Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 43

A Novelist’s Commitment

I’m making what I hope will be my last proofreading of the manuscript for Curva Peligrosa. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve made this journey through the novel, trying to track down any typos, spelling, or punctuation errors. And each time, I seem to find a few, making me wonder how I miss them to begin with. My publisher’s editor also has read the text closely, plucking out any weeds she found. But it’s almost impossible to find them all.

At times, I wonder why my publisher and I are so intent on releasing a product that is as close to error free as possible. What would it matter if a word here and there was misspelled or a punctuation mark was misplaced?

[image error]When I was teaching undergraduates, and trying to instill in them a reverence for correctness in their essays, I would point out how such mistakes undermined their credibility, especially if they were glaring. A reader would be reluctant to read on if the text was riddled with such oversights. Therefore, the paper’s content has less impact if a reader is struggling to find his/her way through the forest of error-filled text. It’s also one reason why self-published authors have trouble finding readers, especially sophisticated ones that know the difference between a comma splice and a run-on sentence.

What I’ve learned from this experience is how deeply committed a writer must be to his/her text, to seeing it through all of these stages until it’s finally ready to burst forth into the world. It’s not unlike the commitment required for any satisfying relationship that can be threatened by so many factors. Illness, job loss, family problems, and more, can intervene and threaten the integrity of the connection.

That’s why paying close attention to the nuts and bolts, to whatever holds together a text or a bond between people, is necessary in order to preserve it. And that’s why a writer will not succeed as a published novelist if s/he can’t make such a commitment. It’s an essential part of the territory!

Filed under: Links Tagged: editing, proofreading, writing novels

Transiting the Real

Recently, my reading group selected Rachel Cusk’s novel Transit as our next book, and I recalled reading a review by Elaine Blair of Cusk’s novel Outline in the January 2015 New Yorker. Blair claims “Cusk has written admiringly about Karl Ove Knausgaard, and her proposed cure for the trouble with fiction sounds like a gloss of his. ‘Autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts,’ she told the Guardian.” Blair goes on to say that some writers are hewing closer to the author’s subjective experiences, of effacing the difference between fiction and their own personal lives.

As a writer, I’m all for any kind of improvisation on the novel or any other narrative. I’ve read Knausgaard’s first book. Parts of it are tedious, yet as a whole it is compelling in a voyeuristic way. But I have devoured all of W. G. Sebald’s “fictions,” novels that are truly novel in that he has invented a hybrid form. Sebald incorporates travelogue, biography, memoir, speculation, and literary criticism, and the narrator is usually a wandering and thoughtful observer of his surroundings.

[image error]Though I hadn’t read Cusk’s work when I read this New Yorker review, I am concerned with the idea that some writers may rely more on their personal experiences to create “fictions” than to employ their imaginations. Contemporary life is already too one-dimensional and focused on surfaces. Most people aren’t aware of their dreams and the unconscious, of what exists outside of our daytime awareness. Or they deny that anything other than the day’s residue is being circulated in these nightly dramas. What a loss!

As Carl Jung pointed out in Man and His Symbols, “Imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding” (82). He also says that it isn’t just poets or other artists who employ these ways of perceiving, but they are also essential to scientists. He emphasizes that the rational intellect isn’t the only way of knowing or understanding ourselves and the world (inner or outer) and claims that “the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements” (86). This observation is even truer today than when Jung wrote this piece in 1961 near the end of his life.

If our novels adhere to portraying our everyday experiences, the chitchat that goes on in our living rooms and other social settings, then we are missing a whole level of vitality and knowledge. It’s the imagination in conjunction with the unconscious that produces myths, symbols, and alternate views of reality. Not that our personal experiences can’t be imbued with these elements, but if they are the sole basis for our fictions, then we are deprived of something much richer and more worthwhile.

(A future post will explore what I discovered from reading Cusk’s Transit.)

 

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: Carl Jung, dreams, imagination, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk, unconscious

What is the REAL story?

“The artist must be deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and harken to its words alone.”  —Kandinsky.

Several years ago I entered a Masters in Creative Writing program as a poet, but I was equally interested in writing fiction and signed up for several short story workshops. My experience in the poetry classes led me into exciting new places as a writer, opening me up to undiscovered parts of myself and of the poetry world. But it has taken me all these years to fully recover from the fiction workshops.

