Esoterica / Part One

Being an esoteric reader, it is common to find books that are really off the beaten path for mainstream readers. Sometimes, it makes complete sense that these books aren't consumed by a lot of people because they fall into the experimental, obscure, or disconnected genre where they may have originated. But it is from these lands of "esoterica" that some really fascinating stories, ideas, and designs emerge from writing. If there is a land of writing and thinking that is worth exploring, to me it is on the edges. It is from these places that new ideas, new approaches come into focus. And while they may remain obscure and strange, they may also push the form and act of the storytelling into new places. 

Take that vision of reading to Mikhail Shishkin's Maidenhair, and consider what you are reading and why. It isn't for the faint of heart or the casual reader. The story is based on the life of Swiss officers who guard the border and interview Russian asylum-seekers where they are subjected to the stories of the oppressed. The book is written in a long prose question and answer style that meanders and moves through ideas and connections. Some of it seems like myth and tales. Other stories are complex and dark. And it begins this complex tapestry that takes its toll on the guards. 

While reading this novel, which is not difficult to read thanks to the translation from the Russian by Marian Schwartz, it begins to feel like something else. Shishkin is doing more than crafting a plot. He is plotting to change the reader in a different way. The conclusion? What if this isn't a novel, but an ethical guide to understanding why we write, why stories are important, and the significant weight of being in possession of the stories we tell. There are times in this book when I am reading and following the life a soldier, or hearing some sad story from an orphanage. And then suddenly, there are one hundred ideas coming to mind, or the basic weight of truth as it pertains to fiction. And suddenly, you don't care about the story, but only in that, it happens to you. And you start to think about the unwritten stories you have yet to write, and you start to wonder why you haven't valued your own stories like your life depended on them. 

"Those speaking may be fictitious, but what they say is real. Truth lies only where it is concealed. Fine, the people aren't real but the stories, ho, the stories are! It's just that they raped someone else at the orphanage, not fat-lips. And the guy from Lithuania heard the story about the brother who burned up and the murdered mother from someone else. What difference does it make who it happened to? It's ways a sure thing. The people here are irrelevant. It's the stories that can be authentic or not. We become what gets written in the transcript"(24). 

Make the point that the transcript is an official document of record, making it feel important and factual, although this is all about the way things shift and move in terms of fiction, stories, and the world. What part of this do we accept? It isn't about facts, but accepting truth as it is. We know that rape, violence, war, and other terrible things happen, and it validates the story. So, what part of belief do we accept? The line between the plausible and implausible is based on the writing, the style, and the ability of the writer to tell that story into plausibility. 

"In the wee hours the interpreter woke bathed in sweat and with a pounding heart; he had dreamed of Galina Petronvna - except the boys all called her Galpetra, out of sheer meanness - and it had come back to him - the lesson, the blackboard - as if all these decades lived had never been. He lay there looking at their brightening ceiling and returned to himself, clutching at his heart. Why be afraid of her now? And what exactly was in your dream - you forget right away and are left with just your schoolboy fear. It's a nasty feeling, too. You never know what empire you're going to wake up in or who as"(26).

This paragraph relates to understanding the 

In terms of writing about writing, we find great style and how-to writing books. I think Stephen King's On Writing is a great approach to understanding a writing life. But once writers immerse themselves in books about character, plot, getting into a routine (and the hundreds of other elements to writing), the writer need a deeper understanding of the relation understanding of texts and storytelling. It is time to move out of how and why we write and move into a higher understanding of what it is we do. We might find this in something like Annie Dillard's The Writing Life * or in the essays of Scott Momaday and his culture of oral tradition. We are convinced that we can define the nuts and bolts of writing, but we need to connect to its higher plane. Some of that is seeking out people who have connected to that thought level. The other difficult part, is having the vision as a reader searching out that information.  This article series discusses the value of defining and searching for texts that change the way we think and write. They can inspire, but they can also remind us of the deeper value in the writing and thinking we create as writers. In this day of diminished word counts, technological distraction, and polarized points of view; it is important to find that place, time, and room to make the a writing life more than words on the page. 

Other Worlds and Escaping

I am reading a title called I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing by A. D. Jameson and he give a short overview of the concept (popular now in fantasy and young adult writing) known as world building. And he used Tolkien's ideas in connecting escapism and plausibility together. He said, 

"Tolkien further argued that in order for this experience to succeed, in order for the faerie to be able to work its magic, the secondary worlds must be credible enough that we fall completely under their spell, to which end authors must give them "the inner consistency of reality."" 

