Bluesky logoInstagram Logo

Apparel for Authors: Marcelle Heath Interviews Me

by | Nov 1, 2022 | Creativity, Interview

Reversible Art Rob & JAJ standing on lake beach masked, & Jablonski author portait inset

“I am very conscious of the role of dress in creating my characters and in how storytelling can manifest itself via what and how characters wear clothing and/or present themselves.”

 

Author Marcelle Heath is the author of the recent  Is That All There Is? (2022), a collection of short stories. [1] Her writing is rich, evocative, and well-crafted, her eye for detail, personality, and the dynamics of human interaction finely tuned.

Marcelle and I share a fascination with how people self-identify and self-express with dress; with the whole notion of clothing as an extension of self but also a product of creativity. She is the creator/curator of Apparel for Authors on Instagram, a visual/text interview series on writers, fashion, and the public sphere. [2] Recently she interviewed me and graciously gave permission for me to reprint that interview.

 

 

Her original IG version can be seen here: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

 

How is clothing a reflection of you and/or your work? 

When I write I wear whatever is loose and comfortable as I often work for long stretches. What I imagine myself wearing is rather different, however. It might be a banyan (18th-century men’s house robe) over an open-neck cotton shirt, waistcoat and walking skirt, or hakama (Japanese pleated, skirt-like trousers) with a linen shirt. I have patterns and fabric for these and hope to make them up this winter. When I attend a social or more formal event, I usually wear a modernish frock coat with a button-down shirt and jeans or layers of skirts with a long tunic or artist’s coat.

Owl Post Lady in frock coat and cowboy hat, lue haired editor lady with large sunglasses and small gold fedora, and Lady Larkin character with long brown curly hair, a corcheted lace caplet,. The last sits in front of a bookcase and ponders a globe

Do you write about clothing?

I am very conscious of the role of dress in creating my characters and in how storytelling can manifest itself via what and how characters wear clothing and/or present themselves. In my academic mystery WIP, characters usually don’t talk about dress explicitly but they are aware of clothing as an expression/extension of who they are. I include accessories and hairstyle in the notion of dress. And I need to see my characters move in order to write them. Clothing—color, fabric, how it fits (or doesn’t), how it drapes and moves—is an aspect of that.

The notion of creative play deeply informs and enhances all of my writing. I typically make props or costumes to accompany my writing and other imagination projects. In another universe altogether I write Dante’s Wardrobe, an artist’s blog I started in 2010. It includes clothing-related posts, some of which have to do with theatrical events, character creation, or my fictional character correspondences. Two examples: The Red Death Comes to the Midwest  and A Costumed Affair.

2 closeups of J.A. Jablonski, a white person with white chin-length hair & wire-rim eyeglasses.

What did you wear for your author photo?

(Left) I am wearing my current favorite, a dark blue cotton man’s shirt with narrow gold stripes that I found at a thrift shop. The necklace was made by my sister using beads I collected. The pendant is something I found on the sidewalk. (Right) I have on a sky-blue linen tunic and waxed canvas hat, the band for which is a thrifted, thin leather belt cut to fit. Same necklace with matching earrings. I often wear different eyeglasses. And I am wearing a wig in both (I have partial alopecia).

 

 

What accessories do you wear?

Rings, many at a time, funky brooches, and artsy earrings. I prefer jewelry of sterling silver or stainless steel though I do have a few antique gold pins and rings that were given to me or I found in antique shops. As with my clothing, I want my accessories to have stories attached to them. Diamonds don’t appeal. I like color and they have none. I favor garnets and gemstones like jade, onyx, and lapis.

I’ve also sewn some caps out of fabrics I’ve recycled from various projects. I wear them when I write to keep my head warm.

Left - Sewn fabric caps, Right - white-skinned hand wearing silver-colored rings on three fingers

Do you have a favorite art work/artist that depicts dress in their work?

The design lines of  clothing from the Western Edwardian era, male and female, really appeal to me. There is an ease and elegance there. I like the rich colors and textures of medieval fabrics. Frida Kahlo is a favorite for her sheer exuberance. I keep a small collection of books on clothing and design. Favorites include Art to Wear by Julie Schafler Dale [3], UnFashion by Tibor Kalman [4], and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty by Andrew Bolton. [5]  And I like to follow artists and historians or persons of dress, fashion, costume design, and clothing creation on social media.

Such as these persons on Instagram:

Emma Capponi, John Armstrong, Julia Bennet, VELES, Kate Strasdin IG avatars

Left to Right: Emma Capponi | John Armstrong | Julia Bennet | VELES | Kate Strasdin

How does your identity intersect with the way you dress?

As long as I can remember I’ve regarded myself as simply am and have always thought/felt that. This sense of identity changes, sometimes from day to day, even morning to afternoon. I dress as it pleases me. I favor more masculine lines these days though I have some winter sewing projects lined up that are more feminine in appearance. Either way, I combine notions and tend not to see garb in purely binary terms; rather, it’s a matter of line, texture, and color.

Right now I am most comfortable wearing men’s dress shirts with jeans and a fitted waistcoat. Menswear fits my shoulders and I like the clean lines and durability of jeans. Waistcoats complete the look, are just so damn cool and sexy as hell. I like the artistic potential of the Japanese haori and have a stash on my project table of colorful cotton prints, denims, dark earth-toned men’s deadstock wool suiting, and slubbed silks along with Folkwear’s haori pattern.

What considerations do you make when purchasing clothing?

Close up of JAJ in straw hat & green canvas jacket with oak leaf appliquesI rarely purchase clothing new. I like garb that has a story, preferably a long and involved story. Most of what I wear is thrifted, hand-me-overs from siblings, sewn by me, or something I made or acquired 20 or 30 years ago. There were no such things as Tall Shops when I grew up, Even now most store-sold clothing designed for women is unappealing: the garments are often poorly made and their design is generic and assumes gender roles for the wearer. Big and tall men’s stores often have better made products but the overt modern “guy-ness” of the designs is boring for me.

I grew up in a family of 12 where our average height (men and women) is around 6’4”. Out of financial necessity, but also artistic preference, we all thrifted. And everyone sewed, even the gents. One of my brothers once sewed himself a camping tent when he couldn’t find one to accommodate his 6′ 8″ self.

How do you respond to dominant expectations of beauty? 

I have never fit the mold. I was 5’10” when I was ten years old, 6’2” when I was twelve, and nearly 6’4” by twenty. I was athletic and had a little bit of beauty when younger though that has changed into an only occasional handsomeness.

What I do respond to is how others manifest themselves in terms of personal style and their own sense of body and appearance. I am not a follower of fashion per se but as a one time theater major, artist, historian, and writer, I am fascinated by clothing as art and as a self-making and self-identifying activity. People who grok that intrigue me, as much for their mindset about it as for the clothing they make, design, or wear.

AUTHOR BIO

J.A. Jablonski has been a university professor and researcher, academic and special librarian, information technology consultant, writing instructor, technical writer, book and database indexer as well as a graphic designer, award-winning display window and exhibits designer, fictional letter writer, live-action role playing actor and theater designer, sewist, and occasional poet. Jude’s current incarnation is fiction writer; they write in three different genres (mystery, speculative SF, and magical realism) while trying to still keep one foot in the academic scene by researching material culture in utopian fiction. Their pronouns are she/her/them/they; their honorifics are Dr/Ms/Mx.

