Q&A with Kim Zarins, author of Sometimes We Tell the Truth

Tags

Boccaccio, fanfiction, Geoffrey Chaucer, Harry Potter, Kim Zarins, Slytherin, Sometimes We Tell the Truth, The Canterbury Tales

I am delighted to introduce you to Kim Zarins, author of the YA novel Sometimes We Tell the Truth (Simon Pulse, Sept. 2016), a brilliant retelling of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in a contemporary setting, with the “pilgrims” as high school seniors on a class trip to Washington, DC. I loved the book when I read it two years ago, and I’m enjoying it even more on my second read. Or is it my third? (I’ve been chasing her down for this blog post for a few years. Each year at Kalamazoo she promised soon!)

I first met Kim in 2003—eons ago!—when my friend Paul Hyams invited me to spend a few days at Cornell University talking to grad students and giving a public talk on the ethics of historical fiction. Kim was one of the grad students I met, working on her PhD in English Literature. She earned her PhD in 2009 while teaching at Cornell, then Santa Clara University, and San Francisco State University. Since 2009 she’s taught at California State University at Sacramento where she’s currently Associate Professor of English. Now here’s the kicker—when she contacted me several years ago, on Twitter, as I recall, I knew at once who she was. She’d made such an impression on me all those years ago at Cornell.

So, without further ado, here’s our conversation:

Candace: First, why modernize?

Kim: It was the right choice for me for many reasons. I love reading historical fiction, but I couldn’t (and can’t) see myself writing a medieval retelling of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I fear I’d get bogged down in researching cobblestones and privy logistics and just feel unqualified at capturing medieval London and the road to Canterbury. Similarly, while I adore Middle English, I didn’t want to wrestle with diction that sounds too ye olde Engelonde-ish. In truth, I didn’t want to convey the medieval atmosphere of Chaucer’s text so much as the characters and stories themselves, the themes that speak to us as clearly as they did back then—meeting people who are different from you and listening to them, being in love, standing up for yourself, facing uncomfortable truths. Modernizing the tales removes all the medieval atmosphere, and since a modern setting doesn’t bear much analysis for modern readers (it’s just teens on a bus riding along with the occasional coffee break), I can keep the focus on the internal growth of the characters and the storytelling dynamic.

Candace: And why teens?

Kim:  Chaucer’s characters are so much larger than life, as well as works-in-progress, and their passionate natures and vibrancy just seemed to make them perfect as teenagers, and the medieval sense of hierarchy and type-casted roles seem not all that different from the high school scene. I love the unabashed coming-of-age narrative we get in kids’ and teens’ books, and I could focus on the characters’ deep feelings and budding insights, while remaining true to their limited viewpoints. I really loved having this toy box of amazing characters to play with. I think if I were writing Geoffrey Chaucer, Father of English Poetry, I’d freeze up and not dare remove him from his pedestal, but Jeff Chaucer the shy teenager was a wonderful and accessible narrator, so frustratingly flawed but so real and relatable. I also loved the idea of meeting Chaucer’s pilgrims as teens, especially the Pardoner. There’s something redemptive about meeting the Pardoner as a teen and seeing if I can shift something so he doesn’t have to grow up and be a bitter, despairing villain. Finally, I loved the idea of writing to a teen audience and sharing these relatable stories, and hopefully spread some Chaucer love to the next generation.

[Candace jumping in to say I was so moved by Pard/the Pardoner. I felt you’d delved into the heart and soul of a character Chaucer had been just sketched in to suit his purpose and you brought out his depths.]

 [Kim jumping in to say Thank you so much! He was the character I worked on the most and the only one who voiced opinions about his own centrality in the novel. No marginalization for this Pardoner! I loved working on every scene he was in.]

Candace: As a writer I’ve wondered whether some of the tales and the pilgrims were easier to modernize than others.

Kim: Not to sound complacent or braggy (believe me, I know about writer’s block!), but some pilgrims and tales were very easy to write. This is partly because I teach Chaucer, and I try to make modern parallels for my students. For example, I make references to Twilight, or my students consider how the characters would talk if they were on Twitter. The pilgrims’ voices are so distinct—the Miller talks only like the Miller, and so on. This really helped my characters have their own voice and not bleed into one another’s. And knowing who they were helped with writing their tales, with an eye to their personalities but also Chaucer’s original tales.

