Theodora Goss's Blog, page 76

The Bookstore

This morning, because I had half an hour before an appointment in Coolidge Corner, I walked into the Brookline Booksmith, one of my favorite independent bookstores. I haven't had much time to browse in bookstores lately, although of course I love doing so. Independent bookstores and second-hand bookshops are my favorites. But nowadays it always gives me a sense of melancholy as well, because I see all those books, on all those shelves – none of them mine. And I think, even if I do write a book, will it get lost in all this? Will anyone read it?

So there I was in the Brookline Booksmith, looking at the Fantasy and Science Fiction shelves, at all the Neil Gaimans and China Miévilles and Ursula Le Guins, feeling melancholy, when I saw this:

Tails of Wonder and Imagination is an anthology of cat stories edited by Ellen Datlow, and my story "The Puma" is the very last one in the volume. Can you imagine how I smiled? There I had been, thinking there was nothing of mine on those shelves, when all the time there was. A story of mine was up there. I was part of that bookstore, part of the literary world it represented.

And then I saw this:

Catherynne M. Valente's The Habitation of the Blessed is based on, or perhaps it just started with, a story of hers called "A Dirge for Prester John." That story was in Interfictions, the last story in the volume. Since I had known Cat for years, I was the one who asked her for it.  Delia and I both loved it, and I was thrilled to have it in the anthology.

So there I was, doubly part of that bookstore, as both author and, in an implicit way, as editor. The thought did not banish all of my melancholy, but it did feel as though the sun had suddenly come out from behind some particularly gray clouds.

The Habitation of the Blessed is currently on my bedside table, and I'm very much looking forward to reading it. I can't wait to see what Cat did with the story I read in manuscript, so long ago.

Art on the Border

Some time ago, I read a New York Times article on the artist Patrick Dougherty, who lives in North Carolina and works all over the world. You can read the article here. Dougherty weaves tree saplings into the most amazing structures, like giant jars, or people made out of twigs, or houses that look as though they came out of fairy tales, all looking askew and windblown. There is something magical about them. You can see pictures of his installations on his website.

And then, some time later, I was given a postcard with a painting by Julie Heffernan. I've loved her paintings since I saw the cover of the Fantastic Women issue of Tin House. You can find a number of her paintings here and here and here. They will, at least, give you a sense of how she combines traditional techniques with a contemporary but fantastical sensibility.

Dougherty and Heffernan are such different artists, and yet in them I find a fundamental similarty: they are both there, on the border, in that space I want to inhabit. Their art is both traditional and modern, fantastical and realistic. And that's where I want to be, that's where I think the excitement is. How do I do that? I'm not sure yet. I think some of my stories are there, for example "Singing of Mount Abora." And now I think about it, the stories that are there, on that border, are the stories I later think are the most effective, the ones most representative of who I am and what I do. "The Rose in Twelve Petals," "Pip and the Fairies," "Singing of Mount Abora," those sorts of stories.

Am I writing those sorts of stories? I think I am, more and more, as I discover who I am as a writer. It's taken a long time to discover that, and it's certainly still a process, still something I engage in with every story. I'm still trying to figure out who Theodora Goss is, exactly. The hardest thing, sometimes, is to see yourself. It's like looking into a mirror. What you see in a mirror isn't really your face, but all the ideas you have about your face, how it looks today compared to the other times you've seen it, how you wish it looked. Also all the ideas you have about how your face doesn't look. It's a wonder we can see clearly enough to brush our hair.

With every story now, I try to find that place where it is me writing, where I am doing whatever it is I do with a story. It's so clear that Dougherty and Heffernan have found that place for themselves: they are both so distinctive, they could not be mistaken for anyone else. Some of my favorite writers are like that. I think I could tell a Kelly Link, a Ted Chiang, a Catherynne Valente within a paragraph. (I can tell, too, when someone else is doing Kelly Link. It's that distinctive.) I'm not sure my writing is that distinctive; sometimes, I can't hear my own writing any more clearly than I can see my own face. But I am trying to figure out what it is I do, and do it. As hard as I can.

