Books and Blooms and Baked Blessings

After a packed, challenging semester, I am officially on summer break.  I plan to update this blog more frequently in the coming weeks with both stories from the road, the release of my second novel, Little Wolves a few months before, and hints about the next one, The Last Dauphin.

Tonight, what's on my mind is all the ways literature can inspire and feed us, sometimes literally.  Shouldn't a pleasurable reading experience invoke all of our senses, including smell and taste?  First, Gustavus Adolfus College down in St. Peter, Minnesota, recently featured a Books and Blooms fundraising event that my press, Soho Press, helped sponsor.  The event featured many books, including my two novels.  I was impressed by how well the florist captured themes and plotlines with these floral arrangements.  Here's the floral arrangement for The Night Birds:

And here's the arrangement for Little Wolves: 

 

And on a lighter, punnier note, one of my favorite librarians, LeAnn Suchy, who just finished teaching a class at St. Kate's in St. Paul, challenged her students to create baked goods that played with the titles of books they'd read during the semester.  I love what they did with The Night Birds:

 

 

 

Credit for the cake goes to:  Katelyn Buechler, Emily Buechler, Ali Wysopal, and Lauren Peck.  I love it!

 

The Farm, the Storm, and Instagram

The best camera I have ever owned is not a camera, but my i-Phone.  Linked with the popular app Instagram, I've been able to take decent photographs, though I am a raw amateur when it comes to photography.   The following shots were taken on a small farm owned and operated  by my in-laws and they show what I love about life in rural Minnesota. This first shot is of the garden and trellis.  We visited on a day of perfect cloud-light, with big, puffy cumuli drifting past in a wash of cobalt blue.  The farm is a land of sky and wind.

This shot shows how the filters operate on Instagram, which isn't completely idiot proof.  While I would like to take the credit for having a "good eye," the truth is that this program makes the process simple.  With my first attempt, I didn't bring out the colors and angles quite right, which may have just been the sun bleaching out colors, but as the clouds passed over the sun the light came just right to allow this photo:

These cows are "belties" or Belted Galloways, the same Scottish breed I chose to feature in my novel, Little Wolves.  (If you look at these cows and think "yum!" you would be right.  The belties raised here are also hormone and antibiotic-free and you can purchase the beef directly from the farmer at:  http://dahlkefarms.com/  Supporting local farmers benefits the environment and your family's health and pocketbook!)  What I know about farming and working the land comes from visiting here along with all the years my wife Melissa, an ordained Lutheran pastor, has spent serving rural congregations.  The second shot is of the barn, properly weather-beaten, dour and sturdy as an old man missing a few front teeth.  If you climb inside, up into the loft, you can touch the hand-hewn beams from a previous century, trace the marks of the awl, and know you are touching something elemental and true, life as it was, and perhaps life as it should be.

Oh, and the farm comes with wildlife, barn cats and snakes and frogs, plenty to keep the kids busy.

We loaded up on fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and sugar snap peas, a summer of abundance.  The vegetable and flower gardens provide only as a result of hours of hard work from my mother and father in-law.

These next shots show the difference between filtered and unfiltered.  While true purists will tag a photograph as "no filter" to show that it hasn't been doctored, my own take is that the filter more closely approximates what I'm seeing with naked eye.  If you look at the third shot of the rainbow, you'll see that I didn't use a filter and you'll notice the difference.  The light is washed out, right?  None of deeper blues of the sky, the storm, or even the flowers have been captured.  It's still pretty, but lacks the drama of the shots with the filter.

What a panoramic landscape the country offers.  Even driving home through this ominous cloudburst made me glad we visited the farm this weekend.

Genre and the Lit Life

The Night Circus is the best example of literary fantasy I've read in a long while, a hybrid book that stirs elements of steampunk, romance, and legends into a bubbling cauldron to make something exciting and new.  It’s like Water for Elephants, but with wizards instead of critters.

The word I thought of most often while reading it was “agon,” the classic Greek term for a contest between two forces which meet in a final climactic battle.  Morgenstern’s clever take on this story structure asks what would happen if protagonist and antagonist fell in love?  What if underneath, the forces were one and the same?

