Journey (If where you’re going isn’t home)

by Max Zimmer

BOOK EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1 

 You know before it’s over. This sound that takes the human breath of a voice and gives it the shimmer of steel and makes it light and effortless and fly like a bird made of the clear bright ringing sound of steel with all the sky out through the windshield to itself.

It’s not enough to hear it.

It has to come from you.

The way you can’t breathe just by listening to someone else’s breathing. Pump blood just by feeling someone else’s heart. Get rid of thirst by watching your mother drink down a glass of her lemonade. It makes you want some too. It has to be you drinking it.

Your breath.

Find out what instrument it came from. Manny and Hidalgo. You can’t ask them. They’ll tease you if you let them see how much it matters. They’ll never tell you.

“What’s got you by the tail there, little man?”

“Nothing.” And then, feeling the punishing bite of telling a grownup a lie, you say, “That music. On the radio.”

“Just now? Just some Mexican jazz. You like it?”

“Mexican what?”

“Jazz. You never heard it?”

“It’s from Mexico?”

“It ain’t from no hymnbook, that’s for sure.”

“Where’s it from?”

“It’s sheepherder music, little man.”

“No it’s not.”

“No? Tell him, Manny. Sheepherder music.”

You, almost twelve, the oldest of five, the first born back in Switzerland, four years before you were put on the Queen Elizabeth and brought across the ocean, then on a plane in New York the rest of the way to Salt Lake City, a big plane called a Constellation, where a stewardess helped your mother scrub your vomit out of the sweater some aunt had knit for you. Born four years before you lived in your grandfather’s open basement in the big house in the Avenues, with your uncles and aunts and cousins, where blankets were hung from the floor joists overhead to make rooms for the families. From there, a tumbling kaleidoscope of the places you found yourself living, moments in your head you could capture and then let go and then catch again like grasshoppers or moths, the upright piano your mother brought from Switzerland in different living rooms, songs from Broadway musicals one of her ways of learning English, the lessons you took at her side from her thin articulate hands the same no matter what else around you kept on changing. The basement apartment where nightcrawlers came up through the drain in the kitchen sink. The house with two front doors, the house divided down the middle, the half where the welder’s family lived and the half where you lived, the room where your fingers nibbled away at night at cracks in the wall your bed was pushed against, where you came home from school one day in the fall to a fire truck, a busted water heater in the yard, the front door open wide, your mother in her striped dress out in front, firemen talking to her. The first Rose Park house on Talisman Drive. The second one, a corner house on another Rose Park street, in whose basement you and a neighbor girl named Louisie pretended you were married. Then La Sal, the ranch down in southern Utah, where they slaughtered a steer each Saturday and passed the meat around and your family always got the kidneys because nobody in America ate kidneys. Four years there, your father the ranch bookkeeper, the retired old workhorse named Rex you used to ride bareback out across the sagebrush till the ranch was a tiny oasis of trees in the shimmer of distant heat, the junkyard of abandoned army trucks across the dirt highway whose dashboard instruments you extracted and traded with your buddies, the tank without a turret in the sagebrush, the mountains behind the ranch bald where their forests ended, the long and intricate and sometimes abruptly scalloped line of distant yellow sandstone that was as far as you could see in every other direction, the piano the choiring heart of the little house where sometimes you woke up to watersnakes in the living room.

School the same kaleidoscope. Kindergarten, the teacher a white-haired woman big as a polar bear, who used to get the class to laugh along with her at the way you fumbled English, who came striding down through the desks when laughing got tiresome to slap the back of your head so hard you saw sparks like lightning in the flash of black. Mrs. Brick. First grade partitioned between three schools you don’t remember except for Webster Elementary. Second grade in Rose Park, where you used to come home for lunch to chocolate and cheese sandwiches your mother would heat in the oven to just before they melted, where the Diamond brothers caught you coming home on Valentine’s Day and scattered the cards the kids in your class had given you in the slush of the gutter. And then the two-room schoolhouse on the ranch. Third grade in the room from old Miss Jenny. Fourth and fifth and sixth in the other room from Betty Peterson whose husband Chas ran the milkhouse across the big dirt lot from the bunkhouse where all the sheepherders lived. The potbellied stove, the portrait of Adlai Stevenson on the wall, the coal bucket you took out back and loaded whenever your turn came around, the flagpole out in front in the dirt that got turned into a maypole every spring. By fifth grade, and then all through sixth, because of Mrs. Brick, you were winning every spelling bee they could throw at you. And then here, two months ago, in April, to this house in a town named Bountiful, twenty minutes north of Salt Lake City, this brand new house on a paved and guttered circle ringed with other brand new houses. So for junior high you wouldn’t have to ride the school bus all the way from the ranch to Moab and back to the ranch again. So you’d be close enough to a school to ride your bike to seventh grade instead.

They let you out of sixth grade early. Your father told them he had to move in April or else lose the house. So they let you and Karl and Molly out of school with two months left and had Manny and Hidalgo use a cattle truck to move your stuff here from the ranch. Karl and Molly and Roy made the trip north through the length of Utah in the deep back seat of your father’s Buick while Maggie rode in your mother’s lap. You got to ride with the sheepherders, on the bench between them, perched on a bundle of gunny sacks so you could see, smelling hay and sheep feed, keeping your knees away from the trembling black knob of the tall gearshift, watching the buttes and the cliffs and the canyons move slowly past, listening to the radio right there in front of you over the grinding whine of the engine. Moab. Crescent Junction. Green River. Price. Helper. Soldier Summit. Towns you knew from the shopping trip your family made in August every year to Sears in Salt Lake City for clothes for school and Christmas toys. Manny driving, Hidalgo on your other side, the sheepherders talked to each other in Mexican the way your father and mother talked to each other in Swiss. When they talked to you, like your father and mother, Hidalgo and Manny used English.

“Hey, little man, we got your bed back there,” Hidalgo saying. “You sleepy, you can go back and take a nap.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“We got all your stuff back there. Those magazines with the naked ladies, too.”

“I don’t have any naked lady magazines.”

“Sure, sure. Manny, he’ll tell you he don’t either, when you ask him.”

“Honest. I don’t.”

“We lose the brakes right now, little man, what you think happen?”

Manny saying something quick and sharp in Mexican to Hidalgo. But you heard chico there in what he said and knew that it meant little kid and you didn’t like it. Not after being called a little man all morning.

“What?”

“You see that kind of cliff down there? Where the road turns?”

