Tag Archives: writing

From Slate, America’s Two Literary Cultures

This article on “America’s two distinct literary cultures” (via University Diaries) touched me because I almost went down the Master of Fine Arts in writing road myself—and of course I taught alongside people who had done so.

After graduating from Reed College with what amounted to a BFA, I was accepted into the MFA program at the U. of Montana, which I was drawn to because Richard Hugo was there, and I really admired him. (Still do.)

All the paperwork was done; I had only to take the Graduate Record Exam. The day came, I woke up, and I did not go to the testing. Instead I went to work in an advertising agency (the English major’s equivalent of being drafted, I used to joke).

Then came years working in magazine publishing, then daily newspapers (definitely not the normal career path for journalism), a little while in book publishing, and finally p.r. for higher education—until one night “some god or daemon” kicked me in the head and said “Graduate School. Religious Studies.”

Which led, ironically enough, back to the English Department. A job’s a job.  And I was on the fringe of this scene:

Thus the fiction writer’s MFA increasingly resembles the poet’s old Ph.D.; not in the rigors of the degree itself—getting an MFA is so easy—but in the way it immerses the writer in a professional academic network. She lives in a college town, and when she turns her gaze forward and outward, toward the future and the literary world at large, she sees not, primarily, the New York cluster of editors and agents and publishers but, rather, a matrix of hundreds of colleges with MFA programs, potential employers all, linked together by Poets & Writers, AWP, and summertime workshops at picturesque make-out camps like Sewanee and Bread Loaf. More links, more connections, are provided by the attractive, unread, university-funded literary quarterlies that are swapped between these places and by the endowments and discretionary funds that deliver an established writer-teacher from her home program to a different one, for a well-paid night or week, with everybody’s drinks expensed: This system of circulating patronage may have some pedagogical value but exists chiefly to supplement the income of the writer-teacher and, perhaps more important, to impress on the students the more glamorous side of becoming—of aspiring to become—a writer-teacher.

It’s a provocative if wandering essay, full of little knife thrusts like ” the continued hunger of undergraduates for undemanding classes.”

I never taught fiction or poetry, but I did teach some creative-nonfiction classes, and I will never know if I was really any good at it or not, because I was one of those “writer-professors preoccupied with their own work or their failure to produce any.”

Still “Chasing Margaret”

Years ago, during my research leading up to the writing of Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America, I went through a period of fascination with science-fiction/fantasy writer Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995), seeking her books on the SF shelves of used bookstores in various cities.

She and her husband, Eric,  were perhaps the first Gardnerian Witches on the West Coast, having flown East to be initiated by Ray and Rosemary Buckland in the early 1960s.

This blog’s first incarnation was a column in various Pagan magazines, and one of those columns was called “Chasing Margaret”, being my attempt to restore her memory and literary reputation in SF.

Blogger Tim Mayer has kept up the chase for her forgotten works and blogged about several of them at Z-7’s Headquarters. Here is a partial list:

Three Worlds of Futurity (1964).

Message from the Eocene (1964).

The Dancers of Noyo (1973) This novel is not only prescient, but it still gets under my skin, although the geography did not become real until I visited the Mendocino coast.

The Games of Neith (1960).

Change the Sky and Other Stories (1974).

The best of the lost has to be “The Goddess on the Street Corner”. It’s a sad tale which would have fitted into The Twilight Zone. The story concerns an alcoholic pensioner who finds an ancient Greek goddess on a city street. He takes her home and feeds her bourbon, hoping to restore the deity’s powers. The story has a bitter sweet ending, which was not entirely expected.

I would like to find that one.

When You Meet the Buddha in the Road, Bite Him

We have a best-selling series of romance novels about vampires written by a Mormon.

But we also have a popular, if not so huge, series of romance novels about people in Amish communities, by a writer who grew up around Amish people but is not herself Amish.

Is this a great country or not? That’s one way to learn about religion. Or you can wait for the English translation of Saint Young Men. Jesus and the Buddha, roommates! The “odd couple” formula works in manga too, evidently.

But wait, you say. Vampires? Religion? Consider that NYU Press has published Paranormal America: Ghost Encounters, UFO Sightings, Bigfoot hunts, and Other Curiosities in Religion and Culture.

Jeffrey Kripal, whose book Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred I am just starting to read, not surprisingly tells the New York Times that scholars of religion should take “the paranormal” seriously.

