Theodora Goss's Blog, page 34

The Adventure Begins

I haven’t been very good about posting on this blog because I’ve been preparing for the trip to Hungary. And now here I am, sitting at a desk in Debrecen, writing this update. It’s Thursday. On Monday, Ophelia and I took a SwissAir flight to Zurich, arriving Tuesday morning, and then another SwissAir flight to Budapest, arriving Tuesday afternoon. Budapest has a small airport: you still walk off the plane and over the tarmac, as I did years ago, the first time I came to Hungary as a teenager. But that was back in the communist era. There were almost no planes flying in, the airport was patrolled by soldiers with Kalashnikovs, and I had to pass through passport control. This time, passport control happened in Zurich, and it consisted of a quick glance at our passports and a quick stamp. Then we drove to Budapest so that I could pick up the key to my grandmother’s apartment. I checked to see if I could still get wifi at the California Café down the street, and I could. I bought a drink there that turned out to be watermelon lemonade, then sat at one of the small tables with my computer. On both sides of me, people were speaking English. I think California Café is one of the places where the Americans and Australians, in particular, gather. And then we drove to Debrecen.

It was a very long day, and I’ve been adjusting to the six-hour time difference. So here I am in Debrecen, where it’s almost ten o’clock although my computer is still on Boston time and tells me that it’s almost four in the afternoon. I’ve been asked to post pictures, so I’ll post them here and tell you what they are. The first picture is of my father’s house on the outskirts of Debrecen. This is where I am staying.

It’s located on a charming little street. This is a street of new houses, but it looks very much like Hungarian streets everywhere in that the houses, whether old or new, are surrounded by gardens. Everyone seems to garden, to grow both flowers and vegetables. One of the strangest things to me, living in the United States, is seeing the broad green lawns in the suburbs, with no gardens in them. Why not? I suppose it’s a cultural difference and has to do in part with the value placed here on fresh fruit and vegetables. Hungarians really care about their food.

Behind the house, there is a traditional Hungarian outdoor oven. We cooked in it the last time I was here, three years ago. I think we cooked a very traditional Hungarian dish: pizza. But this time, so far, I really have had very Hungarian foods. The first night, we went out to a restaurant and I had stuffed cabbage. Since then it’s been dishes like Lecsó, which has meat and tomatoes and peppers, and plenty of paprika, and I’ve had bread with cheese, and a cake made with sweet and sour cherries. Those sorts of things.

This morning, I was woken by a flock of sheet in the field behind the back garden. They were black sheep, with long, twisting horns. I tried to take a closer picture of them, but as I came too close, they moved away.

In the garden itself, the lavender is in bloom, which gives you a sense of the climate here: I see flowers growing that in the United States grow in California. But this landscape is more lush and fertile. There is more rainfall, so the flowers run riot (the roses are particularly beautiful), and the streets are lined with willows and linden trees. I can smell the linden flowers everywhere I go.

These, in case you’re not familiar with them, are linden flowers. They have a strong scent that, once smelled, is never forgotten I think. If you’ve read much nineteenth-century British literature, you’ve no doubt come across references to avenues of limes. Well, those aren’t trees growing the green fruit we think of as limes, which would never survive in England. They’re linden trees, also called limes.

Each of these photos has taken a long time to upload, because although I do have a good internet connection here, it’s not as fast as I’m used to. So in the meantime, I’ve been revising the poetry collection manuscript. There is still plenty of work for me to do here, and I’m trying to do it, although I’m also going around looking at black sheep and linden trees.

My Itinerary

Here is my itinerary for the European trip:

On the night of June 18th, I fly to Budapest. I will be flying overnight and arriving on the 19th. Then, I think I will be going almost directly to Debrecen. I will spend a week in Debrecen, then fly to London on June 25th, where I will stay with friends. In London I’m going to be spending most of my time doing research, but if you would like to contact me while I’m there, I may have time for coffee or whatever it is one drinks in England. Is it too much of a cliché to meet for tea?

On July 4th, I will return from London to Debrecen, and spend a few days there. But I need to be in Budapest by the 8th, I think, because Catherynne Valente and I have two weeks of writing scheduled. We will be writing and hanging out in cafés. However, if you are in Budapest and want to meet up, let me know. In Budapest, it will definitely be coffee. The apartment where we’ll be staying is close to the Hungarian National Museum, in Pest. It’s within walking distance of Váci Utca, which is the main shopping district.  I remember being able to walk down to the Danube.

