Michael Thomas Ford Takes 'The Road Home'

Author Michael Thomas Ford has singlehandedly provided gay readers with a small library of charming, potent stories about our lives, our families, our searches for identity--in sum, ourselves. As literature, Ford's books are funny and tender, and carry the ring of emotional truth. As a public service, his catalogue of gay fiction--and his guide to gay sex and relationships--is nothing short of healing.

Ford has other literary interests, including a strong bent toward the supernatural and toward nature-based religion--both of which show up in his short fiction, as well as in The Road Home, his latest novel from Kensington Books. (Ford is also in the midst of a trilogy that re-casts Jane Austen as a vampire, a series of books being published by Ballantine Books. Volume one, Jane Bites Back, was published late last year; volume two will be out in the fall.)

In The Road Home, a Boston-based photographer named Burke returns to the Vermont farm where he grew up after a car crash leaves him dependent on others to help him recover. Burke expects a strained and unpleasant six weeks with his taciturn widower father--what he discovers is a summer of friendship and recuperation that repairs his damaged spirit even as it allows is broken bones to knit.

Part of Burke's painful past is a love for--and a single sexual encounter with--his best friend from high school, Marshall, or "Mars" for short. When he returns home, Burke finds that his old friend is still happily married, and still a local fixture--but that he now has an 18-year-old son, Will, who all too closely resembles his father at that age. More: Will might be gay--despite being engaged to a local girl.

Will isn't the only gay local Burke meets as he slowly starts to get out and about, propped on his crutches and carrying his slew of cameras around to various scenic locales. In this day and age, meeting out gays--even in rural Vermont--is nothing so very unusual, and the men (and women) who befriend him represent a cross-section of contemporary gay life. But there's something stranger afoot, too: one of Burke's favored sites for taking photos of Will (who is all too happy to model) seems to be haunted; with the help of an older gay man, Burke gradually uncovers a long-buried history of Civil War soldiers and concealed commitment from a time when men who loved men were compelled to live in secrecy and fear.

As his personal past, and that of the long-abandoned farm, intersect, Burke is inexorably brought to a place where he has to reassess his life--and his own future.

Michael Thomas Ford took time from a hectic schedule to chat with EDGE via email about The Road Home, love and family, and one among his many interests--the art of photography.

EDGE: Among other things, I wonder about the prominence of photography in the novel. You've incorporated hobbies you enjoy, such as diving, in other novels; is photography also a passion for you?

Michael Thomas Ford: Photography is indeed something I'm interested in. I've been doing it for a number of years, and last year I started showing in group exhibitions. Writing novels takes a long time, and often you don't see the results of your work for months or even years. Photography is much more immediately gratifying. And just as there are things you can say in words that you can't say in pictures, there are things you can say in pictures that you can't say as well with words. I like the difference of the mediums.

EDGE: Also, the historic mystery you introduce adds a whole extra layer to the story. Are you a Civil Way buff?

Michael Thomas Ford: I'm not, although when I was a child my family lived in Manassas, Virginia, which is the site of a lot of Civil War battles. We used to go to Battlefield Park a lot, so maybe something rubbed off.

EDGE: Does the (largely hidden) history of gays and lesbians in America interest you? From the role John Steinbeck played in your novel Changing Tides, as well as the historic component of The Road Home, I would suspect so - but is it your intention to draw attention in your novels to the way gay contributions have been systematically overlooked in America's "official story?"

Michael Thomas Ford: To be honest, I've never consciously thought about it. My goal with my books is to capture what it's like to be a gay person living at a certain time and in a certain place. I think gay lives in general have remained hidden from the history of America, so almost anything you write about is going to uncover something people haven't considered before. But I don't set out to do that, it's just a natural result of storytelling.

Flexibility and Family

EDGE: There's an element of the supernatural at work in The Road Home, which is nothing new for you as a writer, but it is new for your Kensington novels. What prompted the inclusion of this angle in The Road Home? (And did the supernatural aspect of your Jane Austen-as-Vampire series of books for Ballantine have anything to do with it?)

Michael Thomas Ford: The Road Home is dedicated to my friend Michael Joseph McGuire. He liked my book The Path of the Green Man, which is about gay men and paganism, and he asked me when those themes were going to appear in my fiction. Many of my own experiences with paganism have been with communities in Vermont, and I thought writing about that would add an interesting layer to TRH. Also, that world is completely foreign to the book's main character and I thought dropping him into it would be a good way to shake him up.

EDGE: One thing that your novels with Kensington seem to have in common is a theme of family, whether it's family of origin or family of choice-whether it's the tight-knit groups we meet in Last Summer and Looking for It, or the shifting family connections between three men in Full Circle, or even the father-daughter bond you explore in Changing Tides and the very family-centered mystery of What We Remember. In a way, The Road Home is a flip-side to What We Remember, because it gives a still-living father and his adult son a chance to reconnect.

Michael Thomas Ford: Ultimately, all stories are about relationships of one kind or another, and for me family is the most common relationship experience all of us share, and therefore the most interesting one to write about. I think it's a particularly relevant subject for gay men because we do have so many different types of families in our lives, and the roles these families play often speak to the many different aspects of our experience as gay people.

My next novel is about a long-term couple, which is something I've written about before, but not really as the primary focus of a book. I realized recently that a lot of the relationships I've written about involve a living person coming to terms with a dead or absent person, which is interesting because obviously the absent person isn't there to react to the living one's feelings. Then, as you point out, in The Road Home both parties in the various relationships are alive and can interact face to face. Even then, though, they don't all face one another. Burke and Mars, for instance, never discuss what happened between them when they were boys. That's one thing that, in hindsight, I wish I'd explored.

