In the Labyrinth

Falling Into Water and Rising Swimming

Can I just say how much I love these two etchings by 18th century artist Thomas Rowlandson? The first is a woman diving into the water from a wagon pulled into the surf to serve as a diving platform. "Venus Bathing" is vigorous, round and robust as she takes a "Fashionable Dip" into the ocean at Margate. She dives fearlessly, the people and the shore are small and far away, making her even more wonderful, a woman in her element.

And then she swims...effortlessly like a mermaid on a stroll. "Side Way or Any Way" -- she is perfectly at home in the water, buoyant and serene.

What Has Blogging Become in the Age of a "Like Button?

 

 

 

I have been blogging at this location for the last fifteen years, and it is with pleasure that I continue to do so -- but perhaps with a much-changed mission. When authors I know first started blogging, it was a way of communicating with people. I look back at the posts from five-six years ago, and I am surprised to see how many comments there are, sometimes a rich ongoing discussion inspired by something in my post, or sometimes an exchange of very useful information. But such a community is rare now on a blog. We have switched our allegiance to Facebook, where an announcement of a post does not actually mean someone will follow the link and read it. Still, they will express approval for the general idea by clicking the "like" button. And then we move even farther out, to a mere 280 characters in a tweet, to announce our blog post and receive a few "hearts" and maybe a re-tweet -- but still rare responses on the blog itself. Those kinds of conversations are pretty much over. When I went down my list of bloggers, I was surprised to discover how many had packed it in for the elegant, quick-release variants of Facebook and Twitter. And then there is Instagram, where the totality of an idea must be summed up in perfectly constructed images and hashtags.

 

 

 

Don't get me wrong -- I am not really complaining, just observing the transition and what it means for dinosaurs like me who still love to blog, even if it is for an audience of one. When I started blogging, I did so for the Journal of Mythic Arts and the Endicott Studio. We wanted to be a resource of myth, art, and folklore goodness. We wanted to share the wonderful work done by so many talented people. So, the posts were always aimed outward. When we archived The Journal of Mythic Arts and the Endicott Studio, blogging finally shifted to the personal. I set up my blog, In the Labyrinth, in 2007 and wondered where it might take me.

 

What I discovered was a profound shift -- from promoting others to promoting myself and my work -- and it took a while to figure that out. How much personal information to share, family photos, events, favorite meals -- all the early posts that now seem so much better suited for Facebook. And somewhere along the way, I also wanted to review books I loved and write short critical essays on literary culture, folklore, my writing, and what inspired me. I am pretty eclectic, I know that -- a magpie who is happy to post on the intellectual roots of Garcia Lorca's "Duende" to theatrical work with trance-inducing masks, to Medieval bad-boys who wrote pornographic poetry, deconstructing a brilliant sentence by Joseph Conrad, Balzac's treaties on Coffee drinking (which bordered on the hallucinogenic), Russian artists, Medieval Manuscripts and Irish poets, and The Voynich Manuscript. I do try and promote my work by sharing my research notes and excerpts, my struggles sometimes with getting a story right, and the ever important announcement of a completed new work.

 

 

I understand that I am writing a journal, and that actually pleases me. I am less concerned with how far a post of mine travels, but rather that I can call up the evolution of my ideas over time -- a long time -- and revisit past ideas—a body of my thought. But...in the interest of not feeling quite so lonely, I go every day now to other people's blogs that I find interesting, and I make a point of responding to the posts, asking questions, and sharing my thoughts on the subject where appropriate. I am planning once a week to share the best of the blog posts for the week that I found, and I encourage you, if interested, to visit them and respond.

 

 

 

Art credits: The inestimable Edward Hopper.

Banished Brides and Longbows

 

I found this lovely image—most likely of the great warrior Queen, Matilda of Tuscany—and thought how familiar she looked, banded together with her sisters-in-arms, swords and longbows, arrows, and beautiful dresses. Though Matilda was certainly far more powerful and effective as a warrior queen, this image seemed like a perfect illustration for a band of querulous brides that appear in Zizola's novel.

More than a while ago, I wrote about the peculiar figure of the "banished bride" in folktales and ballads --- the bride who unwittingly stands in for the heroine until she can extricate herself from whatever impediment has kept her temporarily from her intended groom. The poor dear is then banished at the altar -- sent home, and even though financially compensated, her honor and reputation dimmed. Here's what I wrote in that post:

"So what happens to those banished brides -- not the deceitful and disguised brides, they always meet with bad ends -- but those brides like poor Anne of Cleves determined too ugly (and "too swarthy") by Henry the Eighth and sent home as unsuitable. Since we never get their side of the story or the what-ever-happened-to-that-young-woman? The writer in me couldn't resist wondering what those women might do to reclaim themselves if given a chance in a novel. A young writer I know suggested they went home with a huge sigh of relief -- imagining that such weddings to total strangers would have been scary enough to contemplate.