When I sketched an initial outline, a modern concept would spring to mind, and the tale then would write itself. For example, The Knight’s Tale with those two Theban princes revived from the pile of corpses is just *obviously* a zombie love story, right?! And The Franklin’s Tale involves a magician willing to help a young man get a woman through a magical demonstration—the whole situation is creepily Slytherin, so the path was clear there too. I confess the fabliaux were straightforward to write, and I kept the scandalous content but provided a lot of criticism from the women on the bus (a lot of Chaucer’s male characters had to become female, because otherwise it would be a really weird demographic—it just shows how outnumbered the Wife of Bath and Prioress really were).

Other tales were more difficult. The Clerk’s Tale is just painful and The Prioress’s Tale is horribly anti-Semitic. I didn’t see how the modern Prioress could tell a story like that and not get kicked off the bus. The other thing that was hard was that I knew I wanted the Canon’s Yeomen to make an appearance, but working him in took a lot of plot points and backstory. He was the most challenging. Still, I really wanted a complete cast, so it was worth it!

Candace: Did the tales or the characters come first–that is, did you modernize the pilgrims and then think about how to modernize their tale, or did it go the other way, or vary? I love hearing people talk about their writing process. 

Kim: The characters came first. While I was writing drafts of my General Prologue, I was also writing out character descriptions. I made an Excel spreadsheet for seating arrangements based on social hierarchy (cool kids in the back, nerds in the front row), and another for the character traits and which colleges they were planning to attend, what cars they drove, etc, just so I could know more about them before I directed attention to their stories.

Candace: When teens read the book, what sorts of questions do they ask about Geoffrey Chaucer and the medieval setting? Do they ask any? 

Kim: From what I can tell, most teens are surprised that it’s a Chaucer retelling. Any Chaucer-savvy reader can see the references a mile away, but because it’s a modern retelling, it’s not at all obvious to someone unfamiliar with Chaucer. The novel simply reads as a contemporary story. So I’ve heard many teens remark that they were surprised that in the Afterword I call it a Chaucer retelling—and explain what I did—and they express an interest in reading Chaucer. I love to hear that!

Perhaps the coolest Chaucer discussion I’ve ever had with teens was at the Chaucer Celebration at Arizona State University, where I was invited to read from my book to over 100 high school students, many of them from Title I (low income) schools. The students had prepared for the event by reading The Franklin’s Tale, a tale of magic that originally came from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. I read my modern version, which comes across as Harry Potter-fanfiction. Before I read the excerpt, I told the students that my tale is Chaucer fanfiction of Chaucer’s Boccaccio fanfiction, all framed as Harry Potter fanfiction! After the reading, some high school students came over and wanted to hear more about Boccaccio’s winter garden and how I was playing with Boccaccio instead of going with Dorigen’s “grisly feendly rokkes blake” (I love saying that phrase aloud). The teens were eager to read Boccaccio’s tale and see for themselves how Chaucer adapted it for his purposes. We actually talked more about Boccaccio than Harry Potter, which is kind of shocking! One cool thing about that discussion was that teens really get how awesome fanfiction is, so when they find out Chaucer was doing the same thing, it intrigues them. If Harry Potter is the gateway drug to Chaucer and Boccaccio, so be it!

[Candace inserting… “If Harry Potter is the gateway drug to Chaucer and Boccaccio, so be it!” Or is Kim Zarins the gateway drug to Chaucer and Boccaccio?!]

[Kim inserting…  😉 ]

Candace: Do you think of the school trip as a kind of pilgrimage? or is it the occasion of group travel that’s the parallel?  

Kim: The trip to Washington D.C. is a secular analogue for Chaucer’s religious pilgrimage to Thomas à Becket’s shrine. It’s also a right-of-passage for many junior high and/or high school students. It seems like a transition marker and a potentially transformative trip. For me the group dynamic is the key part of the real pilgrimage, rather than the physical destination. I don’t spend much time on Washington D.C. itself, because that’s the curricular pilgrimage, the occasion for the whole thing, but the spiritual pilgrimage is really about this group of teens who learn to listen to one another and rethink one another’s stories and their own.

Candace: What more can I say except you MUST read this book. Whether or not you remember the Canterbury Tales, you will fall in love with Kim’s characters.

NOTE: And for any high school teachers reading this, if you’d like desk copies of the book, Kim invites you to contact her through her website http://www.kimzarins.com/

Kim: Thanks, Candace! This was awesomely fun!

Candace: For me as well!

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A Writer Reading: White Fang by Jack London

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A Conspiracy of Wolves, authorial voice, How Fiction Works, Jack London, James Wood, reading as a writer, Ronad Barthes, White Fang, wolves

**warning: geeky writer post

For the past several years I’ve been browsing books about wolves because, well, I’m writing a book entitled A Conspiracy of Wolves. In my research one book kept rising to the top: White Fang by Jack London. For a while I ignored it, was even, I confess, annoyed that it kept showing up, an old book, surely something better had been written about wolves. But at last I decided to read it, see what all the fuss was about. [Yes, I know, most people read this as children, but somehow I missed it despite loving books about the wild.]

