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Author and Novelist Glynn Young

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child abuse

The Novel That Wasn’t Meant to be Written

July 30, 2018 By Glynn Young 4 Comments

Dancing Priest

For roughly 14 months, from September 2005 to November 2006, a story idea that had been in my head for four years began to pour out on the computer screen. Once it came, it gushed, some 250,000 words of the roughest sort of rough draft. It would be spliced, diced, rewritten, divided into three parts, added to, and subtracted from, eventually published as Dancing Priest (2011), A Light Shining (2012), and Dancing King (2017), the three novels in the Dancing Priest series.

In November 2006, I stopped, and rested. Two months later, a story from my small suburban town of Kirkwood in metropolitan St. Louis became international headlines. A boy kidnapped in nearby Franklin County had been found by police in Kirkwood. With him was found a boy kidnapped in 2002.

Dancing PriestThe kidnapper was a man named Michael Devlin, a manager at a local pizza parlor. He had kept both boys at his apartment, on the far east side of Kirkwood and across the street from the town of Oakland. The apartment complex was just north of the trailhead for Grant’s Trail, which I had ridden hundreds of times. Which meant I had ridden past that apartment hundreds of times. I likely had seen the older boy, who after a couple of years had been allowed outside to ride his bike.

This was, and is, every parent’s nightmare. Your child is taken, and you don’t know if the child is dead, abused, or raised as someone else’s child.

I didn’t feel personal responsibility. I felt something else: a deep sense of horror at a great evil happening a few yards away from where I regularly rode my bicycle.

I did the only thing I knew to do. My writing rest came to an end.

I didn’t write the story of Michael Devlin. Instead, I poured the horror of that story into fiction. Some 40,000 words later, I felt I could stop. I had dropped any reference to Devlin or even a character like him. I had moved the story to England. I moved the crime within the Church of England, most likely being influenced by all of the revelations from the Catholic Church in the United States. I added seminary connections.

And then I set the story aside. It had done what it needed to do. It was a kind of exorcism of the horror represented by Michael Devlin and what he had done.

A Light ShiningIn 2012, in a conversation with my publisher about writing life after A Light Shining, I mentioned this story. A few days later, he sent me a press story from England. A small pedophile ring had been uncovered within the Church of England. He wanted to know if I had “pre-written history.”

In late 2017, I returned to the story and began to work it over. It grew; new elements and characters were added. The abuse story remained at the center; two additional story lines were added – one about a city government collapse and the other about a mother showing up after eight years. Only when the draft was done in early July did I realize that this had become a story about the collapse of institutional authority – family, church, government. It was exactly the institutions that Michael Kent-Hughes, the hero of Dancing King, had committed himself to during his coronation ceremony.

I’m not sure why I chose to develop the original manuscript into a full-blown novel. But I did. It was a story that was never intended or imagined to be written, but it was, because of the shock of a hometown horror.

The manuscript is now in the hands of the publisher for consideration.

Top photograph by Warren Wong via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Inspired by a Horror: Because It Matters

June 15, 2018 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Inspiried by a horror

Grant’s Trail, a biking-walking-jogging-rollerblading trail in St. Louis some 10 miles long, begins about a mile-and-a-half from my house in Kirkwood, officially the oldest incorporated suburb of St. Louis. The trail is a converted railroad track bed, and I’ve been biking it for years now. Counting the round trip and an occasional side meander, it’s a good 20-mile ride.

Just before the trail begins, there’s a brick apartment complex of some 40 to 50 units in five or six buildings. Rather nondescript, it’s neither at the luxury end of residential living nor the housing-of-last-resort end. Nondescript, and rather anonymous, sufficiently describes it.

Each time I’d go to Grant’s Trail, I’d bike past the complex, barely giving it a thought except to watch for doors suddenly opening from cars parked on the street (bikers have to watch for these things). But it wasn’t the kind of building or complex that you’d pay much attention to.

Until January of 2007.

One cold, icy day (I remember because we eventually lost power from the ice coating the trees), police made a startling discovery. Inside one of the apartments was a 13-year-old boy, kidnapped a few days before as he rode his bike home from school in rural Franklin County, near St. Louis. And with him was a 15-year old boy, kidnapped when he was 11. The good news was that both boys had been found alive. The bad news was what they had endured, one during a short few days and the other for several years. Police arrested Michael Devlin, 41 at the time. He later pleaded guilty and is now serving 74 life sentences in a Missouri prison.

The story became international news. During the next few weeks, news media from all over the United States and several other countries converged on the complex, the local pizza parlor where Devlin worked, his family’s home in neighboring Webster Groves, the police department and everywhere else in Kirkwood. To see it shook Kirkwood residents’ perceptions, including mine, of our rather self-idealized community is an understatement. A year later, the murders of several council members and police officers by a disgruntled resident shattered whatever images of our community we had left.

The news cycle eventually turned and went on to other things. But I can’t ride or drive by that apartment complex now without thinking about Michael Devlin and those two boys. What happened there horrified all of us who live in Kirkwood and anyone who read or learned about the story.

For me, the horror went deeper. I don’t really understand why it did – there’s nothing repressed or anything that happened to me when I was young that would trigger such a reaction. But I was profoundly affected. For a considerable time, I biked a different route, simply to avoid the association.

Many people asked why or how this had happened. Why didn’t the older boy try to escape when he had so many opportunities? How did neighbors ignore screams coming from the apartment? Why did the police ignore tips? Why didn’t Devlin’s family question some of his odd behaviors?

I didn’t ask how or why. I understood. For some unknown reason, I knew the answers to all the questions. Instead, I focused on the shock, the fear, the horror, the desolation, the pain, the hopelessness, the desire to survive that became part of these boys’ experiences. I said little to anyone about this.

I finally knew what I had to do to deal with it. I wrote it out. More than 44,000 words poured out of me until I knew it was time to stop. I wrote it as fiction, far removed from Kirkwood and the events of February 2007. And then I set it aside. Anyone reading what I wrote today wouldn’t recognize the original inspiration.

In The Right to Write, author Julia Cameron says that “when we commit our thoughts to paper, we send a strong and clear message that what we are writing about and whom we are writing to matters.”

In my head and in my heart, I became a conduit, what Cameron refers to as “becoming a channel.” I don’t understand why this happened, only that it did. No one except me has seen the manuscript, but it’s now becoming the fourth novel in the Dancing Priest series.

Because I finally realized the story needed to be told. It mattered.

Photograph by Aaron Mello via Unsplash. Used with permission.

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Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

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