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Just Don't Ask Me To Sing the Powdermilk Biscuits Song
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mrissa said in her review of Superpowers (see previous post), and barthanderson too, have started me thinking. It has become clear to me, to my slightly bewildered amusement, that to people who meet me at conventions and such that I am (or can be) a bit of a regional character. Which is to say, my accent (which I myself am rarely aware of) and, I assume, other personality quirks of mine are seen as particularly Midwestern or Minnesotan or both. Which, to be clear, I am entirely fine with, as to date this has not included assumptions that I:
1. know more cows than people;
2. am a casual bigot and/or cultural Stone Age-r of the sort which often represents Midwesterners in Hollywood (I am looking at you, Aaron Sorkin);
3. will never truly blossom unless I move to New York, L.A., etc.
In other words I'm fine with being a type, as long as it's not a stereotype. I can't deny that I am a Minnesotan and a Midwesterner, even if I'm not sure how that looks to other people. I'm proud of it, and sometimes a bit defensive. At times I am provincial about it, but this does not particularly worry me. (In my experience--to make a somewhat recursive statement--the most provincial people of all are from New York City.)
It's begun a bit of a re-identification, though, and that's interesting. (To me, at least.) I've always thought of myself, politics and patriotism aside, as a very American writer, and that's been a conscious thing. As a fantasist (fabulist? imaginist? wanker?) this can be tricky, because the genre is so very rooted in works from Europe and particularly the UK. Works that I love, but which it feels very strange to claim as my own and to build on, because I am not European (at least, not in the sense of being from Europe). There's a disconnect in writing about kings and queens and ancient ruins, because these are not part of my daily life or even my accessible history. Which is not to say that I haven't done it and won't keep on doing it, because at this point it's idiom, and it extends beyond place into folk and fairy tales, and it's something that's immediately understood by readers. But I feel the need to do it slant. To give you an idea of my zeal for this, at one point I made the decision to ban the spelling "grey" from my writing, because it was (from my perspective) reflexively used by so many American fantasy writers in an attempt to borrow gravitas from the British fantasists.
This is not meant to be a diatribe or a criticism of how or what anyone else chooses to write. I think "choice," though, is an important word in this context. For me, someone who spent his first eighteen years in essentially the same place, place is important. The exotic is important in my work, but it begins to lose that value unless I stay aware of where I'm from. I think this is a mistake that beginning writers make; they borrow someone else's context. Imitation is a legitimate way to learn, but if you are from Texas and you're borrowing Tolkien's worldview, or from St. Paul and borrowing Garcia Márquez's (ahem), you're only going to go as far as mimicry can take you. One of the dynamics of maturation, at least for me, has been reconciling myself to my past, which depending upon your viewpoint was stable or boring or safe or sheltered. (Not all of our autobiographies are dense with material.) It's in those early years that we learn how to look at the world. That is sometimes what we have to unlearn, in order to see clearly. It may not be a matter of standing still to look--some people spent their childhoods constantly on the move, and maybe that means a multiplicity of simultaneous perspectives. I can't say. But I think we have to choose to acknowledge the various lenses that we see through in order to account for our personal distortions.
What I'm seeing right now is that perhaps I am a Midwestern writer first, and an American writer second. This feels true because--for one thing--I know that I'm much more likely to get my back up when someone slams the Midwest than I am when someone slams the U.S. (Hell, I'm usually the one slamming the U.S.) But also because--and this is probably what I'd say if I sold a story to one of the Interfictions anthologies--there's one lesson that is brought home very clearly when you grow up in a place that other people refer to as flyover country. The lesson is that when things are happening in the world, almost without exception they are happening somewhere else. And while I'm guessing there are many places that feel like that, and most of us probably feel like that when we are starved for excitement, it's something that's built into the culture of the U.S. Television shows take place in L.A. or New York. Movies make fake snow out of potato flakes (I can always spot it--it's in how it reacts to being driven on) and pretend that Vancouver is Iowa or Detroit. Yes, there is Chicago, but Chicago is in some ways both the epicenter and glaring exception to the Midwest. We aren't the flyover states so much as we are the Between States. Which, now that I look at it, implies transformation, and mediation, and connection. Which is hopefully what all of this is about.
