Ashes in the Rain—Origins, Themes, and Craft

Clara Wren

Right, let’s light this episode with that unmistakable, storm-soaked atmosphere—Vincent, can you bring us back to the first image that sparked Ashes in the Rain? You’ve hinted before that sometimes a story doesn’t start where you expect.

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Yeah—I mean, some stories just arrive like a weather front, pressing in until you have to pay attention. For this one, the image was just… two people under an umbrella, right after a night that went sideways, not even looking at each other. I actually thought at first it’d be a romance—turns out, it was about loyalty, and the cost of keeping silent after chaos.

Clara Wren

Isn’t it wild how the heart of a story hides itself? That image makes me think instantly of the book’s title, too. Ashes in the Rain. There’s both destruction and cleansing—grief and, well, maybe a bit of confession too?

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Exactly. The title’s where that tension lives, yeah? Rain’s about letting things out, washing away, but the ash—that’s what’s left behind after everything ends. There’s beauty and wreckage all tangled together. I kept circling those two ideas—confession, and what actually endures after the storm.

Clara Wren

You know, you shared this once—a memory from your time abroad. That moment at a crossroads, rain falling on everyone, but nobody speaking, and it was just… everyone knew, in their bones, survival was in the silence. There’s power in sharing that kind of space, especially when there’s nothing left to say.

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Yeah, sometimes it really is the silence that’s the most honest voice—or, well, maybe the oldest. I remember watching people after some border checkpoint in Cambodia, coiled tight but together, nobody asking questions, just sharing an umbrella for five silent minutes as rain pattered down. That was as deep as any conversation. The book sort of found its pulse there—that loyalty and quiet endurance more than anything dramatic or grand.

Clara Wren

Let’s take that thread and follow it into the themes, because what’s so striking on the page is what you leave unsaid. What are the ideas readers can hang onto as they turn the pages?

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Well, the ones that stuck with me—grace without permission, I guess you could say. Little acts of kindness in the middle of a mess, and how the weather carries conversations when, honestly, words would do more harm. Sometimes the simplest gesture—sharing part of a meal, drying a coat—becomes the whole story. And I wanted that restraint to shape the book, too: short scenes, white space, not explaining every emotion—letting objects and atmosphere do the real speaking.

Clara Wren

I love the way the scenes breathe. Everything’s spare, but nothing’s empty. You do this thing—I don’t know if you’re aware of it—where the camera’s back just a little, letting us watch, letting small signs—like a battered mug or a coat or a door left ajar—stand in for all that isn’t said out loud. That sort of craft… it invites us to feel the aftershock more than the action, don’t you think?

D. Vincent Delorenzo

That’s exactly it. The moral lives in the distance, and the resonance is in the everyday stuff. The camera “steps back ten inches,” as I keep telling myself. I always believed the most profound truths were in what’s only glimpsed—let the white space and the objects hold memory, tension, even mercy, and skip the sermon.

Clara Wren

And there’s this bit—a recurring metaphor, about ‘the wrong flag’—that gives such weight to a whole decade of conflict, but you don’t tell us everything. It’s, um, reminiscent actually of a moment you mentioned once about seeing a child holding impossibly still at a tense checkpoint. That kind of stillness, that… survival through silence—it just radiates off the page.

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Clara Wren

Let’s bring listeners closer now with a passage from Ashes in the Rain—a scene that lives and breathes that endurance and stillness. Vincent, would you read it for us?

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Of course. Here goes: No one ever counts the breaths you hold when soldiers pass. No one writes down how still a child can be when the wrong flag is raised. But this family did not vanish. They endured. And the rain, for once, did not wash them away.

Clara Wren

That’s a line you feel in your bones. The way you write about breath-holding—the body becoming a small room when danger passes—it echoes so much about trauma and resilience. It’s not just fear on the page, it’s, well, instructions for survival, almost…

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Yeah, endurance is a quiet verb. Sometimes what keeps us alive is what we don’t say—that instinct toward stillness. Especially for kids, they’re fluent in that sort of silent survival long before they can give it words. And about ‘the wrong flag’—that’s exactly the job of a single, clean image. If a flag plants a decade of context, you don’t need a whole history essay right there.

Clara Wren

And that last line—the rain offering mercy, not erasure. That weather as both threat and reprieve—it feels like grace, arriving without anyone asking for it, you know?

D. Vincent Delorenzo

Sometimes weather is the most impartial judge. When it feels like an ally on a page, it usually means the characters have truly earned whatever peace it offers. I, um, might overuse that—letting the rain carry what can’t be put into dialogue. But I think restraint—letting readers enter the silence—does more work than I ever could with explanation.