Mark Tate
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Having recently graduated from a community college, a young man decides to reward himself before his transfer to San Francisco State College with a bicycle trip to Canada in the summer. He travels solo from the Bay Area to British Columbia and has time to remember many boyhood experiences, some that are still troubling him like the sight of a dead man floating in a swimming pool. This is a coming-of-age story that unfolds amid impending crises: the war in Southeast Asia and his low draft number, racism, domestic violence, and madness; but there is also love and Shakespeare.
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Butterfly on the Wheel, Mark Tate’s new autobiographical novel — subtitled A Young Man’s Journey to Find Himself — dives into the past, namely the 1960s and 1970s in America. The war in Vietnam rages, Black Panthers are gunned down, and MLK and RFK are assassinated. It’s a troubled time and understandably, the sensitive protagonist at the heart of the narrative is also troubled. Time after time he remembers family members, friends, and lovers.
Butterfly on the Wheel offers a portrait of a young White man keenly aware of race and racism. His awareness makes the story timely in the age of Black Lives Matter. A page-turner, the novel is also poetic as befits an author who has published three poetry chapbooks. Read this novel and let it open your heart to the pain and the beauty in the world.
Jonah Raskin
author of Beat Blues, San Francisco, 1955
About Butterfly on the Wheel
Notes From The Author
Butterfly on the Wheel, as an auto-biographical novel, began from my notes about a solo bicycle trip I took to Canada when I was twenty years old. I had submitted a rough draft of short, short pieces to friend, Jonah Raskin, a retired SSU professor whose writing career I had been following, and his reaction sparked the form as presented in Part One. That is, the bicyclist reminisces about a lot of things while laboring over the pedals. That spark ignited questions about what happened to protagonist Warren Clifton when he went off to college in the Big City.
Is Butterfly an autobiography (memoir) or fiction (tale)?
About seventy percent of Part One is true, thirty percent fiction. In Part Two, the reverse: about seventy percent is fiction, thirty percent true. I leave this to the reader to sort out.
OTHER BOOKS BY MARK TATE
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This 400-page novel details the life of fictional character Kazumi Matsuoka, commonly known as “Mattie,” a vineyard owner in Sonoma County’s Russian River Valley AVA. As a young child she was forced with her family to live in an internment camp during WWII, but the story is not about internment; rather, it is about her life now, and about those people who revolve around her as she, the octogenarian poet, finds modern life unfolding in all its unexpectant wonder.
Mark Tate, a longtime resident of Sonoma County, has paid attention to the ways that life is lived in our part of the world. He has poured his keen insights into his big new novel, Beside the River, which cuts across time and space, moves from the present to the past and back again. You may not see your own life reflected in Beside the River, but you’re likely to see people and places you recognize. Tate’s epic has it all: the good and the bad, the wrongs and the rights, the flora and the fauna, cops and robbers, the landscapes and those who work them. One of the main characters in this multi-generation, multi-ethnic novel says, ‘One of the marvelous things about humans, we can figure out ways around obstacles. Sometimes, we figure out how to turn disadvantages into advantages.’ It’s in that generous spirit that Tate has written Beside the River, which renewed my sense of community and caring in our dark times.
Jonah Raskin
Author of the Tioga Vignetta series of murder mysteries
What a pleasure to have read Beside the River. You’ve written a promising novel and I enjoyed my immersion in the world you created, one rich with your descriptions of the natural environment, the intertwined lives of the characters, and the compassion that underlies the themes and premises.
Peg Alford Pursell
Author of A Girl Goes Into the Forest
Kazumi Matsuoka, haiku master and vineyard owner, having witnessed a near-fatal vehicle crash on her property, learns that the young woman in the overturned van is the daughter of her friend, English Professor Warren Clifton. Some of the characters we meet in the novel, Beside the River, return in this sequel to explore the reaches of their lives near the river. River’s End will immerse the reader in the struggles of drug addiction, homelessness, murder, bound in the whirlwind of climate change. It will present characters who search for friendship, love, freedom, and validation at the junction of the river and infinity.
Your book is magnificent. Bravo.