Wolf-wise (oh, how I love the implication of that pairing), it’s a delightful book in many ways, though not informative about wolf packs in the wild. His subject is the formative experience of the eponymous canine, a study of nature vs nurture, to an extent.

I began this post several days ago, saying “I don’t like to write about books I’m still reading, but the introduction of a new character, ‘Beauty Smith’, stopped me cold last night. I didn’t want to read further. Now that intrigues me.” I’ve since finished the book, and I can attest to the page-long description of the odious Beauty Smith being the point in the book at which my enthusiasm flagged; it never recovered. What happened? I thought I’d share with you my experience as a writer reading a book but also reading a writer.

Let me first explain London’s point of view in the book. We begin in the head of one of a pair of men being tracked and terrorized by a pack of starving wolves, led by the female wolf who will give birth to White Fang. A few chapters in, the point of view switches to the female, and then, fairly quickly, her pup White Fang, as he discovers the world of the cave in which he’s born, and then ventures forth into the Alaskan wilderness. But London does not limit himself to the close third person; in his own voice he provides background, details of the landscape, and, in a sense, translates for us White Fang’s perceptions. And, increasingly, London adds to this his very human commentary on White Fang’s limitations as a wolf.

In How Fiction Works (Picador 2008, pp. 6-7), James Wood discusses this authorial voice:

…omniscient narration is rarely as omniscient as it seems. To begin with, authorial style generally has a way of making third-person omniscience seem partial and inflected. Authorial style tends to draw our attention toward the writer, toward the artifice of the author’s construction, and so toward the writer’s own impress. …Tolstoy comes closest to a canonical idea of authorial omniscience, and he uses with great naturalness and authority a mode of writing that Roland Barthes called “the reference code” (or sometimes “the cultural code”), whereby a writer makes confident appeal to a universal or consensual truth, or a body of shared cultural or scientific knowledge. *

* He means the way that nineteenth-century writers refer to commonly accepted cultural or scientific knowledge, for instance shared ideological generalities about “women.” I extend the term to cover any kind of authorial generalization.

Having read a great deal of 19^th century lit, I am familiar with this sort of authorial voice, and found London’s comfortable for more than half of the book. However, once I reached the introduction of the clearly bad character at the fort to which White Fang accompanies his native American owner, the authorial voice became far too noticeable. I felt London intruding to instruct me in the “cultural code”, and telegraphing so specifically what was coming that I began to speed read, which, for me, is a sign the author has lost me. As I posted on Goodreads, I give the novel a 5 star up to that point, and a 3 after that, which is actually quite generous. I stayed with the book only because I was curious how London would depict White Fang’s reaction to a city, and then the sophistication of his new owner’s estate (complete with chickens and other dogs). There were delightful moments, but they were drowned out by the “instructive” narration.

After pondering this for a few days and reading some critical material about London’s work I appreciate that the split is intentional: he believed man’s “civilization” was far less noble than the wild, and that man was ennobled by embracing the wild. White Fang’s final owner is clearly meant to seem a cut above those around him, appreciating White Fang for his wildness. He meant to leave him in the wild, but White Fang insisted on staying by his side. So be it. I understand, but it still doesn’t make it more palatable for me.

And yet… this intrusive narration might be completely acceptable if performed by a traditional storyteller—an oral performance, with dramatic pauses for effect, droll asides, expressive body language. In fact, as I write this I can easily imagine enjoying such a performance. I also suspect I would have been oblivious of this aspect of London’s style had I read the book as a child, when I simply devoured stories. (Critical reading is an occupational hazard for a writer.) And I’m quite certain I would have found the narration comfortable had I read it at the time it was published, 1906, when the intrusive narrator was more common in fiction than it is now.

All in all, I’m glad I read it, it’s provided much food for thought, and inspired a geeky blog post. (And I fell in love with White Fang.)

I’m now happily reading Chris Nickson’s new book, The Tin God. Has nothing to do with the Owen Archer mystery I’m writing, it’s just a treat at the end of my day.

