Charles Degelman's Blog - Posts Tagged "degelman"

Here's the latest on my award-winning novel, Gates of Eden, a tale of resistance, rebellion, and love...

In the spirit of the 1960s, LIBERATE GATES OF EDEN

Giveaway! January 8, 9 10 @
http://www.amazon.com/Gates-of-Eden-e...

What was the difference between a hippie, a Digger, and a 60s politico? Between a commune and collective? It's all here...

Kindle readers... Download Gates of Eden, award-winning antiwar tale, @ 5-day 99¢ Kindle Countdown sale http://amzn.to/1eeeq9f

The Resistance Series

Reinhabitory Institute : The multiple protagonists in Gates of Eden are young people coming into adulthood in the 1960s. The novel captures this time of great changes and especially the political awakening of these characters who come from different backgrounds but who are all swept up in the turmoil and possibility of the times. Can you say something about how you came to create these different characters and why you tell the story this way?


Degelman: In order to set a context for our discussion, let me tell you about Gates of Eden and the characters who inhabit the novel. Gates of Eden follows a handful of young rebels who grow up crazed in the conformist claustrophobia of 1950s America. As they grew into awareness, they begin to notice the injustice and inequity in the society that loved to call itself “The American Dream.” They began to notice that the dream often resembled a nightmare, if not for themselves, then for others. Individually and in groups, they began to share their awareness and joined the trickles and torrents that flowed into the resistance, rebellion, and power of the civil rights and anti-war movements.

[Read more... ]

A Bowl Full of Nails

Ever get asked to distill the essence of your novel down to an 85-second audio blurb? I did.

Peter Johnson, producer extraordinaire at The Authors Corner gives authors 85 seconds to "make an impression, paint a vivid image, the most poignant..."

Eighty-five seconds? It was fun, exciting, and a huge challenge. Here's the resulting excerpt from my new 'resistance' novel, A Bowl Full of Nails.

Just click on The Author's Corner and scroll down...

Bookpleasures welcomes as our guest today, writer & editor, Charles Degelman. Charles currently teaches narrative and dramatic writing at California State University, Los Angeles.

Previously, he served as staff writer and editor at a Los Angeles based educational organization while he produced original work for the stage and wrote fiction, screenplays, and political commentary.


In 2010, Charles edited A Voice From the Planet, an award-winning collection of international short fiction, published by Harvard Square Editions.

Recent work includes Gates of Eden, a '60s tale of resistance, rebellion, and love. Gates garnered a silver medal from the 2012 Independent Publishers Book Awards. A Bowl Full of Nails, set in the counterculture of the 1970s, was a finalist in the PEN/ Bellwether Competition and will be published by Harvard Square Editions in February, 2015.

Read interview...



Charles Degelman

Yes, book reviews can be helpful to an author, but I was especially thrilled when a student journalist from one of my writing classes interviewed me to write this Cal State LA University Times article. Excerpt and link below:

"A Bowl Full of Nails, like my first novel Gates of Eden, has been part of an effort to set the record straight about how ingenious and successful the resistance and alternative-lifestyle movements of the 1960s really were," he says. "Those were important times, not only for me, but for the entire nation. And much of this significance came from the energy, idealism, and action of students on campuses who protested the Vietnam War, including '60s war resistors on our own Cal State LA campus!" [read more]

A bowl full of bronze nails for author Charles Degelman — his new novel collected a bronze medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards.

The awards, known as “IPPYs” are intended to recognize and honor exemplary independent and university titles published each year.

This year's IPPY Bronze is the second kudo for Degelman's 60s tale of resistance rebellion and love. Earlier, A Bowl Full of Nails rose to finalist in the Bellwether Competition, sponsored by Barbara Kingsolver.

Published by Harvard Square Editions

Did you know that monarch butterflies flew south in the winter, just like birds? As with many of her novels and essays, Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior sails on the wings of the novelist’s scientific alter ego. Flight Behavior excels in using the microcosm of small lives in flux — human and otherwise — to explore how we grasp and respond to macro concepts and realities so daunting as to appear overwhelming, e.g., the consequences of climate change.

But in Flight Behavior, Kingsolver doesn’t stop at exploring impact. With typical courage, the author explores how living beings confront seemingly impossible phenomena and struggle to address the universal existential question that presses all species…

What is to be done?

Flight Behavior follows Dellarobia Turnbow, a young mother of two who — en route to an uneasy assignation — discovers a migration of Monarch butterflies that has flown astray and crash landed by the millions in the Appalachian forest above her home.

Kingsolver introduces this environmental calamity with mystery, through the eyes of her bright, quick-witted, poorly educated protagonist so that the reader struggles alongside Dellarobia to understand the powerful apparition that has landed in her familiar forest.

The unhappy young mother’s bewilderment is tinged with irony: Dellarobia left her glasses at home to please the manifestation of her restlessness — a local lineman hunk. As she climbs through the forest, the newly arrived Monarchs appear to her as a lake of fire, unidentifiable, anomalous, possibly a warning against her sinful intent.

