In the Labyrinth

A New Undertaking: Leaping Hart Press

I am happy to announce that I have finally taken the plunge and created my own 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 while 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 back-list 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 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. 

 

What Has Blogging Become in the Age of a "Like Button" and Messaging in 280 Characters or Less?

I have been blogging at this location for the last twelve years and it is with pleasure that I continue to 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 on-going discussion inspired by something in my post, or sometimes an exchange of very useful information. But such 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, but 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. And when I went down my list of bloggers, I was surprised to discover how many had packed it in for the nimble, 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 JoMA and the Endicott Studio, blogging finally shifted to the personal. I set up my own 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, write short critical essays on literary culture, folklore, my own 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 own 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 post, to asking questions, sharing my own thoughts on the subject where appropriate. And I am planning once a week to share (on facebook of course!)  the best of the blog posts for the week that I found, and encourage you if interested to visit them and respond.

Art credits: The inestimable Edward Hopper.

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 push against each to create a charged metaphorical experience in the performance (and perhaps in my context as writer, in the creation of the text.) Scheub's voluminous writings on Story and Performance continue to challenge my thinking and my writing every time I go back and re-read his work. 

Notes from Harold Scheub's Story : a really clear and detailed understanding of how story in the oral traditions become a focal point for harmonizing the different, idiosyncratic 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 while meaning is generated in the layering of emotionally evocative and metaphorical imagery. Within the performance the audience has a personal encounter with what is both 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 is telling the story to audiences of mixed ages or just her peers.)

Story is a combination of image and emotions, narrative movement, of form or patterning, the layering of imagery that results in story. The images are pulled from the inherited cache of emotionally evocative images which are paired with contemporary, more realistic images and their interaction in the story create 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 images which contain the deepest dreams, hopes, fears, 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 the fantastic imagery is a poetic reorganization of the real -- and by the contrast to provide a new layer of meaning in the real.

Fantastic images provide a world of connections, of transformations, of metaphorical relations between the real and marvelous, and because many are inherited from a shared historical past, they will also contain fragments of history, 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 into themselves, but as a means to push the story towards the metaphorical. It becomes the engine of change bringing the audience out to where uncertainty exists and then back to the familiar. The power of the tale is not one that emerges with a glimmering metaphor -- the performance of tale itself is the experience of metaphor and that is its power. 

Fantasy tales are a form of reasoning, a way of looking at events in the context of emotion.The combination of the fantasy and the real in the stories provides a new measure of the real world. The blending of the two, not just fantasy alone is important because without the mooring of the real world, the fantasy would be dull -- fantasy breaks our world into artificial pieces and 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. 

Research Notes I: Culinary Arts In the 16th Century

In the process of updating the blog, I was delighted to re-discover an older post on one of my favorite subjects -- food! Especially the culinary arts of the Renaissance which rival those of early Rome. John Varriano's book is a treat for both cooks and artists. 

Researching food is always fun, partially to make to make sure that I won't make any grievous errors putting in a dish that wasn't around until a century later -- or and even more important -- miss the chance to put in a dish that by its very design and substance is more fantastic and magical than anything I could have imagined. Maybe that is part of the allure of research -- discovering that the facts are so much more satisfying to write about than the imagined ones.

So to this lovely little book: Tastes and Temptations, Food and Art in Renaissance Italy by John Varriano -- an excellent examination of the relationship between the artists of the Renaissance and the great chefs of the same period. Varriano demonstrates the ways in which cooks and artists relied more on imagination in the production of their work (and often drawing inspiration from each other), and shared an affinity for ritual and the symbolic value of forms to represent the sacred, nature, and the senses. They were exercises in artifice to make aesthetic statements -- a salmon mousse molded to resemble a goat (so as to confuse and heighten the experience of eating one thing while imagining another) or an exquisite Ovidian scene of diners painted at the bottom of one's soup bowl. And in other ways, the relationship was organically close -- the artists creating still lifes using paints whose binding agents were mainly egg and lard.