First let me say that, no, my intent here is not to bash creative writing programs. I’ve found them useful in many ways. Overall I felt inspired and challenged, part of a community of writers. But it was the poetry workshops that completely turned me around. They made me aware of the amazing work done by writers I’d not read carefully before—many of them women, work that was more innovative than I’d been used to: Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Leslie Scalapino. This writing didn’t fit into the traditional genre of lyric poetry as I understood it, largely autobiographical material, emotional snapshots of the writers’ pasts including an epiphany or “point.”

Reading these poets was like voyaging into a totally foreign country. They made something happen on the page, treating it as theatre, letting the meanings emerge from the interaction of language rather than from recreating a remembered event. They pushed language to its limits, attempting to bring into the poem a larger world by shattering syntax, rethinking grammar, challenging the notions of narrative as we know it, forging beyond linear cause and effect thinking into new realms. They were questioning our assumptions about poetry—what it is, what it can be. Its subject matter. They were (and are) questioning the very fabric of our lives, the notions of subject and subjectivity, of art and its role in our culture.

[image error]Through these classes, I came to see that experimental and traditional works are part of a continuum, not either/or, better/worse. These workshops show writing programs at their best. The poets who taught the classes embraced a wide variety of styles, from formalist to the most experimental. Students were free to experiment and didn’t conform to one particular party line.

Unfortunately, the openness and scope that I experienced in poetry did not carry over into the fiction workshops I took. The writers teaching these classes mainly followed the conventional notions of the short story, the realistic/naturalistic tradition, or the psychologically subtle stories that have descended from Chekhov, Joyce, and James. And, of course, minimalist fiction was hot then.

No room seemed to exist for what has been at the heart of American fiction since its inception—romance, combining the ordinary with the inexplicable. Richard Chase, author of The American Novel and Its Traditions, believes the main difference between the realistic novel and the romance is the way each views reality: “The novel renders reality closely and in comprehensive detail. It takes a group of people and sets them going about the business of life.” The characters, involved in plausible situations, become real to us, revealing their complexities, their human foibles, their multiple motives. In these works, “character is more important than action or plot” (12).

Romance, on the other hand,

feels free to render reality in less volume and detail…..Astonishing events may occur and these are likely to have a symbolic rather than a realistic plausibility. Being less committed to the immediate rendition of reality than the novel, the romance will more freely veer toward the mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms. (13)

Chase’s ideas apply equally to the short story, but as an undergraduate and graduate in creative writing, I learned something different. When I tried to do what was natural to me—to write symbolic dramas, Shirley Jacksonist contemporary folktales/fables that retained the details of everyday experience and psychological authenticity—I found the readers of these pieces did not have a context from which to judge them. I met a blank wall.

I was familiar with Marquez and Borges’ writing, where Western rationality clashes with magical native cultures, the natural and the supernatural intermingling, the living with the dead, each world as real as the other. I’d read the symbolist stories of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, and James. For my first master’s thesis (in the Humanities), I’d investigated the literary fairy tale, parables, and fables, where characters tend to be caricatures rather than fully realized imitations of humans.

But when I tried to suggest there are approaches other than the usual conflict/resolution type of short story where character is the focus, or that caricature may be valid within certain contexts, I didn’t get very far. Since I was still feeling my way around in the short story form, I wasn’t able to clearly articulate yet what I was attempting in my narratives. Unfortunately, my writing instructors and my fellow classmates had not explored much beyond their turf as writers. Hence, many critiques were harmful if not totally destructive because the readers were trying to fit the work into a narrow perspective.

One teacher, after reading a draft of a story I was working on, said “Who are these people?” The characters did not fit into her ideas of what should happen in a story. She went on to say, “My overall impression at this point is that you have serious gifts in the area of the real, honest to God short story. I do not see you succeeding as a ‘magical realist’—in fact, I see you being led down a disastrous path, away from your own power as a storyteller. I would most strongly advise you to give all that up and start to write the real things. I don’t think you’ll ever regret it.”

The authority, she was saying that works of the imagination are not real; the true path is the conventional story. I hadn’t yet sufficiently discovered my voice as a fiction writer, so I couldn’t rebut her criticism.

