Gardner on the storyteller's intelligence, from On Becoming a Novelist.
Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.
Can you tell I've hit the middle of the novel I'm writing?
My favorite tidbit so far: Raymond Carver on his Creative Writing 101 teacher, John Gardner:
For the seven or eight of us who were in his class, he ordered heavy black binders and told us we should keep our written work in these. He kept his own work in such binders, he said, and of course that settled it for us. We carried our stories in our binders and felt we were special, exclusive, singled out from others. And so we were.
Also, from the same place (Carver's introduction to Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist):
Gardner had a crewcut, dressed like a minister or an FBI man, and went to church on Sundays. But he was unconventional in other ways. He started breaking the rules on the first day of class; he was a chain smoker and he smoked continuously in classroom, using a metal wastebasket for an ashtray. In those days [1958] , nobody smoked in a classroom. When another faculty member who used the same room reported on him, Gardner merely remarked to us on the man's pettiness and narrow-mindedness, opened windows, and went on smoking.
One year ago today I began my journey to Svalbard as part of The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency program. I remain deeply humbled by, in awe of, and inspired by my experience there onboard a ship full of artists. If you'd like to read what I wrote right after I returned click here and/or here.
"It is precisely because of our ignorance that we see across the river [to the castle] with such precision. We know the precise carvings on the capital of each stone pillar and the precise history of each soul: they are transparent to our understanding. On our side of the river, even the most familiar lanes bear surprises around well-known bends; we see only a certain distance into the hearts of our wives and friends, before darkness and uncertainty begin. Perhaps, after all, this is the lure of legend: not the dreamy twilight of the luxuriating fancy, in love with all that is misty and half-glimpsed, but the sharp clarity forbidden by our elusive lives."
— Steven Millhauser
from The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon
Recently, I read a large number of online lists of favorite books. In general I found these lists inspiring. Sometimes, they frustrated me, i.e. will I ever read W.G. Sebald? Will I ever be in the in-group? I considered posting a list of my own but I didn't quite get around to it, and like most other online flurries, the lists soon disappeared. But something stuck in the back of my mind, and eventually I realized what it was.
The truth is, if I heeded the hilarious instruction of one pass-it-on type posting to "not think too much before responding," my favorite books were obvious. But in this age of cultivated online personae, how could I broadcast to the world that my all-time favorite books were published by Time Life, and I read them when I was 12?
Well, Vincent Price's 1985 TV commercial for the books helps with that a bit.
I received the first one from my parents: Fairies and Elves. Soon to follow were Legends of Valor, Wizards and Witches, Ghosts, Magical Beasts, and Water Spirits. I don't know who Time Life's editors and consultants were for the Enchanted World series, but the stories and artwork they picked are classic, gorgeous, and not at all rated PG. Ghosts is terrifying, and that made it the best one of all. I fell in love with the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of nymphs and the lady of Shalott, Japanese fairy-tale illustrations, and provocative drawings of all manner of shapeshifters, hollow-mountain dwellers, undersea horsemen, selkies, warlocks, tricksters, ethereal fairies and elemental priestesses. The stories are told as if around a campfire. In them, there is a strong sense that magic lives in the world, even if it is declining. These stories of the fantastic, eerie, mysterious, and magical seeped into me in the best possible way. Deep, and entwined with my budding ideas about the creative process and making imaginative meaning of the world.
I adored these books for years, and then, during the second half of adolescence, I drifted away from my fantasy roots. I was embarrassed that as a kid I'd read mostly Arthurian legends and trilogies of novels in which the heroines maintained telepathic links with their soul-mate spirit animals. Pretty soon I was an English major reading the 20th century literary canon (oh that horde of Johns!). That's all fine, and Rabbit, Run is still one of my favorite books, but I had left the enchanted world behind. Then I was writing my first novel, set in Washington State's Skagit Valley. Then 9/11 happened, then I was in graduate school. Then I found the love of my life. Then I was writing Among the Wonderful. Then I was navigating the publishing world and trying to market the book. Then my child was born.
