Thank you to everyone who attended my book signing, particularly Janet, John, and Darlene–it wouldn’t have been a success or even possible without you there! I’ve had so much support from my friends during this crazy publishing process, and I can’t thank everyone enough. Now I know why there’s a ship in friendship–it’s because loyal friends provide a ship to carry one over rough seas to new horizons.
The book signing was a great chance to catch up with friends I hadn’t seen in years. Some of the conversations I had about The Witch Awakening and what inspired the setting got me thinking again about my writing process. Dr. Billinger, the head of the history department at Wingate University and one of my favorite professors, asked thoughtful questions that caught me off guard (as he did during class lectures in my undergrad days), questions that led my thoughts down some unfamiliar and interesting paths.
History has intrigued me since I witnessed my father pouring over books about the Old West to ensure his realistic woodcarvings of Native Americans and rangers with Henry rifles were as accurate as he could carve them. In the sixth grade, I had a wonderful teacher named Mr. Wilson who made world history come alive–I particularly remember the day he called one boy and six girls to the front of the room. He lined us up and gave the boy a crown (he was King Henry VIII) and then gave us girls each a placard with one of King Henry’s wives’ names written on it. I was Jane Seymour, and I’ve never forgotten the names of Henry’s wives or what happened to them since that day. I suspect this is how my fascination with the Tudors and their world started, a fascination that has informed and inspired the fantasy world in my novels.
I’ve had many wonderful teachers and professors since Mr. Wilson. Dr. Billinger’s presence at my book signing reminded me of his and other professors’ lectures during my time at Wingate. Pieces of those lectures have made their way into my fantasy fiction. Pieces such as Wallenstein (the Bohemian general who was more powerful than the Hapsburg king during the Thirty Years War), the conflict between the nobility and the rising merchant class in early modern Europe, the oppression of Native Americans in the Americas, and Tituba (the slave woman who played such a major role in the Salem witch trials, only to vanish from the historical record afterwards.)
Dr. O’Neal (another favorite professor who tragically passed away in 2001) and I did a research project on women in pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia when I was a rising senior. This project allowed us to travel to Philadelphia and gave me access to precious primary source documents such as diaries and letters, words from women who lived two and a half centuries ago. The past I envisioned from this trip and the documents was rich to me, almost but not quite tangible. That’s the wistful thrill of immersing oneself in the study of history–one can read the words of those long gone from this earth, see where they lived sometimes, perhaps touch an artifact or two, hear the whispers of ghosts even, but ultimately the past is unreachable. The passage of time has left history an infinitely tantalizing mystery, so many stories that will never be known by us, so many stories waiting to be discovered.
In my case, studying history expressed my desire to travel through time, to somehow see it for myself. This impossible longing led me to the world in The Witch Awakening. The present is so compartmentalized–we work in one place, sleep and eat in another, play in yet another, and our relationships these days are guided by firm boundaries. If you don’t believe this, work for a corporation and see what happens when you try to hire your spouse. Or see what happens when you ask your therapist out on a date. Or try practicing law without a license. We have strict roles, a necessary development in a democratic society where all are supposed to have equal rights under the law.
Relationships were far messier in early modern Europe. Forget the romance–your marriage might be the best business deal or worst political blunder of your life. Your children, particularly your eldest son, expected to work with you in your trade. Most business ventures were family ventures. The fields you worked in, the village you lived in, the family you were born in–all were within sight of each other. You weren’t ever getting away from these people!
This contrast fascinates me–our sharply pixelated relationships versus their relationships with blurry edges. What would it be like if my father were my boss, if he had trained me from the time I could walk to follow in his footsteps through my career? What would it be like if I had to marry someone I couldn’t stand because it was politically expedient for my family? What would it be like if my day, instead of being divided between work and personal life in firmly deliniated clock hours, simply flowed according to the rising and setting of the sun? I’ll never know for sure, but I’m going to pursue the mystery in my writing the rest of my life.