On My Mind: Wolves, Magda Digby

Tags

A Vigil of Spies, Aleksander Pluskowski, Farley Mowat, James Roberts, John Thoresby, Magda Digby, wolves, Zoomorphic

Why do we so fear wolves? They are predators, yes, but so are cats, and many of us live with cats, indeed sleep with them curled into our warm bodies. Eagles, hawks, and owls are also predators, yet most people I know, though in awe of them, don’t fear them, don’t see them as threats. Granted, domestic cats and birds of prey cannot knock over an adult human, but they can do serious harm. Yet it’s the wolves…

I’m thinking about this not only because of my work in progress, but also because the battle between farmers/ranchers and wolves is a thing in my state, and it breaks my heart.

Here’s a thoughtful piece of writing about that fear by James Roberts in the ezine Zoomorphic: http://zoomorphic.net/2017/10/in-the-eyes-of-a-wolf/
“Wolves mourn their dead. Some wolf mates return over and over to the place where their partners were trapped or killed. Others leave the pack and spend the rest of their days wandering in a state of growing starvation before they too die. Some wolves, when relocated by helicopter in an effort to shrink pack numbers, travel many hundreds of miles back to their home territory, risking being killed by other packs or by starvation. Some have even been caught again, then again relocated and this time have simply given up and died in their transport cages. Wolves create their own cultures. There is much we humans have forgotten we share with them. There is much we still have to learn from them.”

I tend to agree with Farley Mowat: “We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.”

And this: “…in the wolf we have not so much an animal that we have always known as one that we have consistently imagined.” –Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men

They are exquisitely beautiful beings, loyal to the pack, mating for life.

In medieval England the wolf was considered an enemy of foresters (i.e., the king’s hunting grounds) and the wool trade (monasteries grew rich on the wool their flocks produced), so the goal of wolf hunts was to rid the realm of their presence. In Aleksander Pluskowsky’s book, Wolves and the Wilderness in the Middle Ages (Boydell Press 2006) he notes that “the last reliable reference to wolf trapping in England is dated to 1394-6, from Whitby Abbey in East Yorkshire, where the monks paid 10s 9d for tawing fourteen wolf skins” (30).

So… there might have been wolves up on the moors in the late 14th century…

Also much on my mind: John Thoresby suggested to Magda Digby in A Vigil of Spies that she might cease referring to herself in third person, that she had surely done sufficient penance for her youthful errors. Would she attempt to change her speech pattern in honor of his memory? I’ve been debating this with myself ad nauseam. I’d be curious to know what you think.

 

 

Writing as a Journey of Discovery

Tags

George Saunders, Kate Clifford, Marilynne Robinson, writing process

I’m happily absorbed in rearranging and polishing the third Kate Clifford novel. The first draft of a novel is always a journey of discovery for me: only after I’ve followed the characters through the story do I see the patterns, the connections, the emotional journeys. Then I dive back in, reading it with curiosity, making notes toward the next draft, what to rearrange, what to rewrite, how to polish it. I love this part.

Clearly this process is shared by many, if not most, writers. Here are  two examples that I came across this week.

• In the last paragraph of Marilynne Robinson’s essay “On Finding the Right Word” in Friday’s NYT she warns against forcing the topic:
  “Writing should always be exploratory. There shouldn’t be the assumption that you know ahead of time what you want to express. When you enter into the dance with language, you’ll begin to find that there’s something before, or behind, or more absolute than the thing you thought you wanted to express. And as you work, other kinds of meaning emerge than what you might have expected. It’s like wrestling with the angel: On the one hand you feel the constraints of what can be said, but on the other hand you feel the infinite potential. There’s nothing more interesting than language and the problem of trying to bend it to your will, which you can never quite do. You can only find what it contains, which is always a surprise.”
  Exploratory, a dance, always a surprised. Exactly!
• This reminded me of a short video I discovered a few days ago, George Saunders on Story. in which he “deconstructs what makes for an effective story, and describes his personal strategies for writing, revealing the importance of conversing with your characters, the pitfalls of fixing your intentions in place, and why good storytelling is a bit like being in love.”
  Conversing with your characters–I find that essential. I’ve learned to let go of my intentions as soon as a character balks. Instead, I follow their idea and see where it takes me. Sometimes it’s a dead end and I abandon it, but even then I’ve learned something in the process, and I know the story is better for having listened.

 

 

Series vs Standalone

Tags

A Triple Knot, A Twisted Vengeance, the Kate Clifford series, The King's Mistress, the Margaret Kerr series, the Owen Archer series, The Service of the Dead, The Writing Life

As a reader, if you asked whether I favor books in series or standalone books I’d say I have no preference. However, as a writer I much prefer working on books in series. The following is a glimpse into what I’ve learned about myself in this regard.*

The Pleasures of Writing a Series

Working on a novel is a long process, consuming my days and nights for months of work and worry. I live with the characters, coax them, argue with them. They wake me in the night with suggestions for plot twists, secrets about their pasts, reminders of threads I’ve dropped. On long walks I eavesdrop on arguments among them. And then, one day, the book is ready to send off to my editor. Such a rush of relief—I’ve done it again! I’ve completed another novel.

