Dragons?

Study by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for the jacket of Glimmerglass

"Are there dragons in the book?"

Despite the vibrant one on the cover, there are no dragons in "Glimmerglass." There are, however, some salamanders in a cellar. Nor are there any flying lions. There is, however, a little statue of a minotaur that becomes important later on.

What is it?

This book stands "between" genres, if we must talk about genres. (I don't, as a rule.) In places, it invokes ancient conventions of storytelling like the Muse and the somnium. These are not elements of what might be called a strict realism, but neither are they unknown to us in the world, though we might describe them differently.

Writing as adventure

I'm afraid that I'm known for not doing the same thing twice (inconvenient for publishers but I hope fun for adventurous readers), and perhaps some will think that Glimmerglass is a striking-out into a new territory for me. For the story-weaver inside me, the work all feels like one enormous bolt of cloth with different projects of different shapes and patterns--after all, it's flying from the same loom.

The Clive-art

Neither, I should say, are Clive's cover images and interior images an attempt to convey the literal events of the book. Instead, they revel in the spirit of the book. I posted a longer version of his description earlier, and think it might be helpful:

Glimmerglass is strewn throughout with descriptions of the flora and fauna of an observed landscape. But like the Arabian Nights storyteller, Marly spins tales within tales that access altogether more fabulous topographies, and it’s as though the sea-serpent door-knockers and griffin-embellished wrought-iron gates of the real world, have been markers of hidden realms paralleling the everyday. Bearing in mind I’m a man who reveres the great eighteenth century wood-engraver Thomas Bewick, it was a foregone conclusion that when I came to consider decorations for the chapter headings and tailpieces of this wonderful book, I’d be moved to create a miniature naturalis historia.

Fracas! Ruckus! Brouhaha!

Vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

Dear Slate,

What a lot of grief you are getting for publishing an article about how adults ought to be embarrassed to read children's books. ("Against YA" by Ruth Graham.) I guess maybe that was the point, as it is so often the point in these days. To get attention. To cause a commotion, a hullaballoo, a hoo-ha. To make a sort of paparazzi fuss, all lightbulbs and yelling and jeering. I'm a bit tired of the ruckus, you hear?

A long time ago C. S. Lewis told us that "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." Likewise, Maurice Sendak made it clear that it was whether books were good that mattered. And as to fantasy and fantasizing being for children, he said, "I believe there is no part of our lives, our adult as well as child life, when we're not fantasizing, but we prefer to relegate fantasy to children, as though it were some tomfoolery only fit for the immature minds of the young."

I agree with Lewis and Sendak. Ages and genres make no difference at all. Being packed with energy and life counts the most when it comes to a book, not some idea of audience age and kind or mode. I read the Alice books when I was five, and I am still reading them today. Stand where two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and take the way with the nooks for reading and the stones for skipping and the books without labels, without ages. Hey, it'll make all the difference.

Good cheer,
Marly

P. S. To somewhat change the subject, I don't like the idea that grownups desire to read weak, thin, smarmy books. And that's where the real criticism is hidden, I think--in the idea that some people are content with such books, whether they are written for toddlers, young adults, or grownups. And the writer assumes that children's books are, indeed, lesser, and that an adult could not have a rich experience reading them. Carroll. Sendak. L'Engle. Those are a few of many arguments against that thought.

P. S. So you don't think I'm being mean to her, here's another article by Ruth Graham--a highly sensible proposal that suggests that maybe we've dropped something we should pick up again, revised for our own day.

Notes on my recent books, no. 2

In THALIAD, Marly Youmans has written a powerful and beautiful saga of seven children who escape a fiery apocalypse----though "written" is hardly the word to use, as this extraordinary account seems rather "channeled" or dreamed or imparted in a vision, told in heroic poetry of the highest calibre. Amazing, mesmerizing, filled with pithy wisdom, THALIAD is a work of genius which also seems particularly relevant to our own time.  --Lee Smith

Real and irreal

Detail from the cover of Thaliad. Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins.
I picked this one for the post because it suggests a kind of leafing
and fruiting and singing that joins all good writers, maugre the mode!

