A New Venture

About 10 years ago, I decided to write a novel that I myself would like to read, not having a possible audience in mind, but hoping that it would be acceptable to others. Alas, it didn’t work out. For one thing, it didn’t have enough narrative thrust – none actually – and when I tried to insert some, it sounded artificial to my ears. I have been tinkering with it for some time now. While I was away in Maine, I had a eureka moment: it might work as a blog. I had written it as journal being kept by a woman who had recently been ordained and, along with her new husband, given a charge, roughly set in a fictionalized Baccaro, Nova Scotia, a spot I dearly love. The title of the novel is A Meditation on Psalm 139. One of the inspirations for the novel was a service I attended in Baccaro, where the woman minister read the psalm. As I studied it, I thought that it could have been composed by a woman. Harold Bloom had suggested in The Book of J that some of the psalms might have been written by a woman, that there were educated women high up in the courts of Solomon and David.