And then… I don’t know what to do with myself. I could tackle all the things that fell through the cracks while I rushed toward the deadline, but busywork isn’t satisfying. I’m lonely. I miss the characters.

The only cure is to dive into the next book, which is easy when writing a series. I go for a walk or go out to work in the garden while imagining what might be going on in Owen’s, Maggie’s, or Kate’s life, continuing a thread that began in an earlier book, something not quite tied up. It might be a blooming relationship, a potential conflict, a long-awaited opportunity, the unexpected return of a character from an earlier episode. This might not necessarily be the central plotline, but it primes the pump, puts my characters in play.

I lost this continuity when I stepped away from writing mysteries to work on two standalones (The King’s Mistress and A Triple Knot, by “Emma Campion”). Once completed, I had no easy entrance into the next story. With these, once each book was finished,  that was that. There was no “and then” to play with.

Only by stepping away did I appreciate how much I enjoy writing crime series. In a standalone, everything is wrapped up in one book. In a series, my characters are on stage across a variety of adventures and through time. In the Kate Clifford series, I’ve burdened my main character with her late husband’s debts, his bastard children, an unfriendly clause in his will, a violent past, and a difficult mother. Kate’s issues are presented in book 1, The Service of the Dead, but, as in life, not all are resolved by the end of the first episode. Kate will cope with the hand I’ve dealt her over time, while investigating the crime that propels each book.

Having the leisure of following all the recurring characters over time is a perk of writing a series. Their characters deepen as they face new challenges. In The Service of the Dead, Kate’s uncle Richard Clifford, dean of York Minster, is someone whom she trusts, someone who is there for her when she needs a safe place for her ward, Phillip. But in A Twisted Vengeance he steps back, looking to his own interests as the conflict between the royal cousins, King Richard and Henry Bolingbroke, the heir to the duchy of Lancaster, comes to a head. Because I’ve already established the warm niece/uncle relationship in book 1, this estrangement is all the more disturbing and disappointing—and signals just how dangerous the politics have become.

Or take Kate’s mother, Eleanor Clifford, who arrives at the end of Service, giving Kate an outlet for her pent up anger. In book 2, A Twisted Vengeance, Kate realizes that her mother holds a secret that is endangering her own and Kate’s households. The challenge for Kate is to put her resentment aside and find a way to break down the barriers between them.

The children in Kate’s household are certain to change the most through the series, as they move from childhood to adolescence and beyond. I look forward to exploring how Kate’s headstrong ward, Marie, will adjust to the new member of the household, Petra. And it will be fun to show Marie’s brother, Phillip, finding his way as an apprentice stonemason in the minster yard.

And what of Kate’s heart? She has two intriguing men in her life, Berend (her cook, a former assassin), and Sir Elric, a knight in the service of Ralph Neville, the Earl of Westmoreland. With the country split apart by the warring royal cousins, the two men might very well find themselves on opposite sides. What of Kate? Whose side will she favor?

Stay tuned!

*I am aware that many of you who read this blog don’t follow along on blog tours, so in the next few weeks I’ll share the posts I wrote for my recent tour. This is the first, which appeared at http://booksofallkinds.weebly.com/:

The Subject Is Roses

Tags

Derek Perkins, Minster Rose, The Apothecary Rose

First, an exciting announcement for readers in the US who have wished for Owen Archer audiobooks: The Apothecary Rose is available now, in a new Tantor audiobook narrated by the award winning Derek Perkins. (The Lady Chapel will be available in November, The Nun’s Tale in December.)

https://tantor.com/the-apothecary-rose-candace-robb.html

 

The second rose is this gorgeous one, which Jane Hibbert brought me, fresh from her garden, as she arrived for my talk in the Festival of Ideas in York last month. Called Minster Rose, it has the most exquisite scent. Thank you, Jane!

I believe this is the York Minster Rose bred especially for a minster fundraiser, or so I was told by Richard Shephard as I set it out on his kitchen table. Perfect!

I just wish I might have brought it home. But I’m going to hunt it down. It will look beautiful beside my apothecary rose and in front of my climbing City of York, a white rose (of course!).

The third rose is a rosewood fountain pen made from the remnants of some old rosewood furniture by Bob Newman, a thank you for the Owen Archer books, particularly The Apothecary Rose. This will have pride of place on my desk. Isn’t it beautiful?!

