In an era of technology, attention spans have continued to fade and media is consumed more and more through devices. Phil Pfuehler, a retired River Falls Journal editor and long-time area resident, dives into that theme in his first novel, “The Breathing Pages.”

“The writing style reads like a fable, a fractured fairy tale, with narrators reacting to their surroundings not through the lens of cold logic but via a dreamscape, an imaginative prism. The overall theme is a longing by some people, a very few, to preserve the remaining print books in an age when books and book reading have given way to having all eyes and attention fixated on electronic tablets, laptops and mobile devices,” Pfuehler said.

Pfuehler was the editor at the River Falls Journal for 27 years, living in the city from 1990-2017. He met his wife Kim in college at UW-Eau Claire and has spent time living and working in both Eau Claire and Minneapolis.

For most of his adult life, Pfuehler has been interested in writing a novel, jotting down notes, putting together short stories, creating poems and building fragments of a novel. The editor job ate up a lot of his free time, so it took retirement to truly raise the opportunity. Now, Pfuehler has a trilogy of three “standalone stories that are thematically linked” into one novel.

“The last one is about a lost batch of story characters trying desperately to stay alive by marathon running at night -- instead of sleeping. The aim is to keep moving and stay awake so their existences aren't snuffed out. There is also an encroaching overlap between story characters and writers until it reaches the point that identities are blurred,” Pfuehler said. “While all of this sounds abstract, and it is, I've tried to make sure the prose writing is clear and readable, with hopefully a curious set of circumstances and surroundings that will lure readers into the contents of the book.”

Pfuehler wanted to write a novel that was relevant to his life. After decades working at a newspaper, books and technology felt like a topic to tackle.

“The novel is also about declining literacy and features mobs of people, the unread, who comport themselves like zombies and roam the streets aimlessly, hypnotized by phones that they never let go of or look away from,” Pfuehler said.

He said while the novels are abstract, he said they are “clear and readable,” and he hopes the plot and setting will draw people in.

“I can safely say that my trilogy novel isn't what you'd call 'beach reading.' I think you can lose yourself in the dreamy plots, especially if you aren't afraid to be baffled occasionally and aren't looking for concrete solutions and rational answers,” Pfuehler said. “I agree with what the novelist Jesse Balls has said about his literature: ‘I believe that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living.’ I would never call ‘The Breathing Pages’ a philosophical novel, because at times it has a lowbrow, almost comic-book tone, but it may cause some readers to reflect on their lives and how they view the world.”

The book can be purchased through Amazon, but Pfuehler hopes area bookstores and libraries pick it up soon as well.

“That area will always mean a lot to me. We first lived in the city [of River Falls], on West Park Street across from charming Glen Park. Later we moved to the country, Town of Kinnickinnic, which was in St. Croix County, in a house we built there,” Pfuehler said. “I enjoyed living in both places, particularly taking meandering walks in the city along the Kinni with my dogs, and then enjoying a more laid-back, rustic way of life in the country.”
Pfuehler thanked his wife Kim, as well as daughters Maria and Julia. Julia is an artist and designed a cover for the novel. He also thanked his friend and former River Falls Journal coworker Mike Longaecker for being a “sounding board” through multiple rough drafts of the novel. Additionally, he thanked retired UWRF English professor Ruth Wood for helping to edit and her husband, newspaper columnist Dave Wood for providing a blurb for the back cover along with Ruth.

“The title ‘The Breathing Pages’ not only has a literal place in my novel but also a figurative one, one that persists throughout all three stories. It's that the books we keep and cherish do come alive for us and become almost as essential to life as the act of breathing,” Pfuehler said. “So, you have pages being turned while reading that are almost in rhythm to the very act of breathing. They're melded together -- thus, breathing pages. Through it all, we experience separate and distinct lives through the books we hold onto and read over and over.”