The Mind of a Writer and other Fables
The Mind of a Writer and other Fables collects the often playful, charming, always quirky tales, short plays, verse, and other inhabitants of the imagination of playwright and author Stephen Evans.
From the Foreword:When I moved to Minneapolis in 1992, I could not make the drive myself. So my father drove up with me. I spent three enthralled days on the road listening to him tell wonderful tales of growing up in Iowa: how he got his nickname (Trapper); every job he ever held; how he met my mother; his time in the Navy during WWII. And how he wanted to be a writer.
After the war, he enrolled at George Washington University to study journalism, though he soon had to drop out to support his young family. But he kept a few pages of a story he started.
For most of his life, he was a constant and intrepid reader of anything from English history to Louis L'Amour to Jean Auel's Earth's Children series (he would have been delighted to know that the last book in the series was coming out). We shared a special passion for adventure stories from the Forties by authors like Frank Yerby and Edison Marshall, Rafeal Sabatini and Harold Lamb. I would comb used bookstores and bring them to him like the lost treasures out of the tales themselves.
From time to time over his last few years, we talked about writing a book together, about his boyhood days in Iowa. He even started making notes. As I look at them now, the handwriting reflects the slow decline in his condition. I can't make out the last few words. The letters are too shaky. I would have enjoyed writing that book. And I would have enjoyed reading it. He infused every tale with humor and joy in the telling. I imagine he could have been quite a writer. Instead he gave me the chance to be one. I guess that's what being a father is all about.
He was in his eighties when he finally showed me a story he had started so many years before. I don't know if there is a genetic component to writing, but his style reminds me a little of mine-quirky, fast, funny. But I could never match his storytelling bravado in person.
The last story in this book is his story (which I have completed and named The Gateway) is his story. The text in courier is his. The rest of the text is mine. I hope it will stand in for that book we wanted to write together.
I never discussed it with him, unfortunately, except to tell him I liked it. So I don't know what he intended by it, or for it. That I think will be a mystery, at least until I pass through the gateway myself. So I have used that mystery as the heart of the story.
Dad, I hope you and Louis approve.
Stephen Evans
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