Penny Newbury

Remember Me Penny Newbury

This isn't going to be very traditional "marketing copy," but it'll be a pretty good synopsis. Heck, I'm an academic, and this thing's probably going to sound like a thesis proposal, so brace yourself.
Remember Me is a collection of short stories that tried to be a novel two times and then ended up being what it should have been all along. The first group of six stories is taken from, of all places, my 1996 doctoral dissertation, entitled Who To Watch Out For. I billed it (in part to receive the degree) as a novel and set it in southeastern Connecticut. The stories (twelve in all but six in this collection) center around a group of people affiliated in various ways with a spiritual community called an Ailu and its self-proclaimed "leader," Ray Moss. Ray is a middle-aged white man who wants to transcend just about everything there is to transcend. The novel explores the lengths to which people will go to forsake individuality to be part of a group, any group (cf., Carl Jung's theory of complexes and the role of the "collective"), in this case a "New Age" group of healers, activists, occultists, Wiccans and wannabes. The challenge in using this subject matter was in illustrating the comedy found in much New Age thought and practice while retaining a respect for the characters, and not belittling them. The need to compensate for a lack of self-knowledge, and a fear of individual perception and action are motivations of several of the characters. Also examined in several chapters is the power, nearly magical in nature, of the past and of memory, and how this affects the characters' present desires to connect, however self-destructively, with others.
The first story, The Myth of Black Beans and M&M's, introduces many of the characters, who either are part of the Ailu or members of the Sabian Assembly, a small, esoteric society that also studies astrology and is noted for its brain-bending academic and theosophical exercises and its encompassing