Deborah Dunlevy's Blog, page 6

Naming the World

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The summer before I turned seven, my family moved several states over to a place where I knew no one. We bought a house, but while we were waiting to move in, we stayed for a few weeks in small one-bedroom apartment. I think it was one bedroom. Honestly, I’m not sure. All I remember about the place was that my brother and I slept on the floor. This isn’t important because it was uncomfortable. I was six. The floor was fine. It’s important because I can still close my eyes and go back to lying on that floor in the semi-dark, listening to the music my parents were playing in the next room. It was beautiful and haunting, and I felt a heavy weight on my chest pressing in painfully. I lay there, breathing through the tightness around my heart, wishing that beautiful music would go away because it was making me feel worse. My brother lay silently next to me, and I wondered if he felt the same, but I didn’t ask. Even then I believed that speaking that heaviness aloud would make it crush me.

It was years before I learned otherwise.

I spent half my life avoiding negative emotion. When I was a kid and my friends sought out the thrill of being terrified by watching scary movies and raising their arms on roller coasters, I wanted nothing to do with it. Who wants to be afraid? When I was a teenager, and my friends luxuriated in the angst of feeling sad and misunderstood, moping about listening to grunge and reading the negative headlines with relish, I climbed a tree with a book and got lost better worlds. Who wants to be sad if you don’t have to?

For me, words were an escape, a way to be someone other than myself, a way to retreat from any reality that would be uncomfortable.

In short, I lacked courage, and so for many years I missed out on what courage could have gained me.

We kissed and I closed my eyes and inhaled lavender and her, and I felt so terrified and so in love that I realised they –the terror, the love –were one and the same thing.

–Matt Haig, How to Stop Time

You can trust a human being with grief. That’s what I tell the wardens. I tell them, “Just walk fearlessly into the house of mourning, for grief is just love squaring up to its oldest enemy. And after all these mortal human years, love is up to the challenge.”

-Kate Braestrup, The Moth Presents All These Wonders

There’s no life without risk. You want love? It walks hand in hand with pain. You want fulfillment? Reality is going to drop kick you, but that’s the only way to get where you truly want to be. As David Foster Wallace says in Infinite Jest, “the truth will set you free but not until it is done with you.”

Of course, the real sucker punch of it all is that refusing to acknowledge fear and sadness doesn’t actually make them go away. On the contrary, negative emotions grow in the dark. But what I discovered, to my delight and detriment, is that years can pass before they send shoots out to disturb your sunny day. In the meantime, denial looks like serenity, like self-control, like maturity. It’s great for the ego.

Just not so great for the soul.

“Briefly, he tried to tell himself he should not feel hurt. His parents had not meant to diminish him by their exclusion of him and his sister was under the stress of grief. Then he recognized the lie and turned to embrace what he felt and thus understand it. His mother and grandmother were pre-occupied. His father and his sister had both deliberately attempted to wound him, and he had let them succeed. But these things that had happened, and these feelings he now experienced were not faults to be conquered. He could not deny the feelings, nor should he try to change them. “Accept and grow,” he reminded himself, and felt the pain ease. Wintrow went to pack a change of clothes.”

–Robin Hobb, Ship of Magic

This is what I’ve learned, the way I am training myself to live. When I am faced with loss, with uncertainty, with obstacles and a world that’s upside down, I put words to what I see and what I feel. When I’m awkward and unprepared, the words are faltering and inadequate. When reality is harsh, the words are harsh. When my experience is painful, the words bleed.

Naming things takes away their power, gives that power to the namer. God gave Adam dominion over all the animals, and his first task as ruler was to name them. In ancient civilizations, parents named their children with care, believing that the name they gave would influence the outcome of their child’s life. Throughout history, slave owners have stripped their slaves’ names and given them new ones. If you refuse to acknowledge the way a person has identified himself, if you force him to respond to the name you have assigned, you assert your ownership every time he answers. Naming is a powerful act, for good or for evil.

When I was writing TWIN, I heaped problem after problem on my characters. (Because that’s the way the universe works, isn’t it? Once the hits start coming, they don’t stop until you’re good and pummeled.) Naturally, they resolve some things, but, as in real life, many problems have no resolution. The turning point for my characters, the first step toward making peace with what can’t be changed, is the moment they begin to name the world around them. Naming is thinking the unthinkable, familiarizing the unfamiliar, exerting control over the uncontrollable.

