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.

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.

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.

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.

The Polysyllabic Spree

I've taken a break from the John Fowles journals and sought refuge with Nick Hornby. Honestly, I love John Fowles. Everything I've ever read of Fowles has been rich with emotion, thick with humanity, true in detail, absolutely dark and beautiful, but it seems he was a perfectly miserable human being. Which is perhaps why he wrote miserable human beings so convincingly.

Anyhow, I'm not going to stop loving Fowles novels just because Fowles himself was depression incarnate, but I am going to have to put his journals down from time to time and floss my brain with something, you know, on the lighter side of beautiful. Enter Nick Hornby. I love Nick Hornby. If we were suitably advanced in technology and I could purchase the voice of Nick Hornby to be my conscience and whisper an endless commentary into my ear every waking hour, I'd swipe my credit card without looking at the total.

Hornby writes a regular book review column for The Believer, a magazine for lovers of literature including book reviews and interviews by the same publisher of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and Wholphin. Hornby's book reviews are less about the books themselves and more about his engagement with the books, how he feels about the books, what's going on in his life while reading the books, and reading each essay is like listening to a brilliant monologue at Hornby's kitchen table. You're unable to reply because you've got a pint of English lager shooting from your nose or something equally painful and funny, but that's okay, because you leave the table entertained.

Here's Hornby, rhapsodizing about Dennis Lehane's Mystic River:

Why hasn't anyone ever told me that Mystic River is right up there with Presumed Innocent and Red Dragon? Because I don't know the right kind of people, that's why. In the last three weeks, about five different people have told me that Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty is a work of genius, and I'm sure it is; I intend to read it soonest.... I'm equally sure, however, that I won't walk into a lamp-post while reading it, like I did with Presumed Innocent all those years ago; you don't walk into lamp-posts when you're reading literary novels, do you? How are supposed to find out about landmark thrillers like Mystic River?

In Prayers for Rain, Lehane piles complication upon complication in order to keep his detectives guessing, and there is a certain readerly pleasure to be had from that, of course; but it just seems like a more routine pleasure, compared to what he does in Mystic River. There, Lehane peers into the deep, dark hole that the murder of a young girl leaves in various lives, and tries to make sense of everything revealed therein; everything seems organic, nothing--or almost nothing, anyway--feel contrived. I'm happy to have friends who recommend Alan Hollinghurst, really I am. They're all nice, bright people. I just wish I had friends who could recommend books like Mystic River too. Are you that person? Do you have any vacancies for a pal? If you can't be bothered with a full-on friendship, with all the tearful, drunken, late-night phone calls and bitter accusations and occasional acts of violence thus entailed (the violence is always immediately followed by an apology, I hasten to add), then maybe you could just tell me the titles of the books.

I first picked up the Believer essays when a loved one bought the succeeding volume, Housekeeping vs. the Dirt. I was taking that graduate course in Victorian Lit at the time, and so anything I picked up and tried to read for pleasure looked like drunken, pissed off ants marching all over the page. But as soon as I put the last of my coursework in the mail and had a little recovery time, I was drawn back to Hornby, and after a single page, I was happily lost. Who would have thought that reading about someone else's reading would be so fabulously amusing?

I wonder if Nick Hornby would consider being my friend. :)

Unspeakable Horror: Reader Review

Nick Kaufman has written a nicely thorough review of Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet. Here is his call out of my short story "Black Annis":

Joy Marchand's "Black Annis" turns the fairy tale concept on its head, painting the fairy here as a monster, though one the protagonist is tempted to employ to kill off his homophobic tormentors. A very accomplished and multilayered story.

Read the rest of his review here.

John Fowles, The Journals (1949-1965)

I've become addicted to the journals of writers. I last read Anais Nin's Henry and June and now I'm reading the journals of John Fowles, my favorite writer. Reading the Fowles journals is nothing like reading Nin's. She is utterly sensual, utterly forgiveable and human. Fowles is the essence of alienation; reading him, I both feel pity for him and see myself in him (and the latter is horrifying). As horrible as reading him can be (his existentialism is bleak, his contempt for people painful) I can't help but find truth in his pages, sad truths, but genuine.

The necessity of holding aloof from the mundane literary life. It must be very assiduously avoided. To be a critic, to always be reading and examining other people's creations, destroys one's own impulses. One draws away all one's resources in a kind of eunuch pleasure .... It's lying sleeping every night with the woman you love without touching her. And then one day when you move close and want to take her, you are impotent. A fresh approach, an approach from outside, is impossible.

This not to say that Fowles doesn't read. On the contrary, he reads constantly, speaking of E.M. Forster, Emily Bronte, Samuel Butler, D.H. Lawrence, and I'm only 70 pages in. What he seems to be saying is that analyzing novels in the manner of a critic is the death of writing. I'm sure there's room for argument here. In fact, I'm sure it's a venerable old hobby horse. I think the real reason I agree with Fowles is because I'm just as uncomfortable with the business of being a writer as he was. I'd so much rather just read books and write what I'm moved to write, and damn the rest. Damn trying to make a name. Damn trying to find some sort of key to "good" writing. Damn trying to figure out why classics are classics and why bestsellers are bestsellers. Damn trying to find anything but the truth in writing.

Oh Look! There's a World Out Here

This is the feeling I get after I've bunkered down for a long, laborious project that has consumed every moment of my free time and every angstrom of my thinking power over a long period of time: Oh look! There's a world out here. No one hit the pause button while I was busy being crushed under the pressing stones of work-work, and homework, and parenting, and partnering, and all of those things that eat up units of time we might prefer spending on the couch in our undies, clutching the TV remote. I've just finished the coursework for last semester's literature class after a long, hard slog through over a dozen primary sources written between 1750 and 1931. Yesterday, I went to the post office and put my coursework in the mail and breathed a long, steady sigh of relief. Since finishing the paper on Saturday, I've read one book (Housekeeping vs. The Dirt by Nick Hornby), finished reading one I'd started during a break somewhere in the middle of the slog (Slam, Hornby again), and started a third.

Reading for pleasure, ah, yes, I remember that. I started the third on the train this morning, and it was like slipping into an all-you-can eat buffet. Actually, selecting the book from the shelf was overwhelming. Do I want the chicken fried steak or the filet mignon? Surely, I deserve to have lemon meringue on everything, now that I've done my Work and it's time to Rest. I considered a few light books loaned to me by friends and passed those by with a twinge of regret. (Yes, dear ones, I will read the books you loaned me, but not just now.) I thumbed through a Michael Chabon novel, while trying not to look too hard at the teetering to-be-read stack, and when I put it down, my hand grazed my beloved "recently-read" stack and I found myself holding Mrs. Dalloway. I believe I started the 2008 reading year with just this book. I remember transcribing passages from it, but would have to dig back into my reading journal to remember which passages. It doesn't matter.

I'm free to do whatever I like, at least until I feel compelled to pick up another large project. I'm free to read Mrs. Dalloway again. I have so many units of time now that I can turn the last page, flip the book over, and start again, if that's what I want to do with my time. Don't get me wrong; I'm still busy as hell. Finishing one large project doesn't change the fact that my life is multi-layered and rich, and packed with as much experience as possible. But those pockets of time I was saving for academic writing are now free, and waiting to be filled with prose.

For at least a little while, I can read whatever I want.

Oh, joy! Oh, bliss!

Oh look! There are books out here!