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In writing classes and critique groups I’ve attended, questions that come up more often than you might think are “What is memoir? What is autobiography? What is creative nonfiction? How much can I as a writer bend the truth before I break it?” The answers are far more complex than first might be supposed. Well before Oprah confronted James Frey about his supposedly factual memoir A Million Little Pieces, writers I know have debated these questions. Even in a memoir where all the facts can be corroborated by outside sources, the slippery tricks of memory and the addition of dramatic tension can completely obliterate any objectivity. We don’t remember facts so much as we remember emotions, particularly when it comes to our personal past. An established fact can be portrayed in so many different ways, dependent on variations in tone, word choice, and whose perspective frames it. Just ask any student of history after he or she has taken a course in historiography.
In a sense, all writing is autobiographical. We can’t ever fully escape our own perspective–even us writers of fantasy and science fiction. When I started writing about the House of Landers in my mid-teens, it seemed like a welcome escape from my reality, the reason I suspect many teenagers read fantasy/sci fi and/or write it and/or play role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Adult reality doesn’t just overwhelm some kids–it terrifies them. It terrified me, and I didn’t even realize it had terrified me until I reached age twenty-five or thereabouts and started reflecting more on my life.
At some point, soon after college I think, one of my friends ( someone who devoured every early word I wrote about the Landers), said, “You know, Karen, I could tell you were working out your family stuff in that particular scene.”
I gaped at her. “But this is pure fantasy–it’s not about my family,” I said, and the conversation drifted to another topic.
For years, I’ve turned that offhand comment over and over in my mind, and in that process, I’ve come to some realizations about my writing and writing in general. Even though all the events in the Landers saga are fictional (for instance, I’ve never been in a sword fight or painted a picture or given birth or even sensed an aura, for that matter 
), everything I write about holds some emotional resonance for me, or I wouldn’t write about it. The facts don’t matter so much in fantasy, but the emotional reality does.
I’ve studied psychology on and off for a long time, culminating in the dream group experience I had last fall. The ladies in dream group taught me about internal family systems theory and Jungian archetypes, to the point that I was inspired to finally read Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run with the Wolves. I picked up this book when I was in my early twenties, but it’s one of those books you have to pick up at the right time or it doesn’t affect you in quite the same way. In my early twenties, I wasn’t ready to read it. Now I am. I imagine it’s one of those books to grow old with, as I’ll likely get different insights from it when I’m sixty than I do now. Interestingly enough, several people in my circle are either reading this book or have mentioned Jungian archetypes to me in the last few months. Serendipity can be cool.
Although internal family systems theory doesn’t rely on Jungian archetypes to explain the different parts of the personality, I’ve paired the two theories in my mind because I started seriously thinking about both around the same time. In internal family systems theory (developed by Richard Schwartz), the personality is comprised of manager parts, exile parts, firefighter parts, and then the self, the spiritual whole that can offer some connectivity among the various parts. If you want a better explanation than that without an overwhelming amount of detail, I recommend Wikipedia.
However, since Jungian archetypes are so personally powerful for me, I prefer to think of my personality parts and other peoples’ personality parts in terms of archetypes, not exiles, firefighters, or managers. And if you want to learn more about archetypes (and read some wonderful fairy tales in the bargain), I highly recommend Women Who Run with the Wolves.
Perhaps this has something to do with my love of fantasy. Fantasy novels are extended fairy tales, and fairy tales are a series of archetypes interacting with each other, archetypes that draw on subconscious drives and desires and the innate longing to understand self and others. In my writing, I feel I explore Jungian archetypes that represent mostly subconscious parts of self and how these parts support and conflict with one another, a major tenet of internal family systems theory. In a sense, my novels are my archetypal memoirs.
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My mother was a bit spooky. She dreamt several times of events before they happened, had an out-of-body experience where she watched herself work in her shop from a corner of the ceiling, and after going outside one night, told us the next morning that she had sensed a “web of light” connecting everything–the fireflies, the trees, the ground, the house and us in it. I believe my mother saw the world’s aura that night. I’ve since read another description of a “web of light” connecting all living things in a book called Always Karen by Jeanne Walker.
This amazing little book changed my spirituality. I was a heathen as a child (my dear father had a vendetta against the Lutheran minister where we lived and hence, we never went to church.) I had a vague idea who God and Jesus were from the manger scene my mom put out at Christmas and reading Bible stories, but if you’d asked me, I would have said I believed in the Borrowers and Aslan and fairies and the Easter Bunny, not God. I had plenty of faith in unseen things as children often do, but God didn’t figure into that.
