Author: laledavidson

My novel Blue Woman Burning was published by Emperor Books, an imprint of Red Penguin Books, in the fall of 2021: "In the cold descending breeze of the Altiplano between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon’s narcissistic mother bursts into flames before her family’s eyes. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way." Against the Grain, my latest novel, will be released on Earth Day 2022: “Against the Grain combines gorgeous poetry and romance with heart-stopping action, as the daughter of a rich CEO joins forces with a logger’s son to stop a huge lumber company from destroying an ancient redwood forest. The trees themselves become surprisingly powerful characters in this rich, multilayered novel. After reading Against the Grain, you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again,” says Matt Witten, bestselling author of The Necklace. My book of short stories, Strange Appetites, won the Adirondack Center for Writing People's Choice Award. I love all that is absurd, odd, and beautiful.
Fantasy, Literary Criticism, Magical Realism, Uncategorized

Depression and Other Reality Shifts

laledavidson

Depression*You wake up one morning and for no apparent reason, everything has changed. Your mind is caught in a dark loop, endlessly repeating that you have no friends, you’re ugly,  you’re fat, your writing is worthless, you have been teaching twenty years only to become a disorganized, boring, overly complex and uneasy teacher. And it’s not all in your head, because there was that comment from an acquaintance, that shaming rejection from publisher, those 30 agents who passed on your novel that was supposed to be your resurrection, that sidelong look from a colleague, and those student evaluations. When you stand at a party, no one comes up to talk with you, or people’s eyes go dull when you talk because you are so shallow. And why aren’t you like Karen Russell who at 24 got a story published in Zoetrope and now has a MacArthur genius grant? Anger builds at all the people who wronged you in big and little ways. You find yourself going over this same, dark, messy ground for the umpteenth time despite years of therapy.

You know this isn’t real. Only four days ago, you were thinking you were a loving, fascinating, beautiful person, as good as any published writer.

You know you should clap your hands over your ears, get out of bed, walk up the mountain past the shadows that tear at you, whispering. This isn’t real, you say to yourself, stumbling forward, not real, not real, not real, not. But the knowing comes from some part of your mind that has no flesh, and the voices aren’t on the outside, they’re inside. They’re the very cast of your blood chemistry, the design of your atoms, so real, so real, so real, that you think you would rather die than fight this invisible battle again, this civil war that makes you seem self pitying, irresponsible, disorganized, irritable, and erratic to others. And maybe you are, maybe it’s all just a matter of will, and you are lazy, lazy, lazy. Will you ever be free? The only honorable thing to do is quit your job so that the healthy people who deserve it can have it, or kill yourself so that you don’t have to walk this walk again.

If you have chosen badly, your spouse tells you he or she is sick of your shit, but if you’ve chosen well, he smiles sadly when he sees the signs and stands back knowing you’ll figure it out. Later he cleans the house and does the food shopping to lighten your load.

The survivalist part of your brain tells you that you have to exercise and eat right, and people will tell you to take medication, and maybe you should, but they scare you, so you don’t. You push yourself outside, because in the end that is the thing that has always saved you. And as you walk you call the right friend, and she, instead of trying to talk you out of it, says, yes, that’s how it feels, and it’s hard. And then the tears come, and the two sides of you, the chemical and the rational talk, taking turns with each other and your friend. And you remember not to ever judge others again, because this is how it feels to be inside depression, and no one from the outside knows what it’s like. It looks like nothing. It sounds like a head cold.

A half hour later, after the walk, if that was the particular cast of your genetic dice today, you feel better, but jittery. Your brain feels like it has been wiped clean. You can’t quite remember which street your house is on, because it looks different somehow, the angle has shifted or the light, or you are seeing it from a different time in your life, a time kicked up by that sudden bout of depression. The words threw, through and thru don’t look right, and you know that you knew which was which only yesterday, but for now, you don’t. You swim back through the murk to reclaim your former self and hope others don’t notice. You remember that it’s important to be who you are even if only a fraction of the world wants it, that it may not be the right time for you to become a successful writer, but that you must carry the flag of who you are until that time comes, even if it comes after you die.

This is one of the places magic realism comes from.

*Note to my friends: Don’t worry, I wrote this over a year ago. Thanks to the anti-depressant duloxetine building on years of therapy, I’m fine. This really is just a rumination on one of the many ways that fantasy and magic realism represent a facet of reality.
Advice, Pep Talks, Tools of the Trade

The Strange Life of Words or Why I Write

laledavidson

I dreamt once that words were people, refusing to speak as I walked by. The image neatly sums up my lifelong conflict with language. I adore words. I want to stroke them and live inside their bony curves. A variety comes to me easily, when I’m talking to friends or teaching. It’s a joy to be able to stretch out my hand and have the exact word appear, with the right heft and color, reverberating with history. Yet when asked to define a word, like “fluent” for example, I can’t.

A strong physical sense arises. I know exactly what it means, my hand wants to gesture, but the words to define it stumble out. How is it possible to know and love a word, but not be able to define it with words? How can I love something that is so difficult? Aren’t we supposed to be drawn to the things we are good at?

This paradox has only grown more pressing as I’ve devoted my life to the teaching of writing. I might be walking outdoors, and words will parade through my mind like children playing dress up, trying to shape themselves into silver willow fronds, or simulate the taste of late afternoon sun. But when I sit down before a white page, they scatter.

It happened just the other day, as I walked my dog down our dirt road. I came to a bog pond where a blue heron lives. What I thought was him standing in the water turned out to be a few dry stalks with an orb spider web illuminated by dew. Just beyond the periphery of my vision, the actual heron launched himself silently into the sky, huge, blue-gray and prehistoric. My first impulse – to run home and write it down, to hone the words until they leapt – was followed immediately by doubt. It takes so much time that might be better spent on students, family, and community. Surely writing should only be reserved for obsessed geniuses – or at the very least, for those to whom it comes easily.