Side by side text sysnopses of JAJ academic mystery & SF books with text

(Alt-Text note: Text on these images is included in Image Credits section below.)

Jude’s current projects include a character-driven, ensemble cast academic mystery series set on a small college campus located in the Driftless Region of Wisconsin; an SF novel about competing factions of socio-anthropologists; a collection of stories, poems, and illustrations on the nature of the Muse; and a magical realism tale about a synesthesic young person who meets a one-eyed peer with unusual abilities.

If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

© J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

How to cite this post

Jablonski, J.A. (2022, Nov 1). Apparel for Authors: Marcelle Heath Interviews Me. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
https://jajablonski.com/2022/11/01/apparel-for-authors-interviews-me/

IMAGE CREDITS

Header image | All images by J.A. Jablonski

Marcelle Heath. From the Literary Arts website.

J.A. Jablonski as 3 LARP actors. Images by J.A. Jablonski.

J.A. Jablonski author images. Images by J.A. Jablonski.

Row of handmade cotton caps & one antique crocheted cap. Hand wearing silver & stainless steal rings. Images by J.A. Jablonski.

Instagram avatar images of Emma Capponi | John Armstrong | Julia Bennet | VELES, | Kate Strasdin.  (As of October 2022).

Profile shot of J.A. Jablonski in straw hat & green canvas jacket with oak leaf appliques. Image by Bob Wait.

Triptych images: Glass windows of tall residential building, stone stairs carved into stone walls, a large solar array. Below is text describing J.A. Jablonski’s speculative fiction novel.

Text reads: “SF WIP. The skies have gone silent & the spaceships of ecotourists & Truthseeker Scholars, the economic lifeblood of Hev, will no longer arrive. The inhabitants face a solitary future & the decline of their vaunted Grand Solar Array. The discovery of a trove of historical documents created by a long-ago team of Truthseekers by a Historical Ethnographer & their Linguist Savant brother pits them against an arrogant scholar who would rather let Hev die than reveal the secrets of its past.”

Photo of leafless tree on edge of frozen lake. Image by J.A. Jablonski. Below is text describing Bk. 1 of J.A. Jablonski’s first academic mystery.

Text reads: “Academic Mystery WIP. After the college carillonneur is found dead & the body of an undergrad pulled from the college lake, the Dean of Libraries commits suicide. An eclectic group of campus worthies finds themselves unexpectedly in league & uncertain whom to trust when it becomes likely that one them may be a killer.”

    SOURCES & NOTES

    Disclaimer: As a Bookshop Affiliate (US only) I will earn a commission if you click through on a book title I’ve linked to and make a purchase.

    [1] Heath, Marcelle. (2022). Is That All There Is? AWST Press.
    (Heath includes some of her short stories on her website here.)

    [2] Marcelle Heath’s Apparel for Authors Instagram page.

    [3] Dale, Julia Schafler. (1986). Art to Wear. Abbeville Press.

    [4] Kalman, Tibor & Maira Kalman. (2000). (un)Fashion. Harry N. Abrams.

    [5] Bolton, Andrew. (2011). Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. Metropolitan Museum of Art New York.

     

    Becky Chambers | The Monk & Robot Series

    by | Aug 16, 2022 | Book Thoughts, Science Fiction

    Left: Cover for A Psalm for the WIld Built; Center: Becky Chambers Portrait; Right: Cover of A Prayer for the Crown Sky

    “This story would be enjoyed, I think, by travelers, gardeners, utopianists, urban planners, makers of good meals, sociologists, and people who visualize strongly when they read.”

    I have yet to entirely sort my emotional sensibilities about Becky Chambers’ recent Monk and Robot novella diptych. They are themselves works about sorting so perhaps that is fitting. The first is titled A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the second A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. [1] [2]

    While there is an organic quality to the pair—Prayer needs Psalm to work—each book contains its own small narrative necessities. And there is a gentleness to them. Not surprisingly, then, Chambers’ books have been described by some as hopepunk. Hopepunk is a “subgenre that has emerged … which finds its narrative motivation in the idea of optimism—embodied in acts of love, kindness, and respect for one another—as resistance.” (From Merriam-Webster) [3]

     

    THE STORY

    First, the story overviews from Chambers’ website:

    A Psalm for the Wild-Built

    It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot. [4]

     

    A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

    After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a tea monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. [5]

    THE TELLING

    From a writerly perspective, Chambers does some interesting things. The first book is straightforward narrative, a chronology of events, where we see a young person by name of Sibling Dex make a decision to change their life doings then, as we watch that happen, we are introduced to the intricacy of Panga’s one main urban locale, The City, and the post-Transition, rewilded beauty of the land and villages away from this urban center.

    When Dex meets a stranger named Splendid Speckled Mosscap a sort of confrontation ensues, not between Dex and Mosscap but between the assignments each have set for themselves. Life-altering assignments they are but now, with an unexpected companion, they must make other decisions, ones they had not anticipated.

    The second book begins with the same episodic structure but the scenes are more freestanding. Dex and Mosscap are still traveling together, the point of it to explore a question Panga’s robot denizens have about the human denizens. There are stop-offs. They explore. They meet people, make and receive delicious meals, engage in a little on-page flirting and off-page sex, and struggle though some good conversations. But in the course of these single adventures the sociology and philosophy of this splendidly crafted place Chambers has invented become the focus. It’s not that the plot loses its way—it doesn’t—it just doesn’t seem or want to matter as much.

    HARD SCIENCE SOFTLY, softly

    Wooden mannequin hand hold white tulip

    From the perspective of world crafting or world building, Chambers is utterly first rate. Old-timey science fictioneers believe the science has to be hard, that is, “characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic” and usually a lot of machinery. [6] The science grounding here is indeed hard but framed within the context of long time passing.

    Writing about Book 1, NPR’s Amal El-Mohtar describes that time: “Centuries ago, robots woke to sentience and went on strike, and the humans who made them as laboring tools decided to respect their newfound agency and release them. The robots chose to vanish into the wilderness in order to learn about a world beyond the bounds of human design.” [7]

    Psalm shows us the humans’ world, much of it rewilded, its culture intensely social, interpersonally aware, and technologically kind. When a robot named after a mushroom enters, the solitary young human, a tea monk of whom we have become fond, finds themselves pushed to sort further beyond what they don’t perhaps realize is their unsorted complacency.

    By the time we are well into Book 2 the nature of hard science has softened. Mosscap faces an existential dilemma: should it adhere to the robot’s technological theology that sees mechanical breakdown as inevitable and part of the natural evolution where new robots are reproduced from the parts of the old. Dex, meanwhile, struggles with the positivist notion that one must responsibly progress when their companion’s present tense philosophy suggests simply being is sufficient.

    CONNECTIONS BELOVED

    Ursula K. Le Guin by Marian Wood KolischAnn Leckie Author PhotoR.B. Lemberg author portrait

    The language I’ve used in the previous section makes Chamber’s storytelling sound rigid and analytical. It is not that at all. If anything, the writing and the telling, in addition to being lush and richly descriptive, are almost tender.

    I’ve seen her work referred to as “comfort reading.” Certainly comfort can be taken—I could see her as a tea monk mostly easily—but it’s her optimism that gives ease and provides solace.

