I try not to use my blog as a tumblr, but this seems just Alcestis-appropriate enough to squeak by: historical fiction from a different era. (It’s somewhat difficult to search for historical fictions about Amazons these days.) I don’t know enough about the evolution of the Amazon myth to know when it got this prettified. No “man-slayers” here, just a little light domination. Still, if that prettifying involves Katharine Hepburn in greaves, I guess I’m all right with it.

Found at this tumblr, with the following caption:

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (via corbis)

“Who is Katharine Hepburn? It took me a long time to create that creature.”

Apparently there was a film version of The Warrior’s Husband produced in 1933. It didn’t star Hepburn.

Last Thursday I did my first author visit. My dissertation director is teaching Alcestis in one of his courses this fall, which has led to a lot of delightful things — seeing the book get linked to Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest on Amazon, first of all, when a number of his students bought them together. We did a Q&A and they had great, insightful questions. (Lance is an amazing teacher and they are obviously careful readers.) They’d read the novel just after reading the Odyssey — how’s that for pressure? I didn’t ask them how the two compared. But we did talk about books that inspired the novel, about what Admetus really feels when Alcestis stood up at the banquet table, why Hades reacts the way he does to Persephone’s interest in Alcestis, and why Hermes has a tattered cloak. On that last question I had to resort to the frustrating artistic answer and admit that he just does.

It felt a little weird, honestly, to be in a literature classroom as a writer and a source of information about my writing. As a creative writing teacher, of course, I’ve talked about my writing, but in that case I’m usually talking with students as fellow writers. Normally when I’m in a classroom discussing books with students my role is not to impose my viewpoint, though of course I have topics I’d like address and readings that I consider more or less valid depending on the textual evidence. But this time I was there as Author, complete with Intentions. And I was definitely not dead (though I was a little migrainey).

Lance also tells me that some students in the class may be writing papers on the novel. It’s probably my years of academic conditioning talking, but I find that ridiculously exciting, and also kind of reassuring. As delighted as I was to answer questions about what I was thinking while I wrote the book, I’m glad they’ll be developing their own interpretations of it, too.

First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.

Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:

• Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
• Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
• Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
• A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
• Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
• An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.

And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:

• An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
• Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)

Hipster Book Club has just posted a lovely thoughtful review of Alcestis and a long interview with me, both by Matthew Merendo.

Matthew originally posted a similar review of the book on Goodreads, and after I sent him a message to say thanks, he pitched the interview — and I’m so glad he did! We had a great back-and-forth via email, definitely one of the most in-depth conversations I’ve had about the book since it was published. As Matthew says in the interview’s introduction, we talk “about Alcestis, four Mean Girls from the eighteenth century, dead college students, and the status of gay lit.” We also discuss first novels, fantasy vs. mainstream literature, and my favorite retellings. Do check it out!

The last two weeks of the fiction class I’m teaching are essentially solid workshop. We’ve had a few breaks to discuss general questions about writing and one very good discussion about “Hills Like White Elephants” (including a bit of a digression re: absinthe, the legality and appeal thereof), but it’s almost all student fiction at this point. We have one week left and they’re going strong; I’m really pleased.

It’s strange to feel September coming and not be preparing to teach or take classes. I do have a couple of interviews in the works, so expect more Alcestis-related posts here soon. And, of course, I have links:

• An interview with Jeffrey Kurland, the costume designer for Inception.
• A promo site for Inception with a mock-up manual for the PASIV device used to sedate dreamers.
• One of the most bizarre things I’ve read in a while: an account of the oral history and mythology of South African prison gangs.
• A new book on surprising Greek and Roman cultural practices, including Alexander the Great’s request to be embalmed in honey after death.
• A historical mystery about the disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, a New York State Supreme Court judge, in 1930.

Back in May — long enough ago that I’d totally forgotten about it — Lambda Literary asked for interview questions for the fabulous Sarah Waters. This was just after I’d read The Little Stranger, so I was bubbling over with them, and I left a few at the Lambda Literary blog. Yesterday I was surprised and delighted to see that Lambda Literary had actually asked Sarah Waters those questions, along with great questions by Shelley Ettinger and Jeri Estes. Here’s a snip from her answer to my question about historical fiction, to entice you to visit the LL site and read the rest:

One thing that’s always intrigued me about our relationship with the past is how we’re always rewriting it. You can date a historical novel just like you can a period drama for TV or film: they always tell us as much about the period in which they were produced, as about the period they’re attempting to describe. I don’t see that as a limitation, though. The past is necessarily elusive; we can never “reproduce” it. But we can have lots of fun trying! That’s a big attraction of the genre, for me — taking on stereotypes about the past, and finding way to revise them, or to overturn them altogether.