Manny shaking a cigarette out of the pack of Chesterfields he had on the dashboard while you looked down the road and saw where it looked like it ended. Not a cliff but this bunch of boulders like a family of huge brown elephants. You knew that the road didn’t end there no matter how much it looked like it did because the Buick would have been there, stopped, and your father would have been standing in the road outside the open driver’s door, wondering what to do, your mother complaining for an answer from the passenger seat.

“Yeah,” you saying. “I see it.”

“Time we got there,” Hidalgo saying, “no brakes, we’d be doing maybe a hundred.”

“Would we crash?”

“Would we ever. And all that stuff in back? All that furniture?”

“Yeah?”

“It all come flying. Right through the cab. Smash! Squish us to pieces like three big ripe pumpkin heads. Turn us into pumpkin juice.”

You understood it too when Manny coughed out a burst of white Chesterfield smoke and said fuck in the middle of something in Mexican and you got scared and looked at Hidalgo and he shut up but sat there grinning. And then turned his head and looked out his side window. And after a while said, “Manny don’t like pumpkin juice.”

And then, after the long and growling climb up Price Canyon, after cresting Soldier Summit, after making it around the turn past the elephant family boulders and the road was there again, and the distant back of your father’s Buick, there was the song on the radio, and the sound that was playing the song, a sound you’d never heard before, the human breath of a voice giving flight to a bird made out of the sound of steel.

You sat there spellbound. Your breath. If it was an instrument it was one you’d never heard before. But you wanted it to take your breath too, make it the sound you were hearing, a sound you would follow anywhere. And then it was gone, and Hidalgo was saying sheepherder music, and you were saying no, it’s not, looking at Manny, knowing from this quiet grin around his cigarette that they were fooling you.

“Sure it is,” Hidalgo saying. “Up in the mountains, the moon and the stars all out, the sheep all sleeping, just you and the dog, a little fire going, right, Manny?”

“Keeps away the cougars and coyotes, too,” Manny saying.

“That’s right.” Hidalgo taking a second to lean down toward the dashboard and light his own cigarette. “Makes them peaceful. Takes their minds off their stomachs.”

“You hungry?” Manny saying. “Thirsty?”

“No thanks.”

“Just say so. Don’t want your mom thinking we’re letting you starve.”

The movie your father took when Manny came to get your dog the afternoon before you moved because your mother said you couldn’t bring him north. You drew a picture of him instead to bring along. Rufus sat there, watching you draw, not knowing it was him, not knowing anything until Manny leashed him to the spare tire in the bed of his pickup truck. Manny said he wouldn’t change his name, would call him Rufus too, would make him a happy-go-lucky sheepdog. And then he drove away, Rufus barking, leaping back and forth in the bed, and there you were, in your gold-colored swimming trunks and the piece of tarp you used for a Superman cape, half chasing the small cloud of dust that rose up behind the tailgate, your legs confused and irresolute, the same uncertain jerkiness in your arms, up and then down and then up again, half waving, not knowing how to let him go, not sure how to say goodbye. Rufus. The dog you got when he was a puppy not much bigger than the bowl of your two hands. The coyote you cornered and tackled in the yard. The way you pulled his jaws apart until Rufus fell clear. The day it took for Rufus to come unparalyzed enough to eat and walk again.

Later, in Bountiful, when your father runs it on his noisy home projector during a Family Home Evening, the movie will startle and shame you. It will show you what he sees when he looks at you. You wheeling round, seeing the man behind you in the road with the whirring camera to his face, the recognition in your own face that you’re being filmed, the half-apologetic try at smiling, then wheeling around again to run a few more stumbling steps in the wake of the dust-blurred pickup. In the film you won’t hear Rufus barking. Just see the fierce repeating recoil of his head. Just see you waving while your father records on film what it’s like when you think that a dog would know what it means when you wave at him. The scene will feel endless while your family sits there watching. Jazz. A new word. Sheepherder music. A way to comprehend it. Thistle. Spanish Fork Canyon. Springville. Provo. Orem. Out ahead of you, through the windshield of the cattle truck, through the towns going north all the way to Salt Lake City, there was always the green rear end of your father’s Buick, heads and sometimes faces in the big rear window.

“Hey. Look over there. Your new house.”

Looking where Hidalgo’s pointing. The spires of the Salt Lake Temple above the roofs of the downtown buildings in the yellow afternoon sky.

“That’s the Temple,” you saying, because Hidalgo wasn’t Mormon, because maybe he didn’t know. “God lives there.”

——

Called a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. In the summer of 1978 he wrote a long love story that became the genesis for If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home. He gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, met his wife, and eventually moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he settled in to write If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home from the beginning. The East is now his home. Utah is a place he writes about.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

Author Q & A

Q. Why did you decide to write this book?

A.  (Long one) If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home began as a long story I wrote in the summer of 1978 after my first year at Oswego. Titled “The Courtship of Divorce,” it was about the breakup of my marriage to the girl who’d helped me find my way back again from the long drift my life had taken after I was excommunicated from the Mormon church for the crime of fornication while on a mission as an instrument of the Lord. For five or six years after I was reinstated and we got married in the Salt Lake Temple, we were a model young Mormon couple, happily in love, active in church, living in an apartment close to the University where I was an engineering student. She worked full time as a surgical assistant at a children’s hospital. I worked part time and summers, as a night janitor, a mobile home roofer, a mover for Mayflower Van Lines. I taught Sunday School and served as president of my Elders’ Quorum. I bought an old Porsche Speedster and turned it into a racecar. We obediently avoided what was happening in the outside world: civil rights, Watts, Newark, Vietnam, Hendrix, Joplin, the Doors, the hippie culture, Woodstock, the Summer of Love. We held carefully to the model. She would be a housewife and mother. I would be a mechanical engineer. My love and my gift for writing – both of which I’d discovered on my mission when I wrote a popular and edgy newsletter – were history. Writing was part of my dark side. It had to be denied.

It came slowly and helplessly back, to critical mass, and when it did, I walked away from engineering just before graduation. And then I left the church. She walked away with me, without hesitation, from the religion she had clung to through a destitute and abusive childhood. But the church and engineering weren’t enough for me. I had to walk away from everything. We fought tooth and nail to stay together. A few years later, I wrote “The Courtship of Divorce” as a tribute to her, to let her know as best I could that she was innocent. I wrote it to explore and understand why, in walking away from everything, it had been so necessary to walk away from her as well. And I wrote it as a lament, for something lost, for two young people who still loved each other deeply, who couldn’t understand what was driving them apart, who didn’t know that it would be permanent.

