So let me be the first to say that when it comes to reading, fiction is a great entry point. It’s actually what draws young children into appreciating literature first. Fiction has so much appeal to young readers that they are easily drawn into the world of the story and fantasies. I know for my part that the first books I ever read were fiction books for boys. I later grew to consume adult-themed books but I never forgot those amazing stories of adventure, friendship, and epic battles. So let me share some of the benefits you get from reading fiction books.

An Improved Vocabulary

Let’s get the obvious out first. Reading is a great way to enhance your language skills by introducing you to new words. Your expanded vocabulary will be evident in how you write essays and letters for school and business dealings. Through reading fiction books, or any book for that matter, you are introduced to many new words that you would never have come across. You will become a more eloquent speaker and writer because of it.

Amplified Creativity

We all have the capacity for creativity, but it is through reading that we expand and broaden it. Because fiction books have so many colorful characters and fantastical stories and settings, it stretches our imagination beyond what we’re capable of. Reading forces us to visualize what we read, taking our creativity to its limits and bringing it further than ever before.

Capacity for Empathy

Our capacity to empathize is largely based on our upbringing and how well we socialize. But through reading, we are able to practice empathy because we are taken from one character’s point-of-view to another’s thereby giving us a glimpse of what they are thinking and the motivations behind their actions. We are then better suited to understand how the story is progressing through these insights.

For De-stressing

At the end of a particularly grueling day, talking about work is the last thing I want to do so I try to immerse myself in novels. It’s a fantastic way to get away from the stresses in life and just get lost in the wonder and awe of a good fiction book. You get to explore far-off places, meet zany characters, and follow the adventures of your favorite hero all within the confines of your couch.

Increased Focus

When you read, you basically tune out everything around you. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to be shaken a little to get my attention when I’m reading a book. You get immersed in the story and what you’re reading which greatly helps you to focus.

Achieve Inner Peace

I save this last benefit because it truly has a profound effect on my well-being. Reading and reading fiction in general has really given me a state-of-mind where I am able to feel calmer and more relax. I’m able to manage my stress better and see a different perspective on life which gives me the insight to know that bad moments pass and also to cherish the good ones.

Photo Credits

Images are pixabay creative commons

Guest Author Bio
Evelyn Paulson

Evelyn Paulson is a passionate blogger who loves to write about travel, books, personality development, lifestyle, productivity, and more. She spends her spare time hiking, camping and reading adventure, fantasy, mystery stories, and young adult fiction books for boys and girls. Everything she talks about ends in books.

In the 1970s, zines became a popular alternative to professionally published magazines because they allowed for controversial and politically oriented opinions. In the 1990s, zines saw a revival in the punk scene, and thousands of zines became available through zine distributors worldwide. Many libraries worldwide have zine archives, and some colleges circulate archived zines.

Zines remained popular through 2011 when they hit a mainstream high. In 2019, zines remain popular, but only to those who know they exist. The younger generations who grew up with Facebook and Instagram don’t know what they’re missing.

Social media changed the face of self-expression

Thanks to social media, everyone has the opportunity to express themselves 24/7 and project those expressions to a hungry audience of their peers. Whenever the urge strikes, people can express their own ideas or share other people’s content, adding their own thoughts to expand the conversation.

To the younger generation, printed forms of self-expression – like zines – are unknown territory, and it’s time for another revival.

The limits of expression on social media sites

People love the idea of self-expression, but social media is hardly the place for expression when your views aren’t mainstream. Each time you post something controversial, you risk getting your account deleted. Contrary to popular belief, freedom of speech doesn’t apply to social media platforms. Freedom of speech isn’t even a right, although many believe it is.

When social media sites ban popular commentators, it seems unfair – and it probably is – but it’s not a First Amendment issue.

Freedom of speech is a grossly misunderstood concept. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution doesn’t give anyone the right to speak freely under any and all circumstances. It simply prohibits the government from establishing laws that abridge a person’s right to free speech. Non-governmental entities like employers and private organizations can create whatever rules they wish.

Social media platforms also have the legal right to censor content and control what users can and can’t say on the platform.

Zines provide an outlet for truly free expression

If you have an opinion mainstream media won’t publish, chances are, there’s a zine that will.

If you can’t get your content published in someone else’s zine, why not start your own? If your opinions and ideas are too controversial for other zine owners, create a niche with your own zine.

Want to start a new zine?

To familiarize yourself with the zine scene, start collecting zines with a similar theme. Browse the zines on Zinenation.org. Each description provides a link to buy a copy or contact the owner. Another way to get familiar with the scene is to attend a zine fest. There aren’t many, but they can be found with a little research.

The process of crafting a zine

While many zine owners make quick copies using their copy machine at home, others opt for professional printing. Although the messy nature of hand-folded zines was a draw in the 1990s, today, a professionally bound zine will stand out more.

This zine creation guide describes the steps involved in producing a high-quality zine, and offers free zine templates to help you get started. Traditionally, zines are saddle stitched. The benefit to saddle stitching is you never have to deal with any staples at home. It’s not worth folding your zines by hand and trying to staple them together.

Zines keep the underground movement of free expression alive

People are tired of magazine ads and fake news articles. They’re tired of getting censored on social media. People want substance, but don’t know where to get it. They want to talk about controversial topics and that’s not happening on social media.