    In that way she is very much in the storytelling tradition of Ursula K. Le Guin (L), Ann Leckie (C), and R.B. Lemberg (R). [8] Her style of telling is unique but one hears echoes.

    Nasrullah Mambrol captures the core of Le Guin’s work:

    “When Ursula K. Le Guin . . . has Geny Ai state in The Left Hand of Darkness that ‘truth is a matter of the imagination,’ she is indirectly summarizing the essential focus of her fiction: explorations of the ambiguous nature of truth through imaginative means. Few other contemporary authors have described this process with the force and clarity of Le Guin. Her subject is always humankind and, by extension, the human environment, since humanity cannot survive in a vacuum; her technique is descriptive, and her mode is metaphoric. The worlds Le Guin creates are authentic in a profoundly moral sense as her characters come to experience truth in falsehood, return in separation, unity in variety.” [9]

    In assessing Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy Liz Borke captures the author’s gist:

    “Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch books—the trilogy which comprises Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, and Ancillary Mercy—have a significant amount of thematic depth. On the surface, this trilogy offers fairly straightforward space opera adventure: but underneath are a set of nested, interlocking conversations about justice and empire, identity and complicity. How one sees oneself versus how one is seen by others: when is a person a tool and when is a tool a person? The trilogy is one long argument on negotiating personhood and the appropriate uses of power; on civilisation and the other; and on who gets to draw which lines, and how.” [10]

    American science fiction editor, and critic Gary K. Wolfe, says this about Lemberg’s The Four Profound Weaves:

    “…it’s apparent from the outset that their novel is the work of a poet. The prose is lyrical, evocative, and precise, and it soars when it needs to, without ever yielding to coloratura dramatics. That’s not the only thing appealing, and even refreshing, about this remarkable novel. For one thing, Lemberg demonstrates how it’s possible to construct an evocative and expansive setting without the need for hundreds of pages of ardu­ous, stone-by-stone worldbuilding, and how, by doing this, the setting becomes a function of the tale, rather than the other way around.” [11]

    What Chambers shares with these authors is power of vision, intense storytelling art, and a stunningly deep heart and love of person-, plant-, and animal-kind. She, like them, pours all three into her writing. The style of each is singularly theirs: Le Guin, intelligent and muscularly crafted; Leckie, complex and psychologically confident; Lemberg, lyrical and spare; and Chambers, detailed, playful, and easy, yet meticulously scribed.

    One feels held by Chambers.

    Tea pot & two filled cups of tea on wooden trayIn exploring the craft, the story, and the impact of Chambers’ Monk and Robot books, I don’t want to overlook their pure whimsy and joyfulness. Panga is a lovely little place. The trees, the riverways, the little bugs and great animals; the sheer exuberance of living things is a delight to experience, story and characters aside. 

    One memory I will keep, and one key reason I will reread these books many times, is the food and many kinds of teas. One can see the delicious beauty, smell the mystery of combined ingredients and seasonings, and revel in the shared delight that is its making and sharing. The meals are intermittent but so worth the waiting for.

    This story would be enjoyed, I think, by travelers, gardeners, utopianists, urban planners, makers of good meals, sociologists, and people who visualize strongly when they read. Reading it to children might be fun too, though the philosophizing language and concepts would need to be translated for the simpler understanding of the very young.

     

    If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

    © J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

     

    ABOUT BOOK THOUGHTS

    “Book Thoughts” is an intermittent column within my blog. The essays are not so much book reviews as book responses. I like to converse with and around the books I read.

    How to cite this post

    Jablonski, J.A. (2022, August 16). Becky Chambers | The Monk & Robot Series. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
    https://jajablonski.com/2022/08/16/becky-chambers/


    IMAGE CREDITS

    Header image

      • Becky Chambers. Author photo. From her website
      • Covers of A Psalm for the Wild-Built & A Prayer for the Crown Shy from Tordotcom

    Wooden mannequin hand holding ivory-colored tulip. Photo by Trollinho on Unsplash

    Ursula K. Le Guin. Author photo by Marian Wood Kolisch. Copyyright © by Marian Wood Kolisch

    Ann Leckie. Author photo. From Leckie’s website

    R.B. Lemberg. Author photo. From Lemberg’s website

    Tea pot & two tea cups on wooden tray. Photo by Alisher Sharip on Unsplash

    SOURCES & NOTES

    Disclaimer: As a Bookshop Affiliate (US only) I will earn a commission if you click through on a book title I’ve linked to and make a purchase.

    [1] Chambers, Becky. (2021). A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tordotcom.
    For a complete listing of Chambers’ books see her website, Other Scribbles.

    [2] Chambers, Becky. (2021). A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Tordotcom.

    [3] Definition from Merriam-Webster. (Note: An article I did not cite from but is especially good re: hope and Becky Chambers is Kehe, Jason. (2021, Sept 16). “Is Becky Chambers the Ultimate Hope for Science Fiction?” Backchannel (column), Wired.)

    [4] Description from Chambers website.

    [5] Description from Chambers website.

    [6] Definition from the Wikepedia entry for “Hard science fiction.”

    [7] El-Mohtar, Amal. (2021, July 18). “A Monk and a Robot Meet in a Forest . . . And Talk Philosophy in the New Novel.” Book Reviews. NPR.

    [8] See the websites of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ann Leckie, and R.B. Lemberg for their book info.

    [9] Mambrol, Nasrullah. (2019, Jan 2). “Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Novels.” Literariness.org.

    [10] Bourke, Liz. (2016, Jan 19). “The Politics of Justice: Identity and Empire in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Trilogy.” Tor.com.

    [11] Wolfe, Gary K. (2020, Sept 29). “Gary K. Wolfe Reviews The Four Profound Weaves by R.B. Lemberg.” Locus Magazine.

    Pot Bellies and Wild Hair: Writing Lies, Writing Truth

    by | Jul 26, 2022 | Mystery, Writing Process

    Left: single leaf falls with forest background, Center: woman with hands on face stares at camera, Right: old Corona typewriter on dark wooden desk

    “So I made them into one, the foul lot of them,
    and killed them all. It was quite satisfying.”

     

    Today I wrote of death. Rather, I killed a man.

    It’s a strange power we writers have, and a luxury if truth be told. We can create, we can destroy. World building is one way, backstory another. Characters from whole cloth, or woven-together snippets of people we’ve known or met. Or simply passed on the street, online, in dreams. We give them lives then turn around and edit them, in and out of their existence, as it pleases us, pleases the story.

    Every word we write is a lie. Lies in search of truth.

    And whose truth now? Well, that’s its own tale I suppose. If a book, a book of lies, speaks to me directly, if it strikes my heart, is it true?

    Writing is not my therapy, though who and what I’ve learned certainly surfaces. It cannot help but surface. But I don’t use writing to throw my self onto the universe. Instead, I take the truths of it and craft them into lies. I make story of them. I make art.

    The man I killed was four men though he could have been a great many more. There is a type in academe: the predator. I have fended off more than a few in my time, mostly as a student when I was vulnerable and they knew it. But once, not too long back, the gent was the husband of a professorial colleague. I was considerably taller, certainly more fierce, and could have floored him in a moment. Still he tried. Always astounds me, the ego of the predator. I used my words, as we say, and he slunk away feigning misinterpretation.

