It’s been a season of convergences lately. I just paid my taxes, along with, it seems, every bill known to man, so I’m a little broke but feeling light for the moment. April 1 was the fourth anniversary of my mom’s first brain surgery, and this past Friday she finished up her three weeks of radiation. Work is heating up, Passover is coming and I’m taking my shot at running away for a while. It’s been nearly two years since I had a real vacation, something more than weekends home with my parents or a slightly longer weekend with friends in other cities. I’m taking ten days on the Southwest Chief, an Amtrak route from Chicago to Los Angeles, with stops along the way. I’m bringing my camera, my notebooks and possibly my ukulele. I’m going to see friends I’ve known for years but never met in person. I could not be more relieved and happy.
The last time I did this, it was only one way. I was coming home to Ohio after the most miserable summer of my life, and since I was in San Francisco, I thought I’d make the distance worth my while. Taking the California Zephyr in August 2006 was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I never quite managed to share the pictures from that trip; frankly, I made a stop in Rocky Mountain National Park with my brother and wound up with about 200 shots of mountains and pine trees and roadside elk. It seemed a lot to sort through, but it also felt private, in a way. I liked having that trip to myself. I’m in a much different place in my life now, thankfully, and I expect to share a lot this coming journey on a number of different outlets. For now, though, here are a few images from my last time around. Watch this space for some other things, interesting things, soon.
Reno, NevadaSomewhere, NevadaSomewhere, UtahUnion Station, DenverDepot, Downstate IllinoisA philosophical statement if ever I saw one.Conductor; I've always liked the memory of how he kept an eye on us and yet seemed to want to keep going.Downstate IllinoisThings the sky does in the MidwestI'm coming home.
Every day, at 3:30, Nora waited on the front porch. Her tail would start wagging as soon as she caught sight of me. She put back her ears, whimpered, barked and squirmed until I plopped down on the steps, dropped my backpack and rubbed her belly for as long as I could manage.
All year, all through elementary school, rain, snow or shine, Nora was there. Even if I was home, at 3:30 she’d go stand at the door. Even when I went to middle school and high school and I came home earlier. Even when I left for college, and no one came, she waited for me, at 3:30, every day.
*
In 1991, I was 7. We took a road trip—probably to Chatauqua, New York—and in the car my parents played a Recorded Books edition of the Odyssey (I can still hear it: “Read by Norman Dietz”). In very short order, Homer became an obsession. I’ll never know whether this was because I was always going to love tales of travel and homecoming, or whether the Odyssey affected me so deeply that I seek it in all other stories. It doesn’t matter. That’s the way it shook out. I love Homer. I love the Odyssey. It’s just the way I am.
In Chatauqua, my mother fell in love with a basset hound named Harriet, who just happened to be “preggers.” Mom was ready to drive from southeastern Ohio to Washington, D.C., to have one of Harriet’s puppies. Somehow, leveler heads prevailed. In October we drove deep into the ridge roads, an hour or more away in McConnellsville, to meet a litter of eleven bassets. I remember being let into a small, dark shed with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.
The shed seethed with puppies. They saw us and surged toward the edge of their pen, yelping and wiggling and clamoring for us. I was so ecstatic I sat right down in the middle of them—into a pile of droppings, as it’s been related to me. I didn’t care. The world had shrunk down to the confines of these walls, and it was made of puppies.
One little girl hung back. She was the runt, a watcher, a wait-and-see-er. My parents told her breeder that they wanted to sweetest, most docile little girl in the litter. A few weeks later, we came back to take her home. Our puppy had a ribbon around her neck. She was eight weeks old, all feet and ears. “Good-bye, sweetie,” the breeder’s wife said, sitting with her on the living room carpet. “Have a good life.”
Her first name was Nora, after Nora Barnacle, beloved of James Joyce. Her middle name was Helen—after Helen of Troy, of course.
*
Abandoned there, and half destroyed with flies,
old Argos lay. But when he knew he heard
Odysseus’ voice nearby, he did his best
to wag his tail, nose down, with flattened ears,
having no strength to move nearer his master.
—Homer, The Odyssey (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
*
Homecoming is sacred to me, or near enough. I think Homer did that, unless it was in me all along. The stories that hit me hardest are those about coming home, or not being able to.
The worst grief I’ve ever experienced—prolonged, profound, unshakeable grief—has come to me twice. The first was when Nora died, an event that struck us very quickly and lasted long after she was gone. The second was the long, slow process of emptying out and giving up my childhood home.