Just as poets do, fiction writers have a rich, multiply textured tradition to draw from that includes more than the conventional narrative, and I haven’t even mentioned the fabulists and those writing metafiction. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates says,

…Carol Shields’ third collection of stories, Dressing Up for the Carnival, is an intelligent, provocative, and entertaining collection of variegated prose pieces, both conventional and unconventional….[T]he majority are deftly, even sunnily written, and bristling with ideas, reminding us that fiction need not be emotionally devastating or ‘profound’ to be worthwhile (39).

Shields describes the process she went through in letting go of the rules of “what a story should be and how it must be shaped” in an essay entitled “Arriving Late, Starting Over.” After teaching the absolutes she learned in English Lit for years, she finally rebelled. She actually had no choice. Before she could go forward as a writer, she had to go back and release herself from the structure of the traditional story. It no longer was large or loose enough to allow in what had bubbled up in Various Miracles, her first collection of stories that she’d written in “a mood of reckless happiness” (245 & 246). They opened the way for Dressing Up for the Carnival.

While I enjoy reading all types of fiction, I don’t want to be captive of the realistic story. Reading and writing various story styles keeps me in touch with the strangeness, the unfathomable mysteries, of life. Realistic stories certainly can do this, too. But the stories I’m most attracted to view the world from an unusual angle, from what is invisible to ordinary consciousness—the content we often find in dreams (I’m thinking of Salman Rushdie’s work, as well as Reginald McKnights’, Jeffrey Renard Allen’s, Mark Danielewski’s, and especially Roberto Bolano).

Over the years, in the process of finding and accepting my particular preferences as a writer, I’ve had to teach myself what I didn’t find in the academy. At those times it’s been helpful to remember Eudora’s Welty’s admonition:

Writing is such an internal, interior thing that it can hardly be reached by you, much less by another person. I can’t tell you how to write, no more than you can tell me. We’re all different from one another even in the way we breathe. Writers must learn to trust themselves. (Dawson 27)

Yet this kind of trust doesn’t come easily. However, we’ll never discover in our fellow writers or ourselves what we’re capable of if we don’t consciously release these expectations and enlarge our repertoire. As writers and teachers, we need to be more aware of the range we have available to us so we don’t limit our own or others’ imaginations.

Works Cited

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York: Anchor Books, 1957, p. 12. Print.

Ibid, p 13.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “An Endangered Species,” The New York Review of Books, June 29, 2000, p. 39. Print.

Shields, Carol. “Arriving Late, Starting Over.” Metcalf, John and Struthers, J.R. (Tim), ed. How Stories Mean. Erin, Ontario: The Porcupine’s Quill, 1993, p. 245 & 246. Print.

Dawson, Marie. “An Interview with Eudora Welty.” Poets & Writers Magazine. September/ October 1997, p. 27. Print.

This post is part of the Magic Realism Blog Hop. Nearly 20 blogs are taking part in the hop. Over three days (28th – 30th July 2016) these blogs will be posting about magic realism. Please take the time to click on the links below to visit them and remember that links to the new posts will be added over the three days, so do come back to read more.

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Filed under: Links Tagged: fiction, magic realism, magical realism

Discovering Narrative Structure in the Dordogne

During our recent month-long vacation in France, we spent a week at an Airbnb rental in the Dordogne area. You, dear reader, may be wondering what this post has to do with writing or reading. But bear with me. You’ll eventually see the connection.

Located near the village of Pellegrue, our accommodations originally were constructed 700 years ago. At that time, the farmer lived in the upper level with his family, and his animals were housed below.

Having spent some years on a farm myself as a girl, I have some idea of what the smells and sounds may have been like! Fortunately for us, they hadn’t lingered.

But the external structure has retained its original shape, though its interior has been remodeled. My husband and I were impressed with how the owners, Jane and Mike, originally dairy farmers in Australia, transformed this ancient stone building essentially themselves, calculating how to move beams and hoist them into place, stripping the roof tiles and replacing their under layer before resetting the tile, merging the original stone walls and beams with modern trappings. Modern Italian tile floors meet the authentic stone enclosures on the ground floor, while hardwood floors graces the upper level. The four bathrooms and kitchen all have modern appliances. It’s the ideal blending of old and new, filled with character and charm.