Last August at my parents' house, I saw those enchanted, albeit dusty, spines for the first time in a decade and a half, even though they'd been sitting in plain sight all those years. While my daughter slept, I opened up the books and again fell in love - this time with a gasp of unexpected love for my former self . I recognized the art on every page and realized that myth and folkways are threaded together with my
reason for writing fiction in the first place, my connection with wild nature and
my deepest aspiration as the mother of a wee one.
In an urban world that I often find confusing and troubling, there is a crucial nourishment and
comfort for me in mythic stories and artwork, from the Inuit to the Scottish Highlanders. Partially for me, and partially for my daughter, I reclaimed the Enchanted World. Then, I poked around online, since I'd never heard anyone else mention the series in all those years. To my delight, I discovered there are 21 books in the series, and I have only ever read 7. New titles (well, new to me) included Night Creatures, Spells and Bindings, Seekers and Saviors, Giants and Ogres (shoot! I should have had that one while I researched Among the Wonderful), and Fall of Camelot. Even right now, at the moment I am writing this, I am giddy; I can't wait to dive into those other enchanted worlds. How did I not know there were more?
It turns out that my good fortune didn't end there. During that same haphazard online research session, somehow I landed on writer, artist, and editor Terri Windling's blog, Myth and Moor. The post I read that day was Swan Maidens and Crane Wives, which exquisitely explores not only the power, lightness-with-knowing, and archetypal force of the swan, but also the complexities and difficulties of domestic life when part of your spirit is wild. As a new mother and a novelist, I could relate. Utilizing literary, artistic and musical (yes, the Decembrists' Crane Wife is there too) sources, Terri Windling draws from the same well as the Enchanted World series to conjure a provocative portrait of these avian women, and she relates it all to the world as it is, right now. Terri Windling's thoughtful, magical blog helped me then, and helps me now to anchor firmly in the world of myth and the fantastic that I've always loved, while also linking that world securely to the here-and-now of creative process.
One day, on Myth and Moor, I discovered that Terri Windling was packing up Endicott
West, the writers retreat she cofounded with Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman in the Sonoran desert near Tucson, Arizona. Through Terri's blog posts, I commiserated with Terri, and then Ellen too, as this powerful retreat for mythic artists folded up shop. But when they announced an online auction of books from the Endicott West library, I felt the enchanted world rush in. In recent months, I'd been challenged and enlivened by elements of the fantastic creeping into my novel-in-progress. I'd been wanting to read mythic novels and stories for inspiration and lessons on craft. Here was my chance! In a blur I bid on and then won two boxes of "mystery fiction" to be chosen by Terri. The auction proceeds were to help pay for shipping costs for Terri to bring part of the library back to Devon, England, where she lives.
After I found the boxes on my doorstep, I left them unopened for many hours, just so I could savor my exquisite excitement. But of course I couldn't wait for long. And so it is that one enchanted world leads to another and another, and it just may be that magic is not declining after all. In me it grows.
Llisten to the patterns of tree rings and birds on a wire - translated to music.
From Livescience.com: Artist Bartholomäus Traubeck has custom-built a record player that is able to "play" cross-sectional slices of tree trunks. The result is his artpiece "Years," an audio recording of tree rings being read by a computer and turned into music, much like a record player's needle reads the grooves on an LP. The custom record player takes in data using a PlayStation Eye Camera and a stepper motor attached to its control arm, and relays the data to a computer. A program called Ableton Live then uses it to generate an eerie piano track.
And here's what Jarbas Agnelli says about his musical work, Birds on the Wire:
"Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I
cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location
of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most
original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody
the birds were creating."
My head is still spinning from the inspirational and overwhelming writerly tsunami that is the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference. Here are a handful of writers whose work I particularly enjoyed either during panel discussions or random encounters at the book fair or around the city.
Summer Wood. She had a lot of lovely things to offer during her Structuring the Novel panel. I look forward to reading Raising Wrecker.