This post is a wandering set of responses to another post, in which the ever-interesting Patrick Kurp talks about the literary loves and antipathies of H. L. Mencken. The portions about Mencken as a boy are full of charm, and the whole piece is of interest.

* * *

Having written two fantasy novels (grounded in the landscape and Scots-Irish/Cherokee lore of western North Carolina) and a number of short stories because one of my children was mad for fantasy, I find that am equally happy on either side of the "fanciful and unearthly" vs. "highly literal" divide. Oh, just remembered that I wrote a book-length post-apocalyptic poem, so that's tumbling into the fantastical, too, and I went back to the classical idea of the somnium for a chapter in a forthcoming book. Perhaps I am impossibly mixed--or mixed up--at this point. You see, somehow I fail to feel a keen, profound difference between what others view as various modes when I write. I like to frolic as and where I will, and as story leads.

I'm fond of mythic and fantastic classical works, and in English I like many of the fantastic-leaning poems of Old English and the medieval world. I find it curious that so many people have a pronounced love for or dislike of what we call irrealism. And yet how far it goes back in Western and world literature... So shall we toss Homer? Ovid? Portions of Shakespeare? What about Dante? Gilgamesh? The Mahābhārata? The Dream of the Rood? Or were those elements fine then but not fine now, or not fine for the novel?

In the end, I don't find the divisions of genre helpful for me--I mean, as a writer--and am quite willing to look for a good book under many sorts of labels. But I don't find it a fault that somebody else wouldn't feel the same way. Instead, I find the tendency to like or dislike in this way to be interesting and intriguing. (Of course, maybe that's because it says something about a person's makeup, so I'm off on a writer's nosey, personality-examining jag when I consider the subject.)

Such strong opinions are a challenge to my own stance, surely. And while I know my own mind, I'm not adverse to changing it.

I wonder what Mencken thought of the more fantastical creations of Twain. He may be labeled a realist for perfectly sensible reasons by literary historians, but Twain has some creations that fall strongly into another realm. Even Huckleberry Finn revels in the fact that people have very different angles of vision on the world and how to navigate it--a profusion of angles that just might suggest that we're already living in a kind of metaphorical multiverse, right here and now.

As to this matter of "realist" and "speculative" (choose whatever term you like for the latter--the sf/f/h world seems to expend a great deal of energy arguing that point) fiction, I believe it's all the same realm--a kind of continuum. A writer can move about on that continuum. A writer can stay put. Writers on many points of the continuum can strive to make a truthful and strong story. (Or they can strive for something lesser, but winning the world and losing your soul is a whole other dilemma and fish-kettle...)

Don't all narratives differ from reality and rejoice in making up a world? If a writer reached the point of absolute realism--impossible--we would have reality. And wouldn't that act of transforming words into complete realism be an irrealist tale?

Insomniac frolics

List
In the middle of the night I have been tweaking my links list, mostly adding friends in the arts or the occasional reviewer or blogger, but now I am sleepy and will stop. I haven't nabbed everybody by any means, and if you are a friend and indignant not to see your name, drop me a line.

Sexy clockpunk with Southern or Arctic goblin monks (diverse and did I say sexy?)
Lately I've heard more writers complain about how depressing this agent-editor wish list is than anything else--and that's amazing, given all the recent upheaval and changes. I expect the good ones will all forge on doing what they are doing without paying any attention.

Sexy ephemera versus
Makoto Fujimura: What is the five hundred year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian “15 seconds of fame.”

Genre + age categories
Can't we get it through our heads that these are marketing categories? Once we get past separating good books from the others, nothing else matters.

