Kathe Koja | Writing about writing

Jeff VanderMeer interviews me for “The Weird” and we talk about Angela Carter, Catholicism as punk rock, and why that mouth under your pillow is not really such a good thing.

When Stan and Robin Mendenhall entertain their guests, they want to go above and beyond . . .  all the way above, to the top of their architectural folly, a lovely and audacious structure on the grounds of their home in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Stan and Robin wanted to commission a performance piece at an event they’re hosting this June, and I responded with “Bottom’s Folly, or The Natural World,” a pastoral fantasia featuring Bottom, the gent with a (donkey) head on his shoulders, and two beautifully fierce wood sprites, as they define what’s wild, what’s urban, and what flourishes in the spaces in-between. The performance will incorporate the garden (complete with a labyrinth. chickens, and a city park for a background!) as staging ground and metropolis, as the sun leaves the sky, and the warm summer dusk comes on . . .

The last several years have found me working to bring Under the Poppy to life in an ongoing series – call them chapters – of performances; the latest, “Love Conquers All,” will be staged May 11th in a Victorian-era home in Detroit. “Bottom’s Folly” was and is a chance to work with very different material, a site-specific fiction written to embrace the pleasures and dangers of nature and of folly, thanks to Stan and Robin’s generous vision of what creativity is all about – a different kind of lovely audacity, and a bracing example of one way to bring original art to life.

Yes, it was an organizational desk note to self (I’m writing a new novel), but it works as a signpost too. When we read, no matter how particular the character, the subject really is everyone (and everyone else). And when we write, it’s the same.

Back to work!

This essay originally appeared in an anthology of first stories from writers such as Robert Bloch, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Hand, and others, including me. Not my very first published story (that would be “Happy Birthday, Kim White”), but “Distances” was the first story of mine to be published to a wider audience. This reappraisal of the story was written in 2003.  It’s been nine years; four more to go before lucky 13 rolls around again.

Thirteen: lucky number, jinx number.  Unseen on clocks, no part of time; the unmarked floor in a high rise; it even carries the distinction of its own specific phobia (triskaidekaphobia, if you’re interested).  Thirteen years ago, Asimov’s SF Magazine published my short story “Distances” in its Mid-December issue, a story later reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ prestigious YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION anthology, a story that got me noticed and effectively launched my writing career.

Where were you, thirteen years ago?  What were you doing, where were you living, how did you feel about your life?  Can you remember, will you never forget?  Does it seem like a long time ago?  I remember being a nervous novice writer four years out of the Clarion workshop, with a three-year-old son who is, as I write this, a sophomore in high school.  If you asked him, he might tell you that thirteen years is a very long time indeed.

For the characters in this story time moves elliptically: in bursts, in wide circles; it drags and lags and leaps too fast for counting.  For them, as for anyone whose inner and outer landscapes are at large variance or outright war — those in physical pain, or enduring great want, or separated by iron circumstance from the ones they love — this is always so.  Desire is a chasm steeper than time, unbridgeable as deep space; you may travel it obsessively but grow no nearer to what you seek.   Like the Red Queen and Alice, it will take all the running you can do simply to stay where you are.

I see this story through a lens of time, of other stories (and novels) conceived and completed, of discoveries made in the landscape of my own life, most of them good, all of them necessary.  If I were to write “Distances” over again today, would the same things happen to those characters, the same resolution be reached?  I’m not sure.  “Write what you know,” is the old good advice, but what we know, or think we know, changes as we do, becomes deeper or dearer or paradoxically disappears; growth is unpredictable, pain is sure, and vision is the tool a writer uses to cope with both, on the page and (we hope) in the life that makes the page possible.  All of it, of course, marinated in the brine of time, which has a way of altering perception, of diluting — or concentrating — desire, making of one thing another quite different, without perceptible effort on our part.  It is a kind of magic trick, but a very serious and permanent one.  Just like life itself.

Thirteen years ago; thirteen years to come; and this second, now, sandwiched in their middle, this slice of time where the once-made world of “Distances” is read again and made, by you, its reader, into a living place: where technology flowers, and ambition rages, and two hands reach out to clasp together,  in the airless dome of silent space and the great warm darkness of the mind. …Time is distance.  See you in thirteen years.

OK, I’m being facetious, sometimes it is very difficult, maddening, even, to continue to create in the face of opposition: of poverty: of indifference; of that strange inner welling of resistance that occurs, at times, when you sit down at the desk, the keyboard, the easel, whichever, day after day after day. But this tells only part of the truth of the artist’s life: and the greater part is joy.

It is so fun to make fierce, cool, interesting, original things: using words or paint or sounds or whatever your media may be. That’s the secret.  We express our tortured souls, sure, but in the end, the vast and human-sized end … it’s fun.

From here.

From what’s seen, what occurs in the environment around you; from the filter of your eyes augmented by the filter of your imagination. From nothing you can name. From books, stories, things you read that made you want to go, immediately, and do likewise. From the conversation you heard on the train, on the stairs, on the way into the building; on the phone in the dark.

They rarely come from writing assignments.

They are unreliable in the best sense: you don’t snap your fingers to make them happen, or dig out a prompt: you don’t do anything at all.  They occur. The more you write, the more they occur. Many of them are charming and useless.  Some are unreachable. Some will always be unreachable; that certainly doesn’t mean you stop reaching for them. Some will change your life. Some will change the lives of others. Some will never be forgotten, maybe.  You’ll never know which ones were which.

Where do ideas come from? Every writer’s conduit is different.

Where do your ideas come from?

[Photo: Marche du Nain Rouge, Detroit, 2012]

Who’s the DJ when you read?

Full disclosure: every novel I write has a soundtrack; Headlong had a lot of Pixies, for example, and Under the Poppy and The Mercury Waltz were buoyed and sustained by Rufus Wainwright, Roxy Music, CocoRosie, Lhasa de Sela, Teddy Thompson …. But those were the songs I heard, wanted to hear, chose to hear, when I wrote the books. Would they be your auditory choices, too? They would be indelibly when you were done reading, wouldn’t they?

And do you really need sound effects?

But I haven’t heard BookTrack in action yet, so I ought to listen, first, before I judge, right?

“[I]t’s been said that the opening line sells a book whilst the closing line sells the author’s next one.” Hmmm. Really? Ugh. Anyway, 100 lines to open the door.

I offer

“You must and will suppose (fair or foul reader, but where’s the difference?) that I suppose a heap of happenings that I had no eye to eye knowledge of or concerning.”

from one of the books I love most in the world, Anthony Burgess’ A Dead Man in Deptford which if you have not read, consider yourself importuned to do so stat, and enjoy its magnificent last line for yourself.

The great poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was baptized on this date in 1564, Canterbury, England. The human race was damned lucky to have had him, if only for 29 years.

If you’ve never read him, do yourself an enormous favor, get Doctor Faustus or Edward II (my personal fave), or, if you’re feeling particularly wild, Tamburlaine. “O rare Christopher Marlowe!” Nobody wrote like him, nobody flew higher.

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Poetry (from ‘poiesis’/ποίησις), a making: forming, creating, or the art of poetry, or a poem) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities, in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning.

So says Wikipedia … I love that “apparent” more than I can say.

Emily Dickinson. Christopher Marlowe. Rumi.

Do men die miserably for the lack of a poem? Who explains the world to you? Do you do it yourself?

Franz Wright. Sylvia Plath. Arthur Rimbaud.

Edgar Guest?

Wislawa Szymborska.

I first titled this post “Go and write a poem.” The title it has now means the same thing.