I remember my first story like an alcoholic remembers her first drink. Even then conflict was present. I was six years old. I had just returned from Germany to my hometown. Having learned to read and write in German, I was having difficulty spelling in English. My second grade teacher set me up with a tutor.

I sat at the cafeteria table and the tutor’s words floated down from somewhere up above like bubbles. “Vowels,” she said. “A, e, i, o, u.” They bounced over my head. I stared at the gray table uncomprehending.

More words floated down. “Why don’t you write your own story?”

These words electrified me. I sat up straight and looked up at my tutor’s mouth. I could write my own story? The idea whirled inside me. All those stories my mother read to us that ended terribly. I could change that. I could create a whole new world.

That very night, in a room I shared with my two brothers, I huddled at the end of my bed, enfolding myself in my curtains. I stared at the stone tower of the church across the empty street, bathed in the colors of the traffic light, now red, now green, now yellow. Velvet mystery infused me, and I jotted down my first few lines. For a half hour I flew, my heart large. I had a beginning – the townspeople had trapped a monster inside a church, nailed the roof down on him like a coffin lid. But the huge flathead nails were coming loose. How would it end?

No answer. I sat with for a child’s eternity. The abyss yawned. My wings collapsed.

That’s how my love of writing began – stemming from difficulty, offering liberation and ending in angst.

Ironically, it is that very difficulty that called me to the teaching profession: it helps me help others overcome theirs. More importantly, the undeniable force and magic of words keeps calling me back.

Years ago, living in Paris trying to be a writer, I sat alone in a tiny white-walled apartment at the top of a spiral stair. I tinkered with a piece of writing that later got published. It was a tortured process, a steeping of self in words and wordlessness, a game of hide and seek with a host of internal critics, a dance to catch stars in my skirt without burning a hole in it, a leap into and over the abyss. Under certain conditions, if we strike the right words against each other in just the right way, they catch fire. A piece of writing emerged incrementally with elastic between each word so taut that if I pulled on them, they snapped. All else fell away and a stark truth emerged. This was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I couldn’t think of anything else I’d rather do.

Even though I’ve quit writing many times over the years, I kept returning. And finally I have come to accept the fractiousness of writing. Writing is a set of diverse and sometimes opposing mental and emotional operations. Wild and often unbiddable, it requires that we leap back and forth between the different sides of our brains. On the one hand we must free associate and on the other hand we must choose, discard, catch and order. And it doesn’t stop there: we must be emotional and rational, verbal and spatial, personal and universal, private and public.

Worse yet, it comes with no map. We might draw a map, hold the teacher’s map in our hands, but the road changes with each new sentence, sprouting new paths. The possible routes are endless, and yet some paths work and others don’t. Forget asking why.

Even more threatening, writing is an exposure – you are committing a part of yourself to permanence for the eyes of others.

Complicating everything, some of us think more verbally while others think primarily physically, in a cocktail of chemicals and images and physical sensations. Stuffing that felt-sense into the linearity of language is a devilish challenge and changes the originating impulse. But that very transformation is what we seek. As with a foreigner writing in a non-native tongue, the alien perspective lifts language to new heights. In just this way our difficulty with language gives writing its beauty.

Writing by its very nature requires that you throw yourself out over an abyss and hope that the act of jumping will force new wings.

I’ve come to the conclusion we writers are like flowing water. Some of us, like Stephen King and Joyce Carol Oates, are waterfalls as big as Niagara. And some of us are creeks. We have less to say, or it takes us a long time to say it, we meander all over the place, and we dry up seasonally. But we’re all part of the watershed; we all end up in the same place, the great, deep ocean, the clouds, the sky.

So – what I’m left with is this, I don’t write because it’s easy or because I’m a genius. I write for that moment when we physically inhabit the world and let the structure of the galaxy or the chemistry of a leaf come into us. When the brilliance of the universe comes through our brain’s synaptic cocktail into words that transport others, it is a spiritual moment, a connection to something greater than ourselves. Our words are the sun-crusted spider web, earth-bound, reflecting light, that sometimes turn out to be a great blue heron launching us out of the bog into the air. It’s a blessed moment. A moment we all need.

 

Note: I wrote the following essay for the SUNY Adirondack English Division blog. It was the vehicle I used to break through a three-year writing block. Later, this essay inspired the story, “The Intensest Rendezvous,” which is still looking for a home. The story came out on the fly, I later realized, because I had outlined it in this essay. Whenever I stop writing for a period of time, I now know how to get back into it thanks in large part to Rosann Bane’s Around the Writer’s Block.

Publication Announcements

People’s Climate March

laledavidson

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Central Park West bloomed 400,000 people that day as we carried earth on our shoulders. Charley Chaplin bobbed and tilted beside that blue-green sphere waving an “Oops!” sign. Green haired Captain Planet flexed his rubber pectorals, and Gandolf yelled, “You shell not pass!”

After a moment of silence a sea of voices roared down the avenue and the crowd began to march.

Hurricane-hatted men in black strode on stilts and rained silver beads while white-masked iceberg dancers zig-zagged. Ahead, a man in a business suit drenched in sweat crawled, dragging a brazier of smoking ice behind.

Papier maché bees wreathed the flowered head of “mother earth” and the statue of liberty wore a life jacket. Women with bushes instead of hair wove the crowd and a teenage girl stood on the park wall, her sharp features wreathed by a tree. When she hopped down, she left an empty space in the branches. “May the forest be with you,” said a sign. “Tree hugging capitalist” said another. A girl sat atop her father’s shoulders holding her own sign: “Greed = Death.” A college student tapped a song on clam-shell bra, “I speak for seashells” painted in blue on her belly.

