Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Stephen Policoff writes about Dangerous Blues from Flexible Press.

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A Hidden World of Mysterious Meaning

When I finished my second novel, Come Away (Dzanc Books 2014), I thought for certain I was done with my somewhat unstrung narrator Paul Brickner, his wife Nadia, and their daughter Spring. I invented the somewhat gloomy Paul and his ebullient girlfriend Nadia for my first novel (Beautiful Somewhere Else, Carrol & Graf, 2004) and some intrepid readers seemed to appreciate Paul’s mingling of melancholy and insouciance, his mildly askew sense that the material world is entwined with a hidden world of mysterious meaning.

In Beautiful Somewhere Else, Paul becomes convinced he is being contacted by alien beings (lights lights lights!) pulling him toward some uncertain destination.  I have mixed feelings myself about the possibilities of unseen worlds, but I have always liked the image, to paraphrase Hamlet, of there being more in heaven and earth than we can imagine.

In Come Away (Dzanc Books 2014), Paul, now married to Nadia and the father of toddler Spring, fears that his beloved little girl is being summoned away by changelings, by a mysterious green girl no one else can see.  In that novel, I was channeling incipient fear about losing my older daughter Anna to the dreadful genetic illness we had recently learned she suffered from; the lore of the changeling felt eerily appropriate to that fear.  But when I finished that novel, I was certain I was finished with Paul—his anxieties and off-kilter belief system were getting on my own (slightly less) anxious nerves.

But my certainty about being done with Paul waned when my adored wife Kate died suddenly in 2012, and I was left to take care of now17-year-old Anna, and her younger sister Jane. Anna, adopted from China in 1995, had been diagnosed with the dreadful, fatal genetic illness Niemann-Pick Type C in 2000.  At 17, she was already in a wheelchair, though her glorious smile was not yet dimmed, even as she mourned her mom. Jane, just 11, was deeply attached to Kate, and was sad and scared.  

So was I.

Because I have always processed all of my joys and sorrows through writing, I cannot deny that I began to wonder how Paul would go on if Nadia had died, leaving him to take care of Spring by himself.  Paul has always been a darker version of me, someone whose disquiet about the world is magnified into an almost metaphysical sense of foreboding, someone through whom I could channel my own elemental fears.

One dreary afternoon, watching shadows on the wall of my Greenwich Village apartment, I started imagining what it would be like to suddenly see a spectral version of someone you loved, someone you lost appear, like a puff of smoke, out of nowhere.  I started thinking about writing another novel with Paul as my not-entirely-trustworthy narrator.

I always assumed that anyone who wrote multiple volumes about the same characters must have planned it that way. The Ring Trilogy? Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy? Anthony Powell’s massive A Dance to the Music of Time? Edward St. Aubyn’s The Patrick Melrose Novels? I loved all those books, but I certainly never envisioned attempting a feat that daunting—constructing a continuing narrative, a world populated by characters who live beyond the pages of one book. But in 2014, I discovered that’s what I was doing. 

I began to wrestle again with the ongoing lives of Paul, Nadia, and Spring. I shrugged off thorny issues of continuity—would anyone care that Nadia is pregnant with Spring in 1991 in Beautiful Somewhere Else but Spring is barely 5 in 1999, when I set Come Away? Or that she is a pre-teen in 2011, in the book I had tentatively begun? That Nadia’s father, Dr. Maire, a scholar of occult lore, is mildly villainous in the first novel, turns out to be inadvertently heroic in the second and downright wise in the novel-in-progress which became Dangerous Blues?

I also made an abrupt decision to uproot Paul and Spring. Come Away was set mostly in Phoenicia, New York, where my wife and I had a weekend home for many years. But I wanted them out of there—they wanted to be out of there, fleeing the sad house where Nadia had recently died. I invented a sublet, and moved them to the city, placing them in a version of the NYU faculty apartment which my family has occupied for 25 years. 

Although I have lived in New York for most of my adult life, I had never really written about it. Placing Paul and a pre-teen Spring in my neighborhood was strangely, almost preternaturally liberating. I could write about the Piano Guy in Washington Square Park, the Merchant’s House Museum, the Village Halloween Parade, the hideous architecture of some of NYU’s unloved buildings.

At some point during my blurry explorations for this novel, I heard a song called “Dangerous Blues,” which the folk/blues duo The Four O’clock Flowers performed. It was written and originally recorded by Mattie May Thomas, a largely unknown blues singer, who was incarcerated when she recorded it in the 1930s. The ominous howl of her voice sent shivers down my back; it contains the line I might get better but I won’t get well. Somehow, that seemed to sum up everything I had been feeling for the past year. I found myself throwing chilling blues songs into the mix of this book; I started referring to it as Dangerous Blues.

But in Fall 2014, just as Come Away was about to be published by Dzanc Books, just as I was beginning to see how Dangerous Blues could be written, Anna’s health imploded. She was in the hospital with pneumonia three times in ten months. She left us in June 2015.

I know, I know. People ask all the time: How did you get through all this? Insofar as I did get through it, it was because I didn’t really have much choice. I had Jane to think about, and stumbling along was what I knew how to do. I hid away for quite a while, doing only what I had to do, seeing only people who showed up at our door (in fairness, that’s pretty much the way I have always behaved; maybe this was a little more so). For a long time, I didn’t want to see anyone who didn’t already know what had happened to my family; I felt almost apologetic if I had to catch someone up with my recent life. Once, in the vast, gray lobby of our apartment building, I felt compelled to tell the story to a neighbor who observed in passing that she hadn’t seen Anna for a while. She burst into tears, and I found myself, oddly, comforting her.

But if losing Anna—among the sweetest, loveliest children who ever lived—upended my life in some ways more than losing Kate, it did eventually show me how to make Dangerous Blues a little richer, deeper, at least for myself. Spring became more and more an amalgam of my two daughters—Jane’s exuberant resilience mingled with Anna’s soulful silence. I found that in detailing the father-daughter bond between Paul and the wounded Spring, I could also use some of my most poignant memories of Anna—walking her to preschool singing the Beach Boys’ “Surfer Girl”, watching a family of ducks paddle around the Esopus Creek upstate one summer, reading the unsettling Grimm’s tale “The Juniper Tree” one night, then having to sit there with her for an hour because she was so weirded out by it.

Anna’s spirit, like Kate’s, came to feel like an integral part of Dangerous Blues. I am not especially superstitious and I lack the belief gene, but there were many times when I felt like they were hovering nearby, watching me write about them, and maybe, just maybe, smiling.

Shepherding Jane into quasi-adulthood, my full-time teaching job at NYU, and a lifelong tendency toward procrastination certainly slowed the progress of Dangerous Blues, but it finally lurched into the world (Flexible Press 2022), with praise from authors I admire (Susan Choi! Caroline Leavitt! Jen Pastiloff!).

Am I finally done with Paul and his hapless encounters with the Hidden World? I would like to believe that I have moved on from the aliens, changelings, and ghostly figures which haunt Paul’s existence.  

But I don’t know. 

As Huck points out, I’ve been there.

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Stephen Policoff is the author of Beautiful Somewhere Else, which won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. He was writer-in-residence at Medicine Show Theater Ensemble, with whom he wrote Shipping Out, The Mummer’s Play, Ubu Rides Again, and Bound to Rise, which received an Obie. He was also a freelance writer for Cosmopolitan, Ladies Home Journal, New Age Journal, and many other publications. He helped create Center for Creative Youth, based at Wesleyan University, and has taught writing at CUNY, Wesleyan, and Yale.  He is currently Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU, where he has taught since 1987.