The dedication to Keziah's Song risks sparking speculative ideas regarding the women in my life. Before unhelpful theories are spun up, let me explain who my three Keziahs are.
The first Keziah is Job's second daughter from the ending of the book of Job, which is a rather large poem located just a bit left of centre in the Bible. It's a powerful book, and Job's three daughters at the end have always been an enigma to me. They are named when none of Job's other children get names. They are provided with inheritance when Job's earliest daughters did not get an inheritance, nor was it the practice in Job's era to provide one. And they signify something about a transition from suffering to blessing. There are details regarding how Job's daughters are portrayed at the end of the Book of Job that elude me, as confessed at the end of Even the Monsters, an extended memoir-cum-commentary on Job that I published in 2015. Keziah, in this case, signifies the historical person, the work I put into Even the Monsters, the personal context for wanting to write such a book and so on. The first Keziah, and all she stands for, means a very great deal to me, and I look forward to meeting her one day.
The second Keziah, I'll skip for a moment.
The third Keziah, the "and this one" of the dedication, is the one in the novel, Keziah's Song. Now we've gone from a real, ancient history Keziah to a fictional one. Dedicating a book to a fictional character whose story is told within that very same book would seem like a shade of fiction/reality boundary-blurring suggestive of a mental health concern. Welcome to an author's brain. Keziah of Galilee has become more real to me than many living women I know. Not all, but many. I've spent more hours with her than I have with some of my blood relatives. And lest you misunderstand, she doesn't cooperate, do what I want I want her to do, or live up to my expectations half the time. The other half of the time, she surprises me, delights me, and arrives at places I didn't have the foresight to plan for her. When a character takes over your story, that's a good thing.
Now, back to the second Keziah. I married her.
Keziah (pronounced kez-EYE-ah) means cinnamon or cinnamon tree. A childhood friend of my wife's used to call her Cinnamon Girl (from Neil Young's 1970 first album with Crazy Horse), and so did I in our dating years when nicknames for each other seemed like the thing. She's my beautiful one (another potential root meaning of one of Job's daughter's names), the one who is named in my life, my inheritance, the one who signifies a transition from suffering to blessing. For the record, and particularly for the young, here's an unsolicited lesson from an old guy: you don't really get a Keziah in your life without battling a few monsters along the way. Eye your monsters critically — one of them, or a few of them, may be gates to your Keziah.
Some people are lucky to know one Keziah in their lifetime. I've been blessed with three. Keziah's Song is for them.