And it's there, on that border, with saplings twisted into fairy tale houses, or women whose ball gowns are made of flowers and slain waterfowl.

A Witch's Cottage

Years ago, when I was still working as a lawyer, I went to the New England Flower Show. It was not as interesting as I had expected: many of the displays were made with flowers so perfect that they looked plastic. They looked stiff and formal, not at all the way I like my flowers to look, which is wild. I'm with Marianne: I would have preferred Willoughby's flowers to Colonel Brandon's as well.

But there was one display I loved and still remember. It was the front of a cottage surrounded by a garden, and the garden smelled so sweet! It was labeled a Witch's Cottage, and all the plants around it were herbs, or old-fashioned flowers like violets and pinks. I thought, that's where I want to live, in the Witch's Cottage.

Years later, I read what became my favorite decorating book, which is not a decorating book at all: Elephant House, which was written about Edward Gorey's house just after he died. It's filled with photographs, and the one thing you can tell from them is that the house was absolutely distinctive. No one else could have lived in it but Gorey.  (Nowadays, it is a museum.)

I called this post "A Witch's Cottage," but it's really about my desire for a Writer's Cottage. I have a dream that someday I'll be able to have a cottage in which to write, a small cottage with a garden where I'll grow old roses, and violets and pinks. It will have an herb garden. Inside, it will be lovely and eccentric, and filled with light. And it will be distinctive, the sort of place that only I could create.

Tonight I am very tired, and I'm almost homesick for that Writer's Cottage, or Witch's Cottage, because a writer is very like a witch. With her cat, making magic with words. And maybe changing the world, just a little.

Another Museum Visit

Today, we went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It's very different from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, of course. It's not a regional but a national museum. We went specifically to see the new wing, which looks like this:

And like this from the second landing of the stairway you see in the first picture, which takes you up through the different periods of American art:

The first floor is seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American art, the second floor is nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art, and the third floor is modern art to the 1970s. I explored all of the floors, but of course the second was my favorite. It began with an entire room devoted to John Singer Sargent, about whom more later:

And then if you turned right, there was a collection of Aesthetic art that took my breath away, with items like the following:

I'm sorry about the blurriness. Of course I could not use a flash, so the photographs are not of the quality I would have liked. Photographs taken inside museums never are. But aren't these exactly the sorts of things you would expect to see in Mother Night's house?

While I was exploring the second floor, Kendrick and Ophelia, who are less enamored of nineteenth- and late twentieth-century art than I am, decided to do some of the children's activities in a room filled with model ships. And then they went up to the third floor, because they are confirmed modernists. (Ophelia says her favorite artist is Mark Rothko, because he only uses a few colors, and then Jackson Pollock, because he drips. She loves that he's nicknamed Jack the Dripper.)

By that point, I had gone down to the café in the courtyard, to order a cheese plate and a cappuccino. Kendrick and Ophelia arrived in time to share the cheese plate, and to order fancy cookies and the most elegant banana split I have ever had, a sort of gourmet version, which we shared as well. It reminded me so much of when I was a teenager and I would go spend the day at the National Galleries of Art. I would always eat at the café, ordering a cheese plate and a Perrier. It made me feel so adult!

Then we all went up to the third floor again so they could show me what they had found, and Ophelia could take me to her favorite paintings.

I'm going to write more about the things I saw at the museum, but I wanted to write down this description of the museum itself, so that what I write later will make sense. I did make a resolution, sitting there in the café, realizing that there were things I wanted to jot down and that I did not have paper or a pen. From now on, I'm never going to be without those items. I will always carry a pen and paper with me. Because typing ideas into my Blackberry is profoundly unsatisfying.

So you see, this post is about being a writer after all. Always carry a pen and paper!

Thank You

I just realized something.

It's been exactly two weeks since I created this website and started posting on my blog. In those two weeks, it's gotten well over 2,000 hits. That's amazing. (I know there are blogs that get thousands of hits a day. But for a brand new website? About writing and art, by a writer who hasn't written a bestselling novel? I mean, that's a lot, you know?)