    So I made them into one, the foul lot of them, and killed them all. It was quite satisfying. But it also makes a good story which is more the point. My dead man looks like only one of them, and even then I have borrowed features from three other gents of whom I was and am fond: a little pot belly from the one, another’s lovely round head, the wild hair of a third.

    But the man is dead and good riddance.

    Mystery-writing is new to me. I read ‘em, more now as I need to understand the genre and the market, but I am mainly a non-fiction, science fiction sort of person as well as an artist. Five or so years ago I found I wanted to do something, something large, something bigger than I could not quite see or even, as yet, understand. And I needed to kill someone. So I am using my words again.

    The structure of the mystery novel is ideal for my authorial purposes now. It is like the heavy wire armature a sculptor uses as the inner framework for a piece. The wire can be twisted and bent into shape, any shape. The writing is the wire proper, editing and redrafting, the twisting. It holds the work in place. Holds the lies.

    I am doing a lot of wire work these days, and a lot of twisting. I feel powerful for it, and humbled. It is easy to kill, less easy to make a story of it. It’s the lying. Lying is easy too. Making it into truth, now that is where the real work is.

     

    Partial sculpture of ancient warrior - Wax on a metal armature, mounted on wood

    Model for a Fallen for a Fallen Warrior. c. 1520. Attributed to Giovanni Francesco Rustici.

     

    If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

    © J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

     

     

    How to cite this post

    Jablonski, J.A. (2022, July 26). Pot Bellies and Wild Hair: Writing Lies, Writing Truth. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
    https://jajablonski.com/2022/07/26/writing-lies-writing-truth/


    IMAGE CREDITS

    Header image

    Model for a Fallen Warrior. c. 1520. Attributed to Giovanni Francesco Rustici. (Italian, 1474-1554). Wax on metal armature, mounted on wood. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Permissions: Creative Commons (CC0 1.0)

    Fictional Letters to Authors & Characters Whose Books I Didn’t, Couldn’t, or Wouldn’t Finish Plus One Kick-In-The-Teeth

    by | Jun 22, 2022 | Humor

    Cartoon of angry fountain pen superimposed over old stamped envelopes

    “I’ll probably pick up your book again in a few months, Dylan,

    after I’ve calmed down, but for now I just cannot get past that one sentence.”

     

    DISCLAIMER

    The letters below were inspired by a number of books I’ve read over the past year or so that fell into the DNF* category. Some fell there dramatically, some casually for their lack of originality. One I very much wanted to like, and had it been edited a bit better (about 25 fewer pages wouldn’t have killed the story), I would have gone on to finish. But time is short and my TBR** list far too long. I’ve not included any names (of authors, characters, or book titles). To protect the innocent one might say. But mostly I am just having a bit of summer fun.

    * Did Not Finish | ** To Be Read

    round postmark cancellation with wavy lines

    Vintage French postage stamp shows woman about to write letter with quill pen as small Cupid looks over her shoulderDear Doreen,

    I want you to know that I tried, I really did, but after five chapters (and rereading all five just to be sure) I just didn’t—couldn’t—care. Okay, I admit that was probably your author’s point. Your friends didn’t care, your boss sure didn’t. If your kids did I don’t know. I didn’t read far enough to find out if you had any. And you didn’t seem to care for yourself much either. So, the promise in the blurb—that you’d discover the true meaning of life at some point, or something like that—wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

    Those blurbs also noted, by the way, that your author is known for their writerly empathy. Not quite sure what that means, but they may have slipped up with you. Then again, a famous author with whom I am familiar, blurbed that bit too, the empathy thing I mean. The overall voice of your narrative, though, sounded a tad too much like pity to me.

    I am glad you are a fictional character, Doreen. I couldn’t say this if you were real . . . but I just don’t like you. And don’t they say that if a character isn’t likable, even if they are evil, miserable, or whatever, if there isn’t at least something . . . well, I guess you know how this is going to end. I hope you found what you were looking for.

    1923 US postage stamp shows Lady LibertyDear Dylan,

    I came across your book by accident, a serendipitous find, when I was searching the public library catalog. I went all Boolean! Aren’t I mad cool? I needed something about a certain cluster of personality disorders AND comorbidity AND (“social behavior” OR “social manifestation”).

    It had to be nonfiction and fairly straightforward. Your title was a curious one that suggested your angle on things might contain something unique. But then I read your first words, something along the lines that your father (or maybe it was your stepfather) had the disorder I was interested in.

    Puzzled, I closed the your book to read the back-cover blurbs which I hadn’t yet gotten to. (Just so you know, I look at the entire book when I read. It’s a whole package. I learned that in grad school from some gloriously anal-retentive rare books specialist who wore the funkiest, T.S. Eliot-style eyeglasses.) A slew of notables authored all of your blurbs. Serious notables. “Yikes!” I thought. “What did I miss?” Something probably. If I had hung around to find out maybe I wouldn’t be writing this letter.

    But while I truly hate the notion that the first sentence of a book makes or breaks it, in this case it was all too sadly true. It was as if your My parent had X wanted to have the same literary impact as Call Me Ishmael. It didn’t. (Then again I didn’t read all of Moby Dick either.) It made me doubt your take on things from the get go. Honestly, I thought I’d picked up a memoir by an insecure second-born with daddy issues. Yeah, I know. Heartless AF. I’ll probably pick up your book again in a few months, Dylan, after I’ve calmed down, but for now I just cannot get past that one sentence. Sorry.

    American postage stamp showing Charles Lindbergh's airplaneDear Carlotta,

    I hope you know that an archives, a museum, and a library are not the same thing because it seems your main character hasn’t a clue. I thought your book would be a pleasant escape from looking for comparable titles for my own WIP so my bad there. You could hardly know that I’ve worked in and taught archives and library grad students for a bunch of years.

    But that tiny, secret flat in the old wing that the main character rented? (Or did she grow up there as a orphan or with unfeeling parents, which is virtually the same thing isn’t it?) Sorry, but I ran into several I Heart Libraries-themed novels at the same time last year while we were all hunkering down because of (and emotionally escaping from) the Covid horror. (Two had the secret apartment thing going as well.) They all sounded rather the same and rather rote after awhile.

    And there was one other thing, Carlotta. I know there are people who do not find libraries (or archives or museums) fascinating places of beauty. Poor them. But people and their interests—no accounting is there, eh? If you turn this mystery into a series though, as seems likely, please do not use up another three quarters of a page in waxing triteness about the glorious smell of old books. We know, we know.

    Postage stamp of Sputnik Dear Lucas,

    You nailed the setting! Really nailed it! I was there, body and soul. But then the monumental set caved in and buried, smothered, and annihilated the story you were trying to tell. It forced your little coterie of witty, pretty, sexy characters to hold up the sky, as it were, and they just weren’t up to it. But major kudos for having queer characters who were just that, with no grand authorial agenda; just some credible and obvious people who liked whom they liked and everyone was just fine with it. You are my hero, Lucas!