There’s one place I know I’m definitely going, which is Gerbaud. This is a slice of Dobos Torte from Gerbaud. It is the definitive Dobos Torte: you can tell because it’s the one featured on Wikipedia.

Gerbaud is only a few blocks from the apartment. Who knows, I may walk there every day simply for exercise! And then, on July 24th, I’ll be flying back from Budapest to Boston. So, this is what it looks like:

June 18th Boston to Budapest to Debrecen

June 25th Debrecen to London

July 4th London to Debrecen

By July 8th Debrecen to Budapest

July 24th Budapest to Boston

And there may be some traveling around Hungary during those two weeks in Budapest. I learned something interesting today. I have a porcelain brooch with a painting of an ancestress of mine on it. What I learned is that there’s a picture of the brooch at Bezerédj Castle, where she lived. And I have the original. Here is a picture of it:

And here is the castle where she lived:

It would be interesting to go visit, don’t you think?

All of this does mean that I won’t be able to go to Readercon this year, for the first time in about seven years, I think. I’m very sorry about that! I know there are people who were looking forward to seeing me there, and I was certainly looking forward to seeing them. I tried to find a way to come back for the convention specifically, but it was just too expensive. And my schedule was constrained by the need to go to London as early in summer as I could, to avoid the Olympics. I’m hoping that in the future, I can find a way to both go to Europe to write during the summer, and make Readercon, which is after all one of my favorite conventions.

So there you have it, that’s my itinerary. If you want to meet up with me at any point along the way, let me know! I may be able to manage it. (But if you offer to buy me anything at Gerbaud, I can pretty much guarantee that I’ll be there.)

The Immigrant Class: Part 5

Several days ago, a woman whose daughter plays with Ophelia told me that she would be moving to Jordan for a year, with the children, while her husband stayed in the United States. He was from Jordan, she was from Australia, and they wanted the children to be familiar with his culture as well. I mention this because what I’ve been calling the immigrant class could also, perhaps more accurately, be called an international intellectual class. (Remember that I’m not talking about all immigrants, but specifically those who were highly educated in their own countries. They generally come to the United States for career opportunities, but want to maintain ties to their own cultures — unless they are fleeing repressive regimes, as I suppose we were.) The international immigrant class does things like that — their children are raised all over the world, in part so they will develop the habits and expectations that come from belonging to that class. Even my brother and I were sent to Europe regularly, although my family did not have much money while I was growing up. But being international — rather than provincial, which was one of the worst things my mother could call you — was a requirement.

But I was talking about going to the University of Virginia and encountering class differences there. And there were wide class differences, because it was a state school and therefore relatively inexpensive. Good students from small towns in southern Virginia would go there, as well as the sons and daughters of wealthy lawyers from Richmond. And of course, because it had an international reputations, there were also students from places like New York and Los Angeles. You know what class they belonged to — only the children of the wealthy went to a state school for which they would have to pay out-of-state tuition.

The university had its own upper class, made up of students who were in the University Guides, who were Resident Assistants, who were admitted to the Jefferson Society. Being editor of the school newspaper counted. Some of them eventually ended up residents of the Lawn. You could tell who those were because they proudly walked around the Lawn in their bathrobes in the morning. Their bathrooms were behind the Lawn rooms, so they had to walk outside to get to them. But, on the other hand, they were on Mr. Jefferson’s Lawn — and their rooms had fireplaces. (I know all this because I dated a Lawn resident. I dated a lot of people, in those days.)

In a way, it was funny — because it could be so pretentious. There was a whole other side of the university as well, the side that I think the professors saw, in which UVA was a major research university. But among the students, in these groups, the old traditions lived on. I’m sure they live on at other universities that pride themselves on being serious research institutions — after all, Princeton still has its secret societies.  (So, of course, does UVA, and belonging to one of them put you at the very highest social level.)

