The Flocks of October

The sun is bright and the air is cold and outside my window a flock of birds flies in endless coils as if it is made of smoke.

The flock is not going anywhere. They stay in the same area. The flock is sinuous, as if it is one thing and not many. It boils upward, spiraling and flowing and rising until some invisible signal sends it downward. It turns around itself, coiling like a half-substantial snake, feathers and flashes of air as ephemeral as smoke, as mist, as the cold October fogs in the early mornings. The birds do not follow each other, as there is no time for following, only time for being. The flock is itself, but it’s not going anywhere.

I wonder if there is something wrong with the birds. Perhaps they should be flying south as the cold air smuggles itself in from the north. Birds have a sense of the world, of the magnetic poles. They are pulled. Except this flock of smoke is not going anywhere; it is stuck in an endless loop.

Perhaps the flock’s compass is broken. The glass is cracked and the needle is dancing and the flock twists and turns in emulation of a needle pointing nowhere.

I see the flock and I wonder if it is not so different than most of us. We think we’re following an arrow forward, but we’re really flying in circles, doubling back again and again until we’re tied in invisible knots. Our compasses are broken, and we do not take the time to think, to stop and consult a map (a map that may not exist), and instead we just move, a flock of feathers and hungry beaks searching for a horizon that we’ve forgotten we were looking for.

The frost at the bottom of the window melts as the flock of smoke wings about, and I wonder if I’m wrong; I wonder if the flock knows itself—knows itself so well that it will take this time to rejoice and dance and twirl because it feels the cold air and knows the journey is upon it, a journey that is long and hard, a journey that not all the flock will survive. Members of the flock, little bits of itself, will fall from the sky and not rise again. But the flock will live and journey and continue onward and a destination will be reached. And there will be another journey and another destination after that. And there will be small deaths and cold air and a new spring and flight, flight—always that.

Neil Armstrong and the Death of the Imagination

Picture by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/omster-com

Neil Armstrong's passing this week saddened me, partly for the human loss and partly for the loss of an ideal, of an era of exploration and belief and imagination. His death has had me thinking a lot about our world, about the strange gap we have between science and the cultural imagination.

The endless reduction of funding for NASA and the Space Program bothers me, though I see where some of the impetus comes from. How can we spend billions on space exploration (which doesn't have immediate profits -- and please note the "immediate" there) when there are homeless and hungry people on the street? When so many are out of work? I understand this, and it's a valid reason, to an extent. The problem is that the extent does not reach very far, as the money being cut from such programs is not being used to feed the hungry, is not being used to find jobs for the unemployed; the money is simply feeding the pockets of large corporations (and they have very large pockets, and they are very happy to fill them). Space exploration asks for little in comparison with the vast defense funding that is needlessly supporting the privatization of military endeavors (why should we have a fully capable -- and underpaid -- soldier do what a private contractor can do -- worse -- for six times more?). I'd rather the money go to the Space Program.

I think part of the problem is the short-sightedness of our modern corporate culture and part of it is the easy acceptance of technology and the lack of wonder, curiosity, and belief that led to this technology in the first place.

Delayed profits have become almost foreign to us. We no longer know how to wait. The stock market drives a me me me now now now culture, where immediate growth is all that matters. Sustainable growth is sort of a vague thing on a wishlist. Delayed profit is utterly foreign. And yet much of the omni-present technology that ties our world together (and the endless trillions of dollars flowing across the world because of it) is basically due to the development of the computer and satellite technology that resulted from our desire to explore space. Our cellphones, our glorious Internetz -- the very way we communicate in this brave new digital world -- is due to space exploration, is due to a curiosity about what is beyond. It is due to seeking something beyond ourselves, to see what lies beyond our immediate vicinity. These are the delayed profits of exploration. And yet in the modern human mind, the blank spaces on the maps have all been filled, and there is nowhere left to go, nothing new to find.