    Postage stamp showing American president George Washington in profileDear Kevin,

    My dear, dear Kevin. You are not the voice of the Deity when it comes to the use and placement of commas, semi-colons, and en- and/or em-dashes. I realize you have writing credentials as old as dirt but surely you know there are reference tools called style guides. There are lots of style guides out there, too, each written for specific audiences, publications, and reasons. And please do note the word guide. That’s guide, not rule. That means recommended usage not carved-in-stone-my-way-or-the-highway. Editors can help you here. Babies won’t die and empires won’t fall if some wee fleck of punctuation is used in a way you’d not deign to use yourself. Take a chill pill.

    round postmark cancellation with wavy lines

     

    If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

    © J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

    How to cite this post

    Jablonski, J.A. (2022, June 22). Fictional Letters to Authors & Characters Whose Books I Didn’t, Couldn’t, or Wouldn’t Finish Plus One Kick-In-The-Teeth. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
    https://jajablonski.com/2022/06/22/fictional-letters-to-author/


    IMAGE CREDITS

    Header image

    Postage stamps & cancellation mark. All in Public Domain

    H.G. Parry | The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

    by | Jun 8, 2022 | Book Thoughts

    Cover of The Unlikely Escape of Urish Heep, author photo of H.G. Parry, Map of London, fountain pen

    “It tickled me that while I knew a certain thing had to happen, because that’s the trope or literary tradition Parry was representing, how she twists the representation into a unique thing is what makes it her story—which is precisely how literature works.”

    H.G. Parry’s The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep (2019) is a delightful, splendid, maddening, curious, detailed, remarkable, tantalizing, intriguing, distancing, overexcited, cheering, and rewarding book. Pieces of it turned up in my dreams immediately after I finished reading it. This only happens if something—person, place, thing, or event—has done something unequivocal to me and my imagination. [1]

    The dream pieces were partial images, those I recall seeing as I read but, as within Heep, disappeared and reappeared sporadically. There were a lot of words flying about, differently sized and mostly in serif font. (I think the cover of the book may have had something to do with that.) And there was a quality of light to most of the dreams which was unexpected, a kind of hovering glow of gold satin.

    It is an unusual book.

    THE STORY

    First, the description of the story from Parry’s website:

    For his entire life, Charley Sutherland had concealed a magical ability he can’t quite control: he can bring characters from books into the real world. His older brother, Rob—a young lawyer with a normal house, normal fiancée, and an utterly normal life—hopes that this strange family secret will disappear with disuse, and he will be discharged from his life’s duty of protecting Charley and the real world from each other. But then, literary characters start causing trouble in their city, making threats about destroying the world . . . and for once, it isn’t Charley’s doing. There’s someone else who shares his powers. It’s up to Charley and a reluctant Rob to stop them, before these characters tear apart the fabric of reality. [2]

    The Difficulty of fiction

    Getting into the book was an odd experience. Reading fiction is hard for me, magical realism even more so. My academic training had a goodly component of literary analysis. I did a large piece of research that involved heavy duty content analysis. Then I went on to teach writing and literary analysis for a time, and after that did and taught book and database indexing which requires that one objectify text in order to label its contents for intellectual access.

    As a reader, I find it exceedingly difficult to turn off these various aspects of my mind that run at full tilt most of the day. This means reading is never simply that. Add to that fun, I am a long-time writer. The bulk of my career was professional writing with the occasional self-expressing poetry or fictional correspondences as private entertainment. For the last five or six years I have been writing fiction: magical realism, speculative fiction, and academic mystery. [3]

    What is so fun about Parry’s book is that none of this mattered while at the same time it thrummed below like a bagpipe’s drone all the while I read. 

    And none of this is needed to enjoy The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. It’s a fulsome, fat book that reads fast and fun and goes on and on.

     

    IMPRESSIONS

    Some thoughts on the book.

    Heep takes a little time to get going. Older brother Rob is a bit of a pill in terms of personality. He has the arrogant know-it-all ways of an older sibling and Charley is a bit whiny at first to my tastes. Frankly, I found them both annoying but decided to give Parry benefit of the doubt. Also, analytical-me could see she was doing something. Who, what, and how these brothers are matters.

    Parry has her own interesting take on their creation:

    Charley because he’s seen mostly through other people’s eyes, so it was difficult to sift through that and see who he really is inside his own head; Rob because he’s so reluctant to get involved with anything outside the norm that he risked missing out on most of the plot! [4]

    Once the actual adventuring begins the story takes off. Millie Radcliffe-Dix—a girl detective of Parry’s invention who is a bit of a mix of Nancy Drew and Pippi Longstocking—provides a strong, to my mind stronger, counterpoint to Charley than his brother. When Millie is on stage things seem more coherent. Then again, that is her role and the literary notion of role is central to the characters (those real and those read-in) to the plot, and to the larger tale Parry is creating.

     

    Portrait of SHerlock Holmes by Sidney Paget

    Sherlock Homes by Sidney Paget

    Jane Austen

    Jane Austen (based on sketch by her sister Cassandra)

    Photo portrait of Charles Dickens

    Charles Dickens (From the National Library of Wales)

    Characters and creatures begin to appear, seemingly at random at first: Uriah Heep (from David Copperfield) running around Charley’s English Department and a most fiercesome and real Hound of the Baskervilles (from Conan Doyle’s book of the same name) attacking the brothers at Charley’s home. Then their authors start popping up and other authors, or their representations (there are multiple versions of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, each manifesting a certain, different trait of the man as Austen wrote him). Dickens’ Dorian Gray is quite the devious charmer who both moves the plot onward while providing a seething uncertainty beneath the action.

    There are coexisting universes, not unlike the mundane reality of a reader and the imagined reality created by the book she is reading. The shifting between the two is puzzling at first—I found myself wishing the book’s editing had been slightly tighter here as the imagery was a bit overwhelming (for me, that is). But the increasing overlap of space, places, and imagination becomes a necessary element of the plot and the story.

    It’s difficult to describe further as it might compromise a reader coming fresh to this delightful book. I can say the ending was charming while also satisfying. Somewhere I read that Parry has been asked about writing a sequel and I don’t see how she could without simply repeating herself.  A sequel would simply rerun the tropes and story types she has broken apart this once and so successfully. There were some minor characters, some needed for the plot, some for a kind of comic sensibility, that I’d have edited out, but they do work. (I suspect that’s my English professor persona having a small fit.)

    All in all, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep is a book I will want to periodically reread, which I don’t often do unless something about the book took joyous hold of my imagination.

    The personal book

    I know I am not the only person who felt this but it seemed Parry wrote this book just for me, the one-time academic and academic librarian, the double English major, the been-reading-since-I was-three person. I got to use all my skills and training in cahoots with someone whose skills and training are enough above mine to make reading Heep a sort of game. Could I anticipate a certain next part of the story? Yes! Did I see the occasional inside literary joke? Yes! Did I know the ending because of what I know about how literature, criticism, and storytelling work? Yes.

    But even better, not yes.

