In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses ‘Songs to Joannes’, a little-known work of avant-garde modernist poetry Modernist poetry, at least as it’s usually taught on university survey courses and as it’s fixed in the popular imagination, is something of a closed shop: not just […]
It’s a truism that historical fiction reveals more about its own age it than the one it portrays. We can’t escape or even perceive our own biases, the reasoning goes, so we end up helplessly projecting them onto a past where they don’t belong. But the past is not a museum, and contemporary perspectives don’t necessarily distort historical subjects.
And to state the obvious, historical fiction isn’t history. Accuracy and authenticity are not the same things, and “distortion” is a loaded term to begin with. In The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead interleaves the archival ephemera of slavery with his own dystopian imaginings. That the two are often indistinguishable shows that narratives need not be strictly historical to be fundamentally truthful. Art is supposed to transfigure human experience, to make it newly meaningful. That’s what it’s always done. That’s what it’s for.
Of course, novelists don’t always begin with such lofty intentions. In writing The House on Vesper Sands, I began with no intentions at all. At the time, though, the U.K.’s Tory government was diligently stripping the vulnerable of what meager protections they depended on. Their souls, I remember thinking to myself. They’re devouring people’s souls. And since I found myself with one foot in Victorian London, where such notions were taken pretty seriously, I began to see new shapes in its familiar gaslit fog.
As important as representation may be, gay characters don’t need to appear in fiction for any particular reason. Waters describes her own sexuality as “incidental,” and in her Victorian England, lesbian women are naturally just present. Like everyone else in Fingersmith, though, they’re also schemers and strivers. Waters renders their erotic encounters with dependable virtuosity, only to use them as a fulcrum for one of the most breathtaking double twists in all of fiction.
In historical fiction, verisimilitude isn’t always your friend. The line between authenticity and pastiche is vanishingly fine, but although Catton assuredly knows the risks, she bets the farm in this novel anyway. The Luminaries might be compared to an immaculately crafted piece of reproduction furniture, but one whose intricately inlaid surfaces conceal all manner of arcane inscriptions and secret compartments.
Faber’s revivification of Victorian London is both exquisitely wrought and magnificently coarse. Although his embrace of all social classes invited comparison with Dickens, he has more in common with Chaucer, whose democratic instincts were much less hampered by paternalistic illusions. The only illusions here—as Faber reminds us in sly metafictional interjections—are our own: “You are an alien from another time and place altogether.”
In Atwood’s best-known fictions, for all their undisputed merits, character is often subservient to some overarching schema of ideas. Based on real events—involving an Irish maid implicated in a brutal double murder—Alias Grace provides a counterpoint in a character study as enthralling as it is forensic. It also demonstrates the necessity of revisiting grim historical realities, like the coercive medicalization of femininity, that have never quite gone away.
Like Eleanor Catton, the Australian novelist Peter Carey shows how Victorian certainties tended to dissolve at the periphery of their empire. When he undertakes to transport Lucinda Leplastrier’s glass church to the remote Outback, inveterate gambler Oscar Hopkins seems to embody Pascal’s conception of religious belief as a momentous wager. The same might be said of this novel’s unlikely but indelible love story, in which everything and nothing may be at stake.
Byatt might be unlikely to use the term herself, but in Possession she proves that you can be formidably erudite and also, well, extremely meta. True to form, she styles it “a romance” in the strict literary sense—that is, a quest narrative in which defining values are tested. But as its fusty Victorian scholars unearth a love affair between Victorian poets, they discover hesitant passions of their own. Think Inception, but with tweedy academics and polite rapture.
Bram Stoker hadn’t written Dracula when he left Ireland for London, but he had begun to feel its dark stirrings. There, he managed the Lyceum Theatre and began a lifelong entanglement with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, giants both of the Victorian stage and of egotistical excess. In O’Connor’s wholly masterful recreation, we also see him wander the Ripper-haunted streets, contemplating an era in decline and the monsters it might harbor and bequeath.
The post 7 Contemporary Novels About the Victorian Era appeared first on Electric Literature.
Monica Furlong’s Wise Child was the first time I ever saw a mother that I wanted to be. I was ten or eleven the first time I read it, and I didn’t think about mothers much beyond the fact that they were just sort of there—often harried, overworked, and tired, but useful if you needed a meal or a hug. Although I had a vague sense at the time that I wanted to have kids one day, none of my concrete experiences of what motherhood looked like made it seem all that appealing. Even in books, mothers were mostly just background noise; fathers were at least allowed to be funny or have quirky hobbies, but mothers rarely seemed to have inner lives. Furlong’s Juniper, an independent-minded woman with supernatural healing skills living in a dream cottage full of magic, was different.
