Gary Forrester - Novels, Poetry, Memoir, Stories, and Screenplay

Novels, Poetry, Memoir, Stories, and Screenplay

Following the demise of the Rank Strangers in the 1990s, Forrester turned to writing novels and poetry, with a focus on music and family. Houseboating in the Ozarks (Dufour Editions, 2006), which includes fictional accounts of a bluegrass band, is the story of a circular journey through the American Midwest, with reflective detours to Australia, South America, Japan, and Italy. Houseboating in the Ozarks meanders through tribal and Western spiritual traditions, including those of Aboriginal Australia and Lakota sundances in Green Grass, South Dakota, led by Yuwipi medicine man Frank Fools Crow. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found Houseboating in the Ozarks idiosyncratic but engaging: an autobiographical "extended meditation on the difficulty of preserving familial and social memory, and sustaining and transmitting values and culture in our mobile, throwaway society."

A 2012 review of Houseboating said that "one of the many wonders of the book is that two kids become real people capable of influencing the outcome of the trip. They grab him by the heart and throw him around. They are bright, funny, and embody their own kind of irony that meshes with Dad's . . . a wonderful, smart, sad book." Lawyers and Poetry described Houseboating in the Ozarks as "autobiographical in the sense that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about the life of Robert Pirsig."

His second novel, The Connoisseur of Love, was published in New Zealand in 2012. This novel contains 12 meditations – a dozen episodes from the endgame of Peter Becker, Wellington’s self-styled "connoisseur of love." Peter is not quite at home in his adopted city of Wellington, but there is no place on earth he would rather be. He is a creature of routine, an eccentric public servant, estranged from his only child Katrin and his ex-wife Sylvia. Alone, he stalks Wellington’s second-hand shops and cafés, bicycles through its streets and lanes, battles on its tennis courts, and performs his music – never quite connecting with anyone or anything.

FishHead: Wellington's Magazine described The Connoisseur of Love as a "comprehensive love song" to New Zealand's capital city, which "exudes Wellington." According to FishHead, "it's not just a novel about Wellington, it's a novel for Wellington." A review in the Emerging Writers Network declared Connoisseur to be "smartly written in Forrester's straightforward clear sentences which have always had the echo of Vonnegut," and that the novel created "a unique point of view that is so broad it is at once a Gordian knot of irony, a psychological landscape, and a state of mind."

In a feature article in Wellington's Dominion Post newspaper, Forrester was described as "a lawyer, public servant, bluegrass musician, and author of a novel set in Wellington. But on paper it's being a writer that counts." The Dominion Post article captured Peter Becker's sense of alienation, observing that "writer Gary Forrester made Peter Becker up and planted him as an outsider in Wellington, stumbling through familiar places and unsatisfactory relationships - Peter Becker is an alien in Wellington. He doesn't pretend to be a Wellingtonian. He has his nose pressed against the glass."

The Germans have a word for Peter Becker’s underlying sense that all is not well: Torschlusspanik – literally, "gate-closing panic" – or in Peter’s case, the quiet angst of aging as life’s options narrow. Not that long ago, he seemed to have all the time in the world; now his world is shrinking, and grace has not arrived.

Begotten, Not Made, Forrester's third novel, recounts the travels of a wandering musician and his deaf sidekick, shuffling along on a doomed walking marathon from New York to San Francisco in the 1920s. A lengthy extract from Begotten, Not Made was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press, in Scoring from Second, an anthology featuring the works of "thirty accomplished writers" from North America, including Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus, and others. Begotten, Not Made is written "entirely in free verse in the voice of a demented Brer Rabbit."

Poems from Forrester's 2009 New Zealand book of verse, The Beautiful Daughters of Men: A Novella in Short Verse from Tinakori Hill, have appeared in prominent journals including the South Dakota Review, Poetry New Zealand, JAAM (Just Another Art Movement), the Earl of Seacliffe Art Workshop, and Voyagers: A New Zealand Science Fiction Poetry Anthology. The complete poems were published in January 2009, in The Legal Studies Forum, a journal established by the American Legal Studies Association to promote humanistic, critical, trans-disciplinary legal studies, and featuring works of poetry, essays, memoirs, stories, and criticism. The Beautiful Daughters is the tale of two migrants to New Zealand, a woman from Chechnya and a dying man.

In 2011, Forrester's initial memoir, Blaw, Hunter, Blaw Thy Horn, was published in America. In a review, the Quincy Herald-Whig described the book as "a memoir and historical commentary on the lives of his parents, Harry and Rose, and what impacted the family during their stays in various parts of west-central, central, and southern Illinois." The Herald-Whig's review observed that Harry Forrester, coach of the men's basketball team at Quincy College (now Quincy University) from 1954–57, "eventually earned as much respect for his decision to play five black players as he did for leading the Hawks to their first national tournament appearance." The Herald-Whig's review noted that "Harry Forrester did not spend much time in Quincy, but it's safe to say his impact will be remembered forever," recalling that his landmark coaching decision "came at the height of racial insensitivity in the mid-to-late 1950s and was a full decade before Texas Western (now UTEP) started five black players in what is now the NCAA Division I national championship game. A movie was made about that Texas Western team, but outside of Quincy, only a handful of people to this day realize history was first made in West-Central Illinois."

A review of Blaw, Hunter in the Effingham Daily News observed that most of the memoir takes place in the first half of the twentieth century "in the small slice of Illinois centered in Montgomery and Christian counties - in towns like Raymond, Harvel, and Morrisonville," but that Forrester's memoir also "reaches back to the 16th century and his Melungeon ancestors."

Forrester's story "A Kilgore Trout Moment" appeared in The Legal Studies Forum in 2010. The story is the whimsical tale of an oddball poet who contributes to a baseball writing conference in Tennessee, suffering near-death experiences and failures to communicate along the way, only to find redemption, at last, at "home." In 2012, Forrester's story "Tulips" was also featured in The Legal Studies Forum.