Orange robed monks beat tambourines and we passed a host of Buddhists meditating on a hill, smiling statues. Everywhere, Native Americans chanted and African Americans orated.

Economic, environmental, racial, religious, political agendas combined for one cause, one earth.

Beneath our feet, tree roots uncobbled the street, and a dandelion banner waved “Slow Resistance.”

Among all these lovers, artists and warriors, another world became possible for as many moments as we spoke it.

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I’m pleased to announce that my flash fiction, “Ending Hunger” appears in the autumn issue of Gone Lawn: A Webjournal of Artistic and Progressive Literature. “Ending Hunger” is a modern take on Daphne escaping Apollo. In Metamorphoses, Ovid wrote that Daphne was a naiad and daughter of the river god. Apollo became infatuated with her (some say Eros was messing with him) and chased after her– presumably to have his way with her. Rape in other words. Determined to stay a virgin, she called out to her father or the earth goddess Gaia for help. Before Apollo could overtake Daphne, she turned into the laurel tree. Ever after, Apollo wore her branches wreathed around his head. I’m embarrassed by Daphne’s reasons for rejecting sex, and I don’t recommend her solution for saving the planet from human hunger, but her voice both spoke and unspoke to me one winter day as I walked my dog and looked at my arm among leafless branches. You might wonder at the strange language use at the end: words like “afirm,”  “nowing,” “sunfit,” “downsink,” and “sunhumming.” In most cases, I’m turning a noun into a verb, or merging words. It’s something Emily Dickinson did. Daphne is losing her ability to speak as she turns into a tree. Her grammar is changing as she changes. Her nouns are becoming verbs as she becomes something we think of as a noun (a tree), which is really a verb. “This” also becomes a verb at the very end. As a tree, she is living in a perpetual state of this-ing. Chinese characters nouns are like this…nouns are things in motion, a form of chi — life energy. T. Click here if you want to read “Ending Hunger.” Only 485 words.

Interview, Publication Announcements, Uncategorized

The Collagist: An Interview

laledavidson

In June, my story, “The Opal Maker” had the good fortune of being published in the 59th issue of The Collagist, which had come to my attention via Amber Sparks, who writes humorous, magical realist fiction.

I asked editor Gabriel Blackwell for an interview to try to get a sense of whether there was a certain type of story the magazine was trying to promote, something we writers are always trying to figure out when we decide who to send to, and something editors usually ask us to try to do when they say, “Read the magazine before you submit.” I am also interested in questions of genre, as I find I’m devoted to the literary fantastic, though there are many realist stories that I also adore.

As you will see in the following interview, he wonderfully eludes all my attempts to pin him down, and in the process describes the difference between an artist’s approach to art vs. an academic’s or publisher’s approach.

Flannery O’Connor once said, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.” which paradoxically suggests that all those literary analyses we read in school and were taught to write are not really an explanation of a story, but rather a completely different message that uses the story as a spring board.

In much the same way, Gabriel Blackwell urges us to experience literature without the confines of preconceptions and genre frameworks, and to write what we want.  I, on the other hand, am of two minds.  On the one hand, I’m a low-brow academic, meaning I see the usefulness of trying to define things, but understand that no definition is truly adequate. The experience of life can never be be fully quantified. On the other hand, I’m a fiction writer who has never written anything that truly fits in one genre or another.  What do you think?  Is the concept of genre limiting or helpful as we seek to understand, write and publish literature?

LD: On your “about” page, you say that The Collagist publishes “powerful, progressive literature.”  What does that mean to you? Does the magazine have an aesthetic or a pattern that tends to show up either by unconscious or conscious design?  Many of the pieces that appear in The Collagist seem to fall under the category of magic realism or fabulism. What can you say about these choices

GB: Our “about” page precedes my time as editor of the magazine, so I can’t take credit for it. I do of course hope others will find the work we publish powerful, and so, without intending to dodge the question, I very much hope readers of the magazine will spend more time reading its contents than its “about” page; those fictions and poems and essays are far more complex and interesting than any description I could possibly give of them. (Or, as the case may be, a predecessor may have given of them.)

As far as genre (and aesthetic, I suppose) goes, I’m interested in reading all kinds of different work and mostly uninterested in categorizing that work. Genres are marketing devices—if you like x, you’ll love y—and they can be very useful in getting things read, but I’ve always been a wretched salesman.

I don’t know; I think you’re probably right to say that many people would categorize much of the fiction we publish as fabulist or magical realist, but the number of stories I read and don’t publish that could be considered fabulist or magical realist dwarfs the number that we do publish, and the same goes for submissions in most other genres I can name.

What I mean to say is: I’m not attracted to whatever defines a piece of writing as fabulist (or K-Mart realist, or experimental, or horror, or Alt-Lit, or etc.), I’m attracted to the experience I have while reading that piece of writing.

LD: Other than a marketing device, can genre identification help us to understand the inner workings of a piece – how it achieves the reading experience it provides, how it can be distinguished from other reading experiences?

GB: That’s a fair question, Lale, but not one for me to answer. The Collagist isn’t a genre magazine. All of our readers are free to bring whatever expectations they like to each piece we publish—we don’t set out to put a frame around them. That’s what genre is: a frame, a set of expectations, a way of thinking about a piece of writing. That we do put a frame around what we publish—the Collagist frame; no grandness implied—is probably inevitable, but the existence of such a genre, such a frame, also presupposes some familiarity with the magazine, which I would never presume.