Underground zines like these discuss a wide range of topics including art, culture, women’s issues, race, immigration, and gender. They provide a platform for activists to spread their message and make a difference in the world.

Zines combat censorship

If you’ve got ideas to share with the world, a zine is the best place to express yourself. Unlike magazines, you don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission before creating and publishing a zine. Once you dive into the zine scene, you’ll be glad you abandoned the censorship of social media.

Photo Credit

Photo is Wikimedia Creative Commons

Guest Author Bio
Jamie Lansley

Jamie is a freelance writer who covers trends in business, technology, and health. She loves to go skiing, camping, and rock climbing with her family.

Cervantes

I don’t tend to read a lot of fiction, but when I do, I try to engage in it. I find it helpful and illuminating, when approaching a literary work created in a culture and time frame quite different than mine, to try to suspend my own cultural assumptions in favor of something closer to the context of the author. For example, when I read Dante’s Divine Comedy in translation two years ago, I did so, as best I could, from the perspective of my persona in the Society for Creative Anachronism. That persona is an early fifteenth-century Italian artist. Assuming as a basis a belief in a rather mechanistic and rule-bound concept of Purgatory enabled me to see how Dante was challenging that concept in a way that was completely opaque to a classroom full of 20th-century American agnostics.

This fall I enrolled in a course in Don Quixote, taught in Spanish, at the University of Oregon. I enrolled because I had recently taken a volunteer position that required the person to be bilingual in English and Spanish, and had done so with reluctance, because I have not used Spanish in almost forty years. No one better qualified was willing to take the job. This specialized upper division course was the only one still open to a senior auditor, and the professor was willing to have me. Thus I found myself reading one of the great classics of world literature, in the original language, and trying to discuss it and write essays on it with marginal language skills and no background in Spanish literature. It was not too difficult to shed my cultural assumptions because none of them were of much use in approaching the task at hand.

Don Quixote is not easy to read if one takes it at face value, as primarily a satire on novels of chivalry, with a certain amount of social commentary thrown in. I had tried to read it in translation on several occasions, but had gotten bogged down in a series of improbable romances and the relentless ugly violence. Friends who are mindful readers have had the same experience. The basic plot line – a decaying, impoverished, deranged nobleman who imagines himself a knight errant getting into trouble and making a fool of himself, and incidentally connecting with star-crossed lovers whose troubles are typically resolved – does not require eight hundred pages to develop fully. One gets the feeling that Cervantes, like Dickens, was writing a serial and was paid by the word.

For the most part people today read Don Quixote because they are told that it is a classic, the first modern novel in any European language. Reading it becomes an obligation of being a well-rounded student of the humanities, and this cultural assumption stands in the way of engaging with the text. In contrast, people not only in Spain but in Europe in general in the seventeenth century found this text gripping. It was immensely popular and immediate. Could I access something of that immediacy?

Something about the text reminded me of the absurdist science fiction novels of the Russian dissident writer Andrei Siniavsky, who wrote under the pen name Abram Tertz. I had the good fortune both to read these in Russian and to meet the author himself, and to compare the complex multifaceted originals with bad translations packaged for American consumption, with a propagandist agenda. Siniavsky, who was a respected literary scholar, smuggled the originals out of Russia and had them published, in Russian, using the name of a historical Jewish gangster as an alias.

Cervantes, like Siniavsky, lived in a society where publications were rigorously censored, and where direct criticism of church or state invited the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition. He did not use a pen name, but, part way into the book, he claims that it is a translation from Cide Hamete, an Arab historian, an assertion as absurdist as Siniavsky’s ascribing his science fiction to a gangster who died in 1926. One recurring trope is an insistence that Cide Hamete is an extremely accurate historian, followed by a wealth of seemingly irrelevant detail about something which does not in itself seem essential to the plot.

Once I started reading these details as a subtext conveying dissident views and criticism of the status quo, the novel became much more compelling and immediate. I have probably overcompensated, but I am confident that Cervantes deliberately inserted much of the pattern I am seeing into the text, and that some of his readers recognized this.

I live in the United States, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, surrounded by a print and electronic culture that is ostensibly free of censorship. The censorship is, to be sure, far more subtle than that in either the Soviet Union or sixteenth-century Spain, but it is quite real, and the consequences of stepping over the bounds include job loss, loss of credibility in academic circles, and sometimes the threat of lawsuits. For example, if I, as an academically trained biologist, wished to publish research supporting a model of biological change that included intelligent design, I would do well to distance the statement from my academic persona, using a pseudonym and locating the research lab in a distant galaxy.

Judging from some of the very thoughtful and thought-provoking genre fiction that is appearing in the United States today, this is already occurring.

Image Credit

Cervantes (19th-century engraving). Public domain.

Depending on which sources you believe, the family’s connection with the Clan Lamont goes back to a younger son of King Robert III of Scotland in the late 1300’s, though other accounts describe how a Lamont, fleeing the persecution of his clan, sought refuge with and assumed the name of Burden at their castle in Feddal.

