PRAISE FOR JOURNEY

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR JOURNEY

“Author Stephen Foreman’s electrifying Journey takes us on a wild, emotional ride with three mesmerizing, unforgettable characters in the Old West of the 1830s. Stephen’s prowess as both an author and screenwriter are in full display as we actually see and feel every moment of the adventure. Unlike most westerns, the title character of Journey is a courageous, irrepressible young woman whose indomitable spirit comes alive like a flaming arrow on each page. Set against the backdrop of social challenges such as slavery and intolerance that still resonate today, Journey is a spellbinding page turner that reminds us of how captivating a great story and characters can be in the hands of a master story teller. What a great book—can’t wait to the see the movie.”

— Stephen Simon, producer of the films Somewhere in Time, What Dreams May Come, and All The Right Moves

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“Raw, gritty, unflinching, yet still somehow tender. A gripping tale about freedom, identity, heritage. A Western unlike any you’ve read before.”

— Casey Scieszka, author of To Timbuktu: Nine Countries, Two People, One True Story

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“This stirring tale thrusts the reader into the 1830s of the West. It’s an eye-opening depiction of the savagery and mag¬nificence of the period. It redefines and reanimates our con¬ventional notions of the Western saga. The characters are viv¬idly drawn. The writing style is almost painterly. It’s visual and seems like a firsthand account of actual events. Mr. Fore¬man transports us to a world that is recognizable and at the same time fresh and enthralling.”

— Tony Shalhoub, Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning actor

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“Although identified as “a western” in its subtitle, this briskly paced novel by Stephen Foreman bursts the traditional bounds of the genre. Set in a harsh Southwest still beyond the edge of the law, its vividly constructed characters take the reader on a wild horseback ride through rugged country, villainy, nature’s ferocity, and the evil of slavery on the frontier. Few will forget the journey.”

— E. Donnall Thomas Jr., author of How Sports¬men Saved the World and Montana Streams, Peaks and Prairies

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“Journey, set in the American West before the Civil War, tells the vivid story of three people who struggle to make lives in a still raw and brutal country: Journey is an astonishingly capa¬ble sixteen year old whose background is a mystery and who seems to have been all but born on horseback; Reuben Moon, part Mexican and part Apache, a tracker and a hunter who carries within him the gifts of the mountains and the woods and may also be Journey’s father; and Esau Burdock, a wealthy slave trader who was born poor and didn’t forget it. The land was rich with wild food and wilder animals, including a moun¬tain lion as vivid as Journey herself. The book’s considerable power comes from Foreman’s deep understanding of an America two hundred years ago, run on a slave economy. This is a first rate American novel with haunting characters in the spirit of Larry McMurtry.”

— David Freeman, screenwriter, is also the author of A Hollywood Education, One of Us, It’s All True, and other books

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“A book of historical importance, as Journey is, usually delivers the stuff that satisfies readers. But Stephen Foreman’s achieve¬ment with Journey is to combine historically accurate facts with riveting fiction, creating a book of tremendous impor¬tance. Read, enjoy, and reflect on Journey’s journey and her emancipation. I loved this book!”

— Joseph B. Healy, editor of When Bears Attack

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“Reading this book I was swept into a compelling narrative as raw and bold as the old Southwest. We forget how very differ¬ent we are, yet how connected we can be by events bigger than ourselves. Foreman’s story starts with the meteor shower that stunned and shocked everyone whose eyes were opened to the sky on a November night in 1833. And we cannot help but ride along with the girl who stares at the sky from the back of her paint pony. It was a seminal moment in the lives of all who witnessed the Leonid meteor shower of November 18, 1833. All over the continent eyes were turned to the heavens in wide wonder and fear. This story opens with Journey sitting on a paint pony beneath an angry sky. She wonders what it is going to mean and we do too, swept along with her into Foreman’s epic of incest, injustice and instinct.”

— Gary Lewis, host of Frontier Unlimited, author of John Nosler Going Ballistic

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“The boundaries of color and caste have been breached, tweaked, and traversed in these United States of America even before its formal inception as a nation. And Stephen Foreman fuses compassion, astuteness, and vigorous prose to bring these elements to an antebellum western whose heroic values are at once familiar and fresh. You can almost feel the prairie breezes and night chills on your skin along with Journey’s heroine, who fears nothing in her past or present.”

— Gene Seymour EUGENE SEYMOUR spent more than 30 years in daily journalism, 20 of them as a movie and music critic. He is the author of Jazz the Great American Art and was a former chair of the New York Film Critics Circle. He has contributed articlless and essays to The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe BookForum and CNN.com, This year, he served as a fiction judge for the Kirkus Book Awards and is working on a collection of essays.

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STEPHEN FOREMAN IS AN AMAZING WRITER WHO TAKES YOU ON A JOURNEY WITH HIS WORDS. HE WRITES ABOUT THE HUMAN CONDITION AND HOW WE WILD ANIMALS TAKE CARE OF ONE ANOTHER IN THE WILD. HIS WORDS EXPLORE BIG THEMES AND THE WAY THAT LIFE BINDS US TOGETHER AND TEARS US APART. READ THIS BOOK.

