Remember Me

About the Book

This isn’t going to be very traditional “marketing copy,” but it’ll be a pretty good synopsis. Heck, I’m an academic, and this thing’s probably going to sound like a thesis proposal, so brace yourself.
Remember Me is a collection of short stories that tried to be a novel two times and then ended up being what it should have been all along. The first group of six stories is taken from, of all places, my 1996 doctoral dissertation, entitled Who To Watch Out For. I billed it (in part to receive the degree) as a novel and set it in southeastern Connecticut. The stories (twelve in all but six in this collection) center around a group of people affiliated in various ways with a spiritual community called an Ailu and its self-proclaimed “leader,” Ray Moss. Ray is a middle-aged white man who wants to transcend just about everything there is to transcend. The novel explores the lengths to which people will go to forsake individuality to be part of a group, any group (cf., Carl Jung’s theory of complexes and the role of the “collective”), in this case a “New Age” group of healers, activists, occultists, Wiccans and wannabes. The challenge in using this subject matter was in illustrating the comedy found in much New Age thought and practice while retaining a respect for the characters, and not belittling them. The need to compensate for a lack of self-knowledge, and a fear of individual perception and action are motivations of several of the characters. Also examined in several chapters is the power, nearly magical in nature, of the past and of memory, and how this affects the characters’ present desires to connect, however self-destructively, with others.
The first story, The Myth of Black Beans and M&M’s, introduces many of the characters, who either are part of the Ailu or members of the Sabian Assembly, a small, esoteric society that also studies astrology and is noted for its brain-bending academic and theosophical exercises and its encompassing of many of the world’s religions and philosophies into single numerological “lessons.” Trying to make comedy out of that was a challenge.
The first story establishes many of the characters as desiring to attach themselves to a non-Anglo culture, with varying (positive and negative) results. Nahuatel, a Mayan healer, and his entourage are invited to visit Ray at his Ailu, and Ray assembles a group of paying participants to try and raise some funds for both Nahuatel and himself.
Molly is the narrator of The Myth of Black Beans and M&M’s and reappears in several stories in this first section. Molly is a friend of Ray’s and a dealer in architectural salvage; she does not belong to either the Ailu or the Sabian Assembly and is skeptical about most of the New Age crowd. Other characters in the novel, especially the “practicing” witches and some Ailu members, expend immeasurable amounts of energy trying to connect to the magical, spiritual world. This character, who merely longs for the courage to try new things, is bombarded by magic and has to learn to deal with it in her non-magical world. Jackson Writes a Letter concerns a man paralyzed by his desire to consistently do “good” and the object of his attentions: the political prisoner Leonard Peltier. Jackson is the best friend of Ray Moss, Ailu king. In this story Jackson also assists Ray’s mother Celeste with one of her Wiccan rituals, and is seduced (almost) by Debbie, a pseudo-witch hated by Celeste. I consulted Mr. Peltier and the Defense Committee while writing parts of this story in 1996, though Leonard only acts as a catalyst for Jackson’s self-exploration. Jackson writes many letters to Leonard, finally sending only one. Receiving an answer is doubtful, though a later story (The Fixed and Planted Object) finds Jackson running the Defense Committee headquarters in Kansas for two weeks at the behest of the president, Leonard’s fiancée. Jackson still doesn’t get to speak with Leonard, and his ded

About the Author

Penny Newbury has lived and worked in New England, Paraguay, East Timor and Kosovo. She has taught English and creative writing at colleges and universities in Connecticut, and her short stories have appeared in several literary journals and magazines. She lives in northeastern Connecticut.