LD: John Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction was famed for shaping an entire school of science fiction by sounding a call for a particular aesthetic and then selecting those who adhered to his ideas. Other editors try to keep their finger on the pulse of the literary zeitgeist of the times and select works to represent it. Which role more closely describes your approach to editing The Collagist? What role should the editor play in the creation of literary movements?

GB: I have no interest in making the fictions that we publish conform to my own personal aesthetic preferences (except of course that I will have chosen them in the first place based on those preferences; that’s unavoidable, though, and doesn’t make me any different than all of the other literary editors out there). When I want to write something, I write something, you know? I’m not a top-down kind of guy. So I find it difficult to think in terms of literary movements or my particular role in them, especially as an editor.

I do think that there is isn’t enough literature being published that has much of substance to it—I mean beyond or above melodrama or language-play—and I’d like to believe that The Collagist is helping at least some of that literature find readers. I should maybe say that I think that’s always the case—literature with substance is always in short supply—and that there are other excellent magazines also doing the hard work of publishing such fiction. Fortunately.

LD: In your mind, what constitutes literature of substance? Could you articulate patterns you tend to find in those “unavoidable” personal aesthetic preferences?

GB: Yes, sorry—I’ve just substituted one vague and reductive description (literature of substance) for another (powerful, progressive literature). In the end, neither really satisfies me and so my attempts at their elaboration probably won’t satisfy you.

I do think good examples of “literature of substance” (and of my personal aesthetic preferences) would include but not be limited to the forty-four stories I’ve published in my tenure as fiction editor of The Collagist. I really don’t mean to be evasive or vague, but I have misgivings about any attempt to reduce literature to a set of characteristics (genre, aesthetic, etc.), no matter how broad those characteristics may be.

In his introduction to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, William H. Gass writes, “reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes.” I can’t agree more. To say Hamlet is a tragedy is to say something about oneself: “I find Hamlet tragic.” Hamlet exists apart from that feeling and cannot be reduced to that feeling. One may say that Hamlet is a play, sure, but what does that tell you about Hamlet, exactly? That Hamlet is more or less like The Importance of Being Earnest? Is it? If we go down the list of characters in Hamlet, can we be said to have taken in some part of Hamlet? Even if we give those characters some basic characteristics? If someone tells me the plot of Hamlet, should I assume that I then don’t need to pay attention to it when I see Hamlet? And even if we put all of those things together, as CliffsNotes does, will we have anything even approaching the experience of reading or seeing Hamlet? Of course not; we will not have the pleasure of the thing, either—we will have learned much about what others think about the thing, but we will not have any idea of the thing itself.

LD: How has The Collagist changed since its inception?

GB: We went through a fairly big change last year, when Matthew Olzmann and I took over from Matt Bell. We got a new reviews editor, Michael Jauchen, a new interviews editor, Liz Morris, and a new podcast editor, Rachelle Cruz. That’s pretty much the entire staff.

Even though Matthew has been our poetry editor since the beginning, and even though I’ve been with the magazine for four years, it was a shift. I mean, I can’t help but be a different editor than Matt Bell was—I’ve been a fan of the magazine from Issue #1, so I don’t think my taste is so different from his, but it is different. I’m indebted to him for all the hard work he put into making the magazine what it is, and I have always been proud to be a part of the magazine. That said, I’m not trying to carry on a legacy, I’m just publishing things that I believe in.

Format-wise, we haven’t changed much. I’m a bit more open or agnostic than Matt Bell was, genre-wise, in terms of what I excerpt (we’ve had a couple of excerpts of book-length essays, and a couple of excerpts from hybrid or cross-genre books since I started editing that section), but we’re still doing four fictions, four poets, an essay, and four reviews every month.

With all of the changes going on last year, we didn’t do the chapbook contest, so I’m excited to bring it back this year, and Matthew and I are always talking about ways to make the magazine better, but we have a really good template to work from and neither one of us wants to mess things up just for the sake of doing something different.

LD: How would you describe the relationship between The Collagist and Dzanc Books?

GB: Dzanc is our publisher—they’re completely hands-off, editorially, but they’re also really supportive and easy to work with as a publisher. In addition to hosting the website, they publish the winner of our annual chapbook contest, and they help out with design and are, in general, very helpful.

 

Advice, Tools of the Trade

Five Principles to Combat Writer’s Block

laledavidson

Everyone experiences writer’s block at one time or another. Some experience it only for a few minutes, some for years at a time. The resistance to writing can get particularly strong when you sit down to write about painful autobiographical events.

I have quit writing hundreds of times. But not long ago I had a breakthrough. The blocks melted away and I wrote daily for a period of three years producing my second novel, all while raising a child and working full time. It was such a euphoric and long-lasting revelation, and such a shift from my previous m.o. that I wrote down the principles that enabled me to keep writing so that I could revisit them when the resistance built up again, as it inevitably does.

I presented this and more with Dave Kalish at GrubStreet Muse and the Marketplace session, “How to Turn Personal Tragedy into Entertaining Fiction.”  For more info click here.

Meanwhile, here are the 5 principles absolutely free, a gift from me to you. Please leave a comment if they help.

Principle One: Write only because you want to and because it brings you joy. Don’t try to be brilliant or marketable, or meaningful. Write only because you want to. You don’t need anyone’s permission. You don’t need to pass a writing test. You don’t need to be useful. When you really want to write and write what you really want, it may turn out to be brilliant or marketable or meaningful, but if you set out with that goal, more often than not, it will lower your enjoyment, which will lower your drive to write. This principle can be applied to all things in life. Joy and desire are the linchpins of the universe. They provide the energy to create.

