C.D. Mitchell's Blog
September 15, 2013
An interview with Clovis Clementine
This interview originally appears at:
http://www.michelleabbott.com/clovis....
An Interview with Clovis Clementine, the title character from the story “Clovis Clementine.” The story appears in the Flying House 2012 Anthology and as the lead story in "God’s Naked Will," the debut story collection to be released September 15th, 2013 by Burnt Bridge Press from New Orleans, San Francisco.
August 22, 2013. Word Count 1112.
Tell me about your parents?
I never met my mother. The bitch tried to ring my neck the moment after I was born when that stupid-ass doctor said I had a cloven-hoof because I was missing a big-toe and my other toes were webbed pairs with a gap in between them.
My father died in prison as a result of the statutory rape and incest charges he faced after the affair with my mother, his brother’s daughter. He wrote me a few times from prison, basically blaming my mother for what happened and saying he’d never have gone to prison if she’d just had an abortion.
My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Clarence raised me until Clarence died, then just Aunt Ruth.
At the foot-washing after you were baptized, you became sexually aroused when your Aunt Ruth’s blouse became sheer after getting wet while she washed your feet. She was practically your mother. How could you have seen her as a sexual target?
She was not my mother, and she was the only good-looking piece of ass around. Ruth was beautiful, with long, carrot-red hair, wide hips and a narrow waist. Her breasts were small, and many times she wore only a slip or a chemise under her blouse. She never realized that when she preached her nipples got hard or that she moved her hips like a stripper I’d seen on Television once. She was the sexiest creature I had ever seen. I used to watch her masturbate from outside her window when she still lived at the chapel after Uncle Clarence had died. She was an intensely sexual person and had a hard time dealing with his loss. And yes, preachers masturbate—even lady preachers. The voices told me to go help her, but I never did. But watching her naked like that nearly drove me mad.
Are you possessed by demons?
I even know all of their names. Of course, I guess that depends on your definition of possessed. I see them. They talk to me. They hit me and leave cuts and bruises on my body. The doctors never believed it wasn’t me cutting myself. They whisper in my ears. I only gave in that one time when they told me to kill Benny rice at school that day. He was tormenting me and I snapped his neck like a stalk of celery. I smile every time I think of the look on his face. In the after life his neck is still broken and he can’t control where he looks. It is awesome! The demons kept telling me to rape Ruth—that she would be a great lay, but I couldn’t do it. The presence around her of the Angels was always too powerful. If she was ever going to have sex with me, she would have to ask.
How do you see sounds?
I really don’t know. I just do. That night I committed suicide was wild. The light from the moon disintegrated into laser beams of light floating around the cemetery, and my screams were cannonballs bouncing off the trees like steel marbles in a pinball machine. It was awesome! Then the Colonel rose up from the other cadavers and helped me out and I blew my brains all over the living room wall.
I wish I hadn’t done that now because Aunt Ruth was devastated when she found me and later took her own life too. But I never see her, and that is odd.
Did you really think the rapture had happened when you fell into that empty grave?
Fuck yeah! I’d heard about that shit all of my life, man. I used to go home from church scared shitless every Sunday night, but then the voices would tell me I had nothing to worry about and I’d finally go to sleep.
Is demon-possession real? Does it cause mental illness? Or are the mentally-ill accused of being possessed simply as a witch-hunt—as an excuse to explain the failure of modern medicine to deal with the disease?
If you believe in the Bible, you must believe in the devil and his demons. I met him personally after I committed suicide. I don’t want to talk about that now. I’ve also met John Milton, the poet, and I know now his book was based upon visions revealed to him by the same demons that tormented me. In the New Testament Christ himself cast out demons while here on earth. You can’t just say it isn’t so because modern medicine has created a term called “schizophrenia” to classify all mental illness. Now that’s insane! But your question is like which came first—the egg or the chicken. According to the bible the chicken came first as God created all the creatures and placed them in the Garden. Demons are real and they walk with us everyday. They take many forms to disguise themselves. They may come in the form of addictions or illness or flat-out possession—like in my case. A fool believes he is followed only by angels, but the devil is there, shadowing every step you take.
Are there vampires and zombies?
LOL! Those are just my buddies in different forms.
Will we ever see you again?
Yes. My author plans to expand my story into a novel. He wants to explore the connection between possession and religion, sexuality and death. I am too perfect a character for him to simply let die. Besides, I am haunting him now the way the demons he created in my story haunted me. I won’t leave him alone until he writes my novel.
Are things better for you now?
No one understands the living hell of the mentally ill. Although life for us is a cruel joke, we share the same passion for life as anyone else. I used to love to go for a drive in my car whenever I had one. I loved a beautiful fall morning, or the chill of a winter afternoon, or the warmth of a spring day. But my illness made me miserable, and death eventually gave me all knowledge. Now I know and understand everything, so I am getting along much better now and spending eternity getting even with those still living who tormented me and added to my living hell.
So, yes! Things are much better now.
http://www.michelleabbott.com/clovis....
An Interview with Clovis Clementine, the title character from the story “Clovis Clementine.” The story appears in the Flying House 2012 Anthology and as the lead story in "God’s Naked Will," the debut story collection to be released September 15th, 2013 by Burnt Bridge Press from New Orleans, San Francisco.
August 22, 2013. Word Count 1112.
Tell me about your parents?
I never met my mother. The bitch tried to ring my neck the moment after I was born when that stupid-ass doctor said I had a cloven-hoof because I was missing a big-toe and my other toes were webbed pairs with a gap in between them.
My father died in prison as a result of the statutory rape and incest charges he faced after the affair with my mother, his brother’s daughter. He wrote me a few times from prison, basically blaming my mother for what happened and saying he’d never have gone to prison if she’d just had an abortion.
My Aunt Ruth and Uncle Clarence raised me until Clarence died, then just Aunt Ruth.
At the foot-washing after you were baptized, you became sexually aroused when your Aunt Ruth’s blouse became sheer after getting wet while she washed your feet. She was practically your mother. How could you have seen her as a sexual target?
She was not my mother, and she was the only good-looking piece of ass around. Ruth was beautiful, with long, carrot-red hair, wide hips and a narrow waist. Her breasts were small, and many times she wore only a slip or a chemise under her blouse. She never realized that when she preached her nipples got hard or that she moved her hips like a stripper I’d seen on Television once. She was the sexiest creature I had ever seen. I used to watch her masturbate from outside her window when she still lived at the chapel after Uncle Clarence had died. She was an intensely sexual person and had a hard time dealing with his loss. And yes, preachers masturbate—even lady preachers. The voices told me to go help her, but I never did. But watching her naked like that nearly drove me mad.
Are you possessed by demons?
I even know all of their names. Of course, I guess that depends on your definition of possessed. I see them. They talk to me. They hit me and leave cuts and bruises on my body. The doctors never believed it wasn’t me cutting myself. They whisper in my ears. I only gave in that one time when they told me to kill Benny rice at school that day. He was tormenting me and I snapped his neck like a stalk of celery. I smile every time I think of the look on his face. In the after life his neck is still broken and he can’t control where he looks. It is awesome! The demons kept telling me to rape Ruth—that she would be a great lay, but I couldn’t do it. The presence around her of the Angels was always too powerful. If she was ever going to have sex with me, she would have to ask.
How do you see sounds?
I really don’t know. I just do. That night I committed suicide was wild. The light from the moon disintegrated into laser beams of light floating around the cemetery, and my screams were cannonballs bouncing off the trees like steel marbles in a pinball machine. It was awesome! Then the Colonel rose up from the other cadavers and helped me out and I blew my brains all over the living room wall.
I wish I hadn’t done that now because Aunt Ruth was devastated when she found me and later took her own life too. But I never see her, and that is odd.
Did you really think the rapture had happened when you fell into that empty grave?
Fuck yeah! I’d heard about that shit all of my life, man. I used to go home from church scared shitless every Sunday night, but then the voices would tell me I had nothing to worry about and I’d finally go to sleep.
Is demon-possession real? Does it cause mental illness? Or are the mentally-ill accused of being possessed simply as a witch-hunt—as an excuse to explain the failure of modern medicine to deal with the disease?
If you believe in the Bible, you must believe in the devil and his demons. I met him personally after I committed suicide. I don’t want to talk about that now. I’ve also met John Milton, the poet, and I know now his book was based upon visions revealed to him by the same demons that tormented me. In the New Testament Christ himself cast out demons while here on earth. You can’t just say it isn’t so because modern medicine has created a term called “schizophrenia” to classify all mental illness. Now that’s insane! But your question is like which came first—the egg or the chicken. According to the bible the chicken came first as God created all the creatures and placed them in the Garden. Demons are real and they walk with us everyday. They take many forms to disguise themselves. They may come in the form of addictions or illness or flat-out possession—like in my case. A fool believes he is followed only by angels, but the devil is there, shadowing every step you take.
Are there vampires and zombies?
LOL! Those are just my buddies in different forms.
Will we ever see you again?
Yes. My author plans to expand my story into a novel. He wants to explore the connection between possession and religion, sexuality and death. I am too perfect a character for him to simply let die. Besides, I am haunting him now the way the demons he created in my story haunted me. I won’t leave him alone until he writes my novel.
Are things better for you now?
No one understands the living hell of the mentally ill. Although life for us is a cruel joke, we share the same passion for life as anyone else. I used to love to go for a drive in my car whenever I had one. I loved a beautiful fall morning, or the chill of a winter afternoon, or the warmth of a spring day. But my illness made me miserable, and death eventually gave me all knowledge. Now I know and understand everything, so I am getting along much better now and spending eternity getting even with those still living who tormented me and added to my living hell.
So, yes! Things are much better now.
August 31, 2013
Why I Write Southern Sacrilege
Why I write Southern Sacrilege
By CD Mitchell
I wrote my first story when I was ten years old. It sucked, but all first drafts suck, and I have several stories in their tenth or fifteenth revision that still suck. I have a book coming out soon, but that doesn’t make me a good writer. In fact, when I teach college composition, I always tell my students I am no different from them—I am simply a struggling writer seeking to improve every day—constantly trying to understand why I feel this urge to spell out my thoughts and feelings and to spill my guts to the world so they can judge and label me.
Growing up in the south has shaped me into that creature that many writers do not want to become—a southern writer. The proverb is that one should write what we know. I know life in the south, as I was born and raised there. That is what I write about. Unlike many others who would shun this title, I not only seek it out, but am proud of it. I am not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with other southern writers before me, but to simply imagine myself as a “southern writer” is nearly as great as the dreams I had as a child of playing in a World Series for the Cardinals or flying F-15’s against the Communists.
Due to bind luck and sheer determination, I will have a story collection released in September, 2013. My stories are steeped with religious themes and sexuality—even a bit of erotica–and none of them have the kind of ending that would send a Bible-thumping Pentecostal shouting down the aisles over “Gawd’s” many blessings. In fact, I have been accused of writing these stories to piss off preachers, and one lady even suggested that to write stories like this a preacher must have really hurt me.
So I got to thinking and wondering why religion is so prevalent in southern literature and in my own work.