(Revisions, you ask? Why they're going so well that I took the afternoon to write this post instead ofwrestling struggling with weeping over the next chapter that needs to be completely fucking rewritten.)
mrissa said in her review of Superpowers (see previous post), and barthanderson too, have started me thinking. It has become clear to me, to my slightly bewildered amusement, that to people who meet me at conventions and such that I am (or can be) a bit of a regional character. Which is to say, my accent (which I myself am rarely aware of) and, I assume, other personality quirks of mine are seen as particularly Midwestern or Minnesotan or both. Which, to be clear, I am entirely fine with, as to date this has not included assumptions that I:1. know more cows than people;
2. am a casual bigot and/or cultural Stone Age-r of the sort which often represents Midwesterners in Hollywood (I am looking at you, Aaron Sorkin);
3. will never truly blossom unless I move to New York, L.A., etc.
In other words I'm fine with being a type, as long as it's not a stereotype. I can't deny that I am a Minnesotan and a Midwesterner, even if I'm not sure how that looks to other people. I'm proud of it, and sometimes a bit defensive. At times I am provincial about it, but this does not particularly worry me. (In my experience--to make a somewhat recursive statement--the most provincial people of all are from New York City.)
It's begun a bit of a re-identification, though, and that's interesting. (To me, at least.) I've always thought of myself, politics and patriotism aside, as a very American writer, and that's been a conscious thing. As a fantasist (fabulist? imaginist? wanker?) this can be tricky, because the genre is so very rooted in works from Europe and particularly the UK. Works that I love, but which it feels very strange to claim as my own and to build on, because I am not European (at least, not in the sense of being from Europe). There's a disconnect in writing about kings and queens and ancient ruins, because these are not part of my daily life or even my accessible history. Which is not to say that I haven't done it and won't keep on doing it, because at this point it's idiom, and it extends beyond place into folk and fairy tales, and it's something that's immediately understood by readers. But I feel the need to do it slant. To give you an idea of my zeal for this, at one point I made the decision to ban the spelling "grey" from my writing, because it was (from my perspective) reflexively used by so many American fantasy writers in an attempt to borrow gravitas from the British fantasists.
This is not meant to be a diatribe or a criticism of how or what anyone else chooses to write. I think "choice," though, is an important word in this context. For me, someone who spent his first eighteen years in essentially the same place, place is important. The exotic is important in my work, but it begins to lose that value unless I stay aware of where I'm from. I think this is a mistake that beginning writers make; they borrow someone else's context. Imitation is a legitimate way to learn, but if you are from Texas and you're borrowing Tolkien's worldview, or from St. Paul and borrowing Garcia Márquez's (ahem), you're only going to go as far as mimicry can take you. One of the dynamics of maturation, at least for me, has been reconciling myself to my past, which depending upon your viewpoint was stable or boring or safe or sheltered. (Not all of our autobiographies are dense with material.) It's in those early years that we learn how to look at the world. That is sometimes what we have to unlearn, in order to see clearly. It may not be a matter of standing still to look--some people spent their childhoods constantly on the move, and maybe that means a multiplicity of simultaneous perspectives. I can't say. But I think we have to choose to acknowledge the various lenses that we see through in order to account for our personal distortions.
What I'm seeing right now is that perhaps I am a Midwestern writer first, and an American writer second. This feels true because--for one thing--I know that I'm much more likely to get my back up when someone slams the Midwest than I am when someone slams the U.S. (Hell, I'm usually the one slamming the U.S.) But also because--and this is probably what I'd say if I sold a story to one of the Interfictions anthologies--there's one lesson that is brought home very clearly when you grow up in a place that other people refer to as flyover country. The lesson is that when things are happening in the world, almost without exception they are happening somewhere else. And while I'm guessing there are many places that feel like that, and most of us probably feel like that when we are starved for excitement, it's something that's built into the culture of the U.S. Television shows take place in L.A. or New York. Movies make fake snow out of potato flakes (I can always spot it--it's in how it reacts to being driven on) and pretend that Vancouver is Iowa or Detroit. Yes, there is Chicago, but Chicago is in some ways both the epicenter and glaring exception to the Midwest. We aren't the flyover states so much as we are the Between States. Which, now that I look at it, implies transformation, and mediation, and connection. Which is hopefully what all of this is about.