 Principle Two: Create a well-protected space for rough drafts. First writings are tender and can only occur in a well-protected space – a space that is safe from all criticism and all demands, both internal and external. This builds the first principle. Writing that stems from a desire to be great, or a desire to find god, or a desire to teach a lesson is already under pressure. Let go of all demands and pressure. For this reason, I also would not recommend soliciting publishers before the book is finished. Rejection may discourage you from finishing, and acceptance may create too much pressure to enjoy the writing. Protect yourself in these early stages. Write what you want and trust that it is needed, even if you can’t see how.

Corollary A: Warm up before you write. Never launch right into something unless inspired – it’s too much pressure. Generally, inspiration has to be cultivated gently and without pressure, by writing other things first. A journal is a good warm-up, either a personal journal or a writing journal where you state your intentions for that session…or work out a problem…or, if generating material, do a writing exercise. I find journaling works better when beginning a piece. When I’m well on my way, I can warm up by editing the previous day’s work.

Corollary B: Choose carefully when and to whom you show your writing. In the early stages of generating, show it only to a trusted few, and be clear about what you want from them. If you want only positive feedback, ask for that. When you get to your later drafts, you will have to suck up some courage and show to a wider audience and withstand the storm of self-doubt that this will bring. But initially, give your work over only into the gentlest of care.

Corollary C: Choose a subject that springs from your core concerns, values, or challenges. You know you have found the right subject when you have a lot to write about it. If it isn’t flowing, perhaps the subject isn’t right – isn’t of real interest and joy to you (springs from a false desire to impress or be smart or teach). Find the subject that is intrinsic to your very core and write about that. Write about a topic that you need to write about. Write to bring it to life. I think my second novel generated itself fairly easily because I was writing about something that I’d thought about all my life: death and what happens after. I also wrote the character I needed to be and this helped me write past blocks. Every once in a while I would struggle with whether I should do research (pursue analytic thought) or trust my intuition. My character had to learn to rely on her own intuition as well, so I took a cue from her. I wrote good medicine for myself. Joy Harjo once said that she writes a poem to heal something, like a sore throat or a broken heart. As long as that motive doesn’t weigh you down, go for it.

Corollary E: Imagine an audience you feel comfortable writing for. If it isn’t flowing, perhaps the audience isn’t right. Try writing a paragraph for different audiences, an audience of children, teenagers, all women, all men, all African Americans. As you try this out, pay attention to your energy. When your writing starts to pick up speed and spill out easily, that’s how you know you’ve found the right audience. Again, forget about marketability – the goal is to get it out, not get it published.

Corollary F: Choose the narrative voice that excites you. If it isn’t flowing, maybe the narrator needs to be older, younger, or someone else. Try a few paragraphs in some different points of view, then go with the one that gives you the most energy..

Example: I when went from third to first person, I found a sixteen-year-old voice that I loved. Then asked myself if it would be more interesting or sophisticated if I wrote in an older voice at a greater distance from the events. Immediately, my energy slumped. In the past, I might have agonized about which way to go. But in this new unblocked place, I stopped intellectualizing and took my energy level as my cue. Joseph Campbell wrote, “follow your bliss.” Another way to think of it is to follow your energy surges.

Principle Three: If you can’t write it, write about it. When you feel blocked or nervous about approaching some aspect, write about what you want to achieve. If you ask yourself questions, the answers will come. Sometimes they don’t come right away. Sometimes you have to carry the question around and think about it while you go on walks or do chores. When you do this, it is VERY important to turn the critical voice into a visionary or goal-setting voice. Instead of writing, “Why can’t I write dialogue?” ask “Where can I get help on writing dialogue?”  Instead of writing, “I don’t know how to end this thing,” write, “I want this novel to end with a rich image and just a whiff of mystery.” The more you describe the way you want to write, the more likely you are to slide right into doing it without even noticing. This is great a parenting technique—tell your kid what to do rather than what not to do. Works well in relationships, too.

Principle Four: Listen to the writing block. Even the writing blocks are telling you something important about your writing… And no, they’re not telling you to stop writing. I’ve spent years berating myself every time I got blocked – “See, you’re not a writer. You’re f-d up.” That was just a distraction. Lately, when I get blocked, I think, “Something about what you are doing is bothering you. There’s a problem that you need to work out.” Then see Principle Three, if you can’t write it write about it. Sometimes you can work it out just by writing, “What is bothering me about this?” Here’s an example. I was trying to write a character sketch for my main character in first person, but suddenly everything went flat. This told me that she was more private than I thought – especially when she thought she was being evaluated. So I abandoned the sketch.

Other Suggestions:

  • When the writing goes flat, it may indicate that this scene could be summarized. Listen to the voice that says, this is boring, I want to get to the good stuff. Go ahead. Skip this part. Writing is like magic. Want time to pass? Write, “Three years later….”  and voila! Get right to the good stuff…don’t torture yourself. Maybe it’s flat because the reader doesn’t need this kind of detail either. Summarize it and move on. You can always go back and fill in the gaps later if you need to.
  • Is it flat because you are scared of it – scared you can’t live up to the drama of the moment? Well…either wait until you feel inspired and work on something else…or rough it out and come back to it later.
  • Is it flat because you need to start the story in a new place?

Principle Five: Trust your process. Trust your outcome. Or, work on what you feel like working on when you feel like working on it. When I began my second novel, I started by inventing my own theory about ghosts. I didn’t even have a plot. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. But I was so into writing that. Later I was glad it was written because I didn’t want to write it. It had become boring. Instead, I was all about plot. The novel doesn’t have to be written in order. Jump to the scenes that interest you when they occur to you. I wrote the climax right after I wrote the opening paragraphs because the inspiration struck. Later, as I approached the end of the novel, I became more and more worried about whether I could pull off the ending. When I finally came to it, I re-read the climax I had written almost a year before. I ended up revising it, but that first draft gave me the courage to hammer out a new ending.

