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August 13th, 2023
Eugene
Such an interesting ride. 
Get it here
http://www.barclaypressbookstore.com/Recent-Books/Mark-V-The-Opera.html

Patrick says it comes together and gets really strong about 15  pages in.  I keep finding resonances in it.  "Jack" called from Ashland and we had a good talk about whether I'd been true, or accurate with his character. 
With great good luck, I'll get down to Ashland this fall for a book event.

It's also interesting to be the talented interloper in the land of the professionals; I meet them, we talk, I discover I know nothing, we part on good terms.  Maybe another three books...

(The   cover and sample are still here, just scroll down.)  The big excitement for me is that Act III is well underway; I just signed off on the first eleven pages.  Here's the first page... (I hope you like it.  It's got an almost-riot, sushi, the New York Times song, and...) well, let's just see how it all turns out...?

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Mark V: The Opera - NEWS UPDATES

 

6-29-22

Very proud of my team.  This has been a marathon and they have hung in there through covid, and sick kids, and, and, and...  in AA we say Life Keeps Coming At You

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Memorial Day, 2022 Eugene

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Act II is complete. Twenty-nine pages, and sometimes it seems more an entr'acte, an extended bumper.  Yet to me, the confrontation with the ghosts in the Pioneer Cemetery expresses much of the moral gravity of the story.

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I am looking for readers and speakers.  If you would like a digital preview, let me know.  IM me on FB.  I'll shoot you digital editions of Act I and Act II.

We're on track to break I think late October...  it'll be close!

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3-29-22 Eugene

 

Act I is complete.   Forty-six pages, over a third of the whole book.  Little pause here while that sinks into MY head...

 

More news:  we signed with Barclay Press a couple of weeks ago to publish and print and distribute; expected and so welcome.  It truly is huge:  Barclay is small but mighty,  and their network is worldwide.  It's the best news that they're picking us up for reals.

 

If you know a bookstore, or comics store in your part of the world that should carry Mark V: The Opera, get in touch by all means...  IM through FB works pretty good.

 

YOU SHOULD ALL BE SO PLEASED: family, and friends, and fans on GoFundMe raised over $2,000 to help move this project forward.  That's over 10% of the total projected costs - THANKS ALL!

 

We - Brandon, John, Eric, Sarah - are so pleased at the progress, and we are predicting we will make our schedule and publish about mid-October, six short months away.

 

I am interested in some help promoting this project.  If you would like to preview Mark V: The Opera, I will send you Act I now, and II and III when they're completed.  Let me know: IM on FB.

 

In the meantime, if you haven't seen it yet, help yourself to a preview by looking over our sample:  the first six pages.
We are so pleased to have this to share! It's just a real satisfactory summary of the themes and setting and characters.

 

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Have you heard Derek's new music?  Tried the new songs?  They're starting to fall fast and thick... 

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Even more about Mark V: The Opera

A new graphic novel project by Derek Lamson

The Gadarene Demoniac, Autobiography, and Eugene's Whiteaker neighborhood

 

Today in Eugene, Oregon, my old hometown, people’s sense of community has been severely stressed by homelessness, substance abuse, and mental health disabilities, sometimes afflicting ourselves and sometimes our family or neighbors, and all around us. While many of us are employed and do have places to call home, many of us also have very thin margins of financial safety; many are only one or two paychecks away from financial trouble; our credit is expensive and maxed out; and we’re fearful of medical expenses, car trouble, rent hikes, and getting old.  We pass the homeless army begging on our sidewalks, so much worse off than we are, and whether we volunteer or not, help or ignore, give or don’t give, many of us see clearly how little real space there is between “us” and “them”.

 

And this was all 'normal' before the pandemic, the depression, the marches for justice, the fires, the election (the insurrection).

 

None of this escapes us, none of this is getting fixed anytime soon.  And these too are the gnawing anxieties of the main character in my story, a reasonably normal middle-aged man, a school teacher, and currently unemployed.  

 

He’s a substitute teacher, really, and newly moved back to his old home town of Eugene after decades away.  In my story, he escapes from his own jobless anxieties into grand daydreams of producing a grand opera from the New Testament story of the Gadarene demoniac, that classic drama of schizophrenia, homelessness, and redemption.  While he has a great imagination, he also knows he has no such operatic capability.  Still, he can’t get it out of his head: it seems sometimes he can almost see the lights and hear the music.  

 

As he bikes around Eugene, (visiting his old working-class / hipster Whiteaker neighborhood, checking in with family, registering with the unemployment office), and as his story develops, we begin to see other converging factors in his life contributing to his operatic daydreams:  including his fragile recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse; and how for him, Eugene’s current homeless problem evokes his own vivid memories of being poor in Eugene during the Great Recession of 1980, and even selling his own blood plasma then.  When a meeting with his sister downtown is utterly disrupted by a brutal encounter with a frenzied and naked schizophrenic, he finds himself escaping off alone to Eugene’s Pioneer Cemetery at midnight, to ask the advice of the ghosts of his ancestors: when hard times came, how did they deal with the poor?  How should he?  

 

In his fantasies he compensates for his jobless anxiety by imagining himself as famous (and rich):  the author/librettist of a successful grand opera about the Gadarene demoniac, envisioned by him as a national hit show, and a current touring production at Eugene’s Performing Arts Center; an opera about a desperate schizophrenic outcast, healed and redeemed into health and sanity. Someone a little like him. 

 

Does his opera ever get produced?  Does he get a job?  Does he stay sober?  What happens in the Pioneer Cemetery at midnight?  Do we really have free tickets to Eugene’s very own proletarian, and fun, Emerald Park Players? 

 

It is fictionalized autobiography, and it's biographic fiction, built on elements of my own life, including the very rough summer of 1981 in Eugene’s working class, hipster, poor Whiteaker neighborhood.

 

Producing this tale as a graphic novel is not a job for a one man band, and I'm excited at the team that's come together to help this all happen:  artist John Williams, letterer and digital editor Brandon Buerkle, IT/web support Sarah Katreen Hoggatt, and whole-hearted encouragement from Eric Muhr, for Barclay Press.  Our best news is that we've finally got the artist, (thank you John), and we can continue with the work.  

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