Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 55

WW76 Book Talk: To Kill a Mockingbird

I’m looking forward to making this series of summer videos talking about books I’ve loved. This week: To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. Next week: Newfoundland writer Michael Crummey’s epic saga Galore.

Writing Wednesday 75: Summer Series

Just a short Writing Wednesday video today to talk about what’s coming up in the weeks ahead. Over the summer, I’ll be talking about a favourite book of mine each week and discussing why it’s a favourite and what I’ve learned from it as a writer. The series starts next week with To Kill a Mockingbird.

Writing Wednesday 74: Same River Twice

It’s been an interesting experience, revisiting and revising a novel I wrote many years ago for a re-release. I talked about the upcoming new release of The Man from Lancer Avenue under its new title, Kingdom of the Heart, in this week’s video.

Writing Wednesday 73: Stories About Jane

I have them. You have them too, especially if you’re a writer and/or a hoarder (or your parents are a bit hoardy). Your early writings — those first stories, poems, cartoons or whatever you produced in your younger and wildly creative years. What do you think you’d find if you pulled those out?

I decided to explore this when my dad unearthed some of my early works at his place awhile back. But I decided to do it with the camera turned on. Here’s the (condensed) version of what I discovered when I cracked the construction-paper covers of Stories About Jane, volumes 1, 2 and 3.

I also did this awhile back with old poetry, although only in print form here on the blog. It was back in the good old days (pre Facebook, vlogs etc) when my blogs actually used to get comments, so it’s kind of neat to go back and read that now too. I wonder if someday I’ll be as nostalgic about these blogs and vlogs I made in my 40 as I am now about Stories About Jane? Hopefully I won’t be as embarrassed about them — but I might well be!

We Need to Talk About Patrick

Yes, I realize this is my second blog post in just over a week dealing with deep lessons learned from a fictional character in a young-adult novel. Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing, OK?

The movie version of The Fault in Our Stars comes out today, and I sincerely hope it’s as good as people are saying it will be, good enough to do justice to the book that young people like my kids and adults like myself have fallen in love with. There’s so much to be said about this book, about Hazel and Gus and the whole idea of living and falling in love against the backdrop of certain death — which of course we’re all doing, all the time, except that teenagers with terminal cancer are actually forced to recognize that fact. But my need to write a TFiOS-related blog post has come down to one thing: I want to talk about the character of Patrick, who appears in only one scene in the novel.

Patrick, an adult cancer survivor, is the leader of the support group for young cancer patients at which Hazel Grace Lancaster, a reluctant attendee, meets Augustus Waters. Patrick’s ineffectual leadership of the group gives the reader a great glimpse of narrator Hazel’s sarcasm as she describes Patrick in her internal monologue.

“[We] listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story — how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life. AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!”

Patrick’s small role in the book looks like it’s going to be played beautifully by comedian Mike Birbiglia, as you can see in a short segment of the trailer below (the “support group” scene is about 25 seconds into the trailer).

While the support group is a plot device that allows Hazel and Gus to meet, it’s a lot more than that, despite the fact that neither the group nor its leader plays a major role in the book. To understand why I think Patrick is so key to understanding a major theme of this novel, it helps to know a little about the author.

I’m a moderately obsessive John Green fan, which means that I’ve read all his books, watched many of his YouTube videos, read a lot of interviews, and read a couple of unpublished short stories that he released to fans as part of a charity fundraiser last year, stories which were early attempts at what later became The Fault in Our Stars. As many readers know, John Green planned to go to divinity school with the goal of becoming an Episcopalian minister, but changed plans after working for six months as a chaplain in a children’s hospital. Certainly the experience of working with sick and dying children and teenagers had a huge impact on him, as it would on anyone; Green went onto write three successful young-adult novels but continued to tinker on and off with the idea of writing a book about children with cancer. In the early drafts, as in the two unpublished stories I read, the main character is the young chaplain who struggles to make sense of the suffering all around him.

In the wildly successful novel Green finally managed to write, it’s Hazel, the teenager with terminal cancer, who is the main character; the chaplain role has been reduced almost to nonexistence. He has shrunk to Patrick’s cameo walk-on: the caregiver who clearly cares, but is unable to offer any real hope and whose very powerlessness (Patrick lacks balls in more than just the literal sense) makes him an object of mockery.

Patrick is not a chaplain, but the support group meets in a church, where he constantly reminds the young people that because the room where the group meets is at the centre of the cross-shaped building, they are in the Literal Heart of Jesus: Hazel and Gus first bond over Patrick’s misuse of the word “literal.” Patrick also leads them in prayer at the end of the meeting. In the movie trailer below he also gets that great little song clip about how “Christ is our friend” — emphasizing even further that although he doesn’t wear a clerical collar, Patrick stands in for institutional religion and its inability to offer anything meaningful to a group of sick and possibly dying young people.

