Letter to a Young Poet

One of the things I do (when I choose to do anything at all) is tutor or mentor or guide or coach young writers and poets, both in the classroom (my day job) and outside the classroom (my avocation). 

Recently one of my charges became so frustrated with events transpiring in her life that she asked the fundamental questions of existence that drive many writers to their craft--or from it. I could not answer in that moment with any suitable response but I did return later and typed out something approaching an answer. As I sat back, my fingers still sizzling with the electricity of creation, I was suddenly reminded of another such Q&A between Rainier Maria Rilke and a young poet who asked for his advice.

Not to put myself into that class, I nevertheless thought perhaps this Q&A might be of interest to others who write or mentor writers or those having an interest in existence and identity. (I must confess, I explored notions of identity in quite some seriousness while researching and writing a dissertation which remains hidden in a trunk in the basement.)

After polite small talk and responding to earlier issues related to an opportunity to go to what I cautioned her was a dangerous place now, she asks the following: 

You know what I'm thinking about? It seems that I cannot find myself. What I live for? Where is my place in this world? I cannot find peace...

You ask big questions that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. And me, too. What do we do now that we are here on Earth? Religious ideology has answers and many people follow those suggestions. Non-religious philosophies offer other suggestions. Most seem to come down to helping other people, creating things that will outlast you, or dreaming of a better world and working to make it change to that dream.

I think young people especially wonder about this question. We have school as our focal point for so many years that when we are free of school we have nothing to do. Most get jobs, meet someone and form a family. After that, life demands that they do many things at regular intervals in their lives. They watch their children grow up, they serve their boss at the job, they take vacations, and so on.

Others reject that traditional path and seek something more serious, more meaningful, more profound. That doubles back to the religious questions: Why am I here? What is my purpose? What should I do with my life? Nobody will have the same answers as you or me.

For me, I started as a music student because I loved music so much. However, I found it to be more difficult once I studied it in college. I got my degree and planned to be a music teacher but I never got that job. So I returned to college and studied Communications (TV, radio, film), which led to a job at a TV station in my city. That job was soon eliminated by staff reduction, so I got the first job I could find--which had nothing to do with my education or interests. Eventually I got the opportunity to travel, and live and work in foreign lands. Besides paying well, I learned a lot about myself, what I wanted to do--what interests me and what makes me happy when I'm doing it--and what I am good at doing.

So once again I returned to college and prepared to be an English teacher instead of a Music teacher. I've been on this path for many years now, of course. It is not perfect but it seems the best life I can find. It gives me something to do which makes me feel useful and helpful. It gives me time to do other things that interest me, such as writing novels. Most importantly, perhaps, it gives me an identity: I like being the person I am when I'm doing my job. I am a professor. I like being "a professor" in the eyes of society--even though I usually call myself a "teacher" when asked.

I think identity is very important in selecting a path or purpose in life. Who you want to be is as important as What you want to be or What you want to do. How do you want to see yourself in five years? How do you want people to think of you in five years? Then consider what your best skills are. How can you use those skills in a reasonable, realistic, helpful way? It is not an easy or quick process answering such questions. But careful consideration will result in a choice which enriches you and provides direction in your life, as well as give you a platform for helping others and changing the world in ways you think best.

Along the way, however, you must still stop and take time to be silly, frivolous, immature, unhelpful, and self-centered--at least briefly but at regular intervals. We all need to take a break from a path of purpose, I think. While hiking up to the mountaintop, it's good to pause and take a look around, see the valley below, see the trail you've made, and set your eyes again on that mountain peak.

Good luck! I'll always be here to advise you, for what it may be worth, and you are free to dismiss my advise. You are your own person and only you can walk the path you set yourself on.

Perhaps it is easy to ask questions. Thankfully asking the right question helps us get to the right answer, if it exists. I'm not usually a spiritual person but I have my moments. On that day, I did. Tomorrow I might have fumbled around and said nothing. The muses are forever fickle.

Enjoy your day. Enjoy your life. Help somebody if you have the time and inclination. Nobody is keeping count but it makes the world go round a little happier.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2015 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Is there a Message in this Novel?

