I'm agreeing with many of the ideas introduced so far in my reading of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction. At one time, when while writing fiction, I suggested that a moral dilemma created the sort of conflict that I wanted my characters to face because for one, the situations are many times not capable of being solved directly because they are multi-faceted. Both of my novels dealt with characters required to decide on the merit of other people in their lives and how they could take charge of their own decision making process.

Since writing my first novel, I've had to face the idea that what we write about can develop in the world around us, not necessarily causing, but contributing to it. This idea is presented as a clear desire to find worth or lack of worth when evaluating whether moral fiction is art and worthy of its development. John Gardner talks not just in terms of the artist but of the critic and the responsibilities both have for looking not just at a moral problem but at the consequences of how dealing with the problem will play out. 

For instance, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, raises the question of human rights in the eyes of law and in the eyes of community and in the eyes of the young protagonist. This novel was published during the Civil Rights movement and played into the views people held about segregation and the assumption of guilt or innocence. Did it cause the deaths of people who took part in the Civil Rights movement? Did it isolate issues that helped lead to policy changes? These kinds of questions are what John Gardner discusses as part of the problem of Moral Fiction and the responsibility of art. 

A second problem he develops is the idea of art being developed unconsciously or consciously and the effect it has on the reader. He mentions three artists, Tolstoy, Dante, and  and how at low points in their life, they wrote pieces that influenced their later development of their ideas. All were depressed and down and readers had to deal with their pain.

A third problem of art is the question of how self-improvement is conveyed and the idea that it could aid others by proposing a model. He mentions Freud's work, which has been found helpful by providing a structure for discussing and evaluating ideas about the mind but that some of the work had been found to not be helpful in later years.

This is all the further I have read in the book, but I feel it also has Implications for writing creative nonfiction.  He mentions that morality can be viewed either secularly or in religious thought and also has begun to highlight the many ways people have looked to solve unsolveable problems. Here, the idea of appealing to an image of an "angel", someone pure and good, to whom one addressed the issues and found emotional decisions is offered as a solution. This same idea of viewing one's thoughts about one's life via an audience is offered up as one of the values of self analysis or reflection by way of memoir.

I still have more to read but I am finding it helpful. 

Yesterday, I found my way to the top of Stone Mountain in Atlanta, Georgia, the region one of my favorite fantasy writers, Tom Deitz used in writing his stories. It was not unknown for one of his stories to start with a radio tarot reading, a song played that captured the hero David Sullivan's attention, (for me that would be Sheri Baby), then follow a list of songs that would cue him into trouble coming down via fairy land trauma. Somewhere along the tale, David Sullivan would grab a sleeping bag, head to the woods, or watch the sunrise atop Stone Mountain and chase after white stags or to find himself in a situation where all sorts of magical happenings would occur.

Is Stone Mountain magical?

We arrived at the base of Stone Mountain early enough to realize that commercialization, sky ride, train, shows, and "rides" and the repotted plantation buildings had taken place and many that we later enjoyed, but not so much to keep us from observing the unique ecology of the region.

Rather than try to walk to the top in the heat, we wandered the parking lot, looking for a creek and I managed to find these cute little leaf plants that go right along with the image of a fairy world. Instead of a chasing a white stag, I merely woke up a deer who hustled further into the forest. We did find out there were mysterious fairy shrimp that arrived and were replaced by another species more clam like when we finally got up top.

So yes, if one has enough imagination, yes, there is magic and fantasy.

Tom Deitz' fantasy used the facts of native American society woven together with Celtic legendary. He like to dress up in the fashion that members of the Society for Creative Anachronism do, and he shared the common societal desire to escape the modern office into somewhere else. In the hands of a fantasy writer, Ocmulgee National Monument Earth Lodge becomes a somewhere else where monsters are fought by Indian sorcerers while in the hands of a travel writer the area becomes lists of hotels, restaurants and fun cheers to do something without hands.


Which leads me to the purpose of all of this. Robert Root, one of my writing instructors for the semester brought to my attention two articles in Bookends by Leslie Jamison and Dana Stevens on the question of whether genre makes a difference any more? It's a question we will be discussing in more in the residency, but since neither author touched upon what I have been facing, I thought I'd offer my opinion.

First, genre seems to have boiled down to format of a piece for me, along with style, some of the requirements for voice and facts. Just like we (authors) can play swords and shields to better understand a battle scene, we can use the historical, conceptual, and specifics of genre to guide how a piece is written. We can play with style, see the same incident both as poem and as poetry. But each format has its rules and yet, there is always the assumption that they can be broken.