It occurred to me that Jane and Mike’s work was similar to how a novelist constructs a narrative. Sometimes we start out with a basic structure in mind that might not even be conscious yet, but in the process of writing we uncover it, our words like the items needed to construct a building. We link them together until they eventually take shape and tell a coherent story. The story that the Dordogne Airbnb tells is many layered, still resonating with echoes of its past, just as our novels also have multiple levels, the images our words create transporting readers (and writers) into a new (novel) place.

Filed under: Links Tagged: narrative structure, novels, writing

Travelling enlarges us so our previous roles/containers feel tight, inflexible

Recently, my husband and I spent a month in France: a week each in Provence, the Dordogne, the Loire Valley, and Paris. We were looking forward to a true vacation, not wanting to cram our days so full of sightseeing that we needed a vacation from vacationing when we returned home. Since we planned on spending much of our time in three different regions that are known for their abundance of small towns, we [image error]anticipated the slower pace of French village life. Except for our Airbnb apartment in the main center of St. Remy de Provence, our Dordogne and Loire Valley digs were in the country where vineyards, groves of trees, forests, and rich farmland surrounded us. We had our choice of hamlets to visit, each offering its own unique character, boulangeries, and cafes.

A few days into our trip, the battery in my watch died. It seemed serendipitous for that to happen because I had left behind chronos time and entered something more liminal—not bound by the time’s inexorableness. My usual routines largely dissolved and following a to do [image error]list no longer became the main factor in what I did. We ate when we felt like it. Got into our rental Citroen when we were ready. And let the road (or the GPS) lead us to a destination. These were two-lane secondary roads for the most part (though some were single lane!), and they didn’t promote speeding. It was such a luxury to glide along at our own pace, letting drivers pass us if they were impatient with our sightseeing mode. But for the most part, others motorists seemed to share our delight in being in the moment, many of them vacationers like us or residents who had long ago inculcated this more leisurely mode.

Since returning to our Bay Area home, I’ve had the battery in my watch replaced, and I can’t avoid the usual daily routines that eat up so much of my time: watching the news (we didn’t turn on a TV in France!) for more salacious stories about Trump or scrolling the Internet for what the TV news channels leave out; responding to endless streams of emails; [image error]marketing my novels; preparing to teach a new writing workshop; planning menus and shopping for groceries; cleaning the house and working in the yard; writing for a certain period each day; and so much more. However, I’m chaffing at these duties, having trouble fitting back into the old ways, the life I left behind.

 

[image error]Travelling enlarges us so that the previous roles/containers feel tight, inflexible. So I’ve been trying to make room for reexamining myself in light of this splendid French vacation, trying to incorporate aspects of the culture that I find so civil and healthy, like taking time to sit down and enjoy my lunch rather than eat it on the run. Or making room in my days to just look out the window and enjoy our garden. But it’s not easy to resist jamming myself back into the old ways. Like old shoes, they’re comfortable, though they also don’t fit the way they once did.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Links

Travelling enlarges us so that the previous roles/containers feel tight, inflexible

Recently, my husband and I spent a month in France: a week each in Provence, the Dordogne, the Loire Valley, and Paris. We were looking forward to a true vacation, not wanting to cram our days so full of sightseeing that we needed a vacation from vacationing when we returned home. Since we planned on spending much of our time in three different regions that are known for their abundance of small towns, we [image error]anticipated the slower pace of French village life. Except for our Airbnb apartment in the main center of St. Remy de Provence, our Dordogne and Loire Valley digs were in the country where vineyards, groves of trees, forests, and rich farmland surrounded us. We had our choice of hamlets to visit, each offering its own unique character, boulangeries, and cafes.

A few days into our trip, the battery in my watch died. It seemed serendipitous for that to happen because I had left behind chronos time and entered something more liminal—not bound by the time’s inexorableness. My usual routines largely dissolved and following a to do [image error]list no longer became the main factor in what I did. We ate when we felt like it. Got into our rental Citroen when we were ready. And let the road (or the GPS) lead us to a destination. These were two-lane secondary roads for the most part (though some were single lane!), and they didn’t promote speeding. It was such a luxury to glide along at our own pace, letting drivers pass us if they were impatient with our sightseeing mode. But for the most part, others motorists seemed to share our delight in being in the moment, many of them vacationers like us or residents who had long ago inculcated this more leisurely mode.