As a culture, we once dared to dream. Now, however, we are simply handed wondrous technology and take it for granted. Somehow, with the world at our fingertips, we have become more isolated in our own little lives, our own private spaces, bounded by walls and download speeds. There is a strange lack of connection between our ideas about what might be and what we actually do. Once, writers and thinkers and scientists hypothesized, and then we sought to follow through and explore these dreams and wonderings. Too often now a Sci Fi story or movie is blinked away. Oh, it was cool, but just a story. And then they flip open their cellphones without thinking that this cellphone was once a Sci Fi story too.

We are LIVING in a Sci Fi world, but blindly, oh so blindly. In a world where we have finally discovered the Higgs Boson, no one knows what it is. We walk around blind to the world's evolution -- and to its devolution. We walk around in a world that is shaped solely by profit. We have forgotten (or cast aside) our daydreams, our wonderings, our strange imaginings of what might or could be. We live in a world where the imagination has died, or at least been forcefully subdued -- a world where the future might hold no profit. Unless, that is, we dare to dream, we dare to care about a future that will be shaped by our wants and by our desperate needs, not just for profit, but for survival and expansion. Unless we dare to hope with wide eyes.

Beginning a New Novel: Writer's Limbo

There's something exciting and fearful about the blank page: it is both open and closed. Open to possibility, open to the moment of discovery, open to the potential of a new creation, but closed, yet, to words, and somehow impenetrable. The blank page is opaque, and yet there is an eternal hint of translucency. There's a hint of something beyond, of images and movements, of stolen moments from strange lives. Yet never clear. It's like words heard from a distance, so faint that you are not entirely sure whether they are sounds or imaginings. And yet the wall of the white page ascends before you. Is there a door? If there is, you need a key.

I always find this moment strange, the moment when I'm between one thing and another. Standing on a precipice, deciding whether to jump. For the last few years I've been revising. I've been writing, too: blogs, short stories, new scenes in old novels -- even entirely new storylines woven through these old stories. But never a new novel. And there's something about that, above all other things, that engages me: writing the first draft of a new novel.

It is both exciting and fearful. Perhaps this is always the case with the unknown, the inherent potential for both bliss and catastrophe, whether fictive or real. I've recently finished some drafts of old novels, and now I have this wide white space before me. Calling. Voices are whispering beyond the white page, the white wall. And yet each day the page seems a little more translucent and I see a little more of the world beyond. Faces, mere shadowed silhouettes, press close to the page from the far side, as if they, too, are listening for me; waiting for what? Instructions? Demands? Supplications? Prayers? The animating touch of fingers upon keys?

I know it is a matter of momentum, a matter of imaginative force. I hesitate, always, at the beginning. Beginnings are always the hardest for me, both in a technical sense and in the sense of my own impetus. But there is rich soil on the other side of that white wall, and the ideas are cimbing out of the ground. Whispering. Calling. Wondering. I know, soon, soon, soon, they will get stronger. The din of the voices will grow loud. Fingers will scratch the back of the white page. Tentative at first, but then stronger and stronger. A rip will appear, and then a tear, and then a face will press through, a question on its lips. Now?

Yes, yes: now.

Calling out the White Dudes

Okay, go read this:

http://www.therejectionist.com/2012/02/special-guest-post-meg-clark-on.html

Basically, Meg Clark points out a bunch of stupid things said by Jonathan Franzen about women, women writers, and (in particular) Edith Wharton. Her response is super smart and, you know, pretty funny.

But what I was thinking was that when a White Dude says something stupid on this general topic, a few things occur:

1) A bunch of really smart women write really awesome replies, and you can often find them on the blogosphere. Like Meg's. If you haven't read it yet, do so now. (If you don't, I will take away all your cookies and beer)

2) The mainstream response is limited. Perhaps publications simply don't want to go against the status quo (especially a status quo they've helped build), or perhaps they think it a given that these responses by women simply aren't valuable (the "Oh, those are just the angry feminists" response that completely pisses me off). Mainstream avenues for replies to such comments seem limited, particularly for women. Mostly for the above reasons, I'm guessing, but partly, perhaps, because some of the women who do have mainstream influence won't step up, or at least typically haven't done so -- for fear of rocking the boat? for fear of being labelled and written off? for fear of not being taken seriously? Which is a valid concern, in the sense that there is a large cultural arena in which the depowering response to the lash of such voices is to simply laugh them off. "Oh, those are just the feminists." Which infuriates me, as it is utterly arrogant to dismiss other viewpoints without even being willing to engage them. Ignoring honest discourse is a response of the worst kind. Of course, the problem is that we allow people to get away with this. We don't call them on this. And we should.