One thing the write up about Tom Deitz' work shows is that authors become aware of the style that they are developing and promoting by their own use. I had also read many of the authors from this region--C. S. Friedman for instance, I know as the author of a biotech vampire, with a world that reflects back emotion. 

So if each genre is really more about format, style, and the efforts of a group of authors to write in a certain way, then maybe mystery, science fiction, etc, and all the subgenre's fall away, either by a move to a different style of portraying feminism, or a mix and match of these subsets of story world, or maybe even, the sense that fantasy can seek to change the way our future will develop by writing more to the "literary" tastes that is expected by the academic world.

All I can say is that I had no problem identifying with David Sullivan, complete with attacking evil fairies and magical serpents. And equally, some people saw my futurism looking like Nazism or proclaiming the need for terrorism, when instead I merely hoped to point out the huge cost and damage gangs and their black market drug enterprise had become to our society. Who hurt most, the question I am told every writer should ask of their characters in order to pick the best protagonist or viewpoint character for the scene, is just all of us, or anyone of us. Building the attachment to character in a novel is a requirement for me. 

So will I write genre science fiction? Who else writes about things off planet? Or am I allowed to make my blank sheet as large as I need it to imagine what I will? Perhaps all that is needed is the desire to escape or the ability to dream and the ability to create our own format.

inMy big toenail is black again, this time from kicking something that I didn't know was there, which I should have known, but I was reflecting on something besides myself. No one will know that my big toenail is black, the nice ladies at L-Tek Nails have covered it up with a suitable number of pink polish strokes, no one should be wiser. So like a true navel contemplator, I confess, and see, look how much relieved I sound on the paper. Ha ha, you will never know whether I lie, which I don't.

So why haven't I spent so many years in the writing of my life that I know all the crooks and crannies of personality that this isn't second nature to me, or better yet, first nature?

After about fourteen and even on into my twenties, I cried my heart out to my diary. I found it unfulfilling. The Catholic Church said treat others like you want to be treated and voila, my mom showed up out from behind the stack of laundry and in an angry voice demanding her hairbrush back. I began to see what she needed to make her happy. Same for my husband and others, I see them and try to fix as needed.

To me, I always thought, yes, I wish to be a writer, just not yet, I need to know more. My search is usually outwardly directed--I know me.

But a friend of mine keeps trying to psychoanalyze me for myself since I apparently won't do it. I don't lack sensuality, or thoughts, or new ideas or in depth examination so much as knowing emotions hurt and I don't like pain. Now I am busy on a memoir that takes me into what I thought then, what I think now and more topped off with a healthy dose of noseeums, gnats, biting flies (deer flies?).

Nothing of me is static except my sitting and my books and my spending.  This is enough

I thought Ideate was funny. First, it added Id and ate and so you can imagine my Freudian Id being ate up by who knows what? Some of the what has been learning about Carly Rae Jepson and the fun lip sync's of Call Me Maybe going on-- the Miami Dolphin Cheerleaders and some army men. Other videos for the day that ate my brain was the calving of an ice berg that took ten years to retreat the same distance as the previous 100, not so fun.

And Ideate connected to the Idiot by Dostoevsky. Why not feel like an idiot by betraying ever hungry moment for attention, every lost lonely moment spent neglected, every hurt moment, every tickle to the foot and every cold contemplation of humanity. Unfortunately, unlike what I remembered, my collection of Fyodor Dostoevsky's work didn't include the Idiot. So I spent time reading, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" instead. The story tells a tale of a man about to kill himself when a young girl pleads with him to help her Momma. He decides to shoot himself that night but realizes that his idea that nothing exists because he feels nothing and is nothing and the world is nothing isn't true because this young girl, even though he rejects her, awakens feelings within him. He falls asleep and dreams of a world filled with people who love and are loved, after almost rejecting it because he loves our own sun and the planet Earth so much. He then infects the planet with his negativity. On his wake up, he preaches his dream to everyone as the only truth he has known and even though everyone thinks him ridiculous, he no longer minds.

I often find Dostoyevsky humorous in his close examination of himself, something that I read in The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate, was a similar activity to the essay writing of Michel de Montaigne. Unfortunately, I couldn't finish his essay "Of Books", which I will return to later. 

