Helen Lowe's Blog, page 298

Just Arrived: NK Jemisin's "The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms" & Mira Grant's "Feed"

A while back I posted that it's currently "reading for the  Hugo Awards" time again—and today the first of my two books 'to be read' arrived at more door (literally: because they wouldn't fit in the letterbox the postman hand delivered them to the door.:) )

As you can tell from the title, they're NK Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (which is up for just about everything this year: a Hugo Award, a Gemmell Award, a Locus Award–and there's probably more!) and Mira Grant's Feed.  Mira Grant is a nom de plume for Seanan Maguire, who won the John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer last year.

I am very much looking forward to reading both these books, as well as the other Hugo Award nominees—although I am not quite sure when I am going to get to them while the Great Revision is ongoing. But they're here and on the TBR table: that's got to be a great start.

I'm Going To A Writers' Tea Party: Woot!

Yes, gentle readers, I have been invited—and accepted the invitation—to a Writers' Tea Party on Sunday September 11th.

I don't know, there's just something about being invited to a tea party. It makes me think of Mad Hatters and March Hares—and tea dresses and lace gloves.:)

This particular tea party is held at the Hurunui Memorial Library in Amberley, just north of Christchurch and is hosted by the Friends of the Library (in this case, Hurunui District Libraries, plural.)  The other writers that I will be reading and tea partying  with are James Norcliffe and Joanna Orwin, both of whom I know, so I think it's going to be a lot of fun. My special thanks to Bernadette Hall for the original invitation (and thinking of me as a potential "mad, March gal.":) )

And I'm already eyeing up lace gloves!

What I've Been Doing …

Well, the "Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist?" 3-parter took a bit of effort, but in fact I only put that together in the late evenings after my working day on the Great Revision (aka the GR) was done. I had a bit of a slow start on the GR this week because of a special visitor who had come a 'fur piece' (to quote Faulkner) and therefore merited a modicum of hostly courtesy. (Possibly a misguided ethic on my part but one I don't plan to abandon anytime soon, the laws of hospitality having contributed—in my view—to holding humanity to the 'humane' part of that word for several odd millenia now.)

But once I waved my visitor good-bye early in the week it was all on for the GR. The beginning was slow because I was getting into a new section and had to kind of 'feel' my way forward waiting for the lights to come on, but they have now come on with a vengeance and things are rocking along. I do so love it when that happens.

And that's pretty much me for the week: the GR; the epic fantasy posts; a Tuesday Poem: Yeats' The Lake Isle at Innisfree, being my Mum's favourite—because it was Mother's day last Sunday, of course.

I did reprise the post about Morning Pages—as part of my revision (and general writing) process—on Monday as well. And I have to say, the pages have really helped me stay on the straight and narrow this week: waking up every morning and having the pages to work out/reveal to me: "yup, this is how the revising needs to go today."  And then I go to the computer and 'make it so.'  D'you know what else—da pages are never wrong.

So—Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist? Part 3: "The Wheel of Time" & "A Song of Ice and Fire" Series, and Conclusion

Just to reprise the premise of this post series, on Wednesday I began to explore the question of whether I believe it really is true that epic fantasy, as a subgenre, is misogynist and determined that, in order for the answer to be  positive, I would have to conclude that epic fantasy "consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women."

Yesterday, I commenced the process of looking at a couple of well known series in more detail, beginning with  JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. (Where else could you begin?) And concluded that, like Galadriel at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, JRR's seminal work in the epic fantasy subgenre "passed the test."

Today I am looking at Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (WoT) and George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF—the first book of which is the recently televised A Game of Thrones) which have been dominant forces in epic fantasy for much of the past two decades. (The Eye of the World was first published in 1990; A Game of Thrones in 1996.)

So let's take a look.

The Wheel of Time Series

By contrast with The Lord of the Rings, discussed yesterday, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (WoT) has a great many female characters, many of them ostensibly powerful and influential. There are the Aes Sedai, the all-female magical power users, who are also political power brokers within the world (a little like Frank Herbert's Bene Gesserit); the Wise Ones of the Aiel society; and also numerous queens and political leaders—as well as the central female protagonists of Nynaeve, Egwene, Elayne and Moiraine, plus several prominent secondary and tertiary characters. These include the female Forsaken, such as Lanfear, Moghedien and Graendal.