3) You don't hear much from other White Dudes. I'm guessing, speaking as a White Dude, that many of us don't notice the problem (failing to see the ramifications, for instance, of what Franzen says), have fallen prey to the "Oh, that's just the feminists" argument, or are simply nervous about stepping up, either to challenge the manly manly words of the Franzens ("Maybe people will think I'm not masculine enough!") or for trying to say something when the lovely Meg Clarks of the world can say it better (and the feeling might be that the Meg Clarks have more of a right to speak on the matter -- which may even be true, I don't know, but that doesn't excuse silence).

So! I'm calling out the Whtie Dudes. First, for the White Dudes like me to stop saying stupid White-Dudeish things. And second, for the White Dudes to stand up when another White-Dude says something stupid and say "That's stupid." Well, you can be more polite than this. I mean, I am Canadian (though some of us aren't polite: shhhhh). But silence is permissive. Silence says "Keep talking, Mr. Franzen, we're all in your corner."

But I kind of like Meg Clark' corner. So, you know, I'll hold her spit-bucket while the fight goes on, and I ain't throwin' in the white towel.

Promotions, Pneumonia, Charity, and the Blogging Experience

Perhaps you noticed the static on my blog the last few days? That silence is indicative of an interesting week. For one, I was promoted at work, and I am now the Senior Editor at the wonderful editorial company where I spend so many hours of my week. It's a very pleasing promotion, but it does mean more responsibility and more work. Also, a shift change, with my work days switching from Thursday-Sunday to Sunday-Wednesday, which means I actually have a weekend day off. Break out the potato chips and Manchester United football. But... more work. More hours.

How will this affect the blog? I have no idea! But I'm not too worried. Nathan Bransford and Natalie Whipple started a trend of posts discussing blogging burnout over the last week, as well as discussions on how and why people blog. Apparently: Full-time blogging is hard work! And not always so profitable! Scaling back is okay!

Which is great. Because I scaled back the day I started. Three cheers for a lack of blogging ambition!

Seriously, though, I think it's kind of interesting to see a swing toward doing what you want, in terms of the ol' blog, and doing it when you want it. I've always been selfish like that, and when you throw in my laziness, as well, it's just a great mix.

I think part of the reason the shift seems to be happening is because blogs don't work quite the way that people thought they worked. I think the assumption a lot of writers had was that they were supposed to do this, and it was going to be networking, and building a big platform, and in a few months they'd have a huge following and agents and editors would want to snap up their work when they queried.

But I think there's a sort of fishbowl effect in the writing-blog world. It's self-contained. And, even in this fishy little world, it's hard to build followers. Even the most fabulous blogs, by people who are really good at social networking, usually only have about a thousand followers or so. And this isn't going to sell a publisher a lot of books (though they might like the proactive stance). And this problem is accentuated by the fact that blogging writers are mostly writing to blogging writers. In other words, people just like themselves, who are trying to do just the same thing - not exactly the target audience. The problem is that, in general, the blogs don't actually reach the readers who would be buying the books (at least pre-publication).

So: vast amounts of networking work; little direct payoff; and a slow growth of followers. It's a bit like self-publishing: if you want to take this route, you really need to embrace it. Embrace all of it, even the icky parts, and be willing to invest time and copious amounts of blood. Sweat and tears will be there, but invisible beneath all the blood. Lots of blood.

A lot of writers, however, simply don't have that sort of time. I don't. Busy work schedule, three small kids, my own writing - endless platform building and selling is out. If I get a book published, there would be time for targeted promotion, likely, but endless pre-publication platform building? No time. And, frankly, no inclination.

And blogs really aren't all that great for this, anyway. But what they are good for is making connections within that fishbowl writing community. It's not a platform network, but a social network.

I think blogs are relevant in the connections you can make with people. Because, yes, it is a fishbowl, but we're not the only fish swimming around in there. It's nice to find little schools of fellow writers to swim around with, and occasionally bum a critique off.

