THANKS FOR ASKING & TEASER TO REFLECTIONS ON THE BALKANS

THANKS FOR ASKING & TEASER TO REFLECTIONS ON THE BALKANS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© August 29, 2011

THE WORD WRITTEN LARGE

A number of you have asked the status of my manuscript, A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA.  Thanks for asking.

Since July 15, I've sent out the complete manuscript to twelve reputable publishers.  Four have returned the CD diskette with a form letter.  Only Simon & Schuster has mentioned the title of the book in that reply.

I've sent proposals via email to twenty literary agents gleaned from the Internet complete with the requested information of a brief biography, novel design, and sample chapter.

Half of these literary agents have made courtesy responses.  All have complained about the sheer volume of manuscript proposals.  One complained of receiving 1,000 such proposals a month; another 100 a day. 

In a sense, this is good news.  People are going to the trouble of creating a book, not an easy process.  Moreover, they have the temerity to submit what they have written to a prospective agent if not a publisher.  It might be easier to win the lotto than to have someone read what you have written.

I told BB that were I able to have had the maturity and writing skill in the 1970's, or before the electronic media age, I might have gotten this book published.  But, alas, I was not ready.  I lacked the will to write honestly about South Africa during apartheid, and found it only as old man. 

My children may one day read what I have written, thinking every word to be true, when much of it is made up, without destroying the integrity of the effort.  Once read, I hope they don't think too poorly of their father. 

I have no regrets of having written this book, but instead thank BB for making it possible. 

No one forces anyone to write a book much less a novel, which I have found far more difficult than anything I've written in nonfiction.

THE BALKANS AND HUMANITY

On another subject, I am close to finishing my Danube River Reflections.  I have been working on little else since returning from the Balkans earlier this month.

It would make a wonderful little book, I think, with BB's pictures – she took over a thousand.  The Balkans has been a moving experience.  My wonder is why. 

Could it be that I walked in the footprints of the Romans more than 2,000 years ago, or that my feet touched the same cobblestones of St. Paul the Apostle?  I don't know. 

I am of Nordic extraction but the trauma and pain, defeat and resilience, death and resurrection of the people of this region reside in my marrow.  It often felt like a moving picture in my head, as if I had stepped into Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, and time had stopped, transported through a glass darkly to another age. 

As late as the 1990's, there were brutal wars here when men and young boys were marched out into the countryside, forced to dig their own graves, and then shot to death because they were Bosnian Muslims. 

Similar atrocities happened here in the 1940's during the Nazi occupation if you were Jewish, in the 1960's through the 1980's if you opposed the communist regime.  Alas, it happened more than a thousand years ago when the Romans, the Huns, the Turks, the Magyars, the Visigoths and the Germanic tribes plundered the land and painted the earth red with the blood of innocent people. 

You look into the eyes of these Slavic people, people who cling passionately to their beliefs be they Orthodox Christian, Catholic or Muslim, and you see God in their eyes.  So don't tell me there is no God.  God is shown in the beautiful cities that have been rebuilt over and over again after men of ill will have leveled them to the earth. 

No tribe of man could survive such adversity without the strength of belief in something bigger than the self.

I have worked and lived in Europe over the last fifty years, but have had no reference to this region or people before.  Nor have I felt the strength I felt in this region.  We are made strong by adversity not by its absence.  Suffering is necessary to reach inside us to discover our essence, which is the indomitable human spirit.  I felt it in the Balkans.  I thank God I lived long enough to experience it on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my marriage to BB.  It was a spectacular anniversary present.

Be always well,

Jim