Anca Szilagyi and Fairy Tale Review. During the New Fairy Tales from the North panel, Anca read an excerpt from her short story, "More Like Home Than Home." This story features a girl trapping a raven in a very large jar of custard. I loved it, and now look forward to reading FTR's new Emerald issue.
Sara Loewen read a subtle and deeply moving excerpt from her book of essays, Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands. Loewen was born and raised in Alaska, and lives on Kodiak island, where she teaches and fishes. From the book's synopsis:"Her personal essays integrate natural and island history with her
experiences of fishing and family life, as well as the challenges of
living at the northern edge of the Pacific."
David Huddle. I attended a panel called "The Middle Matters," about the middles of short stories. Huddle got up and blasted us with a spectacular presentation on Eudora Welty's story, "Powerhouse." Provocative, passionate, and stately, Huddle reminded me that Welty's work is not only still relevant, but still edgy, and well worth revisiting.
Barry Lopez. I read Arctic Dreams as a sixth grader and have never shaken it. He spoke with Gretel Ehrlich at AWP. I will post a link to their talk as soon as it's live online.
Colin Dickey (most recently in The Believer). I had the good fortune to meet Colin in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Author of Cranioklepty and Afterlives of the Saints, he's a frequent contributor to Lapham's Quarterly, among other publications. He's also the director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in NYC.
Cari Luna.I am really looking forward to reading her book, which chronicles the lives of five squatters in the mid-nineties in Manhattan's Lower East Side.
Sharma Shields was utterly charming during the Uncanny West panel discussion. Her book concerns a creature who may or may not be a sasquatch. Since she was born and raised in Spokane, Sharma's work would be better characterized as unkanny. Anyone? Bueller?
It was a joy to see Debra Magpie Earling again. I've reread her novel, Perma Red, several times since it came out in 2002.
Please read the first installment of travel journal entries here.
Isfjord, underway
June
17 continued
Standing
at the rail, my eyes compulsively travel the parabolic upsweep of these great,
coastal mountains, and come to rest only in their heights. Now, like in
Longyearbyen, I perceive that something invaluable lies in these crags. Not
just an awesome beauty, but something else. Something invaluable to me
personally. Is this just how I experience wonder in this moment of my life? As
a seeking more powerful than any I
can recall? I try to ease myself back into a place of less wanting. Back to
Emerson’s eyeball: I am nothing. I see
all. I keep thinking of those Mayan architects, their temples designed so
that we humans would be humbled before the gods, climbing up and up hundreds of
narrow, steep steps, basically on all fours, to meet the ascended deities. The
upward and inward draft of our breath in the face of the truly sublime — there
is something of that here in the Spitsbergen ranges that makes me reflect on
the humility of the devout. A good thing, too, since my Arkady Afanas’ev, in
the pages of the book, considers himself something of a holy man. At first his
faith is an answer unto itself. But of course that paradigm crumbles.
St.
Jonsfjorden
Goose
feathers tangled in a kelp holdfast. Paper-thin leaves of shale splayed like a
hand of cards. A seal carcass eroded by stream flow. Two pairs plus one of
common eiders. A trapper’s utilitarian hut seen as a monument to the simple
fact of human survival up here. And such delicacy, too: a purple sandpiper
picking its way through the shallows, and the logarithmic spiral of a tiny,
rose-colored snail shell. Rosettes of lichen, pincushions of moss. Purple
saxifrage. All in this place of places, which we now explore. A terrible
wonderland of ice, stone and sea.
Kongsfjord
/ Kongsbreen
June 18
My
first glacier. The deepest aqua blue ice is the oldest, the most compressed, the
de-oxygenated. This blue, frozen crystalline medium is a jewel of our earth.
The face of the glacier bears so many textures, words certainly fall short. But
I recall the names given to different types of marbles and they seem somewhat
fitting for these calved chunks of glacier ice that drift away from the glacier
with the tide: the swirl, the cat’s eye, the aggie (named for an agate’s concentric
rings), the purie, the mica, and the dragonfly. Looking at glacier ice, I can
think of a few more: the galaxy, the sno-cone, the sparkler. I imagine white
onyx. Each piece of floating ice is a sculptural marvel: grand pianos making
their sideways way through the water. Cups following their translucent saucers.
