I’m delighted to host author Michael Bourne on my blog today. He reveals the journey he took to writing his first novel. Join him!

Michael Bourne is the author of Blithedale Canyon, published by Regal House in 2022. He is a long-time contributing editor at Poets & Writers Magazine, and he has written for the New York Times, the Globe & Mail, The Economist, Literary Hub, and Salon. His fiction has appeared in more than a dozen literary magazines including, most recently, december, The Southampton Review, and Tin House. Blithedale Canyon is his first novel. He grew up in Northern California and now lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife and son.

“Blithedale Canyon is a hard look at the destruction of American capitalism in the lives of the privileged and the devoured. No one here is easy to love, and yet Bourne writes each of his damaged, difficult characters with a clear-eyed complexity that readers will recognize. By the last page, readers will be asking an essential question of our American moment: Can there be any redemption without honesty?” —Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, author of What We Do With the Wreckage and This Life She’s Chosen

“A vivid portrait of Northern California at the turn of the 21st century … A story of love, addiction, regret, and hope. I couldn’t put it down.” —Edan Lupecki, author of California and Woman No. 17

“an acute and vulnerable expression of male angst set in Mill Valley, Calif.”–Publishers Weekly

How long did it take you to write your book?

I started writing Blithedale Canyon in 2001 and I finished it in 2019, so eighteen years. In my defense, I wrote two other books and parts of a third during that time. I also wrote and published a dozen short stories and literally hundreds of essays and articles. So it’s not like I was sitting around doing nothing, but still … eighteen years.

The truth is, I couldn’t have finished the novel I started in 2001. I didn’t really

know how novels worked. I kept starting and stopping, starting and stopping, bouncing between Blithedale Canyon and my other projects, and along the way, very, very slowly, I taught myself how to write a novel. I still don’t understand why it took me so long to figure it out, but for me there weren’t any shortcuts.

Who has supported you along the way?

Writers always thank their spouses in their author’s notes, to the point that it can seem pro forma. Maybe for some writers it is pro forma. Not for me. If it weren’t for my wife, Blithedale Canyon would not exist. From day one, our marriage has inverted traditional gender norms. She has the big important jobs – she was the policy director for the United Nations Secretary General for a while, and now she runs democracy programs in Ukraine and other Eurasian states for a D.C.-based NGO – and I teach part-time and handle the childcare.

It works because we both do what we’re good at. She’s good at saving the world, and I’m good at wiping babies’ butts and playing Monopoly with eight-year-olds. But it has also meant that I was able to spend eighteen years writing a novel. If I had married somebody else, I might be a bigger deal in the world. Maybe I’d be an attorney or a tenured professor. But I would never have written a novel.

What have people most liked or found most meaningful about your book?

Blithedale Canyon tells the story of a young guy in addiction, and from the start women readers have told me they dated my narrator, Trent Wolfer, in their twenties. Or he was their cousin. Or their brother had been like him before he died. I love that response because it’s so human and real. They’re not having a literary response. They’re relating to Trent as a real person. Trent is a good guy, a loving guy, but he can also be very self-destructive – and they see all of that. It’s real to them.

It’s also caused me to reflect on who bears the brunt of addiction’s devastation. It’s right there in my book. The people Trent hurts most are women – his mother and a woman who makes the cardinal mistake of loving him. But I think that’s true in the broader sense, too. Addiction is a disease, a pretty deadly one, and in our society women do most of the caregiving, not just for children but for the sick as well.

How do you start a novel or story?

I think in scenes, so when I’m starting something new, it always begins with a scene. With Blithedale Canyon, it was a scene in which an addict trying to get sober is working at a fast-food joint in his hometown and one day looks up from his register to see a girl he was in love with in high school, with two small kids and no wedding ring. I just woke up one day with that scene in my head and it sent me off on a 100-page jag of writing. I ended up tossing out all of that, except for the opening scene. It took me eighteen years to figure out how to tell the story, but that opening scene never changed.

Where do your characters come from?

