Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 4 – Into and Over the Bighorns: Nostalgia at Crow Agency (They Have Pickles!!!), and a Playful Stop by the Roadside Where We Remember Youth and Rejuvenate in the Mountain Snow

(actually covers June 16; reposted from here)

We stop by the college in Crow Agency. There is no one here because it’s Saturday and summer, and the tribal college looks small and humble, but it also looks colorful and good. There are horses running free and a big tree that towers over the central, circular meeting place made of wooden beams and rusted steel that looks perfect for a powwow. We lie in the grass and feel the sun and let it soak into our skin.

Like all of the others, this reservation is also poor. The streets are lined with wooden shacks peeling blue paint, and there are little brown children playing in one of them. Two boys beat the hell out of each other in good fun like young brothers and laugh about it afterward. This place feels like home.

We stop at the gas station on the way out and it’s just like the gas stations back in Zuni. My Navajo sisters (my relatives in Zuni must never hear of this!) squeal in delight at some nostalgic sight and Holy Sweet Mother of — they have big pickles and ziplock bags and red Icees and shredded jerky and . . .

Zuni is where I grew up part-time, home away from home during summers and about every other spring and winter break as a little, spoiled, know-nothing brat from the suburbs of Indianapolis. We always stayed with my aunt, but now we always stay with my brother. The greatest thing in the world was and is the smell of the desert after it rains there. The sand and the sage and all the plants mix together and fill the air with sweet incense and all the dust falls away. We have rez dogs there, too, and so much dust. And satellite dishes. And gas stations like these. I remember the briny smell of great barrel pickle jars being uncorked by another aunt and eating the juicy goodness all wrapped up in plastic sandwich bags. And I remember my brother always getting Icees when we were driving. And all the perfect, bone-dry jerky of all kinds imaginable . . .

But Zuni is another story.

Because then we depart the little heart-tug gas station (only to return when Hailey realizes she’s forgot her phone again and we have to set out all over again, of course) and head up, up, and up into the Bighorn Mountains.

We climb and climb and pull over at an unpromising site for unpromising photos only to realize this place is amazing. There is no grand vista, but tiny blue mountain flowers sprout from every inhospitable crevice and crack. Purple blossoms spot the ground.Rocks in the distance call our name and we answer, running and bounding, and lo! snow just over the rocks, and more rocks and more rocks to climb.

The air is thin and fresh and tastes like ambrosia. I scale rocks. I walk in the snow. I inhale and exhale. I grow five years younger. Close your eyes. Breathe deep and feel the mountain air in every porous inch of skin and lungs. Cool and clean. I throw a snowball at Hailey. She tries to make a snow angel. Snow gets in her pants. I take a picture of Patrick taking a picture. There are antelope and elk and bighorn sheep in the distance. There are — there are — there are . . .

A perfect wind blows. Let’s never leave.

But instead we roll on down the Bighorns to the hot springs of Thermopolis and sleep among a million high schoolers.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 3 – Down and Up at Devil’s Tower, Fear and Loathing at Little Bighorn, and Finding Hope in the Lakota Land

(actually covers June 15; reposted from here)

We’re up in the AM and moving out of Lakota land up toward Yellowstone again, but first we have a few more stops to make.

First we find ourselves mock-hitchhiking to that Great Gray Tooth jutting from the desert. It looks like a molar rising from the gums of the land in the distance from where we take out first pictures and stick our thumbs out like idiots. It wasn’t my idea. Someone thought it would make a good picture. No one stops, just like they wouldn’t have if and when we’d have been serious in this in those days long ago when we would have been without cell phones — that blessed, hellish, blissful existence I can’t imagine.

We get there and all of a sudden it’s massive and looming and we’re in its never-endingshadow. It’s a castle. A keep. A fortress. . . A tower! Devil’s Tower, they call it. Bear Den. This whole big intrusion of igneous rock that’s fought through sediment and erosion and still stands so tall and imposing. Terrifying crevices creep down its side. They’re scars on its bony flesh clawed out by a great, ancient, and horrifying bear as tall as clouds with a roar like thunderstorms. It has an awesome power that trembles you to your soul, like that intense prayer wind that permeated Bear Butte, but there are more people here, and it’s almost like they don’t quite realize it. What’s before them. What’s above them. They sense it, sense something. They see it, but they don’t see it, like so many of these places. We walk around it, and it eyes us the whole way, and we’re always in its shadow.

