October 8, 2013

I've been thinking recently about research and voice.

In particular, I've been thinking about how, sometimes when starting out to write a novel or other piece of fiction, we do our research and we find the voice through which we tell our stories. Or, perhaps, we do our research and the voices find us.

I've been thinking about this because I'm starting in on writing another YA novel, my third, entitled Miss Emily's Book of Spells. It's based on the premise that embedded in Emily Dickinson's poems are other poems, spells, magical words just waiting to be uttered and released. One reason, I suggest, why her poems appear opaque sometimes, why they rely on what the great poem famously referred to as "circumference," is that she is secreting spells in them. That is, Emily Dickinson was a spell maker!

I think it's a cool premise, but how to tell the tale? Of course, I've been reading her poems, ferreting out the spells inside them. Here's the first one I discovered, based on lines from a number of her poems:

treading – treading – breaking Death                        
            going numb – the Dying breath                                 

Graves before my freezing lips                                   
            Zeroes – taught us – Phosphorus                               

Unto Us – the Suns extinguish –                               
New Horizons – they embellish –                               

The Truth, is Bald, and Cold –                                   
The Truth is Bald and Cold –

If you know Shakespeare you'll recognize the spell's rhythm above is lifted from the witches' spells in Macbeth. I'm not sure if I'll stay with that limitation, but in this first spell I did.

So I've been reading Emily Dickinson, and reading about her, too, particularly Alfred Habegger's biography of the great poet, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books. I'm not very far into it yet, but already I'm learning some cool stuff, such as that, as I learned in the book's very first sentence, "Sometime between 1636 and 1638, Emily Dickinson's earliest American progenitors in the paternal line, Nathaniel and Ann Gull Dickinson, left the parish of Billingborough in Lincolnshire, England, for the raw British outpost of Wethersfield, Connecticut." One sentence in and already I'm finding connections! Elizabeth George Speare's classic novel, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, which I read this summer as part of my "research" into YA books on witches, largely takes place in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1687!

And of course, in reading about early American instances of reported witches, I researched the Salem Witch Trials, where I learned that the first accused "witch" was a slave, a black woman (or, according to Wikipedia, was more probably of mixed racial origins) named Tituba. That led to my reading another novel, this one by the Maryse Conde, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Along the way, in the process of my reading, I knew that Tituba must have had some contact with at least one of those Puritan ancestors of Emily Dickinson. I imagined Tituba's spells running Dickinson bloodlines ever since, until awakened by the poet's words.

I also reread Ishmael Reed's classic "I m a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra," a poem set out in irresistible rhythms about a spell casting mystic cowboy in the old west ("I am a cowboy in the boat of Ra, Lord of the lash,/ the Loup Garou Kid. Half breed son of Pisces and/ Aquarius. I hold the souls of men in my pot. I do/ the dirty boogie with scorpions...."), I've long admired. Reading more of Reed, I discovered his "Neo-HooDoo Manifesto," where he writes, ""Neo-HooDoo is the 'Lost American Church'.... Neo HooDoo would rather 'shake that thing' than be stiff and erect.... HooDoo is the strange and beautiful 'fits' the Black slave Tituba gave the children of Salem." And that led me to research HooDoo.

In Wikipedia HooDoo is defined as "'conjure'" and (inaccurately) as 'Voodoo'... a traditional African-American folk spirituality that developed from a number of West African, Native American and European spiritual traditions" (Side note: As a writer, I'm a big fan of Wikipedia: It gives me information fast and often starts me out on more research, but as a university professor I counsel my students to take its offerings with a grain of salt, since they sometimes contains contested information that hasn't been very deeply vetted). In that Wikipedia HooDoo entry you can find these two sentences: "Paralleling God-as-conjurer, hoodoo practitioners often understand the biblical figure Moses in similar terms. [Zora Neale] Hurston developed this idea in her novel Moses: Man of the Mountain, in which she calls Moses, 'the finest hoodoo man in the world.'" And that led me to read Zora Neale Hurston.