So, lots of strong female characters doing important stuff: there should be no problem, right? Except that, as the series went on, I couldn't help noticing that all these supposedly strong women  never seem to end up doing anything really important (the exception is Moiraine, but she drops out at the end of the fourth book.)  Rather, they seem to concentrate their energies being catty, bitchy, and petty. In addition, the three central protagonists, Nynaeve, Egwene, and Elayne (and others, but most noticeably and consistently these three) are always more concerned about their clothes and in particular the hem- and necklines that always seem to plunge mysteriously up and down whenever they think about their male love interests/objects of desire (which they do pretty much constantly) than they are with the task at hand, no matter how serious this may be.

The women in the Wheel of Time series are all also—almost without exception, whether on the side of "light" or "dark"—exclusively devious and manipulative, as well as strongly hierarchical (i.e. to the point of being fascist) and into corporal punishment and mortification of the flesh for almost any infraction of "the rules" (read hierarchical-fascist), however minor. They also seem to spend a lot of time either imagining themselves being stripped naked, or being actually stripped naked, or subjugated physically in some other way, when they are taken prisoner. The only place where the hierarchical-subjugative pattern is examined/questioned, rather than accepted (e.g. as with the Aes Sedai and the the Wise Ones) is in the case of the Seanchan and the treatment of damane in Book 2, The Great Hunt.

And somehow, the kick-butt female warriors of the Aiel, the Maidens of the Spear, never get to really fight or do anything useful in a practical sense … Oh yes, that's right, it's because the central male protagonist, Rand Al Thor, doesn't like women fighting and dying for him. So, chivalrous or chauvinist? Given that these women are dedicated warriors and part of a warrior society that has existed for thousands of years, footing it with their male counterparts, I'm going for chauvinist, i.e. Rand doesn't respect their freedom to choose for themselves as adult human beings.

To be fair to Jordan, in the 5 or 6 books before I gave up on the series (for a whole host of reasons of which the treatment of the female characters was only one, albeit an important one) he never actually got into full-on graphic description of war violence toward women, in terms of rape and mutilation—and the torture meted out by the Forsaken tended to be fairly evenly allocated between men and women (as I recall.) Also, the physical subjugation following capture is not unrealistic in a war situation, especially where the Geneva Convention does not apply.

Overall, however, I consider that the way in which all Jordan's female characters conform to a very narrow and negative  stereotype in terms of behaviour, character and views, as well as the consistent focus on physical subjugation of the female, whether by other women or by men, makes it difficult not to see Jordan's treatment of women as inherently sexist at best. But does the sexism and the narrow and inherently demeaning/unflattering view of women—particularly suppsoedly powerful women—prevalent in WoT cross the boundary into outright misogyny, a hatred of women and the female? I hesitate to state a categoric "yes", but feel that Jordan' skirts the boundary very closely in places.

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire Series (ASOIAF)

According to NY reviewer Ginia Bellafante of the New York Times, the recently released HBO series, " 'Game of Thrones' is boy fiction patronizingly turned out to reach the population's other half." The "true perversion", though, according to Ms Bellafante, "is the sense you get that all of this illicitness has been tossed in as a little something for the ladies, out of a justifiable fear, perhaps, that no woman alive would watch otherwise."

Interesting reading, as I'm sure you can imagine, for one of those benighted female souls who would watch A Game of Thrones—if it ever gets to New Zealand—and has read all four books in the George RR Martin series to date and not because of the sexual perversion to which she refers (a very small part of the overall story and one which pales, in my opinion, in the context of the innumerable political perversions on offer.) But on to the critical point (which I took Ms Bellafante's remarks to perhaps infer): is George RR Martin's epic A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) series misogynist?