But from a narrative point of view, that's no fun -- especially after reading the Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach; I know that the Italians -- or at least the Sicilians-- are firm believers in spectacular revenge. So I couldn't help but think of a sisterhood of Banished Brides coming together and taking their fury on the road to extract some form of punishing compensation. A band of marauding, almost brides are offering to my young heroine roadside companionship and rancorous cautionary tales about men in general. (Although I suspect the trickster traveling with her would not be able to resist the temptation of meddling with those dangerous women.) Well...there's a few chapters to meditate on and then to write."

Queen Matilda was certainly no banished bride—though she did have an awful marriage to a stepbrother—but she seems to have compensated for all the shortcomings of an unhappy marriage by becoming a highly effective military commander and fighter. All this happened in the 12th century, which is pretty remarkable. 

A New Undertaking: Leaping Hart Press

 

 

I am happy to announce that I have finally taken the plunge and created my independent small press, Leaping Hart Press. It has been an exciting process, watching as each requirement for an LLC falls into place (though not without some anxiety and middle-of-the-night worry.) I am now busy re-reading the original manuscripts and revising, editing, and correcting old mistakes as necessary. There is some joy in this process as I rediscover the work anew and remember who I was at the time of creating the novel. I wrote my first novel when my children were small. Subsequent books were written between driving the children to school, teaching at a high school, researching one magical year-long trip in Italy, and mourning the death of my father and, later, my mother. I see how many moments in the novels echo the events in my life.

But I also am not entirely done writing novels and essays either. Once the backlit is out and published, I look forward to a handful of new projects. Collected short stories (some old, some new), with permission, a collection of my Bordertown Stories, with one or two new ones to join the previously published novellas, and a sequel to at least one of my novels, if not two.

Ambitious? Probably, but not unreasonable, especially as I have terrific friends in the publishing community ready to offer assistance -- which is both humbling and helpful to know. 

 

The Shaping of Story: Working Through Ideas

 

My notes on re-reading Harold Scheub's work on oral narrative structures and performance. They have shaped the way I think of the fantastic in narrative and how it functions, and by extension, how those "electric moments" when the real and the fantastic are combined in narrative.

 

    Notes from Harold Scheub's Story: an evident and detailed understanding of how stories in the oral traditions become a focal point for harmonizing the different, distinctive experiences and histories of the members of an audience. These are performances, and the meanings of the tale, from didactic to metaphorical, occur in the performance as a reaction to the images and the aesthetic patterning of the tale to create a surface narrative from conflict to resolution. In contrast, meaning is generated by layering emotionally evocative and metaphorical imagery. Within the performance, the audience encounters what is familiar in the narrative and what can be interpreted and reinterpreted throughout the listener's life. (c.f. The child who hears the story, the young woman engaged in puberty rights, the new mother, wife or co-wife, the older woman who tells the story to audiences of mixed ages or just her peers.)

    The story combines image and emotions, narrative movement, form or patterning, and the layering of imagery that results in a report. The images are pulled from the inherited cache of emotionally evocative paintings, which are paired with contemporary, more realistic images, and their interaction in the story creates a flashpoint. It is not in the suspension of disbelief that enables meaning but in the moment of tension in the pairing ("electric opposition") of the contemporary realistic images with the fantastic, ancient photos that contain the most profound dreams, hopes, fears, and nightmares of a world experience. The storyteller organizes the images and the narrative in a surface movement from conflict to resolution while at the same time patterning the emotionally evocative images into tropes that allow the audience to discover the nature of the relationship and its significance and meaning. The principle objective of fantastic imagery is a poetic reorganization of the real -- and, by contrast, to provide a new layer of importance in the real.

    Fantastic images provide connections, transformations, and symbolic relations between the natural and the marvelous. Because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history and ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end but a means to push the story toward the symbolic. It becomes the engine of change, bringing the audience to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The tale's power does not emerge with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of the story itself is the experience of metaphor, which is its power. Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion. Combining the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. Blending the two, not just dreaming alone, is essential because, without the mooring of the natural world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces. As the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes. 

    Fantastic images provide connections, transformations, and symbolic relations between the natural and the marvelous. Because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history and ancient traditions that are reconstituted in a new way for contemporary understanding. Supernatural villains & helpers become manifestations of the struggle occurring to the protagonist. The fantastic elements are not an end but a means to push the story toward the symbolic. It becomes the engine of change, bringing the audience to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The tale's power does not emerge with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of the story itself is the experience of metaphor, which is its power.

    Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion. Combining the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. Blending the two, not just dreaming alone, is essential because, without the mooring of the natural world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces. As the storyteller combines the images of reality with the introduction of fantasy, reality finds itself within a fantastic context, forcing our thinking about those matters into new modes. 

 

 

 

 

 

People Inconvienced by Objects and Thoughts

I love these wildly imaginative graphite portraits of "People Inconvenienced by Objects and Thought" by Stefan Zsaitits. They look almost exactly how my head feels right now. itchy, scratchy, and aggravated by an eye infection. 

It has been something of a rough road for these last four months as we traveled from Longmont, Colorado, to Tucson, Arizona, and then to Pittsburgh, where I am now awaiting the flight that will return us to our home in Longmont. It was good seeing so many friends that we have missed and many of our relatives scattered all over the country. 

Love and Do What You Will...

 

 

St. Augustine of Hippo, a figure often remembered by young Catholics for his plea to God during his wild youth, "Give me chastity and continence, but not quite yet," Has left us with a wealth of wisdom. One such quote, which a friend recently shared with me, resonates particularly powerfully in our modern times:

"See what we are insisting upon: that the deeds of men are only discerned by the root of love. For many things may be done that have a good appearance, and yet proceed not from the root of love…Once and for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good." (7th Homily on John 1)

What makes this quote so compelling is its universal applicability. I'm certain that each one of us can adapt this precept to our struggles, goals, and desires. For me, it would be: "Love and do what you will, whether you create, through love create; whether you write, through love write." 

One Does Not Say No to Baba Yaga

 

There are moments in writing that feel so spontaneous that it is hard to believe they have come from oneself but instead are descended in the form of a writerly-grace. When Jane Yolen and I wrote Except the Queen, we began by separately creating characters, each with their voice and chapters, intuitively stitching them together to form one narrative. It was fun as it invited an advantageous approach to writing. I always assumed a direction, a motive, a line in the plot until Jane sent me her most recent chapter, and everything went out the window, and I had to react to her chapter with something entirely different than I had imagined. I also returned the favor to her on some occasions -- and that process was incredibly fruitful. 

Baba Yaga showed up unannounced in a boxcar, slowing down just long enough to allow a terrified and transformed fairie to get hauled aboard by a pair of broad-fingered hands. I hadn't planned her appearance at all. It was as though she stepped in and demanded of me to include her in the novel. Despite her dangerous reputation, she had a killer sense of humor, demonstrated by her attempts to educate the new arrival to the human world on the art of blending in, beginning with a lesson on the casual use of the word "fuck" and "shit" on the college campus.

Another moment occurs when one of the main characters, Meteora, recalls a confrontation between the Fairie Queen and Baba Yaga at the court. I am not the first writer to imagine her as a singular creature, her archetype, out of time and eternal. But the written expression of such a unique status surprised me once I had written it down as she instructed. 

"She leaned back, all the while sucking on her lower lip, scraping her tusks against the purple flesh. She was wearing odd clothes--odd in that she was wearing any at all -- for the little I knew of her, Baba Yaga was not beholden to the fashions of the Seelie court or man himself. She was old enough to have roamed the pristine forests in gleaming nakedness when the first man and first woman still wore their skins in innocence. She could not forgive their betrayal, the death of those perfect forests, and now wore the skin of old age, of mortal corruption, to remind those who encountered her that she had not forgotten. 

"Serena and I had seen her once Under the Hill. Accustomed to the cloth of beauty and youth, we were goggle-eyed at her withered hide, her long, sagging breasts hanging low over her bony chest. Her hips jutted like the pelvis of a starved cow, and the loose skin of her belly lapped in folds over the tangled fur of her sex. But her strong arms were wound with taut ropes of muscles, her hands broad as spades with thick fingers that ended in black nails, sharpened to razor points. She had refused all gifts of clothing the Queen had offered her: the finely woven cloaks with silver clasps, the green silken gowns, the lace chemises, and pretty dresses. 

"Serena and I had talked about nothing else for days. From a leather pouch slung low on her hips, Baba Yaga had withdrawn a necklace of little bones and knuckles and placed it around her neck. The court had cringed at the sight of it. Even Red Cap, there as an emissary from the Unseelie court, bowed his head before the mocking challenge in her flaming eyes. All fell back from her, all except the Queen, who bloodied her delicate garments, carrying the carcass of a newly slaughtered fawn and placing it as an offering in Baba Yaga's hands. "