Thank you, Bob!

More about my trip coming soon…

Meet Chris Nickson, Chronicler of Leeds

Tags

At the Dying of the Year, Chris Nickson, Come the Fear, crime series, Dan Markham mysteries, Dark Briggate Blues, friendship, Leeds, Leeds Big Bookend, On Copper Street, Richard Nottingham, the Leeds Library, Tom Harper

In several weeks (8 June) I’ll be sitting down at the historic Leeds Library (7 pm) with my friend Chris Nickson, engaging in a conversation about our work and our friendship. I’m grateful for this opportunity to share the stage with a friend whose work I so admire. We share a love for the north of England, past and present, and for talking shop. Our almost daily email exchanges are chronicles of our work and inspiration.

We both explore the political landscape of the past in our writing and how it mirrors our contemporary concerns. I might seem more overt in my politics because I include the politics of the realm in my books, but we both aim to show how the wider issues affected the people far from Westminster. Trust me, we’ll entertain you with our chatter.

You’re not familiar with Chris’s book? Most of Chris’s crime series are set in different eras in Leeds, although he’s also set short series in Seattle and Chesterfield. Let me just say, I highly recommend all of his books. You are in for a treat.

His most recent published book is the fifth book in his Tom Harper series, On Copper Street, which was named by Booklist as one of the best crime novels in the past twelve months. Congratulations, Chris! (Yes, it is that good.) The Tom Harper books are set in Victorian Leeds. Although Tom is a great character, I am always eager for scenes with his wife Annabelle. You’ll know why when you read the books. Begin with the first, Gods of Gold.

Three years ago I introduced Chris on this blog, talking about how we’d lived in so many of the same places, but never at the same time. Though we’ve since discovered that’s not quite true, we were in Seattle at the same time for a short stretch–we just didn’t know it! It wasn’t until he had returned to the UK that he contacted me. And we haven’t shut up since.

If you haven’t yet discovered Chris’s books, let me entice you with some samples of his writing.

Chris is a music journalist as well as a crime writer–I mention this because he brings a rhythm and a lyricism, to his writing that enriches his crime novels. The streets his sleuths walk are alive with sound. And he can write about music in a way that teases me into thinking I’m actually hearing it. Here’s a passage from Dark Briggate Blues, the first Dan Markham mystery (1950s Leeds): “The music began just as he walked down the stairs, piano, bass, drums and a young tenor player he’d never seen before. He barely looked old enough to shave and dressed awkwardly in something that could have been his father’s demob suit. But he could play, twisting a world of ache and pain through the melody of ‘Someone To Watch Over Me’ with a heartbreak that went beyond his years. Markham waited in the doorway until the tune ended in a slow flurry of notes that rose like smoke.”

Chris doesn’t stop at one sense, he works them all:
“An early mist had come down as the Constable walked into Leeds, giving a cobweb light to the land. Somewhere off in the trees crows were cawing and he could hear the soft smack of hooves on the earth, but he couldn’t see them.” (Come the Fear, a Richard Nottingham mystery)
“Leadenhall Carcass Market stood behind an arch next to Smith’s Tailors and Outfitters, on one of the thin lanes that ran between Vicar Lane and Briggate. It was late in the day but they were still at work, oil lamps glowing everywhere. The flagstones were slippery with frozen blood but the men working under the overhangs walked around easily, laughing, joking and shouting as they wielded their knives and carelessly hauled around sides of beef. There was a sharp tang to the air, and the flesh steamed as men sliced it open to gut and joint the carcasses that hung from iron hooks. Harper felt himself starting to gag as the bile rose in his throat. He stood still for a moment, hardly daring to breathe until the feeling passed.” (from Two Bronze Pennies, a Tom Harper mystery)

He encapsulates Leeds history in his descriptions. “Rob knew about the bell pits; everyone in Leeds did. They were holds that extended just a few feet into the ground, opening into chambers ten or twelve feet across and shaped like the bells that gave them their names; places where folk gathered scraps of coal for their fires. They’d existed for generations, all over the city, for so long that no one really knew who’d first dug them.” (from At the Dying of the Year, a Richard Nottingham mystery)

Now that I think of it, his books beg to be read aloud.

Chris does far more than simply choose a time and place in which to set a mystery, he recreates that time, researching the cultural history as well as the political history, walking the streets. He has a knack for knowing just when to add words common at the time, yet avoids the danger of slowing down the action with dialect. He has an ear for what will bring the scene to life.

You can see why I’m looking forward to our conversation at the historic Leeds Library on 8 June. Come join us! Ticket info here.  Thank you, Leeds Big Bookend and The Leeds Library for sponsoring this event!

 

 

 

 

 

Snippets about Writing & Fairy Tales

Tags

George Saunders, Kate Clifford, Medieval Women's Choir, the Owen Archer series

First it was the run up to the Medieval Women’s Choir concert (songs of pilgrimage), and the concert itself, and now I’m deep into the middle of Kate Clifford #3, in which I’ve been reacquainted with a beloved cast member of the Owen Archer series who is now elderly but still vibrant. At such times, my blog is sadly abandoned.

But it needn’t be! I thought I’d share some snippets of things that have caught my attention recently.

This morning, it was this exchange on Twitter, where it’s #folkloreThursday. I tweeted a quote I’d come across that I love:
A fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.–Angela Carter
The moderator of the hashtag for that hour responded, Ouch – that’s a bit cynical – I’d have thought it was where one king visits another to borrow some unicorn horn.
And I said, Cynical?! Not at all! Down to earth.
And loads of women expressed delight at my tweet (one adding The queen’s words.)
How much better it would be for all of us if kings/queens/presidents/etc. peaceably swapped homely things like cups of sugar instead of sending armies to take all the sugar cane in the fields. I’m channeling Magda Digby here.

And then recently there was this article by the writer George Saunders, in which I discovered a kindred spirit. We have such similar processes! No, I don’t imagine the P and N on my forehead, but in essence, it’s spot on for me, especially section 7, about the pins.

“A work of fiction can be understood as a three-beat movement: a juggler gathers bowling pins; throws them in the air; catches them. This intuitive approach I’ve been discussing is most essential, I think, during the first phase: the gathering of the pins. This gathering phase really is: conjuring up the pins. Somehow the best pins are the ones made inadvertently… Concentrating on the line-to-line sound of the prose, or some matter of internal logic, or describing a certain swath of nature in the most evocative way (that is, by doing whatever gives us delight, and about which we have a strong opinion), we suddenly find that we’ve made a pin. Which pin? Better not to name it. To name it is to reduce it. Often “pin” exists simply as some form of imperative, or a thing about which we’re curious; a threat, a promise, a pattern, a vow we feel must soon be broken. Scrooge says it would be best if Tiny Tim died and eliminated the surplus population; Romeo loves Juliet; Akaky Akakievich needs a new overcoat; Gatsby really wants Daisy. (The colour grey keeps showing up; everything that occurs in the story does so in pairs.)

“Then: up go the pins. The reader knows they are up there and waits for them to come down and be caught. If they don’t come down (Romeo decides not to date Juliet after all, but to go to law school; the weather in St Petersburg suddenly gets tropical, and the overcoat will not be needed; Gatsby sours on Daisy, falls for Betty; the writer seems to have forgotten about his grey motif) the reader cries foul, …  and she throws down the book and wanders away ….

“The writer, having tossed up some suitably interesting pins, knows they have to come down, and, in my experience, the greatest pleasure in writing fiction is when they come down in a surprising way that conveys more and better meaning than you’d had any idea was possible. One of the new pleasures I experienced writing this, my first novel, was simply that the pins were more numerous, stayed in the air longer, and landed in ways that were more unforeseen and complexly instructive to me than has happened in shorter works.”

It’s a rich, thoughtful article.

Until next time!

The Murder Mystery as a Cultural Lens, part 1

Tags

A Twisted Vengeance, cultural lens, empathy, Kate Clifford, Owen Archer, The Riddle of St Leonard's

In November of last year I was invited by the Classics, Medieval, and Early Modern Studies Graduate Research Cluster at the University of Washington to talk about my career writing fiction about late medieval England, Scotland, and Wales. I flailed around for a topic specific enough to provide some focus, yet sufficiently expansive–so far it’s been quite a ride and I’ve lots to say! I finally chose to talk about the murder mystery writer as a cultural lens.

In case you haven’t encountered the term before: A cultural lens is another term for viewing things from the perspective of a foreign culture. In order to apply a cultural lens on a situation, skills like empathy and understanding are needed. I explained that it’s important for my sleuths to not assume that the people of York (or Edinburgh, Perth, Windsor, St. David’s, etc.) view things the same way they do, or their places of origin did. So this applies on both a personal and government level. I like to emphasize empathy: In an investigation, a detective needs to listen—deep listening—and needs to hear all sides.

I thought I’d share with you the conclusion of that talk, given shortly after the US presidential election.

***

Something odd keeps happening—my books mirror current affairs in uncanny ways. I’d begun writing about the Scottish Wars of Independence from the perspective of the Scottish people—the Margaret Kerr trilogy, seeking to expose the horror of living in a war zone, and how that might give rise to violent rebellion, when 9/11 happened. And we declared war.