To my ancestors, religion is a family business, just like carpentry. Nearly as many of my fifty odd first cousins went into religion for a living as they did carpentry and the building trades. My mother carried us off to church every time the doors opened, and she refused to let us go to church anywhere else. As children we used to play “Church,” and being raised in a Pentecostal church is a bit different from any other religion. They are over-bearing, obnoxious, judgmental, condescending, loud, enthusiastic, and wonderful people. They believe that each soul has a special calling and work to do for the lord. At a recent family reunion, one of my “Christian” aunties grabbed me and pulled me off to the side.
“Son,” she said. “I have felt a special burden for you lately, and I have been praying for you every day. When are you gonna give in and follow the lord’s calling for your life?”
She was one of the many that believed I would make a great preacher. But like the comedian Rodney Carrington noted, I’d have been a great preacher, just a bad example.
“I have found my calling,” I replied. “And I am doing the lord’s work with a dogged determination.”
“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” she said. “And what is that calling, son?
“God has called me to go out and do shit on Saturday night to give you people things to pray about on Sunday morning.”
“Git away from me you rotten scoundrel,” she said. She laughed as she walked away, but I don’t think she meant it.
I should have told her God has called me to write about the insanity of religion.
My family believe in fearing God, and they believe in scaring children into worshipping God. Many nights I went home scared to sleep after a Sunday night service.
Recently I revealed this truth to my mother, who simply replied, “Well, if you’d been right with the lord, you wouldn’t have had any reason to be scared, would ya?”
They had a clichéd, one-line response, usually including some reference to scripture, for every situation
After giving a friend a copy of an anthology that published one of my stories to place in the waiting room of his office, I was later told he removed the book because the opening paragraph referred to an incident of incest. He feared the story might offend some of his more conservative clients. I am sure the last entry of my new story collection, where the preacher gets bent over in the baptism tank by his head deacon while they engage in anal sex after baptizing souls all Sunday, will not be placed in the waiting room either.
Someone even asked me why I had to write “such blasphemy?”
I wasn’t sure, but I think I found my answers in the essays of Flannery O’Connor.
While traveling recently I stumbled upon Andalusia, Miss O’Connor’s home. I immediately performed a U-turn and drove up the long driveway. I had visited Rowan Oaks and the Hemingway/Pfieffer museum, but neither affected me the way that walking on the grounds of Andalusia affected me.
I walked into the front door and grabbed a pen to sign the register. The historian began his speech, and I asked him to wait, as I was a bit star-struck at the moment. I wanted to remove my shoes, as I truly felt like I was walking on holy ground. The greatest insights I received from this visit came later as I read her essays collected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald into a book titled Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. On page 142 I found an essay titled “The Church and the Fiction Writer” that held all the answers to my questions.
In this essay, Miss O’Connor speaks of the Catholic Church, but any religion could be substituted. For me I substitute all religious organizations. My interpretations of Miss O’Connor’s words in this essay are my own—the same way that believers interpret and twist the Holy Scriptures to support their own beliefs. I welcome comment or dissension on my interpretations of these holy scripts.
Miss O’Connor seems to say on P.145 that the church believes that, whatever the religious writer CAN see, “there are certain things that he should not see, straight or otherwise.” She observes that it is supposed by believers that writers should write fiction in a way to “prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural” (145). This would require the fiction writer to substitute the “parochial aesthetic and cultural insularity” of the church for his own vision of his art, and is also one of the gravest forms of censorship.
This seems to be exactly the response I have encountered. Because my first story spoke of incest, someone may be offended. But as a former prosecutor and defense attorney, I can tell you that any southern circuit court docket is loaded with such cases. I suspect the same is true for the north as well.
But Miss O’Connor notes that “what the fiction writer will discover…is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interest of abstract truth” (146).
The artistic writer will reveal his truth as he sees it, and he will refuse to allow anyone else to substitute their version of the truth for his. If the reader is not satisfied with my version of the truth, they can always read a book by Joel Osteen. O’Connor explains that such a writer “in so far as he has the mind of the church, will see from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery.” But on P. 146 she notes that “to the modern mind, as represented by Mr. Phillip Wylie, ‘this is warped vision which bears little or no resemblance to the truth as it is known today.’” She suggests that the problem for the Catholic fiction writer is discovering the “presence of grace as it appears in nature” and not allowing his faith to become “detached from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is.”
Hemingway spoke of writing true sentences. O’Connor speaks of writing true nature, and that grace must appear from these observations, not be imposed upon them by the writer—that is, if the writer seeks to create true art. When O’Connor speaks of writing “nature,” she speaks of writing as the real world exists—not writing subject to a superimposed religious aesthetic.
Her words further indicate a belief that the Catholic reader—substitute Religious reader here once again—has separated “nature” and “grace” and “reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché” and that he recognizes “nature in literature only in two forms, the sentimental and the obscene” (147). Here she makes an incredible comparison of the sentimental to pornography. She defines sentimentality as “an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.” That overemphasis tends to distort sentimentality into its opposite, the obscene. O’Connor notes that we come to grace because of our fall. I believe she is saying that sentimental writing omits the concrete reality of our sins in order to arrive at a “mock state of innocence.” She compares this process to pornography, which she claims separates “the connection of sex to its hard purpose, [reproduction] and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.” O’Connor says in essence, that pornography is simply another form of sentimentality. However, although I believe the religious reader will embrace the pornography of the imposed religious aesthetic and the sentimental nature of the fiction forged by this imposition, they refuse to accept this writing—I refuse to call it literature–as being as obscene as any form of pornography!
“When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality” (148). Grace must be revealed, she seems to be saying, by the true situations we face everyday. I can tell you from my own experience, the one-line clichéd answers tossed at me whenever I questioned religion do not fix these situations. “A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it” (150).
Any good preacher would here, after offering his verses as authority and his explanations as guiding principles, announce he was closing before offering his altar call.
My stories pull no punches. Make no apologies, and respect no persons. I write about life as I see it, and I write about the people that religion has failed. “It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life” (151).