Hurston's most famous work is Their Eyes Were Watching God, but Moses: Man of the Mountain, is a fine novel, too.  Hurston was a folklorist of note, as well, who studied with the great anthropologist Franz Boas, and in her book of "Negro folk-lore," Mules and Men, she has a whole section devoted to Hoodoo. Hurston she says that Hoodoo is another word for Voodoo, which the Wikipedia entry above takes exception with (but I think I stick with Wikipedia on this one, since I want to feel free to deviate from more accepted Voodoo practices in my novel). Nevertheless, there is much great stuff in Mules and Men, both in its folk tale and in the Hoodoo sections. Besides some cool conjuring descriptions, what I also took away from Hurston is her great ear for dialogue, both in her fiction and nonfiction. Reading Hurston, I could almost feel the voices that she represents in her work filtering into my ear.

That Wikipedia entry on HooDoo also led me to the work of Harry Middleton Hyatt, a white folklorist acknowledged by Hurston, who travelled the south in the 1930s, conducting interviews with various HooDoo conjurers. Hyatt wrote up these conversations in his epic collection, Hoodoo -- Conjuration -- Witchcraft -- Rootwork. I'm having a good time playing my way through that work, too.

And somewhere along the way I came across Marie Laveau, the great Creole practitioner of Voodoo in New Orleans in the 19th Century. Laveau catered to both white people and people of color, and she's become a sort of folk legend (for example, check out Bobby Bare's country song about Marie Laveau: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpZzehuWdM4). In the process of all this research,  the narrator of my novel was beginning to take shape, a mixed-race female, the granddaughter of Marie Laveau, born in slavery in Louisiana. Her mother was one of Marie Laveau's daughters. Her father was a Cuban sea captain, a onetime slave trader. Although Marie Laveau was a free woman of color in New Orleans, through some underhanded dealings, her daughter is taken as a slave on a plantation north of New Orleans, and that's where my narrator, Hechizar, was born in 1847. Hechizar, by the way, means "to bewitch" in Spanish. Her mother, when Hechizar was a baby, taking the last name of Spelwomann, escaped from that plantation and made her way north. Crossing over the Ohio River, she lived for a brief period near Columbus, Ohio, but she and her daughter eventually made their way to Massachusetts. Emily Dickinson meets Hechizar in 1858, after Hechizar's mother has passed away. The great poet, through her own poems, teaches her to read. And so, a relationship starts between the two.

Emily Dickinson's period of greatest productivity was in the first half of the 1860's during the Civil War, which is also when she started to become most reclusive. I need to read more about this time in her life, but from what I've learned so far scholars aren't sure of the causes of why she turned so reclusive in this period of her life, in her early thirties.  My novel will give one reason why, her relationship with Hechizar, and the spell work they do during the Civil War to help the Union cause -- Emily Dickinson, spell maker; Hechizar Spellwomann, spell caster!

And so I've started reading Shelby Foote's wonderful multi-volume narrative about the Civil War. My historian friends at The Ohio State University tell me that Foote is somewhat outdated with regards to the latest methods of historiography, but that's okay. Foote writes with a novelist's grace and eye, and with his writer's eye he has tons of great details. From him, I'm gathering information about the antagonists of my story, both fictional and nonfictional: The great Confederate conjurer, Beauregard, his general, Stonewall, and their hordes of Confederate ghouls who make their way north in an effort to counter the great spell maker and spell caster who are thwarting their efforts. The novel is beginning to take shape! Research has led me to this point!

Yeah, and I've been researching Amherst and its environs, and even researching Porphyria, the so-called "vampire" disease that makes people need to shun light, because I'm thinking that Hechizar has that disease, which is why she lives in the dark, so to speak, why historians have never found her. Research has also led me to begin of find the voice of the story, too. Here are the opening pages of Miss Emily's Book of Spells:


Preface (or Afterward) 

            Miss Emily, she been sick, and I had been seeing the orb spiders of death  weaving their invisible webs about her as she lay in her bed these last weeks, so I had known  a while.