Since returning to our Bay Area home, I’ve had the battery in my watch replaced, and I can’t avoid the usual daily routines that eat up so much of my time: watching the news (we didn’t turn on a TV in France!) for more salacious stories about Trump or scrolling the Internet for what the TV news channels leave out; responding to endless streams of emails; [image error]marketing my novels; preparing to teach a new writing workshop; planning menus and shopping for groceries; cleaning the house and working in the yard; writing for a certain period each day; and so much more. However, I’m chaffing at these duties, having trouble fitting back into the old ways, the life I left behind.

 

[image error]Travelling enlarges us so that the previous roles/containers feel tight, inflexible. So I’ve been trying to make room for reexamining myself in light of this splendid French vacation, trying to incorporate aspects of the culture that I find so civil and healthy, like taking time to sit down and enjoy my lunch rather than eat it on the run. Or making room in my days to just look out the window and enjoy our garden. But it’s not easy to resist jamming myself back into the old ways. Like old shoes, they’re comfortable, though they also don’t fit the way they once did.

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Links

Thanks to Prakash Vir Sharma for inviting me to be his first author interview on his blog!

Prakash Vir Sharma has asked great questions. I hope the answers will help aspiring writers fulfil their publishing goals!

Source: Author Interviews

https://pvsharmablog.wordpress.com/author-interviews

Filed under: Links

Words as Animals

I recently read the book Words as Eggs by Jungian analyst Russell Lockhart. The idea for the work, and the chapter from which the title comes, originated in one of Lockhart’s dreams. A voice in his dream said “Do you not know that words are eggs, that words carry life, that words give birth?” (92). Lockhart later points out that this dream revelation isn’t exactly new in the larger scheme of things. In the beginning, it’s rumored that God spoke the world into existence: “the word is seed and gives birth to life and living things” (92). As eggs, words are constantly delivering new ideas and thoughts, filling our minds with possibilities and worlds we otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

A writer, I’m fascinated with anything to do with words and how they inform, form, and reform our surroundings—and us. They are magical and ordinary simultaneously, both grounding us in their multiple meanings as well as suggesting possibilities that seem limitless. That’s one reason why poetry and fiction in particular have such a profound grip on our imaginations and on us. In his exploration of his dream announcement, Lockhart does a compelling job of taking the reader into the soul and roots of language, demonstrating how mysterious and complex these 26 letters of the alphabet are that have an endless capacity to change shape.

So when I recently had an auditory dream that said “words are animals,” my antennae went up and the animal in me growled. What was the dream trying to convey by making this analogy?

Unlike humans, animals aren’t governed by consciousness. They simply exist, functioning instinctively, motivated by immediate needs: hunger, shelter, survival. Also unlike most humans, animals follow their impulses. Their innate drives are their engines. They just do whatever they need to do as they live each day.

[image error]How then are words similar to what I’ve just described? If animals, at least domesticated ones, allow us to corral them, to absorb some of their otherness, their wildness, then words must give in to our domination in similar ways. The very idea that we are abstracting something vital from the language we use in our attempt to create order out of the chaotic mess that unruly letters can make saddens me. We’re draining something intuitive and spontaneous from the method we use to communicate with others and with ourselves.

Is the dream suggesting that as we domestic words, as we drain their animal characteristics from them, we are civilizing ourselves too much, becoming more alienated from our animal origins and perhaps coming to resemble more the robotic gadgets we’re surrounded by? I don’t have any final answers, but I’m curious if others have thoughts about this subject.

Filed under: Links

Words as Placeholders

I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks because I’m vacationing in France and thinking about how limited words are in capturing the essence of a person, place, or thing. They are temporary placeholders, but they rarely accurately depict what they are trying to describe.

Before I visited France, the words Provence, Dordogne, and the Loire Valley were just shells, empty of much meaning. Just words. But now that I have seen all of these places, the words have become worlds, vast and deep, full of resonance, sights, and sounds.

[image error]When people spoke about visiting Provence, they gave the place a mystical quality. Provence! It seemed to epitomize French culture in a way, the focus on good food made from local products and excellent wines, all digested within a framework that encouraged the enjoyment of such things at leisure. After living in the fast-paced San Francisco Bay area for so many years, I had to shift down to a lower gear so I didn’t race through this experience. But it wasn’t until I set foot in Provence that I could enter the word and truly know it. The word has been fleshed out because I’ve had personal experience of the French people working, playing, eating, and drinking in an environment that supports such a life.