This is a fascinating concept that brings the idea that world building is based on things that are different, but consistent with the basic working of reality. I was more interested in the Star Wars elements of this book, however, there are some fascinating asides that really have been notable. 

In many ways, this is how we view truth in fiction. Yes, it is fiction and completely made up, but the theme, the possibility of the action, and the plausibility all come back to this idea of "consistency of reality." Can we learn something fictional and find it based on truth? Of course, we can. It is the possibility that is so compelling in fiction. It isn't how exotic the realm is, but how compelling we find the characters. We know winter is coming in The Game of Thrones because we've seen the northern wall, hell, we know people who have fought there. And winter is coming. How do I know that? Because I've seen it myself. 

In the end, world-building as an idea is vast and creative. It is attractive to writers. But to me, it feels like the most important part of world-building is that we can still find ourselves, even in the most exotic or different realms. 

Lidia Yuknavitch and the The Misfit's Manifesto

I work with college students, more specifically, emerging college students, so they are constantly on the cusp of things that are coming to them. We develop skills, we tell them that they need to improve just to cut it in college. We also tell them about what it means to have a traditional college experience. In reality, a traditional college experience is a myth. We aren't going to live in some kind of strange 1950's vision of academics. 

Our emerging students are not traditional at all. They have had to fight, push, and work much harder than the people around them. In fact, in most cases the students are satisfied just blending in, just being around a higher education experience. They can be self-defeating, battered, wounded learners. 

I've read The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch and I admired her unabashed honesty and the focus of her writing. It was one of the first memoirs that changed the way I think about the form. More important, her writing has connections to failures and finding the most unlikely paths to success. Having followed Lidia Yuknavitch on Twitter, I received a message from her that we all should post our misfit manifesto out to the world and diminish the voice of abusive people. What a great idea. They need to do this. They need to tell me more than what could be gleaned in college writing. They need to write a Misfit Manifesto. They need to write about how improbable success is to them, and how terrifically they have failed. 

When I wrote the assignment sheet for the students, I felt like I had to give them some really good examples of this idea. I used samples from The Mistfit's Manifesto, and I also spoke about specific stories where people feel different and why they may feel this way. Not only was I asking them for specific misfit moments in their lives, I was also asking them to be introspective and thoughtful about their place in the world. 

It was really interesting to hear the reactions to this concept. Some students really didn't understand how this idea would fit into their lives. They had spent so much time assimilating that to think about those misfit moments or times was really part of their lives they didn't want to reveal. But my favorite response was, "Shit, this is going be the easiest assignment you've given us. I've been a screw up all my life." I couldn't wait for that essay. 

One thing I really wanted from them was a personal statement. Not a college application essay, but something unique to their own experience. I told them it is easy to find collective success, but mistakes and other missteps in life are uniquely their own. It reminded me of the Tolstoy quote at the beginning of Anna Karenina when he says, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." 

We also discussed what misfits look like in literature, what they felt like in words. We discussed movie characters, and experiences they saw in the world. We talked about Holden Caulfield, Of Mice and Men, and superheroes. We also discussed time and space for misfits. "Literature is the land o the misfitted." (The Misfit Manifesto).

Most of the essays were simple. They were small things that made them different. For some, it was a bully story or a changing school story. But the story I liked the most was the story from the student who said this is will be easy. And he wrote about being with a group of friends who all got along, and slowly they all turned on him. And for years he was picked on, beat up, and told that he was worthless. And through it all - he somehow, kept it together and waited out his time until he was able to prove himself to the world. That is what he is doing now. It was one of the deeper stories where something held him on a path that (amazingly) wasn't beaten out of him. He never turned. 

As we got through the assignment, I asked that he had a few minutes, I wanted to discuss his paper. He came to the office and was nervous. He asked if there was anything wrong. I showed him the grade. He smiled and said thank you. I told him earned it, from year and years of not giving in. He didn't say anything for a minute -- he flipped the paper over and said, "all that shit's behind me now." 

