Zachary T GordonZachary Todd Gordon grew up on Long Island and lived in Wisconsin, Boston, Chicago and New York before moving to the Pacific Northwest. After graduating from Beloit College and DePaul University College of Law, he worked as a journalist and Wal Street investment banker. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and family.The Genesis of Alley Pond ParkAt the age of eighteen I had an adventure in Mexico.
I had no particular direction or skills, but I did have visions of grandeur. I wanted to be Hemingway. I wanted to experience life on my own, define myself on my own terms.
My field term job at a paper factory in Mexico City kept me officially enrolled in college and out of Vietnam. But after toiling for two boring months, I took off to find the "real" Mexico with an older traveler I met on the streets of Mexico City, assuming a new identity along the way. His goal was Tierra del Fuego. Mine was open-ended. I made it as far as Guatemala before running out of money and returned to school.
I submitted a censored version of the journal I'd kept for field term credit, hoping to someday expand it into a memoir. In the ensuing years, life intervened. The journal sat in various desk drawers in numerous cities through college, graduate school, marriage, children, career and ultimately retirement. In 2017 I exhumed and expanded it, first by returning the sections I'd removed for propriety's sake. Then I began to embellish it. My protagonist became a more audacious, reckless individual. Took adventures I wished I'd experienced. But the half-century of baggage I'd collected in the interim, particularly painful episodes I'd shunted aside, rose from the murk, begging to be reckoned with. I felt compelled to give it voice, at the risk of exposing myself.
A different book emerged, a novel that embraced my Mexico experience while drawing on other aspects of my personal history, as well as the lives of others who had touched mine. With the benefit of hindsight, I created a new protagonist, Seth Matthews, an unreliable narrator who speaks in an unsparing voice that ages from seventeen to forty-three, telling his own story of buried secrets, self-deceptions, and hope. Read More Read Less
