Gridley Fires

Deep Inside The Events of History

 

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The Divorce of Henry VIII - - The Untold Story From Inside The Vatican, by Catherine Fletcher.

One of the slams against history, one that fiction often attempts to solve, is that history texts, research papers, biographies, and history-as-consumer-nonfiction often strike a pose from afar, leaving too many details out. Such history often supplies the broadbrush generalizations, but supplies all too little supporting verbiage, often from only one perspective.

Such isn’t the case with Catherine Fletcher’s book. She’s chosen a most specific segment of a famous  life – in Henry’s case, only one-eighth of his married life. Still, the story as she tells it is almost too broad to carry out in specifics. But she does. As this somewhat melodramatic episode begins, Henry is disenchanted with first wife, Catherine, because she won’t bear him a male heir. He shuns her, bent on marrying Anne Boleyn, but England is still a Catholic nation, and Pope Clement VII won’t grant him a divorce.

 

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Toward the difficult end of disposing of Catherine, Henry enlists the help of the Casali family, who represent Henry’s quest for divorce before the Vatican. The details are too voluminous and tedious to even paraphrase here, but there’s a war going on between The Holy Roman Empire and France, involving the various duchies and city-states of Italy. This of course involves Clement, but he’s in no frame of mind to grant a divorce, anyway. So Henry enlists the aid of others to gather legal and moral opinions on the divorce from a number of academic institutions – and he succeeds in making a case for the divorce.

Meanwhile, Henry is cohabiting with Anne, and Clement becomes even more adamant about the divorce – to the point that a debate begins concerning Henry's possible excommunication. At this point, Henry severs the Church of England from Catholicism. Ironically, Anne bears him another daughter, Elizabeth Tudor, destined to become queen. And many of those who have aided Henry in his cause meet ill ends – including the Casali brothers.

This book is eminently researched, and the author’s story told in detail, in an often conversational voice. However, the book isn’t light nonfiction reading – the author has simply chosen to provide too many historical details, and too few personal, emotional details for that. She has, however, pieced together a lot of disparate history into a taut timeline that should be of use to novelists and historical researchers interested in these events specifically and in the nature of European diplomacy during this era. Toward that end, while it can be a difficult read, it’s a valuable book.

 

My rating: 16 of 20 stars

 

 

 

The Writer's World

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Writers! Think you have nothing to write about? You're hopelessly blocked? Take a look around. If not at the world at large, which is going through more significant changes than at anytime in the past century, then at the good old U.S. of A. Just to list a few topics within those borders to set your readers' blood a-boil:

• Two wars, and an urge by some here to get into another
• Sexual politics
• The new immigration
• Climate change
• Religion - - or not
• Technology
• Education
• Alternative communities

Use one (or more of these) to set an impending crisis in play, invent characters to act it out...and you're suddenly 50 pages into a new novel.

Now, who said you had writer's block?

The Millions : Bolaño’s Last, Great Secret

 I've grown more and more interested in Roberto Bolaño's work since I read 2666. Many of his fans are applying for postumous cult status for him as a fantabulist, a magical realist, and that's all right, I suppose. But I don't think he's in the same class with the other Latin Americans ascribing to that literary sensibility; in fact he may be miscast there. He's more of a social realist clothed in mystery. Still, his work is unique, and he has a voice and  literary style that sets him apart from any crowd. Most importantly, his writing allows readers to view the world through a different lens, and that's immanently valuable.

