As dusk tempers the summer Florida heat, Michael Koontz gazes pensively across Little Lake Weir, beside whose shores he has made his home for over 60 years. He muses over the notion that those waters bestowed upon him a life of contentment and a measure of juvenescence and may be the main reason his life today at age 87 isn’t defined by the physical frailties or diminished mental acuity often associated with his years.
This lake that for most of his life has furnished him with quiet mornings and the patient cadence of a place that never seems in a hurry, found its way into Koontz’ imagined world. There he set his first novel, “Pieces of Judith,” perhaps as homage to a special place, but more likely as a homecoming – a literary offering in gratitude for all the lake has given him.
“Diane (his wife of 64 years) and I have lived on the lake or somewhere on the water for over 60 years and I don’t take that for granted for one minute,” Koontz says as the still water, rustic docks and boathouses behind him echo his words. “We moved to the lake and we stayed here, and when our friends were buying big, nice places, we were just here in this little place. I may live longer because of it.”
Long before Little Lake Weir became one of the settings for “Judith,” it was the landscape that shaped its author. Seen through that lens, publishing a debut novel at age 87 seems less an act of procrastination than as the inevitable consequence of a life lived without urgency. Had “Judith” never gone to print, Koontz would still enjoy the same contentment, having taken the journey and savored the process every step of the way.
“I had no intention of ever finishing,” Koontz says. “I had no goal. I Iiked the process, as dumb as it seems. Only toward the end, I thought, ‘I’m old – I probably should see if I could publish it.’
“I had to get finished with the story before I realized what it was. I had to go back and change some things in the beginning and accommodate the way things turned out – that was part of the process, and I loved the process. I didn’t care if I had a book or not because I loved the process.”
That process took just over 10 years from the time Koontz decided to take what was originally a short story and draw it out into a novel. A retired celebrated interior designer, Koontz spent most of his time balancing color, light and proportion inside clients’ homes, finding what little time was left over to balance character, dialogue and setting onto a page. He admits, “10 minutes here and 20 minutes there is very difficult to get a novel done.
“The thing that made it difficult to write before I (retired) was that I loved my job. I absolutely loved being an interior designer and working with people. If I wrote, it was really a choice, and I was taking time away from what I loved both ways. It’s a wonderful problem to have, but I had it.”
For decades, Koontz furnished homes by day while quietly furnishing another world of his own on paper each evening. Then the constraints of time relaxed quite a bit with the onset of COVID-19.
“From the beginning of the pandemic, I had time to sit there and really concentrate on it and devote time to writing it, putting together things I had been writing for years, sort of a patchwork quilt into a story that made sense.”
“Pieces of Judith”
For the final product, Koontz delivers what could accurately be classified as a psychiatric tale, specifically a girl, Judith, dealing with schizophrenia from adolescence through adulthood. Her journey parallels that of the society in which she lived, specifically the evolving social and political environment of the mid-to-late 20th century American South and its own schizophrenic tendencies.
The question readers want answered is, “Will Judith ultimately defeat her affliction?” At the same time, “Will the society around Judith defeat its sordid past?” In the end, the reader can mostly decide for itself, but Koontz paints a picture of promise on both counts.
For locals, the scenery will look familiar as Koontz pens an accurate picture of what Central Florida, specifically Marion County, must have looked like in the previous century. His descriptions of the region’s diverse botanical beauty along with the culture of its people is part “Cross Creek” and with a touch of Hurston’s vivid folk dialect.
Though it started out as a short story, “Judith” evolved into a novel, mainly due to its complicated subject matter. Perhaps it was meant to be a short story, but Koontz readily admits that brevity is not among his stronger suits.
“I’ve tried over the years to write a simple story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and I’m incapable – my writing’s just too crooked.
“I was talking to (novelist and acclaimed short story writer) Peter Taylor one time, and I asked him, ‘Why do you favor short stories?’ He said, ‘I don’t set out to write short stories; the story just seems to end after 30 pages.’ So, I think that’s me – it never ends easily.”
When the time came to eventually press the ‘send’ button, Koontz instead continued with the process. His criticisms of his own work jeopardized a final product ever reaching the marketplace, but he eventually capitulated to the lure of accomplishment.
“I’m hard on myself. Diane says, ‘Get over yourself; finish it! Publish it! It’s good!’ But I could never accept that – I’m very critical about it. But, I think it’s surprisingly better than I hoped.
“I went along with all the advisors that said, ‘just get your first book finished and stick it in a drawer and work on a good one,’ which I sort of did. I got rid of enough (copy) to make probably three novels.”
“Pieces of Judith” is Koontz’ first published novel, meaning a second one is on the way. He claims to have a thousand pages written for “The Last Summit” which takes place in the Florida panhandle and centers more around male characters than the first. Once Koontz trims it down to around 300 pages, he will have quietly created what every novelist hopes for: a catalogue.
The serenity of lake life, with flora and fauna as his neighbors and an Isaac Levitan-graced canvas stretched before him each morning, likely slowed the biological clock that normally moves at too rapid a pace. Whether that is true is impossible to know, but what is certain is that somewhere between the quiet water, an interior designer’s eye, and 10 unhurried years spent writing a novel with no real intention of finishing, Michael Koontz discovered that the richest life may be measured less by what is accomplished than by the grace with which we inhabit the process.