Similarly, when friends told me they had visited the Dordogne region, it had no impact on me. The word itself was interesting with its string of hard consonants, but I couldn’t have envisioned an area named that until my husband and I drove our rental car to the restored barn we had rented for a week that overlooked vineyards, grain-growing fields, and groves of trees. I couldn’t have imagined so much green or so many villages rooted historically in the past. The restored barn we rented was 700 years old, and while the owners had added many modern conveniences to it, they also preserved much of the original stonework and wooden beams, outside and inside, so we were constantly reminded of the structure’s past life housing animals and people (the farmers would have lived on the second level with their animals roosting in the floor below). Now when I hear “Dordogne,” I have many visual and sensory hooks to hang the word on, so many that it overflows with meaning.

Coincidentally, both the Dordogne and Loire Valley are named after major rivers that run through those areas. While the Loire also is lush, it is more agricultural, though it also has some vineyards. Everywhere I look in the countryside I see forests and golden fields interspersed with timeless villages. Yes, modern life also shows its ugly head in occasional billboards and large stores (Intermarches have sprouted everywhere). But it can’t completely obscure the characteristics that make these regions so distinctive and vibrant, the qualities that contribute to French culture as a whole. Of course, the tolled motorways bring speed and efficiently connect these areas, but the real delight has been driving at a leisurely pace over the secondary roads, stopped frequently by roundabouts that remind us to slow down and look around before moving on.

When I return to the Bay area, I hope to bring some of these qualities with me—a slower pace and a greater appreciation for what makes life worth living: good food, good wine, and the time to enjoy them both with family and friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: Links Tagged: dordogne, france, loire valley, provence, words

Russia is much in the news these days and a Russian was the first governor of Alaska: Learn more in MASTER OF ALASKA!

[image error] About Master of Alaska

The detail and research that author Roger Seiler used—from biographies to actual letters and reports by the Governor Baranov himself—creates a riveting story.

Master of Alaska – a compelling Historical Fiction about the first governor of Alaska sent to the colony by Russia in 1790 – George Washington was President at the time. Master of Alaska starts in October 1790 when Aleksandr Baranov left his family in Russia and sails across the North Pacific to Kodiak to become the chief manager for Tsarina Catherine the Great’s colony in the far Northwest of North America. Baranov is shipwrecked, saved and adopted by the Aleut natives. Later he is forced to marry Anooka the daughter of the tribal chief, despite still having a wife back in Russia to save his men from starvation. Only slated to serve five years, Baranov spends the next 28 years in Alaska, surviving natural disasters, a massacre of his people at Sitka, meddling competing Russian authorities, a British attempt to undermine his colony and an assassination attempt. Interestingly, Baranov’s native wife and teenage daughter play an intricate role and contribute much to his success and survival in Alaska. Baranov built an empire and sought peace with the warring Tlingit, and thanks largely to his efforts Alaska is part of the U.S. today.

Excerpt:

Baranov Meets Anooka (p. 82)

INTRO: After Aleksandr Baranov had reached the Russian settlement at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island, he took command of the colony. The Aleut village chief, named Grigor by the Russians, had learned to speak Russian and invited Baranov into his longhouse to confer. As they sat in front of the central fire, Baranov took from his pocket a bright copper plate engraved with Tsarina Catherine’s coat of arms and gave it to Chief Grigor as a gift.

Chief Grigor’s eyes widened in amazement as he examined the copper plate closely. “This is important,” he said.

It was exactly the reaction Baranov wanted. He continued, “I look for a long future of friendship between us. We can help each other in many ways. I must explore Montague Island, over here, and need some of your men as guides.”

“Great Nanuq, do you have a woman?”

Baranov was taken aback. “I have a wife in Russia.”

“In Russia? What good is that? Take my daughter for wife. Then I be your father, and we work together as one. This way we make powerful alliance.”

Before Baranov could react, Chief Grigor turned and called out to his daughter in his Native tongue, “Anooka, come here!”