As I mentioned, some writers played it safe, some played it with some uncertainty, but they all considered their lives with a different slant. In one student paper, it was clear that it might've put to bed some ghosts. Yuknavitch says, "If you are one of those people who has the ability to make it down to the bottom of the ocean, the ability to swim the dark waters without fear, the astonishing ability to move through life's worst crucibles and not die, then you also have the ability to bring something back to the surface that helps others in a way that they cannot achieve themselves." This assignment is difficult because you are asking people to look at their darker side, their past, their missteps, and wrong fits. The other paper that I really admired was a letter that a student wrote to his future grandchildren - explaining how screwed up the world is and how - if they are reading this - they should be in a better place. And that he was a good person who cared and wanted to right the wrongs of the world. I thought that was a noble approach to his life. 

My students did a good job thinking about this idea. And when you read Lidia Yuknavitch explain her life in The Chronology of Water, you can get a sense of how we have all lived our own misfit lives and why they are so important. It reminds me that we need to be brave, creative, and take risks with our students. Some will feel challenged and frustrated but think of those who needed it most. They've been waiting for a long time to say these things. 

Try it in the class, try it in your writing groups, write your own manifesto. It will change the way you see the world. 

---

Note: Another writing prompt that taps into some significant reflections is Letter to Humanity or this project I worked on awhile back. It is a great tool for reflective nonfiction. Letters to Humanity

Doubts in Magic: How Marquez Makes Realism and Magic Doubtful

Note: This post discusses a reading. It is linked here for reference. A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 

There is a struggle to understand the concept of magical realism as a mode of literature. It is allusive and often very heard to define in terms of traditional literary terms. By reading a short story by one of the legends of magical realism, we can consider how useful this device, this troupe, this idea can be in saying something very important in terms of literature. 

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings: A Tale for Children by Gabriel Marquez brings to light the duplicity that can drawn out in magical realism. It is skepticism, belief, vision, and doubt all constantly swirling about what seems like poetry, fiction, parable, and doubt wrapped into one short story. 

As for the reader, part of what Marquez does so well is adding the possible with the impossible and allow the readers to judge those things on their own merits. In the opening lines: 

"On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross he drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench." 

While this is a strange event, it is very possible to imagine this kind of event happening, particularly in a tropical climate. What is interesting in the idea that these are difficult times, rain, crabs, and fever all build significant tension. It is when the main character, Pelayo finds an old man with wings, face down in the yard that we begin to see how the magical and the realism meet each other, seeking nothing more than an active curiosity of the reader. Between the flood of crabs and the crashed old man in the yard, nothing is amazing, but nothing is normal either. In fact, the old man with wings is dressed "like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had." The magical becomes normalized and accepted. Every possible insight into something extraordinary is then undercut with a healthy dose of reality. When they describe his being stuck in the chicken coup, he is seen "as if [he] weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal."

And everyone who sees the old man with wings comes to the same conclusion, that while it is different, it can't be magical. The church arrives on the Father Gonzaga realizes that he isn't an angel when he doesn't speak the language of the church (Latin) and doesn't respond to him appropriately. And he notices, "that seen up close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels." 

This story gives us a constant measure of how we perceive things and how they hold up to the skeptic, to the church, to the reality of the world. If you think of this story as magical, then everyone is a skeptic and whatever magic is happening is merely incidental to the ways the people abuse, ignore and cast off the miraculous elements happening. If this is a story about realism, it is about finding a hoax, seeing something that is possible but likely impossible. And in the end, something that may have never happened. 

In terms of the reader, it is an opportunity. If you are a realist and skeptic, you might side with the villagers and see this convoluted creature as a mere oddity, sideshow, natural oddity. There is even skepticism in the title. It isn't "The Angel with Enormous Wings" it is titled A Very Wold Man with Enormous Wings. Yet, if you are a believer in magical possibilities, this is a better read. While you are considering the scoffers, you can consider that not all magical things are what we expect. In fact, if the angel is there to take the feverish child (in the beginning) to death, it failed. But if he has come to save the child, he has succeeded. Marquez is constantly slipping back and forth through the elements of possible and impossible, magical and realism to make each sentence a puzzle to decode. 

This is a great text to contemplate the alternative ideas that are created here. For every magical idea, there is room for doubt. And the same could be said for every moment of realism, there is hope that magical things can be slightly tarnished, dirty or just a little tawdry.  