Like Jordan, and unlike Tolkien, ASOAIF has a large cast of female characters—too many to really enumerate (it's a huge series in every sense of the word), but they are certainly diverse. From the very different Stark sisters, Sansa and Arya, one gentle and 'girl-y', one fierce and tomboyish; to the child-bride Daenerys who becomes the 'mother of dragons'; from devoted wife and mother Catelynn Stark; to the incestuous-adultress and inept political schemer, Cersei Lannister; to the awkward female knight Brienne, these women only have one thing in common: they are real women who change and evolve in relation to the circumstances, mostly adverse, that they experience. (OK, maybe with the exception of Cersei—no spoilers, I hope, for all you lucky folk who can view the TV series, but really, she isn't very bright. Learning is not her strong suit.)

One of the best examples of Martin's charcter development, in my opinion, is Sansa Stark. When the story begins she is a gentle but also silly teen girl who very much sees the world as she wants it to be—i.e. in terms of her rose-tinted romantic dreams—and not as it is. Needless to say, she lives in an already brutal world that is about to become more so and gets a very rude awakening. (This is not a spoiler—if there is one thing you can be sure of in this series it's that characters will receive rude awakenings.) Through the subsequent three books, the reader sees Sansa, in many ways still the same gentle girl, become a great deal less foolish and considerably stronger in herself. At no point does she pick up a sword or cast a  magic spell, the evolution lies in her character and her relationship to the world around her—an increasingly brutal world, as I said.

But the thing about the brutality of the ASOIAF world is that it is, from an historical point of view, completely realistic—and there's absolutely no question, the brutality falls equally upon male and female alike. Also, I never feel that the violence is gratuitous. It always serves a purpose in the story and I never get the sense that the author is gettting off on it for its own sake.

So is A Game of Thrones/the ASOIAF series misogynist? The answer to that, in my opinion, is a resounding "no."

Conclusion

As I said on Wednesday, I am not in a position to do a comprehensive survey of the entire body of epic fantasy, but I have read a fair bit of it over the years and I believe the discussion of the three major series above represents a fair 'litmus test.'

Most of what I have read, including other authors such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Kate Elliot, Guy Gavriel Kay, Steven Erikson, Patrick Rothfuss, Midori Snyder and Patricia McKillip with her Riddlemaster trilogy, falls into the Tolkien/Martin camp, where my answer to the question: "are these works misogynist?" is no.

A few, like Jordan, definitely skirt the border into "yes" and some, like Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant series, may slip over it at times as with the defining rape scene in Lord Foul's Bane. So the misogynist element is there in some works—but not many, in my experience. And sexual violence toward women is not, in my opinion, anywhere near as prevalent a part of the epic oeuvre as it is in some other forms of Fantasy, such as the dark and paranormal subgenres.  Or in other forms of fiction for that matter, such as crime and thrillers, which I find draw heavily on crimes of violence against women for their raison d'etre.

So in terms of whether epic fantasy as a subgenre consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women, my answer has to be "no." In terms of those books that do skirt or cross the border into misogyny, the question then becomes whether there are enough of them to write off the subgenre itself as misogynist, i.e. to say that the form itself is inherently driving misogynist writing? Once again, I believe that the answer is "no."

So—Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist? Part 2—"The Lord of the Rings"

Yesterday, I began to explore the question of whether I believe it really is true that epic fantasy, as a subgenre, is misogynist and determined that, in order for the answer to be  positive, I would have to conclude that epic fantasy "consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women."

To read the full post and in particular my discussion of how I might evaluate epic fantasy works to assess whether they "convey an inherent hatred of women", click here.

As part of trying to reach either a positive or negative conclusion I indicated that, although not in a position to undertake a comprehensive survey of epic fantasy, I would look at a couple of well known series in more detail. The purpose of today's post is to kick that process off—and the logical and obvious place to start has to be with JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which effectively defined the epic fantasy genre in the middle of last century. So let's shine the spotlight in that direction now.

The Lord of the Rings

In the past, I have heard allegations of sexism leveled against The Lord of the Rings (LoTR) because of the lack of female characters within the story. I have always partially excused JRR on this count on the grounds of his generation (and because I love the tale, of course) but my question now is whether, as a defining example of epic fantasy, LoTR is misogynist?