Then we set out for the throbbing center of the scar tissue of this land: the rolling hills called Little Bighorn, where it all went down, and dreams flickered like fire on ice.

There is a visitors’ center and little gravel paths with gravestones all marked along their ways and a sprawling cemetery that takes up so much of the land. We don’t go to the cemetery with all its whale-white markers. Instead, we walk up the hill.

I walk up the hill.

The hill is split down its heart by a black paved road.

On one side, there is a bleached monument of pale gray stone and names of US soldiers. It stands in the center of a small square of bright green grass roped off from the rest of the world. The whole thing is foreign and barbaric and looks nothing like these hills.

On the other side, there is a mound of earth. This earth. Brush and grass live on it. Through the mound are circular walls of rock inset with great metallic plaques of the indigenous peoples who fought and hoped and died here for the lives and the ways of the lives of their peoples. In a window in the earth are sculpted outlines in metal and wire of the warriors on their horses, and behind them the great plains and the green-brown hills go on and on. The air is heavy with them — with the breath of the Cheyenne and Arapaho and Crow and Sioux and Arikara who bled here.The Indian memorial gives me hope.

And my heart goes out to the white mothers of the uniformed sons who died here under the command of that black-souled man named Custard, but though their names are written here, I feel none of their presence in this place. Because this is not their home. And I can only hope they have found their way back, and are forever freed.

But of the Indians who fell here . . . they are more than just sculptures and metal outlines. More than just a memorial. They are here. They are here in every fiber of the earth and sky. If you look closely in the dust and the brush, you can see them riding. If you listen closely in the whisper of the wind, you can hear them singing. Put your ear to the ground and the heartbeat is earth and mother and horses’ hooves and drums and prayer. Their breath is strong and good in the air.

I watch the families file past the stones marking the places where soldiers fell. I can only wonder how they feel and what they think. Are they sad? Do they feel guilty? Proud? What is in their hearts in this violent, pacific, Pyrrhic place? Do they feel what their country lost here? Do they feel what we failed to win?

I remember what was said at a little coffee shop on the Pine Ridge reservation. They took our children. Kill the Indian and save the man, they said.

There are little children here. Do they know I’m Indian? Do they know what it means to kill an Indian? Do they know what this place means? What really happened?

And here am I. Am I an Indian? Am I a man?

I turn back and close my eyes and try to listen to the whispers in the wind of the people who were here long before I. I can only imagine that in that spirit world where they must reside, they are riding now, and the buffalo are back, and they number greater than ever.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 2 – The Black Hills, the Badlands, the Calloused East of the Rockies and the Windy Pines

(actually covers June 13-14; reposted from here)

I’m covered in sweat and my heart has given out. This is a holy place. You can hear it in the whispers of the rocks. Signs of prayer line the path to the top. Bear butte speaks for itself.

We head to the Black Hills.

We head to the site of the Massacre of Wounded Knee where Indian blood was spilled for no reason at all. We flash past it without seeing anything, because there is nothing here. We turn around and find ourselves confronted with a sign, red as blood, with bone-white lettering, informing us we stand where 146 men, women, and children died. For no reason at all (though it doesn’t say that). And there is nothing here. It describes to us Chief Big Foot lying sick with pneumonia in his tent, with a white flag hoisted up top. It tells us how the Indians were told to surrender their weapons. The blood-red sign informs us of how a medicine man proceeded through the camp, inciting “the braves” to fight. It educates us of how “a shot was fired” and a battle ensued. It lectures us on how the surviving Indians “stampeded” into the valley and “persuit” by the cavalry “resulted” in the deaths of women and children. We have become very learned by reading it. Because there is nothing else here.