- Gary Lennon - Producer: Power; Producer: Orange Is The New Black

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“After reading Journey, no one will think the same way about the Old West or slavery. This beautifully told tale of love, hate, and courage, with its superb descriptions of western landscape, complex and nuanced characters, vengeance and forgiveness, is a fine work of art.”

— Luke Salisbury, author of Hollywood and & Sunset, The Cleveland Indian, and The Answer Is

What Kind of a Jew Pulls a Trigger? THE HUNTING OF WEST ROGERS AVENUE - SUMMER - 1943

When I was older, a Marine Corps vet, Montana resident, avid hunter, My mother once asked in truly perplexed incomprehension, "What kind of a Jew pulls a trigger?" It was not blood lust but a desire to put food on my plate that came from the mountains, woods, and fields where I always planned to live, which was not going to be Baltimore. No fish. I hated fish, especially the burnt offerings served up by my mother still reeking of wharf. I'd pack the stuff into my cheek like a goddamn squirrel and kept that mush-ball in the pouch until  I could slip it under the table to Daisy, my dog, who'd eat anything. Los Angeles did introduce me to sushi which I avoided like rat turds until one day, came a Hollywood lunch, I didn't, any more. Tuna sushi became God's gift and one reason to prolong my stay in LA long after I should have left. There were other reasons like beautiful actresses, one of whom,was Jamie Donnelly,. Our union is coming into 39 years with a long way to go. I'd walk out the door of our first house in Beachwood Canyon to doves, coyotes, maybe a cougar, hawks, hummingbirds, human comedy, but not elk, deer, bear - grizzly & black - beaver, woodchucks, geese, ducks, eagles, hawks. I only hunted deer and elk,, duck and geese, although while in the tropics I did help take a wild boar, with a cutlass no less, all of it eaten by  the locals in a grand feast. At some point I will go further into this subject. Now I want to talk about Baltimore, Maryland, 1943.

Where did a suburban Jewish kid get the idea of traveling to all kinds of places where there were no Jews, (1). and (2). Why do you do things like a goy? To which I had no answer, just visions and dreams, things I wanted to do. Religion played no part in it. I have a close friend, a smart, adventurous fellow, excellent wing shot, asked me the same question, excuse me, made the following statement, "Funny, you dress like a wasp. You've got the hobbies of a wasp. We're in the Yale Club having scotch, but you're a Jew, right?" He was a genuine wasp himself and somewhat bemused at this infidel. Never planned it that way. Never thought that Jews were inferior to anybody. Never even imagined that I was anything other than me, and, truthfully, at that time in my life and for years thereafter, I really didn't yet know who I was, just steppin' up, just puttin' it all together piece by piece.

It was the summer of 1943. I know it was summer because I was wearing shorts with a small emblem on the pocket that I thought pretty neat and had a full canteen with me, a little boy not much over two feet tall. 

Our backyard at 3814 was fenced in by a white picket fence. I think there were only three houses on our block, no housing development of any kind, just surrounding acres and acres of woodland, and street-lights burning blue gas flames within large, clear glass enclosures. Imagine: an endless surround of woods, thick all around. In one corner of the fence abutting the forest was, I think, a lilac bush. It towered over me and hid me from view - my hide-out, my place of peace and comfort. I''d bring string, find a proper length of flexible wood, sit down on the lip at the corner of that white picket fence, and fashion a bow-and-arrow. This was ground zero. I then climbed over the fence and began stalking through the woods "hunting" squirrels and other wild game. I was dead serious. I was hunting! Something marvelous happened.

I stopped under a tree and watched a squirrel scurry among the branches. It froze, looked at me, and made the usual squirrel sound, that chatter. In places like Alaska it's a method of alerting other animals there's a human lurking close by. That day when I was three I didn't know what it was saying, however, for some reason, I said it back. I chattered. The squirrel chattered back then I chattered back, chatter, chatter, chatter, and damn if that squirrel didn't crawl down from the tree and crawled up on me, stayed on my shoulder for I don't know how long, but it did. It stayed right there. 

I was able to keep up this conversation with squirrels for a long time. When I was in grad school the campus was filled with oak, beech, and elm trees, in other words, lots of nuts and lots of squirrels. I could still get their attention, even get them to move a couple of feet or so towards me, but, except for when I was three, I could not get them to come any closer.

Now, decades, a lifetime later, I sometimes get them to look, sometimes stop perhaps for a nano-second, but then they move on, and so do I.