The homecoming is sacred for me. Unless there is a very good reason for exile—unless I have agreed to hear a story about exile—I need for characters to be able to come home.
*
Not to derail this argument I’m building, but let’s not get too lofty. Dogs are a huge pain in the ass. They need walking, feeding, policing, cleaning up after, bathing, entertaining, quieting down. They stink. They shed. They fart. They get sick. They break things. They chew. They bark. They howl. They eat poop. They roll in carcasses. They slobber. They can bite. They destroy our living spaces. They defecate and urinate indoors, sometimes strategically. They swallow objects and ingest foods they shouldn’t. They track mud all over the floor and the carpet. They ruin furniture. They hump legs. They won’t leave you alone. They hog the bed or the couch or the blanket. They run away. They jump up on you. They get erections at bad times. They keep you home when you’d rather go out. They get neurotic and territorial. They might bully or herd or fight other pets or children. They lie and sneak and steal. They have terrible breath. They ravage your savings with trips to the vet. They have no boundaries.
But they’re also perfect. No one who loves or has loved dogs would disagree. We would do anything for them that we could.
*
Even people who know better can fail to give dogs credit. They somehow think that a dog forgets someone if they’re gone for a long time. This has always struck me as ridiculous. Whenever, at a reunion, someone exclaims, “He remembers you!”, I have to bite back a snarky retort.
Watch this video. Maybe you’ve seen it before: the compilations of dogs welcoming soldiers back always seem to come around. But this one gets me. It’s not a flashy reunion, not like the gigantic Great Dane with his paws on his owner’s shoulders, or the duo of raucous baying beagles, or the small white Westie, vibrating with delight, hoisted high and close in her master’s arms.
This is an old dog. Look at the white in her face. Listen to her. Watch her see her owner again. Ignore the family member who laughs about how she remembers her soldier.
Listen to her. Recognize that? She’s weeping with joy.
*
Except for Argos, the loyal hound who died after waiting for Odysseus, Homer doesn’t generally like dogs. In the Iliad, they’re scavengers of the dead, the lowest of the low, to be cursed and chased away and railed against as they eat the fallen. In the Odyssey, Odysseus laments that his belly makes him little more than a dog, an endlessly hungry body that drowns out the intellect and keeps man from godliness.
Nora was always hungry. She was greedy, and she schemed. I have more stories than I can count of food (and non-food) that she stole, often with ridiculous consequences. (Bags of doughnuts, whole pizzas, an entire gingerbread house, high blood pressure medicine, a cabbage which got stuck in her teeth, endless boxes of crayons…)
About a year after we got Nora, we went on our very first cruise. It was only a week or so, but it was an eternity to a kid who has finally gotten a dog. Mom stepped in: she began to tell me stories about what Nora was getting up to while we were away. Often this involved breaking out of the kennel, donning a special S.W.A.T. suit, tracking me down and embroiling me in a caper that spun wildly, hilariously out of control. My mother’s Nora stories were my favorite thing in the world, and I begged her for them long after I supposedly outgrew them. They also made me determined to be a storyteller.
As you can see, being 7 and 8 was a pretty big time for me.
*
I’m writing this because someone asked me to. “Why dogs?” she said. “Why not cats or rabbits or birds or snakes?” For me, dogs have been all I’ve ever wanted. For her, there was nothing instinctual about wanting companionship from a dog, which is fair.
Why dogs?
I spent a lot of time turning this question over. For days, I sifted through heaps of cliches. Dogs are honest! Dogs are good to hug! Dogs are hilarious! These are true things, but they weren’t the answer I wanted to give.
Something about how dogs emote gets me where I live, that’s true. Canine emotions are easy and satisfying to me. When they’re joyous, it’s in their whole body, their eyes, their voice. When they’re upset, you know—they linger or pace or tuck their tails between their legs. Dogs make no beef about what they want: they’ll bark at the place you keep the leash rather than be coy.
Watch a dog run sometime—really watch, especially in a large, open space. Maybe in slow motion, if that helps. Look at their faces, look at the shapes their bodies make. Look at the length of ground they cover. Do you find that kind of happiness enviable? I do.
That was another answer: I like the way dogs interact with space. I like the way they’re built, the way they move. I like them aesthetically. I prefer big dogs to small dogs. I’m tall, and always have been; I like how unapologetically big the big dogs are. I like how gentle and sweet they are too.