According to The Red Book of Perthshire, the Burdens “…of Auchingarrich and Feddall claimed descent from the family of Lamont of Inneryne, in Argyllshire. James Burden, 4th of Auchengarrich submitted an account of his family to the Lord Lyon which was attested and verified by the then Chief of the Lamonts.”

In the 16th century the Burden’s owned estates in Auchingarrich but by 1659 had extensive lands including a mill in Feddal, near Braco, Perthshire. Here the Burdens would remain until the late 1800’s. Contemporary accounts indicate that comprising almost 1000 acres and with almost 1000 pounds annual revenue, Feddal was one of the most productive estates in Perthshire.

When James Burden died in 1710, his son, the younger James took possession of Feddal. A colourful character, he was known to be a crack swordsman and once challenged the famous Scottish outlaw, Rob Roy.

James Burden was no doubt a Jacobite, sympathetic to the Stuart claim to the throne of England and Scotland. We do know that his son-in-law, Archibald Menzies, who was married to his daughter Margaret, went off to join Bonnie Prince Charlie as the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The following obituary in the 1833 edition of The Gentleman’s Magazine explains his fate:

“Scotland-August 18. (die) At Muthill, aged 90, Miss Mary Campbell, sister to the late Mrs. Graham Burden of Feddal. She was led, while a child, to see the retreating forces of Charles Edward (i.e. Bonnie Prince Charlie) pass from Falkirk to Culloden. Her uncle, the Laird of Feddal and Shawn, in whose house she was brought up followed the fortunes of the Prince to battle, was never more heard of, alive or dead.”

Other branches of the Burden family achieved the status of nobility in Sweden for service to King Charles X and in France as well. The word “bourdon” means pilgrim in French and for all branches of the family the coat of arms is the “Bourdon Or” depicted as one of more golden pilgrim staves. For example this same motif is found in the arms of the Bourdon de Plessix family in Brittany, France.

Interestingly, Scottish court records of the 1800’s show that members of the Burden family were involved in an acrimonious legal dispute.

Perhaps as a result of this in 1878 George S. M. Burden, the last recorded Laird of Feddal, sold his estates for the then very handsome sum of 32,500 pounds and emigrated to the colonies. He is reported as having died in 1902 in an Adelaide, Australia newspaper, the last Lord of Feddal.

However, George Marshall in The Genealogist reports that the Burden “…family seems to have had a tendency to scatter, for in the West Indies were a governor of the Bermuda Islands 1622 and Colonel John Bourden, a member of Assembly of Jamaica 1675.” Henry Burden left Perthshire, Scotland in the early 1800’s and emigrated to Canada, then the United States. He subsequently becoming a wealthy steel magnate and was the first to invent a machine to mass produce horseshoes. Two of his grandsons married into the Vanderbilt family.

My great uncle, Captain Eugene “Gene” Burden was an Antarctic explorer who surveyed some of the last unexplored coastline in the world in the 1940. The Burden Passage at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula was named for him.

The Cecil Jr.

My grandfather, Captain George Burden, sailed three masted tern schooners all over the world in the early 1900’s. His adventures and misadventures included being rammed by a steamship in the Mediterranean, sinking in the mid-Atlantic and running aground at Cape St. Mary, Newfoundland. The remnants of the schooner, “Robert J. Dale” can still be seen there to this day. Once while in Spain, Captain Burden treated himself to front row seats at a bull fight. Apparently the bull jumped over the barricade and ended up almost on top of him causing him to scramble up and into the private box of King Alfonso XIII. Captain Burden received only the 9th certificate for a Master of a Coastwise Vessel issued in Newfoundland. It was received in 1929 after he ceased going to sea.

The Robert J. Dale

The Burden Museum and Gardens in Baton Rouge, Lousiana was once the Windrush Plantation belonging to the Burden family from the mid-1800’s until donated to Lousiana State University by the family.

Burden House, Burden Gardens: Louisiana State University

Despite Vanderbilt descendant Wendy Burden’s book, Dead End Gene Pool, the Burden family still appears to be alive and kicking.

Who knows where we’ll turn up next?

Please visit the Burden Family Association Facebook group started by George Burden and Zee Finley. All of our worldwide Burden family members are welcome.

REFERENCES

1. The Genealogist: Volume III pp.145-150 – by George W. Marshall, LL.D., Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries London, George Bell and Sons, Covent Garden, 1879
2. The Gentleman’s Magazine, Volume 103, Part 2; Volume 154, 1833
3. The Red Book of Perthshire, 2014 by Gordon MacGregor
4. Dunblane Traditions : Being a Series of Warlike and Legendary Narratives, Biographical Sketches of Eccentric Characters, &c. (1887) by John Monteath E. Johnstone, Bookseller MDCCCXXXV

Photo Credits

All photos courtesy of George Burden

Yet here I am in San Francisco on my way to the City Lights Bookstore. My heart is racing; my palms are sweaty – I can hardly contain my joy. A smile widens as my husband and I get closer to the shrine, to this historic spot where magic and artistry came together to form “The Word.” The poet’s haven, as mystical as San Francisco itself. City Lights Bookstore may be just a bookstore to some but for many it is where great minds met and collaborated and formed alliances, bridging gaps while creating new and exciting works of art.

