The Author Talks About Second Chance
Before we talk about the book itself, can you talk a bit about your process in writing it? How much of the novel had you imagined as you began writing?
The way Second Chance evolved was unusual.
I began with no outline or developed characters. In 1993 while I was teaching law, I took a night class in creative writing at a community college and wrote two short scenes. The only thing they had in common was that they took place in New Mexico. One grew out of memories of conversations that I had heard in a café. The other was based loosely on a true story my mother told me about arriving in New Mexico on a train. Life took over, and I didn’t look at what I’d written until I picked them up again as I was clearing out some files twenty years later.
One scene eventually made it into the final third of Second Chance as parts of a scene-setting dialogue between a Sheriff and his Deputy in a little town called Rio Seco. The other involved a passenger getting off a train at an isolated station in northern New Mexico. A variation on that scene eventually became a pivotal plot moment relatively early in the book.
For some time the scenes remained unconnected but eventually pieces like these began to find each other and take their place in the novel. At times in the beginning, it felt as if I was just following wherever the characters pulled me. I wouldn’t recommend such an unstructured approach to anyone starting out, but for me the early work was the richest, most enjoyable part of getting to the finished product.
Looking back, can you say what kept you working on the book through what sounds like a long process?
Well, three things did.
First, I knew I wanted to share what I remembered from my youth about northern New Mexico and its people. Experiences I had later as an adult also motivated me to write the book. And finally, I wanted to write something that I could leave behind for family and friends.
How would you say your experiences have influenced the book?
I would say the characters and stories in the book grew from my early life with my parents and with the neighborhood friends I grew up with. As an adult, I continued to learn more about the issues that run through Second Chance from my teaching experiences in Newark, N.J. and Cambridge, Mass.; from New Mexico politics after college; from practicing and teaching law; and from working with Native American groups on Reservations and with immigrants in northern California and at the border of Mexico.
The book involves lots of chance encounters. Some of the characters view those encounters as part of a miraculous plan. Others see fate or serendipity. How did you decide to bring those themes into the story?
I guess I think that however they are described, what Dylan called “simple twists of fate” from birth on, play a role in all our lives, mine included. It’s not an accident that a main character is named Chance. I met my wife, Mary Margaret, as the result of a confluence of timing and events. And we did not learn until later that generations earlier our two families –strangers with very different family backgrounds--had settled, and ultimately developed a business relationship, in a tiny, isolated multi-ethnic town in the mountains of northern New Mexico. That town became the basis for the town I called Hermosa, New Mexico which is a major setting in the book.
At the beginning of the novel, Chance Ramsey is consumed with discovering who his birth father is, but later his questions broaden. How did that shift occur?
It’s true that what started as Chance Ramsey’s search for his origins gradually expanded into a broader exploration about what it means to lead a good life. Essentially it was a story about a developmental process.
I had an interest in genetic issues from teaching a law school class, Bioethics and Law, and from experiences with someone close to our family who had an inherited genetic disorder that created questions about her heritage. I also had an interest in the psycho-social-political issues that shape Doctor Chance Ramsey’s journey. The genetic mystery and Ramsey’s journey came together gradually and organically in the writing rather than as part of any pre-determined plot structure.
The mystery is gradually resolved but leaves the central character with new relationships and some fundamental issues yet to be worked out. I hope that it evolved into a compelling story that also provides readers with some food for thought about past, present, and future choices in their own lives.
Chance’s life is upended early in the book. Was there something personal for you about the idea of a major life disruption that leads to major life changes? Where did that come from?
I’m not sure I was aware of it while writing the book, but major life fractures were part of my parents’ lives and affected my own.
My father survived prisoner of war camps in Germany during World War II but came home with tuberculosis, and I think his experiences made a search for values a central part of his later life. My parents’ experiences during and following the War led them to move West to New Mexico as a cure for his TB. They had to adapt to new circumstances far different from the lives they had planned, and the disruption led to my growing up in the world that is the heart of Second Chance.
Speaking of your parents, Were they models for any of the characters in the book?
Not models, no. But parts of both of them are present in various characters. There were things about my mother’s supportiveness, political perspective, and good humor that showed up in several of the female characters in the book. Parts of my father’s biography became the background for a character who may have been as serious, but not as thoughtful, wise, or as kind as my father was.
That’s not to say that my parents weren’t models for me. In many ways. In particular, they both were thoughtful writers. As I mentioned, my father was interested in values and wrote on the subject. My mother was a poet. So, although I didn’t take much notice of their writing while I was growing up, I absorbed the idea that there is value in writing from one’s own experience.
Many of the characters you mentioned earlier, even the ones who have many strengths, also have problems, pasts, and secrets that have haunted them. Some of them tell half-truths or do things that hurt others, yet they do not become villains. What did you have in mind there?
I believe that all of the characters, like most of us, are full of strengths and weaknesses and, if we are lucky, we sometimes find our way to our better natures.
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