At the time, I was intimidated by it all. It was only later that I learned about a crucial class distinction between what I will call the provincial upper class and the actual American upper class. I met the provincial upper class while I was working for law firms in Richmond. I heard law firm partners talking at length about the country club, about their daughters’ debuts. And I realized that they were palely imitating what the actual American upper class, which did not live in places like Richmond, had done for the last century. The actual American upper class lives in places like New York and Boston — or lived, because those class hierarchies are in fact breaking apart. They are listed in actual society registers. And what I had gone to school with, at UVA, were the sons and daughters of the provincial upper class, which is important in places like Richmond, or Savannah, or Atlanta, and completely unimportant anywhere else. (If you meet members of that class, nod and smile, listen politely, and get away to somewhere more interesting as quickly as you can. The truth is that, in our international world, they no longer have much power, except at a purely local level. The people who are changing our world do not belong to country clubs.)

My image for the day is of the University of Virginia rotunda as it looks now:

The Rotunda itself, the physical structure, is not the cliché that you see in photographs. I used to walk around it at night, on dates with guys from the college or law school. It is a graceful building, with lovely old bricks. That was one of the reasons I went to UVA — to experience the sense of peace that only something old and graceful can provide.

Writing the Story

I’m going to try very hard to keep my blog posts to around 500 words, because I’m working on a short story. I’m writing around 1000 words a day, and in order to keep that up, I can’t spend a lot of time writing other things. Because the writing does tire me out, after a while. I know there are people who write thousands of words a day, but I find that after a while, if I’m too tired, my words are no good. And it doesn’t make sense to sit there producing writing that isn’t good. Instead, I know that I need to get out, clear my head — go to the coffee shop, buy myself a vanilla latte, walk to the top of the hill, and sit there drinking it, thinking about the story, or just anything at all.

Once I finish the short story, I’m going back to the novel, and at that point I’m going to try to write more per diem, although I don’t know if I’ll be able to — we’ll see. The novel will be more difficult, because I can usually write a short story in three drafts at most, and I’m quite sure I won’t be able to do that with this novel. I think it will take extensive revisions. Each chapter I write teaches me more about the characters, about who they are and how they respond to the world. Which of course means going back and revising the beginning.

All this is to say that I want to keep up blogging, but I’m going to try to confine myself to around 500 words, and here I’ve taken around 250 already to explain myself.

So let me tell me about what I did yesterday. I typed in the morning, then felt as though I couldn’t type anymore. I needed to get out. So I went to the coffee shop, bought myself a vanilla latte, and walked to a small park where there were benches. There, I sat on a bench and wrote the scene in which my main character betrays her lover to the secret police. Here is my Moleskine notebook with part of the scene I was writing.

As I was writing the scene, two bunnies came out and hopped around, nibbling the grass. They looked at me as though to say, “Hello. We are adorable. Are you noticing our adorableness?” So I sat there for a while, distracted, watching the bunnies. I was surprised at how close they got to me, but I suppose that’s what happens when wildlife is not at all frightened of human beings. It was rather lovely.

And here is the writer, not writing her scene, and instead watching bunnies. I’m worry to write that directly after this experience of adorable lapinity, she went back to writing the scene in which her main character sends her lover to a concentration camp. In real life, writers are gentle, harmless, eccentric creatures. But inside their heads, they are assassins. Their cruelty knows no bounds. They are capable of destroying the world. Really, I don’t know why we put up with them!

I am already over my 500 words, so I will leave you with a videotape I made of the bunnies on my cell phone. I wanted to experiment with the video function, and also to see if I could then upload the video. So I have produced what is probably the most soporific video on youtube. But there you go.

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The Immigrant Class: Part 4

This is going to be a short post, because I’m so very tired. I’ve been working all day, and I’ve spent the last two hours typing a thousand words of “England under the White Witch,” the story I drafted on the bus from New York to Boston. But I thought I would talk a bit more about social class, because I do have more to say.