    I knew what was going to happen pretty much all the way through because a close reading of the characters—the literary persons that exist or appear throughout the story and the characters that made the story itself—meant only certain things could happen. So although I knew X would happen or a certain person would do or be something/someone, it didn’t happen quite as I thought it might. I felt genuine childlike glee every time it happened as though Parry and I were playing a game of badminton tapping the birdie back and forth. I got to be Charley (!) who early on explains what reading is for him:

    And while I am reading, the new words I’m taking in will connect to others I’ve already taken in . . . . They make a map, or a pattern, or a constellation. Formless, intricate, infinitely complex, and lovely. And then, at once, they’ll connect. They’ll meet and explode. Of course. That’s the entire point! That’s how the story works, the way each sentence and metaphor and reference feeds into the other to illuminate something important. That explosion of discovery, of understanding, is the most intoxicating moment there is. Emotional, intellectual, aesthetic. Just for a moment, a perfect moment, a small piece of the world makes perfect sense. And it’s beautiful. It’s a moment of pure joy, the kind that brings pleasure like pain. (pg. 26)

     

    A page later Charley says,

    That part is the magic, in that it’s a step further than most people’s reading or analysis goes. It all feels one and the same to me, but that’s where the line crosses from the accepted to the extraordinary. (pg. 27)

    But for all that my lit crit and writing background had me primed, Parry often caught me off guard, often in the most wonderful ways. I won’t spoil anyone’s reading with specifics (and there are many opportunities for this). It tickled me that while I knew a certain thing had to happen, because that’s the trope or literary tradition Parry was representing, how she twists the representation into a unique thing is what makes it her story—which is precisely how literature works.

    And why writing fiction is so hard! Writers are told to “be original” while also being told that, fundamentally, there are only seven types of stories. [4] So how does one manage? How does one make a type fresh?

    In Parry’s case, it was a matter of taking that other adage—write what you know—and converting it to write how you know. About half way through Heep one of the character-people tries to explain something to Rob by saying “If you were in a certain kind of book . . . .” Parry, the writer with a PhD in English Literature, does a version of this. It’s as if she instead asked herself If I were a certain kind of book . . . .

    In a 2019 interview, when asked what research did for this book she said “I cheated with this, because I deliberately wrote a book about everything I love and so I knew a lot already.” [5]

    It must have been quite freeing to simply cut loose in a way that both honored the breadth and depth of English Literature as a formal field of study while also, in effect, kicking all the formal requirements of literary criticism and analysis right in the teeth.

    Lady of Challot by Hunt shows woman standing in center of elbaorte room looking out an arched window
    WOman weaving cloth on loom surrounded by suitors

    Left: The Lady of Shallot by William Holman Hunt

    Right: Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse

    The fun I had with Heep has made my years in academe and lit crit so worth it! Witty, heartfelt, & just plain delightful. Parry is not simply a story teller, she is a story weaver: Ariadne unwinding her skein; The Lady of Shallot embroidering images seen in her mirror; Penelope weaving and unraveling her father-in-law’s shroud. She plays, deeply plays, and we and our imaginations are the better for it in so many ways.

     

    If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

    © J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

    ABOUT BOOK THOUGHTS

    “Book Thoughts” is an intermittent column within my blog. The essays are not so much book reviews as book responses. I like to converse with and around the books I read. Sometimes I will write more formally, sometimes off the cuff, sometimes almost intimately. I write about what I feel like writing about. A book might have come out a month ago, a few decades ago, or a few centuries ago. I read as I please and when thoughts about the experience come to mind sufficiently, I write them here.

    How to cite this post

    Jablonski, J.A. (2022, June 8). H.G. Parry | The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
    https://jajablonski.com/2022/06/08/parry-uriah-heep/


    IMAGE CREDITS

    Header image

    Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget. Via  Wikipedia.

    Portrait of Jane Austen, from the memoir by J. E. Austen-Leigh (1798-1874). Via Wikipedia.

    Charles Dickens. From the National Library of Wales. Via Wikipedia.

    The Lady of Shallot by William Homan Hunt. Via Wikipedia.

    Penelope and the Suitors by John William Waterhouse (1911-1912). Via Wikipedia

     

    SOURCES & NOTES

    Disclaimer: As a Bookshop Affiliate (US only) I will earn a commission if you click through on a book title I’ve linked to and make a purchase.

    [1] Parry, H. G. (2019). The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.  Redhook.

    [2] H.G. Parry’s webpage for The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.

    [3] See this section of my website for a rundown of my works done and in progress.

    [4] The Quillery. (2019, July 30). “Interview with H.G. Parry, author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.” The Quillery website.

    [5] Booker, Christopher. (2004). The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. Bloomsbury Continuum. (This link is to the 2019 edition.)

    [6] The Quillery. (2019, July 30). “Interview with H.G. Parry, author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep.” The Quillery website.

    Signs of Ideas

    by | Mar 22, 2022 | Creativity

    Collage of multicolored sidewalk bricks, a lightbulb in sand, the word Ideas in grey stone, & emoji-like images of lightbulbs

    “For me it is a matter of seeing, a posture of mind.“

    Writers and artists are frequently asked “Where do you get your ideas?” Googling the phrase just now came back with 508,000,000 results. Maria Popova, essayist and creator of The Marginalian website, has written a splendid piece on the question. She opens saying,

    “Since long before the question of where good ideas come from became psychologists’ favorite sport, readers, fans, and audiences have been hurling it at authors and artists, much to their frustration.” [1]

    Melissa Burkley, psychologist and author of the column “The Social Thinker” on the Psychology Today website, addresses the notion in a well-considered discussion of the conscious and unconscious sides, or aspects, of the human mind:

    “So how is it that people who make their living writing can’t tell us where their story ideas truly come from? I think the reason has to do with the fact that the human mind is what psychologists call a “dual-process system . . . . Recognizing that ideas don’t just get consciously invented out of thin air is inspiring. Because we all daydream or get bored and find our mind wandering throughout our day. The only difference is that writers have trained themselves to listen to their inner mule rather than ignore it.” [2]

    Burkley talks about  handing “the reins off to your unconscious brain.” Easier said than done, of course, given how everyday life and responsibilities can freeze us in the here and now.

    At the end of this post I have a few thoughts about how one can shift one’s self from the conscious to unconscious modes (then back again). For me it involves associative thinking, seeing into things (i.e., finding stories in objects), and dreaming.

    Associative Thinking

    We moved not too long ago and our small house has a little front room we like to call the solarium. It faces west and is filled with plants, a cozy sofa, an early 20th-century secretary desk made of recovered barn wood, and an old stereo system that plays CDs and cassette tapes. I like to sit there in the morning and nosh on my breakfast before my husband wakes up. I look out the windows onto our minor neighborhood street and let my mind wander.

    There a many dog walkers and, when it’s warm, people running or walking for their exercise. I recall a moment: a tiny, fierce-looking woman on her morning run. As she ran by a second time and I realized that her running course was just our small city block. I was struck with a fictional notion, an associative notion: I am a 19th-century invalid, one of those fragile ladies from history, like Ida McKinley, the wife of U.S. president William McKinley.

    I imagine sitting in one of those elaborate wicker-back Victorian wheel chairs, gazing wistfully out, or perhaps resentfully, as people pass by. I imagine stories . . .

    • A couple, young and in love, the woman dark haired and small. Or perhaps they are older and also in love but for so long a time that the act of the man quietly offering his arm to his wife belies decades of passions spent and enjoyed;
    • A smallish woman with her hair in a proper updo pushing an elaborate pram, her child so longed for and now so deeply cherished; or perhaps she is a modern era wife, visibly pregnant with an infant never wanted, another forced pregnancy and the child-to-be resented;
    • A skipping girl, her hair ribbon flouncing about like a bird in flight, a girl who will go on to discover the first fossils in Dorset, or who will be struck down by a mysterious fever before the month’s end;
    • A man, dark-haired, young, and desperately handsome, walking with an older man, his father likely by the matching profiles; desperate in other ways as they appear to be debating, the younger man nearly in tears, pleading with his dear Papa to accept that he is a man now with his own mind, the father devastated to lose his son to heathenism.