The term “voracious reader” is clichéd, but it’s the most accurate one to describe what I was like as a kid. I had a bottomless appetite when it came to reading materials, by which I mean that if I didn’t have a book nearby I would resort to the backs of cereal boxes or the weird ads in the yellow pages. I also read literally all the time: at breakfast in the morning, on the school bus, under my desk instead of listening to the math lesson, in the bath. I once got in trouble during gym class for sneaking a book into the outfield during baseball (I’d hidden it under my shirt when we were changing). It wasn’t just that I loved the stories (although I did), but also that my brain craved that specific stimulation, and without its constant input I felt tortuously bored. It was a lonely way to be, not because I was teased for my reading or anything—I had plenty of friends, and I was so cavalier about my obsession that I don’t think it occurred to them to make fun of it—but because I never had anyone to talk to about the fictional worlds that felt at least half real.
I didn’t know anyone who read like I did, least of all my own mother—she had some Danielle Steele books lying around, and at least one installment of the Outlander series, but I’m not sure that I ever actually saw her sit down and crack any of them. Sometimes when she saw me sprawled out on the couch with a book she’d say, “I used to be a reader before I had kids, but now I don’t have the time.” The comment didn’t have any particular layers of meaning to it—other than I should have been helping out more around the house, probably—but I saw dark undercurrents in it: a hint that motherhood thwarted intellectual pursuits, and a threat that if I ever became a mother, I, too, would have to stop reading.
I didn’t have anyone around me to whom I could recommend Wise Child and its prequel Juniper, even though I desperately wanted to talk about them. When my middle sister was old enough to read them, I bought her a copy of each, and she loved them as much as I did. But other than her, I didn’t meet anyone else who had even heard of them until I was an adult, at which point I met a whole bunch of other people—mostly women—who had read and loved those books. They became a sort of password, a shorthand for seeing that someone else had been the kind of kid you’d been: bookish, witchy, often wanting something that you couldn’t quite put into words. I get a quiet thrill every time I meet another Wise Child reader, like I’m meeting members of an extended ersatz family. When I had my own kid, one of the things I wanted most was to shape him into that particular kind of weirdo, too—or, at least, provide the environment in which that kind of weirdo would thrive. I just sort of assumed that any child of mine would inherit this thing that seemed so essentially a part of me that I couldn’t imagine not passing it on.
The hero of Wise Child is a nine year old girl named Margit, although that name is used only once in the book. The rest of the time she’s referred to by her nickname, though as she explains, “Wise Child” is not exactly meant as a compliment—in her language, it’s a term used for children who “used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years.” Wise Child, who lives on a remote Scottish island in some nebulous Medieval era, finds herself suddenly homeless after the death of her grandmother, with whom she’d been living; both her parents are still alive, but her glamorous mother has run off to live a life of luxury on the mainland, and her father is a sea captain off on some voyage. With nowhere else to go, Wise Child winds up living with Juniper, a mysterious woman who lives in a house on a nearby hill and is widely regarded as a witch. The village priest especially seems to fear and dislike her.
I wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.
As it turns out, Juniper is a witch, although she says that’s a vulgar term—instead, she calls herself a doran (the italics are Furlong’s), which she describes to Wise Child as being someone who has found a way of perceiving “the pattern” and as a consequence “lives in the rhythm.” The rest of the book is more or less Juniper teaching Wise Child how to be a doran, punctuated by run-ins with Wise Child’s mother, who is up to no good, and the village priest, who thinks Juniper is in league with the devil. Although parts of Wise Child’s journey to becoming a doran involve magic and spells and thrilling rituals, most of it is more prosaic: memorizing herblore, learning Latin, trekking through the countryside to gather ingredients for the healing ointments and poultices they make. But somehow the descriptions of those day to day chores interested me just as much as the chapters about flying on a broom. I loved all of it; it was the kind of book that made me want to step into it and live inside its story. I wanted Juniper’s house with its hearth and its garden and its stone dairy. I wanted her life. I also wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.