[NOTE: Last time, I shared a report about my brief visit to Seoul, South Korea while I lived in Japan, working as an English teacher. The experience happened more than 20 years ago and when giving it the once-over of revision before posting it, I realized how dated it was. It also may have had a tinge of "cultural imperialism"--although I tried to express positive things about the culture I was experiencing along with what my negative impressions were. I hope I did not offend anyone, especially anyone from Korea or of Korean heritage. My subsequent visits to Korea were quite different and very positive.]

That brings me to the issue of the day: Politics, Social mores, Cultural memes. I might as well throw in mention of all the chaos happening around the world today. Well, for most of this year. Online, friends and colleagues (not necessarily the same) are quick to state or "restate/reblog/share" political and social views. Others are quite quick to respond either superficially (I tend toward a quick sarcastic bit) or, occasionally, with well-considered, even researched, responses that invite further thought regardless of the position of a reader.


I've never been what I would call a politically-minded person. Mostly that comes from my uncertainty of knowing everything I would need to know to make a valid decision on some issue. Also, being someone who purports to teach Argument, I try to present all sides equally, if only to provoke students to seeing sides they had not considered. As a novel writer I also live in a schizophrenic world of multiple characters, each with their own views, positions, and agendas. It can be quite maddening--which is partly why I blog (insert "LOL"). But in light of writing a fictional work supposedly full of realistic personas, we have to accept that, though invented, they must also come with political positions and social agendas.

And so, what do we make of fiction where the characters bring their own politics? Many writers use their characters to present or promote certain ideas. Nothing wrong with that; ideas should be presented. Of course, creative writing teachers preach that there should be no preaching in a story or novel. I say, preaching cannot be excluded if it comes in the form of a character's pontificating. A fine line, yes, but if a character is that type of person, the author must let the character speak freely. And that, friends, brings us to moralizing.

Sorry to say, but I've been thinking about my latest novel, A DRY PATCH of SKIN, and the "moralizing" that comes through in the protagonist's voice. His ideas and the way he speaks of them is steeped in the Western tradition, certainly. In fact, the Judeo-Christian influence on Western Civilization is embedded in the narrative. At first Stefan Szekely refers to "the gods" as though it was an everyday meme. Gradually he switches to "God"--the one and only. Still later, he is directly arguing with God, who he believes has cursed him and his family line. He soon is making deals with God--whether God is in the sky above him or merely in his head, he believes.

By the end this novel may seem like a Christian allegory, but it was never intended to be that. Rather, it is Stefan, the hero, Byronic as he may be, who comes to believe the illusions he has convinced himself are true. He never insists others believe as he does, never chastises others for not believing as he does, and in the end, what is real and what is in his mind are only known to him--and to his confused author.

So is that what I believe? Hard to say. I was drilled with the Bible and those Judeo-Christian beliefs, and schooled in their influence on Western Civilization. I think we have to accept our Western Civilization, for better or worse, as a product of that religious entrenchment--even as I have explored around its edges and found both positive and negative things as alternatives to that religious dogma. It is in my background, my upbringing, my family history, but I like to think I am above all of that "indoctrination." And yet, when inventing characters, I fall back on what I have learned or been exposed to and apply it to a character or two, just to make them more real, more believable.

So what do I believe? As a writer, I have thought long and hard about many, many issues over the years. It's difficult to find the one perfect mantra that will enable everything else in my life to swirl around me in perfect order. Also as a writer, I seem to have fallen back, in these older years of mine, onto author and critic John Gardner's idea in On Moral Fiction: the position that "moral" in fiction is a turn toward life and life-affirming narratives (“True art is moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for an analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms.”). 

Postmodernism, however, has flipped that around so we get so many stories of death and destruction, fragmentation and dissolution, fear and loathing, and more tragedy than "life-affirming" conclusions. Seemingly for the sake of disrupting the psyche. Or it's all for the sake of the drama. 

Perhaps, I'm the one who's off balance. I grew up with one foot on each side of the great divide, so I see the Utopian stories of my youth and today's Dystopian stories. I believe that a tragic ending can still show us a better way, a "moral" view of the human condition. I also believe that, regardless of one's personal religious, spiritual, political, or social positions, views, beliefs, agendas, everyone wants to live, be happy, be free to pursue happiness, and, at the same time, not fear any harm to self, family, or others of one's community. Or perhaps my neighbor said it best: "I just wanna play WOW* all day and not be f***ed with!"

Perhaps that is simple enough without getting all moralizing and stuff.