I like them when they’re loud, when they throw their weight around, when you can hear them coming. I like their presence. I like them when they’re graceful and when they’re ungainly. I like the way they sprawl, and the way they curl up with you. I like the way their faces move, how openly they show what they feel.
I like the big dogs who think they’re lap dogs. Ever had a Great Pyrenees sit in your lap? I did. His name was Mister, and it was like being cuddled by a cloud.
*
The last time I saw Nora was the day I left for my final year of college. I’d come home every summer, in part to be with her, but now my boxes were packed and she needed to go to the kennel. She was old then, nearly 14, and most of her fur had gone white or faded. She sat on the porch, watching me load the other car.
I wasn’t going to the kennel. I don’t remember why; I think I still had packing to do. She always knew when I was leaving; she was no dummy, and she always got clingy and sad. I found her hiding in some bushes. I remember how bright the sun was, and how ghostly she came out in the pictures I took. I laughed at her, untangled the leash and coaxed her back up to the porch.
Looking back, I do think she knew this would be the last time, that she wouldn’t see me come back. I leaned down, very easy, and kissed her in my favorite spot, right between her eyes. How was I to know? She was old, but not so old, and in perfectly good health then, for the most part.
Nora declined, sharply, at the end of October 2005. My parents drove her back and forth to a pet hospital in Columbus, eighty miles each way. We all hoped, desperately, that she’d pull through, just a little while longer. She came home from the hospital the weekend before Thanksgiving. Her kidneys were failing, and she had a tumor in her pituitary gland, and she didn’t seem to recognize people anymore. My parents wrapped her in blankets and put her out on the porch, where she sat in the sun for a while and seemed happy.
The day before I flew home, I shot up in my bed at 6 AM, not knowing why. Right then, though I couldn’t have known it, my parents came downstairs and found her, still warm.
I’d never cried like that before. For months, I dreamed about her. It was incredible, staggering grief. Not long after, I was talking to my mom about it, trying to comprehend it. “Well,” she said, “I guess love makes you ready to love more.”
*
All dogs are different. Not all dogs are good, or giving. Not all owners relate to dogs the same way. But this is about why I love dogs, and the dogs I’ve loved have never held back.
*
Gus came to us after almost a year without Nora. We drove to Toledo to get him. Even at five months old, his feet were as big as my fists. I was conflicted about welcoming him. He was another dog, and we needed a dog in our lives, but he wasn’t Nora. He was a very different creature: well-behaved, and simple, as boy dogs tend to be. But he slept between my legs on the long drive to his new home, and he sat in my lap and he huddled against me, scared but trusting.
He grew into the dog-space Nora left behind, in his own way. Now he’s almost six, and a whopping 80 pounds. Every time I come home, we go through the same routine: I drop to the floor while he charges into the kitchen and throws himself at me. He stands on my knee and chews on my right ear. Then he settles into my lap, for hugs and wrestling and bellyrubs.
My mom was right about love. That’s not exclusive to dogs, of course, but for me, at least, they paved the way.
*
My favorite part about coming back from college was getting in late at night. Often I would take evening flights, and after the two-hour trip from the airport, we’d pull in to our driveway, quietly. We’d come in to the dark house, still quiet, and I would set my bag down near the door.
Nora liked a particular corner, a little nook between the living room and the kitchen. She curled up in a perfect doughnut, feet tucked beneath her nose, snoring and dreaming. Before we turned on the lights, before we made any noise at all, I’d crouch by her head and wait. Before she woke up, her tail would begin thumping. She smelled me. When she opened her eyes, a visible shock of happiness went through her body. She stretched, sleepy-excited-content, and twisted toward me, and her tail would wag harder. That’s when I’d kneel down and kiss her nose, and the spot between her eyes, and scratch behind her ears while she sighed.
This is one way of saying why I love dogs. The homecoming is sacred to me, or near enough.
*
We’re near the end,
but O before the end, as the sparrows wing
each night to their secret nests in the elm’s green dome
O let the last bus bring
love to lover, let the starveling
dog turn the corner and lope suddenly
miraculously, down its own street, home.
I’ve alluded, on and off, to outside stresses that are keeping me from updating as regularly as I’d like. It’s gotten to the point where it makes less sense to avoid talking about what’s going on. So, here it is.
My mom has been dealing with brain cancer (glioblastomas) for about four years now. In November, she had a clean bill of health, but this past Monday, another MRI indicated that tumors are growing again. The physician who’s been in charge of her treatment since her diagnosis says that this is now an end-of-life conversation, and that she may have anywhere from two to six months to live.