Corollary A: Digressions are maps. Even if you are writing things that are digressions or not that interesting as scenes, write them anyway, because you need to write them to understand your plot or your character. You can always take them out later.

Corollary B: Bad writing leads to good writing, or it’s good enough in and of itself. Even if you are writing sentimental, schlocky crap, trust that you need to write it this way to get to the good stuff, or else there is a valid place in the world for sentimental, schlocky crap, and your job is to supply it.

Corollary C: Give it time to rise. When you make bread, you never just mix the ingredients and put it in the oven. You give it time to rise. Likewise, there comes a point in all writing where you have to take a break. You get too close to it; you can’t see it. No writing is finished until you’ve rested, forgotten about, and returned to it with fresh eyes. When you finish the first or second draft, you may think it’s perfect, or you may think something isn’t right about it, but you can’t tell what. Take a break. Put it down and don’t re-read it for long period, a week, a month, a year, maybe more. When you come back to it, you will be amazed at how clearly you see what it lacks and what it needs.

All of the above works better if you accept the following philosophical underpinnings loosely borrowed from Buddhist thought:

  • We each have the brilliance of the universe inside us since we are made of it. We just need to get out of our own way.
  • When connected to ourselves in a balanced way, the world benefits from us, if only in a very small way.
  • We each have a gift to give, and no matter how small, it is essential that we give it.

Good luck, and keep the faith.

P.S. Since I wrote this article I’ve found two books very helpful:

Around the Writers Block by Roseanne Bane and The Seven Secrets of the Prolific by Hilary Rettig.

Writing Prompts

Use the Random to Write

laledavidson

510-playing-cards-randomI read a poem in a magazine recently by someone famous who shall remain nameless, and it made absolutely no sense. Each line/image seemed random and unrelated to the next.  He/she then wrote an explanation of what the poem meant or what life experience it rose from, and again, it seemed to have nothing to do with the poem.  What a great writing prompt, I thought.  So here it is:

Write ten random sentences. Just look around you and write down ten thoughts that occur as you look. Be sure to get something concrete/physical/visual in each line.  Or if you’ve been writing in the same spot for 100 years and are sick of your surroundings, pick ten random lines from 10 different poems by other people. If you happen to miss-read the lines, even better.

Then write a preposterous explanation of what it all means.  Or, if you like, somehow fashion these 10 lines into a coherent piece, changing them all to make them your own, of course.

This exercise has never failed to generate new material for me. Hope it does the same for you.

Fantasy, Review

The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Anti-Fantasy, Brilliant Concept, Slow Going

laledavidson

Magicians PhotoEver wished to be in a Harry Potter novel? Lev Grossman  explores the downsides of that wish in his anti-fantasy novel, The Magicians (Plume 2009). Magic turns out to be more boring, more complex and less uplifting than anyone might have hoped. And to its credit, when the violence in this novel occurs, (what little there is), you cringe, reminding you that, no, you really DON’T want to be Harry Potter fighting Voldemort.

What makes the book brilliant, is its meditation on the nature and purpose of magic: “‘Use magic in anger,’ warns the dean of the magical college where Quentin Coldwater and his friends train, ‘and you will harm yourself much more quickly than you will harm your adversary. There are certain spells … if you lose control of them, they will change you'” (88).

Later, the novel expounds on the danger of magic from a different angle, when the Quentin is undergoing the final college trial, traveling 500 miles to the south pole with nothing to protect him but magic. Having created a bubble of warmth around himself and added strength and speed to his legs, he cruises endless snow, remembering another teacher’s advice: “Once you reach a certain level of fluency as a spellcaster, you will begin to manipulate reality freely … your spells will one day come … almost automatically, but with very little in the way of conscious effort…For the true magician there is no very clear line between what lies inside the mind and what lies outside it. If you desire it, it will become substance. If you despise it, you will see it destroyed. A master magician is not much different from a child or a mad man I that respect. It takes a very clear head and a very strong will to operate once you are in that place” (161). The fantastical concept of magic stems from the real power of naming and speech, which can make present that which is absent, and Grossman identifies this core truth here.

What follows is a beautiful passage, “The stars burned shrilly overhead with impossible force and beauty. Quentin jogged with his head up, knees high no longer feeling anything below his waist, gloriously isolated, lost in the spectacle. He became nothing, a running wraith, a wisp of warm flesh in a silent universe of midnight frost” (162).

These kinds of passages compelled me to stay with the book. But my progress was made torturous by Quentin’s blockheadedness and the shallowness of his friends. Aptly named Coldwater, Quentin pours cold water on everything. While we can all relate to his search for happiness, I kept hoping he would figure out that happiness isn’t the point of life; it’s a poor substitute for fulfillment, the occasional side effect of living a life of purpose, which, according to Daniel Pink’s book Drive, is an inherent need.

But neither Quentin nor any of his friends develop any sense of purpose. Not one of them ever says to themselves, “Gee, maybe I could make the world a better place with this tool.” It’s downright odd. The only characters who come close, Quentin’s girlfriend, Alice, and his non-friend, Penny, get punished. Alice, by far the best character in the book, ends up with a bit part.

I’m not exactly criticizing the book for this, because Grossman made me care, and though it was slow, I was willing to flog myself to finish it and felt bereft when it was over. (The flog-marks are fading, thank you very much.)

So I’d say Grossman’s novel, the first of a trilogy, does what the best books do, re-defining and deepening its genre. But he uses too many adjectives (hint from a reformed adjective addict, don’t use more than one per noun on a regular basis). Also, we don’t need to see the main character going over the same ground 25 times.