Genre and the (Parenthetical) Laundry-Woman

Hideous day of laundry and cleaning here: reminds me of several things having to do with genre fiction--science fiction and fantasy in particular. You may find them interesting. Or not. But here goes the laundrywoman, emptying out the contents of her head into the blog pail.

1.  I saw on facebook the picture of the World Fantasy winners, and they were men men men plus two couples (for editing and press work.) I don't object to men; I like men. I just wondered. It was just an awful lot of male faces. All the writing awards. And art. It's nothing to do with the particular men (in fact, I sometimes correspond with several of the winners), but I'm still wondering. Is that how it always works?

2. While I fold laundry, I often read. And I started thinking about a science fiction and fantasy trope. You know how Luke Skywalker (I have three children, so I know these things) loses his hand in great pain and gets a fancy new robotic one? And how Wormtail in Harry Potter (I have three children, so I have read the entire series aloud) loses his hand (also with great pain) and gets a fancy magic one in its place from Lord Voldemort? (Oh, and isn't he just like Tolkien's Wormtongue? And there's an important arm injury for Frodo, too.) And you know how in Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy (I have three children, did I say?) Lirael loses her hand--her best friend, the Dog (who talks and is much more than a dog) bites it off to save her--and the close tells us that she will gain a beautiful golden hand in its place, made by Sameth, the prince and Wallmaker? No doubt you may add some lost hands and metal replacements of your own if you reach science fiction or fantasy; there are more. Take Eugenides, who is deprived of his clever hand by The Queen of Attolia... Well, you add what you like. Gene Porter's Freckles had no hand. Read that one as a child. And there's a precedent of dogs biting off a hand with Fenris.

Point being, thanks to my laundry-reading, I am wondering if all this comes most clearly from the famous tale of Gotz von Berchlingen (1480-1562, a nice long life for the times), who was known as Gotz of the Iron Hand (as, say, Lirael became known as Lirael Goldenhand.) A Franconian knight, he lost his hand in 1504 in Silesia, when a cannon shot broke his sword hilt (hey, there's another trope--the sword that is broken) and drove half of it, along with arm-plates, into his right arm. His arm was crushed and the hand ripped away entirely. Being a gallant knight, he rode to camp and found a surgeon. He was later given an iron hand and continued as knight till his death, or so the book claimed. What a formidable fellow. Still competent with only one proper hand.

Maybe everybody already knows this... If not, now I do, and you do.

3. I have completely forgotten the third genre-thought I had while folding the endless laundry. Oh, lucky you! And now I need to eat and go vote. You too!

Poetry, fiction, hippos--

STRAY THOUGHTS, LITERARY AND OTHERWISE--
ANIMAL,VEGETABLE, NO MINERAL

1. When you buy a gigantic cauliflower, no one will notice and so somebody else will buy another gigantic cauliflower, and then there will be no room in the fridg inn.

2. When hippos poop in the water, they twirl their tails in circles and attract fish. (This sort of thing is what you learn when your husband goes to Mozambique for a month and then comes back.) Perhaps Mattel would be interested.

3. I no longer have any patience for lists that tell me something like what should be in a narrative poem and give cleverish advice. I've written a long narrative poem that's soon to come out, and I'd rather somebody read it than read a list, just as I'd rather read a writer's narrative poem than his/her lists about what they want in narrative poems. Is it that I'm beginning to think that people read these clever lists about a piece of art and then don't encounter the art? Meanwhile, I am committing a list. Woe is me.

4. To clarify, although primarily to two or three concerned parties: although at times I am ensnared by genre terminology because it's the way so many people look at books, I'm really just a Sendakian divider of books into good and not-good. I don't care about genre and sorting and classification. Just give me the good.

5. Sinyavsky quote plucked from an Amazon review: "In principle only miracles are worth writing about--as the fairy tales knew. And if we ever decide to tell about ordinary things, we should show them in a supernatural light. The art of narrative is to see things like this."