Standing outside, I look in like a small girl in front of a candy store. I am looking at the books, the glorious books that line the shelves. I study the window face and the posters of upcoming events and books on sale. Photos are taken of me with shaking hands and a silly grin. I am here.

There is so much history here in this bookstore, stories of the men and women who adorned this space. Their poems, and their voices reading th poems in screams and sighs and whistles and shouts and in soft whispers. Did Jack Kerouac stand here? I can hear them all in my head – Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferllinghetti and Adrianne Rich, and the list goes on, of all the poets who mattered to some of us who listened.

The hardwood floor creaks and squeaks out sounds as I walk and in my mind I wish on some level to be stalked in this room by the ghosts of those men and women whose creative juice flowed and who made us all think. If I could just have gone back in time for a moment to hear these poets recite their work from this rocking chair, this poet’s chair. The Poets, who may grace the chair that sits by the window overlooking this city, draped most days in a fog, a symbolic cloak of mystery. These poets sat in the poet’s chair and spoke their poem and rhymed and sang their poems to men and women who clapped or snapped, who thanked the poet for the words that spilled out of his or her mouth and gave everyone courage, and hope and desire. The poets, the thinkers of generations past, rocked and roared and laughed and cursed the good, the bad and the indifferent. They worked this room.

The Poets’ Room, the beat room, where the beat generation lives on. Their stories, their poems line the shelves upon shelves. In this room with its bay window. Yellow wood floors, and tables filled with more books. Photos in black and white line the walls above the shelves, photos of the artists. It is quiet, like a church or a library. Patrons are respectful, knowing full well that this place is mystical.

Here I stand with the one I love sharing this most hallowed of experiences for me; it feels like a poem itself. I am in this place where activists and writers lament. Where time is spent browsing over books with the one you love or by yourself. Here I am in this place where poetry is still alive. I didn’t meet Lawrence; he wasn’t in that day. But what would I have said to him had he been there? I who travelled over 5,000 miles with my copy of Coney Island of the Mind picked up some 35 years ago in a bookstore at John Abbott College. I was hoping he would sign it, that he would come through that door and walk across that yellow wood floor and I would be waiting. How I loved that poem he wrote: “Waiting.“

I sit in the “poet’s chair“ and look around. I am here, in San Francisco, at City Lights Bookstore. This is something I have been “Waiting“ to do for such a long time and something I will not soon forget.

Image Credits

“Poet Chair at City Lights Bookstore” by Julie Jordan Scott. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

“City Lights Booksellers and Publishers” by Jay Galvin. Creative Commons Flickr. Some rights reserved.

My sister, two years older, was always outgoing and exceedingly popular no matter where we landed.  I went the other direction.  Whenever adults described me they always inserted a modifier:  they said I was terribly shy or horribly shy or, the most painful of all, painfully shy.  If “Most Likely to be Marked Absent by Mistake” had been a school contest category, I would have won it hands down.

Being shy was okay because I surrounded myself with words and pictures.  Compensating for a lack of nearby book stores, I visited the library often and earned an early reputation for racking up overdue fees.  It’s a habit I couldn’t break even as an adult and a shame I shall carry to my grave.

At home, I owned several volumes of Hardy Boys books, while an aunt would let me borrow several volumes from her collection of Oz books.  I was an early mash-up artist and, in my imagination, would think of unwritten books waiting to be published, such as The Hardy Boys in the Mystery of the Missing Tik-Tok in the Land of Oz or The Hardy Boys and the Sinister Captain Salt of Oz.  Some books are better left unwritten.

Of course, I inhaled comic books and had amassed the kind of collection that if owned today could easily cover my 401k losses from 2007.

I also loved reading the newspaper comics page, especially the Sunday edition and its colorful, over-sized drawings.  Thanks to an ingenious product known as Silly Putty, I could spend an entire afternoon with the Sunday comics (I told you I was easily amused).  I would take the putty, slap it on a favorite comic strip, press hard, and pull away, capturing an image of the strip.  And that’s when the fun really started, because by stretching the putty I could distort the image.  By the time I was done with stout and bearded Bluto, he was as thin as an Abba-Zaba bar at a taffy-pulling contest.

My favorite indoor pastime, however, was a word game a friend and I played, long before “Words with Friends” became a popular smartphone app.  We would comb through a dictionary for a long word, find one and write it at the top of a sheet of paper.  Next, writing furiously and separately for thirty minutes or more, we would compose as many words as we could think of, using only the letters at the top of the page.

“Antidisestablishmentarianism,” clocking in at a long 28 letters, was our favorite starter word.  We were told it was the longest word in the English language and had no reason to doubt it.  As an asthmatic, I could barely pronounce the word without taking big gulps or wheezing after the fifth or sixth syllable.

One day my partner-in-words brought in a medical dictionary and that single change lifted our game to an entirely new level:

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

Those early years were influential.  But I didn’t grow up to become a sales rep for Big Pharma.  From working as a journalist in the United States Navy to teaching English composition at a small university, from magazine cartooning and screenwriting to crafting user manuals and marketing materials in high tech, I remained loyal to my roots.  I was a “word and picture” kind of guy.  Still am.

