Birth of a Book

It’s March 28, 1994. I’m teaching a writing class this evening and I need to come up with some ideas. I settle into my favorite armchair and shut my eyes in meditation, but when I open them a while later, I still have no compelling program. Then my eyes light on The Celtic Tarot. It has been sitting across the room for several days, ever since I brought it home from a Toronto bookstore, where it so seduced me that I couldn’t not buy it, even as I failed to understand the impulse. 

Now I do. I’ll have each student draw, closed-eyed, one of the deck’s cards. Then with their eyes open to the chosen card, I’ll lead them through a guided visualization into writing. 

I never write in workshops I’m teaching, but this class would be different. Once my students are writing, an inner imperative (the voice of my muse?) insists I draw a card of my own. I reach into the deck, pull the Chariot and, without full awareness of what I’m doing, begin to write. What emerges is a tale of an odd-looking man in an even odder-looking coach that is pulled by two odd-colored horses.

A year later in rural Nova Scotia, on the anniversary of that Toronto class, I complete the first draft of my first book — a novel I never planned to write, a novel I knew nothing about except as I wrote it word-by-word: The MoonQuest…a novel that has not only won six literary awards and garnered glowing effusive reviews and critical acclaim, but is slowly making its way to the big screen as an epic fantasy film.

Today, nearly thirty years later, I’m getting to release my first audiobook: an author-read audio edition of The MoonQuest. The MoonQuest audiobook will release this fall on Audible, Amazon, Apple Books and other platforms. Reserve your copy now at www.markdavidgerson.com/mqaudio. Can't wait? Pick up a copy from www.themoonquest.com or from your favorite online bookseller.

Photos:
1/ The Chariot card from the sadly out-of-print “Celtic Tarot,” designed by Courtney Davis.
2/ The original “MoonQuest” cover. Note the similarities between the horses on the card and the horses on the cover. The cover designer never saw the card! The original cover may have been superseded, but the Chariot’s inspiration is still evident throughout “The MoonQuest.”
3/ “The MoonQuest” audiobook, coming to major audiobook platforms this fall.
4/ The current “MoonQuest” cover pictured alongside the West Toronto flat where I held the writing workshop and pulled the Chariot tarot card that inspired the book.