We proceed to the tribal college here, past Pine Ridge, to Oglala Lakota College. They have a little museum and an audio tour. We listen to it. This oral history tells us a different story from the blood-red sign. There is a picture of buffalo skulls as high as ten houses. “Every dead buffalo is one less Indian” said General Sherman, so they had to be exterminated. Ways of life change, but sometimes they are shattered. We learn that more than just people were killed at Wounded Knee. Like the blood-red sign said, the Lakota were told to surrender their weapons. A single rifle was found in the hands of Black Coyote, a deaf-mute, and the warnings that he did not understand went unheeded. “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaps and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with my eyes young,” says Black Elk. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”

We learn in this way how history is made.

And so we tumble onward to the heart of the badlands. The national park starts with a bang and we see why the badlands are called the badlands. Rock rises from the ground in great pillars and slabs and buttes. Stone white whales have beached themselves in this prairie land, sucked up all the water, and turned it into a desert. This is a maze of sunken earth. You can see erosion at work here. The land has fallen away leaving these bulwarks of granite behind. We stop here and get out.

I amble on a path that’s all walkway and no desert and looks like it doesn’t go anywhere, so I turn around and enter the Castle trail. The Castle trail isn’t really a trail. It’s more like just a window into the stomach of this tremendous callous of half-carved land that opens up into a no-man’s-land of fractured clay and rock and cracks. Look up into the sky and see where the land used to be before the wind and rain stomped it down over the course of a hundred million years. Close your eyes and commune with the rocks.

Walking forward, something leaps and lands. Kneel down and examine it. A tiny channel of river and mud in this all this riven dryness. In it, a tiny toad, brown and spotted. There is life here. There is always life.

The sun sets and we drive out through these painted gorges of granite and grass. Back at the hotel, the night twists into colors of flesh and stars and hazy dreams of what we saw and everything we imagined. Sleeps comes like a semi-truck and hits us.

Tumbling Toward Yellowstone 1 – Three Tribes and Open Wounds on the Rivers’ Hip: a Dam, a Pox, & a Black Crude Hope

(actually covers June 10-12; reposted from here)

I was told to blog about this journey of ours into the Heart of the Land, out West, in search of the Native American dream, and quickly realized my humble haikus would not suffice for a proper historical account of the trek. The man, Dr. Kenneth Ridgeway, a professor of geology of the Lenape people rounded us up. A rag-tag amount of Purdue and Ft. Louis students with native blood, eager minds, and highway-bound hearts. This coverage of our story will be of the utmost professionalism, of the utmost Indigenous perspective, of the utmost rawness, of the utmost truth, and the utmost utmostness. Such is the duty. The plot of the story is to read the land and understand its body — her body — and flesh and bone and how she has suckled our peoples in the forgotten years that textbooks don’t remember or record and only exist in elder memory. How our Mother Earth’s body has suffered and born the assault on her by industry and the efforts of economy and energy and that horrible, savage, comfortable thing called civilization. We aim to see how the energy and lifeblood pulled from her in coal mines and coal fields and oil wells and clotted in her veins in the form of dams and man-made lakes and unnatural rivers’ widths have changed and stunted the growth of her children, and how these things matter, and how they tug at the strings of our peoples’ and our brothers’ and sisters’ peoples’ hearts. This is the setting, in the American west, on the road up to the Rockies, where continental plates kiss and collide, and the dreams of America’s natives shimmer and fade and sometimes disappear and then burn brighter.

We tumbled out of Indianapolis on a Sunday dawn and near noon found ourselves in an airport in Bismarck, ND that could only be described as “cozy.” We rented four great metal gasoline-fueled beasts that could carry us on our journey and headed into the road-hewn prairie. Grass and grass for miles. Flatlands that stretched toward the horizon. An endless wind that can knock you down rocks our wheeled beasts and tries to throw us off the road.

And then we’re at Knife River and come to the plains where three villages once stood in a metropolis of earth lodges that’s now just mounds of soil and grass. By a temperature-controlled visitors’ center with pieces of history and vestiges of day-to-day life from a life three hundred years ago alllocked behind glass and display cases, a reconstructed home of earth rises from the ground outside, beside a dirt footpath. We slouch inside and the dirt walls break the wind and in place of its terrible howl a deep quiet falls. Inside the upside-down half-sphere of dried mud and twigs, supported by great beams of wood, everything is roped off. We listen to brief history lesson from a uniformed ranger and retire outside again and walk to where the villages once stood, and what is left is bumps and gooseflesh on the body of the prairie, like pox scars, which is really what they are

And we’re off again to pick up a misplaced companion in Minot, ND, whose flights were shuffled and rearranged in the great bureaucracy of the airline empire. Eat at a diner full of aliens and spaceships. Sleep tonight in a hotel with a roof over our heads.

