Duett at the Loeb Experimental Theater

Tonight is the final performance of "Duett" in the EX at the Loeb Experimental Theater in Cambridge. I'm going to guess that no one who reads Particles of Light has been to the show yet; when I went, only 10 of the 40+ seats were occupied. Which is tragic, because the show was fantastic. I went to see it on 12 June because my daughter is in it, as one of the unnamed, bow-tie sporting on-stage props people. I fervently hope there will be a full house tonight, because by golly, I want my daughter to be appreciated for her dedication to elegantly pouring fake blood all over Catrin Lloyd-Bollad's foundation garment.

Backing up now.

Duett, written by Amy Stebbins, is inspired by Heiner Muller's "Quartet" (in turn, inspired by Choderlos de Laclos's novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses) and Soren Kierkegaard's "Either/Or." I don't know if Amy Stebbins's production owes anything to Robert Wilson's, which is the subject of the review I've linked to, in order to give some background on Quartet, but I figured it was better to link to a review than nothing. All of this to say that the show was a dialogue on hedonism and ethics, discussed by the Vicomte de Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil (you may have seen them portrayed by John Malkovich and Glen Close in the 1988 film Dangerous Liaisons). That's all I can say that the show is "about" because in order to analyze the show and provide my own reading, I'd have to see it several more times, and as I've mentioned, the last show is tonight.

What I can say, in addition, is that the show has great original music composed by Mike Einziger, the guitarist for the band Incubus. Catrin Lloyd-Bollard (the Marquise) and Dan Pecci (the Vicomte) are brilliant actors, singers, and dancers. Separately, they are excellent, and together, electric. They are funny, frightening, clearly fiercely intelligent, and I wish every house had been packed to see them interacting so cleverly and emotionally with the images projected on the enormous screen/giant egg downstage. They taunted each other, lusted after one another, tore each other apart. They enacted and reenacted a particular dialogue from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, singing, sitting in a projected drawing room (cleverly propped against the screen in seated posture), shrieking, fighting, and inevitably, dying. All the while, two bow-tied servants attended to them, filming them, setting up their props, re-setting them physically after scenes (one, two, three, hoist!), and inevitably, killing them. Some scenes were difficult to watch. Some scenes were especially difficult to watch my daughter filming with a handheld camera. I kept thinking, what on earth have I given her permission to do?

But I recognize art when I see it, and this was art. Plastic bottles of blood and all.

Watch the trailer:

Highly recommended.

"A Night at the Empire" in Descended From Darkness

The Apex Book Company has announced the table of contents for their upcoming anthology, Descended From Darkness: Apex Magazine, Vol. 1. I am proud to announce that my story, "A Night at the Empire" is included.

See the announcement and the whole table of contents here.

Unspeakable Horror Reviewed by Monster Librarian

From Michele Lee at Monster Librarian, on Unspeakable Horror featuring my short story, "Black Annis."

“Unspeakable Horror is a standout anthology with a unique focus on queer-themed horror tales. There's a lot to recommend, from tales where horror takes a back seat to the characters and musing tales of their challenges, to stories starring vampires, zombies, ghosts, evil faeries, doppelgangers, and more who complicate already conflicted lives. These tales do not isolate or exclude, but rather put readers in the heads of those who feel lost, struggling with ideas of society, sexuality and themselves.”

Read the full review here.

Unspeakable Horror Named Stoker Award Finalist

Dark Scribe Press reports that its debut title, UNSPEAKABLE HORROR: FROM THE SHADOWS OF THE CLOSET, featuring my short story, "Black Annis," has been named a finalist in the 2008 Bram Stoker Awards. Each year, the Horror Writer’s Association presents the Bram Stoker Awards for Superior Achievement, named in honor of Bram Stoker, author of the seminal horror work, Dracula. The Stoker Awards were instituted immediately after the organization’s incorporation in 1987.

Read the full Stoker Award nomination announcement here.

Unspeakable Horror Reviewed by FearZone

The anthology Unspeakable Horror by Dark Scribe Press has been reviewed by Derek Clendening at FearZone.

2009 Million Writers Award

Posted a little late, but better late than never, right? "A Night at the Empire" has been nominated by Jason Sizemore at Apex Magazine for the storySouth 2009 Million Writers Award.

A list of the top ten electronically published stories of the year will be released on May 15th, at which time the public vote for the top story will begin. For updates on the award process, please see the blog and website of Jason Sanford, who runs the award.

