Anthony Caplan Talks, Yet Today

Are your characters based on real people or do they come entirely from your imagination?

This is an interesting question and one I really have to tackle and be upfront about. I will start by quoting the disclaimer at the beginning of Yet Today.

“This is a work of fiction. Consequently, any resemblance of the characters herein to the living or the dead is unintentional and random.”

But there is a larger picture that does not negate the disclaimer. Instead it opens the story up to the subconscious realms that you need to draw from in order to really reach down and grab something meaningful as a writer.

My family and lived experiences seem to form a large part of the material of the story: the type of characters, the details of their lives, their personalities and conflicts. I think of it as a scaffold, a trellis for the story to take shape and grow on. The final product is fiction, it’s a made up story with an invented narrative that in some almost magical way, in the way of storytelling, tells about a larger truth.

But my process is heavily dependent on what I know, especially when it comes to writing a contemporary story about a unique family living in unique times and how the larger world comes to bear on their relationships and the decisions they make as individuals. At times it might seem like I’m writing what some would call autobiographical fiction, but I call it semi-autobiographical because it is purposely distanced from reality in that my aim is not to mirror the obvious but to reflect on deeper questions.

The story of Yet Today has definite echoes of my real life — the main character is a high school Spanish teacher, check. He has three children, check. He spends a lot of time reflecting on the direction of his life, his relationship to his wife and children and hoping for a better world, check. But things get a lot crazier in Gillum Kaosky’s life whereas I have a relatively boring, sedate existence.

What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters from the opposite sex?

This brings up the question of identity in literature which has taken on such a recent controversial air recently. Can someone from a particular background even claim to be able to tell a story from a point of view with which he, or she, or they have seemingly nothing in common? That’s the question that many seem to have such a hard time dealing with.

I would argue that of course it’s possible to tell a story from another’s point of view. That’s the whole point of fiction, to open us up to the world through other eyes. Imagine if only white males could be depicted in stories by white male authors, or black females in stories of black female authors. The literary world and our culture would be greatly impoverished, in my humble opinion.

Is it easy to write from a female perspective if you are not a female? Of course not. Yet Today is about a white guy coming to terms with his privileged perspective as he gets older and his wife and daughters’ stance towards the family change in ways that reflect the larger society. But I would say that an intentional writer can lay claim to another’s perspective.

We are all related to each other and consequently are hard-wired to understand and see ourselves and the world through the eyes of the people we care about. The crucial element is to care for each other.

About Anthony Caplan

Anthony Caplan is an independent writer, teacher and homesteader in northern New England. He has worked at various times as a shrimp fisherman, environmental activist, journalist, taxi-driver, builder, window-washer, and telemarketer, (the last for only a month, but one week he did win a four tape set of the greatest hits of George Jones for selling the most copies of Time-Life’s The Loggers.)

Currently, Caplan is working on restoring a 150 year old farmstead where he and his family tend sheep and chickens, grow most of their own vegetables, and have started a small apple orchard from scratch His road novels, Birdman and French Pond Road, trace the meanderings of one Billy Kagan, a footloose soul striving after sanity and love in the last years of the last century.

His latest fiction effort, Latitudes – A Story of Coming Home, to be released on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords and paperback in the summer of 2012, is a young boy’s transformative journey overcoming dysfunction, dislocation and distance.

About the Book

Yet Today by Anthony Caplan
Genre: Contemporary Family Thriller

Synopsis

School’s out for summer, and that’s when Gillum Kaosky heads for the exits. Poised somewhere between neediness and nothingness, Kaosky sets out for summer adventures.

Gillum is a Spanish teacher. He’s been married for twenty years and has three children with his wife Sibyl. They have raised their family on a farm in central New Hampshire. But this summer, Gillum lands a job that will change everything: wire-tapping the Dominican crime families responsible for bringing heroin and Fentanyl into northern New England.

Meanwhile, his son, Jonah breaks into the Department of Defense in a hack attempt that lands him in jail. Nothing remains the same, and love does not always conquer all in Yet Today, a thrilling, contemporary family saga from Anthony Caplan.

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