One review of the movie refers to Patrick and his support group as one of Green’s clunkier jokes, but I think that misses the point. Patrick is a joke to Hazel and Gus, but I think to the reader he’s meant to be a key to one of the novel’s themes, and perhaps (if you don’t mind reading biographically, which I don’t) a key to why John Green is a novelist and not an Episcopalian minister or a hospital chaplain.

The only other representatives of traditional religious thought in the book are Gus’s parents, who seem to be conventional church-going types and who decorate their house with “Encouragements” — helpful little reminders like “Without Pain, We Could Not Know Joy” and the like. There’s some subtle fun being poked here, too, not at Gus’s parents exactly but certainly at the Encouragements, which sound so much like the kind of platitudes we all too often hear in church when people are struggling to cope with life’s messy stuff.

Don’t get me wrong: the book makes it pretty clear that Gus’s parents like the Encouragements because they actually do find them encouraging, and lots of people respond well to that kind of “inspirational” thinking. I’ve watched people I love and respect go through terrible experiences — life-threatening illness, the loss of loved ones — and drawing real strength from what sound to me like the most hackneyed of cliches. (And since the advent of social media, I get to see them post those cliches superimposed on photos of sunrises and waterfalls!). You know, whatever gets you through the night. (Also, of course, there are support groups far more helpful and effective than Patrick’s, and hospital chaplains who are great at their jobs).

But it’s important to remember that there’s a huge segment of the population that’s a lot like Hazel and Gus — people who in the midst of grief and confusion and terminal illness are not going to comforted by a picture of a still mountain lake with the words “God hath not promised skies always blue” on it. And I suspect it was the impossibility of trying to balance that kind of “comfort” with the harsh realities of dying kids and their families that drove John Green away from chaplaincy and into writing novels.

In fact, John Green’s career (so far … who knows what he might do next) reminds me of another pastoral dropout, a man I get the impression Green admires. This man studied to be a Presbyterian minister but, intrigued by the possibilities offered by the cutting-edge mass media of his day, bypassed the pulpit for a platform that would bring him directly into the homes of innumerable young people with a message of hope, acceptance and positivity that wasn’t tied to any particular religious dogma. Yeah, I mean this guy:

The challenge for Christian parents and educators whose teens are reading The Fault in our Stars should not be the fact that at one point in the book a sixteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old have sex (I mean, for crying out loud, these kids are dying – should they have saved it for marriage?). The challenge is that the book gently, wisely, kindly exposes how impotent (like Patrick) our answers to the problems of suffering often are. And these include our best-intentioned Christian answers.

I don’t think the solution is to come up with better answers, more effective support groups, prettier Encouragements (though again, these have their place). You could put a team of the world’s best theological minds onto the question of theodicy for ten years. You can spout platitudes like “Everything happens for a reason” or “God needed another angel in heaven,” or you can expound complex theological answers like “We are players in a great controversy between good and evil,” or “Christ rose from the grave to proclaim victory over death.” I’m going to bet all those responses sound equally hollow to the parent standing by the bedside of their dying child.

Maybe the only response that helps when someone is in the midst of pain is sitting down next to people and confessing, “This is really hard, and I don’t know what to say.” 

Not everyone will agree with me on this. Some Christians might look at both John Green and Mr. Rogers and think that by changing direction from the pulpit to the page and screen, they abandoned the message of the gospel for a watered-down humanistic spirituality that offers kindness and love without also issuing a call to repentance and a promise of salvation. And you know what? I think that’s OK. Sure, some people are called to preach the gospel from the pulpit. And those people might argue that the gospel is more than just being kind to people, listening to what they have to say, and accepting them no matter what.

They’re right of course. The gospel is  more than that. But here’s the key point … it’s never, never going to be less than that.

Any religion that can’t lay down its doctrines and theories and platitudes long enough to simply walk beside people when they’re suffering, to share the messiness of life with teenagers and play on the floor with children, is never going to get any further with most of them. Because people don’t want our neutered, ball-less, smiley response to their pain. They want our honest presence, and that includes having the honesty to admit that sometimes life is hard and painful, and we have to face it without a single Encouragement or cheery song to get us through.

 

Writing Wednesday 72: Talk Newfie to Me

Some thoughts on how to be a regional writer without slipping into regional stereotypes — but as I point out at the end, the idea of avoiding stereotypes goes far beyond just regional writing. It’s a pitfall that can open up beneath the feet of writers in any genre, and it’s worth thinking about how to make your characters more like real people and less like caricatures.

The Problem of Susan, and of Everyone

First off, I’m going to say that if you don’t know what I mean by “the problem of Susan,” this blog post probably is going to bore you to tears, as it’s a lengthy discourse on the fate of a fictional character. For the rest of you, go read the piece I read earlier this week that moved me almost to tears and inspired this blog post. That’s right, read it now. I’ll wait till you get back.