There's an organic quality about this, a sense of shared experience that I like, which is so much better than the vast babelish tower of a mechanical platform used for shouting mercantile propaganda. I think, if it's organic and true, blogs can become connected with your life; they become part of you.

Part of the reason I haven't blogged the last few days is because my daughter has pneumonia. Life intrudes. It always does, and perhaps it always should. On Friday, my daughter went to the hospital to have some dental work done under anesthesia. First, she didn't react well to the Versed (mazilopam). Pliable and happy! No! Anxious and hysterical! Yes! And then, apparently, when under full anesthesia, my six-year-old girl aspirated.

This led us back to the Emergency Room on Sunday night, with a little girl who had delusional fevers, continuous vomiting, headache, body aches, nausea, and dizziness. We carried a bucket, and people shrank away from us in the waiting room. But, because of the fever and the possible anesthetic complications, they emergency staff got us in quickly. Chest x-rays showed pneumonia.

Better to discover this sooner than later, however, and the antibiotics have worked wonders. But no blogging was to be had.

And this is a good thing. I think when you force things on a blog it simply becomes a weight. You're in that fishbowl, and it seems that you're being dragged to the bottom, down to that sparkly gravel where the rotten bits of food and fishcrap are lying around. Not so good.

Better to write what you want, and write it when you want it - write in when you need it. Find what works. I think the blog will then reflect you better, and the writing will be more beneficial. Because that's what I truly like about the blog: the writing. Because writing something is not the same as thinking it. There's a clarity and completeness that comes with writing something; the writing demands it. What was a vague thought, something felt or intuited, becomes something concrete and real, something worked-out and solid. In the end, I suppose, I write the blog for me, as a way to work out my own thoughts on the page, to find that moment of clarity.

My blog is useful, first and foremost, to me. But if I'm writing what's useful to me, hopefully this can translate, and others might find it useful for them, too. Because blogs can work wonders. Help yourself and you'll help others; help others and you help yourself. Make a few connections. Who knows what might happen? You might help another writer in writing something great. Or you might help fund a health clinic on the far side of the world. Sometime today there will be a critique by me up for sale over at the Rejectionist's. Please check it out, if you have the time. Sometimes blogs can do good.

Dread

There are times when the very air seems to tingle with fear. A denseness, an emotional humidity - a hot sense of weight, a feeling of smothering.

A moment of existential dread that permeates the air.

This isn't an acute fear: Oh no, a rabid dog! This is a subtler feeling, worse for its invisibility.

I've never been much prone to it, but I feel it more now as a parent. It's easier to handle the risks of the world for yourself, but for small children?

The news, lately, has been full of triggers. Anders Behring Breivik. A man sets off a bomb, and then, as if killing a bunch of people with a bomb wasn't enough, he walked into a camp of young people, mostly teens, and started a massacre. What struck me about this (aside from the fact that, when online, Mr. Breivik used emoticons - :P - after making jokes about exterminating people, which, if nothing else, is a flashing sign of the coming Internet Apocalypse) was just the faces of the victims. It's interesting to see pictures. A brief news account will have numbers, with whole lives lost between digits. How many memories might be hiding between 7 and 6?

Most of them were very young. One was 14, just a boy. They went off to camp, full of excitement. They walked out their front doors, same as always, and yet they would never come back. Their parents will be waiting forever.

The parents hadn't done anything wrong. And there was nothing they could do. Helpless hands; part of their lives stripped away.

Dread.

And then there's the Berry story, about a family in a car accident. There's a beautiful part to this story, with the internet campaign that suddenly flashed everywhere to raise money for support of the children (Internet Redemption). But this was only needed because of the sheer suddenness of an accident. A car, an impact, and the parents were dead. The girl, the youngest of the three children, had a number of broken bones. The two boys were both paralyzed. Paralyzed and orphaned.

Dread.

The parents have left, though not by choice. And yet there's a terrible fear in this for me. That somehow, just when my kids need me most, I won't be there for them. So strange. As a child, I probably had moments of fear: What if I become lost? What if Mommy and Daddy leave? But now I fear that somehow I will be the one to leave, I will be the one who's not there, swallowed by life or death.