    All ideas captured, all stories imagined, all triggered by a small, intense woman with dark hair and a prancing runner’s gait who passed by one morning.

    First Lady Ida McKinley circa 1900

    Ida McKinley in the White House Conservatory (ca. 1900).

    Historical Note: McKinley’s mother & two young daughters died within a short period of time leading to a physical breakdown. She developed migraine and epilepsy. Despite her ailments she provided valuable advice and insight re: politics to her husband. She was also an active supporter of woman suffrage. [3]

    3 old fashioned ligh tbulbs

    Stories from objects

    Top: vintage science instruments in open box; Next: same items in smaller paperboard boxes within wood box: Next: Wooden box closed, it has some artsy brushed on images on top; Bottom: Box wrapped in borwn wrapping paper, tied with red yarn, and with vintage postage stamps & special delivery stickers.
    3 old fashioned ligh tbulbs

    Some years back I was part of a one-day LARP (“Live Action Role-Playing”) children’s theater event. The Harry Potter books were out then and we borrowed the notion of a first day at a magical school as our context. [4]  I played three different characters: an in-person postal delivery person, the six-month, pre-event author/editor of the monthly newspaper, and a Potteresque moving portrait character.

    A good many props, sets, costumes, and the like were made. I was responsible for the “Owl Post” deliveries. Each child (there were 19, ranging in age from 9-14) received several letters and a package. I created them all, a total of 125 letters and 19 unique “magical gifts.”

    I’ve written fictional correspondences over the years [5] so the letter writing was not easy but familiar. Creating the gifts was more of a challenge. What I ended up doing was wandering through thrift shops looking for things that might be made into something different. It was that posture of seeing again. If you’re looking for magical things then magical things appear.

    The top left image shows the found objects assembled for one gift: a long metal tweezers, a scientific measuring device (an expanding spectrometer), a piece of obsidian, and an old wooden pencil box. As with each package, the items were boxed or wrapped or bagged within. And for each a personal letter was enclosed that described or told a story of the items. [6] Each box was then wrapped in heavy brown packing paper, tied with yarn or twine, and had vintage-era postage stamps affixed as well as various special delivery stickers or stamps.

    The story for the letter came from the objects. The recipient for this package, the oldest kid attending, was still at that liminal moment where the child wants to believe but the almost young man is hovering. Knowing that, I selected these objects, and knowing that, a story came into my mind that the letter was from the  former “Head Boy.”

    I am going to take the extra step and send you some stuff I know you will need . . . I wrote . . .  The professor of the mundane technology course always requires his students to gather examples of unusual technology.  I never got around to showing him these so I figure I’d save you some time up front by sending them on. I’m sure he’ll be delighted. I ended by telling him of another professor: Too bad Professor E – – –  (or E-cubed, as we upper levels refer to him!) is on sabbatical this year.  He teaches a mean Magical Metals class.  Tough as all get out but he has a great sense of humor which makes it do-able.

    Postscript: A year later I heard from someone at the event that this package and letter thoroughly delighted this young man and that he thought the tools to be truly wizarding in nature!

     

    dreamtimes

     

    Cream brick famhouse and garage ca. 1930s
    Cream brick farmhouse ca 1956
    Cream brick farm house and barn seen from a distance looking east
    2 men in farm carriage with white hourse pose in front of barn and cream brick farmhouse with garage, ca. 1930s

    My childhood home was this farmhouse. The two upper left and lower right photos are from the 1930s, the lower left from around 1910, and the upper right from 1956. The house itself was built in the 1840s. Our family of twelve lived there beginning in the mid-1950s through the early 2000s. Surrounded by acres of farmland originally, during our time that land had been parceled out and the house stood magnificently alone among blocks and blocks of post-World War II houses.

    Corner floor-to-ceiling cabinet made of wood. Upper door has 5 glass panes; lower third is a wood door.

    The smaller, house-shaped section to the right of the garage held the kitchen in its entirety. Where the piano is in this photo to the left is where a cast iron cook stove would have stood. You can see just see the chimney for it in the upper images.

    In the kitchen corner was this cabinet for the best dishes. My parents kept their small set of wedding china there. The little door below is what fascinated me. When I was four I dreamt I opened it and went inside. So vivid was the dream that I remember it to this day. The actual cupboard had a few shelves. In my dream, just inside the inside top was a small rectangular opening about two by eight inches. Brilliant sunlight flooded down onto what was then a linoleum-covered floor. In the way of dreams I pushed myself through the opening and found myself in our backyard. It was and wasn’t our yard, filled with many more trees and it shimmered with that same unearthly sunlight.

    I have had dreams as vivid as this but except for one other none have stayed with me. That one was more recent (about five years ago) and more typical of the dreams I have now: detailed, visual to the point of cinematic, and rich in storytelling. This particular dream felt called out my subconscious. I’d been pulling together the underlying substance for the academic mystery series I wanted to write. As I cannot write with any focus or success until I see the place for a tale, I was doing a lot of image web browsing of campus maps and old photos of colleges from the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries.

    One weirdly sleepless night I feel into a brief, very deep sleep. It seemed I dreamt for hours. I found myself both on an old college campus and watching it all as a non-participating observer. There were my buildings, the layout, the great oak trees that lined the old quad. And there was a nearby lake. I didn’t fly over it all but for all that it still felt like one of those cool flying dreams! I saw people, knew who they were and how they knew each other. Part way through it all I woke up, just enough to realize what was happening. I told myself to “look harder” and dove back in, now half asleep and half awake. Then I made myself truly wake up. I grabbed my sketchbook and frantically wrote up notes, recording in some places but in others letting the dream push my awake self to invent more. Just now, as I wrote this last sentence, I looked at those sketchbook pages again and had to laugh. I had labeled the pages “a screenplay.”

    Holding on to OR MAKING ideas

    In 1885 Robert Louis Stevenson had a bad dream. His wife Fanny spoke of it later: “In the small hours of one morning . . . I was awakened by cries of horror from Louis. Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened him. He said angrily: ‘Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.’ I had awakened him at the first transformation scene.” [7]  Stevenson, ill and bedridden, subsequently wrote the book we know as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde over the course of the next few days. [8]

    While I rarely have nightmares this vivid, my dreams are typically as intense. I put it down to insomnia. (My mother used to joke that I had sleep issues even as an embryo.) I also have one of those brains that simply does not shut down visually. The proverbial counting sheep trick doesn’t work because the beasties are moving! The only way I can get to sleep is to visualize vast swaths of fabric simply hanging there, or to imagine I am looking at a night sky close up.

    Megan Schmidt, writing for Discover magazine about who remembers their dreams and why narrowed it down nicely for me:

    “. . .  it seems that brain differences, individual characteristics and aspects related to the dreams themselves all play a role.” [9]

    Over time I have learned to be aware in my dreams. If I am relaxed enough I can dream lucidly, my insomnia is a version of the “wake back to bed” mode for encouraging lucid dreams. [10] But rather than engage in a quiet activity, such as reading, while awake as this method suggests, I imagine characters and scenes for the book I am writing. It’s a bit like sitting in that Victorian wheelchair again. I simply sit and watch people move and talk.