There can’t be many readers of the Chronicles of Narnia who haven’t been troubled by the fate of Susan Pevensie in The Last Battle. I know it bothered me, and I think Lewis meant for it to bother me. I’m not sure he meant for it to bother people (especially women) in quite the way it has been bothering them in the last couple of decades. The response a lot of readers have is very well explored in Neil Gaiman’s beautiful and disturbing short story “The Problem of Susan” (it’s OK, go read that too — I’ve got time – but remember I did say “disturbing”).

Contemporary YA fantasy author Philip Pullman, who notoriously hates the Narnia books, said of Susan: “Susan, like Cinderella, is undergoing a transition from one phase of her life to another. Lewis didn’t approve of that. He didn’t like women in general, or sexuality at all, at least at the stage in his life when he wrote the Narnia books. He was frightened and appalled at the notion of wanting to grow up.”

And J.K. Rowling, who you’d think might understand a bit better, said, “There comes a point where Susan, who was the older girl, is lost to Narnia because she becomes interested in lipstick. She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex. I have a big problem with that.” 

Just so we’re all clear, here’s the actual passage in The Last Battle in which Susan’s fate is brought up and dismissed in a little under 200 words:

“Sire,” said Tirian … “if I have read the chronicles aright, there should be another. Has not your Majesty two sister? Where is Queen Susan?”

“My sister Susan,” answered Peter shortly and gravely, “is no longer a friend of Narnia.”

“Yes,” said Eustace, “and whenever you’ve tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says ‘What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.’”

“Oh, Susan!” said Jill. “She’s interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations. She always was a jolly sight too keen on being grown-up.”

“Grown-up, indeed,” said the Lady Polly. “I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she’ll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. Her whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one’s life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can.”

I feel strongly that many readers, including Pullman and Gaiman and Rowling, miss the point Lewis is making here, for reasons that are partly Lewis’s own fault and partly not. People interpret Susan’s fate as misogynistic and anti-sex because the things the other characters report as Susan’s new interests — nylons and lipstick — are traditional markers of adult female sexuality in that time period. And let’s not kid ourselves — Lewis was a misogynist, in exactly that casual, unexamined early twentieth-century white-middle-class-male way that Tolkein and loads of other writers were. But he had, I believe, a very specific point he wanted to make about childhood, adulthood, magic and faith, and he used Susan to make it, and it wasn’t a point about women or about sexuality. He certainly had his issues with women and sex, but I’d argue very strongly that they’re not on display in the Susan problem.

The point Lewis wanted to make about Susan could have been made just as easily by having Peter, the High King (who is after all only a year older than Susan so at the same point in young-adulthood) become obsessed with playing football, or starting a financial career in the City. It’s about the transition from the magical world of childhood faith and fantasy (as represented by Narnia) to the world of adult concerns, which in your late teens and early twenties often seem so much more alluring and exciting, but frequently end up being far less magical than we think they’re going to be.

The key to this is found in Lewis’s own spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy, where he makes it very clear that he sees a direct link between childhood imagination and love of fantasy, and adult religious faith. Indeed, in Lewis’s worldview, one leads very directly to the other, but many of us get sidetracked by “growing up.”

“Boyhood is very like the ‘dark ages’ not as they were but as they are represented in bad, short histories. The dreams of childhood and those of adolescence may have much in common; between them often, boyhood stretches like an alien territory in which everything (ourselves included) has been greedy, cruel, noisy and prosaic, in which the imagination has slept and the most unideal sense and ambitions have been restlessly, even maniacally, awake. In my own life it was certainly so.”  (Surprised by Joy).

The fact that J.K. Rowling is troubled by Susan’s fate interests me, because in my mind, the exact parallel would be if, immediately after the events of Deathly Hallows, Hermoine Granger had looked around at the wreckage of the Battle of Hogwarts and said, “You know what? I’m eighteen years old, I’m brilliant, and back in the real world, both my parents are successful dentists. I could probably take a year of home study to fill in the horrific gaps in my high school education, get into a good university, and go to med school. I’d be able to live out my life enjoying modern technology, having lots of money, and never getting murdered by evil sorcerers. Win/win! ‘Bye Harry! ‘Bye Ron!”

It’s not about adulthood equalling sexuality and dangerous femaleness, for Lewis — it’s about children rejecting fantasy and magic for what they see as a more serious adult world that promises success. This is exactly the vision of “the world” that Jesus warns His disciples they should be “in but not of” — the world of accumulating stuff, impressing others, being a success. And Lewis believed it was far less “real” than the fantasy worlds of childhood.

That, at least, is what I’m pretty sure Lewis had in mind when he allowed Susan to grow up to forget and even make fun of Narnia, when he kept her off that train and thus left her to experience the death of her entire family (and several close family friends).