In the morning we’re on the reservation. These places are truly the badlands. No cell signal penetrates and we are cut off. But this is a busy remote place, rumbling with the promise of oil beneath our feet, and beasts greater than ours hauling frack water lumber down dirt roads, blowing up dust and dirt in their wake, like terrible, mobile storms. We find a comrade, an old friend, a little Hidatsa woman with a big soul and a motherly face with lines of worry and wisdom, who offers her house and grounds and we set up camp in a front yard that flows into forest, and behind us a backyard that ends at the horizon. We listen to her. We amble up the dirt road and talk to a man we have never met who is immediately old family and has lived through several endings of the world across the globe and has the knowledge of experience. We inhale their wisdom and learn of the aches of this place at the edges of the badlands.

The Hidatsa, the Mandan, and the Arikara lived here. Live here. Hold on here. Farmers, hunters, engineers. They farmed the land by the river. They hunted the buffalo. They thrived. We see their remnants. We breathe in the the remains of their culture and hold it in our lungs in the belly of a great community earth lodge as a young Mandan man speaks over the lump in his throat of the blankets they were traded that hid smallpox in the threads of their weaves. He doesn’t need to cry. We see the pain. Of the tens of thousands that inhabited this land, 137 were left alive. In all the world, in all the universe, there is one fluent Mandan speaker who still breathes. This is the meaning of genocide. This is what it means to pierce the heart of a people.

And everywhere we go in this land, people tell us about the dam. A disease can ravage a people, but it cannot kill them. Not strong ones, anyway. The machinery of destruction is more subtle. In this replicate womb of soil and timber, there looms a photo of a Mandan tribal chairman in tears after signing away a quarter of the reservation to the construction of the dam. The illusion of choice without a choice is an insidious tool.  The heaviness in his heart weighs heavily in the soil-scented room. The old lands are flooded. The geography is changed. The tribes are “relocated.” The good people in Bismarck don’t have to worry. If the white people don’t like this land, they just change it. This is surgery of the worst kind, and there is no anesthesia. There is alcohol and sex and drugs. But self-medication cannot heal these wounds.

And everywhere we go in this land, people talk about the oil. We hear it from the tribal government mouthpieces and from the lips of the everyday, unconnected Indians. We hear different stories. After so many plagues, a hope comes from the very land that has always sustained these people. Black gold lies beneath their feet. And so it begins again. The oldest kind of white man’s magic: making land disappear with the empty paper promises. There are dollar signs in the eyes of many Indians. The eldest ones already know. We have been tricked too many times, and this gift must be used wisely. Will it? Will it? Will it?

Look at the earth. Her bones are being broken where no one can see. The marrow is dumped out beside the road. She bears this pain for us. It’s a second chance. What shall we do now? What will come of it? Only our children will know.

We visit the tribal college at Fort Berthold. The walls are painted with beautiful scenes of unsmiling Indians. Sunlight covers the classrooms. The students here are mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Many leave and then come back. The struggle is ongoing, but the fight is a good one. We like this place. The facilities are nice. The bathrooms are clean. But will the minds here save this place? This reservation?

We don’t know. So we fall back to our camp and minds drift into the night.

Musings on Magical Realism and Somnambulations in Surreality

Some say "magic realism" is just "literary" fantasy.

Some say it's just fantasy with more focus on realism than on magic.

Some say it's a fantasy that doesn't have rules for its magic system.

Some say it's like urban fantasy except it isn't urban fantasy.

Some just throw up their hands and give up.

So what is magic realism?

The answer is it's one of those genres that seems to confuse a lot of people and about which I see a lot of people asking questions on writing forums.

I enjoy magic realism and think a lot about it, since it's also a genre I write. I also enjoy and think a lot about what I suppose could be considerd its sister genre, surrealism, which is another genre that gets difficult to define between magic realism and fantasy and all the other genres that incorporate the fantastical out there.