Reading Wise Child for the first time made me feel the way I knew I was supposed to feel in church—that sensation of goosebumps mixed with something unlocking inside out and expanding outwards and outwards and outwards. It’s a moment of touching the infinite unknowable, I guess, or a moment when you know that magic or God or whatever is real. Given all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that Monica Furlong devoted most of her life to religious writing, much of it, like Juniper herself, both subversive and progressive. She was particularly interested in the ordination of women in the Church of England, a context in which Wise Child makes perfect sense, since it’s a fantasy about a quasi-religious order in which women are autonomous and powerful spiritual teachers. It’s also a book about religious men who react violently to women who challenge the status quo, and it’s a book about motherhood, or at the very least a book that’s deeply concerned with mothers, biological and otherwise.
Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have.
Juniper was the first mother-figure I saw who genuinely seemed to love every part of parenting, who approached it as an interesting and interactive project, who felt like she got as much out of it as she put into it. She also had a real life outside of taking care of Wise Child, with friends, travel, interests, and, of course, plenty of time for reading. I loved the way she took Wise Child seriously, listening to feedback and admitting when she was wrong; I still remember the sense of injustice I had as a kid about grownups not understanding that I was a fully-formed person with opinions and feelings of my own. But Juniper’s softness didn’t make her a pushover and, even though respectfully listened to Wise Child’s complaints about her chores, she never let her get out of doing them.
Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have. Not exactly in a parenting sense—my own mother was and continues to be wonderful—but almost in a religious sense. I longed for someone who could induct me into the great mysteries of life, who could make me feel a sense of sustained awe about the world, who could teach me to “live in the rhythm” the way Juniper did. I suspect that this was what Furlong had wanted throughout her life too: some kind of spiritual foremother who could model the divine feminine for her. (She even called the goddess Juniper worships “the Mother.”) Wise Child was my introduction to the idea that faith doesn’t have to be prescriptive or dry, that it can be full of that dizzy, expansive joy that I sometimes felt flashes of but could never hold onto for very long. That catch-your-breath goosebumps that I would, later, associate with falling in love.
My nine-year-old son and I have been reading Wise Child at bedtime for the past few weeks. We make a whole ritual out of it, putting a log in the fireplace and getting our pajamas on and generally letting Furlong’s words and the flickering snap of the fire transport us back to Medieval Britain. I’ve been wanting to read this book to him for ages now, but I’ve held off, partly out of selfish fear: what if he doesn’t like it? What if he just doesn’t care? It felt oddly vulnerable to offer this piece of myself up for his judgment.
Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it.
There is a part towards the end of the book when Wise Child tells Juniper that she is done chasing her biological mother’s love, and that she wants Juniper to be her new mother. I was surprised when my son laughed out loud, saying “that’s not how it works, you can’t choose your mother.” We argued back and forth about the idea of chosen family, but I understand to a certain extent what he means: at nine years old, he doesn’t get to choose much about his life.
But while he might not have chosen me, I chose him, or an idea of him, when I decided to have a kid. Because of that, I gamely worry that I am not living up to that choice, that I am not a good enough mother, that I am not Juniper-caliber. Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it, a sensation that’s been exponentially heightened this year when my son and I have literally been confined together for ten months. I have no problem extending grace to other mothers, quick with a glib “they’re only human” and “we’re all just doing our best,” but there are moments when I know I am not doing my best. Some days—more days than I would like to admit—I am just trying to make it until bedtime.
Then again, life is basically a string of bedtimes, some more anxiously anticipated than others. What I mean by that is: you don’t really get to know the overarching narrative until later, if ever. Juniper takes things hour by hour, for the most part, and then season by season. When Wise Child first comes to live at her house, Juniper’s focus is first on caring for her body: feeding her, washing her hair, giving her a warm nest to sleep in and a chair by the fire. It’s not until Wise Child is physically stronger—like The Secret Garden, one of the pleasures of this book is that it equates eating and gaining weight with happiness—that she can be nurtured in other ways
And even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers who fill in where I fall short—his aunts, his grandmothers, the summer camp director whose every word he hangs on, the handful of teachers who have seen him for the quirky little joy he is, a constellation of mothers of all genders. If motherhood seems too big sometimes, that’s probably because our modern be-all-end-all conception of what a mother should be describes a role that takes multiple people to fill.
Even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers.
