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Dear Friend,
After two years, the Coronavirus and its variants seem to be losing their foothold. People have dealt with the pandemic in their own ways, and now there’s Ukraine. We’re probably just beginning to see the results of artists’ creative efforts in writing, music and art.
I wrote Waterbury Winter in 2020, during the first year of the pandemic, and finished it the following year, so it was my Covid project. The subject matter, an alcoholic dealing with his addiction, was not easy to deal with at first, but Barnaby is an artist, and that makes all the difference. The book is about his struggle to regain his lost self and re-awaken his desire to paint. I’m no psychologist, but since creative works require a certain amount of energy, it makes sense that a depressed person might not want to make the effort to produce much of anything. Far easier to turn to the bottle, or worse. So the challenge I faced with the story was to ensure that Barnaby’s turnaround made sense. In the time of Covid, I wanted to write an uplifting story.
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Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937