When I wrote The Riddle of St. Leonard’s [Owen Archer #5]—about corrodians in medieval hospitals and the financial crisis they were causing at St. Leonard’s in York—the care they received helping them live longer—too long, costing too much to support, I found echoes in political arguments about Social Security and Medicare bankrupting the nation.

And most recently, … in A Twisted Vengeance [Kate Clifford #2] I’m writing about the edginess of the populace in the midst of political upheaval. As I worked through my editor’s notes on the manuscript last week I felt a sense of déjà vu as the election results came in and I realized the enormity of the changes ahead —talk about political upheaval. As a writer I was pleased with the veracity of my depiction of the characters’ fear about the future. Personally I’m in shock to be in their shoes. I have a character question why people have rushed to support the king’s cousin, Henry, who is a cipher to them—yes, he strikes a heroic figure, a tournament champion, but why do they believe his rule will be better for them than Richard’s? Because he says so? And then… almost half the voters in my country go for the guy who promises change—huge change—though he’s never held public office and… well, you see the similarity.

How does this happen? Is it because in writing about the past with empathy novelists are tapping into universals? I think so.

So—since the election I’ve been wondering what lessons I can take from my work. How would Owen and Kate approach what has happened? They would examine the things the other side holds dear, they would frame their questions in ways that opened up dialogue, so the others would reveal themselves. When they met resistance they’d explore different routes in. All in the interest of understanding so that they might see how to restore order.

I’m hoping that the deeper reward for me in using the mystery as a cultural lens, even more resonant and life confirming than my original fascination with discovering what life was like in the past, is in teaching me how to open my eyes in the present, in this difficult present in which I find myself. To look at those I don’t understand as a cultural anthropologist, and to engage them as my sleuths do, with unloaded questions that have some hope of opening up a dialogue in which I might find clues as to how to communicate that we’re all in this together, and this is what’s at stake.

Gazing Inward, With Friendly Curiosity

Tags

creativity, trust, writing

Our most important writing tool is trust in our own unique vision, our own voice. Stop comparing. Look within. I wrote that in my journal after a friend, a poet, confided that she was experiencing a storm of self-doubt. As I reassured her I smiled to myself, remembering times she’s done the same for me.

Here are some inspiring quotes with a similar message (italics mine):

If you get stuck, get away from your desk. Take a walk, take a bath, go to sleep, make a pie, draw, listen to ­music, meditate, exercise; whatever you do, don’t just stick there scowling at the problem. But don’t make telephone calls or go to a party; if you do, other people’s words will pour in where your lost words should be. Open a gap for them, create a space. Be patient. –Hilary Mantel The Guardian 22 Feb 2010

[When asked, what’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift]: The Professional, by W. C. Heinz. It profiles a boxer before a match in the 1950s. I reread it before taping a stand-up special. Preparing to perform comedy in front of hundreds (or thousands) of people and telling jokes that may or may not make them laugh is just as terrifying as getting hit in the face while boxing. I boxed for a while a couple years back, and the fear of getting punched was a big hurdle I had to get over. But you know what helped? Getting punched. Just one time was enough to learn that the fear of pain is worse than the pain itself. That’s like stand-up. I learned to just get up there and own my jokes. Relax and take the punches. The crowd will forgive you for less-than-perfect jokes, but nobody likes to watch a fearful performer.  –Amy Schumer NYT 8/11/16 By the Book

Wright Morris said that “Writes have an island, a center of refuge, within themselves. It is the mind’s anchorage, the soul’s Great Good Place.”

Paula Fox (Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 181) “I never felt any sort of egocentricity about my writing. I think I felt that it was a dispassionate gift that some force had given me. And I still think that. It’s as if something speaks through me, and then I have to sit up there every day for it to have a place to come and speak through me.”  Also:  “Everything you write is autobiographical, even science fiction, and the planet Ork. In some way even that is a reflection of you—who you are. You write about yourself as if you were a specimen, as if you were a specimen of a human being, and so you write about being human. The only one you really know, reasonably well, in some cases unreasonably well, is yourself.”

“…not only must we wake the sleeper in our self, we must help her enter and reenter the state of wonder.” Jonis Agee (The Daily Beast, “The True Secret of Staying Young,” 13 Aug 16)

Richard Wilbur: “Step off into the blank of your mind, something will come to you.”

October Sunrise

Mostly importantly, enjoy your own wonderfully crazy imagination. Untether it. Later, you’ll edit.