Book Review: ActivAmerica by Meagan Cass

ActivAmerica 
Meagan Cass
University of North Texas Press / 2017
Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction
ISBN 978-1574416947 / Paper / 192 Pages

ActivAmerica is a collection of short stories drawn from America's obsession with fitness, sports, and how we re-envision ourselves through sports. If this doesn't sound like your cup of tea, you are probably wrong. This book is a dynamic, funny, ironic, brilliant, and often biting commentary on how we live our lives through the perception of sports. This collection tackles more than just the concept of sports but reframes the American dream in tangents and connections that often feels at once hilarious and so ironic 

This selection of short stories meditates on the ideas around sports. And one thing that Cass does so well is that she is able to bring out the absurdity and the complexity of these ideas and bring that forward into a complex and often poignant vision of America in the face of changing times. Stories range from traditional sports and teams to a more visionary look at how people embrace things like Soloflex, ping-pong, and infatuations with famous athletes.

The story based on the collection title, ActivAmerica is a hilarious story based on securing a new health plan that requires the participants to run a mile every day. In some cases, the sport is a mere reflection of who we once were or who we never tried to become. Cass captures the absurdity of a moment and then turns it into a poignant and emotional connection to how we live our lives. Every line in her stories hold value, depth, and often humor. Nothing feels wasted in the prose. 

In the story Hawthorne Dynasty it reveals life in a typical girls’ soccer league, with a sassy coach and her all-star daughter Alana. The girls admire Alma and watch her become something beyond them. “When the starting whistle blew, she snapped her fingers, rocked onto the balls of her feet and didn’t stop moving until it was over…. She wore blonde hair loose, and on breakaways it would stream back behind her, catching the afternoon sun so it looked like her whole head was on fire.” It isn’t until later that we see Alana in a different life, away from her coach (her mother) and away from the life of suburbia. When we see her again later in life, Alana is a shadow of the woman who played soccer – free from clutches of her mother but haunted by the past. In Night Games, a group of late night, high school ruffians draw out a figure skater to join them in their secret hockey matches in the middle of the night. “Afterwards we sit and drink and the stink of our gear and our sweat rises around us. I breathe it in. It feels good to be a woman with a smell.” And the longing that these games, reminiscent and tribal would be lost in the next cycle of the season, it draws out change, doubt, and loss.

Some of the stories shift a bit from a traditional sports theme into ideas of what it means to be an American on the go. The Body in Space is a visionary story about a science teacher that is selected to go into the space program and the repercussions it has on his family. Ping-Pong, 12 Loring Place also intersects with competitive siblings staying clear of their fight parents. As they kids master the nuances of ping-pong “top spin and back spin, experimented with the flick, the block. … Our rallies grew longer, more heated, our bodies slamming into the gray walls as we struggled to return the push, the loop, the lob, the chop shot.” Through the winter, brother and sister continue the competitive ritual of playing in the basement. Finally, with the death of a marriage, and the coming of spring, the two must leave their bunker. “I was going to college and she was selling the house, buying a smaller one without a basement, without room for a ping-pong table. By then our paddles were barely functional, the stippled rubber worn away from the faces, the red and gold paint dulled. Before we left, Ari put them in one of our grandfather’s old cigar boxes, buried them in the backyard. A time capsule, we called it, as if some distant, future family would know to dig it up, would decipher the hieroglyphics off our nicknames, blurred with sweat. As if nothing was passing away.” In the end, it is more than the sports and activities that draw significance to these stories, it is a sense of measuring the world as it was and how it may become – and the forecast is often fraught with a myriad of emotions that Cass masterfully controls like musical notes on a staff.

Some of these stories reach into the absurd, but it isn’t without value. Cass has the ability to bring stories into focus using humor and satire to make even strange stories build with meaning and emotion. These stories were made for workshop dissection and discussions. Evocative and meaningful, Cass continues to innovate her own voice and style with every new idea and concept in this collection. These stories are not only entertaining and deeply poignant, but she innovates the push and pull that haunts what it means to be an American. Every story is layered in a complex tumult of emotions, action, and vision. Her voice, character, and mastery of the form creates brilliant opportunities to examine more than just themes on sports, but delves deeper into compelling elements of the American dream; to be competitive, physical, aggressive, and beautiful at the cost of our hopes, guilt, longing, and loss. This collection won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. 

Ron Samul is a writer and college educator. 

RonSamul.org 

CLMOOC 2017 Make Cycle #2

Postcards are interesting in that they can convey things and give us an image, an idea, data, connections, and they are often welcome, unlike ads or bills. 