I think I’ve seen a fairly broad range of the social classes this country has to offer. I haven’t seen the bottom or top of the range intimately, but I have at least seen it: the truly poor, whether the urban homeless or the rural poor living in run-down houses, and the ridiculously wealthy. I’ve met a billionaire: Jan Stenbeck, a Swedish media mogul who was mentioned in that crime novel — The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He died several years ago, but while I was working as a corporate lawyer, he was a client of one of the firms I worked for. The firm flew me down to New York regularly to meet with the heads of his companies. We were doing some sort of corporate restructuring, I remember. But most of the people I’ve known and spent my time with belong in what we like to think of as the middle class, although in America the middle class goes all the way from teacher’s aids to law firm partners. You can be earning $20,000 a year or $200,000 a year. And the bottom and top of that class are as alien to each other as they are to other classes, I sometimes think.

I still remember going to the University of Virginia, my freshman year (although it’s called first year, there), and realizing that I was in a completely different social world. I had gone to high school in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., among children whose parents belonged to the broad middle of the middle class. Some of them were government employees who could not afford to live in the city. Some were people who serviced the new suburban economy: construction workers, librarians, restaurant managers. The suburbs had been built up in the last twenty or so years, and there were still fields with horses in them, or actually being farmed. My high school was surrounded by fields. This was a culture shock for me: I had grown up in Budapest, Brussels, and the area around the National Institutes of Health, all of which were more dense, urban, cultured. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself in these new suburbs.

One way social class differences are enforced even during the teenage years is by tracking in the high schools. I was on the advanced academic track, in the gifted program. But there were kids who left in the middle of the day for vocational training. This was the American high school as depicted in so many movies from the 1980s, where football players, cheerleaders, and prom are all important. Where students don’t necessarily go on to college. I, of course, was expected to go to college and then graduate school. But it was a strange atmosphere to be in, where students had such different expectations. My graduating class was not particularly small, several hundred students, but there were only about thirty of us tracked at our level, all taking the same sequence of honors courses. In a sense, we formed a small school within the school. Need I add that we were of course the nerds of the school? The top of the class was drawn from our ranks.

Going to UVA meant encountering a very different social class: kids who had gone to private schools, who recognized each other’s private schools, whose families often knew each other. This was the top of the “middle class” and bottom of the “upper class,” which the broad middle middle class doesn’t truly know or understand. These were the kids who, when they graduated, had internships waiting for them at Sotheby’s or in congressional offices. I think it will take an entirely different blog post to talk about the social structure of UVA, but it involved certain clubs and secret societies — partly because UVA emulated and believed itself equal to the northern Ivies. I saw this social structure from the fringes because I dated some boys from it — my college boyfriend, whom I dated for two years, had gone to Groton, as had his father before him, and he understood that structure while despising it heartily. But he could not escape it either, and walked around campus in the same uniform of untucked button-down oxfords, khakis, and what we called boat shoes — Sperry top-siders. When something more formal was required, he threw a jacket over the oxford shirt. I don’t think he ever tucked it in.

Although I’m so tired, this has been surprisingly easy to write. I think it’s because when you’re outside a social structure, it’s easier to see inside it, to note its small details. Because it was all in the small details. And to understand the nuances that determine how people are placed, and drive how they behave.  More on this to come.

My image for to day is the UVA Rotunda, from the 1870s:

There’s one thing I should be more specific about. I went to such a variety of schools that it’s not quite fair to talk about one high school as being mine. I started school in Brussels; then went to a private Catholic school in Pennsylvania; then a small public school, and then a larger public school, in Maryland; and then H.B. Woodlawn in Virginia, which is one of the best purblic schools in the country (and can best be described as hippie alternative); then a suburban middle school when my mother decided that we needed to be in surburbs (in part because I had been followed and almost attacked by a man while walking home from the bus stop); then a large and rather frightening high school in California; then the high school I described above. The longest I went to any one school was three and a half years. After that, I went to college — which was a relief. But more on that another time.

Ray Bradbury

This morning, it was all over the news and social media: Ray Bradbury had died. Can something be a shock without being a surprise? This afternoon, I found his book on writing, Zen in the Art of Writing, which had somehow gotten into a pile of other books, about five books down, even though I was in the middle of reading it, on p. 59 to be exact. I think I’m going to finish it now.

But it’s a bit superfluous, because for me at least, Bradbury is one of those writers I absorbed into my DNA — I think because of the poetry with which he wrote the fantastic. I was lucky enough to grow up on writers of the fantastic who were also poets (Bradbury and Ursula Le Guin among them), so I never thought there was one particular way to write science fiction and fantasy. I always thought one should have literary aspirations.