I had already climbed up the lattice outside her west window and collected her urine water from her chamber-pot. I had already mixed it in with the water they bathed her body with those final days. I mixed some salt and pepper in it, too, and a pinch of lye, and oil out of the lamp she wrote by, and some gutter water from Main Street as it puddled up outside her house. And then I took an egg, and broke it up. I put it all in an old bottle that used to have camphor in it. Stopped it up tight, and I shook it up good. I must have shook and shimmied with it for a good fifteen minutes. And then, after the service was over and her people be gone, I crept out into the night, and  I placed it in the earth, in the dirt on top of her coffin. I was all alone except for Mr. Humphrey’s ghost shimmering up from the graves to stand beside me as I paid my last respects. He nodded his head with me when I finally patted the earth down with one of Miss Emily’s trowels that I took from the shed out back her house. He knew why I be doing this.

But I told him anyway, “Some people flame the hoodoo awake in themselves something fierce, and they don’t even know it, Mr. Humphrey sir,” I said. “That was Miss Emily. She never knew she had the hoodoo livin’ in her blood until she met me. I don’t know for sure, but I ‘spect  it was Tituba blood rising up in her.”

Tituba, black slave put on trial for witchery in Salem in 1692. One of Miss Emily’s Puritan ancestors musta knowed her way back when and caught one of her hoodoo spells I reckon, and the Tituba hoodoo be a living and a waiting in their bloodline ever since… until Miss Emily came along and breathed it awake with her words.

“Because the hoodoo know, Mr. Humphrey, sir. The hoodoo know who it can trust, and who it can’t.”

            The ghost of Mr. Humphrey nodded again. He still looked, I thought, like the headmaster at Amherst Academy when Miss Emily was sweet on him all those years ago. I remember when she was a giggling to me about his wavy hair, his shiny brown eyes, and his waistcoat hanging so fine on him. He died young, so I could still see the shine of fineness of what he once was. I always liked him. He never gave me that raised eyebrow, haughty chin white man look I sometimes get when they think I be talking nonsense. 

            I tamped the earth with Miss Emily’s trowel again. “I be casting this safe charm on her you see, Mr. Humphrey,” I said. “Now no ghouls or other ungodly spirits be harming her.. She be safe now. I do that for Miss Emily. I do it for her in death just as I did it for her in life.”

            The ghost of Mr. Humphrey nodded.  He didn’t say nothing, but I knew, as he shimmered beside me, what he wanted me to do. He’s still the headmaster. Even if he is all shimmer, he still be the headmaster! I could see it sparkling in his eyes, that earnestness, that seriousness. “Set it down, Hechizar,” his eyes be shimmering at me. “Set it down!”

            It was cold for May as the stars sought their rising and moonlight stroked the night awake. As I bundled up myself against the light and slipped back unnoticed down Triangle Street, I could see the back of her house, and I thought, I no more be seeing her in her flesh and bones flitting about in her white cotton dress anymore, and my heart took a tumble again as I wended my way through the shadows down Main Street, back to my hovel in the woods along near where Amethyst Brook feeds Fort River full. But even through my heart drumming I could still hear the wind whispering through the bulrushes, “Set it down, Hechizar!”  I heard it in the cricket chirp. “Write it, write it, write it!” I saw it in the moon glow that I huddled against, and  in the dull shimmer of Mr. Humphrey still following me. “Set it down, Hechizar. Set it down!”

Miss Emily was the speller and the spell maker, not me. I be the spell caster. But she’s not here. So on this cold, sweet May night, I tell you all, I’m here to set it down.