    When I fall asleep again I may or may not dream my stories but I do tend to fall asleep with a kind of heightened awareness. That is, I almost always know I am dreaming. If I am close enough to that threshold of sleeping and wakefulness I can control or design the dream. More often, though, my observing self tends to say stuff like “this is important” and “don’t forget this one.”

    WRITE IT OUT

    In the final section of the Schmidt article, she cites Michael Schredl from Germany’s Central Institute of Mental Health. He states that “It’s really an ability where ‘practice makes perfect.’ In other words, if you keep trying to remember your dreams, you eventually will.” He recommends keeping a dream journal.

    I don’t do quite that but I do keep my sketch book or note cards at my bedside. If there is a sentence or phrase I want to expand in in my next day’s writing, I’ll write it out but also write the context. Or, as in the case above where I dreamed my college campus into existence along with a few characters and the bare bones of a plot, I get up and go to the guest room next door that serves as my writing space. Then, since I am usually wide awake, I write out as much as I can of what I saw, what people said, and what the story was.

    It’s hardly a perfect process as I often forget dreams between sleep interludes or am too sleepy to get up and write, but the more I do it the better it works. And I comfort myself knowing that if I forget one dream, there will be another that will likely be along similar lines. Dr. Jekyll and his counterpart Mr. Hyde did not appear from nowhere. Stevenson had noted that he’d “. . . long been trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle for that strong sense of man’s double being which must at times come in upon and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature.” [11]

    THINK ABOUT WHAT IF

    We all have those moments: If only I’d said ‘this’ or if only that person lived here not there. We imagine what would be different if something else had been different as well. I find I can get some keen and sometimes fantastic ideas for characters or plot by tweaking things this way.

    In my academic mystery there is a hockey player, a coach. She is cocky and self assured. She’s interesting and fun to write but she seemed flat. I need her to be somehow less perfectly the gold medal winner she is. What if she weren’t as good as people say she is? Or, what if she was once but isn’t now? If either of those, what made that difference? What if, I thought, what if she were injured in a way that changed who she is now. What do hockey players need besides physical skill and endurance? They need to see everything that’s going on. What if my golden girl was legally blind in one eye due to a recent on-ice accident? A little research into NHL player injury gave me some good ideas and now my character is something more as is my story.

    When reading what I wrote I have other what if moments. What if ‘X’ happened two days prior? What if the murderer is not the only one? It means a boat load of rewriting, but then I have different versions to compare.

    For another take on this, see this blog essay “Let’s Agree About Conflict” by writer KJ Charles. In the second half she talks about obstacles. Obstacles are a kind of what if. By tweaking something here or there, so much can change. As Charles put it when considering a set of obstacles for a set of characters, what if she had decided differently:

    “All of those decisions could have worked. All of them would have led to the characters developing and reacting differently. And since plot is character in action, we’d have ended up with completely different books.” [12]

    LET YOUR MIND WANDER

    Fireplace video on vertical monitorIn this time of intense social media bombardment, of frantic and dangerous world events, of private personal and familial concerns, letting one’s mind simply go is not an easy thing. I try to turn away from social media at least twice a week. And by away I mean just that. It’s not easy since I am sitting at my desk with my several work monitors; which is why I can only manage it twice a week! I do much of my writing research online. But I force myself to do it—not open any new tabs on my laptop, shut down my phone. Sometimes it takes me several times to get myself to do this.

    One trick I’ve found is running a relaxing video at full size on the monitor to my left. Right now it’s running a 10-hour burning fireplace, complete with crackling sounds. I find it immensely soothing. And when I need to let my writer’s mind wander, I turn off the other monitor and just look at the fire crackle away. Here are a few other channels I’ve found good videos on:

     

     

      • Ambience of Yesteryear (which they describe as a “collection of yesteryear-inspired cinemagraphs with historical themes, for ambience and ASMR.”)
      • The Silent Watcher (described as a collection of  “videos of beautiful and relaxing nature scener and sounds”)
      • Cat Trumpet (a collection of “videos . . . ideal for sleep, study, meditation and stress relief”)

    More recently, I am learning more about deep breathing exercises. I am not trying to meditate though, for what I want is a daydreaming, associative floating experience, not the meditation goal of the empty or blank mind. I want to play, in a way, I want to see where my mind takes an image, like that woman runner, or a what if notion, or extrapolating a dream story. The breathing helps me slow down my comet-hopping visual mind. This info page over at HealthLine provides instruction for 10 breathing exercises.

    Finding ideas for stories or the like is largely a matter of being open to what’s out there. If I try too hard I lose the flow of discovery. If I don’t take the time to relax, without judgment, and simply allow my curious mind to see, I can just as easily miss things. For me it is a matter of seeing, a posture of mind. The ideas are there for the taking if one but will.

     

     

    If you have a question or comment for me, drop me a line via my Contact page.

    © J.A. Jablonski 2022. All rights reserved.

    HOW TO CITE THIS POST

    Jablonski, J.A. (2022, March 22). Signs of Ideas. Blog post. J.A. Jablonski (website).
    https://jajablonski.com/2022/03/22/signs-of-ideas/

     

    IMAGE CREDITS

    Header Image:

    First Lady Ida McKinley in the White House Conservatory (circa. 1900). From The White House Historical Association.

    Three small old fashioned light bulbs. Modified version of this public domain image.

    Vertical image set of found items-turned-magical-postal-gift. All photos by J.A. Jablonski. All rights reserved.

    Cream brick farmhouse. On Milwaukee website. Kitchen corner image modified from realtor ad.

    Fireplace video on vertical computer monitor. By J.A. Jablonski. All rights reserved.

     

    SELECTED SOURCES | NOTES

    [1] Popova, Maria. (2014). Ursula K. Le Guin on Where Ideas Come From, the “Secret” of Great Writing, and the Trap of Marketing Your Work. (blog post). Brain Pickings. [NOTE: Popova has renamed this site The Marginalian.]

    [2] Burkley, Melissa. (2017, December 4). Where Do Writers Get Their Ideas? Blog post. The Social Thinker. Psychology Today. Burkley also wrote a blog from 2017-2019 called The Writer’s Laboratory Blog that I’ve found insightful.

    [3]  Read more about Ida McKinley at this page from the National Park Service.

    [4] I wrote about this wizarding event on my artist’s blog, Dante’s Wardrobe. Here is the link to that set of posts.

    [5] Writing fictional correspondences is a blast! If you are interested in how to start one and how to make your own letterhead, mailboxes, faux postage, etc. see this collection of posts on my Dante’s Wardrobe site.  NOTE: This is a fun classroom activity as well as one for lovers, roommates, and families.

    [6] The posts listed in note #4 here include a subset on what I referred to as the faux packages. You can find those at this link.

    [7] Balfour, Graham (1912). The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson. Vol. II. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, pg. 15.

    [8] An e-version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be found on the Project Gutenberg website here.

    [9] Schmidt, Megan. (2019, July 14). “Why Do Some People Always Remember Their Dreams, While Others Almost Never Do?” From Discover website.

    [10] Nunez, Kirsten. (updated on January 5, 2022). “5 Lucid Dreaming Techniques to Try.” Healthline website.

    [11] Luckhurst, Roger. (n.d.) “Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.” British Library website. Accessed March 18, 2022.

    [12] Charles, KJ. (2021, June 25). “Let’s Talk About Conflict.” Blog post. KJ Charles website.