Following is an update of an unpublished post drafted in November 2024
For the record, my novels are: Good Ice (2007), Buffalo Ridge (2012), The Swineherd’s Angel (2020), and Beyond All That Matters (2025). The latter is now in print from Lakeside Press. Northstar Press near St. Cloud published the first two. I went total Indie on the third using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. A fifth novel is in progress with the working title, Give Me Something To Do.
Throughout the journey it has been important to create stories that have some meaning, or ‘socially redeeming value’. This mission became reinforced when my research led me to an awareness of the more recent cultural paradigm of Metamodernism. While we remain mired in the cynicism and relativism of the Postmodern Era, more artists and authors are rediscovering the values of truth, sincerity, and ethics yet viewed through a lens of questioning and honest skepticism.
In terms of literary genre, I was also pleased to learn about the term, “upmarket general fiction.” I now use this term to categorize my novels, which are well-written, with occasional flashes of literary quality, and arise from themes that are productive and meaningful. Good candidates for book clubs.
Expanding the aboutness of my novels to a full sentence: Good Ice – Compassion. Small town 1950s kids befriend homeless man, once a wartime hero. Buffalo Ridge – Resilience. Amid woes of adults and meth, children teach about repentance and forgiveness. The Swineherd’s Angel – Inclusion. Iowa farm boy, Iranian girl foreign student bond in livestock disease crisis. Beyond All That Matters – Relationships. Somewhat myopic, self-reliant man follows mysterious guide toward new relationships in family and community.
Inspiration
What inspired the stories? An earlier post described that for Good Ice, relating to my experience as a truck driver in the big city, and seeing homeless people wandering in alleys among warehouses. While I lacked specific inspiration for Buffalo Ridge, other than writing a second novel, I decided to focus on the meth problem in rural areas. It drew on my newspaper experience with law enforcement, and living on a small farm site.
Inspiration for The Swineherd’s Angel arose from hearing a federal official at a conference talk about ‘agro-terrorism’. The conference happened during my experience working with livestock farms on environmental issues. Not many years after the 2001 foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Great Britain, I attended a workshop for government agencies making plans to address such an occurrence in the U.S. The recent memory of Nine Eleven inspired me to identify one of the main characters as a Muslim from Iran. The book about the young Afghan women shot by the Taliban (I am Malala) led me to create the character as a young woman.
The inspiration for Beyond All That Matters arose from the untimely passing of an acquaintance, my interest in quantum physics, and an intrigue about the nexus of faith and science. Experience working in state government, and numerous travels across South Dakota, provided the setting.
Fiction-faction
While these are works of fiction, I do a fair amount of research reading related non-fiction books. As a former journalist, the desire for facts and truth as a foundation for fiction had been ingrained into me. I hope to provide readers with interesting and useful information related to the stories. Faction, perhaps? With the two most recent novels I read a dozen or so books each to research themes, plots and characters. Doing the research also became part of the inspiration for this Words on Paper series.
For The Swineherd’s Angel, my research went beyond books. In developing the character of the young woman grad student from Iran, I quickly realized that I knew nothing about that. A search led me to an Iranian student organization at Iowa State University, a setting for the story. I reached out via email requesting to meet and interview someone. A young man responded, and we set a time to meet at a campus neighborhood coffee shop in Ames.
My wife and I drove to Ames, and we spent an hour where they mostly talked about their experience in the U.S. They seemed to really appreciate the opportunity, and what I learned from them was crucial to the accuracy of the character’s background and experience.
For example, I had intentionally named the character Lelah. When they informed me that means ‘tulip’ in Farsi, I changed it to Laleh, a more common name. The two young women were eager to know if Laleh wore a hijab, the head-covering for Muslim women. I replied ‘sometimes’, which seemed okay with them. They also corrected me on the realities of their student visas. They were single-entry; if they left the U.S. to go home for a visit they could not return. I sensed some sorrow about not being able to visit their families. To fill that void, they relied on each other like a family.
Noble themes
In my fifth attempt at creating a novel I am returning to the past and the experience of my childhood family. My father was institutionalized for mental illness around the time I was born, leaving our mother to raise four boys on her own. While not a memoir, its themes include care of the mentally ill, and community support for a struggling family.
We survived and even thrived in great part from community support from our schools, church, coaches, relatives, and friends. That, along with advocating for more resources for homeless people today, is the positive message that I will strive to infuse into the story. The theme has great relevance today in seeing the number of homeless people.
I sometimes feel a twinge of guilt ignoring panhandlers at stoplights. The only time that I recall giving money occurred years ago in Chicago. We had become lost in a subterranean, dead-end street. At the end sat a disheveled man and woman. As we were about to turn around the man rushed toward the car, smiling excitedly. I opened the window, and he told us how to exit the location and find our destination. I gave him five dollars. Apparently, that’s what they did, sitting there all day giving directions and hoping for some reward.
That won’t be in my story, but it helps open your eyes to the idea that the homeless and mentally ill are people, many with abilities and creativity that could be nurtured if given the chance or at least be able to live in caring and humane conditions.
If you are interested in acquiring any of my novels, you can find the first three on my website, www.forrestpeterson.com. A website update will add Beyond All That Matters. Until that happens, it would be possible to select The Swineherd’s Angel at the same price and send a note to forrestbooks2002@gmail.com requesting the new novel. Cumbersome, but it works, for now. My hope is that my stories offer entertainment, knowledge, and perhaps inspiration.