Blithedale Canyon is fiction, but I know more about drug addiction and alcoholism than I’d like to, and I flailed around in my late twenties – not as badly as Trent does, but bad enough. So, there’s some autobiography there, definitely. But if I’m being honest, I found Trent by listening. I spent years sitting in church basements listening to addicts talk. A twelve-step meeting, or at least a good twelve-step meeting, is this weird mix of public and private. You’re addressing a roomful of people, but you’re speaking of the most intimate, painful things in your life, things you wouldn’t tell anybody. But you tell it there. That’s the deal. You can tell it there.

And that’s where I found Trent, sitting in those rooms. Not literally. No incident from the book came directly from something I heard at a meeting, but going to the meetings made me want to write about the central dilemma of so many of the people I met there, that of being a good person who does bad things. In a movie, you’d only see him doing the bad things and you’d figure that’s all he is, a bad person. But in a novel, you can go inside his head and watch the mental processes of self-destructive behavior, how it actually works. And I got that from sitting in church basements listening to addicts talk.

Why do you write?

Because I can’t help it. I’ve tried to quit writing many times and actually succeeded once. I stopped writing for a couple years in my early twenties. I was a newspaper reporter, and I figured that’s what I would do with my life. Of course, I didn’t know then that this internet thing everyone kept talking about would kill off newspapers, but it didn’t matter because by the time that happened I was back to writing fiction. It just seems to be some baseline need for me. It’s not like it’s brought me fame and fortune. In that way, it’s a vocation rather than a career. It’s the center around which the rest of my life turns, and always has been.

There’s a fair bit of interest, scientific and otherwise, in the links between creativity and insanity. How crazy must someone be to be a good author?

My late grandfather, a small-town doctor, used to say I wasn’t near crazy enough to be a writer. “Look at Poe!” he’d say. “‘Quoth the Raven!’ Now, what the hell is that? The man’s talking to birds. He’s crazy – stone crazy.” I have to admit, I had no answer to that. I don’t talk to birds, and while I’ve had my issues, none of it holds a candle to Poe.

I do think there may be something to the link between insanity and great writing, less because mental illness gets the creative juices flowing, which has always struck me as a Romantic fallacy, than because people whose brains work differently see the world through a different lens. Their lives are also often pretty interesting. But I’m not that kind of writer. I’ve dipped my toe in just enough crazy to have a sense of its contours, but the true well-spring of my fiction is observation. I think it was Saul Bellow who said a writer has to be a first-class noticer. That’s what I aspire to be, a first-class noticer.

What’s the hardest part of writing or publishing?

Many years ago, when I was just starting my MFA program, I submitted a story I thought was brilliant. I had read it at an open mic earlier that summer and it had been a big hit and I figured it would blow away my fellow MFAers. Well, of course it got trashed. It was my very first critique and I literally said at the end, “Was there anything you guys liked?” They were nice and all, but the answer was basically, no.

The unfortunate part is that I don’t think I really heard a thing anybody said. I was listening for the compliment and when I didn’t hear it, I shut down. I’ve learned since, through years of punishing critiques and rejections, to stop taking it personally and listen to what people are saying. That’s the hardest thing for me: taking my ego out of it and listening to what people are saying about my work.

How much time do you spend writing each day?

It varies, obviously. I have work obligations and childcare obligations and just plain-old life obligations, so a fair bit of it is catch-as-catch-can. But when I can clear my schedule, I try to write four to five hours at a stretch, from two in the afternoon until about seven. My writing mind just doesn’t turn on until early afternoon. I can teach and do interviews and grade papers in the morning, but that extra mental turbo charge required to write fiction only kicks in after lunch. So that’s how I try to organize my life, money work in the morning, art work in the afternoons.

What’s next for you?

I’ve just finished a draft of my follow-up to Blithedale Canyon, which is sort of a mashup of a literary novel and a crime thriller. It’s a detective novel, but in this case the “detectives” are the staff of a local newspaper who collectively solve the crime through their reporting. In the novel, which is set in the early 1990s, a radical environmental group is terrorizing a Colorado ski town to stop the construction of a new ski resort in a pristine wilderness. The FBI and the local police are getting nowhere, which leaves it up to the staff of the tiny local daily paper to figure out.