I still write about unexplored worlds, but not for the same reason I did as a child. I no longer write to be absent from my life, but rather to be fully present in it. I’ve stopped trying to skip to the end, where truth has set me free; instead I’m standing here while it works me over.

I’m no longer trying to escape the world, but rather, to name it.

Giving Birth

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I never set out to write a science fiction book. TWIN was born from the blending of two things: my regular daydreams about deserted-island survival scenarios and a conversation between a brother and sister that showed up in my head one day. Over time, the brother and sister became more than just characters in a scene. They become people, and you can’t be a person without having a history and a home. So I gave them both.

“No matter what you may have heard, the characters don’t write their story. Oh, people love to believe that, and certain writers love to tell it–I was typing away and then all of a sudden it was if I had been possessed. The story was unfolding before me. I had been hijacked by my own characters. I was no longer in control. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What I like about the job of being a novelist, and at the same time what I find so exhausting about it, is that it’s the closest thing to being God you’re ever going to get. All of the decisions are yours.”

–Ann Patchett, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

If I had been thinking about what would make an easy novel to write, I might have given them a time and place a little closer to mine. But I wasn’t writing; I was daydreaming. And the story played out thrillingly in a colony on a set of planets circling a far-off star. This was all fine because in my head I could be vague about the details, and the setting was incredibly compelling without anyone there to question how it would all work. The daydreaming part of writing really is the best.

But beautiful thoughts aren’t art. Art has to exist in the real world. A story isn’t a story until I give it physical form, until I give it words.

“…to paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an incarnational activity. The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver. In a very real sense, the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command.”

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water

I love this idea of incarnation, of taking something insubstantial and giving it substance. I won’t be overly self-important and say that I am serving a work greater than myself. It’s just a story, but Cara and Tom’s story was one I wanted to tell. And just like that, I’m a forty-something mom writing a science fiction novel. Let’s just say that when people at your kid’s softball game ask you what you do for a living, that is not what they expect you to say.

Since I started working on TWIN full-time, I’ve made a conscious choice to read other science fiction written by women. It’s not a genre known for a lot of female voices, but when you look, you can find gold, from well-known pioneers like Ursula LeGuin and Madeleine L’Engle and Robin Hobb to newer artists like Nnedi Okorafor and Ann Leckie and Laini Taylor. I want to say, as feminists have tried to say about many things, that science fiction is science fiction no matter who writes it. The idea that there is an inherent difference between art made by a man and art made by a woman makes us bristle because we reject the long history of being told that our voice was less rational, less disciplined, less intelligent, just less. But can we reject that history without rejecting the differences that set us apart?

The women I read write powerfully. They write incisively. They write intelligently. They also write as women. This is a very real thing. I won’t try to define what makes a woman’s voice a woman’s voice because any definition would take away more than it added. Every female writer has a different voice in the same way that every writer has a different voice. But our voice is made up of all that we are, and among many other things, what we are is women.

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We’re back to the idea of incarnation. When Mary gave birth to a child that was God, she also gave birth to a child that was a man. His human form came from his mother. He was God’s son, something completely unknown and unknowable, and he was also her son, and I imagine that he looked like her. This is the way our art works, too. We reach out and capture something, some truth, some reality, some intangible thing that matters to us all, but when we give it form, we also make it in our image. It speaks in our voice. It looks like us.

Though I voraciously read science fiction no matter who writes it, I find a resonance in what other women have written that makes the truths they’ve grasped for even more powerful to me. This is why we need art from everyone. We need art from men and from women. We need art from people of every shade of skin and every cultural background. We need art from the young and from the old. So we can see truth walking around with many different faces. And maybe find one that looks familiar. And maybe find ourselves changed by what we’ve seen.

In the next couple of weeks, I’m going to write more about about some of these women who are inspiring me. I want you to meet them, or at least the parts of them they’ll let you see in their work. I hope you’ll find, as I have, that their imaginary worlds ripple into your real world and leave behind patterns that you’d never have seen otherwise. It might get a little uncomfortable along the way, but I promise it will be worth it. First up, next week: Nnedi Okorafor. She’s going to light you up.

Leaf and Branch, Water and Stone

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“What are you reading?” I asked my dad when he laughed out loud over his book.

He let me see it for myself. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit…”

I was seven. I already wanted more.

“Would we like it?” my brother asked.

The answer was hours in the making, days and weeks living the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and then of his nephew Frodo and his faithful servant Sam. Dad did all the voices, he paused in all the right places, he read just one more chapter when we begged.

