Wanderer's Tales #9 - Summer
Welcome to Issue 9 of Wanderer’s Tales featuring a book review and Summer Fields, a new original song.
Welcome to Issue 9 of Wanderer’s Tales, the newsletter of Ancient Roads. Here you will find fantasy fiction set in ancient worlds, where music makes magic, and the road ahead is always uncertain. Wanderers welcome.
As I write this, our family has returned from several weeks of summer camps. I saw old friends and made new ones. At the first camp of the season, I performed the song Night Ride, which I shared here last month. At the same camp I taught an alternative tuning workshop for guitar.
At the second camp, I participated in a five-day world music singing workshop from an award-winning blues singer-songwriter Anne Weiss. The camp also had a literary salon where I read an excerpt from the first chapter of my novel Shield of the Goddess, and a talent show where I sang several songs from the book, including Song of the Daughter and Song of the Father. I also led music for a nightly campfire style singalong. Somewhere in all of that activity I got rest and renewal.
I started writing Chapter 8 of Shield of the Goddess this month, but since I haven’t finished it yet, I am sharing an original song instead.
Chris Struble
Summer Fields is a meditative fingerstyle instrumental for guitar. It was my first original music composition.
I wrote it in 1980. Back then I still played guitar with a pick. It was the first song I learned to play fingerstyle.
I played it often and never forgot how to play it. It used to have words, but I was never able to make it into a song with a coherent story arc. The first verse went like this:
Out in the summer fields
You'll find answers there
Peace will fill your mind
While love fills the air
Out in the summer fields
Sometimes songs will pull a songwriter in different directions. That certainly happened to me with Summer Fields. Some of the verses were about the love of the world, or the beauty of nature. Others were about the love of a beautiful woman. It remained in tension, like an unresolved chord. So I leave it as an instrumental for you to enjoy.
Our imperialistic culture tells us that only finished works of art that can be sold are of value. I disagree. The process of creating also has value. So does sharing with others freely. I am married to a fiber artist who often tries something out and then unravels it when she doesn’t like it. But she keeps trying, and because of that she has created many beautiful things that have brought joy to many people.
I will conclude by sharing a book review I wrote this month of The Real Middle Earth: Exploring the Magic and Mystery of the Middle Ages, J.R.R. Tolkien, and The Lord of the Rings by Brian Bates, on TheStoryGraph.com. This was a book I wanted to read for years for the fun of it, and it seems to have been a labor of love for the author as well.
How was your summer? What did you create or experience for the pure joy of it? Please share in the comments below.
As always, check out my Books, Music, and Reviews pages to see the ever growing lists of everything I have published to date.
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See you on the road!
Chris Struble