WHY I WROTE STREAM

I went to Africa right after college in the early 1970s. I traveled. I worked in construction. I hung out. When I got back home five years later mother asked me again and again, “What did you actually do in Africa?” She was very persistent. She wanted to know: Where had I gone? Whom did I meet? Who were my friends? Was I ever in danger? What had I seen? Was I ever afraid? What was in my mind? What was I thinking? I wrote DRINKING FROM THE STREAM to answer those questions. 

STREAM is a novel. It tells a real story that is made up. The plot and the characters are imaginary. But the events they live through are historical facts.  

STREAM is about travel, friendship, revolution, politics, ethnic hatred, coming of age, and what was going on in East Africa in 1972. Turns out there was plenty going on. It's about international youth who run smack into dictatorship, revolt, and insurrection in post-colonial Africa. 

STREAM is very much of the moment. Think ON THE ROAD meets HEART OF DARKNESS. The violent imagery in Psalm 110 suggested the novel’s title, DRINKING FROM THE STREAM.

Here’s the plot: Jake Ries and Karl Appel meet by happenstance in Oxford in 1971. Jake has become a fugitive. In an argument about money on an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico a White supremacist cook tries to kill Jake, mistaking him for a Jew. Defending himself, Jake unintentionally kills him and flees to England. Karl, an Oxford graduate student, badly wants to get out of Oxford. They decide to team up and get on a flight to Ethiopia. Along the way they meet Howard Chapman, a brainy English South African fed up with Apartheid teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Beatrice Bergmann, a brilliant German law student who is fed up with the still Nazi-infested West German legal profession. Beatrice also rejects her right-wing family and her left-wing radical friends. Then there's a frustrated, fearful Ugandan woman nicknamed Swee’Pea, a would-be medical student desperate to escape Uganda and her rapacious Ugandan military officer uncle.

I began writing DRINKING FROM THE STREAM to set the world on its ear. But in truth it was a long time coming. I had the entire novel in my head and had written 40 percent of the first draft when the need to find a job and a career forced me to postpone the project. For years that typewritten fragment was carted in a box around the world through umpteen foreign service assignments until I could finally complete it. Thanks mom!