Mike Ramsey Jr
The Backward Becoming
Work in progress
A novel that opens at the far end of a life and turns back toward its beginning.
About this bookFiction
Mike Ramsey Jr
I write fiction.
The Backward Becoming is the novel I am working on now — unfinished, and out with a handful of readers who are telling me the truth about it. PERSISTENT is a finished draft, not yet read back.
The current book
The Backward Becoming
A novel that opens at the far end of a life and turns back toward its beginning.
Work in progress
In the spring of 1972, an American nurse named Nell Hale is working in a cholera-relief camp outside Dacca. The novel opens there, at the far end of a life, on an afternoon that does not go the way the day was supposed to go.
Then it turns back to Calder, Kentucky — to a chicken pie carried into a front room in 1946, to a tenth birthday the January after, to a July afternoon at the river in 1951 — and works forward through the ordinary days that made her.
- Form
- Novel
- Setting
- Calder, Kentucky, 1946–1951 · Dacca, 1972
- Stage
- Drafting; four chapters in advance reading
Bookshelf
Everything with a name on it
PERSISTENT
Draft complete
A finished draft — twenty-nine chapters — waiting for its line-by-line pass.
About this book
About
Mike Ramsey Jr
I write fiction. Two books so far — one still being written, one finished as a draft and waiting to be read back.