Is that the “paranormal” as opposed to the “supernatural”?

According to Dr. Kripal, [four famous paranormal researchers’] omission [from scholarly investigation]  is evidence of a persistent bias among religion scholars, happy to consider the inexplicable, like miracles, as long as they fit a familiar narrative, like Judaism or Christianity.

Meanwhile, someone needs to write a novel: Ghost-hunting single Amish girl falls in love with a vampire and discovered Buddhism. Quick!


Lo, It Is Written . . .

I came home from the post office this afternoon to find M. typing on her PowerBook at the dining room table.

“Cleanse your mind of impure thoughts,” I said. “Assume an attitude of reverence, for the new Holy Book has come.

And then I sat the carton on the sofa and lifted it out: The Chicago Manual of Style, Sixteenth Edition.

Only editors’ hearts beat more quickly when they read text like, “We now recommend, for example, a single approach to ellipses—a three- or four-dot method (chapter 13, where we also explain the European preference for bracketed ellipses.)”

Or “More attention has been given to the role of software for manuscript editors—for example, with the addition of a manuscript cleanup checklist intended to benefit authors and editors alike.”

There are indeed times when it is good to have Authority.

And for those needing only modest amounts of Authority, I recommend the Online Citation Quick Guide, covering both humanities style (footnotes) and author-date style.

The Most ‘Snarkalicious’ Antiphon

I was going to post Mistress Elvira’s video response to the Christine O’Donnell “I’m not a witch. I’m you” video, but Apuleius at Egregores has a much better round-up, so go watch it there. (Other video responses were corralled at The Wild Hunt a few days back.)

Synchronistically, I was just checking something about the original Apuleius for a book proposal that I am writing. Yes, with the American Academy of Religion annual meeting only a week away, I suddenly feel impelled to show up with something.

Nikki Bado, my co-editor in the Equinox Pagan Studies book series, and I will be meeting with at least one author and one co-editor of an edited collection (not an “anthology,” properly, since it is all or mostly new material).

Wet Goddess

Malcolm Brenner, author of Wet Goddess, his unique memoir of working with dolphins, has a new website, with an excerpt from the book, photos, purchase links, and related merchandise.

Malcolm shopped Wet Goddess around to publishers for years before self-publishing it. (After all, one of my favorite novels, The Sea Priestess, went the same route—too weird, too controversial.)

In earlier days, Malcolm Brenner produced some now-archival Wiccan material, such as a video interview with Fred Lamond, and he also produced some amazing (and low budget) illustrations for my 1995 edited collection from Llewellyn: Witchcraft and Shamanism.

Elders Down the Memory Hole

All summer I have been editing and laying out a biography of the American Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (1890-1944). I just sent the galleys to the writer, a professor in Arizona, and am working on my own corrections as well.

There have been the usual hassles—missing “essential” photos, notes that did not match the text, etc.—but we are working through all of that.

I mentioned the project on Facebook once, and got a response from a former student who was raised in the Assemblies of God, one of the larger Pentecostal denominations (the largest, says Wikipedia).

She had heard about Aimee when she was younger, but thought of her as a “scary” person.

Having lived with Aimee’s biography for six months, there is much that I could say about her, but “scary” is not a word that I would use. (I sent the student a PDF of the chapter about Aimee’s revival tour through Denver in the early 1920s.)

Do Pentecostal Christians send their elders down the memory hole as effectively as Pagans do?

Or does that process happen in all religions that do not have formal processes of canonizing saints or the equivalent—something that fixes them in memory?

I am still waiting for a serious academic biography of Gerald Gardner, who is after all the founder of a world religion, now that Wicca is in India, Brazil, Germany, and other places.

No doubt many young Wiccans have  either (a) not heard of him or (b) think that he was some “scary” old guy.

Philip Heselton (interviewed here), the author of two earlier books about Gardner, is supposed to have a new biography coming out from Thoth, although as of today I cannot find it on their fancy-but-unsearchable website.

I judged the earlier books as being strong on research and legwork, but weak on analysis and contextualizing. Credulous, even.  There is probably still room for a biography written by someone with a background in discussing new religious movements.

Meanwhile, Oberon Zell is at work on some new encylopediac work about “wizards of the world.” He has been trying to convince me to a write an entry about Gleb Botkin. Now there is someone who should be kept from sliding down the memory hole of Pagan history as well.