            So be it here subscribed, my tongue talking in white folk speak like Miss Emily taught me all those years ago when she first showed me her poems and showed me how to write, the white folk words clinging to me like the mists that rise out of the trillium, and the Dutchman’s breeches, and the may apples in the woods and in the  meadows where the dame’s rocket sways, that I, Hechizar Spellwomann, granddaughter of the great hoodoo priestess Marie Laveau herself, runaway slave, free woman now, swamp princess, holding my head up high and bowing to no man, taking no orders but that of my own bidding and those of the spirits I do solemnly serve; I do hereby set down this account of my life with one Miss Emily Dickinson, late of Amherst, Massachusetts, hoodoo princess in her bones, coven kin in time to Tituba, with the witch’s spell-kisses in her blood sap and heart roots, Miss Emily, spell maker! She who with her secret words brought down the underworld princes Beauregard and Stonewall, and all the other Confederate hordes of ghouls that followed them north in that great bloody Civil War the white folks fought; she who always told the truth; she who loved and cared for her Hechizar! I set down my account of my life with her. And I swear it be the truth. I swear it by the tears I be dripping down onto these pages as I write. They be my witnesses, my signet, my avowal that what I write be made up of nothing but the sweet and holy truth. So help me by Ka and  Loa and the other holy hoodoo spirits that cling to me as I write. So help me God.  

So help me. I be setting this down now. I be setting this down.

 

Research has all led up to this so far. Feel free to tell me if it was worth it or not.

Until next time,

Be well and write well,

S.D. Lishan

October 2, 2013

This post is about my e-mail exchange with a M.F.A. student, whom I'll call Janet B. In my last post I talked about my memoir writing, in particular a piece of creative nonfiction called "Winter Count, 1964." Well, Janet read that piece when it appeared in either Brevity or Creative Nonfiction, and she wrote me the following e-mail:


Hello Mr. Lishan,

I am an MFA candidate in non-fiction writing with a low-residency 
program called the Whidbey Writer's Workshop based on Whidbey Island,  Washington.  This semester I am taking a class called Short Forms, in which we examine writing techniques in prose poems, flash fiction and brief non-fiction.  One of the pieces we've discussed is your brilliant "Winter Count, 1964." I am writing a paper for the class about how to make childhood memories seem fresh and immediate.  I am using "Winter Count, 1964" as an example of how to include different senses in your description, something you do very well in this piece.  ("ka-chunk" is my new favorite sound effect).

I wonder if you could comment on how you were able to engage your 
senses when recalling a boyhood memory. I can of course speculate, and include techniques that I use.  But since I'm using your example, it would be great to hear your view of this technique, and, with your 
permission, quote you in my paper.

Thank you so much for any help you can provide.

Warmly,

Janet B,
MFA Candidate
Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, Whidbey Writer's Workshop


Well, I have to say, I was a bit flattered by Janet's e-mail. While I've published a lot over the years, it's not often that readers have written me to tell me that I've touched them in some way with my words. A few days later I e-mailed Janet back:

Hi, Janet,

Thanks for your e-mail. I envy you getting to hang out at such a beautiful place as Whidbey Island.

As I recall, the first draft of "Winter Counts 1964" arose out of some writing assignments I was doing with my students in a class I was teaching at Ohio State a few years ago (a class for teachers and teachers-to-be on the pedagogy of creative writing). I'm attaching them above in case you're interested (feel free to use any parts of them you wish for your paper). One of the exercises*, based on the oral calendars that members of the Sioux nation used to keep, has to do with creating a personal winter count of one's life (an entry for each year of your life). It's riffed off an assignment that Margot Fortunato Galt outlines in her book, The Story in History (Teachers & Writers Press). The other assignment* is based on the memory map idea that Bill Roorbach outlines in his excellent book about writing memoir, Writing Life Stories (Story Line Press). Used together, I've found that the two exercises can work nicely as vehicles to uncover and then crack open memories into stories. In my case, when I did my own personal winter count, the entry for 1964 was Sherrie Luna knocking Jerry's head into that handball court wall at Kester Avenue Elementary school (secret for your eyes only: I wasn't sure of Jerry's last name, so I made it up -- everything else in the story is true, though). Cracking open that image eventually led to the story you see now.

I hope that helps, Janet. Let me know if you have any more questions.