In “The Courtship of Divorce,” my character reverses what he did to win her love when he courted her, trying to make himself too cruel and repellent for her to go on loving him,. He has never known how to let himself be loved. He has never been able to trust the depth of her kindness, and so cruelty is a way of trying to find where her kindness bottoms out, where he can draw out of hiding the only responses he feels he deserves: loathing, anger, retaliation. He never finds the bottom. He never draws those feelings out. And every few nights, unable to sleep at one or two in the morning, he gets out of bed and sneaks his racecar up through the quiet city into the mountains. When he reaches them, he unleashes the car, racing up and down the high canyons until his head is finally clear enough to come out of the mountains clean, clean of himself, clean of his hatred for himself, clean enough when it suddenly opens out below him to look down on the endless lake of the city’s lights and pretend that it’s his first time here, that he’s only passing through, clean enough to return home, to her side, and accept the gifts of her beauty and kindness and love as they are.

But where had they come from? What drove him? What gave their story its special brand of tragedy and made it more than just another everyday story of a young couple breaking up? What was the source of her staying power? What was the source of the hunted look in his eyes? What drove him? The answers resided in their past. They were rooted in the unique experience of growing up Mormon in America. This wasn’t a known landscape. It was a cultural and religious landscape that had never been put on the map of our collective literary consciousness in a way that readers everywhere, from all walks of life, all religions, and all cultures, could reach and experience from the familiar territory of their own lives. To create that place, and the psychic and dramatic setting for the story and its characters, I put the original story aside, and began where the story needed to begin – with a boy at the beginning of his duty to his father’s faith and his dream to play jazz trumpet. His story – the three-book chronicle of his ten-year odyssey from the age of 12 to 22 – is still guided and informed by the love story that gave it life that summer.

Q.  Do you have any secret writing tips you’d like to share?

A.  Not so secret but the critical tips are:

1.   Respect your story, your characters, your narrator, and your reader. Subordinate everything to them. Don’t get between them. Don’t use a word, image, metaphor, or other trick that draws attention to you and obscures or rings false against your story or character. Don’t use a story as a platform to strut your creative stuff or extemporize on a pet issue. Keep the story real and immediate. There’s a bright line – actually a curtain – between a narrator and an author. Stay on your side.

2.   Never kill a character you’ve made me fall in love with unless you’ve made absolutely sure that the killing makes sense and can be warranted in the plot and context of the story and in the psyche of the character. Anna Karenina never had to jump in the path of a train. It was, if at all, only remotely in her nature. Tolstoy, whose promiscuities were depraved and dwarfed Anna’s, had to punish her for his own reasons, none of which had to do with her or the story. Just jealous and hamfisted manipulation. In Farewell to Arms, Hemingway makes us fall in love with Catherine and then kills her in the self-affirming act of childbirth. Was that inevitable? No. Was the necessity for her death rooted in the story? No. She had to die for one purpose only: to make us feel pity for Henry, the transparent stand-in for Hemingway, a man who openly pitied himself and always looked for ways to make others pity him. Finally, in the novel Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier creates a wounded soldier struggling to get home from the lost civil war to the woman he loves, a struggle we can’t help but empathize with. He makes it. He reunites with her. We root for him. And then Frazier, after having given us an ending that makes sense in the quiet victory of its resolution, uses a stray bullet in the woods to capriciously kill him. For what selfish reason? I liked that guy. He’d earned the right to be happy. This thing with gratuitous killing was always Lesson 1 to my students, young beginning writers who are prone to amp up the emotional pull of a story by killing off a major character at the end. Don’t make me fall in love with a character and then kill him or her unless you make sure the reason for the killing is embedded in the story itself.

3.   Always let your readers participate in creating the settings and the characters of your story. Don’t overtell. Don’t overdescribe things. Your readers may want to see a character’s face their own way. This is where books will always have it over movies. Movies spell everything out. Characters can only look like the actors who play them. Books give readers the invitation to engage their own imaginations in the creative exercise of a story and use details and memories of their own lives to see the story their own way.

Q.  Tell us a quirky, funny or unexpected story about you.

A.  With its classroom structure, its emphasis on grades, its respected teacher-student formalism, college always struck me as a practical but counter-intuitive place to teach writing. It was okay for teaching the conventions of narrative, character, and plot, but it stood in the way of a kid’s ability to find his or her voice and get to the heart and soul of the story inside them. School had taught them to write according to the common rules of grammar and exposition. But it stood in the way of discovering their vital and immediate flesh-and-blood individuality. And so I always looked for ways to break that formalism down. Anyone here for a grade, I’d say on the first day of a new class, see me after class, and I’ll give you a B if you promise never to come back. I’d have kids call me by my first name. I’d hold classes off campus when I had the chance. I held parties every two weeks where my musician friends set up and played in the kitchen and students and teachers mingled and drank and got crazy together. One fall, on the first day of class for the semester, I spent a couple of morning hours working on an engine rebuild for my old Speedster. When it came time to head for campus my hands were black and my arms and teeshirt streaked and smeared with grease and oil. I threw some old engine parts in my briefcase and grabbed a soccer ball and a Gene Kelly face mask someone had left after a party. I walked into a classroom of kids in their new fall outfits, their new notebooks, their attitudes. I handed out the engine parts and had them pass them around. I called roll. I wrote a quick syllabus on the blackboard. I spelled out crazy rules. I did the entire class as Gene Kelly. I watched them try not to get dirty passing dirty engine parts around. Halfway through class I took them out to a field to play free-for-all soccer. I never took the mask off. The next time we met, everyone was there, everyone was loose, and they got to see my face and we got to work.

Q. What books are on your nightstand right now?

A.  Where I’m Calling From by Ray Carver; The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow; Who Stole the American Dream by Hedrik Smith; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith; The Hot Kid by Elmore Leonard; Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina.

Q. What’s your favorite quote?

A.  Tossup. From William Faulkner: “The work of the artist is to lift people’s hearts and help them endure. From Franz Kafka: “Only that which happens is possible. The impossible never happens.” And from my high school yearbook: “Of all the people I have ever known, you are certainly one of them.”

Q. Who inspires you the most?

A.  Family. Readers I trust. All my students along with many friends who’ve had the patience to believe in me and that I would get us here. Strangers reading. A battered paperback on the subway during rush hour. The first pages of a novel in an aisle of a bookstore on Christmas Eve.