Fantasy, Uncategorized

“Death’s Debut” in April Issue of Eclectica Magazine

laledavidson

“That’s when Death decided he wanted to become a stand up comedian. The idea reverberated with rightness. This laughter thing was invented by humans, completely unforeseen by God. Immortals didn’t get it. That’s why he had to, because, a good joke was like a thunderclap, a convulsion of life and death coming together in perfect balance, a hybrid.”

I’m delighted to announce that my story, “Death’s Debut” appears in this month’s issue in Eclectica Magazine at eclectica.org. I hope you’ll check it out along with all the other excellent stories and poems published there. I’m proud to be published along side them.

The idea for the story came from three sources, watching my 91 year old father “rage against the dying of the light,” a book by Steve Martin called  The Ten, Make that Nine, Habits of Very Organized People. Make that Ten, and a folktale called “Death in a Nut” collected by Duncan and Linda Williamson from the Traveling People of Scotland. In this last story, a boy called Jack stuffs death in a nut and throws him out to sea to prevent him from carting off his mother. Chaos ensues. The idea that death might want to become a comedian was entirely my own.

My father curses when he can’t buckle his belt, or cut his food with a fork, or find the word for computer. “What the devil’s the matter with me?” he says.

“When I can’t find words, I wave my hands around like this,” I say. “Try it. It’s kind of fun.” Sometimes in my writing group (all women of a certain age) we all just wave our arms at each other.

Most days, the only silver lining of old age appears to be what little hair is left on my father’s head.

Fight fire with fire, mystery with mystery, death with laughter, I say. That’s why I wrote the story.  I hope that one day, when death comes a knockin’, we’ll all be able to welcome him like a long lost friend.

Fantasy, Literary Criticism, Magical Realism

Is Magic Realism Really Fantasy?

laledavidson

IMG_0131

In general, quibbling about categories and definitions annoys me. Categories are rarely consistent. Definitions rarely capture the whole thing. They are tools for grouping information to help us retain it, yet they can never contain the whole of what they point to. We shouldn’t mistake our finger for the moon, the Zen saying goes.

However, if categorization and definition helps us understand literature better, helps us to interact with it more deeply, I’m all for it. So even though I think magic realism and surrealism belong under the fantasy umbrella, and even though we are venturing into a Borgesian garden of forking paths here, it’s useful to ask, what is the difference between magic realism and fantasy?

Wait, what? Magic realism is a subset of fantasy? Well, the way I figure it, fantasy was the first form of literature. And by definition, fantasy is any literature in which “reality” (defined in western, white, agnostic culture as normal) is altered. Any literature that goes beyond the known, that externalizes the internal and unconscious reality, that inhabits the divine and sublime, in which the impossible and improbable happens, is fantasy.

But for some reason, my literary friends tend to relegate fantasy to the bad lit bin and accept magic realism as good. In fact the king of magic realism, Gabriel García Márquez, adamantly denied that he wrote fantasy: “Fantasy has nothing to do with the reality of the world we live in; it is purely fantastic invention, an inspiration, and certainly a diversion ill-advised in the arts” (quoted in Kroeber 130).

However, as I said in an earlier post, anyone who has heard “a woman screaming in the forest and follow[ed] the sound into the mouth of a mountain lion” will find the origins of fantasy. Anyone who has spun around with beating heart toward that flicker in the peripheral vision knows where ghosts come from. The amygdala is a crude but lightning fast instrument. So I have to respectfully disagree with the king.

Author Jon Evans, in a great blog post for Tor.com “Magic Realism: Not Fantasy. Sorry,”  says we should think of fantasy as a spectrum with “surreal fantasy” to the left and “systematic fantasy” on the right…

“One Hundred Years of Solitude occupies the far left; a little further in is Ben Okri’s Booker-winning The Famished Road. Midnight’s Children and Little, Big occupy the centre-left. The Dragon Waiting and Patricia McKillip are dead centre. Jonathan Strange is center-right. Julian May is way out on the right, as is, um…Steven Brust” (Evans).

Seems reasonable. So why was García Márquez so adamant that there is a difference—no, a complete divide– and why does he share the disdain for fantasy that we typically find in universities?

The answer lies in the question of what these books do with reality and what the impact is on us.

(For the faint of heart, quit here and read the rest tomorrow. It was devilishly hard to keep this short, and I didn’t succeed.)

Tsvetan Todorov, a literary theorist famous for his treatment of the fantastic, said that magic realism disrupts our sense of reality whereas fantasy creates another completely enclosed reality. So says Lucie Armitt, anyway, in her book, Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. Todorov claimed that fantasy “imposes absolute closure” and “implies complicity on the part of the readers” (Armitt 7). In other words, fantasy calls upon the reader to enter an unreal world and pretend that it is real. It seeks to make the unreal seem real and calls upon the reader to suspend his or her disbelief, as the old saying goes.

Evans agrees that what we typically think of as fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkein, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Terry Brooks) operates by certain rules. In it, the supernatural is regarded with amazement – it’s a stark contrast to what we see as reality. Magic is “systematic,” he says.

This would explain many academics’ disdain for fantasy –because they see it as too tidy, too predictable, too comforting. Literature is supposed to make you think and grow. How can we do that if we have absolute closure? More on this later in some other blog entry.

Let’s get back to magic realism, which Todorov thinks of as a subset of the “literary fantastic” along with surrealism. In contrast to fantasy, the literary fantastic has a “disruptive impulse” and “seeks reader hesitancy” (Armitt 7). The story begins in the “real world” and when something unreal happens, and the reader is never sure if the cause is supernatural or natural, such as a psychotic break or a drug induced hallucination (Armitt 8). According to this definition, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw is an example of the literary fantastic: did she see a ghost or hallucinate it? Did the ghost kill the boy, or did she scare him to death? The movie Pan’s Labyrinth is likewise an example: Is she alive or dead? Did imagination save her or kill her? However, where does this put Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis” in which Gregory Samsa wakes up to find he is a giant insect? We are never meant to believe that he is simply imagining this. Likewise, in Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, there are no “competing readings of the text… revolving around two choices, the psychological or the supernatural” (Armitt 8).