Dread.

My littlest is eighteen months. He's also a handful. Oh, he's a jolly, friendly little guy. But he's hell on wheels, running and climbing everywhere. I call him Evel Knievel for his escape tendencies. And the other day, while heads were briefly turned, he climbed into our car after a door was left open. He happily sat and played while a search went on around him.

But there is, in that moment, a dread. The looming up of the unknown, of chance, of the simple unknowingness of life. With my son it was nothing. Little Evel playing a trick, unknowing himself of what that trick might mean. But life can turn on a moment. The sudden impact of a car; a man walking onto an island with a rifle.

Random and merciless events of the indecipherable present.

And yet we have no choice but to live, to face that unknowingness. There's no way to hide. You need to gather yourself, to tell yourself a story of faith--to convince yourself. We hold to something: a faith in God, a faith in fate, a faith in ourselves, or a faith in the simple probability of hope. We hold to something. A faith in the mathematics of life, that hope divided by despair and dread will somehow equal a positive number.

Little Evel is climbing everywhere these days. I found him the other day, sitting calmly in the middle of the kitchen table, playing, having monkeyed his way up there (rappeling gear, perhaps?). You worry about a fall, you stay alert, you do everything you can - yet sometimes you simply have to trust in their balance.

Craig Rimmel: A Tear in the Fabric of the Fathomable

The world is a story we tell to ourself, and stories must make sense. If our stories didn't make sense the world would be chaos, random and unlivable. And so we shape our lives, creating structures and order. We stitch beginnings and endings, triumphs and losses, into the fabric of what we know, of what we have experienced.

And we read this story into the future. Our life is as much about prediction as it is about this moment. Because the chaos brims beyond the line of our sight. The future is like the ancient belief about the earth: it is flat, and at some point we reach the edge and there is blackness beyond as the waters of the seas pour off the edge of the world into the vast empty of the unknown.

Unless, of course, we weave the story out further. Our lives are constructed not just on what we have seen and known, not just on who we are and what we are living, but on what might be and what we might predict, creating a future woven out of threads of expectation.

And this future we see ahead of us is usually strung together out of certain rules and beliefs. I will be fine. Nothing bad will happen. It will be like this, like this story I see in my head. We do not see the vast empty beyond. We do not let ourselves.

And yet sometimes things happen. It happens to all of us at some point, I think. Something happens, and there's a little tear, the fabric of the fathomable peeling open to reveal the vast seething blackness beyond. The rules, the orders and patterns of our life, of the future we shape for ourselves in our heads, tumble down like matchsticks. Was that all they were? Such tiny, fragile pieces of wood? Little splinters tumbled down. A breeze, just a little breeze, will blow them off the edge of the world.

It is not always the worst thing in the world, though it can be. It happens to some people very young: a parent dies, a matchstick house tumbles. It happens to others only as adults. And the moment may not have arrived yet for some people. They wait in their matchstick houses, smiling at the future, hands flashing as they stitch together bright matchstick quilts of possibility.

My moment came when I was twelve. We got a phone call. My friend, Craig Rimmel, was dead.

He was not the first person I knew to die, but I had already fashioned little rules around death, built little matchstick fences and road signs: One Way Only. Death Goes This Way.

Death was natural. You were born, you grew up, you grew old, you died. This was sad, but this was inevitable. This was the way of things. This was the rule.

(Matchsticks and glue, so much glue... it is harder to weave with sticks than you think)

My grandfather (my father's father) died when I was only one. I remember him and I don't. It is a memory, but not clear--it is more like an impression, a powerful sensory aura, the essential glow of a person. A feeling. My grandfather holding me. Big. I'm sitting on his tummy. I feel the idea of a smile, feel him looking down at me. An impression of warmth.

That is all.

I was too small to understand, but all understanding thereafter was tinted with his lack, with his death, with his absence in the world I knew. This is the possibility.

This is how the rule began.

My other grandfather died when I was five. He'd had a few strokes, and they believed he had another while driving a tractor, and the tractor tipped and he was killed. An accident. But I was small, and he was old, and this was the rule.