My family is not giving up hope; there are several discussions now about second opinions and other options, including the possibility of seeking treatment at cancer centers out of state. Right now we are working to give her the best treatment and support that we can. I have tickets to fly home on Friday, but plans are still shifting.
This is the nightmare scenario, and it’s scary and it’s awful beyond words, but I can say this: the love and support of the people around us are overwhelming, and incredibly appreciated. It’s humbling. Thank you. Many times over, thank you.
What will this mean for Innogen and the Hungry Half? I don’t know yet. It may be that I work on it all the harder in order to have some way to be away from all this; it may be that I can’t focus at all, and Magpie & Whale becomes more nonfiction for a while. My intention is to try for the former, and the goal is still to finish the story by April, as the outline dictates. Readers, you have been so supportive and so patient and so encouraging; when so much else is going to pot, I absolutely appreciate that kindness and enthusiasm.
So, that’s that. I suspect I’ll be writing about it again as we go forward, but I just wanted to stop being oblique. This is no longer something I can keep separate. Thanks again for sticking around.
First things first, folks: I have every hope of posting Chapter 8 of Innogen and the Hungry Half this Tuesday. I am proceeding with this post as though that will be the case. There’s some personal stuff happening at the moment, though, and we expect to get some important news over the next day or two. If there’s another delay, it will be because I’m dealing with family things. As ever, I deeply appreciate your patience and support.
I have been having some frankly wonderful conversations lately with the fabulous Alexandra Kingsley, who is always doing a lot of really cool things with literature, theater, the BBC Sherlock and Americana. (Everything she does is excellent, so you should check out her work!) She told me that she enjoys reviewing these preview posts after the next chapter goes up and seeing what hints link up to the story. Does anyone else do that? I really enjoy writing these up, so it’s lovely to hear you all are enjoying them too.
Fun fact, as an aside: Nikola Tesla shares a birthday with me, along with Jessica Simpson, John Calvin, Marcel Proust and the State of Wyoming.
In The heavens must still work, Imogen wakes up to find the world has changed around her while she slept. She goes to confront the source of all this upheaval, but what Rigantona has to say shocks her. What’s coming? How will it all unfold? Read on and see what you think!
Ah, Poe. So great for so many reasons. This song and this album in particular have a lot of Shakespeare in them: Poe has threaded Hamlet throughout the album’s narrative, and here, bits of King Lear (“My heart will break before I cry”). I’m also delighted, now that I’ve read the lyrics, to discover that one line is “Hallways, always.” Right fitting all around.
Two links:
Rigantona’s device is not quite a Tesla coil, though they’re certainly closely related. One great thing about writing steampunk technology is you can play fast and loose with your skience, so long as you keep it believable/consistent. I do this with open eyes and hope my readers do too. However, this guy who works at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles (which you may recognize from Rebel Without a Cause) gives a great five-minute explanation of what a Tesla coil is really capable of, aside from emitting really cool, gigantic sparks.
And who knows how accurate this is, considering it’s from Tumblr, randomly, but I enjoyed this factoid about children and the age of most nightmares. Considering what’s coming, you may too.
Three lines:
Do you feel me right here? She pressed him to her shoulder as he gasped himself back to sleep. It was a problem to be worked out in the dark, the thin weight of him huddled against her side.
Big things are coming. Are you ready? New, game-changing chapter this Tuesday! As always, no knowledge of steampunk or Cymbeline is necessary to enjoy Innogen and the Hungry Half, but if you’d like to read the play, MIT has the full text available for free online.
At some point early on in the process of writing Innogen and the Hungry Half, I made an attempt at devising an ideal and reasonable production schedule, one that would more or less keep my usual stressors at bay. It’s so sensible, I’m amazed it came to me at all. The schedule looks like this:
Tuesday: Having published a chapter at 9 a.m., I may spend the day alerting readers of the update and taking notes to outline the next chapter.
Tuesday evening, Wednesday and Thursday: Write 1,000 words each day for a first draft. Each chapter tends to be about 3200 words, more or less. During this time I also bother Excellent Enabler with sections as they come, and she tells me what she likes and what could use improving.
Friday: After polishing the first pass, I then send the draft to First Beta, who gives incredibly helpful notes about structure, characterization, plot holes and other big picture issues.
Saturday: I write that week’s chapter preview, which I then schedule to post automatically sometime Sunday morning.
Saturday night or Sunday morning: I edit according to First Beta’s notes, and send the revised draft to Second Beta, who tackles word-by-word issues, smoothing out unclear passages, typos and other messy writing bits.