So I wanted to say thank you. Thanks to everyone who followed me here from my old blog, and to everyone who is visiting for the first time, from all over the world. (Some of the places you come from, I can't even pronounce. Although I'd like to visit . . .)

Please feel free to share with your friends, subscribe if you'd like, add me to your RSS feed, or friend me on facebook. And of course, please feel free to comment! I'll keep posting, once or twice a day. I'll also keep telling you about my writing – where it's coming out, what I'm struggling with, how my writing life is going in general. And I'll keep telling stories.

I still remember creating this website, on a Friday night after a particularly difficult week when I needed something to do, something that had to do with writing. I was feeling as though I had somehow been unfaithful to myself, let all my ambitions lapse. After all, I've wanted to be writer since I was at least twelve years old. I spent time and money to go to the most wonderful writing workshops (Odyssey, where I will be teaching this summer, and Clarion). And I started to write and publish, to the point that I published In the Forest of Forgetting, and was nominated for and won some prestigious awards. And then life became overwhelming, with a child and a teaching position and a husband who was finishing his doctorate. And I just couldn't keep up. Something had to fall to the wayside, and it was writing.

That's not going to happen again. Creating this website, updating all of my information, posting to the blog, were all ways of saying to myself, and to the world in general, that having a writing career (in whatever form that was going to take) was now my primary focus. And that I wasn't going to allow myself to be distracted from it. Oh, there are plenty of things I still need to do in the world. But my writing is important, at least to me, and it's what I want to spend the rest of my life doing. As I wrote in a comment to a blog post, I think, it saves me every day. And in some small way, I hope it helps others as well.

The Border at Night

What I think about, mostly, is the cold.  It is incredibly cold here, colder than I have ever felt.  A stinging cold, until your face goes numb.  And then you start to worry, wondering whether you still have a nose or cheeks or chin. Perhaps they have turned to ice.

I don't usually approve of wearing fur, but today I am grateful for it.

I look back at the sled, where Tilda, Emma, and Mouse are waiting. They are muffled as well, like small sasquatches in their furs. The driver looks even more like a sasquatch. He is a tall man, at least seven feet, and we have not seen his face. We have not asked to. It is not our job to ask questions, at least not this time.

The dogs are silent, lying on the snow. At least until the truck drives up, across the border. When the men get out of the truck, in their black uniforms, the dogs begin to bark furiously.

The border is only a red post, sticking out of the snow. I will not walk past it to them, they will not walk past it to me. But I am waiting on my side of the red post. Because our furs are white, the dogs are white, it is the only colored thing in this landscape.

Four men in uniforms, two to hold the prisoner, two to point the guns.

"Did you bring it?" one of them, their leader, calls to me.

I hold up the bag I am carrying, which says Duty Free Vladivostok.

"Show it to me."

I take out a metal device. Its lethality is, to those who understand such things, immediately obvious. I do not understand such things, they do not belong to my world, but I handle it gingerly.

"All right!" he says. "Put it back in the bag, put the bag by the marker, and then stand back."

"No," I say. I'm almost surprised that my mouth can still move, it's so numb. "Bring him to the marker, and as soon as he crosses, I will hand you the bag myself."

Silence, for a moment. Then, "All right."

He brings the prisoner. There are now three guns pointed at us. I see him, bland face, black uniform. And the prisoner: with his hood up and a scarf over his mouth, all I can see is a pair of green eyes. He steps over the border, I hand over the bag, and that's it. It's happened quickly, silently, with only a suspicious glance from the man in black, the barking of the dogs in the background.

And then we are walking with our backs to the guns.

"They won't shoot," he says, the man who is no longer a prisoner. "They won't shoot across the border."

"I know that," I say, as crossly as I can with a frozen mouth.

"Well, you looked worried, Thea." I glace at him. He has pulled down his scarf and is, improbably, smiling.

"Why did you put me to all this trouble? You could just have dissolved into air, or walked through the walls, or something. I mean, do you know how many days it's taken us to get here?" And how we were almost killed, twice. And how sick Mouse was, at one point. And what a complete idiot he was, to have been captured in the first place.