There's a couple ways that I like to think about magic realism and surrealism. The difference between the two is something I'm still struggling to define, but I'll offer my thoughts on that as well. The definitions that I've come up with are really ones that work for both magic realism and surrealism, but which differentiate them from speculative fictions, including fantasy and science fiction. So I'll talk about that first, and then try to discuss how magic realism and surrealism relate to one another and are different.

Most broadly, magic realism and surrealism are both genres of fiction in which mundane reality merges with fantastical elements, juxtaposing the realistic elements of their stories with the more dream-like and magical elements in the same narrative. But that description doesn't distinguish it very much from various sub-genres of fantasy, so it helps to think about them in other characteristic ways.

The first way I like to think about magic realism and surrealism is that they are genres in which the wall between the story's objective reality and metaphor is broken down until it no longer exists.

One definition of magic realism I see thrown around sometimes is that it's fantasy that doesn't have or explain it's rules. This isn't quite true. The "magic" and fantastical elements of magic realism and surrealism must make sense, but they must make a very different kind of sense than the magic systems in fantasy worlds. They must make a metaphoric kind of sense that is true to the nature of the story and the characters. The fantastical characters of Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders in Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore claim to be bound be rules, but they are rules which make no sense to us, and no explanation of any kind of elaborate magical system is forthcoming; rather they are figures with "rules" that we can only begin to understand by considering them in a metaphoric sense in the context of the story and the characters with whom they interact.

The other way I like to think about magic realism and surrealism is that they are genres in which the fantastical elements emerge from the story, rather than the story emerging from the fantastical elements.

Speculative fiction tends to tell fantastical stories with fantastical plot elements. Magic realism and surrealism tend to tell mundane stories with fantastical plot elements. Stories in fantasy tend to revolve around the fantastical elements: the magic or the invented world. Stories in science fiction tend to revolve around the speculative scientific and technological elements and the futuristic world. In speculative fiction, the fantastical elements of their worlds must make sense even stripped of the story. Take away the characters and the plot, and the magic system still exists, the technology still works, and the foundational world still functions. In fantasy, even if the idea for the story preceded the invention of the world in which it takes place, the fantastical world the author constructs must be the foundation of the story. The story must be built on sensible world-building.

The worlds of magic realism and surrealism work fundamentally differently: the "magic" arises from the story itself and the fantastical elements tend to make sense only in the context of the story and its characters. Magic realism and surrealism are not thought experiments. Take away the plot and the characters, and the magic can no longer exist. By contrast, if every Star Wars and Star Trek story spontaneously disappeared from the Earth (breathe!! — this is only hypothetical), their universes would still exist independently enough to spawn totally new ones. However, the alternative, mystical version of 1984 of Murakami's 1Q84 with its air chrysalises and two moons and the Little People has no reason to exist at all without the characters of Tengo and Aomame and their story together. In speculative fiction, the story is built on the foundation of the fantastical world. In magic realism and fantasy, the magic of the world is build on the foundation of the story.

By its nature, magic realism utilizes the fantastical to tell an ordinary story, often one rooted in our material reality and consciousness. Surrealism utilizes the fantastical to tell an ordinary story, often one rooted in our psychic world and subconsciousness. The fantastical elements exist to illustrate the more illogical and irrational and fantastical and dream-like parts of our mundane lives and the human experience rather than existing to tell a fantastical story.

None of this is to say that in fantasy, the magical elements can't be metaphoric, or that science fiction can't  tell a story that's largely about our present-day material world. You can certainly write a fantasy novel that boils down to a love story. You can write a sci-fi short story that's ultimately about racial tensions in America. You can pen an urban fiction novella in which the vampires are metaphoric for forbidden love or kinky sex or Wall Street stockbrokers. You can type-up a cyberpunk pulpfic that ultimately uses robots and the 'net to explore the question of what makes us human. That doesn't make these stories magic realism or surrealism. Because in these stories, the symbolic possibilities probably aren't the forefront motivation for the fantastical elements. In spec fic, your vampires have to make sense as vampires before they can make sense as metaphors, and your robots have to make sense as robots before you can say anything about the human condition. In the end, they're still largely "what if" stories. Which is okay. Speculative fiction, magic realism, and surrealism can all be equally deep and layered and meaningful, but what differentiates their stories is the motivation, purpose, and function of the fantastical elements within them, and on what level of the story they are at work.