Lack of female characters is certainly a stroke against it. But going back to my first experience of the story as an early teen reader, I don't recall being consciously concerned about the lack of female characters in the same way that I felt uncomfortable when I realized that all the human races allied with Mordor (the Southrons, Haradrim etc) were clearly African/Eastern in ethnic conception. I felt very uncomfortable indeed about that—and even more so when I saw what was in the book faithfully replicated in the screen version.

So why didn't—and don't—I feel so uncomfortable about the women in the story? Although there are few female characters in the first book, those we do meet—Rosie Cotton, Mrs Maggot, Goldberry and Arwen Evenstar—while not particularly important to the story, are in no way negative characters, ie weak and venal. I regarded—and still regard—them all as relatively positive portrayals; they're just not major characters.

Similarly, Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is difficult and unlikable but then so, too, is her son. I never get the sense that Lobelia is unlikable because she is a female: it's because she is a Sackville-Baggins. (And in fact her ornery character, however disagreeable, nonetheless acquires positive virtue at the end of the story because she has stood up the forces of oppression and been imprisoned for doing so.)

Another female character who appears in the early story in a positve, though nonetheless background —in fact, backstory—way, is Luthien Tinuviel. Luthien was clearly powerful, courageous, and a person of integrity as well as (at least in the story that Strider recounts) saving her lover Beren from Morgoth, the Great Enemy.

Nonetheless, despite such minor positives, I still recall the joy with which I first encountered Galadriel:  a strong, powerful, wise, compassionate but nonetheless dangerous character who appears in real time at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring, but whose influence is felt throughout the continuing story: for example,  when Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas speak with Eomer in Rohan; when Sam and Frodo are questioned by Faramir in Ithilien; and during the passage of Cirith Ungol.

And then there's Eowyn. I remember how very real she always seemed to me as a teenager: the way she felt trapped within her role and aspired for more; her crush on Aragorn; and the sheer wonder and glory of the fact that she took her fate into her own hands—and because of that was the right person in the right place at the right time to do something really important for the course of the story.

Eowyn is the sword-wielding chick par excellence, but she is also a real person, troubled and lost. She also gets some great lines on the subject of the roles men allocate to women:

"All your words are but to say: you are a woman, and your part is in the house. But when the men have died in battle and honour, you have leave to be burned in the house, for the men will need it no more."

But also said about her, in this case when Theoden is trying to decide who can lead the people left behind when the army goes to Helm's Deep (the book is a little different from the film.) He has just said that Eomer is the last of his house and cannot be spared, when Hama replies:

" … he is not the last. There is Eowyn … his sister. She is fearless and high-hearted. All love here. Let her be as lord to the Eorlingas."

I know some readers feel that Eowyn's eventual turning way from the sword to healing lessens her role—but within the context of a story where the values of civilization and peace, learning and healing and gardening, are set above the sword, I find it difficult to agree with this perspective. As well as choosing life over death, a choice that the value set within the book establishes as the path of strength (as opposed to Denethor's self-immolation, which Gandalf describes as both weakness and a fall from wisdom), Eowyn also sets aside her crush on Aragorn for the real love of Faramir.

This may seem like a consolation prize in the film version of the story, but as I have always considered the character of Faramir to be one of the strongest and most real in the book, once again I don't see it that way.

So although there are very few women at all in LoTR and only two that I consider to be major in any way, those two are great characters. In the case of Eowyn, she does question the limited choices on offer to her because she is female and follow her own path. Galadriel is quite simply a powerful and charismatic character—and none of the minor female characters are in any way weak or venal, or portrayed negatively simply because they are women.

The historical  "torment" of Elrond's wife in the dens of the orcs is referenced, but LoTR does not really explore the brutalities of war a real time way for either men or women. We know that civilians have been massacred in Rohan and we hear of how characters die in battle—but usually deaths and casualities are reported after the event. Even Boromir's battle with the orcs at the end of Book One is not described in real time, but recounted to Aragorn when he comes on the scene after the event.

Despite the small number of female characters in LoTR, therefore, I do not believe it is possible to make the case that the story is misogynist: there is no sense for me in which hatred of women or the female is inherent in the book.

