An Insupportable Light

"An Insupportable Light is the original Stinz novel, featuring Donna Barr's half-horse hero back when she thought of him as having two legs instead of four. The story begins at the end of one war, with the hope of peace. Then one small incident after another, building and combining like pebbles tossed down a slope, become an avalanche of misunderstandings, broken hearts, fury and revenge. It's about how wars start: nobody wants them, nobody can see them coming and nobody can stop them."Now some background for all my readers: This book exhibits a history of my navigating the new worlds of publishing. It began as a hand-written manuscript, back in the early '80's. Beautiful Schaefer blue ink. It was burnt or lost; I don't remember which. The original title was "Ancient Light," based on Scottish legal concept of building allowances. By the time the book was retyped -- on an old Remington typewriter -- it had a new title, because the old one was close to another. It went digital on one of those dinky one-box Macs whose soldering came loose so that sometimes I had to hit it to make it work (pretty satisfying). There's more about the process, but....Over the years the book has been edited by other people, chased distribution deadlines, gotten scrambled up in the Amazon system when Booksurge became Createspace, even been ignored and forgotten by the author who has been trying to make publishing sense in the new technologies in the face of her massive body of work.This is the final form of An Insupportable Light. I took out the thou and thee forms. To my dear readers: not everybody is as linguistically obsessive as we are, but I don't think you'll find the one time I made my work more accessible made it any less ornate.The one with the brown cover? Don't get that one; it's an orphan. The red cover is the good one."Donna Barr's writing could not possibly be like her drawing, because she draws faster than most people think. It comes close in other ways, though. In An Insupportable Light, Barr has found a way, as she does in her comics, to create a world taken from her own brain which we nonetheless are certain we must have read about somewhere in some history book or other.Possessed of an uncanny knowledge of the European middle ages (due to exhausting research or a past life?), she brings a village and a people - several kinds of people - to life and demonstrates, with a writing style that is part poetry, part irony, how the very worst things can happen, purely by happenstance, to the most well-meaning of souls. Is there a distant future echo in this book, of Homeland Security, or Patriotism acts, of Shock and Awe? I fear so."- Trina Robbins, Tender Murderers: Women Who Kill.