This is also not to say that there is no overlap. There can be considerable overlap. Hell, I think it would be possible to write a story that is simultaneously science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, and surrealist. Or at least employs elements of all of the above. Take, for example, the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is often billed as science fiction. Though the movie has a rather sci-fi premise — a medical treatment to erase memories — I think it could be described as magic realism with sci-fi elements. Similarly, Pan's Labyrinth successfully combines fantasy and magic realism. In both films, the stories focus on our material reality, and the fantastical elements arise naturally from the needs of the stories. Though their speculative premises are sensible apart from the story, we get the sense that they exist solely for telling the stories of the main characters. They explore not their fantastical worlds, but rather use their fantastical elements to explore the inner journeys of their characters in stories rooted in realism.

So what, now, of magic realism versus surrealism?

That's one I'm still struggling with, because I don't think there's a clear distinction between the two. I think it's more of a spectrum. As I mentioned earlier, magic realism tends to use its "magic" to illuminate the illogical and irrational parts of stories rooted in our material reality while surrealism tends to use its dreamlike elements to illuminate the illogical and irrational nature of the more dreamlike and subconscious inner journeys of our own minds. Where exactly that line lies, I think, is one up for interpretation.

Magic realism gains much of its narrative strength in its casual use of magical elements in a narrative otherwise rooted in realism. Conversely, surrealism accomplishes its effects by taking the events of reality and placing them in a surreal, dreamlike world. Contrast, for example, Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle with his Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I would call the former magic realism and the latter surrealism. What would you call them?

I hope my explanations of magical realism make a little sense to someone else out there, too. It's not just a polite way of saying fantasy. When I write fantasy, I'll call it fantasy. When I write magic realism, I call it magic realism. And when I write surrealism, maybe I'll be able to explain it better. For now, I like my definitions as applying to both magic realism and surrealism, and will continue to think of the two as two ends of the same spectrum. What do you think? What defines magic realism and surrealism for you?

Sometimes sad fiction is also the most beautiful

My favorite musician Steven Wilson of the band Porcupine Tree once said before playing "Stop Swimming" on the live album Warszawa, "This is a sad song. But, if you're like me, I always find the saddest music is also the most beautiful."

What, as humans, draws us to sad stories? Or not necessarily sad stories, but drama. Melodrama, even. When we create fiction, we always have conflict on our minds. Conflict is important. You must have conflict, we're told. You need conflict in every chapter, in every scene, in every sentence. Is that true? No, not always, but it's something we live by.

Much of fiction is built around antagonists, whether displaced in the form of a villain or natural forces, or internalized within the characters themselves. There is always something working against characters to prevent them from getting what they want. And it's important our characters want something, or else why are we telling their stories?

But what draws us to this setup? What makes conflict interesting? There exists much fiction that succeeds with very little conflict, or very low-stakes conflict. There is successful low-stakes conflict all around us that makes us feel good and secure and warm and fuzzy inside, from the latest blockbuster romantic comedy to the hottest wish-fulfillment paranormal romance title to comic strips and Hallmark greeting cards to anime like K-On! and Yuru Yuri. These are fictions that bring us happiness and joy, and remind us of the simple delights of the little things in life. But do they change us? To what extent do they affect us?

My favorite movie of all time is End of Evangelion, renowned in otaku circles for how depressing it supposedly is, but it's raw and uncomfortable directness is exactly what I love about it. Good fiction makes us uncomfortable. The best of fiction challenges. My favorite prose comes from the pens of the likes of David Foster Wallace, Haruki Murakami, and Bret Easton Ellis, none of them known for writing happy-go-lucky fiction.

I read novels to feel, not to feel good. But what is it that's comforting about feeling bad?

Is it because we feel sad emotions more intensely than we feel happiness? Is it because that is how we feel alive?