And now back to teaching prep — as you could probably tell from my previous post, I’ve begun teaching my summer fiction workshop class at UT. Today was day two. Tomorrow, among other things, we’re going to take up Kelly Link’s suggestion of listing tropes you like and use that as an idea-generating writing exercise. (I will cheerfully admit that I do the writing exercises right along with my students.)

Kate Pullinger, whose The Mistress of Nothing will soon be released in the US, wrote a great post last week about historians who dismiss historical fiction (in this case, Antony Beevor and Niall Ferguson):

According to reports, Niall Ferguson says he never reads historical fiction because it ‘contaminates historical understanding’; Beevor says he thinks that historical novelists ought to mark in bold type ‘the bits they made up’.Nice to see two such hardy fellows claiming their unparalleled access to the truth.

Pullinger then quotes from a talk about history and historiography¹ delivered by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 2006 and printed in the NYRB., in which Schlesinger argues that “All historians are prisoners of their own experience and servitors to their own prepossessions. We are all entrapped in the egocentric predicament. We bring to history the preconceptions of our personality and the preoccupations of our age.” Beevor and Ferguson, no matter how pristine they consider their own historical understandings, are just as time-blind as everybody else — if not more so, because they’re so submerged in their own cultural context that it’s become invisible to them. (This is the same problem I have with Stanley Fish’s frequent tirades in the NY Times about bias in the classroom: the underlying assumption that choosing not to discuss one’s political beliefs in the classroom means that bias is eradicated. Right.) I’ll put the bits I make up in bold when Beevor agrees to do the same thing.

Pullinger concludes: “this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth.” In essence, she’s making a point pretty similar to that of Sarah Dunant’s recent piece in the London Times, which presents historical fiction as a means of “penetrating ‘otherness.’”

I agree with Dunant, and I loved Pullinger’s post, but I’d drop the “the” before “truth” in her last sentence. The point of Schlesinger’s essay, as Pullinger points out, is that there is no historical “truth.” It doesn’t exist, and even if it did, in some rarefied ideal form, we wouldn’t have access to it. But here’s the thing: for historical fiction, it doesn’t matter that there’s no one truth.

Schlesinger says that “the historian is committed to a doomed enterprise—the quest for an unattainable objectivity.” Writers of historical fiction aren’t. When I write historical fiction, I’m trying to make art. I want the art I make to be truthful, but I don’t pretend that I’m identifying or recording the truth about history.² (I don’t mean to suggest that Pullinger or Dunant would claim this either, though I assume that Beevor and Ferguson think they would.)

I don’t think most readers care if historical fiction represents “the truth,” either. Some do, of course, and I think most readers respond negatively to the obvious importation of contemporary attitudes or speech patterns or modes of thinking into historical settings. But the word that kept coming up in our Wiscon panel discussion about historical fiction wasn’t truth but “authenticity” — the feeling of truth, in other words. The bits we make up as historical fiction writers are there to add to that feeling of truth, whether they’re accurate or not, and the feeling of truth and recognition is crucial to the success of any kind of art. Human understanding — that’s what we’re after.

______

1. “Historiography” is one of my favorite things and one of my favorite words.

2. “Even things that are true can be proved.” (To keep company with the “stark postmodernist sentiments” Schlesinger quotes from John Lothrop Motley’s 1868 lecture.)

I cannot believe it’s the middle of May. My friends: what happened to this spring? I mean, I know what happened — my book came out, I traveled around a bit, I wrote another giant dissertation chapter, I started the next novel (just a wee bit), I started yet another dissertation chapter. But despite all those very good reasons for busy-ness I still feel like this semester has just gone FWOOSH.