Miniature mountain ranges and the upturned hulls of ice ships. And as this ice
drifted by it emitted the popping sound of many fingers snapping.
Five
beluga whales visited our middle distance today. Their backs were creamier by
far than the ice that surrounded them. In fact their banana-like color was
warmer than almost anything I’ve seen today. In all their diving and surfacing
I never saw their faces.
Sometimes
even a porthole-full of this landscape overwhelms. But the continuous joy and daylight
make up for it.
“The
long tradition of hunting on the arctic seas resulted in the formation of whole
family dynasties engaged in this work. Practical skills and psychological
strength were passed on from generation to generation. Possession of these
skills was highly appreciated in Russia at this time, and members of such
families quite often found jobs in the merchant fleet and in the navy.”
--Jasinski,
“The Russian Hunters on Svalbard” 1989.
No
doubt that E. Starostin, patron saint of the Pomor hunters in my book, came
from such a family. It is said that he spent 37 years in Spitsbergen without
once going back to mainland Russia.
The
main prey of the hunters was walrus (tusks, skins, fat); beluga and all species
of seal; on land, reindeer (meat, hides), fox (fur), and eider (down and eggs).
They brought prefabricated wooden huts with them from the mainland. They also
built huts out of driftwood. The front door would be on the leeward side, and a
vestibule followed, for food and storage. The one dwelling room was living
room, kitchen, bedroom, and workshop. The Pomors made stone or brick ovens
(unlike the Norwegians who used metal ovens). The floors of Pomor huts were
usually made from the wooden planks of ships. They often built slate
foundations. The Pomors shot ice bears through specially constructed slots in
hut windows. They lured them close with meat. A scurvy-proof diet would consist
of fresh, raw meat, blood and fish; barrels of soured milk, cloudberries, starka. They brewed potions from pine
cones and needles. They ate the local scurvy grass. Out of the 20 graves at
Russekeila, near Kapp Starostin on the southern edge of the entrance to
Isfjord, only one skeleton showed symptoms of scurvy.
My
Starostin’s hut has whale bones for rafters and walrus skull sconces.
Gravneset
June 19
Here
in Magdalenefjord, the beach is made of larger, more rounded stones than I’ve
yet seen. Granitic, in shades of gray from TV static to whale back. An ocean of
stones, and between them fine sand, very soft to the touch. I wasn’t expecting
that. And on this peninsula lie the bones of 130 whalers. How did they fall?
Accidents at sea, injuries while processing whale blubber? Fighting each other?
And was this their heart’s most beloved place? I imagine them having no
allegiance but to Spitsbergen. Or perhaps they lay here out of necessity and
nothing more. In the ground here, where the blubber ovens used to stand, the
presence of the whales is still felt: intense green and yellow moss shows where
the whale oil permeated the ground. Even after so many centuries (because the
ground thaws for only a few weeks every year) those nutrients feed the earth.
And the black upright crust that seems to be part of the oven-ruin is actually
petrified whale oil that holds the shape of the old copper cauldron.
I
hear little auks here and their voices disconcert me. Strange, how I dwell in
two different Spitsbergens: the one of my imagination, of course, from which I’ve
written a draft of the book already, and now this real one, with these Magdalene
mountains rising up in their green moss capes, and flocks of seabirds traversing
the heights. The sum of this view reminds me somehow of tropical highlands –
Peru, maybe – and I expect an ancient temple city to emerge from this fog.
And
the transmutation of observation into fiction takes time. Gentle, now. I
believe I am frightened of how beautiful and strange Spitsbergen is. Frightened
and excited by the ways my imagination created this place in a good way…in a
way that works…even before I came here. Frightened, in hindsight, that I had
the gall to start the book, not having yet been here. In the end, of course,
wonder and gratitude prevail.