I'm reminded of recent anime: Puella Magi Madoka Magica. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's basically a darker and edgier magical girl anime, which is ultimately about love, friendship, and sacrifice, and in the show, the magical girls in it have to battle witches, culminating in a final fight against the most powerful witch of all, called Walpurgisnacht. It turns out the witches are actually fallen magical girls, and most of them follow rules and are given backstories of how they became witches and what they represent. The final witch, Walpurgisnacht is so powerful that she breaks these rules, without any apparent explanation, and serves as the impending and inevitable doom against which the magical girls must struggle. It turns out Walpurgisnacht is canonically designated as a "stage-constructing witch." She exists solely so that the story can exist. The darkness and drama surrounding her presence serves merely as the external impetus and backdrop to the interpersonal angst and drama against which the magical girls are truly fighting, conquering their internal demons.

Evil is an illusion, but it is an illusion that serves the purpose of illuminating the good. Humans are flawed creatures, and its those flaws which make people interesting. Darker fiction can affect us more because it forces us to face our flaws. Sadness must exist in order for happiness to exist. If there were no bad feelings to measure the good against, we would just be trapped in a cage of bland uncertainty. If there is never any despair, then hope loses it's meaning.

It's often said that you don't really appreciate something until you lose it. I think that's what makes darker fiction work, and what makes it impact us so deeply. When I think back on the memories I cherish most, in many ways, it's the sadder memories that stay with me. Even my happiest moments are stained with sadness, because at the time, I knew they were fleeting, and that recognition of their ephemeral nature made me cherish them all the more, because I knew they would, in a moment, be gone. Those things which we know will disappear, we hold to our chests more tightly than those things which we know will stay with us forever.

Now that I think about it, I wonder if that is part of what makes budding romance so intense: the fear that is could evaporate at any moment and the lack of reassurance that it will last forever. Things which last forever are in some ways meaningless, because there is no reason to cherish them if there is no fear of losing them. And I wonder if that is what makes adolescence such an intense part of life. Perhaps some part of us instinctively knows that the times we have are fleeting, a mere instant of a potentially long life, that will slip away before we know it, and therefore we feel compelled to feel everything in every ounce of our soul, in every cubic centimeter of our being.

I like fiction that makes me cry. Without the cheap tricks like killing off a puppy for no good reason. I like fiction that challenges me. I like fiction that holds up a mirror to the parts of myself I'd rather forget, and makes me examine the chips and scars in me. Why? Because it's how I know that I'm alive. It's what reminds us of our existence. A review of the anime Saikano reads "Every time I watch the last episode of [i]Saikano[/i], I feel like I'll never be happy ever again. The world could end, and I wouldn't notice because I'd be too busy feeling the after effects..." I love fiction that can make me feel scraped raw and naked. Because every time we're stripped to our souls and forced to confront our terrible flaws, we are forced to reborn, and learn to crawl a little bit toward a newer, less broken version of ourselves. It's how we evolve. Stories are how we change ourselves, little by little.

And without the danger of losing something, there is no impetus to step forward. We can take only the things that are guaranteed in life, but that is just cowardice. In the end, humans cannot be born without other humans dying. A happiness without the possibility of losing it is an empty happiness.

That's why we read sad stories. Because we're all broken in some way. And it's only in recognizing in that that we can being to fix ourselves.

Appended afterthoughts:


What fiction has taught me is that to erase all sadness, to feel only happiness, or the illusion of happiness, would be the same as returning to the womb, a regression to an infantile existence. It may feel good, but I wouldn't really call it true happiness. I'm not sure I would even call it existence. It would just be blissful ignorance, without the possibility for change. I'm dreadfully familiar with why that can be dearfully desirable, to the point of catatonia, but I don't think it would be a good thing. It's just a return to nothingness.


Accepting the possibility of sadness is a necessary condition for hope, the possibility of love, the potential for understanding, and a prerequisite for the promise of the fulfillment of the dream that one day one heart can truly reach another.

On Literary Fiction

Well, it's sure been long enough since I last posted, hasn't it?

I thought I'd kick off this year's first post by addressing the old, oft-argued question on the difference between genre fiction and literary fiction. What makes literary fiction "literary"?

Everyone has their own opinions on this matter, and it's spawned many a writers' forum debate and flame war. Even agents and editors seem to disagree, and many fall back on the ol' "I know it when I see it" non-definition. One former agent's definition that I like is Nathan Bransford's blog post on it, which is very similar to my own definition, but I use a couple terms differently.