Monday evening: I edit the chapter with Second Beta’s notes, and schedule the post to go up the next morning. Then I kick back and congratulate myself for managing my time and resources so well.
Sadly, this has yet to actually happen: the real process involves a lot more procrastinating, obsessive outlining, endless and obscure note-taking and scrambling to make deadlines. Things are always finished much closer to posting than is comfortable. Weirdly, though, I like it, and miraculously, so do my friends, for which I am very, very grateful. And each week is an opportunity to get better! This entry is dedicated to anyone who has ever received a frantic last-minute email from me promising that this is the last time this will happen.
Last time, Imogen and Posthumus had a night on the town that anyone would want to sleep off somewhere private. Too bad that’s never an option when you’re the daughter of the king. What’s waiting for them on the other side of the alarm clock? Check back Tuesday to find out — for now, some hints and clues!
One song
“The White Queen Sleeps/The White Palace,” Iain Ballamy, Mirrormask
Do yourself a favor and see this movie if you can; it’s not actually as dated as this trailer makes it look. Imogen is going to wake up in a world that’s askew. This track unnerves me every time I hear it; it’s just off and just eerie enough.
I’m also not going to deny that there’s any of Hedy Lamarr in Rigantona; it’s too neat a fit.
Three lines
I see the corner of his mouth quirk, but his shoulders are tight. “It came out, though, that I changed when I was eight. He just thought I was living up to my potential.”
All right, we’re off to the races now. Come back on Tuesday to see how it falls together! As always, no knowledge of steampunk or Cymbeline is necessary to enjoy Innogen and the Hungry Half, but if you’d like to read the play, MIT has the full text available for free online.
One of my very dearest friends is in Chicago for a quarter, doing wonderful and enviable things at our alma mater. We met up yesterday and instantly started rambling about all the writing projects we have in the air. Being able to talk about story and craft and influences and all the tricksy bits of writing is one of the many reasons I’m so deeply happy she’s here. I began telling her about the series (!!) I want to start (“You want to write not-urban urban fantasy!”), and she told me all about her plans to submit short fiction to paying markets.
“Where does one find out about that?” I asked. “Because all these people I know find out about all these neat anthologies, and I can’t ever seem to keep on top of it!”
“Duotrope,” she said, and I said, “Ooooooh.”
I bookmarked Duotrope once upon a time, but it was buried in a browser I hardly use anymore, and being concerned with other stages of my writing career, I forgot about it. Now, of course, I’m getting that feeling: this is the year. This is when I’m going to buck up and start submitting. This is when I’m going to see my name in print, so to speak. I’ve got all sorts of plans and ideas, and I feel terrifically energized, especially now that Innogen and the Hungry Half is approaching the “one-third of the story” mark, which I honestly kind of never thought would happen. (New chapter this Tuesday, by the way! My computer seems to not be dying yet, thank goodness, and if it does, I’ve wised up and have my external hard drive to save me.)
At the beginnings and ends of calendar years, we often wind up taking stock and making plans. I’m generally less good at the latter, but I found my most recent bout of the former yielded some pretty good results. As it happens, today is the one-year anniversary of my first post to Magpie & Whale. It’s basically a filler entry–it even retains the “Hello world!” subject line–but it’s amazing how far this site has come since then.
We’re also nearing my half-birthday (five more days!), and being 27 and a half gives me a good deal of thoughts. This past birthday, I started to feel like it was time to get my life together in a more directed way. About a year ago, I made up a list of things I wanted to do before I was 50 (see July 10, 2034); I’m actually able to cross some of those off today, to my great delight. I know what I want to do for graduate study, and I know where I want my career to take me, which is farther along than I’ve ever been before. (I’ve also got some big trips and excursions planned: stay tuned for the fun times as well!)
I’m so proud of the work of the past year, and particularly of the past several months. Thank you, all of you, who have read and commented on and shared this project. Thank you to my wonderful friends, who have made this conversation so quality and so interesting. Thank you to my family, who stays interested and cheers me on. I think 2012 is going to be a good one. Much love, and let’s make it come true.
Many of us, I think, have good reason to be mad at Aaron Sorkin. His heroes elevate the professional life to classical heights, and I suspect that if I let myself, I could be quite bitter that the workplace is rarely the scene of an impassioned plea for idealism in action, or even a good pedeconference. It’s not that I feel lied to, because we’ve always known that The West Wing and Studio 60 and Sports Night were fairy tales, but now I have this model for how I’d love to live my professional life, and I don’t know where it exists.