Of course that narrative decision would have left a real-life Susan with horrific trauma and probably PTSD, but authors, especially fantasy authors, are notorious for leaving characters hanging without worrying too much about the real-world consequences of what happens in a fantasy world. I still remember with horror wondering what happened to the two characters from Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry when they got back to real-life Toronto — how they would explain the absence of their three friends who’d either died or chosen to remain in Fionavar. A friend of mine attended a talk at which someone asked Kay that question and he said he had no idea — he hadn’t really thought about it. (In fact, he may have been disingenuous with that, because he did answer that question in a much later book, Ysabel — but it took many years and at the time what lingered with me was a writer’s willingness to leave characters up a creek without a paddle).

My point is, Lewis is not the first or last writer to work things out within his fantasy world in ways that make sense within that world, without thinking too much about how that would work out in real life. By the time he wrote the end of The Last Battle I don’t think he was thinking much about Susan Pevensie as a real human being. I think he was thinking of her as a type of all the short-sighted young people, male and female — young people like he felt he had been himself — who are in a hurry to abandon what they consider “childish things” and may in fact be closing their eyes to deeper spiritual realities in the process.

There are some of us — the saints and mystics, the artists and writers, the geeks and nerds — who don’t successfully make that transition to adulthood, who keep reaching back into the fantasy worlds of childhood to fuel the rest of our lives, and these people, I think Lewis was arguing, are more easily and directly connected to the worlds of faith and spirituality. Because they have never given up believing in Aslan, they find it easier to believe in Jesus than do the girls who got obsessed with nylons and lipstick (or for that matter with stock portfolios and fast cars), and the boys who excelled in sports and had good careers. People who hold onto childhood’s magic, he would have argued, are more spiritually attuned than those who have lived only in and for the dull material world.

Except — it’s a lovely idea, and as a lifelong denizen of fantasy worlds I want to believe it’s true, but — it’s not, is it? Lewis wasn’t wholly wrong, of course — but he wasn’t wholly right either. I know deeply spiritual stockbrokers and ruthlessly materialistic poets. People don’t divide so simply into two different types. We are so much more complex.

The ideal path, Lewis suggests in the Narnia books, is to believe in Narnia as a child and transfer that to an adult belief in heaven that will eventually see you “farther up and farther in.” If you abandon that childhood faith, you are not eternally lost (as many people seem to think Lewis meant for Susan to be, based on absolutely no internal evidence in the book) — you just have a difficult process of unlearning to get back to simple childlike faith.

The thing is — I don’t think anymore that there is only one path. What I love about the blog piece I linked to originally, about Susan Pevensie, is that it imagines her life going down a different path. Not the path that took her siblings back to Narnia, but also not the path of frivolous self-absorption in the material world and its empty promises, either. Susan, in this telling, can remain both a fairy-tale queen and a denizen of the “real world.” She can mature in her own way, find richness and depth and compassion through experiences that Lewis could probably never have imagined her having.

I blogged a couple of months ago about standing at this crossroads in life where my kids are teenagers, moving into their own lives, making their own choices. About how important it is for me to realize that their paths through life are not going to look exactly like I would plan or imagine them. That some of the magical worlds I tried to introduce them to in their childhood might be left behind.

It’s important to me to remember, to believe, that there is more than one way to get through life with beauty and grace and love. That when I think a child is turning her back on a magical world, she may be moving towards something she needs to find, even if it involves nylons and lipstick.

For the record, I have always, always believed that Susan Pevensie got back to Narnia. Much later, after a long, sad, happy, full life. And that when she got there, her brothers and sisters forgave her, and she forgave them. And they lived ever after.

Writing Wednesday 71: Teacher Talk

This week’s installment is listed straight from my life as an English teacher.

Cover Story

For anyone who didn’t have the time or bandwidth to watch yesterday’s video, here’s the big reveal — a mock-up of the cover of A Sudden Sun. It’s another beautiful design by Rhonda Molloy of Breakwater Books, who designed the covers of By the Rivers of Brooklyn and That Forgetful Shore. I really love her designs and I think this cover looks classy and elegant … and hopefully it’ll make people eager to read the book. The blurb in the centre will change (it’s from an earlier book) once we have endorsements in from people who’ve read this book — and I am also very excited about the talented writers who’ve agreed to read this book for me with a view to providing a blurb if they like it. 

It’s an exciting time, a few months out from the book’s release, and seeing the cover is one of the best parts. I can’t wait to share the whole book with readers!

Writing Wednesday 70: Judge a Book by its Cover (Please!)

An exciting reveal on the vlog today! I’ll have more to say about this in written form tomorrow, but for now … watch and enjoy the just-revealed cover for A Sudden Sun. I’m very happy with it!!