Years ago, my writing instructor and friend Isabelle Holland (who wrote The Man Without a Face) told me, "You don't like conflict, and you will never write what you should until you let your characters confront one another." I've never forgotten that, and whenever I start trying to shield my characters from unpleasant experiences I hear Isabelle's voice in my head. I don't always listen to her, but I should. And now that I'm thinking about it, Isabelle died before ever getting to read one of my novels, so maybe I'm just as bad as my characters, trying to show her that I did learn something after all.

EDGE: Along those lines, speaking of family, you include a whole cornucopia of gay familial relationships in The Road Home, addressing a range of choices the characters make at different life points-everything from an older, widowered gay man, to a young gay man choosing to marry a woman despite his true sexuality, to a character who has long been single and created a large network of GLBT friends, to someone who has had serial relationships but never allowed them to turn into something permanent. Was this part of the book's design from the start? Or did it perhaps fall out of the storytelling process?

Michael Thomas Ford: If you look at my novels in chronological order, I think the focus gradually narrows--from the broad definition of family in Last Summer, to the more intimate parent-child relationships in Changing Tides and What We Remember. That wasn't a conscious choice, but I think it was a natural path to take. The Road Home has a little of all of these kinds of relationships, and I suspect that has to do with where I am in both my personal and my writing life. I didn't do this deliberately, so I think it must just be a natural subconscious progression. Really, I'm not clever enough to plan something like that.

EDGE: One particularly interesting, and well depicted, family bond in The Road Home was that of three men in a domestic relationship. That would strike many people as odd or unstable, but those are the three happiest characters in the novel! Can non-binary relationships work well? Why do people speak of them with such disdain and distrust?

Michael Thomas Ford: I love those three characters. I think most of us are so conditioned to believe that "relationship" means "two people" that seeing anything other than that model can be unsettling. I know I thought that way for a long time. Then I met people who are living in other arrangements and I had to reevaluate my thinking. As with any relationships, ultimately some of these work and some of them don't, but no more than "traditional" arrangements do.

I do think we need to expand our ideas about what relationships are and can be, even if ultimately we don't choose these options for ourselves. Dismissing anything other than the one-partner relationship model out of hand is very much the same limited way of thinking that causes people to be afraid of gay marriage. It's fear of something we ourselves find threatening. But if we allow ourselves to explore--literally or intellectually--other ways of looking at partnership, it might provide unexpected rewards. Also, you always have someone to go to the movies with.

Sense and Sensitivities

EDGE: Another sensitive-but well-handled-aspect of The Road Home is that it involves a hot, sexy summer fling between a man in his 40s and a much younger man barely in his 20s. Again, straight society tends to paint gays as universally intent on seducing younger people; and there's also the issue of the younger man being the son of the older man's former best friend. The book is richer for exploring this, and doing so in a pretty matter-of-fact way, but did you have qualms about "going there?"

>slug>Michael Thomas Ford: Fortunately for me, I almost never think about things being potentially controversial when I'm writing a story. It's not until afterward, usually when an editor or my agent points it out, that I realize something in a book might be problematic. You know, after I get the "Are you sure you want to make the kindergarten teacher a collector of Nazi memorabilia?" note on the manuscript.

With the Burke/Will relationship I wanted to show how Burke is trying to be something he isn't, and how Will is trying to find out what it means to be a man. In one sense they're both using each other, but there's also something very tender about how each needs something the other has. When I was in my 20s I was mostly interested in men in their 40s, so perhaps those experiences made the Burke/Will situation seem not so unusual to me.

The fact that Will is the child of Burke's friend was trickier mentally. I couldn't help but think that if Burke was a straight man having an affair with the 20-something daughter of his best friend, I would probably find the whole thing a little creepy. But I think that has more to do with how older man/younger woman relationships are generally more about power and control on the man's part. Having it be two men made the relationship more equal, and I never felt that Burke was manipulating Will into doing something he didn't want to do.

EDGE: You other recent books are a trilogy about Jane Austin as a vampire. What's up with vampires lately, and historical characters being recast in terms of supernatural adventure (as in Seth Grahame -Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for example)?

Michael Thomas Ford: Vampires are--literally--timeless. People can't get enough of them. In fact, the Jane Austen series I'm doing came about because one day my agent and I were talking about the state of publishing and he said, "The only things selling are books about vampires and Jane Austen." I jokingly suggested combining the two, and here we are.

This was long before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies came out, even though my book was ultimately published after that one was. I think that book too was done as a joke. It just happened to be a very, very successful joke, which is why a flood of imitators came after it. As with most trends, what came after is not nearly as good as the first one, so hopefully it will die down soon and something more original will take its place.

In general I am not a fan of using real people in fiction. I prefer creating believable characters readers have never met before and then fall in love with. But there are obvious advantages to working with recognizable characters. You're starting from a place of familiarity, which helps readers get right into the story, and you can have great fun playing with a historical person's known personality traits.

EDGE: What's next on your literary drawing board?

Michael Thomas Ford: In September I have a novel coming out from HarperCollins called Z. It's about a group of people who play a virtual reality zombie hunting game that turns out to be something far more sinister than they could ever have imagined. Then the next Jane Austen vampire book comes out in early 2011.

At the moment I'm working on my next gay-themed novel for Kensington, which is about a couple whose 25-year relationship is rocked when one finds out the other did something potentially unforgivable when they were both college students.

The Road Home, 352 pages, $24, will be published May 25 by Kensington Books. ISBN-13: 978-0-758-218-537