I did fall into "Essays in Idleness" by Kenko, a Japanese writer and poet. What Kenko and Dostoevsky share is a sense of how beauty connects to emotion and to the greater perception that makes life worth living. Kenko offers up some alternatives to viewing of cherry blossoms including the sight of windblown petals or fading colors. He uses lovely poetic language--the dew of morning, the smoke over a mountain and the scent of a woman to help capture the sensual pleasures of life that makes memories.

It connects because I have just gloried in the blown blossoms beneath a flowering tree at Monet's gardens in Giverny and have returned to those summers we all clambered into mom and dad's car and took off to the heat of Yakima's lovely cherry trees, picking the fruit and hauling them down the rickety ladders to take home and can, after a refreshing swim among the crowd at the local swimming pool, much like the swimming pool in Dickinson, ND where we all escaped the heat, almost elbow to elbow. 

Ideate also lends the feeling that one idea can actively generate another and another and another. And yet return, like Pacman, swallowing up our own tales and maybe even becoming wholly human.

My first experience with the idea of self-awareness permeating writing occurred during a Creative Writing class via the University of Washington Extension by Jody Alieson. In my attempt to remember who taught, I find her obituary. I feel appalled and sad, she was quite young and ovarian cancer is such an awful disease. It just shows how little time we all have on the planet and illustrates how cruel life can be to women, although men have their own diseases. Why do I think death cruel and not release? Not relief? I guess I am not ready to go. I know it as a reality, people die, but it seems far from where I dream to be.

In that class, we were asked to touch the contents of a bowl and take some of the contents and experience it. I found it really odd realize that all my muscles resisted putting my hand beneath a towel for which I had no idea what was inside. By everyone of my muscles, I mean, my arm muscles that stiffened and pulled back, my hand muscles that wanted to clench, my back muscles that shoved my shoulders upward, my leg muscles that got set to run. I could go on this way but no need to belabor the point. But in thinking of that time, why did react so strongly? Perhaps because even then, I was seeking to hold onto life rather than make a slip and let some of life go.

Why react that way? Fear of the unknown and what might be lurking beneath--snake, toad, something that might jump, something sticky and icky.

Inside, there were raspberries and I remember my surprise that they felt so warm. The scent reached my nostrils before I tasted, the juice satisfyingly sweet and fresh.  These sensations were about embracing the wonder of life, the rich detail, savoring what I love, capturing the fruit only available for the moment.

Was this pleasant surprise? Relief? I did relax. My eyes shut with the taste. How is it that after all these years I can still remember that one day almost fifteen years ago?

Did it have to do with that change in reaction? Did it have to do with my desire to be aware of everything, including the held breath waitingness of the class and the outdoor yells of a group of students tossing about a football. I'd watched for moments before entering the cold stiffness of the brick building with the wide hallways and overly large windows that seemed to intimidate you. Am I really remembering it, or am I collecting a set of visits all together in one snapshot, like a video sequence with the same shot and many cut out.

For me, this ability to sink into old moments and revisit scenes is something I've learned to rely on so that they seldom make my first drafts where I am seeking meaning, content, sequence, and connectivity. Often my scenes are layered together coat by coat, like a painter working additive color in patchy highlights or dots. I don't value as much what I do easily, instead I work where I feel I am weakest first because a house doesn't stand without a firm foundation.

For me that foundation is thought. I've been taught to remove our that thought and show what was and is inside the structure, which should convey all the thought behind via connections in images, theme, and actions and even character growth and by doing this, I am not telling the reader what occurred but leading them down my path of memory-experience in a specific way. The path is the meaning.

Now I am being taught to put back some of that thought, some of those decisions I made about what to include or not so that the reader is sure they are being offered a bowl filled with fruit rather than a scary uncertainty that could lead to something awful.

The thing about thoughts is they go on and on and on, are repetitive, implied by action often, maybe somewhat predictable based on circumstances. I guess the art of learning which of these thoughts to include can provide overtones of mental illness or creativity or of certainty based on training or whatever character trait is being shown.

My husband asked today, whether a young armadillo had a hard shell or not, since I saw one poking through the grass in search of food near the 11th hole green at Twin Rivers Golf Course. Just on a side note, today was a lovely day for wildlife, we spotted the armadillo looking like a rabbit, plus two species of frogs--one quite yellow and the other green and spotted, along with a female deer and her baby. Anyway, since we guessed the shell would be soft, Bob finding sympathy for the mother if not, I of coursed googled for an answer. Texas Parks and Wildlife provided an answer: soft shell because it is irreplaceable so does not harden until the animal reaches adulthood.