From a dim recess of the lodge, a slender seventeen-year-old in deerskins approached with unusual youthful dignity. She had glistening long, black hair flowing over her shoulders, and set in an oval face were the high cheek bones common to many Natives. Her big, warm, brown eyes looked out from under lovely arched eyebrows. Clear, tan skin, a straight, pretty nose, and a mouth with soft lips completed her. To Baranov, Anooka was strikingly beautiful. Though reserved, the self-confidence of her rank allowed her to glance at the strange Russian in front of her, and then she faced her father.

In the Kenaitze dialect of the Alutiiq language, the chief told her, “Turn around and face the great Russian Nanuq.” She did so. With no hint of shyness, she looked Baranov right in his eyes. Her intelligent dark eyes held his stare as an equal for a long moment, until she yielded a slight smile, revealing perfect white teeth, and looked down.[image error]

Nanuq quickly collected himself and, wanting to get back to the negotiations for guides, replied, “Chief Grigor, your offer is most generous. But as I said, I already have a wife in Russia.”

Grigor insisted, “But not here. How long has it been, great Nanuq, since you’ve had a wife at your side?”

Baranov stared at him in silence. He didn’t want to offend the man, but the proposal was absurd.

The chief tried once more. Certainly an alliance with this Russian Nanuq would greatly benefit his own stature in the eyes of his people—and especially their southern enemies, the hated Tlingit.

“I see. Well, you need a wife here! And we need a strong alliance.”

“A Russian can only have one wife.”

“Poor man! Poor man!” said Grigor in mild disappointment. He knew that making such alliances, especially with one as strong as Nanuq, could take time and much negotiation. But just how strong was Nanuq, anyway? Maybe he should be tested. There was more than one way to impress the Tlingit with Kenaitze power. Grigor motioned to Anooka to return to her work.

“Well, then, the least I can do for you is give you the guides you need.”

Anooka sat on a blanket in the back of the longhouse, where she had been making a bear claw necklace for her father. Why did Father want to give her to this man? Though short, he looked strong and intelligent, but strange. Could she ever want him? She knew what she wanted would count for nothing. Her father would decide, and she had to trust him to choose well for her. She would ask one thing: that her father wait until he really knew a man before he made his choice. As his daughter, she deserved at least that, and the chief had only just met this Nanuq.

Baranov looked into the shadows for Anooka, straining for another glimpse of her youthful beauty. Grigor noticed.

About the Author Roger Seiler

Award-winning filmmaker and author Roger Seiler grew up in Alaska from age three.  His love of adventure comes from both his parents. His father Edwin was a civil engineer eventually becoming an Alaskan bush pilot. His mother Josefina was born in Puerto Rico and was a writer and Alaskan sport-fishing lodge manager with the hobby of Flamenco dancing.  In his late teens, Roger was a king salmon sport fishing guide on Alaska’s Naknek River, and also a commercial salmon fisherman in Bristol Bay.

He attended Deep Springs College and graduated With Honors from UCLA with a BA in Theater Arts – Film. His first film work was for UCLA’s Automotive Collision Research project, including a film for TV, “Safety on the Road,” which he wrote, produced and directed. While attending UCLA, Roger also worked with actor Karl Malden and famed director Francis Ford Coppola.

Roger worked for IBM for several years as an in-house filmmaker involved largely in producing and directing motivational films for employee conventions. He has made over 30 documentary films. His IBM film, The Inner Eye of Alexander Rutsch had a special screening at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and won the CINE Golden Eagle Award, as did three of his other films, Frontiers, Challenge Over the Atlantic, and Strategy of the Achiever.

Roger currently lives in South Nyack, NY with his wife Sally. Roger is a devoted reader and supporter of libraries. In 1977 he was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Nyack Library (Carnegie funded in 1879) and has continued to serve for 40 years, 16 as Board President. Master of Alaska, a historical novel, is his second book and whose publisher North Face Publishing is a subsidiary of Motivational Press Publishing.

Interview with Roger Seiler 

How do you come up with book titles?

 A title must grab attention and be easy to remember. The subtitle should suggest what the book is about, with a bit of a hook – intriguing but not giving away too much.

What have people most liked or found most meaningful/funny/creative/ challenging about your book?

They love the dialog and the way they hear what is going on inside the characters’ heads. Then they say they were gripped by the adventure, the conflicts, and how the confilcts are resolved.

Why do you write?

 I love making characters come to life on paper. Seeing them, hearing them, thinking how they think, feeling what they feel, and putting it all down on paper in words that make it all seem real gives me a thrill.