Jonah Raskin
Author of Tioga Vignetta murder mysteries
Just finished your excellent novel! I loved it! Specifically, I liked a lot of the characters and found them to be unique and believable. I liked the plot and the psychological thriller aspect of the novel. I like the reference to literature and the themes brought by the English professor character. I thought the theme of drug addiction and all the challenges surrounding that for the addicted person and the family was dealt with very well. And for me it was SO exciting to read a book set in my own neighborhood. So thank you so much for the opportunity to read both of your wonderful novels!
Dr. Felicity A. McNichol
retired Internal Medicine MD
Winner of the Blue Light Press Book Award, 2023
From the Preface to Walking Scarecrow:
“. . . as I read Hanshan, known as Cold Mountain; and Bashō, a haiku master who adopted the name of a plant growing near his hut as a nom de plume; and other ancient poets who lived quiet lives, I felt I was on the right path. What began as a homage to Hanshan continued over several years in my own hermitage as a dialogue with the reclusive poet of whom we know so little . . . I kept my Asian-inspired jottings in a box in my closet. I thought of these writings as divergences from the poetry I’d been writing since the early 1970s, and I adopted the name Pineshadow as my pseudonym. As I wrote, keeping in mind the ancient poets, I imagined that as Pineshadow I could have dialogues with these “scarecrows” walking with me in spirit.”
From the sanctuary of Pineshadow (both place name and poetic persona), Mark Tate composes moments of tender, meditative attention, reminding us of beauty and intimacy, as well as what is lost to addiction, dementia, death, and delusion in a fractured world bent on following darkness. "How do we lose our way with this much light?" the poet asks. How indeed! Alluding to the Tang poet Hanshan, Tate writes, "I use what remedy/Is at hand to save the world." Tate's depiction of a Zen tea ceremony midway through the collection offers a kind of ars poetica, simultaneously describing the ritual and his verses, "bowing to every honored thing." With empathy and deft lyricism, the poet blesses our times of darkness with light and transforms them into an experience of the sacred.
Terry Ehret
Author of Lost Body and Night Sky Journey
Mark Tate's new volume of poems, Walking Scarecrow, is a microcosm of large-scale wisdom and beauty. Generously including bits of conversation with the ancients—Bashō, Li Po, and others—Tate interweaves deep questions about how to live richly and well with homespun scenes of his simple, rural life. Cold Mountain runs like a gold vein through the quartz of these poems. "Philosopher and Perch" and "Tea" stand out. Replete with the doings of birds and local flora and fauna, Tate's keenly observant eye, philosophical heart, and skillful use of surreal images invite us into the kitchens and backrooms of his world.
Sandra Anfang
Author of Finishing School and Looking Glass Heart
Open the pages of Walking Scarecrow and join Mark Tate, in his poetic nom de plume of Pineshadow, as he walks in the footsteps of his beloved Hanshan in rural Northern California. On these ventures, like a walking scarecrow, Pineshadow leads us by the lakes and under the moon, in the shadow of pine trees and in the company of crows, thousands of miles and centuries away from Hanshan, that ancient Chinese poet about whom so little is known. But the questions are the same: How do we live? How do we love? How do we find shelter?
Carolyn Miller
Author of Route 66 and Its Sorrow and After Cocteau
About the Author
Mark Tate was born at Hamilton AFB in Marin County, California, and grew up in Northern California except for a three year stay in Japan, ages five through eight when his father was stationed at an airbase during the Korean War. He graduated from San Francisco State University in the early seventies (BA 1971, MA 1974) He is the author of three poetry chapbooks, Pommes de Terre, Sur Lie*, and Rooms and Doorways (Author House, 2001, 2002, 2003), and three novels, Beside the River, its sequel River’s End (McCaa Books, 2021), and Butterfly on the Wheel (House Finch Books, 2024). His work has appeared in Doorknobs and Bodypaint, Genosko Literary Journal, and at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, and most recently Blue Light Press. His book of poems Walking Scarecrow won the Blue Light Press Book of the Year, published December 2023. He served for ten years on the Sonoma County Poet Selection Committee for the poets laureate of that county. He is a long-time resident of Sonoma County where he lives with his wife, Lori.