Don’t get me wrong: my colleagues at my day job are passionate, hardworking, good people. I work at a nonprofit, and I’m very proud of my organization. Oddly enough, though, each day doesn’t unfold like a 45-minute play. There is very little patter, and even less narrative symmetry.
I’m taking the GRE tomorrow, which is why there’s no new chapter of Innogen and the Hungry Half today. As a coping mechanism, as those of you who follow me on Twitter have seen, I accidentally wound up watching the second half of Season 1 of The West Wing, and then the first two episodes of the second season. It’s been a while since I’ve spent time with the Bartlet White House, but one thing becomes apparent very quickly on a rewatch: I am still deeply in love with every one of these characters. It is an ensemble show in the truest sense; even the incidental characters are rich, and all of them mean something to each other. Sorkin’s writing and world-building are staggering, and the man who’s capable of intensely funny episodes (need I say more than “secret plan to fight inflation”?) is also responsible for some of the most powerful and moving television ever aired (“Noël,” Season 2’s Christmas episode, is basically flawless).
There’s a reason we love them all, C.J. and Toby and Sam and Josh and the rest. The commitment these characters display, to their work, to their colleagues, to their principles, is immensely appealing—and this is one of many reasons why it’s a fairy tale, of course. Those manifestations that are out there in the real world aren’t marked by speeches or great banter: they’re subtler. That’s fine. But digging deeper, we find that one feature binding the players of the Bartlet Administration is a commitment to professionalism, to being able to take care of things, to fix them. “Don’t worry about it” is a constant refrain on The West Wing.
I remember, somewhere around middle school, I started having conversation with my parents about how they chose their jobs and how they became an English professor and a psychologist. My mom’s answer has always stuck with me: she wanted an identity as a professional, and I think I’ve absorbed that more deeply than I realized. I want, more than anything, to be a professional writer. It’s been the only consistent occupation I’ve ever wanted, and I’ve been writing stories since I was 4. Magpie & Whale is an effort toward that: with a long interruption in the middle of the year (for family health reasons), I’ve tried to hold myself to a regular posting schedule. I like the challenge of a deadline, and of producing good work quickly. One of the reasons I’m doing Innogen weekly is to push myself out of my comfort zone.
For five weeks, the story was produced more or less on schedule. However, it coincided with an immensely stressful month that I couldn’t have predicted, and while I tried to roll with the punches, some things have to be sacrificed, and given that my other balls in the air were paid work, graduate school prep, family commitments and personal issues, Innogen was what took the hit. (That was three entirely separate metaphors in one sentence—apologies!) I’ve been beating myself up about this. If I’m going to be a professional, I should be able to produce, I should be able to manage my time so that somehow I can put together work that makes me proud. That isn’t what happened, though—I wasn’t proud of any of the starts I made at Chapter 6, and I want this story to be good too badly to sacrifice quality for regularity.
So, all of this is to say that I’m sorry Innogen has fallen off the grid these past few weeks. Once I’m done with the GRE tomorrow, that will be off my back, and I hope to be able to resume normal life/posting. I’m very excited about where the story is going, and I so appreciate those who’ve stuck with me. It means more than I can say that people are interested in this. Thank you.
In the meantime, I have less than 24 hours until I take what I hope is the last standardized test of my life. There are still a few fistfuls of practice sets to do, and—dammit, Sorkin—more episodes of The West Wing to anticipate as a reward.
Note:Innogen and the Hungry Half is still on hiatus, but should resume normal posting next week. Until then, a throwback to the original purpose of Magpie & Whale: the personal essay!
As I was reading The Tiger’s Wife this month, I spent a lot of time being angry at Téa Obreht for being a year younger than me. Her author portrait glows. She’s poised, talented, wise, articulate—and an angelic blonde with wide, liquid eyes. Born in 1985! What right does she have to be so accomplished, before me?
I recognize this jealousy. I felt it every time I was confronted with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated, which I refused to read for years, the principle being that wunderkinder are a pain in the ass. Of course, once I did read it, I was staggered by how good it was, and determined to push myself more, to experiment with form and style and structure, to break out of linear storytelling, to embrace the messiness of human emotions more fully. The Tiger’s Wife has the luck to come after my encounter with Everything Is Illuminated, so my resolve is not quite so fiery, but it’s absolutely a magnificent book that makes me want to try harder, farther and wider.