—

Next up I will look at Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (WoT) and George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF), the first book of which is the recently televised A Game of Thrones. Both series have towered above the plains of epic fantasy over the past two decades—The Eye of the World was first published in 1990; A Game of Thrones in 1996—and so cannot be ignored.

So—Is Epic Fantasy Misogynist? Part 1

A few weeks ago, on April 16, I posted on "Why Write Epic Fantasy?", and in that post I noted that—in my explorations on the epic fantasy topic over the previous few weeks—I had found a few disheartening trends in what folk were thinking and saying out there about my beloved subgenre. The first of these trends was the assertion that:

"epic fantasy as a genre is misogynist, both in the storytelling and the attention paid to female authors of the genre (i.e. your chances of being a successful epic fantasy author are considerably reduced if you're a gal)"

I have been mulling over the first part of this assertion/observation for the past few weeks, while working on the second instalment of my own epic fantasy series, The Wall of Night. (I mulled briefly over the second part as well, i.e. re the attention paid to female authors in the genre, but quickly decided that even if the observation is 100% true there's absolutely nothing I can do about it anyway, other than write the very best stories that I am capable of, hope that my own love of epic fantasy shines through to others who feel the same way about the subgenre, and generally hope for the best.)

I have invested more energy in reflecting on whether it really is true that epic fantasy is misogynist—by which I mean: does it, as a subgenre of Fantasy-SciFi consistently convey an inherent hatred of women?  I use the phrase "hatred of women" because that is the dictionary meaning of misogyny.  I define my own discussion in terms of whether or not epic fantasy "consistently conveys an inherent hatred of women", because in order to make such an assertion about any class of writing I would argue that one or two examples, however odious, do not make a trend.

So then I had to reflect on what would constitute an inherent hatred of women in epic fantasy.

Firstly, I decided that it can't just be that bad stuff, such as rape, abuse, oppression, happens to women in the story. The reason for my approach is that—as discussed in the earlier posts on epic fantasy, here—these stories are almost always about large scale, world changing events, frequently wars. And if an author is trying to be realistic about war and social conflict, then bad stuff is going to happen to characters, and probably—more often, rather than less—that bad stuff is going to happen to women. The reality is that war is a brutal business and those brutalised in the conflict tend to commit further brutal acts. So the presence of those acts within the book do not, on their own, necessarily constitute misogyny.

The frequency and enthusiasm with which such brutal acts are included in the story, and the degree of detail that the author feels compelled to go into, however, might well cross the line from realism/authenticity into misogyny. The context of the story—i.e. is it about war, or about a society that systematically oppresses women?—is definitely an important consideration, as is whether the story simply accepts the status quo of violence/oppression/exclusion or in some way examines/questions its validity. The range of women characters and their experiences are definitely also an important aspect. For example, are either all, or the majority of, the women in the story present as sex/abuse focii? Or does the story instead contain a range of characters—some of whom happen to be women—with a range of  personalities and approaches to life and resolving the difficulties that arise through the story—which may/may not include difficulties that arise for women in an oppressive society? (Although I'll admit to enjoying books where the female characters get to deal with problems in life/the universe/everything other than an oppressive patriarchy and variants on sexual abuse.)

For me, personally, I think it comes down to: whatever the circumstances of the story, do women figure as unique characters/personalities? And when they figure, do they figure positively or negatively (i.e. are women, sometimes at least, strong, powerful, compassionate, wise—or are they always weak, venal or irrelevant?) Or could there even, just possibly, be 'all sorts and conditions' of female characters, just as there is often a mixed bag of male characters?

I am not in a position to undertake a comprehensive survey of the entire body of epic fantasy against the above considerations. But tomorrow I will begin looking at a couple of well known series in more detail and discuss any conclusions reached against my overall reading in the genre, which has been reasonably extensive over a number of years.

Tuesday Poem: "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" by William Butler Yeats

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

William Butler Yeats, 1865 – 1939

—

Sunday May 8 was Mother's Day and The Lake Isle of Innisfree was one of my mother's favourite poems, that she requested to be read at her funeral. My sister read the poem – beautifully – and as May 8 is also her birthday, I felt that this was clearly the only choice for my Tuesday Poem this week.