Freelancing: the Horror

Via Rod Dreher’s new blog, Macroculture, comes this essay by Richard Morgan on the horrors of freelancing.

By the time that I finished it, I was thinking of Knut Hamsun’s novel  Hunger. See the movie version—I saw it as a teenager, and how I ever became a writer afterwards, I do not know. Youthful optimism, I suppose.

I used to tell magazine-writing students that the first rules of successful freelancing were “Don’t quit your day job” and “Have an employed  spouse/partner who thinks that being married to/living with a writer is wonderful, romantic arrangement.”

Morgan, of course, was trying for the top tier of consumer magazines. Quite a few writers do make livings—of sorts—by specializing in something less eye-catching but more lucrative than celebrity-interviewing.

Specialists in financial writing or science writing might have a better chance.

The ‘Old Religion’ of Pendle Hill

In the early 17th century, a condemned witch goes to the gallows, saying under her breath an incantation of the Old Religion.

Only the incantation invokes the Virgin Mary, Ave, Regina Caelorum, and the old religion is Roman Catholicism, made virtually synonymous with treason during the reigns of Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and James I of England.

Considerations of treason would go over the heads of the Pendle witches, however, a group of mostly poor rural women in northern England caught up in an atmosphere of religious turmoil and fear of invasion from Catholic Spain.

Based on court trial records, Mary Sharratt’s Daughters of the Witching Hill tells a generational family story of “cunning women,” folk healers in a popular Catholic tradition (like Mexican curanderas) whose conduct becomes criminalized after the “stripping of the altars” and the destruction of popular Catholicism in the mid-1500s.

In a way that reminds me a bit of some of Mary Stewart’s work, Sharratt follows three generations of women struggling with poverty and seeking the doubled-edged respect and fear of being capable of healing—and thus also of cursing.

To be honest [says Bess Southerns, the grandmother] I didn’t give a toss about the Pope in Rome or any plots in faraway lands, but I yearned for the sense of sanctity and protection that hung over us then [before the Protestant Reformation], the talk of miracles and wonders, a prayer and a saint to ward us from every ill and the solace of the Blessed Mother. Now we’d been left to stand stark and unshielded, to bear whatever cruel lot Providence cast our way.

When Bess, also known as Mother Demdike, risks teaching the making of clay images to a friend’s daughter, Annie, the girl responds, “Are you saying that anyone who moulds clay might work witchcraft, Mother Demdike? Then there’d scarely be a landlord left alive.”

Whatever we might say about the talk of familiar spirits appearing as dogs and boys that the accused witches revealed at their trial, Sharratt treats these as real elements of the plot, giving the story a Gothic edge that moves it beyond the Christian world and suggests why today’s English Witches might still look back four hundred years and wonder just what was happening in Lancashire.

This publisher’s video “trailer” lets you see the novel’s physical setting.

Teens, Vampires, and Seventeen magazine

If I were still teaching magazine writing, I would be sending students to this blog (which I found on Rod Dreher’s blog).

What a great feature-writing idea, albeit in blog form. (Which all goes to show how publishing is changing, &c. &c., and I am glad not to have to be the one to explain it all.)

In essence, high-school senior Jamie Kelles is attempting to live her life according to the dictates of Seventeen magazine—and blogging about it at The Seventeen Magazine Project.

At one point she realizes that a majority of the mag’s “hot guys of summer” are “associated with a vampire franchise.”

Must be super weird for devoted Seventeen readers when they finally follows all the tips, achieve the perfect tan and “healthy” sun-kissed glow, and then realizes that the ultimate Hot Guy of Summer is just a sexed-up, long-haired version a of pale, nocturnal Xbox gamer .

And then there is more about the senior prom, &c. &c.

If you want more on the literary history of vampires, Michael Sims assesses it  in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

So, wondering how I would find a new angle on vampire stories, I said yes. Anthologizing is a dusty sport, half antique hunting and half literary gossipfest, and I love it. I went home and prowled my shelves and realized how many of the Victorian-era stories I had already read. Why, here’s that pasty-faced bastard Lord Ruthven, by Byron’s doctor and hanger-on, John Polidori, and so obviously based upon Byron himself. Here is Théophile Gautier’s crazy priest, in love with a vampire courtesan and wrestling with his naughty soul. And there were many stories I hadn’t read before—gay vampires, child vampires, even an invisible vampire.