Caitlin R. Kiernan is the award-winning writer of such great books as The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, The Red Tree, and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. She keeps a blog which you can read at Dear Sweet Filthy World, and on March 22, 2005 she posted the following:
"I have to write. I have to write regardless. I does not matter if
I've had a bad day. It does not matter if I am depressed or in some
other sort of mood not conducive to writing. I still have to write. I
does not matter if the weather is crappy or if there's trouble in my
family. It does not matter if I'd rather do something else. It does not
matter if, in some objective, cosmic sense, I've earned the right to do
something else. It does not matter if it's not my fault. It does not
matter. I have to write. Nothing else matters, ever. Nothing else
matters more. Them's the rules. I knew them when I signed on, and now
I'm stuck with them. I have to find a way to write in spite of chaos.
That's the only option, because clearly things have no intention of
becoming any less chaotic."
Good Advice.
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
His Inner Poe: Rare Tennessee Williams Horror Story Published For First Time
From www.foxbusiness.com
NEW YORK – As she takes in the despair of her in-laws' one-room apartment in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche Dubois exclaims, "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe could do it justice!"
Years earlier, Tennessee Williams channeled Poe for an entire story.
Williams' "The Eye That Saw Death," appearing in the spring issue of The Strand Magazine, is a feverish, 4,800-word horror tale clearly inspired by the patron of the genre. Recently unearthed by Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli, "The Eye That Saw Death" is narrated by an unnamed man who has suffered from a seemingly incurable disease that has left him nearly blind. At age 30, he receives an eye transplant that restores his sight, but leaves him with ghoulish side effects. The narrator is afflicted with visions that begin as a "chaotic blur," then become more focused and traumatizing, whether "huge, black, bulging eyes" or "terrible, tusk-like teeth."
The new eye, it turns out, belonged to a convicted killer. The narrator begs to have the surgery reversed.
"It is true that the pleasures of the blind are few and frugal," Williams writes. "They live apart from the world and participate little in its affairs. But I do not regret that choice I made the day I fell, raving mad with horror, to the floor of the oculist's office. Oh, never! Far, far better to be blind than to see with the eye that saw death!"
Gulli, who has previously published little-known works by Graham Greene and John Steinbeck among others, found "The Eye That Saw Death" at one of the country's leading literary archives, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Williams scholar George Crandell says the undated work is a "pretty good story" and surprisingly polished for a piece never published before. Crandell is especially impressed because he thinks Williams was likely in high school when he completed it.
"The story has a similar feel to 'The Vengeance of Nitocris,' kind of a horror story that was published in Weird Tales in 1928 (when Williams was 16)," says Crandell, the associate dean of Auburn University's graduate school and a member of the editorial board of the literary journal the Tennessee Williams Annual Review.
"The Eye That Saw Death" has a fable-like quality even as its plot recalls Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." It reads like an inversion of Greek mythology, in which the blind are not prophets or wise men, but those who truly will not see — or like an allegory for creative expression, when the artist is almost literally tortured by his vision.
Williams had good reason to be preoccupied with eyesight. He had poor vision in his left eye and would undergo four cataract operations, one of which he describes in "Memoirs," published in 1975. In a humorous but unsettling scenario that his early short story seemed to anticipate, Williams remembers agreeing to a procedure for which the doctor waived his fee in return for Williams allowing the operation to be the basis of a lecture to observing student ophthalmologists.
"The patient is now in position, apply the straps," Williams remembers, roughly, the doctor saying.
"Tighter, tighter, he has a history of vomiting during the surgery. Eyelids secured against blinking, pupil anesthetized now. The needle is now about to penetrate the iris. It is now into the iris. It has now penetrated the lens. Oh, oh, vomiting, nurse, choking, tube in esophagus. My God, what a patient. I mean very good, of course, but an unusual case."
NEW YORK – As she takes in the despair of her in-laws' one-room apartment in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Blanche Dubois exclaims, "Only Poe! Only Mr. Edgar Allan Poe could do it justice!"
Years earlier, Tennessee Williams channeled Poe for an entire story.
Williams' "The Eye That Saw Death," appearing in the spring issue of The Strand Magazine, is a feverish, 4,800-word horror tale clearly inspired by the patron of the genre. Recently unearthed by Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli, "The Eye That Saw Death" is narrated by an unnamed man who has suffered from a seemingly incurable disease that has left him nearly blind. At age 30, he receives an eye transplant that restores his sight, but leaves him with ghoulish side effects. The narrator is afflicted with visions that begin as a "chaotic blur," then become more focused and traumatizing, whether "huge, black, bulging eyes" or "terrible, tusk-like teeth."
The new eye, it turns out, belonged to a convicted killer. The narrator begs to have the surgery reversed.
"It is true that the pleasures of the blind are few and frugal," Williams writes. "They live apart from the world and participate little in its affairs. But I do not regret that choice I made the day I fell, raving mad with horror, to the floor of the oculist's office. Oh, never! Far, far better to be blind than to see with the eye that saw death!"