(Revisions, you ask? Why they're going so well that I took the afternoon to write this post instead of
no subject
With the railroads, you can blame air and automotive lobbyists--they killed the rails largely, to cut out competition and force the automobile per individual culture and created the flyover country that we live in now. And along with the political maneuverings over which kind of transportation would be given the most political sanctions, the unleashing of the corporate world to basically go to third world countries and abuse people who were used to an even worse life than the working classes of America who were getting uppity and demanding fair wages and work regulations and had begun to organize into powerful unions, you get the poverty-laden landscape of the Midwest today. I haven't laughed so bitterly as I have all this past year as I've met more and more people who seem to have heard about the decline of the Midwest for the first time in their life as it hit the media again during the democratic nomination period. Apparently, many people on the coasts seem to have thought that everyone was middle class and worked white collar jobs and had everything a person basically needs to do well and had all the same opportunities as anyone else in the country. I'm sure they've forgotten about it already again. Economic problems bore people who don't have them, usually.
In any case, I think it's interesting when people react to midwesternness in fiction--I came across that sometimes with my book when it came out too--and I think that the incomprehension of and almost exoticized response to that landscape and its people and their problems and habits and manners is indicative of a huge blind spot in the landscape of fiction as well.
What I dislike more than anything is when people think stories based in locales like Madison (or, in my case, a nameless small rural town on the outskirts of a dead steel town in Ohio that people largely forgot about even though the Boss tried to memorialize it) are quaint. Quaint is a typical response to the midwest. I think there are certainly aspects that are quaint, but there are other aspects of it as well.
In any case, it sucks when you see people talking badly about something you've spent a lot of time and energy in making, and made as best you could at the time. It feels like poison in the well when you come across stuff like that. Best to shrug it off and walk away, unless something they've said actually resonates. I find that it rarely does, though.
no subject
It's kind of strange to have grown up with the assumption, more or less, that where I live has always been Nowhere as far as anyone not living here is concerned; and yet what's being driven home to me by my research is that the opposite is true. The fact that cities exist at all means that, at some point, there were fortunes made there, and trade and industries booming. The small town my mom comes from in Northern Minnesota has less than 600 people living in it today, but back when the stage (and later the railroad) ran through there it had a brewery of its own and several hotels and mills. Almost all of that is gone now.
I have yet to be accused of being quaint, and I haven't had anyone react negatively to the specifically Midwestern aspects of the book. Unfavorable reviews are part of the game, I think, and for the most part they haven't bothered me. What I do find frustrating (but need to get over) is when it feels like the reviewer is making a lot of assumptions about my knowledge and intent based on nothing more than his or her dislike of the text. But, I am not going to be one of those people who argues with reviews. That way lies madness--and worse!--unproductive madness.
no subject
We've been told we're from nowhere when it's not true. That's a very midwestern thing, I find. There were a lot of small towns like your mom's. Some people would argue that the changes that have occurred were inevitable, but I think they mainly changed to make a small group of people wealthier mostly, and not much care has been taken about preserving communities as they changed the rules of the game. Youngstown once had 180,000 people. It now has 85,000. I guess I'm not cool with the whole go where work is thing, either. It just feels wrong, despite it being the thing people have done throughout history when work migrates to other places. I'd rather go down with the ship and flip the world the finger than stay in it and play that sort of game. Unwise, but it's how I feel.
I know what you mean about wanting to write about other countries and space and places that don't exist, too, and wanting to write about the Midwest as well. I think you can do both. I'm trying to do that, too. Hopefully we've got a lot of years of ahead of us to do what we want! (Oh look, the optimist in me came out.) :)