When my grandmothers died the rule was cemented. This is the way the world works. I knew, of course, in my head, that it didn't always work this way. I saw it on the news. But I didn't feel it or know it. This wasn't my story. These bits of news, these images on the television, these other posssibilities, these were just the minor backdrops to the story I saw before me, to the story I told myself about the future.

But Craig was different. I was twelve. He was twelve. He died on his paper route.

I had delivered papers, too, the Pennysaver. I remember cutting the plastic ties. Sorting the ads. Ink on my fingers. Having to scrub them, watching the ink swirl down the drain, but never all of it. So hard to get them entirely clean. The ink left a stain.

Craig was on his paper route. He was twelve. It wasn't even an accident. It was an aneurysm. Something inside just broke. A little balloon stretched and popped, as if the colourful balloon animals of his imagination that danced through his future had been too much. The balloon animals of highschool, of college, of marriage and adulthood. They were too much, required too much air, and the balloon popped.

A boy falling down on his paper route.

We had played soccer together. He was our goalie, his father our coach, the best I ever had. He had a round face, curly blond hair. He had a nice smile. He was nice. He was like a cherub in soccer cleats.

Craig would have known, though, that my rule was not true. He knew, I think, that these houses of possibility were built only out of matchsticks and twigs, glued together with hope and faith and necessary naivety.

His mother had died a few years earlier. Heart attack. And now him. A little tube, ballooning. Popping. A boy falling down on his paper route.

Ink on my fingers. So hard to wash off.

I remember the funeral. I remember his father standing, beside the coffin, with Craig's older brother. Just two of them left now, a family cut in half, a punnett square going nowhere.

I remember sunlight through a window. Motes of dust drifting in the light. Hovering. A room full of children crying. All dressed nicely.

I hated dress clothes for a long time. It was the last funeral I attended for a long time. I avoided them, as if this would somehow allow me to ignore the blackness hiding beyond the present moment.

The coffin was dark, solid. All too solid. A dark, burnished wood. Is this why I have a fascination with dark wood?

A rent in the story, in the fabric of all I had predicted, and all I might predict in the days and years to come.

There was a great void in the four corners of that family, and some of that leaked into my own life. A touch of the chaos, of the unknowingness of things.

I was not a teen that took risks, that felt invulnerable. In every story I could think of, could weave of the future, there was that wooden box, the possibility of it.

What was fathomable had changed.

I was quietly haunted by this for years. I was quieter for years, perhaps.

And yet I remembered, too, that light. The light through the window, the motes of dust hovering in the midst of a slow dance. There was chance and randomness there, too, but of another kind. A glimmer of light, a path, however narrow. Something to follow.

I was an adult when my father died. One day, though, in the dark of grief, I went outside. A winter sky of blue, white sun on white snow, a moment of sublimity, amd perhaps, even, of grace. A gift of hope, of the idea that we can see even in the darkness of what is to come. And in that light of a late winter morning I remembered Craig's funeral, the light through the window, the dancing motes of dust, suspended in a moment and holding off the future.

Tragedy and a Writer's Empathy

Who else out there is like me, and finds it difficult to turn away from what's happening in Japan?

The earthquake. The terrible tsunami. The nuclear crisis. And it's not only that it's riveting, this human dram, but that my writer's brain has turned on, has taken hold of events. I begin to imagine, to plot storylines through the tragedy. I begin to diagnose beginnings, middles, and ends. I begin to navigate conflicts.

I think some people react negatively to this, and think it dispassionate. "You want to write a story about this? What are you, a vulture?" Even some writers, I think, feel this, even about their own reaction, this fascination and watchfulness. I think there's a tendency to think of it as voyeuristic and exploitative, even if only subconsciously.

Yet I don't think this reaction really understands the psychological dynamics at work. Story is the way we think. This, in part, is how we understand the world. We make stories of it. We set beginnings and endings. Heck, we break our lives up into decades, years, months and days to help us do just that. It makes the world more comprehensible, providing patterns by which we can shape and delineate our experience. Memory, really, is simply the stories we repeat to ourselves, either consciously or unconsciously. Disordered minds are often disordered because the stories they tell themselves do not make sense.