As I read through the reviews of friends on this site I find myself agreeing with some of the complaints.  Yes, the scene sets are sumptuous, with descriptions of dinners and spectacle that sometimes become wearying.  Erin Morgenstern excels in her use of imagery, all captured with a third person limited omniscience and told in present tense, which adds forward momentum to the plot.  Yes, some of the minor characters like Poppet and Widget become more interesting than the main characters.  Yes, the emotional landscape of the novel will leave some empty.

Professional reviewers also expressed mixed views.  The New York Times review was less than flattering:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/the-night-circus-by-erin-morgenstern-book-review.html   Stacey D’Erasmo concludes the novel is bloodless, writing that “[m]agic without passion is pretty much a trip to Pier One: lots of shrink-wrapped candles. One wishes Morgenstern had spent less time on the special effects and more on the hauntingly unanswerable question that runs, more or less ignored, through these pages: Can children love who were never loved, only used as intellectual machines? What kind of magic reverses that spell? It’s not as pretty a spectacle, but that’s a story that grips the heart.”   Contrast her take with Ron Charles’ review in the WaPo, and you can see why readers will be divided about this book.    While he complains about “too much going on” Charles also notes how  “[t]he author mingles a sense of adolescent delight with a mature chilliness that reflects the circus’s stunning black-and-white decor, and the abiding potential for violence gives the plot a subtle charge.”  His review positively glows.

Ultimately, after reflection, this is still a five star read in my mind, a book that does what good books should do:  transport a reader into another world.  It’s a book that works the oldest magic of all, enchanting the reader.  The Night Circus is a richly layered story, using Shakespeare’s Tempest and elements of Potter-esque fantasy to tap into the current zeitgeist.  How?

I liked this take from Christine Ziemba, who pointed out that “[a] quick answer lies in DNA. Human wiring brings along its appetites, and one of these happens to be a fascination with the unknown, with possibility beyond plausibility. It’s why we humans can fly now. It’s why our cities light up at night.”

In short, our dreams.  It’s fitting that the final section includes this quote from Prospero in The Tempest:  “We are such stuff/ as dreams are made on; and our little life/Is rounded with a sleep.”  This is why you should read this book.One of my favorite quotes from the novel captures for me what makes it such a charming, original and compelling read.  I’ll conclude with it.

“Stories have changed my dear boy,” the man in the grey suit says, his voice almost imperceptibly sad.  “There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue.  Most maidens are perfectly capable or rescuing themselves in my experience, at least the ones worth something, in any case.  There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path.  The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.  And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise.  Things keep going on, they overlap and blur, your story is part of your sister’s story is part of many other stories, and there is no telling where any of them may lead.  Good and evil are a good deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl.  And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?  Is not the wolf simply acting as a wolf should act?  Though perhaps it is a singular wolf who goes to such lengths as to dress as a grandmother to toy with its prey.”

Catch a Tiger

All great novels, a professor once announced to class, are about sex and death.  Argue that such a view is reductive, if you will, but it’s helped me to understand many difficult works in the past. The Tiger’s Wife tilts toward the death end of this polarity, with a sprinkling of interspecies sex to lighten the passage.

I read this because I am on a mythos kick lately, favoring novels that interweave legend and fairy tale into our ordinary, drab world.  Tea Obreht’s novel  offers a rich reading experience for readers like me, as it braids two myths—The Deathless Man and the Tiger’s Wife—with the story of a young female doctor’s search for what happened following her beloved grandfather’s death.

Because I am a writer and not a book critic, I will offer here two contrasting views of the novel.   Writing for Salon.com, well known literary critic Laura Miller said that “the plain truth is that “The Tiger’s Wife,” while certainly entertaining and of considerable literary merit, is too rich for its own good: Obreht would have been well-advised to parcel out its constituent elements as stand-alone stories.”