On the last page of her essay Miss O’Connor explains that “the serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be explained by the adequate motivation of its characters, or by a believable imitation of a way of life, or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story to occupy himself with” (153). If mother’s one-line clichés can explain away the heart of the story, why write it? I believe in the last paragraph of the essay, that Miss Flannery O’Connor instructs the writer who aspires to write true fiction to go beyond the point where religion has the answers: “…the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted” (153).
After submitting Job to horrendous trials in order to win a bet he made with the devil himself, God replaced all he took from Job with excess and abundance. If God had not rewarded Job, the story would have been completely different. I write about those God forgot to reward after their trials, those whose mistakes have left them suffering from burdens from which they can find no relief, or who suffer from burdens that, like Job’s, were created from no fault of their own. These are the characters who are truly challenged to find grace. If the reader’s faith is not strong enough to read these stories and receive the messages contained therein, then perhaps the stories can somehow bring them, to a closer walk with God. If not, they will find themselves as lost as the characters I have created. Of course, they can always read a book by Joel Osteen.
Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof!
Tags: Blogging, Flannery O'Connor, gods naked will, religion, southern literature, true, truth, WritingC.D. Mitchell
By CD Mitchell
I wrote my first story when I was ten years old. It sucked, but all first drafts suck, and I have several stories in their tenth or fifteenth revision that still suck. I have a book coming out soon, but that doesn’t make me a good writer. In fact, when I teach college composition, I always tell my students I am no different from them—I am simply a struggling writer seeking to improve every day—constantly trying to understand why I feel this urge to spell out my thoughts and feelings and to spill my guts to the world so they can judge and label me.
Growing up in the south has shaped me into that creature that many writers do not want to become—a southern writer. The proverb is that one should write what we know. I know life in the south, as I was born and raised there. That is what I write about. Unlike many others who would shun this title, I not only seek it out, but am proud of it. I am not worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with other southern writers before me, but to simply imagine myself as a “southern writer” is nearly as great as the dreams I had as a child of playing in a World Series for the Cardinals or flying F-15’s against the Communists.
Due to bind luck and sheer determination, I will have a story collection released in September, 2013. My stories are steeped with religious themes and sexuality—even a bit of erotica–and none of them have the kind of ending that would send a Bible-thumping Pentecostal shouting down the aisles over “Gawd’s” many blessings. In fact, I have been accused of writing these stories to piss off preachers, and one lady even suggested that to write stories like this a preacher must have really hurt me.
So I got to thinking and wondering why religion is so prevalent in southern literature and in my own work.
To my ancestors, religion is a family business, just like carpentry. Nearly as many of my fifty odd first cousins went into religion for a living as they did carpentry and the building trades. My mother carried us off to church every time the doors opened, and she refused to let us go to church anywhere else. As children we used to play “Church,” and being raised in a Pentecostal church is a bit different from any other religion. They are over-bearing, obnoxious, judgmental, condescending, loud, enthusiastic, and wonderful people. They believe that each soul has a special calling and work to do for the lord. At a recent family reunion, one of my “Christian” aunties grabbed me and pulled me off to the side.
“Son,” she said. “I have felt a special burden for you lately, and I have been praying for you every day. When are you gonna give in and follow the lord’s calling for your life?”
She was one of the many that believed I would make a great preacher. But like the comedian Rodney Carrington noted, I’d have been a great preacher, just a bad example.
“I have found my calling,” I replied. “And I am doing the lord’s work with a dogged determination.”
“Oh, thank you, Jesus,” she said. “And what is that calling, son?
“God has called me to go out and do shit on Saturday night to give you people things to pray about on Sunday morning.”
“Git away from me you rotten scoundrel,” she said. She laughed as she walked away, but I don’t think she meant it.
I should have told her God has called me to write about the insanity of religion.
My family believe in fearing God, and they believe in scaring children into worshipping God. Many nights I went home scared to sleep after a Sunday night service.
Recently I revealed this truth to my mother, who simply replied, “Well, if you’d been right with the lord, you wouldn’t have had any reason to be scared, would ya?”
They had a clichéd, one-line response, usually including some reference to scripture, for every situation
After giving a friend a copy of an anthology that published one of my stories to place in the waiting room of his office, I was later told he removed the book because the opening paragraph referred to an incident of incest. He feared the story might offend some of his more conservative clients. I am sure the last entry of my new story collection, where the preacher gets bent over in the baptism tank by his head deacon while they engage in anal sex after baptizing souls all Sunday, will not be placed in the waiting room either.
Someone even asked me why I had to write “such blasphemy?”
I wasn’t sure, but I think I found my answers in the essays of Flannery O’Connor.
While traveling recently I stumbled upon Andalusia, Miss O’Connor’s home. I immediately performed a U-turn and drove up the long driveway. I had visited Rowan Oaks and the Hemingway/Pfieffer museum, but neither affected me the way that walking on the grounds of Andalusia affected me.
I walked into the front door and grabbed a pen to sign the register. The historian began his speech, and I asked him to wait, as I was a bit star-struck at the moment. I wanted to remove my shoes, as I truly felt like I was walking on holy ground. The greatest insights I received from this visit came later as I read her essays collected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald into a book titled Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose. On page 142 I found an essay titled “The Church and the Fiction Writer” that held all the answers to my questions.
In this essay, Miss O’Connor speaks of the Catholic Church, but any religion could be substituted. For me I substitute all religious organizations. My interpretations of Miss O’Connor’s words in this essay are my own—the same way that believers interpret and twist the Holy Scriptures to support their own beliefs. I welcome comment or dissension on my interpretations of these holy scripts.