2009 Rhysling Awards

My poem, "The Midwife's Progress," published by Goblin Fruit in 2008, has been nominated for a Rhysling Award and will appear in the 2009 Rhysling Anthology. Last year at Readercon, I hoped one day I'd have a poem in this anthology, so I'm very pleased indeed. It's an honor.

Bookshelf: More on Maps & Legends

A passage from Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends leapt out at me that reminded me of an earlier post, wherein I expressed both a tendency and a fear to use real life experiences in my writing.

Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things I really did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarassing thoughts that I have at one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written. Even if I assume that readers will be charitable enough to absolve me from personally having done or thought such things--itself a dubious assumption, given my own reprehensible tendency as a reader to see authobiography in the purest of fictions--the mere fact that I could even imagine someone's having done or thought them, whispers my fear, is damning in itself.

The skeletal fingers of a hundred literary transgressions I've already made climbed up my spine upon reading this. I've published some damned disturbing stories full of damned disturbing people. I try not to think about the stories after they leave me (although I'll admit to self-Googling for reviews as much as the next Digital Age writer). I try to imagine them running in fields of alfalfa, chasing rabbits, free to be what they are. Free of authorship. Free of my life's baggage. I've never been a drug addict, a murderer, a woman in a coma, a male nurse in love with a woman in a coma, a rapist, a thug, a gay teenaged boy consumed by thoughts of vengeance, a centuries-old hag with a taste for flesh. I've never been any of those things, but I can imagine being those things well enough to write about them. I'm the perfect audience for a quiet horror film where the mayhem takes place offscreen, because I can supply the mayhem myself more effectively than a special effects team ever could.

There's a pocket of darkness in me from which dark things spring, but I try not to think about the stories once they leave home. I try not to worry that my parents might think I'm psychopath. I try not to worry that my loved ones might think I'm capable of infidelity, substance abuse, suicide. I try to remember that other people have this kind of intuitive understanding of darker human nature--criminal profilers, psychologists, palm readers. Just because you can *see* doesn't mean you can (or would) *do* the things you see.

I write nightmares, but what I write both is and isn't me. If I think about the stories after they leave home, I worry about them. I fear the exposure. What will they think of me (sick freak, you wouldn't believe, how could she, I wonder if that really happened...) but the worry isn't enough for me to keep the damning stories in a shoebox under the bed.

It's better to let them run free, chasing rabbits. Safer for all of us. Really.

Bookshelf: Maps and Legends

Michael Chabon has my gratitude forever. I know I sounded a bit snarly in my last post; change is difficult, and it makes even the most harmless person want to bite something and shake it. Listening to a reaction from a loved-one about yesterday's post, I realized I may have come across as anti-genre, but that's definitely not the case. Despite my vehemence, I'm not anti-genre, and I'm not anti-entertainment. I'm reading Michael Chabon's book Maps and Legends right now, and in the first essay, "Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story," he explains things better than I did yesterday. I'd say "better than I ever could," but I don't feel like giving up on this rough ride before I've been in the saddle for a while longer. I'm going to hang in there, and borrow Chabon's words until I can wrap my brain around this topic a little bit better on my own. He says:

"...I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain.... Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

Here is a sample, chosen at random from my career as a reader, of encounters that would be covered under my new definition of entertainment: the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a fine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon riverboat; or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman's Sandman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust (vol. 3); a duel to the death with broadswords on the seacoast of ancient Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or human slaughter in Melville or McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary's clubfoot-correcting device; the outrageousness of outrage in a page of Philip Roth; words written in smoke across the sky of London on a day in June 1923; a momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-heated glee; the recounting of a portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch on the Neva."

Yes, yes, and yes. Chabon is an omnivore. He reads *all kinds of good stuff.* He's a wanderer, an adventurer, an insatiable, curious intellect. Later in the essay, he argues the existence of genre as a marketing tool, more eloquently than I did yesterday, by comparing Mrs. Dalloway to Moby Dick wondering just how different two books have to be before it's impossible to shelve them together. He rather brilliantly points out the formulas for literary fiction, "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." I have to admit that my jaw dropped on the floor at this last part, and I blushed, though there wasn't anyone around to see me do it. I hadn't realized until reading this bit what the unifying thing was that I liked about a story; it's this moment-of-truth thing. Without it, I find a story dull, but I've never been able to put my finger on it before. The thing is, I find a story dull without that moment-of-truth regardless of the premise. Give me a good gothic romance or pirate story with a contemporary, quotidian, plotless moment of truth, and I'm yours. I'm not anti-genre, and anti-formula, I just prefer the formula of so-called literary fiction, but imbued with the gloss of the fabulous. I prefer stories that take a little from each paint pot, a little of this, a little of that--mundane fabulism, as it were.

