Interview with D. J. Pratt, Author of Dominiques Journey – NewInBooks

What’s the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

Honestly? The seed for this series was a self-challenge to experiment with characterization, voice, and perspective. I like architected books, books that gradually explain themselves as the plot builds, and with characters I can care about. I constructed a universe to meet that challenge, and one idea led to another. I had mapped out the trilogy before I wrote a word. The trilogy is centered around a cause-and-effect loop tied to the characters’ metaphysical and emotional journeys. The first book, Prima Nocta, explores one part of that loop through two souls who reincarnate and find each other over and over. Dominique’s Journey explores another.

Dominique was only one of twelve principal characters in the other book, a 16th-century French scholar whose single incarnation left me with a loose thread. How would a man raised in Renaissance France respond to the problems posed by the universe’s larger mystery? Physically, he has to find his way across an extraordinarily difficult landscape, and I loved researching what that journey would actually have felt like and what each stage needed to accomplish in the story. But I also loved building his interior journey: how does he come to understand things for which his milieu has no vocabulary? That became a twenty-one-year journey from France across Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Asia, and present-day India, eventually reaching a hidden Tantric ashram in the Himalayas. I was fascinated by what might happen if an intelligent, skeptical Westerner encountered different religious and philosophical traditions without knowing in advance which one was “right.” What would survive when he began putting them together? The result became less a book about finding answers than about what it means to be human.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

This one is dangerous. I could lose an afternoon doing it.

For Dominique — “Hallelujah,” Leonard Cohen. Sacred and sensual tangled together. Seeking from the PoV of an imperfect being.

For Léonide, perhaps “Into the Mystic” by Van Morrison. She is the person who turns Dominique’s intellectual curiosity into a journey he can no longer avoid.

Avice: I’m thinking “Fields of Gold” by Sting. There’s a dichotomy in the character. This song evokes who she is inside. Tenderness, memory, a love experienced across time, and a bittersweet, melancholy quality that feels very Avice.

For Amir, I’m thinking “I Hope You Dance” by Lee Ann Womack. Amir has his own answers, but doesn’t expect them to become Dominique’s answers. He wants Dominique to keep looking, keep experiencing, and keep wondering.

“The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel is my first pick for Trikala. She confronts what people refuse to see. She’s not silent, but hears more in silence than most of us hear in a cacophony. Plus… she’s dealing with a lot of darkness of her own.

And Leela? I think she’d refuse to have a theme song assigned to her, then explain why the question itself reveals something I haven’t understood.

What’s your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

I’m an eclectic reader. I’m drawn to books that give me something to think about after I’ve finished them, whether they’re literary fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, philosophy, history, or nonfiction about how human beings and societies work. That’s probably why my fiction is difficult to put neatly on one shelf. Dominique’s Journey is historical fiction, a love story, an adventure, and eventually a fairly serious exploration of spirituality and consciousness. Apparently, I don’t believe genres should be allowed to mind their own business.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

Oh, good Lord! I’ve been knee-deep in writing, and lately the only time I’ve been able to “read” is listening to audiobooks while driving somewhere. I’m going to take some time for myself now and touch paper again. I can do eBooks. I can do audiobooks. But I can lose myself in paper. Something about touching it…

First on my list is The Alchemist. Everyone says Dominique’s Journey has a lot in common with that one, so I’d like to learn why. The Red Tent comes up in comparisons too, so it’s on the list.

Researching this book pulled me more deeply into Tantric Yoga and Buddhist philosophy. I’ve studied it, but I really dug deep because I wanted to be fastidious about honoring those traditions. There are already several books under my belt from that experience, and I still have a couple more on the pile.

And I have a bunch of books about society, ecology, and science waiting for those times I’m feeling serious.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

Léonide’s point-of-view chapter. It appears in this book as a reprint for people who read this one first (or only), but was originally published in Prima Nocta. What’s going on in her head is fascinating.

In Dominique’s Journey, certainly the culmination. The whole book leads to an unexpected reveal in the last chapter, with several threads coming clear at once. To me, writing it felt like Christmas where I’m finally going to give the present that’s been sitting under the tree for a month. And Leela’s final journal entry especially… layers in layers.

It was also satisfying to finally get Dominique into the Ashram of the Purple Lotus, when the journey becomes less about readiness and more about inner culmination. There are several scenes with Avice, Trikala, and Leela that I loved writing too, because Dominique is intelligent, educated, and accustomed to understanding things, and they have the remarkable ability to make him realize that he doesn’t.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

I’m not sure they’re quirky enough to qualify. I don’t have a lucky mug, and no cat is permitted editorial authority. But I do spend an unreasonable amount of time researching details that may ultimately occupy one sentence. Writing a novel that crosses 16th-century France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman world, Persia, and India… and then covering with authority and respect several different spiritual perspectives… gives nearly unlimited opportunities to disappear down research rabbit holes. The dangerous part is that I enjoy the rabbit holes. I lost a lot of time on just getting one sentence right here and there.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

Personally? The serenity philosophy—strength to change the things I must, serenity to accept the things I cannot, and the wisdom to tell the difference. Maybe it sounds like inspirational needlepoint, but it’s important to me. Some of the most interesting things I’ve learned began with realizing that something I was quite certain about wasn’t quite so certain, and the things that caused lost sleep were, at the end of the day, a lot of wasted agitation. I still seek wisdom. It’s even a tattoo on my arm. It’s also very much at the heart of Dominique’s Journey. He learns to move from a burning desire to understand to a gracious place where he can just experience.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

That we don’t have to choose between questioning and wonder, Dominique begins his journey wanting answers. What he gradually discovers is that different cultures, religions, relationships, and people can hold pieces of something larger without any one of them possessing the whole. I’d be delighted if a reader finished the book a little more curious about ideas outside their own experience, and perhaps a little less certain that the boundaries we’ve inherited are the only way to understand one another.