the working title “More More Time.” The central character of this story is a 62-year-old history teacher who, in the first chapter, has fallen down his basement steps. Subsequently, he starts hearing two words strung together over and over: endingworldendingworldendingworld. No, this is not an apocalyptic novel about the End of the World, but it is a story about time. There are six main characters, each one facing personal and relational problems that will raise questions about the time that life has given them and how to best use it.
David, thanks for joining us today and giving us a look at why you wrote Chimney Bluffs. This is definitely a tale that will stay with readers and your research pays off.
Now, for those of you who aren’t familiar with David let me give you a bit of background. David is the author of four novels. Charlie No Face (2011) was a Finalist for the INDIE Excellence in Books Award (2011). He lives in Spencerport, NY; is married and has two adult daughters and two granddaughters. David is also a retired family psychologist and Presbyterian minister.
For more information on David and his writing, you can visit his website, email him at dseaburn@gmail.com or find him at his publisher’s website.
Chimney Bluffs is published by Savant Books and Publications and is available at Amazon and can also be ordered through any bookstore.
Thanks everyone for stopping by today. Have you ever read about an event (tragic or otherwise) and wondered about the outcome of it?
David’s latest release is CHARLIE NO FACE from Savant Books and Publications. Here’s a brief synopsis of the book. CHARLIE NO FACE is a coming of age story about an 11 year old boy, Jackie, growing up in the late 1950s in western Pa. He lives with his father, his mother having died when he was an infant. The biggest preoccupation of Jackie and his friends (and many others) is Charlie No Face, a severely disfigured and deformed hermit who roams country roads at night and is reputed to kill children, animals and just about anything else he can get his hands on. Jackie and Charlie No Face eventually form an unlikely friendship that transforms them both, shedding light on Jackie’s mother’s lifer, helping Charlie make peace with his past and teaching Jackie how to look at people with his heart. It is a story for anyone who has ever been abused, bullied, rejected or misunderstood. It is for those who feel their true face has never been recognized. This is a story about the power of compassion.
David stops by to answer a couple of questions for me about his writing.
Mason - Have you always wanted to write or was there an event that lead you to writing?
David - I would say the desire to write grew on my over time. I wrote bad poetry and was on the high school newspaper staff as a teenager. That was about it until I went to seminary at Boston University (1972) where I had my first publication---a collection of poems for the alumni magazine. Also while I was in seminary, 1973 to be exact, I started keeping a journal, something I have done ever since. That solidified for me the importance of writing as a means of personal expression, as a way to make sense of experience.
In 1975 I was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and for the next six years wrote sermons every week¸ a creative discipline that served me well for many years. During that time I also wrote short stories, two plays and two full-length non-fiction manuscripts, one of which was accepted for publication but then rejected. I didn’t write anything for a few years after that!
My career aspirations changed and I went back to school for another master’s degree and eventually a PhD. I entered the mental health field and have spent the remainder of my career as a family psychologist. I was an Assistant Professor of 
Psychiatry and Family Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center for almost 20 years. I did considerable academic writing during this period of time, publishing two professional books and over 50 journal articles and books chapters. One seldom thinks of academic writing as creative, but my focus was often on clinical work and involved what might be thought of as creative nonfiction from time to time. It was in academics that I learned how to be self-disciplined as a writer. I had excellent mentoring, feedback and editing on all my work. During this period I realized that I needed to write as much as I wanted to write. It became a vital part of who I was becoming.
While I did a lot of writing between 1986 and 2004, I never wrote any fiction during this period. My work as a psychotherapist, though, taught me how to be a good story-listener, something that I believe is important to becoming a good story teller. My clients often told me remarkable stories about their lives, stories that resonated with me, stories that often went to the core of what it means to be a human being.
A turning point came when a client told me a devastating story about an incident that had occurred when he was young. I made notes about that incident and my imaginings about what it must have been like. This expanded into a fictional rendering of the incident and those who might have been a part of it. Soon I had a folder full of notes for a novel, but wasn’t sure how to proceed, so I put the folder away in 1990. I returned to those now dusty notes in 2004, when I felt ready to write the story, and in 2005 published my first novel, entitled DARKNESS IS AS LIGHT.
It is interesting that even then, after so many years of writing, I didn’t think of myself as a writer. Being a writer was a declaration of identity I felt hesitant to make. I left my position at the University in 2005 for many reasons, among them being the desire to devote more time to writing fiction. The result was the publication of my second novel, PUMPKIN HILL, in 2007 and my third, CHARLIE NO FACE, in 2011. It was during the writing of PUMPKIN HILL that I began to think of myself as a writer, as someone whose work and identity were as one.
My current novel, CHARLIE NO FACE, has, thus far, been the most enjoyable to write. It is a first person narrative told by an 11-year-old boy, Jackie, growing up in the late 1950s in a small western Pa. town called Ellwood City, which happens to be my home town. In those days there was a real life person known as Charlie No Face who had been severely disfigured and deformed in an electrical accident as child. He spent most of his life being taunted, mistreated and sometimes beaten by teenagers and others who went looking for him when he roamed country roads at night, the only time he could safely go outside. In this story, Jackie and Charlie No Face create an unlikely friendship that transforms and redeems them both; teaching Jackie, in particular, the importance of compassion for those who may seem different but who are actually the same under the skin. I fictionalized Charlie No Face and was able to use incidents from my own growing up in this story, which made it fun and transformative for me as well.
As I said earlier, I grew into writing. In my view it was a natural progression from my training in theology and my work as a psychotherapist. My theological background taught me about the importance of making meaning out of our life experience, often through the use of language. Psychotherapy exposed me to the primary way by which people make meaning---telling stories about their lives. When I sit down in front of the computer, I am trying to tell an engaging story about characters that are doing their best to live meaningfully, sometimes even heroically, despite the steep odds and occasional failures.
Mason - What can readers expect from you next?
David - About two years ago, while I was finishing CHARLIE NO FACE, I read a newspaper story about an incident that had occurred in England. A husband and wife jumped off a famous cliff to their deaths a day after their young son had died of an incurable disease. They were found at the bottom of the cliff with two sacks beside them, one had the body of their young son, and the other had his toys. I couldn’t shake the story and read as much as I couldn’t about what had happened. Two questions tugged at me: How did this decision come to make sense to both of these people? What would have happened if one of them had survived the jump? Those questions are what I am now addressing in my fourth novel, CHIMNEY BLUFFS, which I anticipate completing in the next few months.
David, thanks for guest blogging today. It was interesting learning how your writing evolved.
Here’s a bit more information about David. Recently retired, David is a family psychologist and ordained minister who spent the majority of his career as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at the University of Rochester (NY) Medical Center. He is married and has two adult daughters and two wonderful granddaughters. He lives in Spencerport NY. He is currently completing work on his fourth novel, CHIMNEY BLUFFS.
For more on David and his writing, check out his website at www.davidbseaburn.com or contact him directly at dseaburn@gmail.com. You can also listen to a podcast interview with David about his book on KHOW radio (Denver) at http://www.authorsden.com/adstorage/119251/CharlieNoFaceInterview.doc.mp3. CHARLIE NO FACE is available at www.amazon.com/dp/0984555285 or it can be ordered through your local bookstore.
In addition, you can see a video about CHARLIE NO FACE on YouTube by clicking on this link: http://youtu.be/wR8OeYfXpsg
If you’re a writer, was there an event that lead you to write or have you just always wanted to write? As a reader, what are your thoughts on coming-of-age stories?