1.Next year marks the tenth anniversary of the death of Roberto Bolaño, the prolific genre-bender whose narratives and exile from Chile began seriously enchanting the literary world in 2005, the year The New Yorker began publishing his short stories. Altogether, nine stories have appeared in the magazine, including January’s “Labyrinth,” which accompanied a curious photograph. But I’ll get to that in a moment. First, a bit about Bolaño’s following, which may be credited in part to his early exit from said world at the age of 50, by way of liver failure. For the uninitiated, “Gomez Palacio,” his posthumous New Yorker debut about a tormented writer interviewing for a teaching post in a remote Mexican town, tends to work a kind of magic. A ragged copy of the issue in which “Gomez Palacio” appeared caught critic Francine Prose in a waiting room: “I was glad the doctor was running late,” she wrote later in reviewing Last Evenings on Earth, “so I could read the story twice, and still have a few minutes left over to consider the fact that I had just encountered something extraordinarily beautiful and (at least to me) entirely new.”

via www.themillions.com

The Internet and IRL

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Writers who have had the good fortune to have something published a few times a year invariably look to the Internet for its marketing possibilities. There are several avenues open on the Net for self-promotion, and my experience tells me this:

Facebook/Twitter - with almost a billion active users, you can easily get lost in that billion. Facebook ads? I've found that they draw "Likes" to your advertised writing projects but few readers/buyers.

Websites - same story, more or less. With some half a billion websites out there, you may get lost in the shuffle. The trick here is to link to other websites, blogs, etc. This increases your chances of being noticed in the ever-growing crowd.

Blogs - Ditto. Roughly the same number. Personal blogs will probably grow unnoticed, even with your well-written literary derring-do. Opt to blog in a ready-made community of readers/writers. Again this increases your chances of being noticed.

Whatever your mode, the thing to remember is that in order to attract readers/viewers, don't just talk about your product - let the "Net lurkers" get to know you - your interests, likes and dislikes.

Net surfers these days do so on mobile divices - while at stop lights, on the bus or train, sneaking peeks in class or at work, so get to the point quickly in your posts, and post often. The more posts, the better the odds of developing a noticed "brand."

To me, though, what this means is getting back to IRL (In Real Life). That is, make person-to person contacts: set up readings, talk to book groups, indie bookstores, libraries, shop owners who might carry your books, etc., on consignment. Always leave business cards. Get people's e-mail addresses. Once you have an IRL fan base, the Internet can help you stay connected and - possibly - grow your audience. 

Belles-Lettres

Arts and Letters – Issue 26, Spring 2012

image via gcsu.edu 

I’ve become somewhat jaded about literary magazines, particularly those sponsored and published by the various colleges and universities, but not this time. This publication by Georgia College in Milledgeville, GA, contains some of the best writing by up and coming writers I’ve seen between print covers (btw, A&L also now offers an e-version).

This being a publication from a Southern college, I’m pleased to see pieces from all cultural angles and all subject matter, although death seems oddly prominent in this collection. Of particular interest to this reader is a full-tilt drama by James C. McKelly, a fiction piece by Courtney Marcello Norton, an interview with fiction writer, Liza Wieland, and a clever piece of poetry by Stephanie Ivanoff.

If I have a criticism, it’s a general one: some pieces seem overdone, length-wise, but that’s mostly a question of taste on my part. Kudos to writers and editors alike.

 

My rating: 17 of 20 stars

 

 

 

Making Scant History Work For Fiction

I'm still working on an historical novel set in medieval times. Of course, this necessitated a lot of research; still, that age didn't have a scintilla of the informational resources that we have today, so imagination - tempered with logic - has its work cut out for it.

image via historyforkids.org

I'm both enjoying and concerned with not trivializing the era's sensibilities by writing in cliches, i.e., it would be easy to oversimplify the era's foundling Christianity, Europe's almost completely uneducated public, or to demean the ruling famlies of medieval Europe.

This serves  notice that I should watch myself as I pick my way through these areas of that era.

Bob Mayer's Blog | WRITE IT FORWARD

Writers: if you feel your career is jammed up, going nowhere, read this post by Bob Mayer. He's spot on concerning who cares most about your writing.

image via writeitforward.wordpress.com

When I give presentations to writers I joke that the difference between being aggressive and obnoxious is that the aggressive writer has a good manuscript and the obnoxious one has a bad manuscript.  For over a decade that’s always gotten a good laugh.

via writeitforward.wordpress.com

A Woman's View Of Life In Islam

Infidel, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

image via straitjacketsmagazine.com 

 

I recently found this book on the living room bookshelves, one I soon learned the missus had read for her book discussion group. I was familiar with this woman’s role in Dutch Parliament, her stand against the worst acts Islam has committed against the human condition, but this book was been a revelation.

