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Ginny & The Ouroboros by Stephanie Lorée
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Despite being a Writers of the Future finalist selection, "Ginny & The Ouroboros" took three years and thirteen rejections to find a home. To quote Ms. Lorée: 'I like to think that Ginny made me immune to rejection. I would joke about all the personal rejections I received, about how I was always the bridesmaid, never the bride. But the truth was, the story was driving me out of my mind. It got the point where I was checking my email on my phone, and I'd turn to my husband and say, "Guess who got another personal rejection?" And he would know exactly to whom I referred.'
Of the many reasons to reject a story, some have nothing to do with the story itself, others are purely situational. My question is:
Do you thing there's something structural about "Ginny & The Ouroboros" that made it a hard sell, and if so, what do you think that is?
I'm not sure what you mean by "structural" but this isn't a second-world fantasy and I can see how most people would not want to piss off the cops. Depicting brutality is one thing but stuff like "Off-duty like this, he looks almost human." might be pushing the envelope.Of course there are publishers who don't mind: http://www.akpress.org/octavia-s-broo... Better watch the way you use the A-word if you want them to publish you though. :-)
I am also not sure what is meant by structural. However if cops were going to retaliate against people involved with any work of fiction in which characters have and express a low opinion of police, they are going to have a sizeable job ahead of them and it might be a couple of centuries before they work their way around to this particular short story. Who can't name off the top of their head twenty major motion pictures or novels or television shows in which some character might well say just exactly that sentence? I certainly can, without much effort.I was watching Winter's Bone last night, speaking of a major motion picture in which there are characters without any time or patience for the police at all. :-)
As far as why the story wasn't immediately accepted, are 13 submissions such an unreasonable number before a story gets sold? I'm not intimately familiar with the market but that doesn't sound to me like an out of the question number of submissions for a story that is IMO a little bit clunky. Still worthwhile, I agree it deserved to sell, but there's some clunkage. Also, you know, there's always personal taste and the ebbs and flows of the marketplace.
Ms. Lorée writes on her blog:'There once was a girl named Ginny. She appeared in my head one day; a young black woman shoving her hands into the ground up to her elbows. Around her, the earth exploded with a violent green energy.'
The story forms around this image. Add the setting, Jackson, Mississippi, and we have a young black woman in the south, a stereotype, a trope. Poverty and crime and police brutality: more tropes.
"Ginny & The Ouroboros" has quite a few tropes in it: dystopian urban decay, ecological disaster, dryads with fertile feet, the Green Man, firestarter, phoenix, Checkov's volcano, Yggdrasil, Ying and Yang, Ouroboros. I'm sure I've missed others.
Bunny remarks:
'Who can't name off the top of their head twenty major motion pictures or novels or television shows in which some character might well say just exactly that sentence? I certainly can, without much effort.'
We all can. They are tropes. I meant 'structural' in a deconstructionist sense- story elements, such as character, setting, or tropes.
So do all of the tropes work here, or do some muddle the water? Are there too many? Is this what's meant by 'clunky'?
What I meant by clunky was awkward language use or other elements that were not quite working in a way that was distracting to me. Like a machine that mostly does the job and does what its supposed to do, but not all that smoothly, sometimes the gears catch and jerk and go clunk. So for example: "He hasn't been a cop long enough for the city to sink into his skin, but it would happen soon." That tense change is - to my ear, clunky. He hasn't but it will, or he hadn't but it would - either of those would flow better.
Or; "Her sister smiles, a sly, lopsided thing that is part childish, part devil." That sentence would be less clunky to me if it read part child part devil, or part childish part devilish, but the switch from adjective to noun, again it hitches me up.
There are other things that throw me off, for example: "She slips Stephen's keys from her pocket, secures her grip on the bowl with the acorn, and heads toward the Coliseum. Behind her the exhaust blooms and the blacktop breaks." I'm guessing this is supposed to convey that she took his keys and rode off on his motorcycle. The image of exhaust and cracking blacktop spreading behind her as she rides away is nice, I like it. But I can't actually figure out how she started and is steering a motorcycle while gripping a bowl in one hand. It throws me out of the story slightly.
Or when she says of Stephens eyes "They're blue as storybook skies, and touristy pictures of the Mississippi River, and that baby she found last year in an alley" Its an intentionally shocking third choice in a set of comparisons but actually storybook skies, the Mississippi River and a cyanotic baby are none of them the same color. So again, it hitches me up, it distracts me and throws me out of the story for a moment.
There are a lot of things like that in this story for me, things that don't quite land, that don't quite make sense or flow. Its not all that way or the story would be unreadable, in other ways the story works okay. It just doesn't work as well as it might. That's what I mean by clunky. It doesn't fully engage me because I keep getting held up by things that don't quite ... I once described the feeling to another reader as being thrown off the suspension of disbelief wagon and having to clamber back on board, again and again.
