It Took All Year to Write this Post... and One Night

 I awoke from a very strange dream early this morning and, instead of my usual m.o. of saying, when a thought comes to me, “I should write that down,” and then turning over and going back to sleep, this time I actually wrote it down: 

What fantasy teaches us –  

We are taught that what is true and what is real are synonymous. 

And we are taught that believing and knowing are the same thing. 

What fantasy teaches us is that what is real is often not true, and what is true is often not real. 

And what we believe is often not what we know, and what we know is often not what we believe. 

And that is why so many hate fantasy. 

Not because it’s an “escape,” but an acknowledgment of our contradictions. 

And with that knowledge, whether we’re free or imprisoned, we can become truly dangerous. 

Fantasy can, or at least may, give someone not only the power to recognize the words “true,” “real,” “believe,’ “know,” but to change them. 

... And then I went back to sleep.  

It’s been a strange year for everyone, but not “strange” for everyone in the same way. Every journey has been a little (or a lot) different.  

For me, the challenges have been somewhat personal. I’ve found myself in a position that I wouldn’t have imagined a few years ago, but one I would have hoped for a decade or so back.  

I’m writing, though not as much writing fiction as I’d like. 

I’m teaching, though not necessarily the subjects I’d imagined I’d be teaching. Still, the subjects are in the neighborhood of my “area of expertise,” as some colleague might call it. “Foundations in Creative Writing” – I’m supposed to know about them. “English Authors from Beowulf to Blake” – would not have been surprising in grad school, but fifty years ago if you had told me I would be teaching Chaucer, Marlowe, and Pope, I would have laughed. When it came to literature, I cared little about what was written yesterday. I wanted to read what was being written today. I wanted to read what was being written tomorrow. My journey through literature has been a backward progression.  

The one that really had me – and still does – perplexed is the Fantasy Writing Workshop. I’ve known and read fantasy fiction for years.  

But I can’t say I know what it is. 

The literary categorical definitions have been little help. The one quote that has really helped was from Gene Wolfe, who said something along the lines (too lazy to look it up now) that it is the one thing in the universe that is bigger than the universe. There is more going on than “primary” and “secondary” worlds, with respectful apologies to J. R. R. Tolkien.  

What is primary to some is secondary to others, and vice versa. There are times when it seems that the primary world is merely an extension, or an appendix, of the secondary. 

I know many of my students want merely to write medieval idylls with dragons, elves, and fairies, but I can’t help feeling there’s more to this. 

Some of that feeling may be personally driven. For the past couple of years I’ve been watching my mother, now 92, descending into dementia. And I believe part of the reason why it’s been so difficult for me to watch her descent is because, for her, all her life, the lines between primary and secondary worlds never really existed. What she believed to be true and real was always incredibly flexible.  

It wasn’t that she was “merely” a liar, although she lied. It wasn’t that she rearranged facts for the convenience of the immediate circumstance – that's just part of it. It wasn’t that she chose a “make believe” world at times over the “real” one. I think, honestly, that she couldn’t tell the difference between the make believe world and the real one. 

Mentally ill? Not entirely. Not necessarily. I think millions of people do much the same thing. The only difference may be in degree. Some people are just good at it. 

I may be one of them. After all, I am my mother’s son, along with being my father’s son. 

Funny. Both of them excoriated literary fantasy to some degree. And yet both them lived intensely interior fantasies. Perhaps that is their legacy to me. And it may be why the traditional definitions of fantasy have left me cold. Something’s incomplete about them. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. 

And perhaps that’s where the dream came from – the dream that left me awake at 4:45 in the morning with those words in my head. It’s taken me a year, maybe two years, to figure them out somewhere in some part of my conscious or unconscious. 

For a large part of my life, I have felt that my life was a long, sloppy, unfortunate accident. I was the wrong person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. I was a “rough draft” of a human being that it would have been better to erase and start all over again, were the laws of the land not written to prevent such corrections. 

I’m beginning to think that maybe the accident was not so unfortunate after all. Even more – that it may not be an accident after all. 

That’s something new for me. And it may be that the twists and turns of our current pandemic have played a role in getting me in that frame of mind. 

I’m not saying pandemics are good, but it’s perhaps possible that not all of their outcomes are bad. 

Let’s see what the next dream tells me. 

By the way, Happy New Year.  

 

What I Learned from Teaching What I Don’t Know

 

My most often used phrase on this blog: It’s been a while.

I’ve been busy.