Best of luck with your paper and in writing the sweet words,

Stuart Lishan

p.s. If you're not quite sure what the traditional winters counts were, do a Google search of "winter counts." One of the first entries you'll see is this very cool and informative presentation about them on the Smithsonian website. Peace, sdl

That answer didn't quite satisfy dear Janet, who wrote me back the following e-mail:

Stuart,

Thanks so much for your prompt response, your explanation, the
attachments-- all very helpful. I wonder if I might trouble you a
little further to clarify some information about the sensory details.  I
see in the assignment you say:  "try to include vivid details of color,
taste, smell, and sensation."  This is one of the strengths of your
piece, and part of what makes the story so vivid.  Can you pinpoint how you accessed sensory details that were forty years old?  Would you say doing the memory map helped?  Did you do any other exercises to jog the sensory parts of your memory?  How did you remember that the song you danced to was the theme from 2001?  That Melinda's curls caught in your wireframe glasses? etc.

I hope I'm not asking too many questions.  I'd like to address this in
my paper, because I think it can be a stumbling block for people as they re-create old memories on the page.

I did google winter counts, such a fascinating concept and a great idea
for a writing prompt.  Have you written other "winter counts?"

Jerry Kruger is a great name, real or not!

And I agree, Whidbey is a wonderful place to retreat to for our writing
residencies.  we are lucky.

Thanks so much again,

Janet

 

I guess I was still flattered, I guess, because a few days later, I wrote Janet back this e-mail:

Hi, Janet,

Well, as you no doubt know, as you crack open a scene, and think and imagine yourself or your characters deeper and deeper into the particular time and place and action of the situation of your scene, you are apt find out more and more and, in the case of memoir, to remember more and more, as well.

One exercise I do with my students (and myself from time to time) is to imagine myself in the place of the scene and close my eyes (with computer keyboard or writing pad handy). I tell my students to look to their left. What, in their scene, do they see, hear, smell, touch even. Write that down. Then I ask them to look right (do the same with regards to writing down what they perceive using their senses). I also ask them to look behind them and then in front of them (sometimes up and down, as well). For each direction, I ask them to write down what my students hear, see, smell, and perhaps touch. Sometimes we'll even use blindfolds (makes it more fun and mysterious). But you don't have to do that -- just twisting yourself mind and imagination deeper and deeper into the well of scene can produce the same results.

Now, your e-mail also brings up a question of ethics, Janet, in particular the ethics of the journalist versus the ethics of the creative nonfiction writer. In both cases we try to "get" what happened rightly and truly. That's our pledge, yes? In fiction, we try to do that, too, more or less (that is, fidelity to the scenes and characters and fictional world that we make up), and it's the "more or less" where the "creative" part of creative nonfiction comes in. Did Miss Arlington play that Straus waltz on that particular day in 1964. I can't swear that she did, although I do remember she played it sometime during that semester when I was a poor pupil in her class. And did I have a crush on Melinda Coates when I was 8. Absolutely. Did I dance with her on that particular day when Sherrie Luna rammed Jerry's head into the handball court wall? I'm can't swear to that, either, but I did dance with her, and my hair did get caught in the hinges of my glasses now and again.

As a creative writer, as opposed to being bound as a journalist is to presenting the sequence of events exactly as they happened, I feel justified in rearranging those details of what happened for the sake of the verisimilitude of the scene and the story I'm trying to tell, a story that is at its heart, I feel, right and true in its overall TRUTH (in this case  a truth about love, in particular the inarticulate ways we have of expressing love at that age, and, all to often, alas, beyond). And I'm also bound to tell the truth (note the little "t") of what happened, even if it didn't happen in that order or on that day. Journalists can't take that liberty of rearrangement, but creative nonfiction writers can. However, we are still fulfilling a trust to the reader that what happened on the page indeed happened. If no Martians fell from the sky, then no Martians can fall from the sky in the tale we're telling (unless, of course, our true-life character truly imagined that they did, but that, dear Janet, is another story, isn't it? :-).

Enjoy the day,

Stuart

There's a lot in those e-mail exchanges, I think, about how our stories can arise, and how we can develop them when they do, and where the real truth lies within them, even if what we're writing about didn't actually happen in the actual way that they're played out on our sweet pages.

Until next time,

be well and write well,

S.D.


* P.S. If you're interested in seeing the assignments that I refer to in my e-mails to Janet B., read on...

Neighborhood Map and Story Exercise

Purpose: To draw upon what we know (or what we didn’t know we knew), literally and figuratively.

Part One: Neighborhood Map and Story:

Draw a map of a neighborhood from your childhood. Include as much detail as you can.

Who lived where? What were the secret places? Where were your friends? Where did the

weird people live? Where were the friends of your brothers and sisters? Where were the off-limits places and so forth?

 

Part Two:

a)      Tell a story from your map. You may begin with static description, or you may prefer to establish conflict right up front: “Once when my next door neighbor Mrs. Neddlemeyer slipped on her icy driveway and blamed my brother for missing the spot…” Elaborate on your recollections to develop a coherent story. Aim for something to happen in this story (don’t forget Flannery O’Connor’s admonition: “If nothing happens, it’s not a story”). Don’t edit yourself much; don’t try for anything finished. You’re just getting started for now. So the story needn’t be long: two-three pages are fine (but keep going if you get inspired). Also, include a detail from your image journal in the story.

 

b)      Or, since you’ve already started to build and develop a story already (you remember, the story machine assignment with the character and odd, quirky detail cards?), use your neighborhood map to revise and build upon that story. Use your neighborhood map to elaborate upon what you’ve started. Maybe now, you’ll think of different directions, different complications to throw in as you turn up the burner of the conflict you’re creating (or the pattern of connection/disconnection if you like).

 

Part Three:  Reread your map story and look for a sentence or a phrase that condenses or skims over or rushes past a possible scene. Build the sentence or phrase you’ve identified into at last two pages of scene: pure action uninterrupted by explanation. The idea is to start to develop an eye for scenes that can move a story forward or dramatize a character’s internal struggle. Remember that dialogue is part of scene. Feel free to include a little or a lot of believable conversation between characters. Also, don’t forget your image journal detail.

 

And if you're interested in Margot Fortunato Galt's writing assignment about creative writing and history, here's a section from  chapter on creative writing in the Handbook of Research in Arts Education, which I wrote with my colleague, Terry Hermsen. It discusses Galt's work in a little more detail:

 

One of the best books that describe how creative writing can enhance the study of history, however, is The Story in History: Writing Your Way into the American Experience (1992), by Margot Fortunato Galt. In her book Galt presents a number of lessons centered around such diverse topics as the family in history (linking one’s personal past to an awareness of the individual within a public context of historical events); or she uses creative writing to help students more fully enter the lives of “real” historical people (to help students close the distance between the historical past and themselves); or she creates assignments based on various aspects of aboriginal culture (to inculcate lessons in diversity and broader cultural awareness); or she uses photographs and literature to build assignments that help students understand the effects and consequences of war, violence and protest (to use literature and the visual arts  make the “facts” of history become more alive for students); or she manages to create assignments that make concrete what for some students are abstract terms such as “social and technological change” (to help them realize that these sorts of changes have consequences upon their own lives). For example, building upon the idea of “Winter Counts,” the oral histories of the Sioux tribe of native Americans, students construct their own personal Winter Counts (pp. 108-124); or, using Walt Whitman’s words to help them make the transition, they imaginatively enter American Civil War-era photographs and write from the point of view of people in that time and place (pp. 146-176); or they write radio sketches from the 1940’s that dramatize social change (pp. 188-209). Galt writes, “When we study history at arm’s length, with more emphasis on facts than on individual human responses [… t]he past remains distant, not quite real, safe.  But when we invite imagination to enter our study of history, we open the door to character, emotion, irony, and the magic of metaphorical language” (p. 165). When that happens, she suggests, real learning takes place.