Where do your characters come from?

I focus on the historical novel genre, so my characters come from history. Mostly they are people who     actually existed or could have existed at the time of my story. My fictional people help to draw out and support the character exposition of the true-to-life protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist has to be someone we can identify with and admire in some way – maybe not all the time, but most of the time. The antagonist and bad people are bad because they have no empathy for anyone. I try to show that the greatest conflicts between people can be negotiated with empathy.

At what moment did you decide you were a writer?

When I won an American Legion writing contest in the 8th grade. I still have the silver medal I won, but the essay I wrote on some patriotic subject is misplaced somewhere. It led me to historical fiction, usually focused on some time of conflict in American history. I love telling stories about real people who were unique, fascinating, conflicted, and who tell us something about the human condition that is useful in our own lives. My first story came in 1987 — a sci-fi story about a scientist who discovered the origin of Dark Energy and the ordinary composition of Dark Matter.

How do you start a novel/story?

I do historical research about a subject that interests me, first online and then in books and letters. Then I sketch the story by hand on paper as scenes based on history in a rough outline, using the guidelines of the three act structure, the inciting incident, and the ups and downs within the story arc. I leave a lot of space between scene headings for me to add notes later. I look over the sketch and then start filling in details, though not in any particular order – just as ideas and visions of characters, events, and things come to me. Once the sketch is fairly fleshed out, I key it into my laptop. Then I start writing – a little bit here, a little bit there, as ideas come to me. At first, writing is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. As for the start of the story, I come back to do that last after I really know my characters and what the heart of the story is about. I can almost never know this at the beginning of my process. I’ll typically do at least 100 rewrites of the first page to get it right – which I could never do at the beginning of the process because I don’t really know enough then about my characters and story which have had to evolve throughout my writing process. Sometimes a rewrite of the first page can involve a change of just one word or a punctuation mark, which can make a remarkably significant difference. Just like panning for gold – a constant flushing out of the sand to reveal what has value.

What feeds your process? Can you listen to music and write or not… can you write late at night or are you a morning person… when the spark happens, do you run for the pen or the screen or do you just hope it is still there tomorrow?

I rarely listen to music as I write because its mood can distract me from the mood of my story, as I concentrate on thinking, imagining, and writing. I start writing right after breakfast and just keep going until I run out of steam that day – sometimes that’s not until 11 at night. But I do have other things to do, so sometimes I’ll stop writing after 2 or 3 hours in the morning, then come back to it in the evening. Mostly, once I have an idea about how some characters are going to interact in a scene, I write continuously until it feels like I’ve got something meaningful happening between them, or a particular character has been more fully revealed.

What writing mistakes do you find yourself making most often?

 I tend to overwrite, especially in “showing” the story. I’ve learned that it’s often best to “show” just the high points and low points of the story, but to “tell” what happens in between so as not to bog down the reader in unnecessary minutia, and to move the story along in a way that keeps the reader engaged. Too much “showing” can be boring. “Telling” has its place, like stepping on the accelerator to get in the fast lane. There needs to be a rhythm between show and tell, and once you find the right rhythm, you keep up its proper tempo.

Who is your favorite character from your book(s)?

In Master of Alaska, my favorite character is Baranov’s wife Anna with their daughter Irina a close second, because of their success in showing empathy for others. Baranov is fascinating, but he has had to learn from Anna how to succeed in dealing with adversaries. She showed him how to develop a different kind of inner strength than ever had before. Without her he would have failed.

If a movie was made of your book, who would the stars be?

Daniel Craig or Jeremy Renner would be Baranov; Ariel Tweto (1/2 Alaskan Native) as Irina, Baranov’s part Native daughter, unknown Alaskan Native as Anooka/Anna; James Franko as Kuskov. The film director should be Ali Selim.

Important Links:

Roger reading from his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBgh3nraTrY&feature=youtu.be

On Twitter: https://twitter.com/MasterAlaska

On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/search/top/?q=master%20of%20alaska

Website http://MasterofAlaska.com

On Amazon: http://amzn.to/2qrLNQQ

On B&N: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Master+of+Alaska?_requestid=312472

On Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31921257-master-of-alaska?from_search=true

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed under: guest authors, Links Tagged: ALASka, governor, Roger Seiler, russia, russians