Michael Cogdill's Blog - Posts Tagged "love-triangle"
She-Rain Puts the Love Back in Love Triangle, Takes On Inevitability of Sex Scandal
Adultery makes news the way war once did. I have no need here to call names. The above headline alone will send famous faces – and the images of their attendant heartbreak -- soaring to mind.
Celebrity love triangles seem as common as our very longing to be loved. I’ve worked in television news for twenty-five years and have never seen so widespread a herd of big-name libidos running wild. Perhaps it’s just more chic now to cover the naked truth of people we wish never to see naked. It is, certainly, magnetic. Viewers and readers pile in.
Yet for all its info-tainment, this wide-screen cheat-fest, even with its weeping contrition, has a way of attaching despair to us. It gives off the feel that we’re nearly doomed by our deeply human nature. Stepping out in the Biblical sense may begin to feel inevitable. I wonder how many people in devoted relationships secretly fear themselves left out. Even the most sympathetic witnesses to the heartbreak of a scandalized relationship may honestly feel they’re missing the fun that caused it. A real and lasting love can feel as likely as the NBC Nightly News with Conan O’Brien.
For She-Rain, I leaned into a simple definition of romantic love: Young hearts longing for one another as they long for the very best for each other. This seems a clarifying and pure way to think of it. For the people who form the love triangle of She-Rain, the very best of living with it does not come naturally, or easily. Their lust is as common as hunger, strong as sunlight. Some good science shows run-amok romantic love grows from brain chemistry awfully akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. Pedro Calderon de la Barca believed love that is not madness is not love. Frank, Mary Lizbeth and Sophia – as they made way through my imagination – feel this madness as an irresistible agony.
But what if amid that madness, a love triangle formed a constellation of hope rather than a design of malice? Human longing -- lived well – just might improve the nature of our hearts. The Faulknerian heart in conflict with itself can brace us to stand gracefully on our feet of clay.
As with our minds, we allow the majority of our hearts to lie fallow, seldom explored or used for their greatest good. Readers of She-Rain discover three people, survivors of crunching hard times, who venture out toward the edges of what the heart can hold. There to find that we human creatures -- so prone to the self-destruction of lust, envy and revenge – hold a stunning capacity for beauty.
I have chosen to tell a scandalous Southern tale -- a love story like no other. In it, all are flawed, love at times seems the most malignant insanity, and people practically sun themselves in tragedies of the early 20th Century -- many of which still make news today. Yet in She-Rain, three people clear themselves a way to let the love between them reign. They show us that malice and disgrace, in the face of temptation, are not inevitable. Living imperfect lives of defiance, two women in love with the same man create a wonder of the least expected. In this fiction, I believe we see a truth about ourselves. We catch sight of what’s possible. Those powerful women show the way.
That defiance in She-Rain draws from my boyhood reality. Growing up in the home of an alcoholic who kept the air charged with threat of violence, I saw love as an act of miserable sacrifice. Sociologists might have presumed such a boy would devolve into a man on the same path – sentencing the women I encountered along the way to the same abuses, and myself to destruction. Yet the opposite occurred. I managed to flout expectation. By the great virtue of strong women who raised me, and the model of a World War I veteran who put on display the stunning strength found in living as a gentle man, I cut a path far apart from addiction, abuse of women, and religious fundamentalism, which too often sentences women and children to death in the name of family. I abandoned a father hell-bent on destroying himself, and that act generated an accountability that saw him hit bottom and bounce into a beautifully forgiven man. One whose memory my mother and I love and honor deeply to this day. She-Rain is dedicated, in parts, to both of them.
I dedicate it, also, to my wife Jill, my muse who inspired both women in the love triangle. She remains the idealistic young soul I fell nearly instantly in love with in 1985. I tried to marry her so fast I nearly spooked her father into moving her away. Yet a few years into the writing of She-Rain, I found an utterly new woman emerging in her. Out of her strength, a stronger woman came. Rather than aging, she’s become a constant re-creation of herself, one of stunning beauty and grace I wish to deserve. In She-Rain, she inspired me to let fly the wisdom of measuring ourselves not by who we are, but by the legacy of what we can become. She deserves the plural title loves of my life.