Then as a teenager, I converted to Catholicism. This happened because my mother, thinking my spiritual development was being compromised by reading too much Edgar Cayce, asked which church I would go to if I had to go to church. I answered that I didn’t care what church we went to so long as it was beautiful, and the most beautiful church I knew of was the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville. So we went, and I found that I loved the ritual and rich symbolism of the Catholic rites, and I was a devout Catholic for several years. We had a wonderful priest at the Basilica at the time–Fr. Carl Kaltreider–I could devote a whole post to him. He’s quite a priest. When the diocese transferred him from the Basilica, things were never quite the same.
Then in my early 20s, I drifted away from the Church. It was about the time the sexual abuse scandal first came out in the news, and I feel now, given my personal history, that this impacted me more than I realized. I just don’t feel the same in a Catholic church anymore, not just because of a few wicked priests’ behavior (tragically, an authority figure in any setting–school, church, what have you, can be an abuser, not just in a Catholic church) but because the church hierarchy, however misguided, abetted the wicked priests in their crimes against children. I could also devote a whole post to this, but perhaps another time . . .
So, there I was, spiritually adrift, in a gray area where I was neither spiritual nor non-spiritual. I just didn’t think that much about it. Then various disasters befell my family, such as my mother developing lymphoma after a long battle with rheumatoid arthritis, and my subconscious realized it could respond in one of two ways: either not believe and be an atheist or believe and simply be. In either case, I would at least find some harbor, some purpose that would help me make sense of what had happened in my family–being adrift was no longer an option, not if I expected to grow into the shoes I was now required by circumstance to fill.
So I went back and forth, at some points not believing in God, because how could a just God allow so much evil in the world, and at some points believing in God because amidst all the pain, there is great beauty, and because there had to be some purpose for all the suffering, some ultimate redemption. All this moody vacillating, while far preferable to the spiritual numbness that came before it, was exhausting. My temperament is prone to ambivalence, and ambivalence constantly paces to and fro between heaven and hell, which is a long, trying walk for those of you who have experienced it. Then my mother, my spooky mother, sensed the angel, and that was when my spirituality shifted again.
The angel came in the summer of 2004, to Baptist Hospital in Winston-Salem of all places. A gray, cold rain fell that morning when I woke up in the hotel room where my mother and I stayed. She was already at the hospital–all that week, she spent mornings at the hospital having her stem cells harvested in the first step of a bone marrow procedure to treat her lymphoma. Usually I went with her, but she had let me sleep that morning, telling me to follow her on the shuttle between the hotel and the hospital.
When I got on the shuttle bus, a lady was the only other passenger. She was going to visit a friend with terminal cancer at Baptist–we talked for a little bit, her friend’s dire prognosis adding to my growing depression on this gray morning. I took the elevator and entered the lab where my mother and other patients lay in beds, the whir of the blood centrifuges white noise in the background. The windowless, cinderblock walls and flourescent lights depressed me even more, and I was a dark mood as I made my way to my mother’s seemingly sleeping form at the far end of the lab.
The instant I sat in the chair beside her bed, my mood shifted so drastically that I sat up straight, confused but jubilant. I wanted to sing and dance and frolic about in some natural, sudden high that had no explanation, at least none that I could fathom then. This wonderful intensity faded to a soothing tingle after a few minutes, but it was enough to jar me out of my depression for the rest of the day. My mother opened her eyes then, and I started reading to her from Harry Potter, something to enchant and distract both of us from our surroundings, though it wasn’t needed that particular morning.
Hours later, in the car, we were talking about politics, I think, when she abruptly said, “I think I saw an angel today.”
“When?” I glanced at her, the cheery purple polka-dotted kercheif knotted on her head (her dew-rag, as she called it) at odds with her pale skin, the dark circles of cancer exhaustion under her eyes, still bright as a child’s.
“In the lab, right before you came in.”
“I thought you were asleep when I came in.”