Here are some things I learned this spring, in no particular order:

Thing 1: Sarah Waters is brilliant. I knew this; I love her faux-Victorian novels, though I was slightly less enthused about The Night Watch. But The Little Stranger impressed the hell out of me. It’s so cleverly managed and yet reads in so natural a way that the trappings of the haunted house plot seem realistic and psychologically appropriate. This interview with Waters, from last May, is worth watching, and she’s also got a short piece on Angela Carter, here. Every time I read an interview with her or one of her essays about writing I get even more fangirly. I totally want to buy her coffee and talk about pacing.

The Little Stranger was one of the books on my new year’s resolution list — so far, I’ve also read Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter and The Woman in White. You can see brief responses to those books on my Goodreads account, if you’re curious. The Little Stranger was definitely my favorite of these, though I was startled by how much I loved the first two-thirds of The Woman in White (the last third is bit draggy, in my opinion). The Sealed Letter I found readable and interesting but oddly unenchanting; I felt compelled to finish it, but when I was done, my reaction was mostly: “Huh.” Even though it suits my genre interests and contains a lot of things I like. Not sure why that was.

Thing 2: Job interviews for a job you really want to do can be fun. I had a couple, and I actually enjoyed them (even the one that got extended by a day by a snowstorm). The academic job market isn’t at its best right now, and the process of waiting to hear about interviews and offers and all that is always going to be frustrating, but the conversations themselves were entertaining and even MLA wasn’t too stressful.

Thing 3: Doing promo for a book is shockingly time-consuming, especially when you’ve never done it before. It offers far too many ways to procrastinate on other work, too. And, like job interviews, promo can actually be pretty fun, especially when you have the chance to talk to individual readers about your book. (Or even to spy on individual readers, via, for example, Goodreads.)

Thing 4: Apparently my fondness for watching L&O reruns at the gym places me in a recognizable demographic. Note the mention of UT.

Thing 5: It can be a pain to apply for fellowships, jobs, grants, etc., but it’s worth it. (More on this soon.)

Did you learn anything useful or entertaining this spring?

Linky post! Because I’m a bit headachey again.

• Women studying anatomy, circa 1905, via Twitter, as usual; I’m definitely going to be using this as a reference for Killingly.
• This dog has been appearing at Greek demonstrations for the last two years. He has to belong to a protester — he is wearing a collar. But it’s awfully easy to think of him as some little god of protest — Eris as a mutt?
• And speaking of little gods, do read Sarah Johnson’s long interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, in which they discuss, among other things, writing historical fiction that treats the culture’s religion as real rather than symbolic (something I’m also interested in, of course).
• See also David Mitchell’s essay in the Telegraph about historical fiction. Tonally, this feels a little weird to me; it’s very cheery and flip. Mitchell has just published a historical novel, though apparently not on purpose, as he explains: “I didn’t set out to write a historical novel just for the heck of it – you’d have to be mad.” (You would? Also, who ever writes a novel “just for the heck of it?”) The breezy tour through the history of historical fiction also rang a bit false for me at times, though that’s partly because I love nothing better than nitpicking at other people’s generalizations about eighteenth-century literature. I also find his suggestion about “Bygonese” both accurate and, again, a little tonally weird; as with the whole piece, it’s written in a manner that suggests it’s more original than it is, especially since Mitchell then suggests a set of features common to historical-fiction dialogue (“Commonly, shall is used more often than will …”) and lists errors to avoid (using ahistorical vocabulary: “such as brinkmanship: duh, it’s a Cold War term.” As Omar would say: indeed). I’d love to see Mitchell write a piece about historical fiction intended for historical fiction writers and readers rather than a general newspaper audience.

Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis. The shot-by-shot demonstration of the braiding is pretty remarkable.

Alcestis lived earlier than the era of the Acropolis, but I always imagined her wearing fairly similar braids.

Regarding more modern research, here’s a neat blog post by Richard Oram of the Harry Ransom Center (where I worked as an intern for two years) about “decline letters,” including a few examples by Edmund Wilson and G. B. Shaw. I actually found one from Wilson in a collection while doing other research for a patron and made Rich a copy; in fact, I made a bunch of copies for the staff, because it’s such a great little document. I had my copy tacked up over my inbox for the duration of my job there.

And finally: a hilarious takedown of Twilight‘s prose style. Such as it is.