The armadillo is really a nine-banded armadillo in our area. He has been on my mind since writing about feeling armored against others. Here, truly, in this small creature with poor eyesight, is an image of bumbling me, going about my way, carefully shielded from my environment.

My husband and I saw our first armadillo on Merritt Island after visiting the Kennedy Space Center on one of our journeys to Florida to visit his parents. We were birding along a narrow road, looking for the wildlife refuge and not finding it. At the end of this road, lined with lovely houses, we followed one poor armadillo, keeping him in sight and taking picture after picture. Not perhaps, its favorite day.

Our next encounter of merit, occurred during a stay at Burnt Store Marina. It was late. The moon full with an October Harvest peach tint; we waited for the coming eclipse. We felt restless; when visiting the elderly, we often found ourselves with too much energy, trapped in a sit down world, no exercise felt enough. So we walked. Walking around the marina led us to many first time sightings of manatees then a stumble through buildings and out across the dry dock and then a few kisses under some palms after the sunset faded and then a racket aroused our attention.

Who made the noise in the shrubs we wondered. The answer was an armadillo. Who else would wander around out at night?

So that brings me back to the recent sighting of a dead armadillo. I think perhaps one problem with war, and all of our armaments is that we believe in that power of armor. Armor keeps us safe and as long as we have it around, we needn't worry. No matter if we are short sighted. There are term-ites enough that we will all survive for a time. 

Imagine the load, someone with armor can bear. Might as well pile on the responsibilities and duties, because surely they are built strong enough they can not fail.

Yet, clearly, the poor carcass left after the black vultures picked out the meat tells the truth. They have a nervous jump that often takes them under the wheels of a car.

So why am I thinking these gruesome thoughts about death? Its the blood lining the edges of the torn armor. With armor, humans seem to become something superhuman at the expense of reality. Inside those shells, are living, breathing, hungry, wanting to be loved animals. They bleed. Anything that bleeds is never truly safe or protected.

According to Seneca the Younger, I am wishy-washy about bathing. If I were into the simple persona of Sheri, I would embrace the lifestyle of Scipio, rinsing in the unadorned outdoor bath after a hard day of sweat. I am reading Philip Lopate's "The Art of the Personal Essay" and having been told in my earlier residency by one of the instructors that he decided to just daily blog, and so decided to do similarly, just write one of those blogs that no one visits unless suddenly discovering some fine wonderful authority in their words, how wonderful they are and follow.

Since this is an appropriate length of time to write before needing to capture the readers attention with a photo, I thought I would add one. This looks like a swimming pool, although the water is somewhat greenish for my tastes in swimming. It's a fountain or pool at the palace and fort of Granada called the Alhambra. The Alhambra was rebuilt  by Mohammed ben Al-Ahmar of Granada who added to the fort built in 889. 

I must confess that I gardened today and followed that stint of turning drippy from sweat into a dive into my swimming pool. Our bathrooms are unlike the elegant ones complained about by Scipio, most look like they are falling apart after 20 years of use and they are currently the "neediest" place in the house other than the doors damaged by the last hurricane.

My earliest memories of bathing involve playing "alligator", where you hold yourself up with your arms and let your legs float,. 

Bathing in old age is fraught with worry--will my inner organs dry out, will I get a bladder infection, why is my skin so dry, will my new dye job burn my scalp when wet in the pool or worse turn green or red. Yet, cooling is needed after working in Florida outdoors with 93F temperature and lots of humidity. 

I wonder why humidity and humility are so nearly alike? Is it because, we are all water and all sorrow?

My joke about a few more days of intense humidity on the golf course got a laugh--soon my skin will slide off, my bones turn to shell and flake into the ocean bed and all that will be left is a jelly fish. I wonder if anyone has given a jelly fish an IQ test?

So I did do the Scipio bath--work hard, sweat, rinse off in a pool (but ours is currently clean). I have to admit though I have had my dreams of knocking the walls of my bathroom out, changing my closet to one side of the room, turning the shower to a stand free sort, adding French doors, and installing a hot tub with the idea that come those cold January and February days, I could slip into something warm, relax and look at all the flowers I had planted blooming among the lush tropical greens, ah, sounds so good. Yes, definitely corrupt.

Why not?