Image Credit

Self-portrait of Mark Saunders – By Mark Saunders – All Rights Reserved

Guest Author Bio

Mark Saunders
Mark Saunders prefers to write short, humorous pieces befitting his height and attention span. His humorous memoir about dropping out and moving to Mexico, Nobody Knows the Spanish I Speak, was voted the #2 book in San Miguel in 2012. An award-winning playwright, screenwriter and cartoonist, Mark is a former winner of the Walden Fellowship, awarded to three Oregon writers or artists each year. Back in his drawing days, more than 500 of his cartoons were published nationally, in publications as diverse as The San Jose Mercury News, Writer’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and Twilight Zone Magazine. He once owned a Yugo (please don’t ask about the car). Mark is currently working on The Duke of San Miguel, a sequel to his humorous memoir about life south of the border.

Blog / Website: msaunderswriter.com

“What have I got in my pocket?”

I sit completely still, which is almost unheard of for me; after all, I have been labelled the squirmiest kid alive. He stops the story for the day and I feel it like a hollowness in my chest. What happens next? Does Bilbo make it out into the sunshine, or does the nasty creature eat him?

I squirm and bump the chair, making the clicking noise which Mr Duffy hates. He raises a thin eyebrow.

I am eleven years old and thus has begun my love affair with the scribblings of Mr. J.R.R. Tolkien.

~

The library is quiet and cool, and I am surrounded by the muted ticking of a large grandfather clock which sports carvings of bear cubs. It is the first day I am allowed into the adult section all by myself. I stare at the walls lined not with books but with possibilities. I run my hands over leather-bound volumes, their soft, smooth surfaces solid with promise under my seeking fingers.

The librarian smiles, the first smile I’ve received from her. She no longer seems bent on shooing me downstairs into the kid section. She introduces me to the Dewey Decimal System and I realize that finding a good book no longer means having to trip across the book I want, although I still love coming across an unexpected treasure.

She can’t see me over the stack of books in my arms as I bump into walls before finding the desk. My new world darkens when she tells me that three is the maximum I can sign out. Two hours later I am finally able to leave the building. Decision making can be arduous.

~

Small waves gently push the boat against the dock with a rhythmic thump, thump. The resonating splashes under the wooden planks and against the hull will forever signify summer to me. A light breeze ruffles my hair as I stretch out across the seats of the big vessel. My feet dangle over the sides and an occasional splash of cool water tickles my toes.

There is a layer of detritus strewn across the floor. My shoes, towel, lunch, and a bucket with cleaning supplies sit untouched. I am reading The Man of the Forest. The Lodge has the entire collection and I am systematically making my way through each book.

My love affair with Mr. Zane Grey ends almost as soon as it begins. But for a brief time my fourteen-year-old heart is smitten with slow-speaking cowboys, lonely campfires, and wild horses.

~

The road stretches flat and straight in front of me. My little Jetta wagon is packed to the rafters with “stuff.” I am on kilometer 300 of a six-thousand-kilometer journey. I pull the first CD out of the case and watch it slide into the dash. A few brief notes of music play, then the narrator’s voice begins to read.

I’ve quit my job, sold my home, sold or given away most of my possessions. I am leaving my old life behind and heading all the way across the country. It’s exciting; I feel light, happy, scared, and a little in shock. I have no home to go to – only a small travel trailer waits at the end of the journey – but in the meantime a small girl has been left on a ship and no one knows how she got there, or who her parents are. I change the disc a hundred kilometers later.

~

“It’s not working,” my mom says. “This is stupid.”

I sigh and sit down beside her and go over the steps again. As usual, she pays little attention; she is more interested in telling me about her neighbour and what she cooked for supper. I finally get her to push the right button and she giggles as it is replaced with a new one.

“If the writing is too small,” I tell her, “you can increase the font like this.”

“That’s better,” she exclaims. “Leave it like that.” Over the next year she makes her way through a few of the free books which have come loaded on her new Kobo. Then she’s admitted into the hospital.

Even though it’s noisy and frenetic, she mostly sleeps. I sit beside her and read while she dreams her final dream.

Image Credit

“Books” by Henry… . www.flickr.com. Some rights reserved.

High school: the thought of it made my stomach sick and my skin crawl. I could actually feel the anxiety down, down deep in my gut. I was too young for high school, and yet I was too old for high school. Either way, the whole thought of going on a bus to school at seven every morning consumed my summer.

There was also the battle with my parents about where I was going to go to school – public or private? At the time I had a very strong religious conviction. I prayed a lot; I asked God to intervene on a daily basis in my life. Imagine. How tough could my life have been at thirteen? But there you go: we often think children don’t deal with stress, but they do.

So do my parents send me to private or public? I really don’t think they had the money to send me to private school; I think they were waiting for me to put up a fight about private, and I was torn. I really wanted to be with my friends as they were what was important to me at the time. The bond I had with my friends in elementary school was so strong to me (whether they felt the same way, I don’t know). But for me my friends were what got me through my days. And so I decided I would go to public school just as all my friends were doing.

My mother and father both supported this decision and so my summer was spent worrying and contemplating what high school would be like.

At thirteen my life was pretty limited as to what I could do. I spent most nights that summer at home. My parents were often out at parties or events and I was designated babysitter for my elderly Aunt.