And this idea of experience as story, I think, holds even greater strength for writers. We are writers because we are deeply touched by story, and in some way we've come to understand their value, and so we consciously try to shape narratives. This is an act of exploration, of trying to understand the world around us by shaping it into a story (no matter how strange and transformed that story might be).

And tragedies hold some of the deepest and most powerful stories. These are the difficult stories, the wrenching stories. And this is why they call to us, because they beg for understanding, beg for us to try and come to grips with them. Sometimes we need to do just that. The world can be a haunting place, and some exorcisms can only take place with a blessing of words.

This act of connective story, of fascination and recreation, is not dispassionate. It is, at heart, an action of extreme empathy. We might be distant, but we try to make ourselves immediate, we try to find a way inside the story, inside the people, inside the experiences, no matter how terrible, how tragic, how full of despair.

There is a human need to share, to take in experience, and to offer a little of ourselves in return. For when we write we invite others to take this exploration with us, to step into a new world, a new experience. To taste tragedy and joy...

Doesn't everyone feel this? At least a little? An accident occurs at the side of a road. People drive by... and everyone slows down and looks. Traffic jams are created from this simple desire, to look. But are we all ghouls, ready to drink in the misery? Or is it simply this need to understand; what is the story? What was its beginning, and middle, and end? What is this experience? For a fleeting moment we enter that story, and we wonder, we feel, we try to share and experience it.

For most, however, this is a fleeting thing. The car moves past, and as the scene fades into the mirror the empathetic connection is lost.

But a writer? Sometimes those connections are strong. We have seen and felt a fragment of something, and it won't let us go. And we want to get to the bottom of it. We need to understand, to try and grasp the human meaning, to piece the puzzle together, to find and shape and share the experience in its entirety.

And so we write. And so we tell a story.

They Dreamed of Stories

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Actually, being Canadian, this isn't a holiday for me, but I like it anyway. It's important, though I sometimes regret its need. There's something appealing about the idea I've heard expressed, that we shouldn't have such markers because they highlight separation, and black history should be integrated entirely within general American history. There is, in such a thought, a powerful sense of arrival, of equality. But do we live in such a society yet? A society where minorites, and their histories, have their proper and honest representation within our history and cultural self-definitions? Where these voices, and stories, won't be lost beneath a white tide?

I don't think so. We're not there yet. And so it's important to have such markers, such signposts to memory and, I hope, future action. I wanted to do something on the blog, and so I thought I'd focus on some great black authors. These writers had a dream, too, and their dreams are made real in the words of their stories.

First, the classics. It's hard to look at black writers in America without looking at Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Both of these writers are important to me. Ellison's Invisible Man is a thoughtful and brilliant evocation of the forced invisibility of a black man in a white world. Wright's Native Son reveals life in black Chicago, simmering with rage and the power of a voice being found.

Both books should be read. First, because they are great literature. Second, because they are important, both for the dreams they make real and for the cultural impact they've had.


Shop Indie Bookstores


Shop Indie Bookstores

Chester Himes is another writer who is important to me. His prison novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry is an impressive work dealing with race and justice in America, and it deserves wider recognition and circulation. Himes left America, feeling that it was too difficult to be both free and black there, but he returned to it in his writing, in particular with his series of crime novels, in which he set mysteries in a Harlem under the eye of his two black detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.


Shop Indie Bookstores


Shop Indie Bookstores

James Baldwin was one of the great intellectuals of the Civil Rights Movement, and the honesty and incisiveness of books like The Fire Next Time helped shape me, and helped shape the way I viewed the world, showing me how a human lens was always needed when peering at any ideology.


Shop Indie Bookstores

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones, is a novel about slavery. It's not an easy book, uninterested as it is in pat conclusions and easy moral summaries. It's a look at the human stories of slavery, the all too easy choices at the heart of devaluing others for your own gain, and the cultural patterns of power that enforce such choices.


Shop Indie Bookstores

All these books are great. All have affected me in the way that great literature should.

Yet, if days such as this are to be more than mere markers of remembrance they must help shape who we are and who we want to be. They must shape us going forward. They must shape our dreams and actions.