For the first time, I’ve taught what can be considered a “full load” for a working college teacher. Nine semester hours, three courses. In total, just under seventy students. And none of these courses were anything with which I am intimately familiar: Tolkien, Fantasy Writing, Foundations in Creative Writing.

Let me amend that. I’m not familiar with teaching those classes, though I have some familiarity with the basics in each case.

But I had to put each course together by scratch, no matter who had taught it before or under whatever circumstances. I can’t teach someone else’s course any more than I  can wear someone else’s clothes.

And I had to put each course together as online classes.

Thank you, Covid-19. Teaching online is never my first choice, though I’ve considered creating online courses before. Considered.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Be assured, it’s more work than you would bargain for.

Never in my wildest dreams (and my dreams can get pretty wild) would I have imagined myself teaching a course on Tolkien. I mentioned that before, when I was dragooned into finishing Jana Tuzar’s course for the spring semester.

But here’s what I learned (other than that I know little or nothing about Tolkien): when you teach in an arts college, allow your students to make their final projects art projects. Let them paint their final exams, or design them for the stage, or interpret them musically, or through oral interpretation, or re-stage scenes from The Lord of the Rings as comedy sketches. These students won’t let you down.

The course Foundations in Creative Writing is supposed to acquaint students with many aspects of the creative writing world. Apparently, it’s also supposed to acquaint them with the lingo that will make them sound like grad students in an MFA program.

Forget that.

Find some interesting exercises and let them go to town. They won’t do what you think they’re going to do, but you’ll be surprised with what they come up with.

And give them interesting things to read. My students ended up reading a lot of science fiction because, since I’m not teaching any science fiction courses this term, I had no one else to give them to. Chances are they’ve never read anything like it before, and the stories present the notion that they can write in ways that they hadn’t imagined they could try before. Not always, but it’s worth a shot. In many ways, my Foundations students were the best ones I’ve had in a long time.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned from teaching all these courses this term has to do with the inclusion and/or intrusion of some critical language in the creative process.

You can’t go far into reading Tolkien studies without running into the term “secondary world.” That, according to critics, is where the fantasy world is. The primary world is “our” world, which runs by the rules Nature set out for us. The secondary world is Wonderland, or Oz, or Narnia, or Neverland – the place that follows its own rules and can contain magic, dragons, elves, fairies, giants, shape-shifters, and whatever else you can come up with.

One of the students in my Fantasy Writing Workshop is very interested in writing fantasy set in current times. In the bookstore, you’ll find all sorts of books shelved together or labeled as “urban fantasy.” We’d hit upon a quote from Flannery O’Connor: “I would even go so far as to say that the person writing a fantasy has to be even more strictly attentive to concrete detail than someone writing in a naturalistic vein – because the greater the story's strain on the credulity, the more convincing the properties in it have to be.” (from “Writing Short Stories” in Mystery and Manners).

Suddenly it occurred to me: what you need to do is take these convenient labels, primary world and secondary world, and turn them around. What we think of as the primary world is actually the secondary world, and it is contained in the world of fantasy. The “real” world, of magic and dragons and all the rest, is all around us, in hiding, in disguise. What the author, through the characters, has to do is see through the veil that the “mundane” magic-less world throws around us.

I’d given the class an exercise, “Magic All Around You,” based on that premise. I wanted them to come up with a fantasy story based on what they could see out a window. A closed-up doorway to an abandoned warehouse might just be a “portal” to another world (“portal” is another word you’ll find is popular with critics). The woman at the window in the building across may be a sorceress. Statues may come to life at three a.m. A box of candy may contain the souls of the damned. What we see may not be all there is to see in any given place at any given time.

We played around with this a little in my Tolkien class, too. So much is made of Tolkien’s secondary world of Middle-earth. So I brought in the work of “outsider” sculptor Tom Every, AKA Dr. Evermor, and the music of Sun Ra, and how these artists assert their secondary worlds into our primary world.

Most of us, in fact, have lived with secondary worlds in our imaginations most of our lives. It is a survival skill in a universe that demands our sublimation into a conformity we’re told is necessary but really is no such thing.

To quote Luis Buñuel: “Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether.”

The important thing is to get past the labels. Or reverse them. Or stretch them out of shape. I used to quote Damon Knight about science fiction not being a literary category but a point of view – a way of looking at the world. The same is true of fantasy. And it may as well be said that it’s true of “realistic” fiction too.

And if I ever get the chance to teach this course again, I have a better handle now on where I should take it.