A Generation of Leaves

Having returned from Nova Scotia two weeks ago, I have been pondering some way to re-enter this portal. I would like the words to be meaningful for the reader and the writer since if it’s meaningless to one than it’s meaningless to both. It should have something to say about getting my book out in the world and something about why that continues to be important. This is one of the perils of self-publishing. You become your own press although I have not, as yet, done the Whitmanesque trick of writing my own reviews.

While in Nova Scotia, a one-act play was produced in English and français acadien based on a melding of several sections of A Generation of Leaves. It was performed at the outside amphitheater at Le Village Historique in Lower West Pubnico. http://levillage.novascotia.ca/what-see-do One of the most moving moments was at the end of the play when Aubrey, played by Réal Boudreau, lifted the bugle to his lips and played The Last Post in front of a giant hanging of The Menin Gate in Ypres, Belgium where the names of 55,000 men, including the central character in the book, are engraved. They are the WWI missing whose bodies during the battles surrounding Ypres were never found. The haunting notes drifted up and out into the stillness of the Acadian village and lingered over the marshes, fields and homes where the characters in the book had lived and died.

It might be good for us all to linger today as those notes lingered on the cost of war. Listening to the President of the United States last night, it is apparent that there is no war that ends all wars.

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