I understand Kundera's star has faded somewhat. Maybe that is for the best, instead of the fame we are paying attention to what he says. I have been spending time away from fiction and digging into 1850 Indiana, and I have spent time listening to Gore Vidal on YouTube. Historical amnesia is on my mind. Do we forget to cover our pains? Is there a glimpse at tyranny through the rewriting of history? Yes, probably a bit of Orwell hiding in there, too. There is a problem with the exceptions to a rule, a beauty to a simple narrative. People will latch onto x because if it is too confusing, perhaps frightening, about the truth being x + m + e + a times 33.
Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long oak table, peering over
his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen
thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to
sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble
almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.
“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it was a prerequisite. No answer.
“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.
“Has
he told the truth?” grunts George Orwell almost absentmindedly while
scrutinizing the Burmese tattoos on his knuckles. No answer.
I am jittery, a bundle of nerves, and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.
“Nobody
is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, looking me straight
in the eye, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension in the
room. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d
better polish with your brain.”
At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.
***
And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that
writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing
is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I
read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a
disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of
secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may
have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Personally, Kurt Vonegut’s words
playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write,” he
says, “I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
***
And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither
does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that
if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there.
Along with Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, I found Mario Vargas Llosa on YouTube. I read his book on writing while in prison and have read several of his novels (including Feast of the Goat). I found reading him more than worthwhile.
In many ways, mythic fiction is more popular than ever. Even as the Hero’s Journey
has arguably lost some of the obsessive luster from decades past,
storytellers and audiences alike are more entranced than ever by myth,
fairy tale, cultural symbolism, and psychological archetypes. Yet in
some ways, I feel like we’re also in a time in which we have somewhat
lost touch with the underlying touchstones of why these forms are
meaningful.
For the most part, we understand the idea of mythic fiction through a
few specific lenses. On the one hand, we might think of the old
stories—fairy and folk tales (e.g., Beauty and the Beast, Bluebeard’s
Wives, the Girl With No Hands, Vasilisa the Beautiful, etc.) or
mythological stories that largely arose from interpretations of the
supernatural (e.g., Kronos and the Titans; Isis, Osiris, and Horus;
Eros, Psyche, and Aphrodite; Thor and Odin, etc.).
We also experience all these stories through the more anthropological
perspective found in the works of Joseph Campbell, Clarissa Pinkola
Estes, and others like them—who not only collected the old stories, but
studied their underlying similarities, patterns, and symbolic messages.
From here, we might also think of the influence of archetypal
psychological approaches, such as Carl Jung’s, in which the symbolism
becomes increasingly internalized. These explorations are what gave
birth to the fascination for modernizing such (arguably) ancient forms
as the Hero’s Journey.
Increasingly, contemporary storytellers and audiences also understand
myth and archetype specifically through popular culture’s
reinterpreation of these myths and their underlying structures—most
famously with Star Wars, but since then through an
ever-increasing number of stories that seek to understand and tap the
deep power and resonance of these old storyforms.
Not that I think it is possible to write an epic about Indiana, albeit Raintree County made a damn good stab at the epic. I do not have the time left me to write a book like that, even if I had the talent.
Here are four reasons I think the writing of mythic fiction is particularly important right now:
1. Our Relationship to the Old Stories Has Grown Thin
2. Mythic Fiction Requires the Partnership of Intuition and Intellect
3. Mythic Fiction Reconnects Writers to the Deep Source of Story
4. The Need for New Myths in a Changing World
And my critique of my writing:
Reading We Could’ve Been Happy Here made me think that I did not do enough with personal relationships in
my stories. Not all, maybe not even in the best of them. But that was
not the idea. What I wanted to do the personal and what I will call the
economic. Probably read too much Dreiser. Who is a chore to read. He is
not sentimental in a sickly way. Mostly, this email goes back to what we
have been talking about all along - that what we grew up with is no
longer fashionable. We might be the tail end of the Industrial Age. We
have not retreated from the world into emotional navel-gazing. Perhaps I
could turn up the emotional stakes, but I can neither see how nor do I
want to revise further. The novella might actually do better at the
emotional stakes in the Daria stories and in the Kate Harvey parts. The
Mike Devlin divorce story was already emotional enough - even if it had
to do with Mike trying to play hero. I was joking about camels, but
there is little I see in some published stories that concern
political/social issues. Also, not fashionable? Science fiction - some
of it, anyway - does not shy away from these kinds of issues. I do think
I did get how these people live and love in their environment. After
all, we did. We were just trying to figure out how to have a life in a
world of economic and social uncertainty, and we did not have the luxury
of navel-gazing. A bit more thoughtfulness might have helped us, but
there is the humanity, isn't it?
