Daral Boles
AUTHOR
I am Daral Boles
Author photo is courtesy of Alex Delfont
I’m a writer turned therapist, turned writer again. Several decades ago, in my first career as an architectural journalist, I made my living with words, in a career that took me all over the country, and the world.
Then, when our three children were young, my husband and I embarked on a seven-year sojourn overseas, following his career to Brazil, The Netherlands, and England, before settling in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Four years after we returned to the States, in September 2000, Doug died suddenly and unexpectedly.
In the years that followed, I did what you do. I raised our family. And I went back to school in counseling, drawn by the pressing need to understand what had happened to us and how to live with that loss. My three children now have partners, and two have children of their own. As for me, I carried on as a counselor specializing in trauma and addiction, until a dream job in Portugal (or so I thought) came my way.
The Serra is Burning, which tells the story of that year in Portugal and the fire that consumed it, is my first foray into memoir, but it’s not my first book. That honor goes to a monograph on contemporary American house design, published by Rizzoli and co-authored with a colleague who served as a beta reader for The Serra is Burning. The publishing business has changed radically since the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when American House Now and the two books that followed it were published. The pleasure (and pain) of writing, happily, has not.
Part of the job of a journalist is to see the connections between things, between people and events. The job of a memoirist is to tell a story and in the process, ferret out the themes, the thread, the seam that runs through. For all the pain and confusion that resurfaced while I was writing The Serra is Burning, it also felt like coming home. I am so glad to be here. There is so much more to explore. Join me.
Why did I write this book?
It’s a compelling story. With action, danger, conflict, grace.
It’s a cautionary tale. A kind of anti-hero’s journey—the point being, if this happened to me it could happen to you.
It’s an exploration of vulnerabilities.
-
Of place (the pathos of a ruined agrarian culture; the Serra’s more recent and devastating fire history)
-
Of people (the way personality shapes our response to a crisis; how what we know and what we have experienced shapes what we can imagine)
-
Of regional and national history (the long-suffering Serra da Estrela; the fierce independence of its people and their mistrust of national government)
-
Of program (the struggles of a startup; team building and personnel conflict)
-
Of the clash between models: for-profit business as usual (hierarchical, investor-driven) versus clinical (responsive, in the moment, people-focused)
It’s also an exploration of regrowth and resilience (how evacuees came together to form the Fire People; how they looked after each other; what they learned from the fire)
Are you my reader?
That is, someone who finds this story compelling and intriguing, someone who is curious about cross-cultural encounters but who, over the course of the book, comes to a creeping sense of identification and resonance. Someone who asks: Is this a story that could only happen on a remote mountain in eastern Portugal? Or could this be my story someday?