If I’m wrong, please let me know, but I think it was Miles Davis who talked about studying trumpet this way. First you copy, he said. Then you learn. For Shake Tauffler, playing along with record albums in his garage, copying was playing note for note what a trumpet player was doing, mastering it to where you only hear one trumpet when you played with him. Learning came after that. When you started to lift your trumpet away from his, started to try things of your own, started to hear signs of your own voice, your own material.

When I started writing back in college at the University of Utah I saw no fictional value in where I was from. It was Utah. Nobody wrote about Utah. The reason nobody wrote about Utah was because nobody wanted to read about Utah. I certainly didn’t. I loved everything and everywhere else. The gray streets and desolate skies of Kafka. Sartre and Camus. My first little try at a novel, in fact, was about a bachelor postal worker in an imagined town in Eastern Europe. I loved pretty much every writer – from Borges to John Hawkes – that New Directions published. Carlos Fuentes. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And Pete Hamill and his Brooklyn stories. I tried to write them myself ­– stories about Puerto Rican neighborhoods whose streets I’d never walked, Irish families I’d never had dinner with. I tried to write everything I read. I tried to copy everyone. Grace Paley and her New York Jewish stories. Contemporary writers. Pynchon. Kerouac. Cuckoo’s Nest. Tom Robbins. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. I read and copied all of them. My second novel – the one that Doctorow was enthusiastic about but that I never had the chance to finish – was a panoramic novel that ranged across the western United States. Its main characters were a truck driver and a ballerina and a woman named Mavis Hopgood, a retired Vegas showgirl who lived in an Airstream in the desert and wore turtleshells in her bra for falsies. There was the cult that was building a secret rocketship shaped like a statue of Jesus in northern Arizona.

The novel was a fusion of Pynchon’s V and Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction and probably every other acid-inspired novel of the day. But the promising part was this: it was about the West. I was still copying; still writing someone else’s novel; but at least I was starting to pull away from them. Getting closer to home. Starting to learn my own stuff.

While the novel was underway I wrote the story “Utah Died for Your Sins” and for the first time took on my own life. Then I came east for a summer at Yaddo, the artist’s retreat in upstate New York, where I met the poet Grace Schulman. When she wasn’t at Yaddo she lived in New York off a corner of Washington Square and taught at Hunter. I gave her a copy of “Utah Died.” We talked about where I was from. My background – growing up Mormon in Utah – fascinated her. She said there were writers who would give their right arm for the kind of raw material I had. I told her I didn’t want to write about growing up Mormon because my father loved his faith. She was shocked. We’re talking about literature, she said. About art. You never let anything or anyone get in the way. She knew writers – good writers – who would kill parents who stood in the way of what they felt they were born to write.

She may have been exaggerating.

She didn’t look like it.

A year later, in summer in an upstate college town, I wrote “The Courtship of Divorce,” the story from which If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home evolved. It was written as a tribute to the kind and loving and beautiful girl whose heart I broke. It was set in Salt Lake City in the one bedroom apartment she and I shared as a young married couple. The rust-colored Porsche Speedster in the garage was the one I’d salvaged and turned into a racecar. The canyons my character ran after midnight to clear his head were the same canyons I’d used for the same purpose. Like I had been, the character was cruel and reckless, and the voice and feel and detail of the story raw and unforgiving.

That was where things clicked. The story I had to tell wasn’t Kafka’s or Hamill’s or Pynchon’s. It wasn’t The Death of Artemio Cruz or Blood Oranges. It was my own. It stood there big as life – as big and sweeping as the country in which I had lived my life. In Utah I hadn’t seen it. In the Mojave Desert, racing army tanks across desolate dry lakes and shooting up the black mountains, I hadn’t either. Nor in the secret take-no-prisoners rituals of the temple ceremony. Or the orchard towns where my buddies and I used to steal people’s daughters. Or on State Street in Salt Lake where we cruised at night with the rest of the city’s chrome and neon spangled underculture. But there it was. My story. So big I could look west see it all the way from New York. Nothing stood in the way.

I know of writers in New York and other places who never venture out of the zip code they were born in and still write successful novels about their neighborhoods. It wasn’t that way for me. It wasn’t until I left Utah – until I put a few thousand zip codes between me and where I’d come from – that I figured out that where I’d come from was my story. The story I knew in my bones the way Hamill knew Brooklyn and Fuentes Mexico and Kafka Prague. I had done my copying. I had apprenticed myself to the best. Like Shake, when he breaks away from a Miles Davis solo on Summertime to do his own, I was learning now. Where I was different. What my story was. Leaving Utah gave me the distance I needed to learn how to tell it so that it connected with readers everywhere. If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home. My story. A story Pete Hamill or Franz Kafka couldn’t write any more than I could write theirs. And that was a very cool thing to learn. You can take a look at Journey, the first book of the trilogy, at maxzimmer.com. Feel free to leave a question, comment, anything you’d like.

——

Called a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. In the summer of 1978 he wrote a long love story that became the genesis for If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home. He gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, met his wife, and eventually moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he settled in to write If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home from the beginning. The East is now his home. Utah is a place he writes about.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home began as a long story I wrote in the summer of 1978 after my first year teaching at Oswego. Titled “The Courtship of Divorce,” it was a fictional account of the breakup of my marriage to the girl who’d helped me find my way back again from the long drift my life had taken after I was excommunicated from the Mormon church. For five or six years after my reinstatement, and our wedding in the Salt Lake Temple, we were a model young Mormon couple, happily in love, active in church, living in an apartment close to the University where I was an engineering student. She worked full time as a surgical assistant at a children’s hospital. I worked part time and summers, as a night janitor, a mobile home roofer, a mover for Mayflower. We both taught Sunday School. I bought an old Porsche Speedster and built it into a racecar. We obediently avoided what was happening in the world outside: civil rights, Watts, Newark, Vietnam, Hendrix, Joplin, the Doors, the hippie culture, Woodstock, the Summer of Love. We held carefully to the model. She would be a housewife and mother. I would be a mechanical engineer. My love and my gift for writing – which I’d discovered on my mission when I wrote a popular edgy newsletter – were history. Writing was part of my dark side. It had to be denied.