For a fun exercise in fictional moralizing, I recommend THE DREAM LAND Trilogy, set in part on another world and, as such, includes alternate religious beliefs, deities, and doctrines--all of which directly impact why and how the people there do what they do. In the third volume, such religiosity serious compromises the population's attempts to evacuate the planet in advance of a lethal comet strike.

Enjoy your week, and many happy weekends to you!


(*World of Warcraft, a computer game in which players take on military roles and seek to kill the enemy.)


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(C) Copyright 2010-2014 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Got Goddesses?

First, let me sincerely apologize to those dear readers and followers who were made uncomfortable by my previous blog post. I did not realize the portion of people prone to Leporiphobia was so high. Sorry to shock you with so many bunny pictures. I just really, really wanted to celebrate the arrival of spring in what I thought (and polls had backed me up on this) was the best way possible. For me, and many others (again, the polls support this), the bunny is the epitome of spring icons. Perhaps I did go a little overboard, but if you can't go overboard with "itty bitty bunny wabbits" then what can you go overboard with? I ask you!

Sooooo, as a kind of self-flagellation, I have found I needed to regain some religion. Not necessarily the usual brands, of course. (I cannot do anything ordinary; even my posting of itty bitty bunny wabbit pictures is rather an ordinary act, granted.) No, I refer to the seven gods and nine goddesses followed, if not actually worshiped, by the various peoples of the planet Ghoupallesz, which is the location (along with Earth) of the tales recounted in THE DREAM LAND trilogy. That's right: fictional religion. At least to you and me, not to them.

Sooooo, returning to my Work-In-Production, we find our heroine, the unstoppable Gina Parton, a.k.a. Jinetta-d'Elous, faced with a whole host of obstacles--as every heroine usually is when stuck in a work of fiction by an unscrupulous author.

In the present scene, Gina has just escaped from an airship crash and the attack of a mob of religious fanatics bent on destroying technology and killing the scientists who make technology, including the hated interstellar spacecraft intended to evacuation some of the population in advance of a catastrophic comet. (Was that a spoiler?) Fleeing to an inn with the wounded co-pilot (naughty gal!), she connects to the Overlord (a.k.a. the governor of the city-state that is the Kobarel metropolis) via comm link. Because of the airship crash and the destruction of the fuel cell she was bringing to the Overlord, Gina fears she will not be able to free her young adult daughter from the re-education facility; the Overlord was supposed to grant that in exchange for the fuel cell, but you know how things go in science-fiction stories....

Anyhoo, Gina was previously captured and examined by the Overlord's staff, based on an unflattering report by Gina's nemesis/colleague Hanar-Santorak. They found interesting data from the lab report. The co-pilot from Gina's airship also suspects she's not quite the ordinary Ghoupalle woman she has been maintaining she is. Certainly, she could not be someone from a place called Earth! Long story short, they suspect Gina may be one of the goddesses come down to challenge them in their darkest days. And they may be correct!

EXCERPT from THE DREAM LAND Book III "Diaspora" Act IV

. . . “Are you a goddess?” the Overlord asked [via the comm link] in a suddenly different voice, a stream of phonemes coated in sugar, running fluidly from his tongue as though he had rehearsed the question for a week. “And if so, which goddess are you?”

* * *

The clanking she heard she knew to be the wheels that turned to raise or lower the metal gates of the castle in heaven where mortals were invited to stay for all eternity if they sufficiently displeased the gods and goddesses. Torture was routine, agony the order of the day, hopelessness the new blood flowing out of their veins. Not many had managed to return from such fate. Certainly not Interdimensional Voyagers, no matter what their class might be. Gina was a First-Class Voyager, but it had been so many years now since she had traversed a tangent that she was not very confident of being able to do so. She feared that instead of stepping through to an Earth she barely knew, she would find herself there outside the gates of heaven and see the chains pulling up the bars and the huge Guardian Iur-Fax swinging his thick, muscular arm toward the castle, a bull voice roaring “Sata!”—Welcome!

Gina remembered the lessons of her children, lifetime after lifetime, teaching them what all good Ghoupalle children should know.

Nourii stands tallest among the goddesses, presumed the eldest of Great God Zaul, red hair and pink skin, scars of war across her chest, breastless (one lost in battle, the other the result of self-mutilation after being outraged by the cheating god, Katoux); long, sharpened teeth and fingernails; rides a three-wheeled chariot pulled by three bintur—giant red badgers. People pray to her for strength during difficult times, though she seldom listens.

