The Inspiration for “Roam”
When I was a teen I loved ‘Jonathan Livingstone Seagull’ and some years back I got the idea to write that type of spiritual journey or Everyman tale, but with a dog as the protagonist. I’d been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, and I was fascinated with the structure of mythic stories, and their universal cross-cultural meaning. As a dog-lover, I wanted Roam to be the story of a dog’s heroic journey across America, but I wanted it to be more than that too, to try and reflect some of the ups and downs, the loves and losses, the joy and pain all of us experience in our lives.
The idea crystallized when I started seeing a lot of newspaper articles about lost dogs that had been reunited with their owners after many years, thanks to the miracle of chip technology. As the owner of three dogs, I knew that little could be worse than experiencing your dog get lost, not knowing where they were, what they were doing, if they were even alive at all. I wondered where those lost dogs had travelled for so many years, and of course they could never tell us. So, the idea for Roam bubbled around in my subconscious. Then, several years back I lost my dad. As those who’ve experienced it know, losing a parent is such a big event in our lives. There’s enormous grief in losing one you love so much, and it gets one thinking a lot about life and death, and the meaning of it all. A few months after losing my dad, I started writing Roam.
Our three family dogs were big inspirations for the novel as well. When I take them for walks, their nose is pretty much glued to the ground, sniffing the grass with such passion and purpose. So many times I’ve wondered what is going through their heads, what the smell of grass means to them. Smell is a powerful part of a dog’s experience of the world, and writing as much from Nelson’s perspective in Roam as I could, I tried to experience a world where scent and not sight is dominant.
In researching the story, I also came to realize the full extent of the tragedy going on in dog shelters across the USA. So many amazing people work in these shelters, but due to lack of resources, upwards of four million dogs (and cats) are put to death every year because they cannot find a home. I do hope Roam also heightens awareness of this situation. I had purchased our three dogs from pet stores, not knowing better at the time, but I will definitely always adopt in the future.
While we were editing Roam, my fantastic editor, Sarah Durand, knowing I was a composer as well, suggested I write some music to accompany the book. I was very intrigued with this idea, as I thought it could possibly heighten the reader’s emotional experience of the novel. Music expresses emotion in a different, more mysterious way to the written word. At the same time I didn’t want music to overwhelm the text. So, I came up with seven simple piano pieces that a reader may listen to at points in the novel. They can be accessed by this amazing technology the publisher came up with – you can scan tags in the book with your iPhone and it’ll play the music off YouTube. You can also listen to the tracks at my website www.alanlazar.com.
-Alan Lazar
