In “Nate and Adel and Other Stories,” I needed to invoke the memory of one of the boys of summer.  That is, I needed to borrow the image of one of the Brooklyn Dodgers of the mid 1950’s as a theme — if not character — important to the people I created, people who had to deal with the severe crises of troubled lives.  Of course, I had many well-known players to choose from, not the least of which was my own childhood hero, Duke Snider, who battled against an unfair press, fickle fans, and knee injuries.  And I could easily have chosen other heroes of that great team for whom life seemed to hold as many impossible-to-hit curve balls as fat pitches:  Gil Hodges (the best first baseman by far of the 1950’s, who has been wrongly denied his well-earned place in baseball’s Hall of Fame), Jim “Junior” Gilliam (National League Rookie of the Year in 1953 and second baseman on four World Championship teams, whose selfless play kept him out of the headlines he deserved), and Roy Campanella (catching great whose career ended when he was paralyzed in an automobile accident in 1958), to name but a few.  But Adel, as it turns out, fell in love with Jackie.  You will need to read the stories to understand better what he meant to her. 

I did not completely appreciate the spiritual connection between Adel and Jackie until long after he entered my stories, but the more I wrote about Adel and the sharper an image she became in my mind, the more I saw the wisdom of her “choice,” if she can be said to have chosen how her mental illness would manifest itself.  Jackie did not speak to her in the chaos of her diseased mind without good reason.  Did she in some way grasp parallels between her own troubled life and the hardships that Jackie faced?  Did she aspire to emulate the strong yet quiet dignity that Jackie exuded?  Look for “Nate and Adel and Other Stories,” to appear soon on Amazon’s Kindle.

What is it that brings us back twice each year, year after year, to the mountains?  Not just any mountain, but why to the mountains around Big Bear Lake, California, a place that some benighted souls might dismiss as just another resort town, replete with cheesy souvenir shops (“Stupidiotic” – where one can purchase a DVD rewinder), quaint diners (“Teddy Bear Café”), and a hangout for long-haired L.A. teens seeking winter thrills on snow boards (“Bear Mountain Resort”)?

 I can honestly say that I’ve done some of my best writing here, early in the morning, sitting on our back deck while it’s still in the shade, laptop where else but on my lap, sipping coffee from a mug.  But writing alone doesn’t begin to explain my strong attachment – and that of my wife, Laurie – to these hills 70 miles to the east of Chavez Ravine.  After all, I write for only an hour or so each day while we’re here. 

It must be the thin air, which forces one’s lungs to work harder, galvanizing inner energy.  It must be the inevitable sunlight and pure blue sky, the tall pines playing catch with the warm rays and hiding flower-bordered paths in deep shadow.  It must be the trails that lift us 1000 feet or more to the surrounding peaks.   And it must be our cabin, fondly called “Pine Cone Lodge” for commercial reasons, where our family can enjoy simply being together, cooking dinners, playing pool and Scrabble, and painting deck furniture and Berger Bear, the massive carving that guards our front door, to protect them from the weather.

It’s all of these things, and it’s the fact that Big Bear Lake is so far away from that other more mundane and yet frenetic life from which we take refuge.

I posted a comment on a Linked-In writer’s group page just now, explaining how my last two completed stories had their genesis in dreams.  One night, a couple of months ago, I dreamed that some type of small, furry mammal entered my house and started to talk.  Maybe it was a bear cub, I don’t really know.  But I woke up and thought that there must be a story somewhere that would benefit, if not exactly revolved around, an animal coming into a house and talking.  I mulled it over for an hour, got an idea, and then went back to sleep.  Then, maybe the night after, I dreamed that some sort of spacecraft was falling on me.  Whew!  I managed to wake up before impact, so call that one a nightmare.  Danged if I didn’t think again that there must be story hiding there.  But what?  Another hour’s lost sleep until I had the germ of an idea.  I won’t say more about these stories right now, at least until I’ve tried to have them published. 

Dream are stories that everyone tells themselves.  They have meaning and function for the dreamer, even when the elements of the dream are obscure or unrecalled.  When we write  stories, we hope to present a picture that interests and holds meaning for others.  To have a clue as to what may be meaningful to our readers, we should capture the meaning to ourselves in our own dreams.

“The Circle Line,” published June 1, 2010 in Spilling Ink Review

http://spillinginkreview.com/fiction/bruce-j-berger/

Let’s face it. My team has been gone from Brooklyn for 53 years. Ebbets Field exists only in photographs and memories. Visit New York City, enter any sports clothing store featuring baseball caps from every major league team, and ask the sales clerk if they have any Brooklyn Dodgers caps; the answer will be “What? Who are the Brooklyn Dodgers?” On a down day, it seems like no one remembers or cares about my team.

That’s how the germ of a story arose two years ago. I asked my daughter, Jean, for an idea for a new story. She thought for a second, then suggested writing about what it must have been like for people in Montreal to lose the Expos after 2004 and, in the blink of an eye, added that the main character should suffer from schizophrenia. Huh? Well, my daughter was a graduate student studying psychology at Catholic University at the time. It made sense, somehow, but I immediately saw that the story should be set in Brooklyn in the 1950’s, and within days Adel Miller was born, Nate (her Dad) was at her side, Louise (her Mom) had been chased away by a knife, and we were on our way to discovery. So Adel loves her home town Dodgers of the mid 1950’s, loves even more Jackie Robinson, and hallucinates that he talks to her of love and tells her how Dodgers’ games will end up. And wouldn’t you know it? One story led to another and to another, and soon I will share the first collection, entitled “Nate and Adel and Other Stories.”

You need to know that Adel believes she’s real. When I told her once that she was a figment of my imagination, she became very upset and tried to storm out of my office. I didn’t know her that well then, and — I must sheepishly confess — prevented her from leaving until she gave me more information that I desperately needed. I am not proud of myself, but felt that honesty required me to write about it, so stay tuned for the story “Conversation Under Duress,” part of the second collection — “Adel’s Journal and Other Stories” — that will be published. Truly a prosaic name, but at least it’s honest.

Why Do We Write?

             Why do we write?  What is the connection between creative writing and God?  What common ground may be found in the creative impulse that formed the Universe and the creative impulse that pushes writers to write?  And, if one may wonder about how God feels about His creation, then we might equally well ask also how the writer feels about the characters he creates. 

             Now, put yourself into the mind of the character.  Should the character know, meet, hear the voice of, or otherwise have an inkling of the author who created her?  But that’s meta-fiction!  The characters’ world should be self-contained, there should be no interaction, you say?  Yet, there are examples in literature in which the author presents himself in his own fiction, e.g., John Fowles’s appearance in the railroad car and elsewhere in The French Lieutenant’s Woman.  How would the scene in the railroad car have played out if Fowles had given Smithson advice?  How would that scene have played out if Smithson recognized that Fowles had created him?  Or if Fowles told Smithson that he was a fiction of Fowles’s imagination?   

             We are God to our creations, aren’t we?  “In the beginning, the Author created Heaven and Earth.”  From nothing, through the Author’s willpower, an image of Man emerges from the blank page.  The Big Bang has ripped open a universe where before there was at most the Thought.  Man emerges, then Woman.  Or, reverse the order.  A world of complications forms around them and they are sent on their way, for better or worse, to err or to succeed.