The Twisty Path
Tenacity Tale: Mark Cecil on hope and hard choices
Our March Tenacity Tale is Mark Cecil, journalist, host of The Thoughtful Bro literary podcast, and author of Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny (Pantheon Books, March 26, 2024), a novel that imagines origin stories for American legends Paul Bunyan and John Henry as an “an adventure quest with deeper interrogations of race, class, and industrialization.”
On its surface, Mark Cecil’s debut novel Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny is a retelling of the Paul Bunyan story that reimagines the legendary lumberjack as a newlywed who lives—but most toils—in Lump Town. When his bride falls victim to a progressive disease caused by pollution in their not-so-fair city, Bunyan embarks on a quest to find the one man who might have a cure for his beloved wife, and—as in the way of all fabulist quest tales—comical and heartbreaking shenanigans ensue.
Beneath the surface, though, Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny is also a fable about the personal effort and sacrifice required to live our lives to our fullest potentials, or—as the book would describe it—to reach each our own individual “Beautiful Destinies.”
Early in the novel, a mythical creature called the Chilali guides Bunyan to follow the Twisty Path by following the Gleam, a force that appears at crossroads moments to help people intuit which choice will bring them one step closer to their destinies. But while the Gleam might sound like a cheat code to the good life, it almost always encourages a traveler to make the hard choice over the easy one, twisting the hairy heck out of the path to the Beautiful Destiny in the process.
It’s this Beautiful Destiny element that infuses Cecil’s quest story with deep purpose and turns the novel into something of a Rorschach test for its readers. Where one reader might see the novel as a takedown of capitalism because the El Boffo villain’s cruel profit over people priorities, another might see the novel as a Cli-Fi1 fable about lethal corporate greed. And anyone pursuing a creative path—tenacious writers, perhaps?—will see the long and winding road of the artistic life mirrored in the Twisty Path.
As is so often the way of these things, Cecil could only write such a moving fable about characters tenacious enough to follow the Twisty Path to their Beautiful Destinies because he was so intimately familiar with the disappointments and dead ends along his own Twisty Path to his writerly destiny:
Twist one—Cecil spent years ignoring his desire to write novels, telling himself it wasn’t a viable career path, only turning to novel writing in a panic when it hit him that the viable path had handed him in a soul-sucking corporate job that made him miserable.
Twist two—The author of the indefatigably hopeful Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny started out by writing dark thrillers about doomed figures in history and modern retellings of two decidedly hopeless Greek tragedies.
Twist three—Cecil sold the two tragedies to a big five publisher in 2018, but after a stalemate with his editor about how the book should end, Cecil canceled the contract in the spring of 2019 and—during his literary dark night of the soul—realized that he was only gravitating to retellings because the original material provided a ready plot. When his editor asked him to deviate from the arc of the original play, he couldn’t do it because he wasn’t fluent in story structure, so he did his level best to become fluent.
“I was trying to write novels but I realized I hadn’t ever read a single book about how to do that. So I proceeded to read every last thing I could about the tropes, paradigms and conventions of great storytelling, some of which worked for me, and some of which did not. Eventually, I was able to internalize the machinery and scaffolding of story structure to the point that I could write with my own roadmap. I wanted the shape of my stories to be accessible and authentic at the same time." 2
When he wondered if the hopeful stories he was telling his kids at bedtime might be the seed of a new novel, he had the tools he needed to follow the Twisty Path of this new story wherever it led.
“The novel is really a metaphor of my journey to becoming a writer,” Cecil says. “It’s a book about how you lift your life to the next level. It’s something I went through, and I want readers to believe that they can have it for themselves. The last line of the book—For the fight is never finished and the hope is never gone—I want to put that on my headstone. I want to talk about hope, and I want to talk about the great potential in people.”
The Beautiful Destiny for Writers
Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny is neither a craft book nor a story about a writer, but writers will recognize their own journey in Bunyan’s devotion to following the Gleam on the Twisty Path. Here’s a sample of the wisdom this book for writers:
On the nature of writerly intuition:
“Will you swear to give yourself to the strange way, the hard way, the absurd way, the unconventional way, the courageous way, no matter what the Gleam asks?” (page 70)
On the enormity of the task:
“My own Everest is to one day publish a book.” (page 288)
On finding motivation in the middle of a long project:
“I think the fire under your ass needs a fire under its ass.” (page 82)
On the importance of telling the story only you can tell:
I got something I can’t give up, something I won’t let go, something I’ll never deny.” (page 105)
On the importance of letting your inner weirdo play on the page:
“There is a tyranny that lurks behind the notion of normalcy.” (305)
On loving the process
With a true vocation, you’ve got to love the guts of a thing. Not just the flower and the fruit, but the sap, the roots, the bark. Everything.” (222)
On the importance of community:
“Each person who chases the Beautiful Destiny causes another to chase it. Each person who gives up causes another to give up.” (229)
On the humility of revision:
“We had been wrong by a hair. We had been wrong by a mile.” (298)
On refusing to give up:
“We can’t give up now, when our dreams are almost born.” (336)
On writerly tenacity (a psalm):
“Tell me, then, have you yet heard a thousand nos before hearing a single yes? Have you yet searched the utmost corners of your soul, to find your final effort? And even then, after all has been given, have you found a way to give again?”
“And tell me … in your time on the Twisty Path, have you borne what you never thought you could bear, yet still kept true to the compass of your soul? And have you…amid all the battles with the obstacles outside you, yet contended with the obstacles within you?”
“And in … this, your terrible hour of fear, have you proven you can wait out the dark and, when daylight comes, step into the gusting winds once more?”
“And have you yet learned to keep the faith, that at the end of all your suffering you will find a door? Have you yet learned that even with a hundred backward, sideways, and painful steps, the Twisty Path will still deliver you to Beauty in the final moment? And have you yet realized that every second you have spent on the wrong path has prepared the way for your ultimate deliverance?”
“And if you have not been and done and known these things … how can you say you know the Twisty Path? How dare you say the Path is at an end? How dare you say you are anything but a beginner?” (183)
Tenacity Tales is HIBOU’s monthly celebration of the tiny tenacities in a writerly life. If you have a tenacity tale you’d like to share, comment below or send me your pitch at hibou@substack.com. To learn more about what we’re looking for, read the original Tenacity Tale here.
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Climate Fiction
His three favorite writers on story structure are Robert McKee, K. M. Weiland, and Christopher Vogler
This is rich, rich, rich. Thank you!
Thank you for writing this Cathy. You really got my work, and also somehow boiled down a meandering hour long conversation to its absolute essence. The best!