It came slowly and helplessly back, to critical mass, and when it did, I walked away from engineering just before graduation. And then I left the church. She walked away with me, without hesitation, from the religion she had clung to through a destitute and abusive childhood. But the church and engineering weren’t enough for me. I had to walk away from everything. A few years later, in New York, I wrote “The Courtship of Divorce” as a tribute to her, to let her know the one way I knew how that she was innocent. I wrote it to explore and understand why, in walking away from everything, it had also been so necessary to walk away from her. And I wrote it as a lament, for something lost, for two young people who still loved each other deeply, who fought hard to stay together, who couldn’t understand the force that was driving them apart, who didn’t know that it would be permanent.

In “The Courtship of Divorce,” my character reversed what he did to win her love when he courted her, trying to make her fall out of love with him. He had never been able to trust her kindness. And so he used cruelty as a way of trying to find where her kindness bottomed out – where he could draw out of hiding the way she truly felt about him. He never found that bottom. Every few nights, unable to sleep at one or two in the morning, he got out of bed and sneaked his racecar up through the quiet city into the mountains, where he unleashed the car and raced up and down the high canyons until his head was finally clear enough to come out of the mountains clean, clean enough when it suddenly opened out below him that he could look down on the endless lake of the city and its lights and pretend that it was his first time here, that he was only passing through, clean enough to return home, to her side, and accept the gifts of her beauty and kindness and love for what they so plainly were.

I finished the story but it kept haunting me. It took a long time to realize why. I’d started the story relatively late in Shake Tauffler’s young life. Where had he come from? What drove him? What gave their story its special brand of tragedy and made it stand apart from just another story of a young couple breaking up? What was the source of her staying power? What was the hunted look you could catch in his eyes? What tormented him? What did he have to clear his head of? Why were they who they were?

The answers resided in their shared past. In the experience of growing up Mormon. In the long and stifling accumulation over the years of so many different events. In the dream she’d been taught to nurture from childhood to marry a returned missionary in the Salt Lake Temple. In his mission and excommunication and in the long grueling process of working to be reinstated so he could give her that dream. “The Courtship of Divorce” only dealt with the effect of those events. The events themselves – the events that had made them who they were and now drove them toward their breakup – were missing. Without the shared experience of those events, you could pity them, but you couldn’t understand them, and if you couldn’t understand them, it wasn’t possible to empathize with them.

Cause and effect. It was a lesson I’d forgotten.

And so I put the original story aside and began where the story needed to begin – with a twelve-year-old boy at the threshold of his duty to his father’s faith and the discovery of his dream to play jazz trumpet. I had to take it back to where readers could stand on common ground with him, where his journey through the heart of the Mormon experience began, where they could step into his shoes and join that journey. That was where the answers were. In his innocent dream to play jazz trumpet and his lonely quest to get there. In his upbringing by immigrant parents frantic to be accepted. In his hunger for his father’s admiration. In the long indoctrination that taught him he meant nothing – to himself, his father, his congregation, the only world he was allowed to know – outside the church. I was asking to take my readers to a brand new place. So it was there, on their ground, with a kid they could recognize, a regular kid about to confront forces and events that would do their best to gut him of identity and worth, that I had to start. There that I hoped to root the empathy my readers would need to go all the way with him. So far so good. You can take a look at Journey, the first book of his story, at maxzimmer.com. Feel free to leave a question, a comment, anything you’d like or are moved to.

——

Called a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. In the summer of 1978 he wrote a long love story that became the genesis for If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home. He gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, met his wife, and eventually moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he settled in to write If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home from the beginning. The East is now his home. Utah is a place he writes about.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

Maybe the oldest rule we as writers have is to write what we know. There’s also its flip side. I guess you could say its alter ego rule. To know what you write.

My wife and I used to take a week out of every March to go down to Key West. It started where some of our biker pals here in northwest Jersey were going down to Daytona for bike week and then, before heading north for home, heading down the coast and doing Key West for three or four days. Not being bikers, Toni and I skipped Daytona, and hit Key West a few days ahead of them. That week in March is a good time to experience Duval Street. The bikers are doing the town before heading home, and the spring break kids are just starting to show up. You can dine outside,­ off a tablecloth, while college girls in bikinis stroll by on the sidewalk and some beautiful Harleys cruise by on the street. Later, down Duval, in a place called The Bull, there’s a barmaid who’ll pull down the neck of her peasant blouse if you ask the right way.

I wanted the main character of my trilogy, a kid named Shake Tauffler, to be an artist of some kind, to have something that took discipline and passion to pursue. A writer was out because writing about a writer makes no sense to me. I rejected painter and sculptor too. Because neither pursuit had ever interested me, I wouldn’t do them anything close to justice. The same held true for belly dancer, sword swallower, fire eater, tightrope walker, potter, figure skater.

Music was different. Especially jazz. I watched my kid brother become a jazz pianist. I loved hanging out with his crowd. For a long time, whether I lived in Utah, New York, or Jersey, most of my friends were jazz musicians. I envied them. I’d taken piano lessons off and on most of my life but never had the discipline when I was young to be one of them. I’ve longed to live those years again and focus this time on learning an instrument, well enough to play in a band without being left behind, fishing for notes off the side of the road.

And suddenly there was a way. I could make my protagonist a jazz musician. At a young age, I’d put him in a place where he’d discover jazz, give him the dream to play it, and make sure he stuck it out. I’d find him a teacher. I’d make him pay his way. I’d throw all kinds of trouble in his path. All I needed was an instrument. I don’t know why I picked a trumpet. Maybe how portable it was – he could lash to the back of his bike and go. Maybe the clarity, the ringing shimmer of steel, the sense of flight in its sound. And maybe it wasn’t my choice after all, but his.

Soon after I got into the writing we took our week in Key West. We stayed at a place on Mallory Square where you could sit on the balcony drinking a mojito overlooking the sunset action. The torch thrower and the fire eater. The Houdini guy who chained himself in a straight jacket and hung himself upside down from a tripod. And there was music. One night, wandering the square, we came across a quartet playing a mix of standards and latin jazz. One of them played trumpet. He was an older guy – tall, lanky, going gray – and his face showed he’d been around. On a break, we talked, and I told him I was writing a novel about a kid who played jazz trumpet. It got his attention. Ah, he said. So you play trumpet too. No, I said. Just piano. Okay, he said. You’re writing a book about a kid who plays trumpet, but you don’t play trumpet. It can’t be that different from piano, I said. And there’s stuff on the Internet. He looked at his horn, then at me, smiled, shook his head, told me good luck, and walked off toward the tiki bar.