Before getting into what makes literary fiction "literary," I'll start with a few definitions with which I disagree. Some say genre-fiction is plot-driven and literary fiction is character-driven. I think that's a bit too simplistic. Where does that leave, say, a character-driven genre romance? What about literary fiction that has a great, exciting plot (and yes, they do exist(!!))? Some say literary fiction is just "good" genre fiction that manages to "transcend" its genre. I think that's not only inaccurate, but terribly demeaning to writers of genre fiction, as if genre was a shackle holding them back.

What else is literary fiction not? It's not a genre. It's a category. I often hear "literary fiction is just another genre," which is inaccurate in the same way that other categories like "YA" or "commercial" are not genres. Genres describe the content of a story. It allows the readers to form expectations about what's going to be involved in the plot or setting or characters. If it's a science fiction, you know to expect science or technology to play some sort of major role in the plot. If it's a romance, you know to expect a couple getting together with an HEA or HFN. If it's a mystery, you expect a mystery to be solved. What does "literary fiction" tell you about the content of the story? Absolutely nothing. Rather, it tells you something about the nature of the story and how it's written. Moreover, any novel which is literary fiction can also have (and probably does have) a genre. You can have a literary sci-fi story or a literary mystery. Many novels of literary fiction fall into genres that don't really have sections in bookstores, such as bildungsroman or magical realism. (By the way, when talking about "genre fiction" vs "literary genre fiction," I often used the term "straight-up genre fiction" to describe fiction which belongs to a popular genre but is not literary.) Literary is a category, and just as knowing a novel is YA tells you something about the pacing and voice, but very little about the content, knowing a novel is literary fiction tells you something about the style of the writing and on what level the story is going to take place.

What do I mean by what level the story takes place? The way I like to think about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction is to draw a distinction between plot and story. In an interview with Jon Favreau, Martin Scorsese talks about the difference between plot and story. When I speak of "story," I don't mean the definition you often see that regards "The king died and then the queen died" as story and "The kind died and then the queen died of grief" a plot. When I speak of story, I'm addressing more directly what is the meat of your story? What is it about? What do you want to tell?

And now, finally, here's the way I think about the difference between literary fiction and genre fiction (hint: it's not that exciting, but maybe it's illustrative): in (straight-up) genre fiction, the plot and the story are convergent, are more or less the same, and basically coincide with one another; in literary fiction, the plot and the story are divergent, are different from one another, and the story happens under the surface of the plot.

Yes, a lot of this is a rehashing of Mr. Bransford's definition in different terms. Like I said, this is just the way I like to think about it.

In genre fiction, the focus is more or less on the material, interconnected and interrelated events that happen in the world of the character's (plot). In most genre fiction that is not literary, this is also the story. In literary fiction, the plot serves as a vehicle for the story rather than coinciding with it: the plot exists to allow the story to happen. This is why some literary fiction can seem to aimless and plotless. In some literary fiction, the story requires only a very minimal plot, because material events in the real world have minimal impact on the story. (This is also easy to do very badly.) However in more commercial literary fiction, you can have an abundance of plot (see Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan, David Foster Wallace, etc.). In literary fiction, the focus and purpose of the novel is what happens beneath the surface of events, while in genre fiction, the focus is on the events themselves, even in a very character-driven piece.

Now don't mistake me! This is not to say that genre fiction can't have a lot of things happening under the surface as well. Genre fiction can and very often does have a lot going on beneath the surface of its plot. But that is not its focus. It's not where the meat of the story is, though it may be where many important and valuable morsels may be hidden.

Since I see the question on forums so often, I hope my thoughts make sense to one or two confused people out there. Or maybe I just confused you more. What is literary fiction to you?

Next week (oh who am I kidding: whenever I get to it) I define magical realism! Stay tuned.

Real Schrödinger's Cat

This is also what I say when people call me a pervert.

Nazi Zombies

Lots of people say guns are worthless, because you need to take the head off.  I say get a bigger caliber.  (And sometimes you just need to slow them down.)

Pointer Poetry

there once was a pointer named x
who value was changed via hex
he was dereferenced one day
in an unsafe way
segfault