The author:
Following the receipt of “a lot” of college credits in the natural sciences, Coke Newell completed a Bachelor’s degree in journalism (Phi Beta Kappa, Scripps Howard National Scholar) at Colorado State University and then a Master’s degree in strategic communications at Montana State University. He has worked in academia in the U.S. and Mexico; in newspaper, magazine, and television journalism; and in corporate media relations, including 11 years as a media relations officer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His stories and articles have been published in more than 1000 U.S., Canadian, and Mexican periodicals. Takes His Music with Him is his seventh published book.
The book:
What begins as a story about one man’s search for his young son in the labyrinthine redrock canyon country of southern Utah gradually evolves into an intimate study of pride and prejudice, pitting its central characters against time, the elements, and themselves in a contemporary tale that explores themes of heritage, community, alienation, personal faith, and personal worth. Ultimately, it is a story about honor, devotion, and change.
I could spend this first blog I have ever written telling you how until six weeks before my 18th birthday I had never heard of the Mormons and how seven days later I was one. But that’s a story told in detail in On the Road to Heaven (AML Novel Award and Whitney Awards Novel of the Year, 2007).
I could tell you how on the day before I moved to Utah in 1993 to take a job as a media relations officer for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints I was a moderate Colorado Republican and the day after I moved there I was a radical Democrat—having never changed my mind about a single thing moral or political or registered as a devotee of either party.
Or I could just tell you how an old German immigrant, a Navajo baby left to die in the high branches of a desert tree, and a wild mustang orphaned by a speeding semi-trailer rig on a lonely western highway came together seeking solace and redemption in the redrock country of southeastern Utah. But I give that story 320 pages in Takes His Music with Him. So beyond the back-cover overview inserted above, I’ll just invite you to read that story and commit this space to responding to AML’s request that I tell you how and why I wrote it.
How:
Louis L’Amour noted in High Lonesome (1962) that “No man is free of the image his literature imposes upon him.” That I preserved that quotation at all (it’s not Shakespeare, after all) is proof of the proposal. I was raised in a very “western” and very literary home in the high mountains of central Colorado, a fourth-generation native of that state, but having Native American ancestry (Seneca) in western New York state several generations before that. The images my literature and genetics “imposed” upon me as a child, therefore, included mostly Native American tales and “outdoor” or wilderness stories. In my teenage years, Jean Craighead George, Jack Schaefer, and Charles Ira Coombs gave way to such as Henry David Thoreau, Black Elk, Jack Kerouac, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey.
The raw idea for what became Takes His Music first emerged over the New Years’ holiday in 2004-2005, when I was producing a short film called Man of Cold Reason, inspired by a Jack London short story (To Build a Fire) and filmed in the snow-blanketed high country of northern Utah. Watching my lead actor, Bob Hardy, perform his role gave me a strong notion for a lead character in a larger story in at least two ways beyond the visual mimetics: Bob taught German for 32 years in the Salt Lake public school system, and he plays the German konzertina, an unusual musical instrument that emerged as an important artifact in the book. But contemplation of a book just languished as a barely-roughed-out idea in my story files until late April, 2017.
A few months before that, in his final term as U.S. President, Barack Obama had established Bears Ears National Monument in a remote section of the Colorado Plateau, one of the most archeologically rich and culturally significant landscapes in the world. It was an area that my family had visited and loved for decades. Yet within months, and with the support of almost every member of the Utah political cabal, the incoming president whose name I can never remember correctly and his now-defunct Interior Secretary (Oh yeah: think of the bumper sticker on my Prius) gutted the Monument in both size and management priority. I suddenly knew I had my setting and my larger circumstance for the book, and the writing of THM began in earnest, particularly when its characters started talking to me at night.
My background in scriptwriting and speechwriting inform my typical book development process: Structure, then Content, then Art (know the beginning, the middle, and the end; then drop all the ideas in their proper place; then spend however long it takes to massage it all into shape). As with all of my most recent book projects, that evolutionary process seems to give my characters permission to start speaking to me—which for THM they did, incessantly, for the next year and a half: sharing their backstories, their motivations, and tipping me off about strands and interrelationships within the story. Unlike my next book—to be published Fall 2020, written in extended chiastic structure, and loaded with color and sound and other literary devices—or the one in the queue after that—a complex exercise in voice, point-of-view, and narrator-reliability—Takes His Music with Him is pretty straightforward narrative following a linear chronology. Like both of those, though, and in a vein first tapped for On the Road to Heaven, it is set in the open-road outdoors of contemporary western America and it explores some aspect of personal trauma as its overt and intentional theme; in a phrase, wounded and marginalized people seeking and finding redemption. In Christ. It is overtly and intentionally “Mormon,” reflecting and celebrating the core of my own personal experience with religious faith.
Why:
This is a story featuring fictional characters set within a context that is very real; and to me, very distressing: what others may call ‘environmental fiction.’ To me, it’s just my natural literary habitat. I was inculcated from birth with a strident and intentional land ethic. My upbringing strictly forbade desecrating the rural outdoors with even so much as loud shouting, scratching one’s name into an aspen trunk, or peeing within 200 feet of a stream. And it certainly rejected leaving one’s trash in the woods or the desert, carving them up with a motorized vehicle, or offering any evidence that I had even been out there. I love narrow trails accommodating only foot traffic, silent skies, silent forests, silent canyons, virgin slopes and untrammeled landscapes. I know a good deal about how forests grow, continents form, at what altitude deer herds give way to elk and Steller jays surrender habitat to Clark’s nutcrackers. I know which flowers will emerge first in the spring, why a hoodoo is not a spire, and why those deep diagonal lines crisscross Fern’s Nipple.