My son likes Wise Child well enough, I think; he reacts, he asks questions, he offers analysis. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the bookish weirdo—he likes being read to, but he’s still not too keen on independent reading—but that’s all right. I didn’t turn out to be much like my mother, but the parts of her that I see in myself are gifts that I appreciate very much. What matters most is that she was present, that she made sure I was clean and fed and had a warm place to sleep and outlets for my interests, even if they were not hers. She was the one who took me to the library and helped me check out stacks of books, who paid off the fines I racked up as my Christmas and birthday presents, who scoured my grandparents’ basement to find the paperbacks she’d loved as a kid. And really, if she didn’t have time to read, whose fault was that? It belongs at least partly to the kid who spent so much time sprawled on the couch with a beat-up Judy Blume instead of doing the bare minimum to help out around the house.
My mother gave me the gift of accessing the enchantment of books; I hope that I help my son find a gateway to a similar feeling, through whatever medium. Even if books aren’t what takes him there, the moments when we read together are still a communion of sorts. We come together and share in this moment, and then we separate. It’s a pattern that will only grow broader as he gets older; the separations will be wider, punctuated by, hopefully, moments of the same old wonder of joining. Maybe that’s living the rhythm, or at least a part of it. Maybe it’s as easy as that.
The post Everyone Deserves a Mother Figure Like Juniper from “Wise Child” appeared first on Electric Literature.
Every Wednesday, Robert Lee Brewer shares a prompt and an example poem to get things started on the Poetic Asides blog. This week, write a clear poem.
For today’s prompt, write a clear poem. There are many ways to interpret what clear could mean. For starters, there are clear nail colors and clear plastic containers. Of course, clear directions are easy to follow. Clear weather is pretty nice. Clearing the air can help mend disputes. So clear your throat, clear your mind, and write your clear poem today.
Remember: These prompts are springboards to creativity. Use them to expand your possibilities, not limit them.
Note on commenting: If you wish to comment on the site, go to Disqus to create a free new account, verify your account on this site below (one-time thing), and then comment away. It’s free, easy, and the comments (for the most part) don’t require manual approval like on the old site.
*****
Poem your days away with Robert Lee Brewer’s Smash Poetry Journal. This fun poetic guide is loaded with 125 poetry prompts, space to place your poems, and plenty of fun poetic asides.
(Writer’s Digest uses affiliate links)
*****
“Alls Clear”
The deer hesitate before emerging
into the clearing. They see me,
but I’ve been here before,
and we have an understanding.
Per usual, they look and eat,
look and eat. A head raises
and sniffs the air, always
ready to bolt back to
the dark cover of the woods,
always making sure alls clear,
and for this moment,
it is.
It’s time to look ahead to the New Year! After experiencing a year unlike any other, there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Due to unprecedented circumstances, you may not have been able to meet your writing goals this past year—but here’s your opportunity for a fresh start! The expert planners and strategists at Writer’s Relief have some tips to help you keep all your writing resolutions in the New Year.
Set A New Routine—Or Refine Your Current One! It’s hard to resist the urge to check our favorite websites, social media, or e-mail inbox for updates. But click on that cute cat video for “just a second” and before you know it, all the time you blocked out for writing has vanished! Free browser-based website blockers like LeechBlock can help you eliminate distractions by blocking the sites that tend to distract you from your writing.
If you realize that writing every day in the evening doesn’t work with your other responsibilities, try a different day or time, or even once a week. Having a scheduled writing time that you can stick to will make it easier for you to keep to your routine.
To further enforce your new writing routine, designate a new spot in your home as your work area. If you used to write in your bedroom, try sitting at a window in the living room, or even at the kitchen table—as long as there aren’t more distractions in those locations.
Get Organized: It’s important to clearly define your writing goals. Is there a certain word count you want to reach during each writing session? Are there improvements you want to incorporate into your newsletter or the latest piece you’re writing? Make a list of your goals and keep it handy so you can easily refer to it and check your progress. Bonus: Each goal you mark “done” will give you a sense of accomplishment and will keep you motivated!
Recharge: When planning your new writing schedule, be sure to set aside time to do activities that will help boost your creativity. Try freewriting or other creative writing exercises. You can also do non-writing activities to recharge and inspire your writing: meditate, attempt the thirty circles challenge, or just people-watch!
Gain New Skills: There are many free apps and affordable online courses that can help improve your writing skills. Joanna Penn has a number of paid courses such as “How to Write a Novel.” If you’re feeling daring, try The Most Dangerous Writing App!
Connect With Other Writers: Having other writers to encourage and support you will make it easier to meet your writing goals. You can find writers’ groups on Facebook, including our very own Writer’s Relief Café! There are also online writing groups like Critique Circle and Story Write that offer critique and feedback on your writing. Joining a local writing group is another great way to connect with other writers and get constructive feedback on your writing—many of these local groups also have online meetings.