"But then he wouldn't have taken what was in the bag, believing it's what he wants, would he?"

I stop walking. "You mean it's not?"

"Of course not." Still smiling. I want, very badly, to hit him.

Only now do I look back. The men in black uniforms have gotten back into their truck. I can hear the engine. Our journey will be much longer, but we accomplished – something, evidently, although not what I thought. I hate not being told what I'm doing, being left out of plans. Even when they're Mother Night's plans.

"Next time, I'm not saving you," I say.  I start walking again, and he follows.

"But you haven't saved me. You've saved the world."

"What, again?" I sound bitter. But we have arrived back at the sled, and Emma is handing me a thermos, and as I drink the coffee, warm and sweet, I start to feel my face thawing. I say, "Girls, guess what we did."

Tilda says, "Again? That's got to be the third time. We should get a medal or something."

Van Gogh Drawings

I wish I could have taken better pictures of these drawings, but of course I could not use a flash, and my digital camera is quite old. This was the best I could do.

I took them in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which I've already described (look back to my post on the museum trip). And I've been thinking about them ever since. The drawings were part of an exhibit of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings, all of which were magnificent, some of which were truly unexpected. It was fascinating to see drawings by Edgar Degas and Berthe Morisot. But Vincent Van Gogh? Artists draw, of course. But somehow I never expected to see a Van Gogh drawing. Here they are:

What's so magnificent about them is that they're not like drawings by anyone else.  Look at them closely to see the details.  I don't even know how he drew that tree.  It's as though it was drawn by someone who made up a new way of drawing, using those thick hatch marks.  Who draws a tree like that?  And the waterscape.  Look closely and you'll see how delicate it is, what a fine eye he had.

I feel as though these drawings should lead me to some sort of philosophical statement about art and the artist.  But the only thing they make me think of is that Van Gogh truly was unique.  Picasso made himself unique: he imitated everyone else until he figured out who he was as an artist, how to paint like no one else.  But Van Gogh simply seems to have seen the world differently.  (It reminds me of the scene in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse where Mr. Ramsey thinks about two different ways to get to R.  Some people have to go through the entire alphabet to get to R logically, while others seems to get there directly, by skipping most of the letters and simply intuiting R.)

I suppose the only philosophical statement this leads me to is that all great artists become great in different ways.  And I will admit, although it's difficult to admit, that a place like the VMFA leads me just a little to despair.  Because there is such an obvious difference between a great work and a not-so-great work, when it's hanging on the wall in front of you.  And I wonder if I will ever write something not just good, but truly great, something that people will still want to read a hundred years from now, as they want to look at Van Gogh's paintings.  (Although I also like looking at the drawings.  It is in the minor works, often, that you can learn the most about an artist.  But we look at the drawings because of the paintings, at the minor works because of the major ones.)  That way lies discontent, and so I just write.  But as I do, I think about things like Van Gogh's drawings, about how he stamps his personality so completely on even these small works.

Even in them, he can't not be Van Gogh.

My Writing Life

Aspiring writers are often told something like the following: you need to write a story, submit it, and start working on the next story. As soon as the first story comes back, submit it somewhere else. And don't stop writing. They are essentially told that the writing cycle is "write and submit." And they are told the same sort of thing about novels as well: write one, submit it to an agent, start writing the next one. But still the cycle is "write and submit."

My writing life is nothing like that. And honesty, I'm not sure how far you can get following that advice, because the writers I know, the ones who are doing well – their writing lives are nothing like that either.

I was thinking about that today, and thought I would describe what my writing life is actually like in case it helps any of you think about what you want to do with your own writing lives. So, my writing life. Here is what I've been doing this week.

