Resurrection (Eden Book 3) (33 page)

If you haven’t read
Resurrection
first, skip this paragraph, because it contains a spoiler.
Resurrection
ends on a cliff hanger, literally. When I began writing
Resurrection
, I did just that. I sat down and I wrote. And I got the story that I wanted to tell out of me. But when I went to revise, I ran into a problem. Namely, I was thirty to forty thousand words over what I needed to be. I was faced with a dilemma. I could prune even more than I already had, and leave certain storylines (e.g., Gwen and Mickey’s) unresolved, or I could stick to my guns and tell the story the way I wanted, which would necessitate a fourth book. Thing is, I’d promised a trilogy, but, well, now we have something more than that.

Anthony’s class is loosely modeled on classes I have had the privilege of sitting in with Ira Shor, one of the brightest guys I know. Ira was personal friends and collaborated with Paulo Freire, the seminal figure in Critical Pedagogy. A good starting point, if Critical Pedagogy interests you, would be Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
; Shor’s
Critical Teaching and Everyday Life
; and Joe Kincheloe’s
Critical Pedagogy Primer
. Anthony’s class touches on ideas discussed in Goran Therborn’s
The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology
and Val Plumwood’s
Feminism and the Mastery of Nature
.

I owe a lot of people a lot of thanks, and I will never remember to thank them all, so I offer my apologies to any I leave out. I would like to thank my parents and my Uncle Mike, the people who taught me to love to read. Thank you to the people who made me love to write: from Kurt Vonnegut, Sherman Alexie, and Joe Brown to George Pelecanos and Andrew Vachss to Jerry Ahern, Jack Hild and a whole bunch of authors laboring under the Gold Eagle imprimatur. Early encouragement was provided in grade school by friends who appeared in the action-horror stories I wrote; a practice that continued in high school.

I’d like to thank the people who help me keep my sanity. At home, this is my wife, Myoungmee, and our children, Tony Michael and Honalee. At work, the emo-support lunch bunch of Jim Doller, Sean Pope, and Ed Reisert, as well as Kevin Crowley and my KEA crew. I’d like to thank those who believed in me as a writer and nurtured my voice: Robert Kennedy, Joe Kincheloe and Shirley Steinberg, and Jacob Kier. For their inspiration, I will always admire George Romero, Richard Matheson, and Stephen King. To the ones paving the way—J.L. Bourne, Robert Kirkman, and Max Brooks—thanks are due for helping to provide the opportunities opening up to the genre. Thank you to Permuted Press for taking the chance and re-issuing Eden then publishing its sequels. A special thanks to Louise Bohmer for her fine work of editing and her encouraging words. To the many readers who have contacted me, I appreciate your taking the time to read my books and get in touch with me. It’s humbling and validating. If you haven’t already said hello, please do! (
[email protected]
)

Tony Monchinski

Peekskill, New York