In terms of commentary, I believe that the beauty and lyricism of the poem, reflective of Yeats' early style, speaks for itself—as really, all poetry and writing should, without need for interpretation or explanation—and the poet is also sufficiently well known to preclude the need for biography. For those who wish to know more, an online biography is available here.

—

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog—and to link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

Picking Up Post Threads 2: "One Vital Part of My Process'

Continuing on with my process of bouncing a few blog conversations out of "comments" and back into "posts," I thought I'd come back to last Sunday's post, "About Revision: One Vital Part of My Process", in which I discussed "morning pages".

You can read the full post here, but the essence of my post was how useful I found morning pages in order to both 'get writing' and also to resolve issues of plot and character development, continuity and consistency while revising—which I am currently doing with my second-in-series, The Gathering of the Lost.

Catherine responded with an interesting link to the Quiet: Power of Introverts blog and an article on 7 Tips for Busting Through Fear and Being More Creative. The particular tip that Catherine was referencing was number 6—Work at night when your cortisol levels are lower.

The essence of what the author, Susan Cain, is saying is this:

" …  Cortisol is a stress hormone, and it peaks in the morning and steadily dissipates throughout the day.

So while you probably think most clearly first thing in the morning, you may be at your least inhibited at night. I've noticed that interesting turns of phrase and associative leaps come much more easily in the evening hours. And indeed creativity researchers believe that a relaxed brain, a brain that is not in the grip of anxiety or blocked by other psychological barriers, is a more creative brain."

I am not sure of the science behind the cortisol correlation, but will take it on faith for the purposes of this post. I was also interested in the observation that (because of cortisol, by implication) " … while you probably think most clearly first thing in the morning, you may be at your least inhibited at night." [Emphasis mine.]

I still believe that to a certain extent morning vs night, lark or owl, will come down to personal constitution. For example, as I admitted in the comments, I appear incapable of "all-nighters"—I just can't last the distance; no stamina, clearly —but will very happily work through until 11 pm or 12 midnight when on a writing roll.  With regards creativity, therefore, my experience is not out-of-sync with Ms. Cain's observation; with respect to being clearer in the mornings, our views match (the reason for the emphasis added above.)

For me, in terms of "getting clear" about what's going down with my story and where things are heading, the "morning pages"—that fresh-off-the-blocks, stream-of-consciousness start to the day—are undoubtedly an effective tool. For example, yesterday morning I used the three pages to explore directions for four potential plot threads arising out of the revision I'm currently working on—two for later in this current book, but two looking ahead to the books to come. Obviously I'm very careful to write up those notes after I've finished the morning pages as well!

But coming back to night-time creativity, I do always keep a pen and paper handy at my bedside, to make sure I capture any ideas that spark along the boundary between waking and sleeping. Mind you, I always have a pen and paper handy anyway, both in the house and in my bag (and have been known to beg paper napkins and pens in cafes when the paper/pen reserve in the bag has either been left behind or used up, in order to capture new ideas—possibly arising because of Ms Cain's point 3: "Coffee is magic" )

What I'm saying here (with a respectful nod to the coffee) is that the act of writing itself begets further creativity, at whatever time of day one engages in it. And the more we write, the more the ideas spark and the more creative we become … How many of you, I wonder, have also experienced the phenomenon that I call "run-on"—when you have been working hard on the writing (or similarly intense project) for an uninterrupted period but you know it's time for a break—and as soon as you get up and go to get coffee or lunch, or just tidy your workspace a bit as wind-down, the quick rush of the "next" ideas come, not unlike certain kinds of engines that "run on" even when the motor has been switched off?

I suspect this may be why the "morning pages" work so effectively for me: I am naturally a morning person to start with; I am tapping into the clarity of the early morning period—what I described previously as "my subconscious telling me what it's resolved while I've been sleeping"; and I am using the act of writing itself to generate creativity—a process that is enhanced (exponentially) if I am disciplined about doing the pages regularly, i.e with any practive, the more frequently we do it the more quickly and easily we get back to the 'highest point' of where we were before.