Still – as Jon Evans says in his blog post, this literature “draws from the well” of political disruption, violence and chaos, where the “surreal becomes normal and the insane becomes rational.”

Another attribute of magic realism is that supernatural events are described with “a brick face” according to Garcia Marquez (quoted in Writer’s Almanac). The effect on the reader is that our sense of reality is constantly disrupted. We aren’t allowed to escape into another world that is orderly and consistent. We are left straddling many worlds, teetering back and forth uneasily between.

Karl Kroeber echoes this idea: “surrealism is a subversion of meaning, fantasy is a construction of meaning” (quoted in Le Guin). Though I disagree with him when he says that “Surrealism subverts in order to destroy, fantasy subverts in order to rebuild.” The point of the “disruption” or “destruction” of surrealism is, ultimately, to rebuild. Surrealists are not sadists.

Complicating these definitions is the fact that the concept of reality is culturally defined. Orthodox Christians consider God and the Bible real. Atheists consider both fantasy. Roman mythology was at one time was considered real; now the word myth is synonymous with lie. Native American writers such as Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko write about things that most Caucasian Americans would call unreal, but which are very real to them.

So where does this put Aimee Bender and Karen Russell? Both of them come from the U.S. presumably where peace and (mostly) good order rule. Bender writes both kinds of stories: ones that take place in a recognizable reality and then diverge from it in “Tiger Mending” and ones that start in fairytale land and stay there in “Devourings.” She plays at both ends of the spectrum. So does Amber Sparks, a writer who I hope will soon gain a wider audience. Karen Russell belongs on the left end of the spectrum with her wrinkled old vampire who sits in the lemon grove hardly noticed by tourists and her Japanese women who turn into human silk worms.

I’ve raised more questions here than answers. And that’s the point. Armed with questions we become better readers.

Armitt, Lucie. Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005.

Bender, Aimee. The Color Master. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Evans, Jon. “Magic Realism: Not Fantasy. Sorry.” Tor.com. Tor Books. 23 October 2008. Web. 12 March 2014.

Kroeber, Karl. Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Critics, The Monsters and the Fantasists.” The Secret History of Fantasy. Ed. Peter S. Beagle. San Francisco: Tachyan Publications, 2010. 355-366.

Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. Perf. Ivana Baquero, Ariadna Gil, Sergi López. Warner Brothers, 2006. Film.

Russell, Karen. Vampires in the Lemon Grove. New York: Knopf, 2013.

“Thursday, March 6, 2014.” The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. American Public Media, 6 March, 2014. Web. March 12, 2014.

Uncategorized

Double Standards in Writing Circles

laledavidson

Remember the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?  Sometimes I think that’s what’s going on in academic, literary and writing circles. I’ve seen it at readings. The poet intones and everyone nods. Afterwards, at the reception, people talk about how brilliant so-and-so’s volume is. But if you pull one of them out of the room and down the hall and say, “Yes, but I have no idea what most of it means. Tell me,” they will sometimes admit that they, too, have no idea. Occasionally, if you are standing too close to the punch bowl where others can overhear, your companion will answer you incomprehensibly, using academic code words to say something quite ordinary, like, “utilizing first person plural invokes the contemporary zeitgeist,” an idea, which, if you used regular words, would be  “no, duh” moment.

            I am not suggesting that poetry should be more accessible. The difficulty demands a reader’s engagement. And we are more willing to work hard for a poet that has been anointed. It is often the case that you can’t really understand the poem or a story until you read the whole collection. Then you begin to understand the way a writer is defining certain words, or what they are using certain images to signify. Take Wallace Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.”

 

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

 

            At first blush, it’s pretty incomprehensible. But if you read a lot of his poetry,  you come to see that white represents the void – the incomprehensible abyss  that forms the backdrop of our existence. Ice-cream is white. So he conjures all these fleshy, bawdy, physical images, and then says – but, remember, all comes to nothing. When he says, “let be be finale of seem, “ he’s saying, try to see what is actually here.  See life as it actually is. Perhaps, if we understand that we will become nothing, we will love life more.  In the second stanza, he tells a tiny story of a woman who is dead, but she lived an ordinary life, much like ours, with missing dresser knobs and hobbies. She created beauty, but now she is dead. See how her feet are just objects of death. The whole poem is a kind of joyous/despairing tap dance on the head of a tombstone. 

            I’m building to two points here. One: if we pretend to understand when we don’t, we are missing an opportunity to collectively share in one of the chief joys of art: figuring it out together. Two: we writers/artists are sometimes are victims and perpetrators of double standards. When a writer has been given the nod by a press or a magazine we admire, baptized into publication, become one of the anointed, we all stand back in admiration. We take the time to study their work until we get it or we find their incomprehensibility acceptable. But in a workshop, when a colleague submits a story we don’t understand, we tear it apart. We tell the writer they have an obligation to explain themselves more.  The anointed are allowed to be incomprehensible, but the un-anointed are not. The anointed deserve our attention to decipher them, but the un-anointed do not.  Perhaps it’s a failure of courage or respect.  We don’t want to put time into someone who isn’t worth it and we can’t tell whether they are worth it or not, because no one has given them the nod.

            I wish in workshops, instead of asking themselves “Did I like this? What does the writer have to do to help me get it?” more people would ask themselves, “What kind of a story or poem is this? What is it trying to achieve?  How is it operating? What are the internal rules of this piece?

            Enough said.