Coming home, getting back to writing, the look he’d given me kept nagging me. And that line about stuff on the Internet. It made me cringe to remember saying it.

My niece had a student trumpet she hadn’t played in years. The mouthpiece was stuck and the valves weren’t coming up. I offered her $300 and dinner at a restaurant of her choice. She wore a black dress and looked stunning wolfing down a delmonico steak. I had the trumpet reconditioned, opened some space in the furnace room, and went for middle C. I blew that first note all to hell. If the sound that came out of the bell had been blood, the room would have looked like a slaughterhouse. It was nothing like piano. You didn’t learn a scale your first time out. You learned one note. Each note was different. Each note had its own mix of what it wanted from your lips and the volume and velocity of breath you fed it. When you found that mix – that place where the metal would suddenly ring and the note fly clear – you practiced till you owned it. And then the next note. And there was everything else – the way you held it, the heft it had in your hands, the cold hard rim of the mouthpiece, how light reflected off the brass of the bell, your breath suddenly that bright steel sound.

My first trumpet lesson was discovering how right that guy on the square had been and how lucky I’d been to find him. From there, whatever I learned, Shake learned, hands on, the hard way, the way my readers would know was real. I found a teacher named Mr. Selby. Shake signed up for lessons too. After all the astute decision making – what kind of artist he’d be and then the instrument I’d give him – I’d come so close to ruining things for him. Know what you write. If you don’t know it, learn it. You can read the outcome of the lesson I learned in Journey.

Could I have gotten away with not learning how to play trumpet myself? With just looking stuff up on the Internet? Probably. But I wouldn’t have known the source of that steel bird sound. I would always question my commitment to authenticity. I would always doubt if I’d given my readers enough of the real thing: the full monty they deserved. And I would have had to keep a safe distance from the instrument – what it felt like, what it took to learn it – when the role the instrument plays in the story was way too important to treat at that kind of superficial distance.

I think every author faces this question of verisimilitude – the “believability” of narrative – with every story. To what extent does my narrative have to be realistic? To what degree do I have to “know” something? When does it need to be hands on? When is “stuff on the Internet” enough? I’d love to hear what you think. You can take a look at Journey, the first book of the trilogy, at maxzimmer.com. Feel free to leave a question, comment, anything you’re moved to.

——

Called a raw new voice in American fiction by Rolling Stone, Pushcart Prize winner Max Zimmer was born in Switzerland, brought across the Atlantic at the age of four, and raised in Utah in the take-no-prisoners crucible of the Mormon faith. In the summer of 1978 he wrote a long love story that became the genesis for If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home. He gravitated toward the city, lived and tended bar in Manhattan, met his wife, and eventually moved to the northwest corner of New Jersey, where he settled in to write If Where You’re Going Isn’t Home from the beginning. The East is now his home. Utah is a place he writes about.

Learn more at maxzimmer.com.

I never draw close to controversy – I stray from it – but some items are just too tempting to avoid sharing one’s thoughts about.  This one is an age-old debate.

The question put to us today is:  Do animals have souls?

Humanity has constantly told itself “No!” and the way we have treated the animal kingdom reflects this.  I have always cringed at stuffed heads on walls, the caging of zoo animals, and the sports of fishing and hunting.  I know we need meat as carnivores, but the excess taking of animal life has disturbed me.

Not that I am a softie when it comes to the physical world we live in, but in all life, I feel empathy.  Even in the plants we grow at home, the pruning and treatment of roots is a caring consideration I take and make each time I am working outside.

Handling this one topic of animals having souls puts the religious world at two ends.  One saying Animals have no soul, just a spirit – only humans can have souls, to those who say Animals indeed have souls.

It’s hard for us to make the call on this because, we as people have never seen our own soul, aside from the one spelled differently on the bottom of our shoe.  But we know our soul exists as the mention of it appears 458 times in the King James Bible.

The simplest argument for animals coming along with us to heaven is the fact that God himself created animals and we are told that earth mirrors heaven.  I guess this is so we won’t feel out of place when we get there.   Noah was commanded to bring two of every species along with him on the arc, (Genesis 6:19-20).  Sort of a prep work for the Bronx Zoo.  Noah could have forgotten the scorpions and mosquitoes, but maybe they hitched a free ride during the forty day flood.

We see in great detail animals described in the Revelation of Saint John (Revelation 6:2-8).  Several scriptures foretell the lion lying down with the lamb in eternity, a sort of savage detenté.

Elijah was taken up to Heaven in a chariot pulled by horses, (2 Kings 2:11).  We could fill several blogs with Scripture reference, and based on responses we get here, we may follow the thread with more detailed proofs.

There was one passage, I recently was shown that added more proof to my personal belief that we will see our pets in Heaven and that animals will accompany us on the streets of gold.  A portion of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3 gives us some interesting food for thought on Animals having souls, and God’s desire to have his will done on earth as it is in heaven.

Starting at verse 18…I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. (19)  For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. (20)  All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. (21)  Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? (22)  Wherefore I perceive that there is nothing better, than that a man should rejoice in his own works; for that is his portion: for who shall bring him to see what shall be after him?

Genesis 2:19 says “Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.”  We were formed the same way.

Read more in your Bible and be sure to order the new and unique Alpha Bible.  You can have your own Alpha Bible now by ordering on CreateSpace or on Amazon.com.

——

Bill Winter grew up liking to read by looking at the pictures.  No one ever said reading was easy and no one helps you with the Books of the Bible – you are on your own.  So Bill was inspired to create an aid to the Bible for himself and for others by compiling the ALPHA BIBLE.

A Simple compilation of the 66 Books of the Bible in alphabetical order is not an absolutely unique concept, but the Alpha Bible is presented in a 21st Century style to make Bible reading much easier.

Having grown up in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by two uncles who were pastors, a natural inclination for the “Word of God” was stirred within young William.

Becoming a pastor in 2007, Bill soon saw the problems average parishioners had with finding Bible references during service – so the impetus for the Alpha Bible came forth.

Learn more by visiting www.alfabible.com

Bill Winter

A Simple compilation of the 66 Books of the Bible in alphabetical order is not an absolutely unique concept, but the Alpha Bible is presented in a 21st Century style to make Bible reading much easier.

Having grown up in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by two uncles who were pastors, a natural inclination for the “Word of God” was stirred within young William.

