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A Story Twice Told: Novelist's close call reverberates in book to be released this month
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Denzil Strickland took the title of his novel, Swimmers in the Sea, from a poem by Matthew Arnold.
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Published: September 4, 2008
Denzil Strickland was 53 when he had a brain hemorrhage that could have killed him.
Cliff Sanford was 5 when half his family died in a car accident in New Orleans, and his mother took him to rural Eastern North Carolina, pushing heartbreak behind her as best she could.
Fate has been painfully random to both men, one a Winston-Salem writer, the other man created by the writer's imagination, a flat, wounded character central to his first novel.
That novel, Swimmers in the Sea, will be released by local publisher Press 53 this month, with a launch party at Bookmarks festival on Sept. 13 at Bethabara Park.
At its heart, the book is about reconciliation between a father and son separated by time, distance and tragedy. Cliff's older sister and brother were killed in the accident, on their way home from a party that he couldn't go to because he had chickenpox. His parents survive, but barely.
But what's remarkable about Swimmers is that it is in print at all.
The novel was languishing in no-man's land when Strickland had his hemorrhage. Publishers didn't want it. Strickland himself thought that it felt unfinished, not quite right.
The novel began life as a short story called "Inheritance" that Strickland wrote in 2000. In the story, Cliff -- broke, unemployed and separated from his wife -- returns to New Orleans as an adult to his father's deathbed, spurred by the promise of the money his father might leave him
In 2002, Strickland said, another one of his stories caught the eye of a literary agent. He wanted to know if Strickland was working on a novel. "Inheritance" wasn't, but it was long, Strickland thought. So he stretched the truth and told him "yes."
By late 2003, Inheritance in novel form was ready to be shopped around to publishers. But no one bit.
On Dec. 28, 2004, Strickland woke up with painful headache. He walked into the bathroom, ran his head under a shower, and knew something wasn't right. Later that day, he underwent surgery at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, an operation that attached a small metal clip to the artery.
He was in intensive care for about two weeks. He was lucky to live.
Strickland was told that he had probably been born with a weak spot in an artery that ran through his brain. It caused a cerebral aneurysm, or a bulge in the artery's wall, that suddenly began to bleed. About 75 percent of people who have a cerebral aneurysm that hemorrhages die or have a chance of paralysis or speech loss, said Dr. Richard Bey, Strickland's neurologist.
Out of the hospital, Strickland had seizures and had trouble with short-term memory and controlling his emotions. "I cried when someone got booted off American Idol," he said.
Worst of all, his writing, which had flowed easily before, was not coming.
An English major in college who went into advertising, Strickland has clung to writing. Some people collect stamps or spend their free time hiking. Strickland plays golf, but he also sometimes wakes up at 5:30 a.m. so he can write before he goes to his day job, running his advertising firm, Garage Branding.
At first after his hemorrhage, writing was tedious. He wrote, and then he read. His words sounded sterile. He struggled with similes and images that used to come easily to him. "I had never experienced writer's block in my life. Nothing was coming. It was kind of like writing a term paper."
The hemorrhage affected his right prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain associated with personality, emotional control, and "executive function," or being able to organize a schedule, put thoughts and activities in order, or even stay on task.
Neurologists say that our minds are more complex than the simple association of the right brain with artistic expression and left brain with logic.
Strickland knows that it's not that straightforward. But he also knows that his writing has changed.
"For a writer, it changed the side where spontaneity and creativity come from, where the unbridled thinking comes from," he said. "I thought I would never be able to write again."
But even as he stumbled over his writing, Strickland felt as if his internal editor had been switched on. And he felt an eerie parallel to the story he was working on, the random flick of fate that gave him a weak spot in his brain.
He put aside a second novel that he had started to work on, and picked up Inheritance again. If he couldn't finish another book, he thought he could work on the one he had.
He ended up rewriting much of Inheritance. He changed the book's ending and eventually the book's title, too. He tinkered with the chronology, rewrote some scenes and added others, and moved some flashbacks to the book's beginning.
This time, the damage to his still-healing brain was a gift. The book was picked up by Press 53.
There's no formula to writing well. But when you add the mystery of creativity, the subconscious connections that words can make, and the physiology of the human brain, and it becomes even harder to explain.
Creativity isn't confined to one area of the brain, Bey said. "But we do know that people with frontal-lobe injury have lack of motivation or organization skills.
"He was extremely lucky -- first of all that he lived, and ultimately -- that he made it out with no deficit and creativity returned," Bey said. "There could have been other problems, pre-injury. I think having a near-death experience … it changes what's important in life."
Today, Strickland is back at work on his second novel.
Relationships -- ones that are failing, or floundering -- are a common theme in his writing, Strickland said, even though he's been married for 21 years to his wife, Carolyn. Together, they've had two daughters. The family moved to Winston-Salem in 2001 from Chapel Hill. Before that, the family lived in Atlanta. Strickland used to work for an ad agency there that was based in New Orleans. He also spent part of his summers there as a child.
Swimmers takes place away from the genteel Garden District, in the grittier neighborhoods of the Ninth Ward, and in Chalmette, a community in St. Bernard Parish.
In North Carolina, Cliff's mother takes her only living child home to Ennis, a made-up town that could stand in for any struggling farm community in the long, flat swath of the eastern part of the state.
"It (New Orleans) lives below sea level. Its graves are above ground, which says somehow that the dead are still among us, just as Cliff's sister and mother still influence him," Strickland said. "I don't write about wealth. The people I write about aren't successful people. They're people just trying to get by.
"I'm finally getting back to that place where I can write more unconscious. When I write, I feel like I'm listening quite a bit to things I've already thought."
All the while, he looked for small signs that his brain was working again.
That's when a new title came to him. He thought of it while he was mowing his yard one day last summer. Swimmers in the Sea came from a line in "Sohrab and Rustum," a poem by Victorian poet Matthew Arnold. Strickland ran inside, and found the poem in one of his college textbooks.
Some 30 years ago, he had underlined it: "For we are all, like swimmers in the sea, poised on the top of a huge wave of fate, which hangs uncertain on which side to fall."
■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.
If you go
• Denzil Strickland will speak and read from his new novel, Swimmers in the Sea, at the Bookmarks festival of Books on Sept. 13 at Bethabara Park. For more information about Bookmarks, go to www.bookmarksbookfestival.org.
• Strickland will also read at 3 p.m. on Oct. 23 at Wake Forest University in Room 204 of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library, at 7 p.m. on Nov. 7 at Borders Books and Music on Stratford Road, and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Nov. 29 at Waldenbooks in Hanes Mall.
There's more
• Find out about more Bookmarks festival authors in Sunday's Living section of the Journal.
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