An Adventure of the Senses
My brother, Larry Haavik, is a fine musician who defines music as an “adventure for the ear.” I recently attended his two lectures on the history of jazz. He talked about how from the earliest times, people have used sticks, animal skins and other materials to make music, gradually expanding and transforming their repertoire as they sought new sounds and new adventures for the ear. Exploring Longer scales, more beats per measure, unusual instruments, different rhythms, and other variations all contribute.
The same, of course, applies to art as painters seek new ways to paint the world and people around them. We can easily see how photography made realistic interpretations boring. The artist seeking new adventures in paint moved on to impressionism, expressionism, and so on to explore new ways of presenting the world around them.
Taste presents another dimension of exploration and adventure. My first taste of Chinese food thrilled me. I wanted to try more and more dishes. It was an adventure indeed. Indonesian food in the Netherlands was another adventure. Ethiopian food sent me on a different taste adventure that included the hands. The world abounds in taste adventures for the traveler. Anthony Bourdain was the supreme adventurer of taste.
I am at heart an adventurer, but I express my love of exploration in writing. For my first novel, Shadow of the Rock, the word exploration was taken literally. My husband and I traveled all over Florida, St. Thomas, Gibraltar, and Morocco tracking down the bits and pieces of a fascinating story. This story, often mentioned in Florida history books, is about a young woman captured by Barbary pirates, married off to the vizier of Morocco, escaped in a palace coup, and her grandson became the first senator from the state of Florida. In the book, a parallel story takes a present-day character along the route I followed in researching the novel.
Learning new facts about history, living vicariously through the adventures in my novels, meeting other writers at conferences, and reading through the vast number of books that interest me in libraries and bookstores all feed my own love of adventure. How do you feed yours?
Eileen McIntire
Eileen has ridden a camel in the Moroccan Sahara, fished for piranhas on the Amazon, sailed in a felucca on the Nile, and lived for three years on a motorsailer, exploring the coast from Annapolis to Key West. Eileen has many years experience writing, editing and designing all manner of publications for nonprofits and professional associations. She is now co-owner of Summit Crossroads Press, which publishes books for parents, and its fiction imprint, Amanita Books. The inspiration for her 90s Club mystery series springs from meeting a slim, attractive woman at a pool party who was the only one actually in the pool swimming laps, and she was 91 years old. Since then, Eileen has collected articles about people in their 90s—and 100s—who are still active, alert and on the job. She often speaks at retirement villages on “Old Dogs, New Tricks.”