Interview with the Amomancer, Part V:

This is the final of five parts of an interview
I've conducted online with William F. DeVault
over the last several days.
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WFDV:
Knowing how mercurial I can be, I hate predicting what books I will release next, but I can promise this: No new books until next year, if then.
EJ:
Why not?
WFDV:
I just put out three books, including THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES in three months' time. Emotionally, I am exhausted. I have not the emotional web of a lover or even a close circle of friends to fall back upon. Under these conditions, I am healing very slowly...it has been literally years, maybe decades, since I had anyone looking out for me...I'm tough, but I am worn and weathered and needing a chance to recharge. I think I shall spend a season or two as just a man before I have to put on the tights and cape again.
EJ:
Is that why you postponed your tour until next Spring?
WFDV:
Yes. In the last ten years I have been through half a dozen cross-country moves, two divorces, a major change in my financial status and the release of eight books. The only person more shocked than my doctor that I am even still alive is me. I did not suspect my durability.
EJ:
You almost make it sounds like you wish you weren't so "durable".
WFDV:
There are times when my life has resembled more an endurance contest than anything else. I celebrate my life and those I have had the joy to know, but there is in me a weariness, long held at bay, that came out when my second marriage disintegrated. I am profoundly tired.
Perhaps when next blooms the Spring I shall find myself again, but for now I am heavy-laden with the fallen leaves and snows.
EJ:
You sound somewhat regretful.
WFDV:
I can't afford regret. I am sad at all I have given up, even when the purpose and purposes for which I have given it up were of value. No one likes being a martyr, no one, and it is not a role I relish, cherish or seek.
EJ:
You feel you've been scapegoated by fate?
WFDV:
No. Fate is an illusion, a Keyser Soze for those unwilling to accept the randomness of the universe and their own complicity in their suffering. Suffering is a part of life. Without stress there is no evolution. I've played well my role. I know people who are alive today for my intervention, who have gotten the most important things from life because I was willing to be the catalyst or even to their parasitism. I am content, even glad, for those moments in my life, I can look back on my life and say, on the whole, I have done more good than bad, more charity than evil.
EJ:
More charity?
WFDV:
Not money to the poor. Unconditional love. We have to love, to forgive, without question, without denial. God, who is perfect, accepts us thus and commands the same from us. We don't deserve our arrogance. We hoard nothing of value when we withhold ourselves from loving.
EJ:
You've gotten more spiritual as time goes by, haven't you?
WFDV:
No, just more willing to express it. The whole cultural Christianity thing is a huge mistake. God isn't about membership, exclusion and the accumulation of wealth. I have heard people in leadership roles, both on the national level and the personal level, call others fools, backstab and gossip, smear and insult, poison and spit contempt. We are our own evil, just hidden by our own arrogance.
EJ:
That's a dark statement.
WFDV:
You haven't been some of the places I have been, seen some of the things I have seen, known some of the people I have known. I have known despair more than once after having gotten to know some of the people who have intersected my life.
Then I hear a voice, take a pen in hand, and am reproven of the beauty of life, the grace of truth, the elegance of love.
I am a romantic, or as I sometimes call it, a romantique. I will die assured of the truth of the love I have seen, felt and offered. Disappointed, yes, but no one straps on wings and jumps off a cliff without taking some hard knocks. My life means to me the ability to prove that we can endure the pain of life, or crushing defeat, and get back up and still believe in what is good and right and true in people.
EJ:
So, any hints about the next book?
WFDV:
You know as much as anyone. I have several possible projects under consideration. All I know is, with the success of THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES, I can't turn back. I cant follow it up with another slim volume, comparable to the normal mass-market pamphlets that pass for books nowadays in the poetry field. It has to be another table-shaking doomsday device of words.
EJ:
You had spoken before of perhaps taking more of your older books off the market, as you have done already with PANTHEON.
WFDV:
I am considering that, capping the two books I initially did with iUniverse. My best seller with them has always been 101 GREAT LOVE POEMS, and it is my only hardback edition in place, so I am tempted to leave it where it is. But, yes, FROM AN UNEXPECTED QUARTER and LOVE GODS OF A FORGOTTEN RELIGION are both facing extinction in the new year. I want to recycle some of the works from those in my next volumes.
EJ:
Is there anything to be made of the fact your ex-wife, Ann, is on those two covers?
WFDV:
I wish Ann nothing but the best in the life she has chosen for herself. I wish to have my life, I am not responsible for carrying her banner anymore. I make a lousy spear-carrier. Besides, maybe she'll ask to be on the cover of one of my next few books.
EJ:
Holding your breath?
WFDV:
I tried that already, I just turned blue and passed out. I have chosen my vector and applied my energies. It is up to others to climb aboard, I am not veering. Climb on or get out of the way.
EJ:
How are you promoting your new books differently than your old books?
WFDV:
Well, THE MORGANTOWN SUITE POEMS is a book I am not even really promoting. I signed the royalties over to Arts Monongahela, and it's their bag now. INVOCATO will take care of itself. THE COMPLEAT PANTHER CYCLES...well, just hang on...I have to keep to a grass roots campaign for now, but I am going to be as aggressively as possible moving on that.
EJ:
Touring?
WFDV:
Not until the Spring. A few appearances, but mostly special distributions to people I know and trust and who generate public opinion. It will be my first book reviewed in a major way.
EJ:
And the reviews will be?
WFDV:
70/20/10. Seventy percent favourable. Twenty percent mixed, ten per cent negative. Those 10 percenters will mostly be individuals who never got over their exclusion from their high school anthology.
EJ:
How have you been enjoying blogging?
WFDV:
God, but I love it. I can express myself in the moment without having to worry about being too profound. I am considering, when I start dating seriously again, whether or not to talk about the women who enter my life, in here.
EJ:
That would scare some women away.
WFDV:
I've chosen my vector. Climb on or clear way. I'm not stopping or altering my course for another again, I have spent my life sacrificing to give others what they want, bending myself into a facade of a human being to please this girlfriend or this girlfriend's mother or this friend of a friend. Real friends accept you for who you are. Real lovers love you for who you are. I used to say a true friend is someone you can trust behind you with a sharp knife and a good reason.
I learned, brutally, that this goes for lovers, as well.
EJ:
And what do you want for your epitaph?
WFDV:
I actually wrote my own obituary: "He's gone. get over it."
I don't want to be mourned in death, particularly by those who did not celebrate me in life. Hypocrisy festers, and I do not want that stench on my grave.
EJ:
Thanks for the time and trouble.
WFDV:
Thank you, and you are welcome.
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