There are great novels by minority writers coming out all the time, yet we need to keep reading, and supporting, them. There is a disparity in the publishing world, the field still tilted away from minority writers. All that uphill running...

We can all do something, even if it's something as simple as reading. A simple choice, a step forward. It would be great, I think, if we could all pick a book by a black author (or another minority) and read. And talk it! Share it! Blog it! Tweet it! Facebooker it! Word of mouth, the voices of individuals coming together to form the voice of a community, can still help flatten the playing field.

As for me, I'm going to read Man Gone Down, by Michael Thomas.


Shop Indie Bookstores

The City - The World in Miniature

By Bryan Russell

The City

The village often seemed lost in the jungle: no one could find it who didn’t live there. And no one who left ever remembered the way back, except for R.

The jungle seemed a little closer, a little darker, each year. The young people slipped away in the night. Out to the road. And then down the road to The City, though that was far away. The people heard The City on the magic of the radio, but in the real world it was just a rumor, though always a convincing one.

A few of the young people didn’t sneak off, back in the beginning. They said they were leaving. Off to The City. There was a celebration with dancing and music to send them on their way. So beautiful! the people said. We cried so much! And they will come back with great stories! With learning and money and machines!

But the people who left for The City never came back, except for R. They left. They called, sometimes, on the telephone. For awhile. But even then their voices were like rumors, less real than the radio. And, soon and always, the calls stopped.

The people in the village, mostly the old, cried less and held more grimly to the young. They grabbed the children and held them, squeezing tight so the children would not grow, would not leave. The older children started sneaking off in the night.

The younger children waited.

The old villagers could not squeeze hard enough, and the children grew, and in the night they left, never to return, all but R.

R. was different. He came back, and the people were happy to see him, but, really, it was not a happy story. It was hard to recognize him. He talked different, looked different. And he came back only to flaunt what he had become, all that he had gained in The City. It was a pilgrimage of vanity. He brought his car, drove it along the rough road and into the village where it could be admired. People came and looked at it. The car was old, though, and the engine died and R. kicked it many times, yelling and cursing. His grand return seemed less grand.

R. did not stay. He left in the night, walking out on foot, leaving his car behind.

The car stayed. It was very heavy, and hard to move, and the old villagers were wary of it. Keeping a distance seemed wise.

The car sat, rusting in the moist jungle air. Grass grew up around it as it lay sleeping. A vine curled through the windows. A tree grew up through the trunk. It waited, gaunted and grim and silent, its eyes shuttered.

And yet sometimes, at night, when the villagers were asleep, the engine rolled over and a hum, as of some vast insect, filled the air. The engine whirred, exhaust leaking from the crumbling tailpipe as the car dreamed of The City so far away, and a world it had once known. Lights and cars and factories, shining so brightly, but always the dream faded and the jungle returned, the thick and heavy air settling on the car.

Memories rusted quickly, and it was easier to forget.

I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

One of the reasons I started this blog was because I love to talk about writing. Indeed, that's why I first embraced the online world - I missed having a writig community.

I have a couple degress in Creative Writing, and one of the great things about those experiences was the fact that I wasn't alone. Writing is such a solitary endeavor at times, and yet there's a part of me that wants very much to share the process. Not the immediate act, but the sense of the experience itself. It's nice to commune with like minds, with people who understand what you're going through, who've shared the same (or at least similar) experiences.

After I finished my Masters degree, though, that community split up and scattered across the world. I found myself missing that sense of a shared journey. I turned to the online world and found a new community, and I've been grateful ever since. I've met so many wonderful writers and people who are on the same journey. A load shared is a load lightened.

And yet it's so hard to keep up with that community the way I want to. Yes, I'm particularly busy right now, but I'm certainly not the only busy person out there. Many are busier.

There are so many interesting writers and interesting blogs, and yet I struggle to visit many of them as often as I'd like. So what do you do? How do you keep tied into this wonderful community? How do you find time to take it all in?

I mean, my friend Tahereh must have friends lining up around the block, her email account bending and bowing down in the middle under the weight of all those friendly messages and communiques from fellow travellers.

So how do you do it? How does a hermitish fellow keep the conversation alive? How do you make time for everyone?