“Martha, we are leaving now,” my mother yelled from downstairs.

“Okay,” I replied. Then there would be a pause and my mother would continue on.

“Don’t forget to check on Gert, Martha. Make sure she hasn’t fallen or anything. Alright, your father and I are going now. Good night. Don’t wait up for us.”

“Okay, I will, bye mom.” I answered back to the voice. Engrossed in a book I didn’t want to put down, I continued reading. Most days and nights were spent doing things like that: reading or writing or watching television. That would pretty much sum up my summer.

So while I had those free moments at home I would do what most teenagers do; I would wallow in self pity and teenage angst. Fawn over boys who probably never even knew I existed, and listened to music. Music and dancing, neither of which I am good at but both of which I so immensely enjoy and rejoice in!

I would put on Frank Sinatra. Man, how I loved Frank and that big band sound! And I memorized every lyric to every song on his Greatest Hits album. I would belt out My Way and Summer Breeze and I would often become the conductor, orchestrating when and where each instrument would come in. It was a good thing my aunt was deaf.

I listened to other pieces of music as well, from classical to pop, but Ole Blue Eyes was one of my favorites. I would also invent dances and dance around our living room as though I were a fair maiden gypsy dancing for gold. I would dance till the sweat dripped down my forehead and I would wipe it off with my shirt sleeve, get a drink of water and start over again.

Dancing made me feel whole. In that living room there was just me, the dance and the music, loud music, and I would be lost in it. Lost in the movement of my body, and in how perfectly everything worked, how my hand softly creased upward or downward, how high I could kick my leg up in the air, how softly I could pivot down, down till I lay sprawled out on the carpet exhausted and filled with absolute joy.

At thirteen you don’t realize just how marvelous life is; it’s too hard to see it’s beauty. Writing this piece I feel the urge to weep for that young woman who so loved to dance, and who loved the sound of any type of music and how miraculously the music and the dance fit together. How awesome was that, that your body could move so passionately to music! At thirteen it moved without effort without fatigue.

Summer at thirteen was a time of gathering up the strength for what was to come. Long days of rest – of reading in the back yard, sitting under a tree in the quiet shade. Walks to girlfriends’ houses to hang out, and chat and experiment with cigarettes.

“Hey Marth, want to go down to the bowling alley and buys some cigarettes?” my friend Al asked me one day.

“Oh, okay. Do you have any money?” I asked her.

“Well, I stole a couple of dollars from my mom’s purse. Do you think you could get the rest?” she asked.

“I’ll try. Wait here,” I said to her at our front door.

“Martha, who’s that at the door?” my mom yelled from upstairs. We did a lot of yelling in our house.
“It’s Alison,”

“Oh, what are you two doing?”

“Nothing, mom. We’re just going to the park or something. I won’t be long,” I yelled up to her while I rummaged through her purse looking for loose change.

After discovering the bottom of my mother’s purse was like a gold mine I managed to scrounge enough nickels and dimes in order for Al and I to buy our first pack of smokes. Export “A .“ We told the man at the bowling alley that the cigarettes were for my mom. Thankfully both of us looked a lot more innocent than we actually were. We opened up that pack of smokes and sat by the train tracks and smoked the whole pack in about an hour.

“I don’t get what is so great about this do you, Marth?” Al said to me.

“No, I think your right; it kind of hurts the throat eh?” I responded, probably looking rather green as I did.

“Your parents smoke, so you must be used to this?” Al asked me

“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, not really knowing what she meant. Most parents would have tortured their children by making them smoke a pack of cigarettes and here we were doing the torturing all by ourselves. We were, I suppose, a bit masochistic when it came to smoking. But it would be something to tell our other friends. Wouldn’t they be impressed that we smoked a pack of Export “A” in about a minute and half?

“Do you have any gum, Marth? “ Alison asked me

“No, but we better get some,” I said and went back into the bowling alley and bought some gum. We ate the whole pack of gum too on the way home.

Watching old black and white movies on our new color television, mostly musicals, like Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Carousel, and West Side Story. And I would write.
I would write long wordy poems about war, about love about the trees. I would write and imagine myself as a great poet one day, reading my poetry in front of large crowds who would weep and cheer and understand exactly how I felt at that moment of writing. I would spend many nights with my copy books, thinking of rhymes and hoping I could find a rhyme that fit. Cool, school, hope, dope. My poems were anything but fancy but they had a rhythm and to me they were masterpieces of extraordinary genius. When I finished my writing I would gather all my books and hide them under my bed so my brother or my parents wouldn’t find them. They were private and none needed to know what I was writing about, except the imaginary audiences that I would conjure up.

Those poems and stories are still with me. The books are hidden away still. To read them makes me feel sad – so many years ago, so many words ago. And the words have kept on coming, and the years have too. The years have come too quickly it seems. When did I become middle aged. How did that happen? Yet Frank is still around, those songs embedded in my brain. Those moments in the living room performing for nobody but myself, with absolute abandon, waving my arms around conducting the orchestra or holding something in my hand that resembled a microphone and belting out “ I did it my way. “  Content that Frank would have been proud of me.
And I must say there were times when I would get caught in the act. Times when my parents would show up early out of the blue and there I would be in prefect pose, my eyes closed, and my lips pursed singing something and I would hear, “Marthaaaaa, turn that down. How can you listen to music that loud?” It would take me a little while to even notice someone was there. And when I did, oh, the embarrassment, the feeling I had been caught at something horrible. It was as though all the joy and intensity of the moment had deflated in an instant.