I started reading this study in part because I needed to know if the roasted peacock I placed in a scene was acceptable -- and then discovered after reading that I had in fact grossly under sold it in the scene. One of the great chefs of the mid 1500s, Bartolomeo Scappi, known for dramatic and delectable skill (a kind of culinary sprezzetura -- a word that needs a post of its own to explain) enjoyed cooking that "vainglorious creature," using an extravagant assortment of spices and a method of preparation that reassembled the bird with metal rods and reattached its feathers  in order to serve it up come se fosse vivo-- "as if it were still alive." So yes -- my peacock is in. With bells and feathers and beak.

But this would have been one of many, many dishes. Consider this "simple meal" prepared by Scappi and his army of cooks -- a modest three course feast on a day of abstinence (meatless Friday) with forty guests, and "the first two courses consisted of fifty dishes served on four hundred pieces of gold, silver, and maiolica tableware," which were then followed by twenty-seven desserts served in two hundred and sixteen bowls and dishes. And..there were "six edible statues" of nymphs, exotic creatures and mythological inventions, "the first made of sugar; the second of butter; and the third, pasta." The meal then ended with scented toothpicks and posies of silk flowers with gold stems for each guest.

The hardest part now of writing that scene is going to be to reign in the desire to over indulge -- as artists and cooks are able to do -- so the reader won't somewhere midway through the scene, throw the book down and go in search of something good to eat. Like a pan of brownies or an entire brie with slices of pear,  or a half a pound of prosciutto and green olives. Sigh...now I am hungry.  

 

Art: Paolo Veronese, Wedding at Cana; Bartolomeo Passarotti, The Baker Prearing Pies; Bartolomea di Giovanni, The Wedding of Thetis and Peleus; Vincenzo Campi, Fruit Seller.

Evohe Bacche!

While looking for the title of a specific book (Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by Culiano and Cook) that I knew to be in one of my research notebooks, I came across a little scrap of paper on which I had written a description of a masked ceremonial dance -- probably something from the phallic cults of Dionysus because I also wrote the phrase "Evohle Bacche!" (the invocation to Bacchus) right next to it. Though it's also possible I was reading about the origins of theatre's twin comedy/tragedy masks. Here's what I wrote:

"Men and damsels dancing, each having two masks -- one in front was smiling, the back one weeping...arms linked man to man, maiden to maiden.  Happy face always turned toward the sad face of the next person."

I have no idea from what book I captured this scene -- but I still find it compelling, something that should find its way somewhere in a story. It's also a good reminder for me to re-read my notes more often.

New Editions of Except the Queen in Italy and Turkey

Well...this is nice! I just learned earlier this week when a check arrived that Jane and I had sold our novel Except the Queen in Turkey. I knew the Italian deal was in the works, so it was awesome finding this cover of the Italian edition on the internet with its new title that translates as "Diary of the Fairies," -- which is a wee bit odd...but ok, it's sure pretty!

PW Review for Except the Queen

Here's a bit of lovely news -- the first review from PW for the new novel Except the Queen: 

"World Fantasy Award-winning Yolen  (Dragon's Heart) teams up with Snyder (The Innamorati) to weave a magical tale. After Serana and Meteora stumble across a secret that could damage the reputation of the Fairy Queen, the close-knit fae siblings are separated and banished to Earth. Stripped of youth, beauty, and magic, they struggle to adapt to the baffling modern world. In New York, Serana meets a feral young man whose talent for music is uncanny. In Milwaukee, Meteora finds refuge in the legendary Baba Yaga's house, where she befriends a trouble woman being stalked by a murderous tattoist. As the various players converge for a deadly showdown, the truth behind the sisters' exile is revealed. Unconventional narrative techniques and a full dose of magic and folklore give this urban fantasy a lyrical, mythic feel."

The book is currently available at Amazon for pre-ordering. Given the hectic and difficult past year I am still a bit stunned that I got this novel turned in at all! Many thanks to Jane for all the support and splendid work.