When I first visited Lothlorien, it was my dad’s voice that explained how elvish magic works. He made it deep and slow and resonant with wisdom.

“Are these magic cloaks? asked Pippin, looking at them in wonder.

“I do not know what you mean by that,” answered the leader of the Elves. “They are fair garments, and the web is good, for it was made in this land. They are elvish robes certainly, if that is what you mean. Leaf and branch, water and stone: they have the hue and beauty of all those things under the twilight of Lorien that we love; for we put the thought of all that we love into all that we make.”

Leaf and branch, water and stone.
For me the water was those hours of stories read out loud. Visiting Middle Earth and Narnia and the lesser-known country of Mensandor. It wasn’t the heroes that I loved. It was the journey they had no choice but to take. The friends they met by a chance so perfect it had to be fate. The impossible deeds done in tiny, ridiculous steps.
I still dream in stories because stories made me. Everything I make today has the thought of that first love.

Although, it wasn’t truly first, of course. The leaf and the branch came before, I think, though I didn’t recognize them until the stories watered them to life.

The branch grew from a seed of faith, planted before my earliest memories. A belief in a Creator, the same one who made the universe and also me. A constant awareness that what I could see, what I did in my little life, was not all that there was. There was something bigger, something grander, something more. A universe of mystery and purpose. A work of art beyond the scope of my imagination. And yet, I was a part of it. This story for the ages was not about me, but it was my story just the same.

The branches of that vine weave through every story I’ve ever told.

And those branches grew green leaves of deep connection, the first to sprout being love for my family. We bounced around the country as I grew up, different houses, different towns, different cultures, but this circle of four was a place of safety and belonging. A place to laugh and to argue, to make bold claims and to be believed. A place to sing songs and eat good food. A place to trust people even when I couldn’t totally understand them. A place to face a million unknowns and know there was always my brother facing them with me, maybe equally baffled by it all, but there just the same.

Relationships are complex and they only get more so as I grow older, but deep in the core of who I am those stubborn green leaves refuse to wither. Family, whether by blood or by choice, is not optional. Family is the heart of who we are made to be, complex and connected. Inextricably bound up together.

When I tell stories, they are stories of family; they are stories of what I love.

Leaf and branch, water and stone.

I was twenty when I dug down and unearthed my stone. On the brink of leaping into full-on adulthood and afraid that I was on the wrong path, I spent a summer at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I had a job and room in my parents’ basement but my friends were far away. I stared at the mountains and felt the longing to disappear into them. I wanted to climb, but there was no one to climb with me. It was a turning point, looking up at where I wanted to be. The moment I decided that I would just go. I would find a map and learn to read it. I would pick a trail and strap on a backpack, and I would go. It would have been better to have someone go with me, but if there was no one, I would go alone. I wouldn’t sit around lamenting what I didn’t have. I went. I climbed. I found the most spectacular paths. It was all I could have hoped for. I have never looked back.

As much as I delight in words, action is what my heart craves. To go. To do. To risk. To walk the paths that I would otherwise only dream about. Eventually I found someone to climb with me, and that has taken me higher still, but stepping out is something we each have to do for ourselves.

So I write stories of risk, stories of growth and change and braving the unknown. I write stories that live because if we’re not living, there’s only one other option.

This writing itself is one those risks I take. Daring to think my words should be shared with others. With my new book, TWIN, coming out in a few weeks, I’ve turned to thinking about new projects and evaluating again why I even do this. I have no grandiose notions that my stories are changing the world, or even that they are changing the life of any one reader. So why do it?

N.D. Wilson said it better than I can:

“Growth requires food. Multiple times every day, throughout my childhood, I was fed. How many specific meals do I remember? How many peanut butter and jelly sandwiches do I remember uniquely as distinct from all the others? I remember meals the same way that I remember story times. The atmosphere and aura of feeding — goblets and goblins, milk and villains, ice cream and orcs. I was fed. I grew. Inside and out. We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment — narrative catechisms.”

This is my work. Just as I make dinner for my children every night and do my best to make it delicious as well as healthy for their bodies, so I keep telling stories, filling them with what has nourished my soul and captivated my heart and mind. No one story will be all that anyone needs just as no one meal will satisfy forever, but the sum of all the stories is a life. I so very much want for it to be a good life. For my readers and for myself.

So, leaf and branch, water and stone, I put the thought of all that I love into all that I make. That’s my kind of magic.