Between June 14 and July 2 I participated in The Arctic Circle's expeditionary residency, an arts-and-science-driven voyage on a barkentine sailing ship up the west/northwest coast of Svalbard, Norway. During this trip I absorbed the landscape (sea, mountains, ice, river, sky) and worked on my novel-in-progress, which is largely set in Svalbard. Here is the first installment of selected journal entries that I made during the trip.
Oslo,
Norway
June
13
I’ve
been up for 27 hours. Two planes, two trains, two buses and a whole lot of
first-day-in-a-new-city flailing. Special train or regular? Why doesn’t my credit
card work in the ticket machine? Am I on the right bus? No! Yes! But no matter,
I got to see the Viking ships. Millenium-old oak carved with serpent heads,
spirals, knots. So much grace in the craftsmanship. Metal puzzles, remnants of
woven tapestries, bridles, jewelry. And to think that this most beautiful ship,
filled with riches, was the burial place for a Viking noblewoman (perhaps a
shield maiden). The actual burial chamber was there in the museum too, a
peak-topped tiny cabin of charred wood, reconstructed post pyre. I wonder if
the oils from her earthly husk infused those old beams and if she haunts this
place. Wood, copper, iron, stone. Woven sails, ships full of men each sitting
on his own sea chest as a bench. Moving silently through fjords to the open
seas. Rambling now just to savor this day. Turning toward the sea, welcome the
allies and ghosts of this journey. Rest in it, the woven shawl, the braided
rope, the metal and stone baubles.
Longyearbyen,
Svalbard
June
15
I
am here. Shale and snow patch. Barnacle geese, Svalbard reindeer, snow bunting,
glaucous gull. One small moss campion cushion glimpsed while walking back to
New Town. Passed a tipi full of people blasting the Jackson 5. So many children
here, playing outside in snowsuits. There is an Arctic Nature Guide school here…be
still my heart. Random coal buckets and mining infrastructure scattered across
town, and an old boarded-up mine high on the mountainside, hanging over this
place like a ghost. The landscape something out of myth – citadels,
battlements, precipitous heights. Rivers of shale flowing down and turning to
moss and then the sea. All of it beneath a thick overcast.
Longyearbyen,
Svalbard
June
16
Last
night I hiked to the abandoned mine. Up scree that changed from brown to red to
a soft black sand that must be coal. Above the mine little auks gave me a true
welcome to this place: their ominous, insane laughter mocked the human presence
here. My eye constantly travels up to these stone faces above me. I try to read
the expressions in pinnacle and crag. Many-faceted meaning many faced. You can
search those stone faces all you want, all you can handle for as long as you
can stand the mystery of unanswered questions. Inside the mine, treacherous
going. Would hate to break a leg before the trip really begins. I inched inside
for just long enough to sense jagged icicles and missing floorboards. Broken
equipment, graffiti in many languages. I’ll stay out in the perpetual daylight
instead. It’s 1 am. Time to head down to the valley and see what else is
stirring.
Isfjord,
underway
June
17
Yesterday
we boarded the good ship Antigua, which is a square-rigged barkentine and part
of the Dutch Tall Ship Fleet. I was met by three spectacular female wilderness
guides: Theres, Sara and Åshild. Purple sandpipers, northern fulmars, a puffin
and arctic terns. Standing at the rail, my heart full to bursting. My cohort is
amazing. Already conversations about ethereal Norwegian doppelganger spirits
who slip between different dimensions of reality, chapter 42 of Moby Dick, ravens. Everywhere I step I
trip over inspiration. The sea at first bordered on emerald and then shifted to
a strange, white-cast blue. As if the color intends to be friendly and yet
within the white opacity you sense only death.
Break
open preconception. Toss habitual modes overboard. How can I take a cue from
these improvisers, my companions? Some of them shipped supplies that did not
arrive in time for our departure. Some counted on a trip to the Longyearbyen
hardware store but it was closed. Mia rolling her tarpaper down the mountain.
Amanda collecting vintage ropes and spinning paper to rope like some patron
saint of seafarers. I hold my story, The
Gyre, in my cupped palms. It is time to lose my knowledge and move the book
forward into new territory. Listen: where is it?