This isn’t going to be a book review so much as a book reaction. I will say that The Tiger’s Wife is intricate, interconnected, restrained, vivid, fully felt and richly realized, and that it’s well worth your time. (Also: that certain repetitions began to bore me after a point; certain choices felt unnecessary and dulled the consequences that resulted; the end, to me, did not match the rest of the story in scope or depth or power, but your mileage may vary.) I am very much excited to see Téa Obreht continue to write: she should have a long, fruitful and amazing career, and despite her age (fie!), I wish her very, very well.
Tangled up with this fixation on Obreht’s age is a question I keep asking myself: What could I write, if I was to try something like this? Because The Tiger’s Wife is very much the product of growing up in and with the Balkans. It deals with wars, survivors, myths, superstitions, borders, local lore, traditions, families, religion and death, all in a context that I simply haven’t experienced. I grew up a faculty brat in a university town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. I had no relatives in the area—our family is quite far-flung, though I grew up constantly surrounded by stories. Still, the things that give my life texture are different than Obreht’s, and it’s easy to feel somewhat shy about them, when, in comparison, they seem so American, and of a certain strain that’s not short of representation.
Of course, there’s nothing to be done about where we both were born and have lived our lives. And The Tiger’s Wife isn’t a book I would have written for reasons other than biographical ones. Though it contains a strain of magical realism, I found myself frustrated by how limited that aspect of the story was. It flirts with the fantastic, but at moments, I wished—much as she often frustrates me—for Cat Valente to take over the story. In her hands, the stories and the act of telling the stories would have taken on a life and hue of their own, living and breathing as more than cultural illustrations, things people do. As they emerged, the stories would have warped the story itself. That wasn’t their purpose with The Tiger’s Wife; in ways, it was explicitly the opposite.
Which led me to another question: What moves people to write literary fiction? This isn’t entirely facetious, and it’s not just because I have no use for Jonathan Franzen. I don’t understand the appeal of a lot of contemporary literary fiction. Historical fiction, Great Books/“classics,” genre fiction (even of the non-magical variety, like mysteries or satire)—I love it! But straight treatments of human topics somehow don’t get me where I live like the stranger takes do, and I’m not sold on the idea that the plot of a “literary” novel inherently lives beneath the surface, requiring more work from the reader. Still, the point remains that given the choice, I would probably steer away from creating a book that’s so devoted to realism. The times I’ve tried to root my fiction in a non-magical universe, I’ve at least had a world from the past to fill in for other kinds of strangeness.
With Obreht’s novel, I craved a stranger story than the one I got. All my favorite stories have some unnatural or supernatural element to them. Someone recently asked me my opinion on Shakespeare’s history plays; I don’t particularly have an opinion on them, though give me Macbeth or The Tempest or King Lear and I am off to the races. There is something about the literalizing of the imagination that engages me without qualifications (see Esther by genre for more on that). This isn’t to say there’s nothing worthy in a “literary” work; I’ve just realized more and more that other things speak more closely to my heart.
In the end, all that matters about the year Téa Obreht was born is that’s where her arc as someone who shares words—her words, her particular take on the world—begins. This book spoke to me, and I’m glad I found it. Storytelling is a gift economy at heart. I’ve learned a lot from reading The Tiger’s Wife, and I hope that will work its way into Innogen and the Hungry Half sooner rather than later.
And if I write that deeply rooted story about where I come from, somewhere down the line, it will be stronger for hearing other voices. It will be mine. And it will have unreal things in it.
The day after the next installment of Innogen and the Hungry Half goes up (or is supposed to go up — more on that in a minute), I’m flying to Columbus, Ohio, for Thanksgiving with the fam. The only sensible way to ensure that I enjoy my vacation and you enjoy the next chapter is for me to take a breather, so FYI, we’re going on hiatus for two weeks starting this Tuesday. I promise that means there won’t too much of a cliffhanger. Wait, what? No, sorry, I think I mean the opposite of that.
In all seriousness, it’s going to be a good spot for a break. I charged into writing this story on fairly little notice. There’s a larger outline planned, and I know the ending in as exquisite detail as I knew the opening, but it’ll be good to step back and get a little more strategic about where we’re going in the more immediate future. We’ve had a lot of character- and world-building so far; in long-form improv, or at least in the Harold that they teach at iO, this is the first beat of the show, from which you extrapolate the rest and go in wild and new directions. Personally, I’m looking forward to the action, capers, skience and intrigue that’s coming — and I thank you all for staying with the story, whether you’ve just arrived or read since the beginning!