I’m not even sure, now, what I read by Bradbury: Farenheit 451, of course; The Martian Chronicles; a whole bunch of short stories. I read him knowing that in his writing I would find a particular mixture of poetry and seriousness. He was at once in deadly earnest and intensely playful. His death reminds me of a poem by Stephen Spender, “I Continually Think of Those.” It goes like this:

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget

The delight of the blood drawn from ancient springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;

Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,

Nor its grave evening demand for love;

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are fêted by the waving grass,

And by the streamers of white cloud,

And whispers of wind in the listening sky;

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.

Born of the sun, they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

Bradbury was one of those who were truly great, who remembered the soul’s history. I still remember the conclusion of Farenheit 451, of people gathered around a fire in the darkness — people who are also bits of literature, who carry in them our human and cultural heritage. That is, in a sense, an image for what we should all be. We should all carry in ourselves the highest, the best, that we as human beings can produce. We should participate in it, absorb it into us. And if we are fortunate enough to be able to, create out of it.

So often, I am so tired. But I would like to be one of those who fought for life, the life of the spirit — who wore at their hearts the fire’s center. I suppose the height and purpose of human life is to try.

Here is what Bradbury himself said about writing, and it really can’t be said any better:

“And what, you ask, does writing teach us?

“First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

“So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

“Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

“Not to write, for many of us, is to die.

“We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audience would know.

“A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.

“But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.”

And then he says the following:

Rest in peace, master.

The Workshop

Tonight, I am in the Slough of Despond. That’s a reference to Pilgrim’s Progress, although Christian’s slough has to do with his sins and guilt for them, and my particular slough has to do more with my complete exhaustion. This is how the slough is described in the book:

“This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond: for still as the sinner is awakened about his lost condition, there ariseth in his soul many fears, and doubts, and discouraging apprehensions, which all of them get together, and settle in this place; and this is the reason of the badness of this ground.”

Well, the fears and doubts and discouraging apprehensions are right on, anyway. I think I’m feeling them because I’ve been going and going and going, as though I’m some sort of automaton, and of course I’m not. Eventually, I wear myself out.

Last week, I revised the first five chapters of the novel, and this weekend I took the bus to New York so I could workshop them with my group, The Injustice League. Some of us could not make it, but Catherynne Valente, Delia Sherman, and Ellen Kushner were all there. When we workshop, we do it a little differently from most groups. Here’s what happened this time: over lunch at a Thai place, we workshopped Cat’s story, then over dessert at a coffee shop (where I had a wonderful tiramisu) we workshopped my chapters, and then finally, over dinner at a Japanese place, we workshopped Delia’s story. Each manuscript was discussed for more than an hour, and each was discussed more intensely than I’ve ever seen a manuscript discussed in any other workshop. That’s what makes this workshop so special, I think. I’ve never talked to other writers about writing at such a high level.

And the critiques were intensely useful. I now know why I’m writing this novel and what I need to do next and after that and after that.  Before, I didn’t have a clear path; I have one now.  I know where to go, and how to get to the next place when I don’t–when what I do know runs out. Thank you, Cat and Delia and Ellen! You are all brilliant, and I don’t think I could do this without you.

But by the time I was sitting on the bus back to Boston, I was completely exhausted–to the level where I always become an emotional mess. It’s a combination of exhaustion, sensory overload, mental distress–a sort of stew of different things that all add up to a feeling as though I’m about to break. And that’s how I felt, sitting on that bus on the way back.

So I did the logical thing, which was to text my friend Nathan Ballingrud, who had the perfect solution. He said, let’s both write a story, under 5000 words. And I said, I’m going to start now. Actually, I had already started while standing in line, waiting to get on the bus. The first few lines had come to me then. But now, I sat there with my Moleskine notebook and my pen, scribbling. By the time I arrived in Boston, I had a very rough first draft. But I knew what the story was about, and I knew that I could type it up and give it the right shape, the narrative arc it needed.

I’m going to try to type it in the next two weeks, which is the deadline Nathan and I agreed on. Then, we will exchange stories for critiquing. But the immediate lesson for me was this:

If you’re a writer, whatever your problem, the solution is always writing.