Ayaan (I’ll use that name so as not to confuse regarding her many-tiered family names) grew up in Somalia under the tutelage of two strong, severe women – her mother and grandmother. In that African tribal culture of Islam, Ayaan contends, men are given carte blanche to wear anything, do most anything, while the women are constantly beaten, are subjugated in every way imaginable. One of the most poignant passages of the book has to do with the childhood circumcision of Ayaan and her sister, Haweya. Various female tissues are cut away, without the use of pain medication or anesthesia, and the vagina sewn shut with only a tine aperture allowing urine to exit. When the women marry, it’s necessary for their men to enter forcibly. Again a painful process for women.

Ayaan’s family moves constantly, trying to escape the growing tribal feuds, trying to find work, trying to find a place of physical and emotional refuge for the women. Sadly, the cultural practices follow them, as Ayaan discovered when she sought refuge in the Netherlands. There, she questioned her faith; consequently, death threats dogged her, and the Dutch government had to provide security for her.

Her move away from Islam was obviously the reason for the book’s name, but there seems as well a larger umbrella for that title. In the Netherlands, Ayaan found it necessary to defend sexual as well as gender freedom, and to stand forthrightly for women’s rights worldwide.

The book is written, as most memoirs are, in a conversational voice. For a Somali for whom English is at least a third or fourth language, it’s hard to criticize her diction or writing style. Still, that voice is remarkably strong and resilient, as is the woman herself. This book will educate you from the inside about African culture, about the repression of women under that version of Islam, all in the voice of a woman who has been there.

 

My rating:  16 of 20 stars

 

 

Examining Story Anew

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My writing partner, Lyn, and I are taking divergent paths in writing - which is extremely OK. I'll leave the explanation of her writing path to her (she's a teacher and most capable of articulating her excellent writing style and structure), but I've taken a rather experimental path. I haven't committed to experimental prose, per se, but I am in the thrall of J.M. Coetzee's structural experiments. Again, I won't go into his writing - it's  available everywhere you might look. 

I began with a mystery novel (A Reason To Tremble) published some 18 years ago in Canada, in which I revealed the villain(s) early on. The attraction for the reader, I think, is in being able to examine the motives and lifestyle, the character strengths and weaknesses, of both victims and perps simulataneously. And I carried this a step further in my second novel (A Place of Belonging) in which a murder connected two families at opposite ends of the social and economic spectrum.

That was a place to start. Since then I've been working on an historical novel (tentative title: The Eagle of the East) set among the eastern front battles of World War II, examining how Soviet, German, and American combatants dealt with the morality (or lack thereof) of that awful war. Here, I began on the last day of the European war and quickly moved ahead chronologically from 1942. However, I've strategically allowed my German characters to move backwards in time to allow the reader to examine that great military failure, as if history were spooling backwards from the war's final result.

And now I'm writing another historical novel set roughly in the year 1000 - a critical time following the division of Charlemagne's empire. Here, I'm centering on a specific character - a literary lightning rod, if you will - the text written as if a diary of that person, re-copied and added to by a pair of Benedictine monks. 

Am I trying to reinvent structure just for the sake of experimentation? I don't see it that way. First, I'm trying to give the reader a new way of examining story, history, and the social spectrum. Second, writing in the same structural format over and over tends to make one's writing stale and predictable - and that's bad for both reader and writer. 

Doris Betts - A New York Press Requiem

Doris Betts, who mentored me and many others should be remembered for her generosity in developing aspiring writers, but also for her talent as a writer.

Sadly, Doris never remotely gained the recognition she deserved and earned as a writer. That that was all right with her serves as the best testimony to her caliber as a human being.