Miss O’Connor seems to say on P.145 that the church believes that, whatever the religious writer CAN see, “there are certain things that he should not see, straight or otherwise.” She observes that it is supposed by believers that writers should write fiction in a way to “prove the truth of the Faith, or at the least, to prove the existence of the supernatural” (145). This would require the fiction writer to substitute the “parochial aesthetic and cultural insularity” of the church for his own vision of his art, and is also one of the gravest forms of censorship.
This seems to be exactly the response I have encountered. Because my first story spoke of incest, someone may be offended. But as a former prosecutor and defense attorney, I can tell you that any southern circuit court docket is loaded with such cases. I suspect the same is true for the north as well.
But Miss O’Connor notes that “what the fiction writer will discover…is that he himself cannot move or mold reality in the interest of abstract truth” (146).
The artistic writer will reveal his truth as he sees it, and he will refuse to allow anyone else to substitute their version of the truth for his. If the reader is not satisfied with my version of the truth, they can always read a book by Joel Osteen. O’Connor explains that such a writer “in so far as he has the mind of the church, will see from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery.” But on P. 146 she notes that “to the modern mind, as represented by Mr. Phillip Wylie, ‘this is warped vision which bears little or no resemblance to the truth as it is known today.’” She suggests that the problem for the Catholic fiction writer is discovering the “presence of grace as it appears in nature” and not allowing his faith to become “detached from his dramatic sense and from his vision of what-is.”
Hemingway spoke of writing true sentences. O’Connor speaks of writing true nature, and that grace must appear from these observations, not be imposed upon them by the writer—that is, if the writer seeks to create true art. When O’Connor speaks of writing “nature,” she speaks of writing as the real world exists—not writing subject to a superimposed religious aesthetic.
Her words further indicate a belief that the Catholic reader—substitute Religious reader here once again—has separated “nature” and “grace” and “reduced his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché” and that he recognizes “nature in literature only in two forms, the sentimental and the obscene” (147). Here she makes an incredible comparison of the sentimental to pornography. She defines sentimentality as “an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence.” That overemphasis tends to distort sentimentality into its opposite, the obscene. O’Connor notes that we come to grace because of our fall. I believe she is saying that sentimental writing omits the concrete reality of our sins in order to arrive at a “mock state of innocence.” She compares this process to pornography, which she claims separates “the connection of sex to its hard purpose, [reproduction] and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.” O’Connor says in essence, that pornography is simply another form of sentimentality. However, although I believe the religious reader will embrace the pornography of the imposed religious aesthetic and the sentimental nature of the fiction forged by this imposition, they refuse to accept this writing—I refuse to call it literature–as being as obscene as any form of pornography!
“When fiction is made according to its nature, it should reinforce our sense of the supernatural by grounding it in concrete, observable reality” (148). Grace must be revealed, she seems to be saying, by the true situations we face everyday. I can tell you from my own experience, the one-line clichéd answers tossed at me whenever I questioned religion do not fix these situations. “A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it” (150).
Any good preacher would here, after offering his verses as authority and his explanations as guiding principles, announce he was closing before offering his altar call.
My stories pull no punches. Make no apologies, and respect no persons. I write about life as I see it, and I write about the people that religion has failed. “It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life” (151).
On the last page of her essay Miss O’Connor explains that “the serious fiction writer will think that any story that can be explained by the adequate motivation of its characters, or by a believable imitation of a way of life, or by a proper theology, will not be a large enough story to occupy himself with” (153). If mother’s one-line clichés can explain away the heart of the story, why write it? I believe in the last paragraph of the essay, that Miss Flannery O’Connor instructs the writer who aspires to write true fiction to go beyond the point where religion has the answers: “…the meaning of his story does not begin except at a depth where these things have been exhausted” (153).
After submitting Job to horrendous trials in order to win a bet he made with the devil himself, God replaced all he took from Job with excess and abundance. If God had not rewarded Job, the story would have been completely different. I write about those God forgot to reward after their trials, those whose mistakes have left them suffering from burdens from which they can find no relief, or who suffer from burdens that, like Job’s, were created from no fault of their own. These are the characters who are truly challenged to find grace. If the reader’s faith is not strong enough to read these stories and receive the messages contained therein, then perhaps the stories can somehow bring them, to a closer walk with God. If not, they will find themselves as lost as the characters I have created. Of course, they can always read a book by Joel Osteen.
Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof!
Tags: Blogging, Flannery O'Connor, gods naked will, religion, southern literature, true, truth, WritingC.D. Mitchell
The Story behind the Stories of God's Naked Will: Clovis Clementine
Helllo all:
Writers are always asked “Where do you find material for your stories?” and “What ever inspired you to write this piece?” With the wild topics in “God’s Naked Will,” I have already received several such questions. I thought I would go through the table of contents and give the history of the inspiration for each story and how those stories came about. John Dufresne used to post on his blog “Today’s Short Story Waiting to be Written.” I guess I would call this “The Inspiration for Yesterday’s Drivel.”
These will appear as weekly entries on my blog going through the table of contents of God’s Naked Will in chronological order.
So that brings us to the first chapter of God’s Naked Will, the story “Clovis Clementine,” and one of the wildest stories I have ever written.
The original inspiration for this story came from a newspaper article in the Atlanta Constitution that ran sometime after September and before December, 1997. The article told of an appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court of a denial of workmen’s compensation benefits. The claimant had been a groundskeeper of a cemetery near New Brunswick. The cemetery had been flooded by a hurricane–I can’t find the name of the hurricane, but it must have been sometime in 1995 or 1996 for this case to have worked its way to and through the GA appellate courts.
