Blood Meridian and Intermediate Novel at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop

If anybody’s interested, I’ll be facilitating two sessions at Lighthouse starting in mid-August. The first is the 8 Week: Intermediate Novel Workshop, meeting on Saturday mornings, and the second is the 4-Week Reading as a Writer: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, meeting on Monday evenings.

I’m really excited for both, of course, but I’m a little out of my mind for the Blood Meridian session. Anybody who knows me has probably heard a little of my rap on that book, and I’ve been having a ball reading and compiling notes in preparation.

Like this passage, from Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860:

In American mythogenesis the founding fathers were not those eighteenth-century gentlemen who composed a nation at Philadelphia. Rather, they were those who (to paraphrase Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) tore violently a nation from the implacable and opulent wilderness – the rogues, adventurers, and land boomers; the Indian fighters, traders, missionaries, explorers, and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence, and their justifications of themselves, as expressed in literature, are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history

. . .

The voluminous reports of presidential commissions on violence, racism, and civil disorder have recently begun to say to us what artists like Melville and Faulkner had earlier prophesied: that myths reach out of the past to cripple, incapacitate, or strike down the living.