Wednesday, July 21, 2004
Dried wells and dead horses
Sounds like a title for a western, don't it? ;-)
Grims posted something that reminded me of a book-length project I've thought about, a lot, and put off, a lot. When I was putting together a little booklet of the best and worst of my poetry the other day, I was reminded of it again. So maybe it's time to talk about it a little more! I have always envisioned it as the writer's Holy Grail - you know, The Next Great Novel (or, for 'mericans, The Great American Novel), complete with aspirations to appear on Oprah's Book Club before she started selecting from among the classics.
The inspiration is the life of my great-aunt Helyn. If our family had a matriarch, it was Aunt Helyn. One of my earliest memories is of Aunt Helyn standing over me at the end of the counter in the kitchen at our house (where my parents still live - wow!) asking me if I wasn't excited about my new baby brother. (I think this was when K was born, so I was about three years old.)When I was a kid, most of our summer vacations as well as one or two Christmas holidays included making a trip to visit her and Uncle Hous in Ft. Myers, FL. Theirs was a romantic kind of tale; they met when boarding at the same boarding house and eventually married, never mind the social rules of their era and the fact that she was in her forties and he was fifteen years her junior. (As time passes, their story always gives me hope for romance and a loving partnership to happen in my life, too. *grin*)
She grew up in a small mining town in southwestern Virginia. She left home and traveled with a theatre group all around the US, even out to the West Coast. That was the 1920s. Back in Virginia, she taught school in the Shenandoah Valley and became one of the first women school superintendents in the state. (We were also always fascinated by the fact that some of the original Statler Brothers had been among her students, and one of them had been the bagger at her local market.) She didn't worry so much about segregation and forged a lifetime friendship with someone she wasn't supposed to have taught because of those stupid laws. With her mother, she practically raised my dad when things were tight in his family. She'd hold her own with the filthiest sailor cussing you out one minute but then coo over a baby the next. And she adored cats.
In her 89 years, she impacted a lot of people's lives, mostly in a positive way. She led the sort of life that, I think, not only deserves but needs to be chronicled, even as fiction. And that's what I want to do. I know how I want to structure the novel and the particular narrative devices I want to use in it. I know at least some of the stories I want to tell. Yet I keep considering it and putting it off. At one point, it seemed like such a visual idea that I decided to try to write it as a script rather than as a novel; changing formats didn't make me work on it any faster. I think the biggest part of what plays into putting it off is that, whenever I get around to telling this story, more than anything else I want it to be as close to great and perfect and as worthy of its inspiration as possible. Seems like a heavy burden for an idea, no?
Something I noticed in reviewing the poetry is that I seem to write about memory a lot. Not memories, specifically, but remembering as an act, something you do or don't do. I knew that I was writing a cycle of Alzheimer's poems, but I had not realized how many other pieces could be placed in that broad category, as well. I was about to say that the motif hasn't yet appeared in the prose, however, that's not entirely true. Wherever it surfaces in the prose, memory/remembering is approached differently from the way it appears in the poetry. It's not faulty.
You know, I love thinking about this stuff. Puts a new spin on the academic stuff I've written when analyzing the work of this or that writer. *hah* Well, for the time being I continue to stand by Jungian archetypal criticism as a reliable way to interpret a text. OK, let's go tap into the collective unconscious...
Grims posted something that reminded me of a book-length project I've thought about, a lot, and put off, a lot. When I was putting together a little booklet of the best and worst of my poetry the other day, I was reminded of it again. So maybe it's time to talk about it a little more! I have always envisioned it as the writer's Holy Grail - you know, The Next Great Novel (or, for 'mericans, The Great American Novel), complete with aspirations to appear on Oprah's Book Club before she started selecting from among the classics.
The inspiration is the life of my great-aunt Helyn. If our family had a matriarch, it was Aunt Helyn. One of my earliest memories is of Aunt Helyn standing over me at the end of the counter in the kitchen at our house (where my parents still live - wow!) asking me if I wasn't excited about my new baby brother. (I think this was when K was born, so I was about three years old.)When I was a kid, most of our summer vacations as well as one or two Christmas holidays included making a trip to visit her and Uncle Hous in Ft. Myers, FL. Theirs was a romantic kind of tale; they met when boarding at the same boarding house and eventually married, never mind the social rules of their era and the fact that she was in her forties and he was fifteen years her junior. (As time passes, their story always gives me hope for romance and a loving partnership to happen in my life, too. *grin*)
She grew up in a small mining town in southwestern Virginia. She left home and traveled with a theatre group all around the US, even out to the West Coast. That was the 1920s. Back in Virginia, she taught school in the Shenandoah Valley and became one of the first women school superintendents in the state. (We were also always fascinated by the fact that some of the original Statler Brothers had been among her students, and one of them had been the bagger at her local market.) She didn't worry so much about segregation and forged a lifetime friendship with someone she wasn't supposed to have taught because of those stupid laws. With her mother, she practically raised my dad when things were tight in his family. She'd hold her own with the filthiest sailor cussing you out one minute but then coo over a baby the next. And she adored cats.
In her 89 years, she impacted a lot of people's lives, mostly in a positive way. She led the sort of life that, I think, not only deserves but needs to be chronicled, even as fiction. And that's what I want to do. I know how I want to structure the novel and the particular narrative devices I want to use in it. I know at least some of the stories I want to tell. Yet I keep considering it and putting it off. At one point, it seemed like such a visual idea that I decided to try to write it as a script rather than as a novel; changing formats didn't make me work on it any faster. I think the biggest part of what plays into putting it off is that, whenever I get around to telling this story, more than anything else I want it to be as close to great and perfect and as worthy of its inspiration as possible. Seems like a heavy burden for an idea, no?
Something I noticed in reviewing the poetry is that I seem to write about memory a lot. Not memories, specifically, but remembering as an act, something you do or don't do. I knew that I was writing a cycle of Alzheimer's poems, but I had not realized how many other pieces could be placed in that broad category, as well. I was about to say that the motif hasn't yet appeared in the prose, however, that's not entirely true. Wherever it surfaces in the prose, memory/remembering is approached differently from the way it appears in the poetry. It's not faulty.
You know, I love thinking about this stuff. Puts a new spin on the academic stuff I've written when analyzing the work of this or that writer. *hah* Well, for the time being I continue to stand by Jungian archetypal criticism as a reliable way to interpret a text. OK, let's go tap into the collective unconscious...
