In the Labyrinth

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.

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. 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

"Molly" in "Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales"

 

 

The new anthology, Troll's Eye View: A Book of Villianous Tales, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling is now out for the reading pleasure of your favorite middle grade scary-book reader. (My kids devoured all of Alvin Schwartz's wonderfully ghoulish and creepy tales at that age.) The anthology offers versions of well-known fairy tales, but from a unique perspective -- the villains'. Do they really suffer at the hands of our familiar heroes and heroines? In my story "Molly," based on the English fairy tale "Molly Whuppie," the Giant ogre and his family are certainly made to suffer cruel and unusual punishments. In the traditional version of the tale Molly Whuppie is a heroic youngest sister, outwitting a flesh eating Giant, and securing riches for her sisters as well as royal marriages -- on the Giant's dime of course. Read more>>>