At the moment, I have three projects I'm working on. The first (by deadline) is my Folkroots column, which will be on vampires. I think it will start with the line "I don't like sparkly vampires." That's due in early January. I haven't started on it yet, but I already know which sources I'm going to use. After all, I'm teaching "Carmilla" and Dracula next semester. I really should rename my Spring course Vampires 101. The second is a story I've been asked to write for an anthology. I was having difficulty coming up with an idea for the story, but today it came to me – a completely different way of looking at the project that should be fun and interesting to write. That's due in mid-January. I have a month for both, which means I'd better get on them. Like, yesterday. And finally, I have a story I want to write – the first in a while that I haven't been asked to write. I've already mentioned it, "Elena's Egg," and even though right now it's just a mass of notes, I'm already thinking about where I might place it, because it fits on the boundary between mainstream and fantasy fiction. So while there are a number of magazines where I might send it, places I've published stories that are interested in this sort of thing, I might actually start with a mainstream literary magazine, who knows. I'll have to see how the story turns out.

Earlier this week, I proofed two interviews that I had done for Clarkesworld and Booklife. I talked to an editor about a project I had worked on some time ago, an introduction to an anthology, and made sure all the stories were lined up so the anthology could be published. I promised to write a blurb, which I will do this weekend. (Fair warning: I've been terrible about blurbs this year, because my schedule does not allow me to read books. I could only write this one because I was already familiar with the manuscript.) Also this weekend, I need to register and reserve a hotel room for ICFA. And, I almost forgot, I just received my invitation to Boskone.

Every day, I checked facebook, wrote blog posts, and posted links to my blog posts on facebook.

So, what is involved in my writing life? Writing stories, essays, introductions, and blurbs. Doing interviews. Contacting editors and other authors. Updating my website. Keeping in touch with the writing community on facebook. Preparing for conventions.

That's a lot more than "write and submit."

But the writers I know who are doing well, the ones whose names you will recognize, are all doing the same sorts of things. Some of them found magazines. Some edit anthologies. Some go on tours with singers. All of them are actively involved in the writing community, and actively forming their writing lives. All of them have multiple projects going on at one time, because they know that any one project can fail.

So when you think about your own writing life, imagine it not as a repeating cycle, but as a sort of vine that grows and branches. What sorts of things can you do? What can you reach out for, what can you propose or create that others will find interesting? Be imaginative. After all, being imaginative is (hopefully) why you became a writer in the first place.

Writing Darkness

I woke this morning from a night filled with nightmares – for the second time in two weeks.

It comes, I think, from the stresses of the past few months, which have been some of the most difficult I remember. And it's made me think about my life, about how I respond to certain situations.

The thing is, I've lived a fascinating life. I know it's fascinating, and that parts of it sound like a story. But those of us who have had lives in which things like the secret police and imprisonment for political crimes were real threats – you can't mess with us. We are extraordinarily sensitive to certain things – certain kinds of darkness. Certain things triggers a sort of post-traumatic stress response. We can't, for example, stand cruelty or coercion or silencing. Even minor examples trigger a strong reaction.

I think I have a fundamental need to believe that the world is rational, and that people are at least capable of behaving in civilized ways. Because I've seen and heard too much of the other stuff. And I have a fundamental need, myself, to feel free – to know that all the world is mine, that all possible thoughts are mine, that I can go anywhere and do anything I set my mind to.

It's a legacy, I think, of having been born behind closed borders.

The stresses of the past few months have brought some of those issues back – I think that's the reason for the nightmares. But there's a useful lesson in this for writing as well.

I think the darkest story I have ever written is "The Belt." It's a story about mental and physical imprisonment, and I could barely stand to write it. I could barely stand to read it afterward – and now I never do, although I know it's pretty mild stuff, by some people's standards.

My one serious problem with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that there are dark, violent scenes that are written almost as set pieces, by someone who obviously enjoyed writing them, enjoyed constructing those particular scenes. I can see that, as a writer. And to me as a reader, that is genuinely disturbing. Because darkness is real, it's not a literary device or convention. (The second book in the series starts with one of those set pieces, which is one reason I won't be reading the series.  Although I probably wouldn't anyway.  I learned some interesting things about plotting from the first book, but Stieg Larsson's prose is not the sort I particularly enjoy.)  One thing I admire about the Harry Potter books is that J.K. Rowling is intensely aware of the reality of darkness. Voldemort and his Death Eaters are, strangely enough, more real than Larsson's sadists and serial killers. But then, Rowling worked for Amnesty International. She knows what she's talking about.