Writing a story distracted me, calmed me, made me feel as though life was worth living again. I’m still not recovered, and I suspect recovery will take another week or so. I’ve just been working too hard. But at least I feel a little better.

I wanted to find an image of a woman writing to go with this post, and you know what? There are quite a lot of them. So here is your image: Woman Writing a Letter by Gerard Ter Borch II.

Victorian Hats

Tonight, I’m packing to go to New York, so this will be a short post with lots of pictures. Of hats.

Last night, I was up very late revising the first five chapters of The Mad Scientist’s Daughter. Around 3:00 a.m., I sent the revised manuscript to my writing group. In my email, I apologized for the roughness of the manuscript, and it really is rough at the moment: it’s at the stage where I’m still trying to get all the elements of the plot right. I’m trying to figure out the pieces of what will eventually be the central mystery of the novel. And at the same time, I’m trying to get a feel for my characters, for how they will act and interact. Since this is a historical fantasy, that includes figuring out their environment, including such seemingly mundane elements as what they wear, what rooms they go into and what furniture those rooms contain, when and what they eat. How they interact with their physical surroundings. I have to be able to imagine all those things in order to make them move through space smoothly.

In order to do that, I often have to consult research sources. Last night, for example, I was trying to figure out exactly what Mary Jekyll would look like. Here is how I started the first chapter. This may or may not be the eventual beginning of the novel.

Mary looked at herself in the hall mirror.

The face looking back was pale, with dark circles under the eyes. A halo of pale gold hair was visible under the brim of the black hat, and a high-collared black dress made the girl in the mirror look particularly sepulchral.

“What are you going to do?” Mary asked her.

“No sense talking to yourself, Miss,” said Mrs. Poole. “That’s what your poor mother started doing, toward the end. And much good it did her.”

“I doubt it did any harm,” said Mary. She turned to look at the housekeeper. “Is it still raining?”

“Yes, and you’d better take a cab or you’ll be soaked,” said Mrs. Poole.  “A week it’s been, and when will it stop, I wonder?  I’ve never seen London in such a foul mood.  Mr. Byles about snapped my head off when I asked for chops for your dinner, and the children in the park looked as though they’d been told there would be no Christmas this year.”

There are several reasons I started this way. First, the monster looking at itself in the mirror is a classic scene. I won’t go into the whole history of the scene, but I could: Frankenstein’s monster looks at himself in a pool, Jekyll uses a cheval glass to confirm his transformation into Hyde, etc. Second, in writing workshops, you’re always told not to have characters look at themselves in mirrors, and I like breaking writing rules. Third and most importantly, it simply felt right.

But the main issue for me was, what does Mary actually look like in this scene? Originally, I had her wearing a bonnet, but then I realized that a bonnet would have been worn earlier in the century. So I did some research, and found these pictures of late nineteenth-century hats. There were so many of them, so many different styles. I had to decide what sort of hat my character, Mary Jekyll, would wear.

They were a little earlier than the time during which my novel is set: the 1890s, when the New Woman movement became prominent.  Hats became more masculine, and therefore more sensible, during those years.  And Mary herself is a sensible girl.  She would wear a sensible hat. But these pictures could at least give me some ideas.

The ones below were far too feminine, too fancy. Mary would never wear anything like that.

These, too, were too fancy, and far too extravagant for a girl like Mary who has no money and must make her own way in the world. In the Victorian world, financial status was almost everything (social status was everything else). And so it has to be in my novel as well, even though it’s a fantasy.

No, no, no.  Seriously? Did women actually go around wearing these things?

Now we were getting closer.  These were hats specifically for sports, but some of them resembled the sorts of rather plain hats that Mary might wear. The one in the upper right, which looks almost like a woman’s black bowler, would fit both her pocketbook and her personality.

The last set were hats for children, and while Mary is of age, she is still young.  These hats gave me a better sense of what a younger woman might wear.  I decided that she was wearing something like the hat in the upper left, the black one.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can leave so much to the reader’s imagination. So I don’t have to tell you exactly what sort of hat Mary is wearing. But it does become important later in the novel when she comes home and takes her hat off. Does she first take out a hatpin? I decided that she does not, that her hat is simple enough to just be taken off her head, and that her hair is probably in some sort of low bun that would allow her to wear a close-fitting hat. At least, that’s what I think for now. As I write the novel, I’ll get a better sense of who Mary is and what she looks like.