Becoming a pastor in 2007, Bill soon saw the problems average parishioners had with finding Bible references during service – so the impetus for the Alpha Bible came forth.

Learn more by visiting www.alfabible.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Why did you decide to write this book?

People and publicists call me an author, and that is not accurate, I am simply a compiler as I did not ‘write’ the Bible, but re-ordered the books alphabetically.  I did decide to compile this book because I saw a real need for an book that had all the various and hard-to-find books of the Bible in an order that people could find their way around quickly.  Not everyone knows the order of the Minor Prophets, nor the order of Paul’s writings, but everyone has a handle on the alphabet.  I did a preliminary web search to see if anyone had composed an alphabetical Bible and finding none, I went ahead full speed to produce one.

Do you have any secret writing tips to share?

In addition to compiling large volumes of material, I do indeed write.  As a writer, I have a voice, and I write in it.  Jargon and nuances of language have always intrigued me and quaint phrases or odd colloquialisms always meander into the dialogue and descriptive language I use.  I have found it never beneficial to write down to the reader and if anything, I‘ve been accused of being verbose and writing ‘up’   Writing is a discipline and to stay on top, you need to practice – daily.   I have a leaning for non-fiction, but I learned early to stray from your leaning.  Adventure with new styles, not just writing haiku, but branching off into screenwriting, news writing, or tacking topics that are not of interest and finding something interesting to write about them.

Can you tell us a quirky or unexpected story about yourself?

I fully attribute writing skills to being able to meet President Reagan.  While stationed with the Navy Seabees I was tasked to take pictures of work projects by the Seabees when they were doing their final touches at the Reagan Ranch after the President left office.  Seabees are often attached to Presidential residences and retreats.  While there shooting pictures I met the ranch manager and was able to send a letter to the President and that lead to many letters to and from the President and eventually a meeting with him in his Century City office.  So words have power.

What books are currently in your queue?

As a Pastor, I read biblical reference and Christian Literature.  I advise readers to have a concordance, Bible dictionary and a commentary at the least.

Can you share with us a favorite quote?

“Sit where your mother sat, when she got married.”  1920′s colloquial welcome.

Who inspires you the most?

Anyone who writes, who loves to write and is ready to write at a moment’s notice inspires me the most.  Many have attained greatness through their literary prowess and prose for gain and public awareness; these folks inspire me.  Anyone who wants to write and cannot and  yet picks up the pen or dashes their thoughts upon the keyboard inspires me.

My offering is a presentation of words that were inspired.  Inspired by the very creator of us all, we are told within its tomes.  Inspiration is indeed the word it self, a very proof of it’s sound, shape and resonance which by nature is a creation of inspiration expressed in the word.

What are the benefits of the Bible and how can it be useful to me.

The Bible is divided into the Old and New Testaments. The Old section written by and aimed at the Jewish faith has been embraced by modern day Christians who feel the Old dove-tails into the New. The New is about Jesus and the books that compile the New were written after the crucifixion by men who personally knew Jesus and one, Paul, who had a miraculous encounter with the Lord.

To the untrained or unfamiliar reader, the Bible is mix of either history or stories that have little to no bearing on modern day life. Nothing can be further than truth, as the Bible is always a modern book and a continuous unfolding of wisdom, knowledge and most important, the immediate will of God. How can words written so long ago be pertinent to life in today’s complex world that we live in. Simply put, the creator of everything authored each word.

If you find yourself skeptical, take a hint from the movie theater. When you watch a movie, you take in the whole film and pretty much believe everything that is presented to you at a rate of 24 frames per second. What happens to you during the motion picture is you find every scene credible. This is called “suspension of disbelief” because you believe that the secret agent is escaping and destroying the villains all within the last ten minutes of the flick. So if you can suspend your disbelief mechanism for a movie, why not try it with God’s Word.

As children we take everything at face value, this is how we should approach God and his Word. Don’t believe it, try it first. Because the most important element in gaining anything from the Bible is faith for without faith, you will not see mystery behind the words.

A good first place to start are in the PSALMS. This collection of 150 sets of lyrics were either written by King David or commissioned by him to be drafted. In some of the Psalms, you will see the word “Selah” and even to this day, no one knows exactly what the word means. Some say it means ‘exclamation’, others say it is similar to a musical ‘rest., while others say it is similar to shouting “Hallelujah”. In the Psalms you will see the human heart’s cry to its creator. You can feel a rainbow of emotions from the words contained. Each Psalm has a theme, some are for thanksgiving, while others recognize God’s greatness and some asking for mercy and forgiveness.

There are small books in the Bible, such as Jude, Jonah, and Nahum. These small books make for an easy read and the interesting thing about the Bible is the division of the text by verse. Sections that are profound or meaningful can be found or cited by verse.

Of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – the first three are more historical and capture the story of Jesus from birth to resurrection. They are similar in capturing the story of Jesus in chronological order and these first three are known as the ‘synoptic’ Gospels. John captures the event’s of Jesus life, but not in the same fashion as the previous three. The book of John is a good introduction to what the Bible is all about.

Hopefully the new miniseries “The Bible” will generate more interest in this timeless book.

As your interest in the Bible grows, be sure you have an Alpha Bible available because whenever you heard a verse or reference, you can find it faster in the Alpha Bible.

Own your copy now by ordering on CreateSpace or on Amazon.com.

——

Bill Winter grew up liking to read by looking at the pictures.  No one ever said reading was easy and no one helps you with the Books of the Bible – you are on your own.  So Bill was inspired to create an aid to the Bible for himself and for others by compiling the ALPHA BIBLE.

A Simple compilation of the 66 Books of the Bible in alphabetical order is not an absolutely unique concept, but the Alpha Bible is presented in a 21st Century style to make Bible reading much easier.

Having grown up in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by two uncles who were pastors, a natural inclination for the “Word of God” was stirred within young William.

Becoming a pastor in 2007, Bill soon saw the problems average parishioners had with finding Bible references during service – so the impetus for the Alpha Bible came forth.

Learn more by visiting www.alfabible.com

In our present day world, there are sharp lines of delineation between Catholic and Protestant forms of Christianity. Martin Luther’s revolt against indulgences within the vast church created the schism which lead to the divide of churches. Protestants were so named because, as a sect, we protested against the universal church. But in so doing, major changes occurred which in essence needed not happen.