“Why are you home?” I would ask, turning off the stereo.

“No reason.”

“Oh.”  Then I would go up to my room and quietly listen to the radio, praying that my parents would not go around telling everyone about how Martha pretends she’s a singer.

When the time finally came for me to get on that early morning bus I was crushed, my spirit broken by the confines of high school. No more, music, no more dancing, no more freedom. At least I still had cigarettes. Jr. high was nothing like I thought it would be; it was worse, and it got even more anti-climactic as I continued on. But I had the summer to look forward to again: the music, and the dance, and the words, which over time and years really did improve, unlike my dancing or singing. I always had words, those I read and those I wrote.

Image Credit

Photo by Martha Farley. All rights reserved.

~

Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruelest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.

With these lines the artist (as artist) is described, and once again we can, if we choose, shift worlds, since all the examples noted can be found here, and in our history. This blurring is extended in the next paragraph.

If he lived a handful of breaths from this moment, or if he lived a hundred thousand years, he would fight – for something, a truth, that he could not even name. It was, perhaps, the god behind the gods of colour. The god that offered both creation and recognition, that set forth the laws of substance and comprehension, of outside and inside and the difference between the two.

Here I make the closest connection to our own, monotheistic, world.

He wanted to meet that god. He wanted a word or two with that god. He wanted, above all, to look into its eyes, and see in them the truth of madness.

As an artist, I am with K here, in every way.

With brush and desire, I will make a god.

This line foreshadows K’s reappearance in the ten-volume series, which temporally occurs thousands of years later.

Watch me.

But in this moment, as he rode through swords of light and shrouds of shadow, upon the trail of blind savagery, Kadaspala was himself like a man without eyes.

Third time we return to those shafts of light, but now their emotional context is stark: violence (swords) and grief (shroud).

The painted face was everywhere. His fingers could not stop painting it, in the air, like mystical conjurations, like evocations of unseen powers, like a warlock’s curse and a witch’s warding against evil.

Recall K’s belief that what his fingers describe defines and shapes reality.

Fingers that could close wounds at a stroke, that could unravel the bound knots of time and make anew a world still thriving with possibilities – that could do all these things (god-like power), yet tracked on in their small scribings, trapped by a face of death.

Yet, for all that power, he is a helpless creator, and why? Because he feels.

Because the god behind the gods was mad.

Direct and logical conclusion to his thesis. The proof is on the ground all around him.

I shall paint the face of darkness. I shall ride the dead down the throat of that damned god. I, Kadaspala, now avow this: world, I am at war with you. Outside – you, outside, hear me! The inside shall be unleashed. Unleashed.

I shall paint the face of darkness. And give it a dead child’s eyes.

Because in darkness, we see nothing.

In darkness, behold, there is peace.

The section closes with K’s avowal, a reaffirmation of his role as an artist, but drawn tightly back into his own world. There can be instances where it works to keep that metafictional blurring open to close a scene, but not here. The scene has to close with a firm re-anchoring in the fictional world, and this is why “darkness” is brought to the fore. The last line is delivered (in my mind) in the bitterest tones imaginable, with thudding emphasis on the word “peace.” Because by this point, isn’t “peace” synonymous with death? And doesn’t this echo back to his opening thoughts on the gods of colour and their absence? So, K continues on his journey, but it will be into a place devoid of all colour. This too is foreshadowing.

Now, as writers you must be wondering: to what extent is this guy aware of all this stuff? I assure you that one cannot deconstruct as part of the initial creative process. No, what I’m trying to show here is how you can (and, if you work hard at it, will) reach a place where you can do this with your own work. It’s down to discovering the potential of language, and the fullest extent of your control over it as writers, and this comes from practice and lots and lots of thinking – about your creative process, about what is possible and how it might be achieved, about the effects of what you put on the page. I emphasise this last bit because it is where you will find your revelation as an artist (in this case, as a writer), your blinding moment of realization and recognition. It is, to put it bluntly, fucking breathtaking what you can do with language, and the degree to which you can set forth a sequence of words to convey and trigger psychological effects in your reader. But bear in mind, you need to free yourself first: free yourself to feel those effects. A writer who has never shed tears would have a long way to go, not just as a writer, but as a person. We cannot create from an intellectual starting point: it must be an emotional one, beginning with the impulse to create in the first place. The only role of the intellectual perspective is in the structuring and ordering (the craft) of what you’re doing. The joy lies in fusing the emotional impulse with the intellectual craft, until they exist in a seamless state.

Deconstruction exercises like this one might suggest that instinct is suspect, or unimportant. Not so. Instincts are powerful forces of recognition and reason: they just fool you into thinking they come from some formless, emotional, state of the subconscious. I would suggest the opposite: instincts know what work. Now it’s down to you to look those instincts in the eye, and work out why they want what they want.

No writing course can give you the reason for writing – the reason you possess inside. Nor should it have any business telling you what to write, or what to write about. The only thing it can do is reveal to you the tools of the craft.