A Great Sadness

I woke up with it one recent morning, this sadness. Like the innocent but Godly man in Arthur Miller's The Crucible who is being executed by having extremely heavy stones placed on his chest in an effort to make him recant: when the executioner asks him if he has anything to say, the man answers, "More weight". He dies with his honor and conscience intact. I don't intend to portray myself as either innocent or Godly, however the sadness I felt was like a tonnage of slate slabs on my person - my head, my chest, my legs, my heart, mostly, my heart. I'm sure the reason why is obvious to many of you as will the symbolism of the three hour dream which preceded it .Someone very dear to me is not here. Don't know how or where this person is. So. I very much doubt I'll write many more sad ones. That is not the purpose of my blog. Its original title was Growing Older. I re-named it: MY FIELDS/MY STREAMS/MY WOODS/MY HOME. Mostly, that's what I intend to write about. Some of it follows.

 After I awakened, I walked around feeling as if I had taken a hard punch to the head, much like one I took years ago during a sparring session with the Police Olympic Heavyweight champion. It's a strange feeling. Unlike a body shot, which makes you want to crumble & die, a head shot doesn't really hurt, but it separates you from reality, as if there is a space between you and the real world, and you can't quite get your bearings. That heavyweight punch knocked me out, but I stayed on my feet, walking around the ring wondering why everyone seemed so concerned with how I was. They knew I was out. I didn't. I just knew that people were asking me questions, and I was answering them, or so I thought. Mostly I was asking, "Huh?" & "What?" & "What?" & "Huh?"

So this dream I had. I was walking around Pasadena, near All Saints Church and old hotels, through wide streets and cobblestone walkways, looking for my car - a plum colored, Mazda sedan. I looked and looked and could not find it anywhere. I asked parking lot attendants to help, hotel workers, nada. I just couldn't find it, and I knew I had to. I had to get some place important. Where, I don't know, only that it was very important, and I needed to get there but couldn't because I couldn't find my car. One old lady, a guest in the hotel, asked me, sourly, what was the big deal? I got angry and told her I was Obama's speech writer and had to get to Washington. When she criticized me for supporting Obama, I told her I'd been Bush's speechwriter as well. That shut her up. Then I went back to looking for my car. At some point I remember realizing that I no longer had that plum colored Mazda, had not had it for years. Oh, wow! What a relief! But, then, the dream instantly kicked in again, and I had to find that car. I remember hitting on a crazy girl with black hair in the hotel lounge. I ditched her after a phone call from my mother - just her disembodied voice - hysterically begging me not to marry a goy. I kept on looking for my car with a feeling of dread that I had lost it forever until I finally woke up, woke up with this space between me and the real world, and a great sadness.

I went for a walk up my mountain in the back to shake this sadness. I struggled with the thought that if I could defeat this sadness did it mean that I would no longer care for this person so very dear to me, that I would have let this someone go? Does that mean I have to hold onto it? This sadness. Keep it?

When I walk I amble. I meander. There are ancient words for what I do: "dander", to stroll leisurely, Ireland;  "doddle", to walk slowly and pleasurably, Northern Ireland; "nuddle", to walk in a dreamy manner with head down, as if pre-occupied, Suffolk; "soodle", to walk in a slow or leisurely manner, stroll, saunter, "Cambridgeshire/poetic". And then there's "spurring", following the track of a wild animal, Exmoor, something I've done countless times. I look down a lot. I look for the small things because there are so many worlds we do not see, and I want to know them. Moss, for example. Who cares? Well, if you look at moss under a scope every bit is as original and intricate as a snowflake. It is a jungle unto itself that transports water, locks in seeds, waxes and wanes green and brittle brown with the moisture in the air. What follows is a quote from a book specifically about moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer. I wish I'd written it.

"The beauty of mosses in these forests is much more than visual. They are integral to the function of the forest. Mosses not only flourish in the humidity of a temperate rain forest, they play a vital role in creating it. When rainfall meets a forest canopy, its potentials routes to the ground below are many. Very little precipitation falls directly to the forest floor. I've stood in a forest during a downpour and been as dry as if I had been holding an umbrella. The raindrops are intercepted by the leaves, where they slide off toward the twigs. At a junction, two drips meet and then two more, forming tiny rivulets at the confluence of branches. Like tributaries of an arboreal river, all flow toward the stream running down the trunk of the tree. Foresters call this water coursing down the tree 'stemflow'. 'Throughfall' is the name for water which drips from branches and leaves."

Seeing this, knowing this makes me feel better. Sometimes I become disgruntled with myself because, after all these years, I don't know the name of every living thing out there. The scientific name. But neither did the Native Americans. They knew what things did and when they came, and I know a lot of that as well. What I do is look for the words to describe what I see. For instance, this morning I saw bunches of tiny, white, bell shaped flowers. I thought, "Tiny as a baby's tooth." I walk like this and try to live like this because it gives me a sense of wonder. I look down, and then I look up, like the psalmist said, "...to the hills from whence cometh my help." This sense of wonder enables me to deal with everything else. I cannot defeat this great sadness, but I can bear it because of the wonder of "soodling" through my world.

When students ask me why I write, my standard answer is, "Because I have to. I can't not write." While this is certainly true, it's not the whole truth. I write to re-create that sense of wonder, the feeling that "tiny as a baby's tooth" brings to me. It helps. It brings me peace. The sadness remains - it lurks in the background - but not quite so much.