Reading Petrarch on Cities, Time, and Heraclitus by Iván Parga Ornelas Antigone made me think of Thoreau. There is a difference between being alone and solitude. The former can be imposed and resented; the other is a peace and a joy.
The idea of a solitary life in some field or forest has probably appealed to many of us. But Petrarch’s solitudo is demanding. One must not only abandon the city, but everything it represents: ambitions, desires and appetites, and the wish for recognition and personal gain through others. Petrarch, in other words, would not approve of the digital nomad, nor of your plan to retire into a cabin in the woods and spend the day reading and writing for Antigone, if your motivation was to gain recognition and applause.
PO visited yesterday. I asked what he meant by treatment. I got a lot of talk about all the meanings treatment could have, which was not a good thing since the pain from the hernias is not helpful with my patience. It came down to the sentencing order siad I was to have psychosexual counseling. Pretty sure the government does not understand the nature of the programs to which they are sending people. I remain amused by this. The only psychiatric diagnoses I have had are that I have depression. Nothing else. Bureaucracy does not care if the treatment fits a problem; bureaucracy needs a treatment that they can check off as being assigned.
The heat set in. I worked on my research project. Then I watched Netflix.
Today, I woke late, had some problems with my bowels, and did not go to the writer's group. More work on the research project. I got a date for my surgery.
I thought to change the sleeping schedule around, but I could not get to sleep since lawn care erupted outside my window. Off to Walmart. I really dislike Walmart, too many people and the worst people working with the public. The cashier wanted to sell me green Lucky Strikes when I asked for reds. I did not even know they had green Luckies.
Back here, my hair soaked with sweat; putting off heating up the leftovers. The last thing this apartment needs is more heat. The clouds are dissipating and I have direct sunlight.
I need to bite the bullet and start up the air conditioner.
In the days before the Civil War, the South worked hard to censor any
literature that cast slavery in a negative light. Officials in
Charleston, S.C. went through mailbags for abolitionist newspapers.
Legislatures passed laws banning any publication that may show “a
tendency to make our slaves discontented.” In Maryland, the Rev. Jacob
Gruber was prosecuted for daring to preach a sermon that hinted that
slavery might be sinful. Anyone found with a copy of the explosive novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was subject to arrest.
***
The order to whitewash America’s historic sites of anything less than
rosy about the nation’s past has led to some predictable
embarrassments. Visitors to Independence Hall in Philadelphia won’t
learn much about the enslaved people owned by the founding fathers. The
internment camp at Manzanar won’t have anything “negative” about the
detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans in World War II. Fort Moultrie
National Monument no longer has information related to rising sea
levels that threaten Charleston Harbor. The order extends to books and
materials on sale at the gift stores. Books related to Malcolm X and
other Black leaders have been reportedly removed.
My own book details the consequential events at a place called Fort
Monroe in Virginia that led directly to Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation and the end of American slavery. Yet it is not for sale in
the bookstore of the Fort Monroe National Monument. Because the book
tells a hopeful story about how enslaved people ran toward the American
flag during the Civil War, sought their own freedom and helped tip the
military balance against the Confederacy, I would have thought it would
have been in alignment with even the narrowest conservative definition
of patriotic content. But the cover depicts seven members of the U.S.
Colored Troops standing at attention. The jacket copy makes it clear
that it is about slavery. It is not hard to imagine it setting off minor
alarms on the part of the National Park Service or Eastern National,
the concessionaire with the exclusive contract to supply the bookstore.
***
The irony was that the South’s preferred message about “happy and
contented slaves” was all a lie. Instead of being proved on the ground
of open debate and inquiry, it had to be proved in the Civil War when
the enslaved people bolted toward the Union Army at the first possible
opportunity, to the astonishment of the slaveholding class which had
believed its own cheerful propaganda
How easily scared and manipulated are Americans! Has it always been this way? I never read Richard Hofstadter's book on American paranoia, so all I can see is from my own perspective. There was the Red Scare after WWI, and that continued through HUAC and then started rising under Nixon and Dies until the fever of McCarthyism broke out. Has the time come for America to go under? That Lincoln's last best hope was all just an illusion?