As an aside, I was being groomed to begin teaching a creative writing course at a Canadian university, wherein I would teach a workshop on writing in Science Fiction and Fantasy. But then we left the country. Thinking back on it, I would probably have been the worst choice possible, as not only does my work often subvert the tropes of my chosen genre, but I also see no real distinction, in terms of craft, between all forms of fiction, and would no doubt have argued from that position, which would have made a workshop in SF and Fantasy kinda pointless, huh?

Cheers

SE

Image Credit

Photograph published with permission of author

~

There were other corpses. A man and a woman, their backs cut and stabbed as they sought to hold their bodies protectively over those children they could reach, not that it had helped, since those children had been dragged out and killed. A dog, lying half cut in two just above the hips, the hind limbs lying one way, the fore limbs and head the opposite way. Its eyes, too, were flat.

Badly written clause, highlighted here, and obviously something I need to fix in the revision. This paragraph elaborates on details of the scene, but still within a human context (mother, father, children), emphasizing once again the brutality of the murders. Connecting the flat eyes of the dog to that of the child points to the dehumanizing necessary to kill, but also raises the disturbing query of what’s the difference between child and dog, “human” and animal?

When traveling through the forest, Kadaspala was in the habit of leaving the main track, of finding these lesser paths that took him through small camps such as this one. He had shared meals with the quiet forest people, with the Deniers although they denied nothing of value that he could see. They lived in familiarity and in love, and wry percipience and wise humility, and they made art that took Kadaspala’s breath away.

This offers K’s relationship with these people, moving us back to a personal context, though for K that context is still one of art. But we’ve begun the return journey to K as a person, a feeling entity, and this is important for what is to come in this section. It also provides more details on the Deniers, humanizing them as well.

The figurines, the masks, the beadwork – all lost in the burnt huts now.

How violence destroys beauty. This foreshadows a major scene with K later in the novel.

Someone had carved a wavy line on the chest of the dead boy. It seemed that worship of the river god was a death sentence now.

Cultural context reinforced.

He would not bury these dead. He would leave them lying where they were. Offered to the earth and the small scavengers that would take them away, bit by bit, until the fading of flesh and memory were one.

This points to K’s understanding of these forest people, as integral parts of nature.

He painted with his fingers, setting in his mind where all the bodies were lying in relation to one another; and the huts and the dead dog, and how the sun’s light struggled through the smoke to make every detail scream.

Through his painting gesture, we get a summary of the salient details, but in an emotionless tone, a running through of a shopping list, all of which leads up to underscore the emotional impact of the last word in the paragraph. Juxtaposition on an emotional level can be very effective.

Then, kicking his mule forward, he watched as the beast daintily stepped over the boy’s body, and for the briefest of moment hid every detail in shadow.

This seems a small detail, a simple description which sets him moving again, but it is crucial. On the one hand, the arrival of shadow foreshadows later events in the novel and in the series (especially regarding the Deniers), and on the other hand, it thematically leads us into the next train of thoughts, as K considers the hiding/disguising effect of the loss of light. Backing up, consider the use of the word “daintily” and give some thought to the emotion it registers in you, the reader. It is delicate, and anthropomorphic, which is fine because K is watching it (POV again). What if I had elected something else here? The animal roughly stepping on the body or kicking it carelessly. A whole different emotional context would be established here, one that would demand some kind of response from K: would he beat his mount for its indifference? How does that fit with K’s character? It doesn’t, so here, to avoid complications that I feel are problematic, I use the language to smooth the transition.

In the world of night promised by Mother Dark, so much would remain forever unseen. He began to wonder if that would be a mercy. He began to wonder if this was the secret of her promised blessing to all her believers, her children. Darkness now and forever more. So we can get on with things.

Welcome to an unseeing world (but then, you know all about an unseeing world). This is an artist speaking, an artist wondering why he bothers; an artist who sees his world turning into a place that makes him, and his art, irrelevant. And then, from the pain in his soul, from its despair and exhaustion, he wonders if that irrelevance would be merciful. But the last line rejects that notion, because it is bitter as hell. At this point, the artist as the enemy of authority is subtly suggested, which leads to what’s coming in this section.

A score or more horses had taken the trail he was now on. The killers were moving westward. He might well meet them if they had camped to rest up from their night of slaughter. They might well murder him, or just feed him.

We’ve started moving again, leading to questions of what waits ahead. The two possibilities raised by K for when he meets the killers come across as flat, which supports the next paragraph’s opening statement.

Kadaspala did not care. He had ten thousand faces in his head, and they were all the same.

POV control can permit the writer a natural shorthand. Consider the previous two lines. If I wasn’t as close to K in this point of view, I might have had to write something like: “Kadaspala did not care, because he had ten thousand….” But the tight POV permits me to dispense with “because.” So it’s cleaner and smoother.

The memory of Enesdia seemed far away now. If he was spared, he would ride for her, desperate with need. For the beauty he dared not paint, for the love he dared not confess. She was where the gods of colour gathered all the glory in their possession. She was where he would find the rebirth of his faith.

This reinforces elements of K’s character noted in other sections with him (his unnatural obsession with his sister).

Image Credit

Photograph published with author’s permission.