To become noticeably different from Catholics, the Protestant church does not practice the sign of the cross and changed the fruit of the vine from real wine to grape juice. Christians who find themselves classified as Protestants would do well to look at history and acknowledge that without the Catholic church, we would have no Bible today, for it was the Roman Church that preserved and copied the Scriptures. The main divisions between these two Christian practices is that Catholics honor and worship the Virgin Mary and the pantheon of Saints, whereas Protestants acknowledge Jesus only and do not pray for or to the dead. Protestants may someday realize that aside from some of the differences, we are all Christian and that practices such as the Sign of the Cross and using real wine in communion could and should be a part of Protestant worship.

Protestant, or as they are commonly referred to as “Christians” as compared to those who practice the Catholic Faith all come from the same roots in Christ.  Those of Islamic Faith may claim the same root in Abraham and we all can claim one common bond in the Universal Man known as Adam, for the red-earth he was formed from.

Retaining the Apocrypha in the Catholic Bible, covering the 400 years of Maccabean rule in Israel is the major difference of the Catholic Bible from the more common Old/New Testaments of the current day “Christian” Bible.

There is a place for all faiths following Christ’s path and even though narrow be the way, anyone who reads the Bible, and truly believes what they read and what they gain for themselves from its pages will find the truth.   So many practices and procedures from the organized churches have gotten in the way of true worship of G-d and adherence to the sayings of the L-rd, that many have lost the message of God’s word.  Truth be told and truth be found within its pages.

The Alpha Bible, published in 2012, is the latest in a long line of Bibles aimed at uniting readers and lovers of this ancient best-seller.   Alpha Bible is a unique study tool and a ready reference to have when listening to messages or studying the Bible.  Order your copy today on CreateSpace or on Amazon.com.

——

Bill Winter grew up liking to read by looking at the pictures.  No one ever said reading was easy and no one helps you with the Books of the Bible – you are on your own.  So Bill was inspired to create an aid to the Bible for himself and for others by compiling the ALPHA BIBLE.

A Simple compilation of the 66 Books of the Bible in alphabetical order is not an absolutely unique concept, but the Alpha Bible is presented in a 21st Century style to make Bible reading much easier.

Having grown up in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by two uncles who were pastors, a natural inclination for the “Word of God” was stirred within young William.

Becoming a pastor in 2007, Bill soon saw the problems average parishioners had with finding Bible references during service – so the impetus for the Alpha Bible came forth.

Learn more by visiting www.alfabible.com

Significant changes to our modern day Bible have all evolved around format and not content. The basic premise and rock-solid tenet of the faith is based upon the infallibility of the “Word” and the fact that for centuries, the integrity of the original has not been lost, nor compromised. The earliest manuscripts found throughout modern day Turkey, Greece and Palestine, which is modern day Israel, and Lebanon are copies from the first, second, and third centuries. These fragments and remaining documents were transcribed upon vellum or animal skin, and on papyrus. Scrolls and fragments found in the Dead Sea area in the late 1940’s yielded a treasure trove of early biblical literature. The scrolls were saved inside of clay and terracotta pots buried in caves used by the early sect knows as the Essenes. It was from this group that John the Baptist came forth from in his introduction of Jesus, when he baptized Jesus in the Jordan River. It was said that Jesus hung out with this sect as many of their practices, such as full immersion water baptism have survived until this day. Communion, or communal meals and celebratory feasts were also common.

The Vatican has perhaps the largest collection of early manuscripts in addition to university libraries, such as Oxford, Cambridge, and some universities in Germany.

Of recent interest, George Lamsa translated the ancient Syriac bible into contemporary English. This version, known as the Peshitta, contained the original heart and breadth of the Word in Aramaic. Aramaic, was the localized lingua franca of Palestine at the time of Jesus. Mel Gibson, in his Passion movie recreated the dialogue in Aramaic; no small feat to accomplish. Aramaic, is still spoken in some small regions in the middle east – but for practical purposes, the language is almost lost.

In reference to languages, the Hebrew language was revived after the repatriation of the disbursed Jewish civilization with its homeland in Israel. Prior to that, for many centuries, the heart of Hebrew was retained only by Biblical scholars and in part through vernacular languages such as Yiddish. The Bible we have now was primarily penned in Hebrew and Greek. The Greek, known as Koine or common Greek, was the spoken medium of the region which was conquered by the Greeks and later the Romans. At the time of Jesus, the Roman occupation introduced Latin to the region, but did not become the lingua franca of the region. With missionary trips throughout the Mediterranean by Paul and early converts, attention focused on Crete, Cyprus, Malta, Sardinia, Sicily and eventually Italy, where the Roman Church formed.

The earliest compilation of a Bible that resembles what we know have was created two centuries ahead of the birth of Christ. This version was called the Septuagint as it was compiled by 70 writers who translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Koine Greek. The Septuagint was relied upon by many of the New Testament writers, when quoting the Old Testament in their letters and epistles.

New Testament Books were composed in Greek and remained in Greek until the Latin Vulgate was created to translate the Greek and Hebrew Scriptures into Latin. The Latin Vulgate remained as the main version of the Bible until the printing press and the famous Guttenberg Bible.   Prior to Guttenberg, Bibles were produced by hand-writing of the text.  It was said that some copyists would lay down their pen and use a new one after each time they wrote the name of God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit.   God appears 4,444  times in the KJV Bible, Jesus, 983 times and the Holy Ghost, 90 and Holy Spirit, 7.  This does not take into account the use of the name Jehovah and other such mentions of the unmentionable Holy One.

The history of transition and translation of the Bible would fill many books, but one item of note is the purpose of this blog, to introduce and promote the newest version, the Alpha Bible, a version designed for the 21st Century reader.  A version aimed at attracting more people to the Bible and making it easier to use and to read.

You can order your copy immediately on CreateSpace or on Amazon.com.

——-

Bill Winter grew up liking to read by looking at the pictures.  No one ever said reading was easy and no one helps you with the Books of the Bible – you are on your own.  So Bill was inspired to create an aid to the Bible for himself and for others by compiling the ALPHA BIBLE.

A Simple compilation of the 66 Books of the Bible in alphabetical order is not an absolutely unique concept, but the Alpha Bible is presented in a 21st Century style to make Bible reading much easier.

Having grown up in Northern New Jersey, surrounded by two uncles who were pastors, a natural inclination for the “Word of God” was stirred within young William.

Becoming a pastor in 2007, Bill soon saw the problems average parishioners had with finding Bible references during service – so the impetus for the Alpha Bible came forth.

Learn more by visiting www.alfabible.com