Which brings me to the title of She-Rain; it derives from an Appalachian folklore term for a scrap of fog that breaks from a cloud to drift on the mountain treetops. It takes on the delicate look of lace, surrendered to wind, and that surrender reminds us of a higher order to which we can yield. Hard times, most certainly in relationships, are inevitable. Yet we are not doomed to a hard fall. Through the clash of body and soul, above the warring of our inner good and evil, we can soar.
In the novel, I chose to put this first on display in a simple act of love between two desperately poor children. Out of their terrible times, they respect and serve one another -- creating a form of love that defies words. As it evolves into young adulthood, that love grows more familiar to what we know as the longings behind every sex scandal ever known. Yet this young man -- soon to find himself in love with two women at once -- respects himself enough to harbor a sacrosanct kind of respect for them. He becomes man enough to allow both women to improve him. This love triangle helps yank him from the swamp of ignorance and violence into which he was born and set him on a path to greatness no one sees coming.
This young man, Frank Locke, your narrator in She-Rain, lives a lifetime in one of the ironic truths of sacrificial young love: It refuses to grow old and weary as we do. The feel of it sweetens with age, improves us, even as we stumble and fall and crave forgiveness, often failing to live up to its high ideal. I won’t spoil the story by letting you know which woman he shares the majority of his life with, or the full impact both women have on who he becomes. Though I leave you with a few of his words, written from his teenage memory of one of those women he adores. In this passage of She-Rain lives the yearning that can scandalize a man, alongside the devotion that can fortify him. In it a young man coming of age in a terrible time celebrates his early joy of a great woman’s love – feeling the brush of her own against his heart.
"Seeing her braced me to the bone, yet moved a sweet pain through to the marrow – as if we had been apart years instead of days. The dark curls in a tide around her face, skin colored in shades of creek sand, deep with summer and the force of a seventeen-¬year-¬old heart. Her eyes shone wet and bright as a long mountain view after rain – at once delicate and strong, refusing to grant sorrow or malice a bed of its own. Even in that cemetery, in the hardness of the time, every line that formed her, everything she was, begged for a fingertip. She was, to me, perfect satisfaction. A near-¬holy place of rest."
Michael Cogdill, a 24-time Emmy winner in television, dedicates his Southern novel She-Rain to the empowerment of women, encouraging all in a toxic relationships to walk out before they have to run.
She-Rain
Celebrity love triangles seem as common as our very longing to be loved. I’ve worked in television news for twenty-five years and have never seen so widespread a herd of big-name libidos running wild. Perhaps it’s just more chic now to cover the naked truth of people we wish never to see naked. It is, certainly, magnetic. Viewers and readers pile in.
Yet for all its info-tainment, this wide-screen cheat-fest, even with its weeping contrition, has a way of attaching despair to us. It gives off the feel that we’re nearly doomed by our deeply human nature. Stepping out in the Biblical sense may begin to feel inevitable. I wonder how many people in devoted relationships secretly fear themselves left out. Even the most sympathetic witnesses to the heartbreak of a scandalized relationship may honestly feel they’re missing the fun that caused it. A real and lasting love can feel as likely as the NBC Nightly News with Conan O’Brien.
For She-Rain, I leaned into a simple definition of romantic love: Young hearts longing for one another as they long for the very best for each other. This seems a clarifying and pure way to think of it. For the people who form the love triangle of She-Rain, the very best of living with it does not come naturally, or easily. Their lust is as common as hunger, strong as sunlight. Some good science shows run-amok romantic love grows from brain chemistry awfully akin to obsessive compulsive disorder. Pedro Calderon de la Barca believed love that is not madness is not love. Frank, Mary Lizbeth and Sophia – as they made way through my imagination – feel this madness as an irresistible agony.
But what if amid that madness, a love triangle formed a constellation of hope rather than a design of malice? Human longing -- lived well – just might improve the nature of our hearts. The Faulknerian heart in conflict with itself can brace us to stand gracefully on our feet of clay.
As with our minds, we allow the majority of our hearts to lie fallow, seldom explored or used for their greatest good. Readers of She-Rain discover three people, survivors of crunching hard times, who venture out toward the edges of what the heart can hold. There to find that we human creatures -- so prone to the self-destruction of lust, envy and revenge – hold a stunning capacity for beauty.