—

By the way, Ms Cain's 7 tips (to bust through fear and be more creative) are:

1. Know that you're in good company.

2.  When it comes to social media, think self-expression, not self-promotion.

3.  Coffee is magic.

4. Train yourself, a la Pavlov, to associate creative work with pleasure.

5. Work alone (or "alone together" – for example, sitting by yourself in a coffee shop or library).

6. Work at night when your cortisol levels are lower.

7. Strengthen your backbone, and therefore your confidence, in small steps.

Each tip comes with a paragraph or so of explanation/discussion so it's well worth checking out the full post, here.

Just Arrived: "broadsheet 7: new new zealand poetry"

I always love that moment when I open my post office box and find a new book or journal waiting for me—in this case my contributor's copies of  broadsheet 7: new new zealand poetry, edited by Mark Pirie and published by The Night Press, Wellington.

broadsheet 7 features UK poet, translator, editor and Anthony Rudolf, including poems from his new collection, Zigzag, published by Carcanet/Northern House (UK) in August 2010, as well as an extract from his forthcoming memoir, A Vanished Hand: My Autograph Album.

Other poets featured in broadsheet 7 comprise Emma Barnes, Sarah Jane Barnett, Janet Charman, Basim Furat, Anna Jackson, Jan Kemp, Saradha Koirala, Graham Lindsay, Bill Manhire, Genevieve McClean, Harvey Molloy, Ila Selwyn, Madeleine Marie Slavick, and myself—in my case with the poems Starman and also Penelope Dreaming from the Ithaca Conversations sequence.

broadsheet 7 new new zealand poetry is available from:

The Editor

97/43 Mulgrave Street

Thorndon

Wellington 6011

Aotearoa-New Zealand

or online at:

http://headworx.eyesis.co.nz

Picking Up Post Threads 1: "Baggage"

We have been having a few conversations on the blog recently and so I thought it might be good to bounce a few of the threads out of "comments" and back into "posts."

Last Saturday, I posted on the Australian short story collection Baggage, edited by Gillian Polack and published by Eneit Press. You can read the full post here, but the short version is that I very much enjoyed Baggage. Also, since it is both Australian and short fiction, reading it turned my mind back to another recent post, in which I ruminated on whether there is a form of speculative fiction that is distinctively New Zealand in character. (To 'en-ruminate', click here.) A key observation from last Saturday's post, however, may have been:

" Recently I discussed … how the themes of environmental dystopia and to a lesser, but still noticeable, extent reproductive scifi, occurred within the [New Zealand] anthology A Foreign Country (Eds. K. Buchanan & A. Caro, Random Static.)"

While in terms of the Baggage I wrote:

" … I was intrigued to notice that a strong theme emerged through what were very different stories. Australia as landscape and environment was strongly present in all the stories (except the one about Franz Josef glacier, where environment/landscape was nonetheless a defining factor in the story.) The response of diverse cultures, whether positive or hostile, to that landscape, defined the anthology for me."

Gillian's initial reply—and I am delighted that she did reply—was (abridged—to read the full comments, click here):

" … Landscape and environment discussions didn't actually come up that often … [in specific discussions with the authors] …  but it was there from the very first drafts with all stories. Even Monica …[Carroll] … had landscape, albeit her landscape was paper.

I was thinking how dark the speculative visions of our two countries are. Not unredeemedly bleak, but not the lucky country/mateship/positive image that other media have given us. Baggage isn't a horror anthology, but three of its stories are in Australia's year's best horror, for instance …"

My initial reply was, I confess, a little tongue-in-cheek although also a case of true words being spoken in jest (i.e. I do think we "don't know how lucky we are" in this corner of the world):

"In terms of the darkness/bleakness of ANZAC speculative vision, I can't help wondering if it isn't because we have it so good—compared to the greater part of the world—that we have to get our suffering through fiction?"

But more seriously:

" … Another rationale may be dislocation: we are still only very recent arrivals in both a cultural and geographic sense and are still struggling with that transition, even intergenerationally: ie something of Frost's "the land was ours before we were the lands"?"

