Mark Pomeroy wrote the first draft of “The Brightwood Stillness” when he was 27 years old. He’s now 45. And now, his novel has been published by OSU Press.

“I know what it’s like to put something in the drawer for good,” Pomeroy wrote in an email to The Mountain Times. “But with ‘The Brightwood Stillness,’ the characters and the story kept pulling me back.”

The Journey
The author started visiting in Brightwood when he was 3 years old at his
grandparents’ (Bob and Bev Pomeroy) cabin.

“My mother and I would drive up there often to visit,” Pomeroy wrote on the
OSU Press website. “And ... that mountain land began to seep into me. The
moist woods, the Salmon River, the small dark cabins. The shadows.”

Pomeroy was raised partly by a Vietnam veteran stepfather who terrified and
intrigued him with his silence and anger of the war.

“What had happened to him in that mysterious far-off land?” Pomeroy wrote.
“What had he done? What was so difficult for him to talk about?”

So Pomeroy began reading about the war. In high school he tutored
Vietnamese refugees – whole families in some cases – and visited in their
apartments and listened to stories about their lives in Vietnam.

“Here were actual Vietnamese people, offering me cashews and tea, sitting
across from me, trying to sound out strange vocabulary words,” he wrote.
Much later, he and his wife – to whom he had proposed to on Thanksgiving
Day, 1999, beside the Salmon River – went to Vietnam.

“I had to see it with my own eyes, finally,” he wrote. “Had to smell it. Here
were the places I’d read about, seen on TV, heard about from Vietnamese
students and veterans willing to share their stories. Everything could become
an enemy in this forest, fast. And yet, of course, for other human beings it
was home.”

The Novel
“In light of the concerted campaign during the Vietnam War to dehumanize
the Vietnamese, I felt it important to show the humanity of a Vietnamese
character,” Pomeroy wrote in an email to The Mountain Times. “And what
better way to learn about someone’s true character than seeing him when his
back’s up against the wall.”

That character, Hieu Nguyen, is a Portland school teacher who is accused of
sexual misconduct by two students. At the same time, Nate Davis – a close
friend and fellow teacher – tries to lend support but is deep in his own
personal problems.

Davis launches on a search for his uncle, a drifter and Vietnam veteran.
Hieu is driven into solitude amid a police investigation, and he reflects on his
year during the war that included service in the NLF (Viet Cong).

Their stories run in parallel as both confront the ways in which their pasts –
each so linked to a mysterious far-off country – have left them isolated men.
“The Brightwood Stillness” is a riveting story of love, betrayal, and ultimately,
redemption.

“It’s been a long, memorable road,” Pomeroy wrote in his email. “And the
thing about it is, even though parts of that road have been harrowing, as it is
for all writers of course, I think that the novel is better for it. Call it forced
revision.”

The novel can be purchased for $18.95 at the website:
osupress.oregonstate.ed/book/brightwood-stillness.