Gulli, who has previously published little-known works by Graham Greene and John Steinbeck among others, found "The Eye That Saw Death" at one of the country's leading literary archives, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Williams scholar George Crandell says the undated work is a "pretty good story" and surprisingly polished for a piece never published before. Crandell is especially impressed because he thinks Williams was likely in high school when he completed it.
"The story has a similar feel to 'The Vengeance of Nitocris,' kind of a horror story that was published in Weird Tales in 1928 (when Williams was 16)," says Crandell, the associate dean of Auburn University's graduate school and a member of the editorial board of the literary journal the Tennessee Williams Annual Review.
"The Eye That Saw Death" has a fable-like quality even as its plot recalls Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." It reads like an inversion of Greek mythology, in which the blind are not prophets or wise men, but those who truly will not see — or like an allegory for creative expression, when the artist is almost literally tortured by his vision.
Williams had good reason to be preoccupied with eyesight. He had poor vision in his left eye and would undergo four cataract operations, one of which he describes in "Memoirs," published in 1975. In a humorous but unsettling scenario that his early short story seemed to anticipate, Williams remembers agreeing to a procedure for which the doctor waived his fee in return for Williams allowing the operation to be the basis of a lecture to observing student ophthalmologists.
"The patient is now in position, apply the straps," Williams remembers, roughly, the doctor saying.
"Tighter, tighter, he has a history of vomiting during the surgery. Eyelids secured against blinking, pupil anesthetized now. The needle is now about to penetrate the iris. It is now into the iris. It has now penetrated the lens. Oh, oh, vomiting, nurse, choking, tube in esophagus. My God, what a patient. I mean very good, of course, but an unusual case."
Ohio Woman Held Captive a Decade Overcoming Fears, Loves Stephen King
From abcnews.go.com
A young woman held captive and tortured for more than a decade in a Cleveland home says she is conquering fears these days.
Michelle Knight said she now likes reading Stephen King novels.
"I like a little scare in my life," she explained at a Cleveland Main Library public discussion on Saturday.
She also said she plans to go skydiving to overcome a fear of heights and because "I'm adventurous."
The Plain Dealer of Cleveland http://bit.ly/1bax6ar
reported, though, that she hasn't decided whether to watch an upcoming
TV movie about the ordeal she, Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus survived.
"I prefer not to put myself in a backwards spiral," Knight, now 33,
explained. "You've got to take the bad in life and replace it with
something good."
She said her main goal is "to keep hope alive for the missing and the voiceless."
Knight was kidnapped at age 21 by Ariel Castro. The women escaped his
house in May 2013 and Castro committed suicide in prison that September
after pleading guilty to a long list of charges.
Knight was the first taken captive by Castro, in August 2002.
"When I first was outside, it felt like my eyes were being fried like
eggs in a frying pan," she said, telling the audience she needed special
sunglasses after being freed.
"I don't have pity for him," she said of Castro. "He has hurt me for years, and now I am over that."
The Plain Dealer reported repeated applause and cheering for Knight, whose book "Finding Me" is now in paperback.
"How could you not be moved?" asked Cleveland resident Karen Sroka, one
of the many who lined up to have books signed by Knight, be photographed
with her or just chat briefly. Sroka gave Knight her sweatshirt from Alaska after Knight complimented her on it.
She didn't want to discuss her son, who was adopted while she was still
missing and "locked away in hell." She also described her relationship
with Berry and DeJesus as "kind of hectic ... It's best to deal with it
in our own way.
Knight legally changed her name to Lily Rose Lee, but still goes by Michelle Knight in public appearances.
She said she recently moved into her own house and has named a puppy she
adopted "Sky," because the pattern on her fur "reminds of the sky I
didn't get to see for years."
"She's an inspiration," said Cindy Spiegler of Willoughby. "We've all had hardships, but hers is beyond anything."
Saturday, March 21, 2015
Molly Campbell Keeps The Ends Loose
Dayton, Ohio author Molly D. Campbell's new YA novel “Keep the Ends Loose” has drawn widespread interest since its February 24th release. Well-known writers such as Beth Hoffman, Robin Black and Anita Hughes have lavished praise on the work, bestowing terms like “brilliant”, “charming”, and “insightful” on both the book and its writer. For Molly Campbell herself however, the novel, a coming-of-age story, about a quirky fifteen-year-old named Miranda Heath, is simply the end result of her interest in unusual names.
“I'm a humor blogger,” the
two-time Erma Bombeck Writing Award winner said at a local coffee
shop recently. “And I've been blogging for a long, long time. I was
writing my blog and very active on social media, and apparently my
mind works in strange ways. I've always been interested in names,
particularly unusual names. Your own name, 'Tim Walker',” she
continued, ”is a perfectly normal name – but if you were walking
around with a name like 'Reginald Arbithnot', how would that affect
you and your life? How would that change things?”