By contrast, Michiko Kakutani, in a glowing review for The New York Times, praised how, ”Ms. Obreht creates an indelible sense of place, a world, like the Balkans, haunted by its past and struggling to sort out its future, its imagination shaped by stories handed down generation to generation; its people torn between ancient beliefs and the imperatives of what should be a more rational present. In doing so, Ms. Obreht has not only made a precocious debut, but she has also written a richly textured and searing novel.”

Bloated or blazing?  Who has the tiger by its tail?  (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)  The truth probably runs a split between these two views.  I loved the myths interwoven in this novel, but found the present day rendering of the war in the Balkans to be bleached out in comparison, a pale yet subtly enchanting experience in its own right.  That it is to say that it was lovely to read, but because the author is so intent on avoiding anything smacking of melodrama, the result is that these scenes don’t evoke as much emotion as they should. That’s a small complaint in what is otherwise a wonderful novel.

My own verdict:   It’s a damn good book.  It would be easy to hate Tea Obreht since she is not yet even thirty years old and has a written a work that will live for the ages.  Don’t believe me?  Read “The Laugh” which was also featured in Best American Short Stories, 2011:  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/08/the-laugh/7531/

It’s an absolutely chilling story.  You will not like hyenas at the end, in case you were a fan of this animal species before reading it.  We read this story in my intro to creative writing class and I can remember after reading aloud the endnotes how surprised my students were that Tea Obreht had never been to Africa. 

“Cheater!” one student exclaimed.  Like I said, it would be easy to hate her.  If you are inclined to such feelings, go ahead.  As for me, I intend to read all of her work.  I will conclude here with my usual technique, typing out my favorite passages from the novel.   Here’s a cool scene set:

“North of Brejevina, the road was well paved, stark and new because the scrubland had not grown back up to it, the cliffs rising white and pitch and pocked with thorn trees.  A wind-flattened thunderhead stood clear of the sea, its gray insides stretching out under the shining anvil…”

Here is the grandfather, and a little of the death theme.  Please note that the grandfather is most fully present in this novel through the telling of his mythology:  “You are going to see what it is like someday, being in a room full of the dying.  They’re always waiting, and in their sleep they are waiting most of all.  When you’re around them you’re waiting too, measuring all the time their breaths, their sighs.”

Here is one of my favorite passages as the Deathless Man explains his reason for existence:   “You and I are misunderstanding one another,” he says…”The dead are celebrated.  The dead are loved.  They give something to the living. Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know where to find it.”

“I want to say to him, the living are celebrated too, and loved.”

Yes, it’s a melancholy work, but I love melancholy.

And here is a passage from Darisa, the bear hunter.  One other thing I really loved about this work was how fully fleshed out even minor characters were.  Darisa has just lost his epilectic sister, his charge, to a deadly seizure:  “Young boys are fascinated by animals, but for Darisa the hysterical dream of the golden labyrinth, coupled with the silent sanctuary of the trophy room, amounted to a much simpler notion:  absence, solitude, and then, at the end of it all, Death in thousands of forms, standing in that hall with frankness and clarity—Death had size and color and shape, texture and grace.  There was something concrete to it.  In that room, Death had come and gone, swept by, and left a mirage of life—it was possible, he realized to find life in Death.”

To find life in death.  Yes.  For me that gets to the core of what art should do.

Early News for Little Wolves is Good!

Two of the best friends of any beginning writer are independent bookstores and librarians, so this prepub alert about my forthcoming novel, Little Wolves (due for release in January, 2013), is good news.   In this piece, Library Journal editor Barbara Hoffert says the novel promises "smart thrills" as she recommends it.

This makes me both hopeful and excited!  See here for more:  http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2012/07/prepub/fiction-previews/fiction-previews-jan-2013-pt-3-bauermeister-maltman-and-anonymous-behind-the-scenes-at-a-tv-talent-show/

Review of Salvage the Bones

The short of it:  the best book of 2011, a stirring evocation of race, poverty, and Hurricane Katrina, Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones should have won the Pulitzer.