This weeks postcards was a combination of ideas I had kicking around. One was to write half truth, half fictional newspaper articles that might resonant with people. I find that no matter how big the town, people have their share of quirky people living around them. This is a project to document some of those stories, and capture some interesting jump off points for stories and anecdotes. 

This group has turned my thinking around and while I know the type of content I want to include, I started this with template making and finding the right application to make this work for me. I tried a few different programs and apps, but landed on Publisher. Even though I don't love it, it worked for this layering of textboxes and other elements. 

Postcard #1 was about a screaming lady and while I don't love the content, I was more concerned with the entire look and size. During our Makers Hangout on 7/18/17 we considered the idea that the post card has two sides -- the content side and the address side. While these two sides may be different, they also may be connected - one showing part of the idea and the other the answer, or the reveal, or a clue. 

We also discussed the personal nature of writing and sending a unique correspondence to someone and what that means as a transaction of social or connective significance. When I was creating the back, I wanted to create an orientation to the article and project. But I also wanted to number them and personalize them like numbered prints or series collections so people would be excited about finding and reading a series or collection. (More in the collection here). 

Data Postcards

It sounded like the group had been working in data and using data cards to establish a connection. I have to say, thanks to Kevin, I was able to watch the data video Big Bang Data which really helped me understand the concepts and the connections. I really love this concept and idea. And I think it will be a fascinating connection to do with writers. How often to you think about your characters, novel, plot -- or how often did you write a poem. Part of collecting this kind of data for writers is not only for the collections of data, but to see productivity. Writers have a terrible self view and they always feel like their work is kept behind closed doors. This proves their worth, their working, and that they are constantly seeing the world through the lens of a writer. Fascinating and an evolving thought pattern in creating connections to writers. 

Between The Lines: Slaughterhouse Five Opening

Truth and fiction is a strange world. Writers are constantly invested in the vision of living many lives - some on paper while others are in real life. The complexity of writing fiction and understanding truth runs parallel to the idea that we can talk about truth and find its mirrored in fiction. In terms of writing, true stories and real accounts has a value to the general readership. We see labels splashed across book covers and movie posters that profess that they are based on a true story. And yet, the layers of fact to fiction can be complex and run deep into the story. 

Does it matter? Does fiction have to hold truth? Does a true story shift into fiction as soon as it is captured and told from different voices?  

It is important to write about these lines and ideas as they relate to both sides of the issue. It isn't black and white, truth and fiction, but a combination of millions of possibilities and connections that make truth stranger than fiction. This series continues to discuss this concept. Sometimes, these entries will be brief notes and connections, while other articles will a bit more elaborate. 

In Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, we are faced with the kind of strange world that I want to continue to explore - perhaps for the rest of my life. I want to be the truth expert in fiction... whatever that means. 

"All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunman after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names." 

In looking at the way this opening reads, it is clear that fact and fiction are coming together. Most of the sentences in this section have disclaimers to the truth. "All this happened" is very declarative until it is disqualified with "more or less." This builds the uncomfortable relationship that is being established. 

He moves on to the next idea, "The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true." Alluding to the idea that "pretty much" covers enough. As we move to the next sentence, we should acknowledge the emphasis on the words. "One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his." This is a moment where you feel like the writer wants to look you in the eyes, look, this happened. Notice there are no names here. The next sentence continues this serious tone, "Another guy really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by a hired gunman after the war." In these phrases, the narrator wants us to realize that there is truth, even fact in these words, but they can't be verified. They can't be questioned. You will have to take his word for it that they happened.

In the last two sentences, we have "And so on" as if we would just carry on with more of his stories. And then he forfeits it all by saying, "I've changed all the names." The obscuring of the names isn't at all a surprise, the narrator has teased out the balance between truth and fiction here, but to it does remind us - I will tell the truth by obscuring facts and leaving you merely with truth. Of course, this is merely an interpretation, but it does a back and fourth of reality that is being played one aginst the other. 

This work is considered semi-autobiographical which alone strikes at the heart of the matter. Half true, half something else. Part of what we are seeing here might be an answer for the mass destruction, the death, and the insanity of war. It can't be shown to the reader without cloaking it in imagination, shifting the reality away from the reader, intentionally block the brunt of the evil so that the readers can begin somewhere. This novel was written twenty-five years out from his personal experience. Perhaps it is this distortion that helps define the balance between right and wrong.  - #


Ron Samul is a writer and educator. For more information or to contact him, go to www.RonSamul.org 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.