The clandestine tryst with the lineman is never consummated but a new love begins for Dellarobia — the discovery of her rapacious curiosity and deep-running wonder for a world beyond her child-father husband, overbearing in-laws, and the demands of survival in a churchy community ravaged by chronic rural poverty.

Word spreads quickly. Something odd has happened in Dellarobia ‘s hardscrabble farming township. The community first responds with denial and pragmatism. How will Dellarobia’s husband and father-in-law log the mountain top with an infestation of bugs covering the trees? Who cares about a bunch of butterflies? There’s plenty more where they came from… right?

Ironically, Kingsolver sets the Monarchs demise — an event of sudden and gigantic proportions — in a community long-besieged by soggy, deviant weather that has delivered a near-Biblical saturation to the delicate landscape, ruining crops and making life tougher than ever for its hard-working tenants.

The unprecedented rain also serves to introduce Kingsolver’s exploration of how humans cloak themselves in denial and blind faith in a world where life had been defined by everyday life and the predictable cycle of the seasons.

Denial and lack of understanding play major roles in Flight Behavior. Her characters are not dumb; they’re complex and worthy of high regard. The women are stoic or whipsaw sharp, the men stubborn but often thoughtful and surprisingly vulnerable. But Kingsolver’s butterflies numb their sensibilities and intelligence, despite their deep understanding of the prominent role nature plays in their lives.

So now, when nature goes awry in Dellarobia’s world, Kingsolver serves up folks too busy, too poor, and too religion-bound to recognize the significance of the Monarch's confused arrival. Besides, what are you gonna do? How do you fix a world that has run amuck?

Enter the dialectic forces of the media and science. Feathertown’s citizens may be annoyed by their majestic, orange-winged squatters, but the outside world has gotten word of the aberration. The beleaguered insects' newsworthiness appears in the form of an inevitably blonde, disinformed, and ambitious broadcast journalist who corners Dellarobia.

Our young protagonist awkwardly spills her jumbled but intelligent reflections for the charming lady, with Kingsolver making sure we see both versions: Dellarobia’s awkward truth versus the media-ized outcome where the journalist personifies Dellarobia as a simple but intuitive native, a sexualized witness to the profundity of the Monarchs, her words yanked from her mouth and twisted into a separate reality.

Science arrives in the form of Ovid Byron, a tall, Jamaican lepidopterist who appears unannounced in Feathertown, makes a preliminary foray into the forest, and returns with a research party and a field station. Ovid’s return brings with it the realization that the aberration in the forest is earth-shaking. Ovid’s exhaustive scientific focus also provides Kingsolver a voice that explains what the Monarch’s distorted flight path means for the planet and with a scientist's mind that gives us a window into the deep, darkness that often comes with knowledge.

For Dellarobia, Ovid reflects the claustrophobic inadequacy of her own life and reveals the excitement of an urgent new world represented by the troubled Monarchs and the exactitude of scientific inquiry. Through Ovid’s carefully moderated response to the Monarch displacement and Kingsolver’s detailed and fascinating description of how a scholar studies a natural phenomenon, we see Dellarobia begins to absorb and codify her own response to this earth-changing butterfly visit.

The Monarchs' presence resonates throughout the tight community. The local pastor labels Dellarobia’s discovery as a vision. Her judgmental mother-in-law struggles with the concept of no return in a world where seasonal repetition and weekly sermons has established the rhythm of the universe. Her husband opens his eyes to his child-bride’s power, and the village patriarch yields his forest clearcut plans with grace and dignity.

The tide of carelessness, denial, and disinformation turns when Ovid Byron locks horns — or antennae — with the blonde, assumptive media maven. He shoots down her media clichés and assumptions and banishes her from the scene. But always, Dellarobia’s heart and mind beats at the center of Flight Behavior, giving us a window into the reality of the unrealizable — that our planet is changing, fundamentally, drastically, and forever.

Through Dellarobia’s efforts to grapple with our anthropocene reality, accompanied by the diverse efforts of her family, neighbors, and parishioners to shake off their sleepwalk and through the labors of and the intensely engaged Ovid, Kingsolver asks us — as she makes her characters ask themselves — What is to be done?

Kingsolver is one of my favorite novelists: she inevitably weaves deep social meaning into the fabric of her skilled and gorgeous works. But, as with many writers who have reached well-deserved heights, she needs editing. In Flight Behavior, she indulges us — and possibly herself — with a near-endless chapter in a goodwill store, describing in revolving detail the items for sale, the speculated-upon origins, and her kids' reactions to her 'yeses and nos. The scene serves a purpose, Dellarobia discusses plot points with her sidekick, Crystal but ten pages would have covered the territory; the other 40 seem over the top.

Conversely, toward the end of the book, Kingsolver seems to rush to the finish, using narrative to briefly describe life-changing scenes and circumstances.

Editorial problems notwithdstanding, As Dellarobia moves into her next chapter, beyond the end of Flight Behavior, the reader is left with Kingsolver's subtle but definitive answer to the question "What is to be done?" Plenty.