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Don Hynes's avatar

The heroine’s journey, beautifully told with all the pain and dark challenges such a journey contains. The retelling of the story is the gift you return with from the journey. Cathartic for you perhaps, revelatory for we your readers. I’m wondering how the story might work if you wrote it in third person. It would lose some of the immediacy, but might give you more room to operate. Just a thought. Very glad to be along for the ride. Thank you Sandy.

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Sandy Brown Jensen's avatar

Thanks for your thoughts on the Fianna story and the point of view it is told from. I’ve been working off and on on this piece for thirty years. The prose wasn’t so balls to the wall in earlier drafts. I kept revisiting it to find ways to pump up the drama, and first person point of view seemed the best way to keep the reader in the center of the story.

Whatever catharsis there might have been passed so very long ago. If I hadn’t drafted the story and kept journals, honestly, I wouldn’t remember a fraction of this. It happened to a different person.

I hesitated about putting it out in public because I used to worry about how other Emissaries, not to speak of the primary players, would react, but that, too, has passed as I learned more about how readers enter any story, fiction or memoir, as if it were their own dream.

For all intents and purposes, that first person narrator is a fictive construct, even though she is constructed out of memories of a life I seem to have lived—through a glass darkly.

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Pam Stevens's avatar

A well-told story in itself, and an incredible cliffhanger. I want more. And you owe me a box of tissues. 💧

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Gregory Fladager's avatar

Great writing…no holds barred.

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Anna Factor's avatar

My goodness Sandy. This is the first account of read about the trauma of moving on from the Emissaries. Don and I met you at Glen Ivy when we visited during his time at the Contreras Clinic being cured of life threatening cancer and I think about what a life saver Glen Ivy was, how kind everyone was. I still saw John and Pam occasionally until 18 months ago when I returned to UK from CA. Back then when we returned to UK we drifted further and further away out of orbit eventually and were spared the heartbreak that so many others went through. I am still so grateful for the friendships I made then, and felt and still feel so blessed, and so many still friends whom I’m in touch with on Facebook, and other kindred spirits too. I was only vaguely aware of the upheaval and power struggles after Martin died, first bcos a great friend and ally from UK was staying with us in my father in laws house in PS where we began to spend our winters, and she was on her way to 200 Mile House to interview him for her magazine when Martin died. How far away those days seem now, part of my spiritual quest, another step after a Roman Catholic schooling which I had also left behind. Thank you for the vigour and immediacy of your story.

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Anna Factor's avatar

Sorry I should have corrected more errors before I posted !

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Rick N Koglin's avatar

Sandy,

I am totally enthralled by this story, and your telling of it.

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