The Concord Diary

By Peter Cowlam

Student Marcus Fyer is at odds with both family and campus life, and is about to quit university and just take off. His father arranges a course of therapy to see him through his crisis, though Marcus finds himself at odds with that arrangement too. His therapist can get very little out of him, so suggests he keep a diary recording his reactions to his therapy group. This Marcus does, but what can his diary tell us about his state of mind?

• Language: English
• Publisher: CentreHouse Press
• Release date: Jul 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798201009250

Peter Cowlam

Peter Cowlam studied Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. He has had plays performed at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth, and by the Dartington Playgoers, and has had readings at the State University of New York and for the Theatre West 100 Plays project in Bristol, England.As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. In total he has had three novels published independently.He has had four collections of haikuesque poems published (one in collaboration with Kathryn Kopple), also independently, and as poet and writer of fiction his work has appeared on the Fairlight Books website, in En Bloc, The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, The Brown Boat, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Liberal, the Criterion, and others.Peter Cowlam is the Literary Editor at Ars Notoria (arsnotoria.com). He can be contacted at [e-mail]

Book preview

The Concord Diary

Peter Cowlam

Peter Cowlam has asserted his rights under the Copyright and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by CentreHouse Press at Smashwords 2023. Cover image Shutterstock / Receh Bukit Jaya.

Student Marcus Fyer is at odds with both family and campus life, and is about to quit university and just take off. His father arranges a course of therapy sessions to see him through his crisis, though Marcus finds himself at odds with that arrangement too. His therapist can get very little out of him, so suggests he keep a diary recording his reactions to his designated therapy group. This Marcus does, but what can his diary tell us about his state of mind?

CONTENTS

The Concord Diary

• Case Notes

• Commentary

Other Books by Peter Cowlam

• New King Palmers

• Across the Rebel Network

• Who’s Afraid of the Booker Prize?

• Marisa

• Opus Thirty Three Bagatelles

• Manifesto

• Meakin

For more information on these and other titles visit the author’s website.

The Concord Diary

Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

—Ralp Waldo Emerson, ‘Self-Reliance’, Essays

Case Notes

In a hurried phone call from my new boss Andrew Blaise I was told he’d been called away, and wouldn’t be here for my first three days at Belvedere, the retreat he ran a few miles short of Concord. According to him, his unexpected absence would prove a help rather than a hindrance, as his newest client, whose name was Marcus Fyer, was also due at Belvedere on Monday. In a sense we would help each other, forced in our different ways to adapt to a new routine.

Fyer’s father had called us several weeks ago (apparently), a man busy commercially, as CEO of an agglomerate never short of the Dow Jones. He offered his own diagnosis, even before our sessions began, and knew before we did what Marcus’s trouble was. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, a condition fully revealed in Marcus’s final days at high school. Then as now he had failed to keep to the same set of friends for more than a few weeks together, but despite that was always out with someone – to the detriment of his student life.

New to Belvedere I might have been, but this was not an unusual case. Despite pep talks and all kinds of incentive, Marcus’s problems hadn’t disappeared. He was studying politics, but having almost failed his exams was about to drop out. Of course, Fyer the elder wanted him to see it through, a point put less than delicately in the only background I