Magpie & Whale won’t be totally quiet, though. I’ll be posting some tidbits to tide us over, and — if you’re curious — answering questions. Actually, I would love to answer your questions about the story — where the idea came from, what a detail means, how I envision something, whatever you can come up with! Please feel free to send me a Tweet or a DM on @magpiewhale, to submit an Ask on my Tumblr or to leave a comment here. Queries about the future of the story will be as cryptic and misleading as I see fit, which I hope will be to our mutual entertainment.
On a separate note, Chapter 6 has turned out to be more work than I anticipated. Given the rest of my workload, I’m going to try and get it out by Tuesday or Wednesday morning, but in the interests of having a good chapter rather than an on-schedule chapter, it may be a little later than normal. Thanks for your patience.
Last week, after being thwarted from every corner, Imogen decided to hell with it and broke out, only to find that the dream team was, somewhat conditionally, together again. Now she and Posthumus are on the hunt for Cloten, somewhere in the public houses of Londinium. That can’t possibly go wrong in any way, right?
If you were alive in 1998, you probably have this song burned into your ears forevermore. It is a stupid, stupid song, and also incredibly catchy. I don’t have a lot of pub crawl music, but Flogging Molly was too political for what I was looking for: a theme song for Cloten’s night out on the town. I feel like he would be pretty laddish offstage, given what we see in polite company. (Obviously the oeuvre isn’t confined to Chumbawamba by any stretch of the imagination, but despite the track’s commercialism, it gets the job done well enough for our purposes.)
In conclusion, this can only end well. Tune in this week to watch it unfold! Don’t forget, I’ll be answering your questions about Innogen over the hiatus, so send ’em in wherever you’re happiest. As always, no knowledge of steampunk or Cymbeline is necessary to enjoy Innogen and the Hungry Half, but if you’d like to read the play, MIT has the full text available for free online.
I write this from the futon at a friend’s place in another state. Another friend drove us down here, and we’ve been marveling at how gorgeous her apartment is and rending our hair at the low, low rent. It’s been a great opportunity to get out of Chicago and hang out with people I adore, but unfortunately work, like a Prohibition-era G-man chasing down bootleggers, will always cross state lines and stay on my tail. I’m pleased to report that I’ve made my way through all the chapters of my Kaplan GRE test prep workbook, and that high school math is finally fun for me. However, it did require that my two friends leave me at the apartment for a few hours yesterday. Not exactly the mini-vacation it could have been, but I know I won’t go into full-on panic mode later.
All this prioritizing and pacing of competing and equally pressing needs feels very like college again. In theory, I’m older and wiser now, and not given to all-nighter weekends. That’s borne out less than I would like, but I have been congratulating myself a little for keeping Innogen on schedule for a whole month. That’s certainly an improvement over college-aged Esther, and I hope it bodes well for throwing myself back into school again.
Last week, Imogen took a huge risk and revealed the full extent of her suspicions about her nightmares. The risk seems to have isolated her, though — and as a woman of politics, she can’t let her emotional life interfere with teasing out this undercurrent of rebellion against Rome in Britain. Not being able to talk to Posthumus has thrown her off-kilter, though, and one or the other needs to be resolved as soon as possible.
Which will it be, and how? Tune in Tuesday to see it for yourself. For now, some preview material!
I was introduced to this song by an incredible fan video about Dean Winchester and his mother, characters from the CW series Supernatural. I love the restlessness of the track, and the conflict. Sage Francis is just blisteringly intelligent too, and there’s a vividness about his music that really works for me. In certain ways (not all of them obvious yet, but that’s on me), “Sea Lion” could speak for Imogen or Posthumus right now; certainly “a healthy distrust” is good advice for them both.
Two links I need to give a well-deserved shout-out to Cambridge University, alma mater of my future husband and also home of the incredibly useful Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain. Seriously: this thing is the best of the best, as far as this story is concerned.
Sorry, this is a short one this week, since at this point, large swathes of Chapter 5 still need to be written.
Three lines
“Doctor, where is Posthumus now?”
He frowns, and makes an aimless gesture toward the palace. “She was on her way to inspect the walls, and he wanted to go along. Physics,” he adds, with a shrug.
Curious? Given my schedule, so am I! Swing back on Tuesday to see where it all leads. As always, no knowledge of steampunk or Cymbeline is necessary to enjoy Innogen and the Hungry Half, but if you’d like to read the play, MIT has the full text available for free online.
Magpie & Whale 