The hurricane had flooded the cemetery, saturating the grounds and causing the coffins to pop up and float off with the rising waters. The claimant had, as part of his job, been required to stuff the dead bodies back into the coffins and retrieve all of the lost bodies he could find for reburial. As a result of this traumatic experience, he became neurotic, having dreams and nightmares of bodies floating around him and rising from his floors, and even woke himself once as he shot holes in his chest of drawers trying to kill one of these zombies.
He had applied for workmen’s compensation benefits when he could no longer do his job, and of course, had been denied. The Ga Supreme Court also denied his claim, stating that the GA legislature had not provided for benefits to be paid for mental incapacity and urging the legislature to take immediate action if that was their intent.
Well, I had found me a story!
Along about that time I read a book that also provided a profound influence on the evolution of this story. The book was by Tom Wolf—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. You gotta read the book. But Wolf created some fantastic images, and I became fascinated by the psychedelic world of LSD.
So I created a main character who was an acid-head and a Vietnam vet—yes, even I knew at the time it was clichéd but I used it to get started. I set him up working at the cemetery and dropping acid and having flashbacks. Then one night he walks outside after the hurricane and falls into an open grave and believes the rapture has happened. That was when the bodies all jumped up and started talking to him.
While I was living at Russellville Ar., from 1998 till 1999, I hired an MA student studying creative writing at AR.Tech to critique my stories. Although at the time I was far too narcissistic about my writing to realize it, he was an excellent coach, and I wish I could remember his name so I could thank him. He suggested the story was clichéd, and that I should “Drop the acid” (he laughed at his own joke) and concentrate on the real problems of mental illness.
I fired him shortly thereafter for being such a lousy judge of creative talent. My bad. This was 1998.
The story sat neglected in my archives until I started the MFA program at McNeese in 2002. I pulled it out, polished it up, and submitted it to workshop, once again to have my hopes dashed by the Portland Mutual Admiration Society (The PMAD”S, students all from Portland who believed they owned all of the creative talent in the classroom and everyone else sucked) and the Dead Poet’s Society (poets in the program who believed rhythm was all that was necessary—who needs story in the face of iambic pentameter) who believed the story a complete failure.
The story was once again set aside indefinitely.
I completed my MFA program, graduating in 2006 from the University of Memphis. Shortly thereafter, my younger sister died from complications created by her battle with schizophrenia. I also watched “A Beautiful Mind” with Russell Crowe and an episode of “Criminal Minds” where a schizophrenic criminal took hostages on a bus and the director included scenes that revealed the hostage-taker’s visions of the voices and people talking to him, telling him what to do. Of course, these people could not be seen by the hostages.
This got me thinking more about that old story I had titled “Acid Images.” I loved that story, but I had learned that the ones we love are usually the one’s we need to let die.
I had learned much about acute paranoid schizophrenia by then—dealing extensively with the illness as a result of the affliction of my sister, my duties as a prosecuting attorney responsible for civil commitments of the mentally ill in Arkansas, and a defense attorney with clients stricken with the illness. I had learned immediately there is no help, and little if any resources, available to the mentally ill and the families struggling to deal with mental illness. I had also learned that many of the Bible-thumpers in the Bible-Belt South attributed mental illness to demon possession.
Here I must acknowledge the influence of being raised in a Pentecostal church that firmly believed in demon possession. They taught and talked about demon possession incessantly—almost as much as they preached about the rapture—and they believed that you could be possessed by simply watching “The Exorcist” or attending a Kiss concert. To me, slasher movies are not scary, because I nothing that walks on two or four legs will ever frighten me. But The Exorcist was the scariest movie I had ever seen because I was taught all of my life that demon possession was real, and I would be possessed if I ever watched this movie.
I still have family members who claim watching that movie is what is wrong with me today.
I remembered the earlier critique where I was encouraged to “drop the acid” angle of the story. I started thinking I could revise the story and keep basically the same plot, only use mental illness instead of LSD. I could also drop the PTSD-Vietnam-Vet cliché. Few if any of our vets returned from Vietnam to turn into John Rambo. Although PTSD is a severe problem, after the death of my sister, my passion now was for those suffering from mental illness. The character was a flawed cliché that had to be dropped from the story. I just wasn’t sure how to replace him. I now had a potential revision.
Then within a week’s time, my mother and my younger brother both asked me about that old story of the cemetery caretaker. This was now 2011. They remembered that story after all of those years and wanted to know what I had done with it.
So someone else had been as smitten with the story as I was. Every once in a while you have those moments as a writer where you think, that just maybe, someone gets it.
A short time later I came across a call for submissions from Flying House. Flying House selected six writers and six artists and paired them together to create a new story and new artistic creation for the Flying House Anthology. At the time, this had nothing to do with the story, but eventually wound up completely changing the story.
I applied, as I apply for everything, thinking I had no chance of being selected, and was fortunate enough to be one of six writers chosen for the project. More importantly, I was matched with the brilliant Chicago photographer Jennifer Moore. Before I even talked with Jennifer, I went to her website and viewed her work. I was awe-struck. She had exhibits touring Europe and all across the United States. I was worried she would object to even being matched with me.
We finally caught up on a phone call and got to talking about our creative interests. Jennifer seemed to have a morbid, spiritual fascination with the macabre and grotesque, and I knew we would be like peas and carrots. We both agreed her pictures should reflect her own visions and interpretations of the themes of the story and not just illustrate the story.
While chatting with Jennifer, I thought of the old “Acid Images” story. I told her of the story and how I had considered completely revising the plot and approaching the issue from the point of view of an acute paranoid schizophrenic. I hoped to some day use the story to call attention to the plight of the mentally ill and to show just how much courage it took for them to live each day of their lives.
I have always believed my sister, Sheila, was one of the most courageous people I ever met.
Jennifer was fascinated with the idea and wanted to work on it, so our collaboration began. I shifted the focus of the story to schizophrenia. I was also working on new stories for my collection and thought I might be able to use some religious themes within this.
This story could never have taken the shape it achieved without the incredible input from Jennifer Moore. She tirelessly read revision after revision, offering invaluable insight and advice that resulted in major revisions and minor tweaking and even individual word choices.
As the story took shape, I knew it needed a new title. I assigned a working title, “The Cloven Hoof,” but I wasn’t happy with that. I gave my character the name of “Clovis.” But I couldn’t decide on a last name. So I went on Facebook and asked for suggestions. A dear friend from high school, Jenifer Dodd Vanaman, suggested “Clementine.”
I had the name for my character, and the title of my story—“Clovis Clementine.”
I finished revisions of the story, and Jennifer Moore finished her photos for the story, and we all met at the Maes Art Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, in late August of 2012 for what proved to be one of the most exciting professional events of my life. My oldest son, Clinton Mitchell, attended the event with me. Having him as a part of such a fantastic professional event was priceless. My children have been made aware of my many failures-certain people in their lives have made sure to point these out—and I have made their task easy over the years. But for once, one of my children saw a side of their father no one else in my family had ever experienced.
Maes Art gallery, Chicago, 2012
Maes Art gallery, Chicago, 2012
When we write a story, we know our own vision and understanding of the story. When I finally observed the photographic essay Jennifer Moore had created for my story, I was speechless. My favorite was the one of the flies stuck to the paper, which s perfectly depicted the hysteria that is acute paranoid schizophrenia. Her vision and interpretation of “Clovis Clementine” was simply amazing. Her photos for this story can be seen on her website by clicking here:
http://jmooreart.com/section/324722_C...
When selecting and arranging the stories for the book “God’s Naked Will” I knew I needed a story at the beginning of the collection with a ‘WOW!” factor that would stir my readers to want to read more.
I knew there was only one choice for that position! “Clovis Clementine.”
Ms. Moore and I have continued to collaborate on other projects. We have a new manuscript titled “Original Sin” of stories and photos we are marketing in Europe. Jennifer continues to experience tremendous, well-deserved success for her visionary photographic work that now lines my living room wall.
And now you have the rest of the story, of an idea that evolved over fifteen years, from 1997 to 2012, of a story that became a collaboration and a testament—I hope—to the plight of the mentally ill
Writers are always asked “Where do you find material for your stories?” and “What ever inspired you to write this piece?” With the wild topics in “God’s Naked Will,” I have already received several such questions. I thought I would go through the table of contents and give the history of the inspiration for each story and how those stories came about. John Dufresne used to post on his blog “Today’s Short Story Waiting to be Written.” I guess I would call this “The Inspiration for Yesterday’s Drivel.”
These will appear as weekly entries on my blog going through the table of contents of God’s Naked Will in chronological order.
So that brings us to the first chapter of God’s Naked Will, the story “Clovis Clementine,” and one of the wildest stories I have ever written.
The original inspiration for this story came from a newspaper article in the Atlanta Constitution that ran sometime after September and before December, 1997. The article told of an appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court of a denial of workmen’s compensation benefits. The claimant had been a groundskeeper of a cemetery near New Brunswick. The cemetery had been flooded by a hurricane–I can’t find the name of the hurricane, but it must have been sometime in 1995 or 1996 for this case to have worked its way to and through the GA appellate courts.
The hurricane had flooded the cemetery, saturating the grounds and causing the coffins to pop up and float off with the rising waters. The claimant had, as part of his job, been required to stuff the dead bodies back into the coffins and retrieve all of the lost bodies he could find for reburial. As a result of this traumatic experience, he became neurotic, having dreams and nightmares of bodies floating around him and rising from his floors, and even woke himself once as he shot holes in his chest of drawers trying to kill one of these zombies.
He had applied for workmen’s compensation benefits when he could no longer do his job, and of course, had been denied. The Ga Supreme Court also denied his claim, stating that the GA legislature had not provided for benefits to be paid for mental incapacity and urging the legislature to take immediate action if that was their intent.
Well, I had found me a story!
Along about that time I read a book that also provided a profound influence on the evolution of this story. The book was by Tom Wolf—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. You gotta read the book. But Wolf created some fantastic images, and I became fascinated by the psychedelic world of LSD.
So I created a main character who was an acid-head and a Vietnam vet—yes, even I knew at the time it was clichéd but I used it to get started. I set him up working at the cemetery and dropping acid and having flashbacks. Then one night he walks outside after the hurricane and falls into an open grave and believes the rapture has happened. That was when the bodies all jumped up and started talking to him.
While I was living at Russellville Ar., from 1998 till 1999, I hired an MA student studying creative writing at AR.Tech to critique my stories. Although at the time I was far too narcissistic about my writing to realize it, he was an excellent coach, and I wish I could remember his name so I could thank him. He suggested the story was clichéd, and that I should “Drop the acid” (he laughed at his own joke) and concentrate on the real problems of mental illness.
I fired him shortly thereafter for being such a lousy judge of creative talent. My bad. This was 1998.
The story sat neglected in my archives until I started the MFA program at McNeese in 2002. I pulled it out, polished it up, and submitted it to workshop, once again to have my hopes dashed by the Portland Mutual Admiration Society (The PMAD”S, students all from Portland who believed they owned all of the creative talent in the classroom and everyone else sucked) and the Dead Poet’s Society (poets in the program who believed rhythm was all that was necessary—who needs story in the face of iambic pentameter) who believed the story a complete failure.
The story was once again set aside indefinitely.
I completed my MFA program, graduating in 2006 from the University of Memphis. Shortly thereafter, my younger sister died from complications created by her battle with schizophrenia. I also watched “A Beautiful Mind” with Russell Crowe and an episode of “Criminal Minds” where a schizophrenic criminal took hostages on a bus and the director included scenes that revealed the hostage-taker’s visions of the voices and people talking to him, telling him what to do. Of course, these people could not be seen by the hostages.