The New Year is a great opportunity to start fresh, reenergize your writing, and work with renewed dedication toward achieving your goals. With these five easy tips for keeping your writing resolutions, you’ll be ready to write, submit, and boost your odds of getting published in the months ahead!
And when you’re ready to submit your short stories, personal essays, poems, or book, Writer’s Relief is ready to help you meet your publishing goals. Learn more here!
Question: What are your writing resolutions for the New Year? How do you plan to stay on track?
When you’re ready to submit short stories, poetry, or personal essays to literary journals, it’s important to check the guidelines for phrases such as we do not accept work that is previously published, or submit previously unpublished work only. Why? Because most literary editors are not interested in publishing something that’s already appeared elsewhere. But what does previously published really mean? The answer to this question has become increasingly hard to pin down as the Internet takes on a huge role in the writing world. Fortunately, the submissions experts at Writer’s Relief can help you determine what’s considered previously published.
Physically printed and distributed: This is the most basic definition of “previously published.” If your poems, stories, or essays appeared in a book, journal, anthology, textbook, newsletter, newspaper, magazine, or any other print publication, it is considered published. Does this include your high school or college literary journal? Yes, it does.
Available to the public digitally: One of the main reasons so many literary journal editors don’t like previously published work is that they want their offerings to be fresh and new to their audience. Editors want to be the first to discover your writing. So if your work is available online—whether through an online literary journal, a digital archive like Wattpad, a social media platform, a website, or a personal blog—most editors will consider it previously published. Also, editors would prefer to stay away from any rights entanglements.
What if you take your writing off the site or platform? Often, even though you’ve removed your work, it may be cached elsewhere on the Internet and still show up in searches. Google and other search engines will often archive old Web pages, so simply deleting something from the Internet doesn’t mean it’s gone. If you remove a short story, essay, or poem from the Internet, do a search of random lines from the work to see if it’s appearing anywhere.
No one can stop you from taking your work down and then submitting it, but be warned: Editors may not like this tactic. And if an editor finds your “unpublished” work online, you might look irresponsible or, worse, devious.
Our best advice: Don’t post your work online if you plan to submit it for publication in a literary journal.
Posted on a private critique forum: If the forum, board, or workshopping site is private and intended for the purposes of encouraging feedback or community support, most editors and literary agents will probably consider the work unpublished. But just to be safe, you may want to take it down once you’ve received feedback so it doesn’t appear online.
If the forum in question is public (that is, if nonmembers can see what you’ve written), then your work will likely be considered previously published.
Posted on my own author website: Having samples of your writing on your author website is a great way to entice new readers and literary agents who may be researching your work and online presence. But, as you may have guessed, whatever short stories or poems you post on your public author website will be considered previously published by literary editors. And don’t post your work on your website and then plan to take it down and start submitting to journals. Remember, that won’t necessarily stop your writing from showing up in an Internet search. The best approach is to only post writing that has already been published (after the publication rights revert back to you, of course).
An alternative is to write stories or poems specifically for your website, with no intention to publish them elsewhere. This approach could also provide an incentive for readers to come back to your website for new, original content.
Self-published in print or e-book format: If you’ve self-published a book or novel on your own or with a third-party POD publishing house, and you still retain the copyright, you can pitch it to most literary agents. That said, always be forthcoming about your book’s history—and you may need to remove your book from online bookstores and take your book down from the Internet.
Book excerpt in a literary journal: Publishing a passage from your book in a journal shouldn’t disqualify your book from agent representation. As long as your excerpt is a small section from your book—maybe a chapter or two—agents will know that there is still a lot of untapped potential in your book. In fact, successfully publishing an excerpt can boost your chances of securing an agent, since it shows you have an audience who is interested in your book’s story.
What if your work is considered “previously published”?
Keep in mind that these are general guidelines: Each literary editor may have his or her own definition of what is considered previously published. Most literary journals list what they consider previously published in their submission guidelines—so always check before you send your work!
If you realize your writing is previously published, don’t give up yet. There are a few journal editors who do accept previously published works. Be sure to be upfront about your publication history. Editors will check to see if your work shows up in searches, and if you don’t let them know your story or poem has already been published, you’ll earn a poor reputation in the industry. Editors DO talk to each other!
As a general rule, if you plan to submit your work to literary journals and magazines, DON’T post it publicly online first—anywhere. Then you won’t have to worry about whether you’ve inadvertently become “previously published.”