6. Another Sinyavsky: "Art does nothing but convert matter into spirit."

7. Me, one minute after midnight: One reason that poetry is a higher art (when it is a higher art) than the novel is that one can approach perfection with a poem, whereas a novelist is doomed to throw in a wrench and the kitchen sink.

Tolkien/Jacobson, genre/literary

Update: Book designer John Coulthart just sent me a link to this piece, in which he says Jacobson is more nuanced about genre. "The best fiction doesn't need a label." It looks interesting, and I'm going to read it now and then get back to work. Thank you, John!

High school started here on Thursday. The three children and I watched The Lord of the Rings trilogy in celebration of the start of the youngest's sophomore year in high school (the hallways of Orcs! the all-seeing principal Eye! the young women sharp as a blade!) and finished the last bit last night, finally obliterating the sign of sin and overreaching power in the volcanic flow of Mount Doom. Of course, the movies are nothing so complex as the book in three volumes that was praised by Auden and has been dearly loved and reread by many, but it got me considering that curious man, Tolkien, off and on all week. Last night I was thinking about how interesting it is that he disliked Macbeth and yet clearly does more than nod to it with his moving forest on Ent-march and his "no man" oracular prophecy and plot twist.

This morning I read Howard Jacobson's interview in the Guardian, where he says he is "contemptuous of genre things...." Not books but things. (I tend to be with Sendak in thinking that there are "good books" and then the others, but we live in a world where people like to categorize.) Jacobson goes on to reference without naming the Twilight series and then to cite 50 Shades. Ridiculously easy potshots! I'd like to see what he thought of Crowley's Little, Big, for example. He is also contemptuous of the term "literary fiction." He writes "fiction," he insists, while others write "crap." I know a lot of these attacks are a clever, Amis-like use of a media that desires column inches with sharp teeth and blood and hair. No doubt they are good publicity for the new book.

Those of us who write what is called "literary fiction" evidently want to be acknowledged as writing the only fiction that matters; that's why we desire that simple label, "fiction." What we do, we believe, matters more. But it ain't necessarily so. What I learned in writing two fantasies for young readers and a number of fantastic stories for anthologies is that our "literary fiction" worldview is provincial. Writers in other genres believe strongly that we write in simply another genre, one often less vital than their own. Sometimes they are right--depends on the book. It always depends on the book. Likewise, a book in another genre can clamber up to the heights. Entertainment may fly up into the realm of art. Why not? There are no rules, only the force and heart and skill of the mind behind the keyboard. What is The Tempest if not a romance of first love and a fantastic tale of a wand-wielding and -breaking wizard intended to please both the ruled rabble and the ruling classes?

Oh, I have sympathy for Jacobson's past situation, and am glad he has been lifted into light where he is visible. I know all about his "working away at the edges for years." No doubt the stacks of sold copies for A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage and Catherwood and all the rest are but very little hobbits compared to the giant cave trolls of a Booker winner or a NYT bestseller. But hobbits are sturdy, lovable storytellers and song-makers. And the hinterlands and the edges have their advantages. From the edge, you can reach out into space that has no chart, building a world outward as you will. From the edge, the trends and bubbles of the day are only white noise, lost in the distance, and what matters from the past stands like a great field of monuments where a writer can lose and find himself in wandering.

Any of us "at the edges" would trade something for visibility, for a greater number of readers. But it's an old story; I imagine that Melville, say, would have been willing to give up a limb and hobble like a peg-leg sailor to keep the readers he had with Typee and gain a few more. Poe certainly wrote wild attacks with teeth and hair and gave up everything in search of a wider audience. Dickinson ventured out and then back, sealing the door. Yet they and others like them--some remembered, some not--had their painful, joyful, austere reward, just as Stephanie Meyers and the writer of 50 Shades of Gray have a reward of another kind. Let's look to Jacobson's "genre things" for what we must do about the strange ways of the world. As Gandalf says, what comes to those in a time "is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

Thanks to Damien Walter, Guardian columnist, for the Jacobson interview link.