“So,” she said, “I started a
Twitter account called “Characters in Search of a Novel”, where
every day – and this was just for my own entertainment; I had no
followers at first – I would post a person's name and a
one-sentence description of that person. And I did this every day for
a year, and I wound up with a few hundred followers. I was just doing
it for the heck of it. Then a very gifted writer named Robin Black
contacted me and said 'You know, you're throwing these away. You need
to hire an illustrator, and write a book, with a story written around
each one of these characters.”
“So I did that,” Molly said. “And
that became my first book, “Characters in Search of a Novel”,
with local artist Randy Palmer illustrating the stories for me. And
then one day while online I came across The Story Plant, who is the
publisher of the new book – I thought it was a literary magazine,
and I submitted one of my little character sketches to them. And they
wrote back and said 'We're not a literary magazine, we're a publisher
– but have you written anything longer?' I said no, and they said
'Well you really need to consider doing that.' At that point I
thought they were crazy. I'm a blogger, so I said no. But they kept
dogging me, and for a period of probably five years we had this
ongoing conversation. So finally they convinced me to try and write a
novel.”
Their persistence paid off, it seems.
The five-year effort on the part of The Story Plant has been rewarded
with an excellent Young Adult crossover novel, “Keep the Ends
Loose”. Miranda Heath, the teenage protagonist, is just one of the
many interesting characters - and yes, many of them do have unusual
names – in Campbell's second book. “It's about a teenage girl,
she's fifteen,” Molly outlined when asked about the book. “Her
mom recruits her to find this guy who's her long-lost uncle, and all
sorts of things happen. Family secrets are revealed, and chaos
ensues.”
Written in a stream of consciousness
style which immediately puts one in mind of Holden Caulfield, the
book is a charming, poignant, and and often very funny slice of
teenage life from a girl who views life through cinematic terms –
every time she gets into a difficult situation, she imagines that
it's actually the plot of a movie.
Her older brother, her best friend,
her father Roy Heath, her mother and her aunt Iris Fletcher all
combine in Miranda's eyes to make the novel a story of family, love
and loss that will have you alternately tearing up and then laughing
out loud. The familiar skyline of Dayton, Ohio makes an appearance as
well.
“I've been in this area for a long,
long time. I graduated from Miami, and taught English at
Miami-Jacobs. Dayton is in the book – the family doesn't live in
Dayton, but they come to Dayton on one of their quests. The town they
live in is totally fictitious, because I didn't want to be tied down
to anything factual where she lives. I had a bunch of information in
the book that the publishers asked me to take out, but I asked them
'Please let me leave the Dayton stuff in, because we're from Dayton
and it's kind of a tribute', so there is a lot of local stuff in
there.”
Fiction lovers from all walks of life
are sure to get a kick out of Miranda Heath's quest and pithy
observations on teenage life. And for those who read the book and
wonder if there might be a sequel someday?
When asked if she has any other novels
in the works, Campbell responds “Yes, because now that I know I can
do it, why not?”
Friday, March 20, 2015
Joseph Campbell on the Meaning of Life
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t
think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking
is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the
purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being
and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Jessica Amanda Salmonson Once Wrote Me a Letter
Jessica Amanda Salmonson, discussing transcendent fantasy in a 1994 letter to the blogger:
"Many other writers 'in the field' look pretty damned good compared to the field as a whole. But it's like comparing a healthy compost to fresh shit. All too often, the most highly prized of 'genre' fantasy pales alongside work that is transcendent. It seems no one really wants to make their intended goal anything as extraordinary as Gogol's "The Overcoat" or Fuentes' "Aura" or Vernon Lee's "Legend of Saint Julian" or Yorucenar's legend of "Our Lady of Swallows" or Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl", and such like tales and authors. Who can deny that it is unfair to contrast f/sf's "best" writers to the world's actual works of genius? 'Not as good as The Overcoat' would indeed be unfair; for all owe our existence as short story writers to "The Overcoat" and are embraced in its fabric. Yet too many critics, having decided to overlook true greatness, go one step farther and begin to find greatness where mere goodness barely exists."
"Many other writers 'in the field' look pretty damned good compared to the field as a whole. But it's like comparing a healthy compost to fresh shit. All too often, the most highly prized of 'genre' fantasy pales alongside work that is transcendent. It seems no one really wants to make their intended goal anything as extraordinary as Gogol's "The Overcoat" or Fuentes' "Aura" or Vernon Lee's "Legend of Saint Julian" or Yorucenar's legend of "Our Lady of Swallows" or Cynthia Ozick's "The Shawl", and such like tales and authors. Who can deny that it is unfair to contrast f/sf's "best" writers to the world's actual works of genius? 'Not as good as The Overcoat' would indeed be unfair; for all owe our existence as short story writers to "The Overcoat" and are embraced in its fabric. Yet too many critics, having decided to overlook true greatness, go one step farther and begin to find greatness where mere goodness barely exists."
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