“I had my eyes closed, half-dozing, but I could see like my eyes were open. These little points of light came zipping from all sides of the lab and came together in a big ball of light that hovered over my bed. I’ve never felt more peaceful.”
I remember my sudden mood shift and told her about it. We sat in silence for awhile, and then she said, “I guess the oncology ward is as good a place as any to see an angel.”
Hyper-reality. My word for the world around us that can’t be sensed with our five physical senses. Some would call it the spiritual realm, some would call it paranormal phenomena, and some would probably call the rest of us crazy for believing in something we can’t see, touch, hear, smell, or taste, at least not in the usual way.
The world that the witches and warlocks in my stories can sense and eventually manipulate is my fantasy version of hyper-reality, and I believe that it is at this level of reality that my mom sensed the angel that day. Six months after she sensed the angel, my mom passed away in January of 2005 and permanently beyond this physical reality into hyper-reality. We put so much faith in physical reality because it’s usually the only reality we can consciously sense. In Always, Karen, Jeanne Walker says that the “evolution of consciousness” is the purpose of our existence, that all living things are in a process of evolving consciousness, and when we die, it is a merely a passing to the next highest level of awareness. I find this such a comfort, more of a comfort than the traditional view of heaven which has never made sense to me. Hyper-reality and the “evolution of consciousness”–the best way I have of making sense of happenings like the angel over my spooky mother’s hospital bed.
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My gothic historical fantasy novel The Witch Awakening is officially published and available for sale through Amazon.com!
Click Here to purchase The Witch Awakening on Amazon.com
The most interesting thing about this (at least to me) is that my main character Safire’s birthday coincides with the publishing date (March 3, 2010, although Amazon states March 11th for some reason) of The Witch Awakening. This was not planned–when I woke up yesterday morning, I realized the connection. For those of you who enjoy astrology as much as I do, that makes Safire and The Witch Awakening both Pisces. Considering that Pisces is arguably the most psychically attuned and intuitive of all the astrological signs, Safire’s witchy ways fall right in line with her sun sign!
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| The Snow Man |
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
and, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
–Wallace Stevens, 1921
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When I was in high school, my debate teacher Mr. Yutzy read poems to us every week. One day he read Wallace Steven’s “The Snow Man,” which has been my favorite poem ever since. At that time, I had a vague notion that Taoism was an eastern philosophy that involved Buddha somehow. Certainly I didn’t make the connection then that appreciating the quiet cold of the pristine woods in winter was Taoist, that this poem is a Taoist poem. I just knew I loved it, how the words so perfectly captured one of a thousand moments from my lonely childhood in the snowy woods of northeastern Minnesota.
It snowed almost a foot here for the second time this winter, something that hasn’t happened before in the twenty years I’ve lived in North Carolina. The practical adult in me curses the snow when my car gets stuck, when the electricity goes out, when nature halts my puny human plans. However, the practical adult me is but one of dozens of cloaks I don in my interactions with the outside world. It’s not the real me. The real me is wordless, the me who loves this poem, the me who loves the snow, the me who dwells outside of time and with the eternal. The me who hijacked my fingers and posted the following on Facebook: “After a tough week, the last thing I wanted was snow to get stuck in. But I took a night-time trudge tonight, and it lifted my spirits so much that I had to post. The transcendent hush of beauty–even with clouds covering the moon and stars, the snow made its own light, and I could see where I was going. I felt 9 years old again, listening to the crystalized hum of thousands of tiny icy flakes falling at once.”
Looking at the snow, I believe that Buddha must have stood in some woods in winter for awhile, the hush of falling snow all around. It’s enough to make anyone a Taoist.
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Frequent advice to new writers is to keep a journal and write in it religiously, every day if possible. I’ve never taken this advice. The only time I’ve come close is with the dream journal I’ve kept the past six months. Otherwise I have diaries scattered around the house with perhaps the first few pages filled in, then no more. My poor abandoned livejournal account looks somewhat the same, a peppering of random entries that soon petered out.
In contrast to this poor attention to chronicling real events and my reactions to them, I find that I write and write and write about the imaginary people who populate my mind, surrounding myself with stacks of manuscript that may never be read by anyone other than me and few devoted friends. What does this say about me, that I love reading and writing and talking about other peoples’ lives but that I avoid my own? Am I a psychological voyeur? Am I an escape artist from my own life?
Given that I lack but a few pages to complete the second draft of Tapestry Lion, the sprawling sequel to Witch Awakening (which already pushes the boundaries of acceptable word count for first novels, even fantasy), I’ve been wondering of late.
Five years ago, on this very day, my mother passed away after a tough battle with lymphoma. She collapsed in my father’s arms in the bathroom about six yards from where I sit typing this. Certainly, if I’d been writing a true account of my life the last five years instead of Tapestry Lion and Witch Awakening, my readers would likely find it no less fantastical than my imaginary lands of Cormalen and Sarneth. The real events of my life since my mother’s passing seem at turns lurid, tragic, wonderful, then lurid again. Justice gained at an incredible cost, fizzled romance and loves lost, traveling to Norway twice to see my wonderful family there, a few false friends and professional mayhem, tragedy and grief, some great opportunities for my writing, a copperhead in my dryer, a live possum in my kitchen (I dwell in the country, what can I say?), many true friends to laugh with and tide me through the unbearable (what would I be, what would I do, without my friends? I can only hope to be half the friend, one quarter the friend, my friends have been to me. For those of you reading this, please know I am eternally grateful for you.)
As I start to edit the second draft of Tapestry Lion, I wonder what inspired certain characters and certain scenes. The realization has dawned on me that far from avoiding writing about my life, I have subconsciously used this vehicle of fantasy to write all about my life. Witch Awakening and Tapestry Lion are my journals, my diaries of a life told in symbols. Far from the escape I planned, I find myself confronting my life in a fun house mirror, my reflection all wavy and distorted, some parts overemphasized, some parts deflated, but still my reflection.
There are some people in this world who think that fantasy, horror, and sci-fi are not serious writing, that someone who writes the modern equivalent of fairy tales can’t possibly be serious about his or her work. I wish these naysayers luck confronting themselves at the witching hour, long after the lights have gone out and they’re alone with themselves in the dark, just their rational thoughts to accompany them . . .
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I’m absurdly excited, so excited I have to post about this. There will be two full moons in the month of December this year, one that occurred on December 2nd and one occuring on New Year’s Eve! What a way to welcome in the New Year–with a blue moon! The werewolves will be out and about on New Year’s Eve, partying with the rest of us. Personally, I wouldn’t mind dating a werewolf, if he was cute and hairy like Wolverine and had a tractor and knew how to use it (I’ve gotten very practical about romantic matters as I’ve gotten older–men who come with tractors, who love fixing rutted driveways and silty ponds–now they’re my kind of men. I think I’d marry one of those and cook big meals for him so he would be in high gear to grade the driveway.) But I digress.
It’s odd–I’ve had a very moony year, culminating in this blue moon month. I go out walking a lot at night after I get home from work, and during November’s full moon, I had a mystical experience on one of these walks. It was a misty night, and the mist captured the moonlight and refracted it, so that everything had this dreamy, silvery cast. I remember walking and listening to my soundtrack for 6 Feet Under and feeling outside of my body as I stared up at the moon. I felt like my soul could travel until I bridged galaxies, bridged eons of time. In clock time, only a half hour or so went by. But in real time, it felt like that walk went on forever, into silvery eternity.
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Mister Gus Nilsen, also known as Goose, Gooseboy, Tiger Tail Tufted Toe and various other aliases and monikers, passed away early in the morning on October 24, 2008, from complications related to asthma. Born on March 6, 2000, to Vernetta Jane and Falcon Hawk of Tayaway Cattery, Gus always had a regal bearing even at his silliest moments. His parents hoped he would fulfill his early promise of greatness by seeking a career as a cat show star. Even a stint in cat food commercials would have been acceptable. As the picture below demonstrates, Gus had the charisma of a model when it came to the camera. However, Gus’s outward dignity and pride concealed a wild streak, likely a rogue gene from his distant Viking ancestors, the Norwegian Forest cats.
His disappointed parents sent him away as a two-month-old kitten to seek his fortune. He somehow found his way to the infamous Nilsen family, a known hideaway for silly dogs, fish who eat their friends, and stray cats with bad attitudes. Dashing his parents’ last hopes for him, Gus shunned the show and stud circuit. Instead, he misspent his youth basking in the sunlight, begging for lunch meat, rolling in burr patches, using the neighbor’s property as his personal litter box, and shedding on the couch. He ran away from his new home once as a rebellious teenager and spent two days and nights 65 feet up a poplar tree, only jumping down when the dreaded tree man came for him. Far tougher than his plush appearance would suggest, Gus survived the jump and was at the door howling for his dinner in no time. However, Gus never forgot nor forgave the tree man, snubbing him whenever the man showed up at the house. A mostly gentle giant, Gus never needed to be much of a fighter to express his opinions. Usually a loud, deep “yowellll!” and a bat with one of his large, tufted paws was enough to make His Highness’s wishes known.
He settled into a career as a gardening, reading, and cooking consultant, accompanying the Nilsens on their various tasks around the house and offering his advice and companionship, particularly when lunch meat was involved. He also often took it upon himself to entertain houseguests, draping himself across the furniture or floor and flicking his tail as he stared at people with his unnervingly understanding gaze. A vain creature, he knew his own gorgeousness and made frequent use of his appearance to gain admiration and treats.
Gus had some funny, occasionally criminal habits. He would often climb into spaces far too small for him and sleep, his long, raccoon-like tail sometimes the only evidence of his presence. A voracious reader, he frequently took naps on magazines, books, even his mistress’s manuscript. Every time his mistress would return home from a trip with a certain blue duffel bag, Gus would climb on the bag and sleep, one time even riding it through the house. He fell in love with one guest’s sleeping bag (the material crinkled invitingly when he jumped on it). He left a half-chewed bit of meat grizzle on the bag where the guest would put her hand on it, a clear message of his intentions towards the bag. She was not amused. Another time, he peed on the sofa where his mistress would sit because he didn’t like that she had let some stray kittens play in his area. She was not amused either, at least at the time.
Once he and his hoodlum friend Maytag demolished a Christmas tree. They stole all the glass balls and hid them in an undisclosed location in the house, pulling one or two out each night for a week and batting them around the wooden floors with a festive tinkling. The Nilsens never did find where Gus and Maytag hid the stash of ornaments, a testament to their feline cunning.
Despite these occasional lapses, Gus was the bestest of cats, even winning over the crusty Glenn Nilsen. Glenn loved to give Gus gourmet treats such as Norwegian cheese and summer sausage, and then scratch him under his chin. If Gus didn’t show up in time for his treat, Glenn would yell into the night, “Gus! Gus, get in here, you sonofabitch!” and Gus would come running, his beautiful tail held high. He never came for “Here, kitty, kitty,” evidently considering kitty an unworthy title for his feline greatness.
Edward Scrap, the cat who never won a fight but kept valiantly trying until the end, and Maytag, MIA and presumed killed in the Hickory Nut Mountain coyote wars, preceded Gus into cat heaven. Gus was laid to rest today beside his adopted brother Edward, in sight of the garden and koi pond both so loved. He is survived by Big Agnes the fish, Bessie, Maddie, Honey (the dog who thinks she’s a cat, to the point that she washed Gus’s ears for him) and the great Miss Chessie Cat, known best for her namesake’s famous ad campaign for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, her eccentric hobbies such as keeping frogs as pets in the basement sump pump hole, and her bad attitude (we won’t mention her arrest in 2006 for slapping a veterinary assistant.) Gus will be sorely missed by all his family and friends. Disclaimer: The nature of Gus’s relationship with the big blue rabbit in one of the pictures below is unconfirmed. The rabbit was unavailable for comment at this writing.
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So one of my co-workers started this dream group, and it’s turned into the highlight of my summer. I’ve always had vivid dreams and have sometimes taken a stab at interpreting the dreams that I remember, so when I heard about this dream group, I was hooked. The woman who runs the group is a depth psychologist (which means she knows a lot about Jungian archetypes and other cool stuff)–check out her website www.tayriaward.com .
Anyway, the dream group has had two meetings so far, and it fascinates me to hear others’ dreams as well as their interpretations of mine. Listening to others’ dreams, I feel as if I slip into the dream with the dreamer, as if I’m seeing the dream flash before my eyes like a movie. It’s a powerful experience that Tayria calls entering the dream space, when everyone in the group has the same feeling of being in the dream with the dreamer. I suppose the dream space could be the great collective unconsciousness that Jung describes.
The dream group has helped me come to some realizations, about myself, others, and this modern culture we live in. A few years ago, I started to pursue my masters in clinical psychology. I dropped out of the program at the end of the first semester for a variety of reasons–illness in the family, beaucoup loans to pay from undergrad without adding more, etc. However, the main reason I dropped out was because the program and I were not a good fit.
Modern psychology tries desperately to be as reputable a science as biology or chemistry, and science is for our society what the Catholic Church was for Europe in the Middle Ages–a seeming explanation for everything that is and will ever be. This is a great comfort in some ways–it’s nice sometimes to be able to organize everything into neat little boxes and have some expert tell you that the disturbing dream you had last night was only because you ate a bad salad. Putting things in boxes, organizing your mind as you would a closet, seems to keep life under control. It’s safe. Predictable. And boring beyond belief.
In the dream group, we’re tapping into a vast sea of ancient archetypes, symbols, and mystery that can’t be put into little boxes. It can’t be controlled or rationalized away, this intuitive, emotional, spiritual, mysterious part of us, the part that connects us to everyone else and everything else alive on this planet. It’s called our soul, and it’s what I was missing in that clinical psychology program.
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http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/06/08/090608crat_atlarge_menand
Please follow the link above for an interesting, occasionally scary, article about post-graduate programs for creative writing. I confess that parts of this article irritated me–smug assertions that the state of “literary” fiction has never been better, mostly due to MFA programs churning out the cream of the wannabe writer crop. Give me a break. Of course, I tend to be a bit crabby on this subject. Both my parents were successful artists who spent very little time in a classroom learning the technical stuff. Too poor to afford tuition to MFA programs, mom and dad picked up their skills from books and the occasional class at the local Art Colony, an eclectic summer art school that had no university or college affiliations.
So . . . if a character can be an anti-hero (somehow still being a hero without possessing the standard heroic qualities) can I be an anti-snob? I remember a few years ago an excellent short story writer joined one of the critique groups I belong to. After this writer shared one of her many great stories, another member of the group turned to us and said, his eyes aglow, “She has a MFA, you know.” The way he said it made it sound like her talent was mostly due to her attending a prestigious masters program in creative writing, that the masters program had somehow made her a ”literary” writer instead a hack.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to masters level programs for writing–in fact, I’m attending such a class this fall. Like the author concludes at the end of theabove linked article, I feel that anything that helps more people write and then share and improve their writing can only be a good thing. However, being a snob about it isn’t a good thing, and we have far too many university- and college-minted snobs in all fields of study these days. I call it the tyranny of those educated just enough to be dangerous.
Probably no surprise here, but I take offense to the designations literary and genre. This started in my childhood, when I dipped into every novel I could get my hands on, no matter style or content. I just loved to read. It was in these early years with Nancy Drew, the Borrowers, Narnia, and many other unforgettable lands and characters, that I came to the unconscious (at that time) conclusion that writing should entertain, first and foremost, because if it doesn’t accomplish this basic feat, then why should the reader care about theme, symbolism, and the other abstractions that the literati salivate over?
This nebulous discontent with the designation “literary” solidified into outright rebellion when I read A Reader’s Manifesto by B.R. Myers. I can picture many talented writers in my acquaintance rolling their eyes at the mention of Myers, but for better or worse, his Manifesto has irrevocably influenced how I approach writing. Instead of putting some of our best storytellers into neat little genre boxes that forever assign them a lesser quality than their “literary” colleagues, let’s ask ourselves two simple questions whenever we read a book. First of all, no matter the writing style, is the story entertaining or boring? Second, if it’s entertaining, is it entertaining like a television sitcom that you’ll forget as soon as the TV goes off or is it entertaining in a way that resonates with you? If it’s entertaining and it resonates, it’s good literature, no matter if it’s fantasy, romance, thriller, or God forbid, “literary.”
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