So there you have it, a small glimpse into what I was doing after midnight last night: revising a novel, but also looking at pictures of women’s hats from the 1880s-1900s.

Cat Country

Daisy died this morning.

Daisy was a cat, a small gray and orange and white cat. She had come to me more than twenty years ago, when she was just a kitten, rescued from a vacant lot. She lived a long life for a cat, being her own sweet self. Everyone who saw her remarked on her eyes, where were a particularly vivid shade of green.  I usually give cats fancier names (Nicholas, Cordelia).  But she came to me named Daisy, and the name suited her perfect: day’s eye, a simple, familiar name.

She had been getting older, slower, visibly thinner. Had stopped grooming herself. Seeing her had reminded me of my grandmother, whom I had taken care of before she died, also of old age. It was the same process, in a person and a cat.

So this morning we went through one of the rituals of childhood: the death of a pet. I’ve had many cats in my life, and I hope it doesn’t sound callous when I say that I’m used to them dying. It’s always sad, but part of the natural cycle of our lives. And there is a great beauty in that cycle. I remember thinking, even while taking care of my grandmother, that the human body was beautiful in decay. That death itself could be beautiful rather than frightening. The experience was a revelation to me, and I thought, that’s how I want to die: peacefully, suddenly, perhaps while eating breakfast one morning.

Of course, Ophelia did not have the philosophical tools to understand it that way. She responded purely emotionally, the way I would have as a child. So I told her about Cat Country.

Cat Country is a secret, so you must not tell anyone about it. I’m only sharing it here with you, and you must only share it with friends you trust. Have you ever looked for a cat everywhere, and not been able to find it–but then seen it come out from the place you just looked? It’s not that you missed the cat. It was in Cat Country.

In Cat Country, the rivers flow with milk. The berries that grow on the bushes are chicken or salmon or lamb. the trees are perfect for climbing with claws, and their leaves are like paper, easy to chew and rip. There are birds and salamanders and mice, but no dogs of any sort. There are many insects to chase in the grass, which is particularly succulent. In Cat Country there is a castle filled with pillows, and sunlit windowsills, and dark closets to explore. It is ruled over by the Lady of Cats, who adjudicates any disputes, brushes knots out of hair.

Cats, who are magical, can go to Cat Country at any time. The one thing Cat Country does not have is human beings, so they like to come into our world for what they can’t get there: hands to pet them, laser pointers. When they die, they leave their bodies and go to Cat Country.

I told Ophelia about Cat Country, and by the end, she was telling me what she thought was there, how there were fish in the streams and entire fields of catnip. By the time we buried Daisy and marked her grave with stones, she was all right–still missing Daisy of course, but able to handle her emotional response to death.  (I think that’s one thing we are responsible for teaching children–how to handle their own emotional responses.  And telling stories is a wonderful way to handle, to understand and create a context for, our emotions.)

Cat Country is a fairy tale, of course, but it expresses what I deeply believe about death–that it is not an end but a transition, and that what lies on the other side is another series of adventures. I believe that nothing wonderful is ever lost, that all the things we have created still exist somewhere, even though the library of Alexandria burned and entire cities have been buried under the earth. Death happens so quickly, and the sense I have, seeing a body just after the moment of death, is that something has left–has gone elsewhere. That was the sense I had with Daisy this morning.

By now, I think she’s probably in the catnip fields . . .

Fantasy and Biography

This is going to be a short post, because I’m very, very tired today and I still have a lot of work to get done.  But I wanted to write about a blog post by Damien Walter: “Fantasy Must Be a Struggle With Life.”  Walter writes about a lecture by Jonathan Franzen that was reprinted in The Guardian, in which Franzen says the following:

“My conception of a novel is that it ought to be a personal struggle, a direct and total engagement with the author’s story of his or her own life. This conception, again, I take from Kafka, who, although he was never transformed into an insect, and although he never had a piece of food (an apple from his family’s table!) lodged in his flesh and rotting there, devoted his whole life as a writer to describing his personal struggle with his family, with women, with his Jewish heritage, with moral law, with his Unconscious, with his sense of guilt, and with the modern world. Kafka’s work, which grows out of the night-time dreamworld in Kafka’s brain, is more autobiographical than any realistic retelling of his daytime experiences at the office or with his family or with a prostitute could have been. What is fiction, after all, if not a kind of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to create a dream that is vivid and has meaning, so that the reader can then vividly dream it and experience meaning. And work like Kafka’s, which seems to proceed directly from dream, is therefore an exceptionally pure form of autobiography. There is an important paradox here that I would like to stress: the greater the autobiographical content of a fiction writer’s work, the smaller its superficial resemblance to the writer’s actual life. The deeper the writer digs for meaning, the more the random particulars of the writer’s life become impediments to deliberate dreaming.”

Walter writes about the two conflicting impulses that have driven his own writing. One is the impulse toward autobiography (taking materials from one’s own life):

“When I began writing I found myself tugged back and forth between two seemingly conflicted urges. One was to write about my life. My first half-dozen published stories, all now hidden on my hard drive out of public sight, were very direct explorations of the tough bits of my own life. These stories, recounting for instance the exacting details of watching my mother die of cancer, felt uncomfortably like bludgeoning an emotional response from readers. (I have the same feeling even looking back at that last sentence) In literary terms I’d had the advantage of of a traumatic childhood. I had a lot of dramatic experience to draw upon and wasn’t afraid in my early twenties to beat the shit out of people with it. In fact I enjoyed the sensation and found some needed emotional resolution in it. But I couldn’t avoid the idea that this was an unfair way to treat the reader, and I could see that this was a limited kind of writing.”

The other is the impulse toward fantasy (making stuff up):

“Fortunately, the other tug on my writing sensibilities was the urge to write fantasy. By which I mean everything from Tolkienesque high fantasy to Gibsonesque cyberpunkian sci-fi fantasy. It’s all fantasy to my way of thinking. These were the writers I’d grown up with, the imaginary worlds I had retreated in to as an escape from all that traumatic childhood stuff. But whenever I tried, or sometimes return to trying, to write fantasy as an escape, I found that what I wrote died on the page. I have half a dozen novels worth of failed fantasy that will remain locked away until and hopefully after the day I die. It all needed to be written, it has all contributed to the million words every writer must write for their apprenticeship. But none of it ever needs to be read. I can’t quite bring myself to burn/delete it all, but I could do so with no great loss.”

He concludes, “The stories I have written that pass my internal quality tests, and which I have therefore left lying around for interested people to read, have all satisfied both my urges for biography and fantasy.”

I’ve quoted so extensively from Walter here because I think his blog post states, wonderfully, what I feel when I write: those two impulses, which are not necessarily conflicting impulses for me, perhaps because my biography has been so strange anyway. So fantastical. I find that the only way I can actually write about myself, about the story of my life, is through fantasy. I’m going to link to two stories of mine that I think of as deeply personal, even though only one of them reads as personal, and both read as at least somewhat fantastical:

“The Rapid Advance of Sorrow“

“Her Mother’s Ghosts“

In a way, “Her Mother’s Ghosts” explains a bit about the more personal elements of “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow.” I also once gave a talk at an APA convention about those elements. The talk was published as an essay: “Writing My Mother’s Ghosts.” Maybe that conjunction of the biographical and fantastical is what James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel were thinking about when they reprinted “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow” in Kafkaesque: Stories Inspired by Franz Kafka.

Walter ends by saying, of Franzan’s formulation,

“Whilst it might seem counter-intuative to some, all the fantasy writing I consider truly great conforms to that conception of the novel. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings struggles with his own story of surviving the trenches of World War One. China Mieville’s Bas Lag novels struggle with his own story of living as an intellectual and marxist in one of the worlds great capitalist cities. William Gibson’s novels from Neuromancer to Zero History struggle with his own story of understanding a world reshaped by the emerging web of media he calls ‘the net.’ It’s the thing I find missing in most of the fantasy writing I encounter. However brilliantly it builds a world, tells a story, spins out remarkable idea . . . if the author isn’t engaged in the struggle with their own story, it all adds up to little more than a calcified shell, missing the fleshy pulp of life within.”

And I agree with that.