I have chosen to tell a scandalous Southern tale -- a love story like no other. In it, all are flawed, love at times seems the most malignant insanity, and people practically sun themselves in tragedies of the early 20th Century -- many of which still make news today. Yet in She-Rain, three people clear themselves a way to let the love between them reign. They show us that malice and disgrace, in the face of temptation, are not inevitable. Living imperfect lives of defiance, two women in love with the same man create a wonder of the least expected. In this fiction, I believe we see a truth about ourselves. We catch sight of what’s possible. Those powerful women show the way.
That defiance in She-Rain draws from my boyhood reality. Growing up in the home of an alcoholic who kept the air charged with threat of violence, I saw love as an act of miserable sacrifice. Sociologists might have presumed such a boy would devolve into a man on the same path – sentencing the women I encountered along the way to the same abuses, and myself to destruction. Yet the opposite occurred. I managed to flout expectation. By the great virtue of strong women who raised me, and the model of a World War I veteran who put on display the stunning strength found in living as a gentle man, I cut a path far apart from addiction, abuse of women, and religious fundamentalism, which too often sentences women and children to death in the name of family. I abandoned a father hell-bent on destroying himself, and that act generated an accountability that saw him hit bottom and bounce into a beautifully forgiven man. One whose memory my mother and I love and honor deeply to this day. She-Rain is dedicated, in parts, to both of them.
I dedicate it, also, to my wife Jill, my muse who inspired both women in the love triangle. She remains the idealistic young soul I fell nearly instantly in love with in 1985. I tried to marry her so fast I nearly spooked her father into moving her away. Yet a few years into the writing of She-Rain, I found an utterly new woman emerging in her. Out of her strength, a stronger woman came. Rather than aging, she’s become a constant re-creation of herself, one of stunning beauty and grace I wish to deserve. In She-Rain, she inspired me to let fly the wisdom of measuring ourselves not by who we are, but by the legacy of what we can become. She deserves the plural title loves of my life.
Which brings me to the title of She-Rain; it derives from an Appalachian folklore term for a scrap of fog that breaks from a cloud to drift on the mountain treetops. It takes on the delicate look of lace, surrendered to wind, and that surrender reminds us of a higher order to which we can yield. Hard times, most certainly in relationships, are inevitable. Yet we are not doomed to a hard fall. Through the clash of body and soul, above the warring of our inner good and evil, we can soar.
In the novel, I chose to put this first on display in a simple act of love between two desperately poor children. Out of their terrible times, they respect and serve one another -- creating a form of love that defies words. As it evolves into young adulthood, that love grows more familiar to what we know as the longings behind every sex scandal ever known. Yet this young man -- soon to find himself in love with two women at once -- respects himself enough to harbor a sacrosanct kind of respect for them. He becomes man enough to allow both women to improve him. This love triangle helps yank him from the swamp of ignorance and violence into which he was born and set him on a path to greatness no one sees coming.
This young man, Frank Locke, your narrator in She-Rain, lives a lifetime in one of the ironic truths of sacrificial young love: It refuses to grow old and weary as we do. The feel of it sweetens with age, improves us, even as we stumble and fall and crave forgiveness, often failing to live up to its high ideal. I won’t spoil the story by letting you know which woman he shares the majority of his life with, or the full impact both women have on who he becomes. Though I leave you with a few of his words, written from his teenage memory of one of those women he adores. In this passage of She-Rain lives the yearning that can scandalize a man, alongside the devotion that can fortify him. In it a young man coming of age in a terrible time celebrates his early joy of a great woman’s love – feeling the brush of her own against his heart.
"Seeing her braced me to the bone, yet moved a sweet pain through to the marrow – as if we had been apart years instead of days. The dark curls in a tide around her face, skin colored in shades of creek sand, deep with summer and the force of a seventeen-¬year-¬old heart. Her eyes shone wet and bright as a long mountain view after rain – at once delicate and strong, refusing to grant sorrow or malice a bed of its own. Even in that cemetery, in the hardness of the time, every line that formed her, everything she was, begged for a fingertip. She was, to me, perfect satisfaction. A near-¬holy place of rest."
Michael Cogdill, a 24-time Emmy winner in television, dedicates his Southern novel She-Rain to the empowerment of women, encouraging all in a toxic relationships to walk out before they have to run.
She-Rain