But this obscures the asymmetry doing the real work. To approve access to medication abortion the FDA required drug companies to meet normal evidentiary standards demonstrating that the potential harm to patients taking mifepristone is marginal. The court, however, intervened, stating that this normal process was insufficient. Why? Because there could be some uncertainty about the applicability of these findings, given there was no longer an in-person requirement.
Doubt, in other words, undermined the conclusions of the FDA’s own rulemaking processes. In contrast, doubt played no role in undercutting Louisiana’s unfounded claims of risk and potential for “sovereign injury” — that is, the potential the state itself would suffer a kind of harm to its power as a state.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Nothing scares those unworthy of power like its loss.
People who blame others for their failings, the kind of men who suck their thumbs and whine until they get attention. The traditional family, what they call the nuclear family, is a fiction, These kinds of people needing to put down others only show off their inadequacies.
Douglas Wilson has
a modest proposal to improve American life: He wants to repeal the
Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote. In his ideal system,
“we would do it in our politics the same way we do it in our church
structure,” he told me recently. “And that is, we vote by household.”
Wilson
is a co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches,
based in Moscow, Idaho. Over the past five decades, he has built a small
empire there, dedicated to disseminating his theocratic vision for the
United States: a publishing house, a school, a liberal-arts college, and
a video-streaming service. His denomination, which has about 170
affiliated churches, counts Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as a member,
and Wilson was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in
February. So when the pastor casually suggests disenfranchising half of
America, people listen.
***
The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first Black
president, and to a growing Latino population. But the multiracial
appeal of the manosphere and Trump’s 2024 inroads with young minority
men point in a different direction. “People ask me what the New Right is
furious about,” the author Laura Field, whose book, Furious Minds,
describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism, told me. “And I
think a good shorthand for that is they’re furious about their own loss
of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made
that happen, and I think that the pithiest short version of that is that
it’s the women. It’s the women who took their status.”
Maybe I have spent too much time reading from 1850 with no little disgust at the racism of our ancestors.
Last evening, I kept working on my research project until I was just too tired to think. Then I went over to Netflix and watched Stranger Things for a while.
Democratic primary voters are still perfectly free to reject Platner on
Tuesday in favor of their own Democratic governor. If they don’t, those
tempted byconsequentialist arguments to vote for a creep in November should first weigh the actual consequences—for Congress, as well as their own credibility and conscience.
It is a decision for Maine voters and they are not stuck with Platner.
Sara Majka's Saint Andrews Hotel (Public Spaces) took my mind and slapped it around. I think I want to submit a piece to Public Spaces, only this story scares me to do so.
I walked down to the convenience store - out of smokes and Coke, I have been doing too much of both - with the clouds gray and thick and promising rain. When I came back, the apartment was stifling from the heat generated by one pan on the stove. Glad I got the inhaler. Summer has arrived with all its heat and suffocating humidity.
Oh, how things have changed - department stores with display windows?
6/9
Down a little later than the previous days and up a little later today.
Rejections are coming in again.
We appreciate the opportunity to read "Saved by Rock and Roll," and we
appreciate the time and effort you spent crafting it. Unfortunately, we
have chosen not to accept this story for publication.
Thank you for considering Orion’s Belt as a destination for your work.
We wish you the best of luck in finding a home for this story.
Thank you
for submitting to the 2025 Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers. We
received many excellent entries this year and are delighted to announce
that the winning story is "In America" by Sebastian Edward Bliss.
Congratulations also to our runner-up, "Canary" by J.L. Zhang.
All stories will appear in an upcoming issue this year.
I worked on a couple of blog posts, one of which is published and a couple that will be. A trip down to the convenience store. I wonder about putting off the laundry.
YouTube running the background, trying to learn a few things about America, or trying to reclaim knowledge. I will share this one now:
I am too thick-headed and too thick-tongued for poetry. However, this is an Indiana magazine, so I want to point them out.
The Indianapolis Review, established in 2017, is an online quarterly publication featuring poetry, art, and visual poetry. We work to promote artists and writers from our region, but we also showcase work from around the country and the world. We don’t limit ourselves to one particular school or style of poetry or art; we simply want art and poetry that surprises, sings, and makes us think.
We believe that poetry and art often (not always) save us from desolation, misunderstanding, and thinking we are alone in our suffering . We believe that creating and sharing creativity is a gift and service to one’s community and can shift the way we experience our realities.