On the other hand there are things here that really work for me. I like Ginny very much. I like the descriptions of feeling the earth under the skin of the city. I like the little worm curled around the acorn (although the idea of worms whining kind of threw me). There are some fine images, like the one I referred to earlier of the exhaust and the cracking asphalt as the motorcycle pulls away, that gives me a great picture.So to me its a mixed bag. That makes sense of the rejections with encouraging feedback. The editors didn't like the story enough to buy it because of some of the false notes, but they liked it enough to want to hear from the author again, thus the encouragement.
Your examples of clunky prose are spot on. I confess that while I did get thrown off the wagon by a few bumps, most of the examples you cite didn't bother me; I took them to be subjective narration from Ginny's imagery and word choice.
Different things catch different people up. I tend to be particularly sensitive to how things "sound" in my mind's ear. I notice that this story is quite visual, with many strong images, so I imagine it might work better for people who are more oriented toward the visual.
What does considering Ginny as Green Man signify for the story? What does that make of Dakota, and of Dakota's death, and of the ending? If the worm wrapped around Ginny's acorn is Ouroboros, what are we to make of Ginny and Dakota, the 'two trunks twined together at the base, but only one reaches toward a blue, blue sky'?
A structural thing, since the first post asks about that: I feel like she starts too slow and ends too fast. The beginning scene doesn't really snag me—Ginny herself does not seem terribly concerned about her possible arrest, so why should the reader care? and there's little indication up front of what the speculative element is. Might be my preference but I feel like she's taking a bit too much time getting to the real story here. And then almost as soon as we do figure out what's going on, the story is over. On the other hand, once I get into the story, I do like Ginny and I like the writing, too. Although I can't argue with what Bunny's mentioned as awkward phrasing, there were a lot of nice descriptions and turns of phrase, too, and on the whole it flowed smoothly enough for me. And honestly, my knowledge of the urban fantasy genre pretty much begins and ends with that Emma Bull novel but I enjoyed this more than I expected to.
Perhaps stories should be distinguished only by their excellence, but without scabs to pick, it’s harder to get under the surface; there’s less to learn from. Imperfect stories are easier to analyze. With perfection, you’re left with the story; the storytelling becomes invisible. Certainly many great yarns are told by less than perfect storytellers.An exception might be when the prose itself rises to poetry, and even then you could argue that beautiful prose can detract from the story. I remember reading The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and being stopped cold by the scene where Stephen sees the girl bathing. I spent part of that day pressing the scene on everyone who came near me.
Ginny and Dakota had an interesting relationship. The little snippets of the past left me wanting more.Same thing goes for how they relate to the city. What got Dakota to the point where she would say, "Nothing but steel and sinners"?
I like the story, but maybe there are too many ideas for something this short.
‘Too many ideas’ speaks, to me, to the abundance of tropes in the story. A reader might dislike a trope, as Neal’s does zombie tropes, or love it, as fans of The Walking Dead do. But the trope itself it’s neither good nor bad; it’s just a shorthand for a set of reader expectations. If it’s written like every other example of the same trope, it’s cliché. Give it a new twist and the story practically (as Ms. Lorée posted) writes itself.
I think the tropes in "Ginny & The Ouroboros" aren’t given new twists because there isn’t room to develop them. Nor are they clichéd, because there’s not much space for that either. They’re mostly just limned in. They also seem to cluster. The angry black woman, poverty, crime, southern, urban decay, ecological disaster, and police brutality tropes comprise one group (the ‘problem’). The dryad, fertile feet, Green Man, firestarter, phoenix, tree of life, yin/yang, and Ouroboros tropes are another (the ‘solution’.)
What do you think?
Tropes generally do not bother me. It's hard to get away from tropes, no matter the genre. What's important to me are interesting characters and a good prose structure. This story, for me, had both.I particularly liked the transmutative relationship between Ginny and Dakota. I kept hoping they would somehow work together to bring balance to the lopsided society around them. Perhaps in a longer story.
My only gripe is that the ending seemed to try too hard to conform to the story's set mythology. Even so, I enjoyed the story very much.
Do you suppose the Ouroboros worm is a reference to The Worm Ouroboros ?
Before anyone jumps in to explain to me what the Ouroboros snake is in world mythology, or who Eddison was or that wurm is an archaic word for snake, I am aware of all that. I just got a giggle out of an actual worm named Ouroboros.
Misha,The nicest thing about the reader role is that you can have absolutely any opinion you like. All opinions are welcome.
And not to worry, if a post's tone is inappropriate, I'm sure the group moderators will correct it. Oh, wait....
Just to clarify one thing. I wasn't suggesting that the title of the story meant that the story was using themes or elements from the book The Worm Oruboros. I just meant that book is a fairly well-known classic of the genre and even people who haven't read it may have heard of it. So someone might riff off that title in the same way that someone might riff off say the name Tarzan without intending any very specific reference to Edgar Rice Burroughs.Like, there's a relatively recent story called "What I Didn't See," that is a reference to the classic Tiptree story. I kind of enjoy those little references to earlier works if they are just in passing and you don't actually have to have read the earlier story in order to understand the current one. If it's done in a way that doesn't take away anything important if the reader doesn't catch the reference but adds a little something if the reader does know the earlier one.
Ms. Lorée writes that a part of this story’s gestation was attending the 2012 World Fantasy Convention and hearing one of the editors of the Urban Green Man: An Archetype of Renewal anthology (Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing) speak. Ginny is a Green Man. Theodore Roszak writes in his book, The Voice of the Earth, that there’s a synergistic relationship between our personal well-being and the health of the earth, that mental health is tied to ecological health. We can see this in Ginny. Urban blight makes her ill: 'The press of the city makes Ginny slouch.'
The idea is that the Green Man, as a Jungian archetype, has evolved from a May Day figure to a different creature for our times, one that can redress the disconnect between humans and the earth that nurtures us. But it costs Ginny to ‘make it go’, to cause growth and encourage life. 'Slowly, like sucking a milkshake up a straw, the acorn pulls on her. It starts under her rib cage, lower like a stomach ache, and tugs at things inside her that were never meant to be tugged.'
We’re fortunate that Ms. Lorée posted about this story on her blog; it adds a dimension to the discussion. Regarding Ginny she writes: She's just a girl who's trapped in a city and loves her sister despite everything.
Except that she’s not just a girl. Where Ginny walks, flowers spring up in her footsteps, and asphalt rips and cracks. Where Dakota walks, scorched earth and ashes follow. If Ginny’s the constructive goddess, Dakota is the destructive goddess, even as an infant. 'She laughs until the weeds around her wither. Laughs until tears roll down her cheeks and splash the soil like acid rain. Fissures form around her fingertips, like veins leading toward the sapling protected at its heart.' She can be deadly: 'Then there are only the man’s screams deafening Ginny’s ears and charred meat filling her nostrils and a brilliant red soaking Dakota’s dress.' Where Ginny walks, flowers spring up in her footsteps, and asphalt rips and cracks. Where Dakota walks, scorched earth and ashes follow.
Many, perhaps most, renewal myths make destruction a prerequisite for construction. The phoenix must die and be consumed by fire in order to be reborn. The Ragnarok is bound to Yggdrasil. Dakota is yang to Ginny’s yin. I think of them, in a way, as one character.
I agree that this story is a little bit of a magpie's nest. Lots of bright shiny objects thrown together but not enough to connect them into a cohesive whole. I have read many times in different sources that it's a common failing of new writers, enthusiastically throwing everything and the kitchen sink into a story. Apparently people generally get over it in time.For me the mythological elements are kind of a jumble. Ouroboros is a Greek myth so then are the trees at the end a reference to Daphne? That doesn't seem to fit with the events. Where does the Green Man fit into this, that's Britain and France, not Greece, and why all this European mythos anyway, if she's connecting to the spirits and powers of a place?
If she's connecting to the spirits and powers under the soil in Jackson Mississippi then those spirits and powers should be of the Chippewa or one of the other Mississippian cultures. If she's connecting to the spirits of her own heritage then I need to know what her heritage is. Or need some kind of logic of why a random assortment of different figures from different European myths are interacting in Mississippi.
Quite possibly but then there's an ethnocentrism problem isn't there?
I mean if your setting isn't European and your characters aren't European then you can't have all of your mythological references be European and call that universal. If you see what I mean. Gotta at least throw in something from another continent!
Sometimes a sort of grab bag of images approach will work for me because the author's idiolect is close enough to mine that I feel like I'm in a dream that I don't quite understand but find significant nonetheless. But that's a very dependent on me clicking with the images that are significant to that author. Or on the author teaching me what those images mean which of course there isn't much time to do in a short story.Catherine Valente can do that kind of image and symbol story very well.
I'm sorry I'm sure I misspelled that but I'm on mobile right now and don't have free hands to correct.
This jumbled ideas / magpie thing keeps making me circle back to tropes, even if it makes me a One Trick Pony.Misha suggests Lorée intended to play with universal archetypes. I don’t know how intentional it was, but I think that’s exactly what happens with “Ginny and the Ouroboros.” I’d said that the dryad, fertile feet, Green Man, firestarter, phoenix, tree of life, yin/yang, and Ouroboros tropes all seem to be a cluster. They’re all related in the sense that they’re recreational, and, as such, one of those universal archetypes. Or you might think of these individually as sub-tropes of a ‘super-trope.’
Throwing them all into a short form makes them a mess, but their interconnectedness is, I think, what makes this story special. It’s a mess, but it’s a wonderful mess.
I agree with most of what's been said up to now, in that I found myself spending more effort trying to decode the imagery than actually following the story. I really did like the character of Ginny and her tribulations, and I rather wish there had been a bit more emphasis on her human side.Speaking of decoding, I was wondering if anyone worked out what the oak tree was meant to represent? Given the Nordic flavour, I found myself associating it with Yggadrasil, but I couldn't work out what that made Ginny if she was the one planting it?
Or does it have another meaning that I completely missed?
I thought of Yggdrasil at one point too! But then rejected it because Yggrasil wasn't an oak. I never was able to come to a very satisfactory understanding of what was up with the tree/trees. There are a number of famous very old live oaks in the south and they have a very distinctive appearance with a thick trunk and a wide spreading canopy. It could be that particular shape sort of resembles the conventional image of a volcanic explosion?? I'm reaching, really.
Also I don't really understand the bit about only one trunk reaching toward the sky. Where is the other trunk going? Sideways? I guess?
Glad it wasn't just me that got that! The oak is a symbol of wisdom in several European cultures and I think I remember reading that the word 'druid' comes from the same root.I'm still struggling to see how that fits into the story though. Perhaps it was just a symbol of Ginny's role as a sort of fertility goddess, and we're overinterpreting?
Ginny's inducing seeds to grow reminded me of Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro, where with Totoro, the kids urge the seeds up out of the ground. (Not suggesting this in a hey-that's-copying way, but rather in a hey-similar-idea way)
And the worm wrapped around the acorn in her pocket can be an echo of Ouroboros wrapped around the world in the myth. Which may be why she chose an acorn, because its roundish and big enough for a worm to wrap around, wouldn't exactly work with the seed of an ash or a beech. For me though the images don't hang together coherently unless I, as Misha put it, start "inventing things out of whole cloth to try to fill in the gaps." Which is really not so much over interpreting. More like trying to help finish and fill in what's missing so the story can make sense. But without more guidance from the author then we are each sort of making up our own version.
Too many choices in a way. Like, the generation of the tree at the end - there's a hole opening up down into the extinct volcano, and an acorn and a worm and Ginny and Dakota all going into the hole, and then a giant tree with two trunks grows out of it... is it the acorn or the worm or Ginny or the volcano or Dakota or all of them that turned into the tree? Its a whole lotta eggs in that cake!!
I'm finding this interesting because when I finished reading it, I thought it was my congenital pedantry that was making me worry about decoding the symbolism, and everyone else would be more impressed by the language and story which were the story's strengths.It's nice to know I'm in good company!
As the week is coming to an end I just want to take a minute to thank Terry for posting an interesting story and leading an interesting discussion.
Thank you for your kind words. In turn, I’d like to thank those who participated in this week’s discussion. I look forward to finding out where future threads in this series take us. This one turned out to be a story dissection.I think that’s a good thing. John Clute writes, regarding SF reviews, of the dangers of affinity. The club-like camaraderie of writers and critics and readers tempts reviewers to avoid friction, to the point of avoiding reviews of books written by friends and acquaintances. As he says, if you’re of that bent and in the field long enough, you’re left with a diminished group of people with whom you can afford to be honest.
I don’t know Stephanie Lorée. I haven’t met or contacted her. That makes it easier to pick over the bones of her story. I stated at the beginning of the thread that I fell in love with “Ginny and the Ouroboros”, and that’s true. The story’s shortcomings the discussion illuminated- often, as with Bunny’s line edit examples, with laser-like intensity- hasn’t changed my feeling one bit. It’s a good yarn. Could it have been a better story? Certainly. A work of fiction is never finished; it’s just delivered.
Writers write for many reasons, but I’m sure the desire for approbation is in every writer’s soul. It’s a paradox of writing that to achieve that approbation you must accept repudiation from a writer’s group or writing partner, and rejection from the submission process. Once the story’s published, it’s subjected to an even worse fate. It’s no longer malleable; it can’t be improved, and the warts and scars are there for everyone to see, forever. It’s a naked place to be.
I’ve wondered what Ms. Lorée will think about how we’ve roasted her baby, when she reads this thread. She will, eventually, of course. I hope that she considers its intentions favorably.. You don’t invest a week and a lot of thought into something of which you're dismissive. We tried, I think, to be honest. I'm proud of the result.
Mod
Thank you Terry and everyone else who participated.
That's a good point, Sarah. The story was a great choice because it gave us plenty to pick over. Thanks for that, Terry!
To kick things off, I've picked a story by an author new to me, Stephanie Lorée, which I instantly fell in love with. The story is online at:
http://urbanfantasymagazine.com/2015/...
On Sunday, I'll offer a few questions to get things rolling, but I'm posting this now to give you a chance to read and consider the story.