This got me thinking more about that old story I had titled “Acid Images.” I loved that story, but I had learned that the ones we love are usually the one’s we need to let die.
I had learned much about acute paranoid schizophrenia by then—dealing extensively with the illness as a result of the affliction of my sister, my duties as a prosecuting attorney responsible for civil commitments of the mentally ill in Arkansas, and a defense attorney with clients stricken with the illness. I had learned immediately there is no help, and little if any resources, available to the mentally ill and the families struggling to deal with mental illness. I had also learned that many of the Bible-thumpers in the Bible-Belt South attributed mental illness to demon possession.
Here I must acknowledge the influence of being raised in a Pentecostal church that firmly believed in demon possession. They taught and talked about demon possession incessantly—almost as much as they preached about the rapture—and they believed that you could be possessed by simply watching “The Exorcist” or attending a Kiss concert. To me, slasher movies are not scary, because I nothing that walks on two or four legs will ever frighten me. But The Exorcist was the scariest movie I had ever seen because I was taught all of my life that demon possession was real, and I would be possessed if I ever watched this movie.
I still have family members who claim watching that movie is what is wrong with me today.
I remembered the earlier critique where I was encouraged to “drop the acid” angle of the story. I started thinking I could revise the story and keep basically the same plot, only use mental illness instead of LSD. I could also drop the PTSD-Vietnam-Vet cliché. Few if any of our vets returned from Vietnam to turn into John Rambo. Although PTSD is a severe problem, after the death of my sister, my passion now was for those suffering from mental illness. The character was a flawed cliché that had to be dropped from the story. I just wasn’t sure how to replace him. I now had a potential revision.
Then within a week’s time, my mother and my younger brother both asked me about that old story of the cemetery caretaker. This was now 2011. They remembered that story after all of those years and wanted to know what I had done with it.
So someone else had been as smitten with the story as I was. Every once in a while you have those moments as a writer where you think, that just maybe, someone gets it.
A short time later I came across a call for submissions from Flying House. Flying House selected six writers and six artists and paired them together to create a new story and new artistic creation for the Flying House Anthology. At the time, this had nothing to do with the story, but eventually wound up completely changing the story.
I applied, as I apply for everything, thinking I had no chance of being selected, and was fortunate enough to be one of six writers chosen for the project. More importantly, I was matched with the brilliant Chicago photographer Jennifer Moore. Before I even talked with Jennifer, I went to her website and viewed her work. I was awe-struck. She had exhibits touring Europe and all across the United States. I was worried she would object to even being matched with me.
We finally caught up on a phone call and got to talking about our creative interests. Jennifer seemed to have a morbid, spiritual fascination with the macabre and grotesque, and I knew we would be like peas and carrots. We both agreed her pictures should reflect her own visions and interpretations of the themes of the story and not just illustrate the story.
While chatting with Jennifer, I thought of the old “Acid Images” story. I told her of the story and how I had considered completely revising the plot and approaching the issue from the point of view of an acute paranoid schizophrenic. I hoped to some day use the story to call attention to the plight of the mentally ill and to show just how much courage it took for them to live each day of their lives.
I have always believed my sister, Sheila, was one of the most courageous people I ever met.
Jennifer was fascinated with the idea and wanted to work on it, so our collaboration began. I shifted the focus of the story to schizophrenia. I was also working on new stories for my collection and thought I might be able to use some religious themes within this.
This story could never have taken the shape it achieved without the incredible input from Jennifer Moore. She tirelessly read revision after revision, offering invaluable insight and advice that resulted in major revisions and minor tweaking and even individual word choices.
As the story took shape, I knew it needed a new title. I assigned a working title, “The Cloven Hoof,” but I wasn’t happy with that. I gave my character the name of “Clovis.” But I couldn’t decide on a last name. So I went on Facebook and asked for suggestions. A dear friend from high school, Jenifer Dodd Vanaman, suggested “Clementine.”
I had the name for my character, and the title of my story—“Clovis Clementine.”
I finished revisions of the story, and Jennifer Moore finished her photos for the story, and we all met at the Maes Art Gallery in Chicago, Illinois, in late August of 2012 for what proved to be one of the most exciting professional events of my life. My oldest son, Clinton Mitchell, attended the event with me. Having him as a part of such a fantastic professional event was priceless. My children have been made aware of my many failures-certain people in their lives have made sure to point these out—and I have made their task easy over the years. But for once, one of my children saw a side of their father no one else in my family had ever experienced.
Maes Art gallery, Chicago, 2012
Maes Art gallery, Chicago, 2012
When we write a story, we know our own vision and understanding of the story. When I finally observed the photographic essay Jennifer Moore had created for my story, I was speechless. My favorite was the one of the flies stuck to the paper, which s perfectly depicted the hysteria that is acute paranoid schizophrenia. Her vision and interpretation of “Clovis Clementine” was simply amazing. Her photos for this story can be seen on her website by clicking here:
http://jmooreart.com/section/324722_C...
When selecting and arranging the stories for the book “God’s Naked Will” I knew I needed a story at the beginning of the collection with a ‘WOW!” factor that would stir my readers to want to read more.
I knew there was only one choice for that position! “Clovis Clementine.”
Ms. Moore and I have continued to collaborate on other projects. We have a new manuscript titled “Original Sin” of stories and photos we are marketing in Europe. Jennifer continues to experience tremendous, well-deserved success for her visionary photographic work that now lines my living room wall.
And now you have the rest of the story, of an idea that evolved over fifteen years, from 1997 to 2012, of a story that became a collaboration and a testament—I hope—to the plight of the mentally ill