But along the way I got religion. Over the course of four or five weeks when I was 17 years old, I converted from no religious faith (except a smattering of Native American thought and Ram Dass Buddhism) to Christ, and then a few weeks later formally converted to and joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after reading the Book of Mormonon a high outcrop of pink Pikes Peak granite overlooking the Lost Peak wilderness. Seven days from First Nephi to first baptism, due in some measure to what I found to be a perfect fit between Mormon doctrine and a deep regard for the earth and its biotic systems.
You can imagine my joy in learning some months later while on a 16-week academic field expedition for natural science majors at Ricks College that deep roots of “revealed” doctrine about the earth and its systems did in fact coincide with both science and the responsible and benevolent land ethic in which I had been immersed since birth. And my shock in learning within mere months of that same experience that the purveyors of such left-wing, liberal, must-be-a-commiepropaganda were surely unlearned apostates to the faith, and probably from California.
Or my shock in hearing it, at least. Ad nauseam.
This may be the only overtly ‘political’ novel I ever write. The last one wasn’t; the next two won’t be. There are not that many issues that move me, politically, after all. This one does, and it always has. So Takes His Music with Him is my call of the wild, and while it may regarded by some as a lone voice screeching in the wilderness, it is in fact a hymn of praise, and mostly soliloquially silent. The only things in it that screech are the politicians.
But ultimately, it’s only fiction. You can blame any perceived acrimony on my characters. I just took notes.
Q & A
Following are additional questions I am asked most often about Takes His Music with Him, so I here attempt to reproduce such conversations.
Q. Your other books have been published by traditional trade publishers, including one of the biggest New York houses (Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Six Billion Years of Mormonism, St. Martin’s Press, 2000); why is this one self-published?
A. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that a few fragments of the story underlying Takes His Music were in my head for well over a decade, including the old German immigrant character, the Navajo orphan, and the setting in southeastern Utah. But I just wasn’t sure what the larger story looked like until Trump and Herbert and the Utah congressional delegation started dismantling the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase national monuments in late 2016. I suddenly had the larger context I’d been seeking, and the book started to come alive for me.
But that also put some dates on the production calendar—I wanted to get the book out while the many lawsuits challenging the Trump-administration move were still active, and the involved players still in place and not dead from Big Mac heart failure. The typical process of publishing a book takes a trade publisher at least a year after the book is written, which writing process itself took me a year and a half to complete. I didn’t want to wait another year (or more) once the book was written to finally see it in print, so I decided to bring it out directly through Amazon and Ingram, cutting a good year off the traditional process.
Q. When do you write?
A. I still work a full-time corporate job, so I frequently begin writing at three or four in the morning, give it a couple hours’ effort, then go back to bed for an hour or so before heading off to my other job—the one that includes a paycheck. BTW, during this same period of time (2017) I also wrote and recorded about 20 original songs (you can hear them on Spotify, iTunes, et cetera), so it was a satisfyingly productive year!
Q. How accurate is the geography of the book?
A. Pretty darn. With very few exceptions made for the sake of the story’s pacing, I used both the boots-on-the-ground method and highly detailed maps (okay, I don’t wear boots in fragile wilderness; I wear Teva sandals). I have walked a stretch of the Hole-in-the-Rock trail, climbed into the Bears Ears, camped below them, and shopped, eaten, and slept many nights in the region. To the best of my ability, the geology, flora, and fauna are all contextually accurate.
Q. Of your seven published books, which has been the most successful?
A. There is no short answer to that. My first published book—Dying Words, in 1990—was of course a thrill, but it only stayed in print for about two years and sold around 500 copies. The biggest money was Latter Days: A Guided Tour Through Six Billion Years of Mormonism, which came out back in 2000 and sold around 40,000 copies before going out of print about six years later; the longest-lived has been Cow Chips Aren’t for Dipping, which was written in three weeks and has now been in print for more than 23 years (May, 1996) and is now in its second edition; the biggest awards came with my autobiographical novel On the Road to Heaven, which won “Novel of the Year” awards from both the Association for Mormon Letters and the Whitney Academy in 2007. The most satisfying, personally, has been Takes His Music with Him, due to a number of things, including, in my view, the quality of the writing, the geographic setting, and the fact that it is entirely fiction set-against real circumstances. I’m hoping the next one will be even better.
Q. Speaking of which, what is next?
A. I’m well into my next novel, called Blue Moon Silver Highway. It’s a boy-meets-girl love story set in the Colorado Rockies. And it features a dog instead of an old horse. Should be out in the summer of 2020.
Q. Any regrets regarding Takes His Music?
A. Yeah; unfortunately, there is no Dairy Queen in Moab.
Q. OK, finally: the book, or at least the characters in the book, express some pretty strong political leanings; would you mind saying how you voted in the last presidential election?
A. Sure: I used a ballot.