Haven Springs

Growing up in Haven Springs had seemed to me, as a boy, to be the cruelest imaginable trick the fates could ever have played on a helpless mortal child. That town was, I believed, the original, the one and only, God-forsaken place. Oh, yes, I was chock-full of that voluble despair so peculiar to the young. Haven Springs, my home town, was an egregiously misnamed patch-town in the played-out minefields of mountainous northeastern Pennsylvania. A black culm bank loomed over the house I grew up in-something like a lunar landscape it seemed to me, or the land of Mordor in my own back yard. The black dust from that embankment tinged our daily sky. The coal of course was all gone before ever I came on the scene, and the town was a shadow of its former self. It was as if the breath of doomed had passed over Towamensing Valley–sometime previous to my arrival, and probably in preparation for my coming–draining all life and hope and color from the place. Even the Christmas ornaments strung across our winding Main Street each December seemed disheveled and colorless. Oh, I was full of romantic despair for my homeplace in those days. All my ambition, all my boyish dreams, had only to do with getting out.

Voice

Long away, but the story has been on my mind. I want to experiment a little, getting away from the careful and methodical plotting, at least for now. I want to get "inside" the story. So far I've been looking at it from the outside. For now at least I want to get into the head of the main character. Like this:

My beginnings, like everyone else's, were somewhat complicated. My mother gave birth to me in the upstairs front bedroom of this very house, nearly 87 years ago. Her husband, who was off in France at the time, fighting the Germans in the war to end all wars, happened not to be my father. Yes, that sort of thing happened even then. Not uncommonly, as a matter of fact. My father, so I've been told, had come to town to help organize the miners into a union. It wasn't long before a company dick knocked him on the head with a club and threw him in the Susquehanna River. This was down in Plymouth Township, by the way. A few moths later my mother died in the ordeal of childbirth, and my Aunt May and Uncle Charles took me in, wondering what they were going to tell my father (I mean my mother's husband). This all happened back in 1918, a year to remember, that's for sure.