The long of it:  This is a lean, lyrical and visceral work, but what I truly admired was how skillfully Ward weaves the vicious Greek myth of Medea into Esch's thoughts, her unrequited love for Manny, father of the child she carries.  Mythos--the world of spirit and legend--is one of the four pillars that Aristotle said supports great drama, and it's one often neglected in contemporary literature.  (The other three are ethos, pathos, and logos.)  I won't say much more here, but just want to log in two of my favorite quotes from the novel:

"The sun will not show.  It must be out there, over the furious hurricane beating itself against the coastline like China at the tin door of her shed when she wants to go out and Skeet will not let her.  But here on the Pit, we are caught in the hour where the sun is hidden beyond the trees but hasn't escaped over the horizon, when it is coming and going, when light comes from everywhere and nowhere, when everything is gray.

"I lie awake and cannot see anything but that baby, the baby I have formed whole in my head, a black Athena, who reaches for me.  Who gives me that name as if it is mine:  Mama.  I swallow salt.  That voice, ringing in my head, is drowned out by a train letting out one long, high blast.  And then it disappears, and there is only the sound of the wind like a snake big enough to swallow the world sliding against the mountains.  And then the wind like a train again, and the house creaks.  I curl into a ball.

"Did you hear that?"

It is Skeetah;  I can barely see him.  He is only a wash of greater darkness that moves in the dark opening of the hallway"  (Ward 219).

----2nd quote---

"I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered.  Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons.  She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes.  She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land.  She left us to learn to crawl.  She left us to salvage.  Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes"  (Ward 255).

In those two quotes you see the weaving of myth, the motifs of snakes and mothers, puppies and babies, and all of it wrapped in this fierce and violent world, every bit alive.

The Killer in Me?

While the AWP writing conference Is still fresh in my mind, I want to set down the highlights of the best sessions I attended, one each this week over spring break.



Among the best was a Friday session entitled “Villians, Killers, and Criminals, Oh My: Representing Evildoers in Literary Fiction.” This stellar panel, which included Reese Okyong Kwon, Matt Bell, Eugene Cross, Brian Evenson, and Lauren Groff, stepped up and delivered.


Matt Bell opened up with a short lyric essay with references ranging from Sauron to the Mecha-Hitler in Wolfenstein 3-D. One of his primary concerns was reductive portraits of evil—like turning Hitler, a complex and iconic figure of evil from the last century—into a ridiculous cartoon. Matt Bell also warned against replacing theological explanations of evil (the devil made me do it) with psychological (he had a messed up childhood). Either excuse is reductive and flat. Ultimately , for literature to have power, the antagonist must be relatable. Bell wants us to “set a place at the table for the reader and to do this the portrait of evil must present a blankness” into which the reader can project herself. Ultimately, it’s the devil inside each one of us that is truly frightening.

All the presenters spoke against explanation. Once we try to explain evil, we set up a wall, distance it from ourselves. One presenter reminded the audience of Sartre’s quote: “The line that divides good and evil runs through the human heart.”


They talked about memorable villains. Cormac McCarthy’s The Judge. Flannery O’ Connor’s The Misfit. Shakespeare’s Iago . They talked about the complexity, how the judge compels by being inexplicable. “We don’t understand,” one panelist pointed out, “but he remains interesting.”


Most intriguing to me was the idea that Shakespeare muddled his explanation for what drives Iago. I believe it was Reese Okyong Kwon who pointed out that in an early draft Shakespeare had an easy enough motive for Iago: he could have simply had his desire for Desdemona the driving force for his wickedness. Desire and jealousy. Instead, Shakespeare allows no motive for Iago. Iago just is. His cunning manipulations, his deviousness lead to Othello to destroying what he most loves. Iago is interesting precisely because we can’t explain him.


“Stupidity insists on the desire to conclude,” the panelists reminded us. In the real world, sometimes evil defies explanation and sometimes the same must be true in literature. Perhaps, when it comes to writing villains, this quote from the Misfit sums it up best: "Shut up, Bobby Lee," The Misfit said. "It's no real pleasure in life.” ― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories