Edification – Newsletter #93 – October 24, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
And so we tilt into the last of October, with warm weather lingering on across the Midwest and South.
I’ve been taking pictures every day of the second spring at hand in my back yard. Even as we clear away the garden and get ready for winter, the apple trees have bloomed; the toddlers have grazed on new raspberries every day. Bees bump on.
It is ominous and beautiful. I guess that’s life (death) on our living dying planet.
I’m trying not to be too morbid about it.
On a totally unrelated doomsday note, West Virginia continues to be “the least safe state” in the country for Covid. “Least safe” is a fun way of saying “most dangerous,” in case anybody out there wants to write a feel-good piece for West Virginia, the state that gets ranked at the bottom of practically everything. We could really use the morale boost!
According to the survey of state-by-state data, we “ranked 50 in Vaccination Rate, 50 in Hospitalization Rate, and tied for 50 with Idaho in Death Rate.” I don’t know about you, but if I lived in Idaho right now I’d feel a little embarrassed just to be in the running here. Y’all okay out there?
I kid because I love West Virginia. It’s beautiful. And we’re stuck here. Whaddaya gonna do.
My current novel-in-progress is set in the vortex of social crisis here: long-term economic distress, the opioid epidemic, constant flooding and infrastructure failure (also a climate change issue). In a way, the setting takes on a life of its own. The place becomes a character. And it’s both an antagonist and a protagonist, in a way.
I guess one of the central themes I come back to in writing is how individuals grapple against massive problems. (It’s the story of my own life, too.)
And I wrestle with the concept of agency, with the expectation that character choices drive the story, create the arc. Because in real life, as we know, choice is only one element of what happens to us. We can make all the right decisions and do everything we’re supposed to and then something much bigger than us can sweep away our retirements (like a stock market crash) or our loved ones (like a pandemic) or our ability to live in a place (like a hurricane).
Matthew Salesses, in his book Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping, contrasts the traditional hero-journey of Western storytelling to the more external, episodic forms of Asian stories that, to me at least, seem to bear more fidelity to the reality of our trying times.
As someone who considers herself a realistic, literary fiction writer, there are times I wonder how realistic individualistic agency is. How much control do we have over what happens? How often are we given the opportunity to resolve the central conflicts in our lives, or even confront their true sources? Is that even possible as individuals? Is a character arc as measured by how much they have changed internally even a good metric for my subject matter?
I think a lot about these things. I worry, and I wonder whether my craft decisions will sour my writing for the most crucial readers – agents, editors, voracious and well-read book-lovers – who I care about very much. I’m not making art for myself alone, nor would I enjoy marching off the beaten path just to be a contrarian about this stuff. As a lover of the classics myself, I respect tradition.
I guess this is all to say that I’m still learning, and breaking a sweat over how I treat my made-up people. Writing is tough business!
On a lighter note, my husband and I are still yelling and beating guitars. We have been writing songs together for a few weeks now, pretty steadily. We have four that I would call … good. Yes, good. Or really good. I think. And we have another batch of song fragments that have a lot of workable material to draw from.
It’s kind of magical to write music. We start playing, talk about what it reminds us of, pull records down and put them on, analyze how other artists dealt with melody or bridge/chorus transitions. We learn and translate and flip the sweater inside out to admire the knots. Music is so much fun, y’all.
Lately we’ve been listening to a great mash of things. Currently in the CD player (yes, we have a massive CD collection – we are nü old) are greatest hits collections from Roy Orbison, Leonard Cohen, Simon & Garfunkel, Waylon Jennings, and George Jones. What the hell, right? We tackle each other in the blind-spots.
We’re not writing country music or folk. It’s just that those genres are great at revealing the scaffolding for song-craft. Strip everything down, structure the song well, and then bust out the fuzz pedal, you know? Musical (sonic) inspiration lately has been PJ Harvey, turn-of-the-century-era Beck, and anything Steve Albini-engineered.
As we write, we also wrestle with questions. An awful lot of “wrestling” goes on around here! We ask ourselves: why should anyone listen to this? Why would they listen to us? And most excruciatingly, why is it necessary that we are the ones to write or sing this song and not someone else?
I think my husband struggles with getting older and worrying there is no market for middle-aged rockers. It’s a valid concern.
Is rock-and-roll to the youth of today like polka was to me as a kid? My grandmother adored Lawrence Welk.
But also, who cares? I’m a rebel, babe. Who cares if the youth don’t want guitar-based music? Does it matter? Will it come back into style? Isn’t there always a market for rock/pop/country/folk/whatever?
I mean, we do care, though. We all care about music. Music is an art form vastly more popular than literature. Everyone’s got an opinion and preference about music. Not everyone could volunteer their favorite books or authors, but pretty much everyone can list off their favorite bands, tunes, albums, etc. Music is the bee’s knees.
To the question of the necessity of us: I remember my high school art teacher, heated, at a museum because someone disparaged an abstract painting. The guy said something to the effect of “my kindergartner could do that.” And my art teacher hissed, “yeah but he didn’t.”
And sometimes you just have to channel that indignation. We’re writing these songs. I’m writing these stories. Why is it necessary that we’re the ones to do it? Because nobody else is. Nobody’s going to tell these stories. Nobody’s going to write a song about West Virginia stuff in the style of Paul Simon and sing it like PJ Harvey and ripsaw a guitar over it like Steve Albini if we don’t do it.
And whether it ends up being worth anything will be determined in the course of public response and historical context. That’s beyond us. Dare I say – that part of our “arc” is out of the bounds of our individual agency. So our concern has to be on making it as well as we can and letting the world and the future decide.
In 2012, the late poet Donald Hall spoke about the prospect of being forgotten after death. He noted,
“Having some success in your life doesn't mean that your work will endure. In an almanac, look at the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize over the last 60-70 years and see how many names you remember. It's chilling. I can hope, I can daydream, but certainly think that the chances of me being read 50 years from now or 100 years from now are probably not good. That cannot be your only end. You cannot write to be immortal because you will never know. It's impossible. Just write as well as you can and don't speculate about whether you will be Chaucer or Shakespeare.”
He was 83 at the time of that interview (and he lived on to be 89, writing one more book and recording an eleven-song poem cycle in 2018).
Although Hall’s takeaway about the obscurity of great writers might sound negative, it’s not necessarily so. I think he’s correct. Fame is not the goal. Success in artistic achievement has to be measured along a different axis than posterity alone. Otherwise, that’s when you really run headlong against that “what’s the point?” despair.
A little sprinkle of “who cares” audacity goes a long way in the world of art. I say season the dish, bake with confidence, and pack that sucker for the potluck.
Talk soon,
Edie