The Writing Life Too

The darkness has faded revealing that fog has settled everywhere this morning blanketing the neighborhood, the giant evergreens across the street rising out of the mist. Easy to imagine I’m in England, or a Dickens-type character might emerge from the mist perhaps wearing a top hat or some shabby bundle of rags. I’m reminded of Carl Sandburg’s line, "the fog came on little cat feet", because when you wake up to a world of fog, it’s such a delightful surprise.

And oh joy, I just learned that Charlie Huston has a new crime fiction book out, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death. If you can handle gore and such, you might want to check out his site pulpnoir.com . He’s also blogging at Amazon’s Omnivoracious this week. Read his dialogue and weep.

Today is Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. He was already a Baptist minister when he led his first boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery at 26.I hadn’t realized that he was so young when he first became a civil rights activist. I was thinking back to myself at 26—it was the time I was living on an Ojibwa reservation in northern Wisconsin, writing poetry, raising my daughter, singing. I was a bit lost at that time in my life—partly because I was afraid of being a writer, partly because I had a lot of growing up to do. But leading what turned out to be a revolution at 26? Whew—with gratitude to his friends and family who lost him.

Yesterday I was trying to find a Henry James quote about drama—haven’t found it yet—but was reminded of his knowledge of storytelling. In his more than 50 year career he produced novels, plays, criticism, essays and stories. Since it’s January and despite a world-wide recession and weather that is freezing our eyeballs shut in some parts of the world (I talked with my aunt in northern Wisconsin yesterday and didn’t dare mention our temperatures were supposed to be in the 50s this week) we need to saddle up our hopes and plant our butts—some a bit wider since the holidays—at our computers.

Here’s a bit of inspiration from The Future of the Novel: Essays on the Art of the Novel by the esteemed Mr. James:
The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field glass, which forms again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees small one see coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may not open; ‘fortunately’ by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the ‘choice of subject’; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the ‘literary form’; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher – without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist. Tell me what the artist is, and I will tell you of what he has been conscious. Thereby I shall express to you at once his boundless freedom and his ‘moral’ reference.