Yesterday Gillian picked up on the dislocation observation (while—probably wisely—overlooking the one that preceded it ):

I always thought that the Australian vision had the potential for bleakness because we perceive our environment as tough and that means we get to create ourselves as tough even when we grow up in suburbia. Now I'm realising that this is only one component. The dislocation you talk about – that's much bigger. We brought our baggage with us and don't often address it, as well (which is why I wanted to do the anthology). We can't belong until we understand who we are and have been, in essence.

Responding in this post, I find it difficult to conceive how the sheer harshness and difference, beauty and terror, of the Australian environment could not have overawed the early immigrants: it would simply have been so different to everything they had known before. And both the power of landscape and human awareness of it certainly came through very strongly for me in the Baggage stories.

New Zealand does not seem so harsh an environment by comparison, i.e. it's temperate and without the extremes of vast deserts stretching to the tropics, but for both 19th and early 20th century immigrants the natural landscape would have been vastly different from those that newcomers from places as diverse as Europe (the majority) and China (a minority, but with a significant place in NZ's settlement history) had been born to. And that their forbears for many generations, in most cases, would also have been born to—and how long does it take for a graft to become truly native stock, part of the terroir that is the interweaving of culture and environment?

Perhaps each new generation of settlers experiences terror instead—the shock of both dislocation from the old and alienation from the new. I often think, when I read both NZ's (mainly environmental) dystopian speculative fiction (mind you— CK Stead's Smith's Dream) and works of contemporary realism that their  "dark … visions", to quote Gillian's first comment, reflect an unease and discomfort with ourselves. But perhaps it is the juxtaposition of ourselves in this "world made strange"—which for NZ's 19th century immigrants would have meant an isolated interior of dense bush country and travel that was almost always via water, whether coastal or inland, with attendant shipwrecks and deaths via drowning. There was also the perception of Maori as a threat—and although an historical perspective suggests that the  perception was always far greater than the actual threat, there were violent incidents between immigrant and tangata whenua, as well as the Land Wars with the kingitangain the 1860s.  And always, that sense of geographic and — again — cultural isolation, of being on the far side of the world …

There may be some readers who wonder what tangata whenua means. Interestingly, translated literally, it means 'people land' and is usually interpreted as 'the people of the land'—and is one of the names that Maori give themselves …

Which brings me to culture—how strongly it figured as a theme in Baggage, both in terms of originating culture and cultural journey to Australia, and what it subsequently means to be Australian. Yet—doing a quick (and no doubt fallible!) mental review of NZ literature, speculative or otherwise, particularly short fiction—culture is very rarely addressed in terms of the juxtaposiiton of origin and what it then means to be a New Zealander: not in the way that it is in Baggage. We sometimes address origin independently, for example in books such as Natasha Templeton's Winter in the Summer Garden or Kapka Kassabova's Love in the Land of Midas, but the works that most strongly address culture within the NZ context are—in my experience—those by Maori or Pacific Island writers such as Witi Ihimaera (e.g. Tangi; Whanau), Patricia Grace (e.g Mutuwhenua; Potiki; Tu) and Albert Wendt (e.g. Sons for the Return Home.) And more recently, Alison Wong's As the Moon Turns Silver addressed the historical Chinese experience of immigration. None of these works are speculative fiction, but I think the  disinterest in culture as a theme applies across all forms of contemporary NZ literature … or perhaps it isn't disinterest, but once again that sense of dis-ease. But then again, if we were interested, wouldn't culture pervade our work anyway, whether consciously or unconsciously?

And now I realise [laughing] that I have gotten carried away and no doubt made large claims that will not stand the too-close scrutiny of my peers … Then again on the other hand, I will admit to enjoying engaging in both speculation—the tossing about of thoughts and ideas—and a certain amount of ramble. And I must admit that for me, it is interesting ramble. So what do you think? Am I 'warm' in my speculation or 'way off beam'? And would anyone like to pick up on Gillian's observation about the: " … baggage … [we brought] … can't belong until we understand who we are and have been, in essence"?