Chabon goes on to talk about the tricksters in mythology--Hermes, Loki, Coyote, Eshu, Krishna, Satan, etc. "Trickster is always associated with borders, no man's lands, with crossroads and intersections. Trickster is the conveyor of souls across ultimate boundaries, the transgressor of heaven, the reconciler of opposites. He operates through inversion of laws and regulations, presiding over carnivals and feasts of fools. He is a hermaphrodite; he is at once hero and villain, scourge and benefactor." He says, "Trickster is also the god of the marketplace, of the city as intersection of converging roads and destinies, as transfer point.... Trickster goes where where the action is, and the action is in the borders between things."

This is a nice setup for a discussion about interstitial fiction, without calling it interstitial fiction. Chabon talks about Borges, Calvino, Fowles, Millhauser, Pychon, Vonnegut, John Crowley, A.S. Byatt, and Cormac McCarthy--writers who have "plied their trade in the spaces between genres, in the no man's land. These great writers have not written science fiction of fantasy, horror or westerns--you can tell that by the book jackets [from an earlier discussion where he says authors who escape the "genre" ghetto get subtler, more elegant book jackets]. But they have drawn immense power from and provided considerable pleasure for readers through play, through the peculiar commingling of mockery and tribute, invocation and analysis, considered rejection and passionate embrace, which are the hallmarks of our Trickster literature in this time of unending crossroads. Some of them have even found themselves straddling the most confounding and mysterious border of all: the one that lies between wild commercial success and unreserved critical acclaim."

Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore.

And that's where I want to go. Those are the places I want to haunt. Neither here nor there, this or that. I want to be delighted, to smear the lines. I'm willing to write things that belong nowhere in the hopes of discovering something wonderful. I'm not sure I want wild commercial success (though honestly, I wouldn't turn it down) but I know I want to be Trickster, dancing in the borderlands. I want to learn the magic formula of the quintessential entertaining story [well, a story that entertains *me*], absorb it, transform it, and play.

Bookshelf: Moral Disorder

I've been struggling with the very idea of writing lately. There's always something I need to be doing. Trimming cat claws. Painting rooms. Holding someone's hand (there are a lot of hands to be held around here, believe me). I took a huge risk and quit my writing group this month. No doubt, it was a terrible decision that I will pay dearly for later. For now, however, it frees up a piece of my mind that was holding something forcibly open in my brain, the door to "science fiction and fantasy." My grip was brutal. I know SF & F. I've published in it. I've gotten paid for my words there. All I had to do, this little ferocious brain monster insisted, to really "make it" was practice, read the rags, try to write the kind of story that would get past JJA's desk to GVG's desk, the promised land. All I had to do was study, practice, write the dang stories.

Something in my brain has been rebelling. I've been writing stories that have been creeping ever so steadily over the line from SF & F to "interstitial" and beyond. Is this fantasy? the writing group was asking. It was a fair question. After all, who would I be mailing these stories to? Magazines with wizards on the cover, or mags with the word "Review" in the title? I didn't know. I was just writing. Maybe it didn't matter, doesn't matter, never will matter who I submit the stories to while I'm writing them. But the thing is, the words have stopped coming. The industry is too depressing. Trying to find genre rags that will take my stuff is disheartening. And I'm reading all those writers that the SF & F people keep trying, with all their might, to absorb into their ranks, whether or not the author wants to be absorbed.

One of those writers is Margaret Atwood. If you want to cause a fuss at a science fiction convention, if you like being snarled at, hold up a copy of Oryx and Crake and suggest there's more to it than an SF story about biotechnology. Suggest that it's serious fiction, that there's a reason it's shelved with Atwood's other stuff in bookstores most of the time. Ride the love-to-hate hobby horse of art versus hackery, highbrow versus lowbrow, literature versus genre fiction. Get stuff thrown at you, including curse words in fabricated languages. SF nerds love to hate on authors who won't "own up" to writing SF. People will be gutting each other over this dumb argument until the end of time. Seriously. Me, I could give a damn where the books are shelved. I just don't care. I don't care whose imprint is on the spine. I'm just finding myself done trying to write furry alien stories, adventure stories with spaceships. All of my SF & F stories have frustrated people in them, marginalized people, wrestling with major emotional shit. To me, that makes a good SF & F story; to me, an SF & F story without characters wrestling with major emotional shit is a boring story.