 Pemaa, the quiet sister, loves to cook and enjoys a clean home; plays with small animals; eats only three plants: eguo, blith, and resh, usually together in the same meal. Believed to care about young lovers, popular with girls who are popular with boys. She sleeps with snakes and plays with fish, often acting as a mermaid and tricking sailors.
   Roloura is the smart one, the scientist of the family, the holder of stars and worlds, the measurer of everything, the decider of days and nights and lifetimes. People call to her for longer lives, shorter work hours, extra tries in sporting events, and a full growing season for crops. She seldom grants favors other than a single extra day for the truly righteous people who lie upon their death beds.

Garou has hair blacker than night, eyes of red, hands that sweat blood with six fingers each, feet with six toes each; long feet and long legs that stride the world, from kingdom to kingdom; who hovers over croplands to water the soil from her loins; who calls women to bow to the earth before giving birth. Mothers-to-be sometimes sacrifice to her, leaving one of their fingers buried in the soil of a garden.

Emmau is the child of innocence, the irrational waif who prefers to play games than take the fate of mortals seriously. She is often chastised for her lack of concern. She responds that eternity is long enough for both work and play; she will do her work later. The lazy people of Ghoupallesz pray to her, begging for excuses to skip work or school or come home to spouses after cheating on them. She laughs a lot, and almost always at inappropriate moments.

Furanna, the matron saint of the Furank people, is a warrior goddess with a silver shield who lives deep in the forests and rides a jalo. Always surrounded by fairies, often sung to by birds, given fish and fowl for food by mountain gnomes whom she prefers as bedmates. She carries a silver spear that can penetrate anything and is forever sharp. She takes it to bed with her.

Aburra is the happy one, full of juicy fruit and cuddly pet animals, the one who dances across the clouds. She wears flowers and nothing else, and carries small, divine pugua in her arms at all times. She never sits, not wanting to smash her buttocks, and believes her bottom has the most perfect curves in the universe. She is often painted as a nude figure admired by a circle of lusty men.

Sethi is thoughtful, kind when it suits her, helpful with household matters, believed responsible for the deaths of babies when the mothers are unsuitable. Men pray to her for a woman who will please them in the qala; they pray to Pemaa for a good, faithful wife, however. Most young couples have a Sethi icon hanging on the wall over the qala.

Memitha is the ornery one, always looking for ways to hinder progress; she loves throwing obstacles before mortals. Traditionally she has brown hair with streaks of golden locks throughout. Her body is the one men dream of as they mate with their wives, yet were they to be welcomed by her they would die before they could satisfy her. She never takes shit from anyone—god, goddess, or mortal. She loves playing handball with human heads and never loses.

Gina took a breath, let it out slowly, patiently.

“I am Memitha. And you are toast.”

***
The Overlord did not understand her reference to ‘burnt bread’ but he got the gist of her demeanor: the Overlord was nevertheless a mortal and had not been acting very decently in recent weeks. He was therefore subject to discipline and Goddess Memitha had been assigned to dispense it. First, however, she needed to get to Vazak-Mixerran’s country house and fly the aircraft to Kobarêl. Only then could the spanking begin....

 

Now she has to prove it with her special goddess-like powers...somehow. Perhaps storm the high-rise "palace" and capture the Overlord, force him to command the release of her daughter. Or perhaps she could use the jet aircraft, secretly built by her former colleague Vazak-Mixerran (who also built the fuel cell she was trying to exchange for her daughter), to buzz the conference of the International Aerospace Commission as they await the results of the Zetin's attempt to send missiles to destroy the comet. Or any of a number of other possibilities. With a Work-In-Production anything is possible. And everything is possible!


I promise you it will all be sorted out by the time you finish reading THE DREAM LAND Book I "Long Distance Voyager" (available now) and Book II "Dreams of Future's Past (coming this summer). Book III "Diaspora" is anticipated for early 2014.

NOTE: The accompanying pictures of goddesses are not intended to represent those particular deities described. As divine law prohibits any depiction of the gods and goddesses, I sought only to give some visual support to the text. No disrespect to the nine goddesses was ever intended. I shall perform the required penitence if any goddess deems it appropriate as a result of my lapse of decorum.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2013 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.