Reasons for Moving (manuscript) by Stephanie Eden Lenz

This is the second novel my close personal friend* and co-editor Eden has completed.

She finished her first novel, Whited Sepulchers, in July 2000 (that date makes me =-O). She started RFM shortly thereafter and she was also shopping WS around for a while, but then she had two kids and the books went on the backburner.

Lately she’s been re-editing WS in preparation for sending it out again. In January, she picked up RFM and finished the first draft in 16 days. 60+k in just over two weeks. Bravo! It’s so good to see her writing fiction again. She’s going to write an editorial about the experience for the March issue of TC.

I need to re-read WS (it’s on my List), but from what I recall, RFM is very different in content and style.

RFM is set in the early ’90s in a college town in Pennsylvania. The narrator, Seth, who is 20 at the time of the story, was an abused child who left home after a traumatic event some three years earlier. Since then, he’s been hitchhiking around the country and doing what he has to to get by. He winds up on this college campus and, finding he blends in with the students, starts following them to classes. It’s winter and basically he’s looking for a warm place to hang out. He ends up following a girl to a small poetry writing seminar where the instructor spots him before he can escape. Soon he’s writing poetry, rooming with the classmate he followed that first day, and perhaps most surprisingly, setting down some roots. Through both the poetry and the personal connections he makes, he finally starts to work through his traumatic past, stop the destructive cycle he’s been on since he left home, and begins to look toward the future for the first time in his life.

*Is that phrase trademarked yet? 😉