Then I realized I was letting the SF & F stuff get in my way, or I was leaning on it too hard, or something, and clogging my word arteries. I sit down to write a story, and I get hung up on the SF gizmo instead of getting right to really good stuff that is the sine qua non of the story. I have a problem, Houston. I don't want to write those stories right now. Maybe I will again later, but what I'd like to do is spend some time writing without the veil of fantasy over everything. I'd like to step right into the pale moonlight and get it on without the fairy dust. I want to see what that's like. Maybe it'll be boring as hell. Maybe I'll go screeching back to fairy dust right damn quick as soon as I cast around for my tools and they're not there anymore, and I miss them. But maybe not.

Blame this on Brokeback Mountain. I dunno. Blame this on Moral Disorder, a book of related short stories by Margaret Atwood. Blame it on this passage, from the short story, "White Horse." It's about cats. It's about nothing. It's plotless. I don't really know what it means in the context of the story; I haven't really tried to untangle the thing to get at the theme. I just read it at the breakfast table and entertained a loved one by laughing in delight over it. I laughed. Yes. In delight.

They'd also sprouted a number of cats, offspring of the single cat that had been transported to the farm from the city, and was supposed to have been spayed. Obviously there had been a mistake, because this cat kittened underneath a corner of the house. The kittens were quite wild. They ran away and plunged into their burrow if Nell even tried to get near them. Then they would peer out, hissing and trying to look ferocious. When they were older they moved to the barn, where they hunted mice and had secrets. Once in a while, a gizzard--squirrel, Nell suspected--or else a tail, or some other chewed-up body-part offering, would appear on the back-door threshold, where Nell would be sure to step on it, especially if her feet happened to be bare, as they often were in summer. The cats had a vestigial memory of civilization and its rituals, it seemed. They knew they were supposed to pay rent, but they were confused about the details.

Blame it on Margaret Atwood. Accuse me of snobbery, of elitism, of throwing over my genre roots. Deny me access to the con suite and the Mystery Munch. Cast me out, my SF & F friends. Call me a traitor. But I'm going to try to write something naked and wizardless and yet somehow twice as magical for it.

I might be back. There might not even *be* a back. Maybe it's just that I need to spray those tough-to-pigeonhole stories around a bit. Just sit and tap at the keys and stop wrenching on whatever comes out. Just let it come and be whatever it will be. So long as it delights me. So long as that delight in writing comes back. I'll do anything. Clap my hands and say I believe in fairies. Write about nothing, about cats and squirrel gizzards. Whatever it takes. Amen.

Bookshelf: Brokeback Mountain

I'm torn about the novella Brokeback Mountain; I'm almost sad it was made into a movie. Not that I minded seeing Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a clinch; far from it. I enjoy seeing lovely people in a clinch, even when they're just acting. But the nature of the clinch opened the story to mockery, both good-natured and not so much. Yes, I think the Angry Alien cartoon Brokeback Mountain in 30 Seconds, Reenacted by Bunnies is freaking hilarious, but I also think the existence of the cartoon is kind of sad. Brokeback Mountain a beautiful, serious sad story, and the novella is beautifully written and passionate and loving, without sentimentality. But because of its subject matter, its lack of sentimentality, and its brutally realistic details, it's often summarized as "that movie where Heath Ledger spits in his hand before doing Jake Gyllenhaal from behind." So I'm glad the story was seen by a larger audience. I'm glad it's popular enough that a spoof of it works. But I'm also sad that Jack Twist's heart-wrenching, "I wish I knew how to quit you," doesn't reach more hearts. It reached mine, on a bumpy bus ride between North Station and Kendall Square.

What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.

They had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still memorable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, "Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse," and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words "see you tomorrow," and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.

Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives.

There are more than a few dozy embraces I'll remember for the rest of my difficult life. Complicated, painful, frozen in amber. Laugh at the bunnies; I certainly have. But consider reading about Jack and Ennis afterward in Annie Proulx's vibrant language, consider Heath Ledger's raw, vulnerable performance in the film, consider your own dozy embraces, your own conflicts and complications, and imagine what mountains are inside of you.

Then cheer yourself up by giggling at the bunnies again.