Late at night when I wake up in a cold sweat, the cause is one of two things; the memory of the time I beheaded a deer with my car and the head came crashing through the windshield and the antlers almost killed me, or my overdue library book.
I know I need to return it, and I’m going to, but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. And the longer it sits there, the more the late fee increases, and the less I want to think about it all. To be honest, it fills me with so much dread I almost want to just move and leave the book behind and let the new owners of the house deal with it.
What had once been a magical portal to imaginary lands is now a brick of angst.
My hope is that if I wait long enough, this will become one of those endearing stories you read in the news where a man returns a library book decades after it was checked out and everyone forgives him.
Until that time comes, my story is one of wearing big hats and sunglasses to the library, speaking in a fake Scandinavian accent, and going by the name Tad Winslow.
Worst of all is thinking of all the people I’ve hurt. Strangers have come to the library, looking for the book that I have, and been denied an opportunity to read it. Who knows how that book may have changed those people’s lives? Instead, they had to read something else, like a book about home improvement, and it’s all my fault.
If you have any connections at the Boston Public Library and can help me in some way — I would love to set things right if I can be offered clemency. I can’t take this anymore.
BEST FEATURE: It was free. WORST FEATURE: It will end up costing me more than I can ever imagine.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a pudding stain.
The first time I took note of Ariel Levy was when I read her essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” which ran in a November, 2013 issue of the New Yorker and would go on to win a National Magazine Award. The essay tells of Levy’s experience losing her unborn baby at 19 weeks, while on assignment in Mongolia. Levy didn’t shy away from describing the terrible details of her rare second-trimester miscarriage; alone in her hotel room on a blood-soaked rug, the lost baby in her arms. I felt sucker-punched by the trauma of it, and also thankful that she’d had the courage to share an experience which women are generally expected to suffer though in silence.
Of course this piece was hardly Levy’s first — she’s been writing for almost two decades, first for New York Magazine and then for the New Yorker, where she has been on staff since 2008. Among other topics, she’s investigated the controversy surrounding the South African runner Caster Semenya and profiled Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act.
Levy’s recently released memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply(Random House, March), beginsby acknowledging what readers of “Thankgiving in Mongolia” learned part of: at 38-years-old, Levy lost everything — her baby, her wife, and her house. But during her young adult life in New York and San Francisco, she was happy, feeling like she’d sucessfully avoided the rules traditionally placed on women in regards to family and career. Throughout the book, Levy reevaluates this assumption, and many others, as she grapples with the haunting power of hindsight.
I had the chance to talk with Levy over email about creating honesty in memoirs, the illusion of control, and why she’ll never stop traveling.
Carrie Mullins: I read, and like so many others was struck by, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” when it was first published in the New Yorker. As a reader, the way you read a story when you happen upon it in a magazine and have only the information contained within its pages is different than how you approach it when it’s part of a bigger story, and you have more context. For you, as the writer, what were the differences in telling these stories individually versus weaving them together as a memoir? Did the way that you tell them change in any way?
Ariel Levy: “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” was a pretty unique experience for me as a writer — it just came out of my fingers, I really don’t know how else to say it. The Rules Do Not Apply was much more like my usual process: I try things, sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t and I have to cut them, sometimes they work but not in the way or the place I initially intended.
CM: I was reading an interview with a female author recently who said, “Fate is the fundamental engine of narrative, and women are particularly vulnerable to the fake security it promises.” At first I was like, yes, fate, that’s so true! But then I realized that the world I see around me is actually peddling the opposite idea, specifically that women can take control over every aspect of our lives — we have the burden of control. You can go to the gym to become skinny or act and dress a certain way to attract a partner. Or to use an example from your book, “Because I want to believe that if only my loved ones and I refrain from smoking, we’d be ineligible for lung cancer.” I feel like this question of fate versus control permeates your memoir. What are your thoughts?
AL: Well put. I think that on the one hand, it’s very important to make use of the agency and power that generations of women before us have fought for. It is a relatively new phenomenon for women to have the option to decide what kind of career to have, whether we want to marry, whether we want have children, what we want to accomplish in this life. I’m thrilled that we have that freedom, and it was hard-won.
But nobody, really, has control. That applies to men as much as women. I think putting down the “burden of control,” as you so elegantly put it, is the process by which one becomes an adult. I remember my father once told me he never felt as old as he did when he was thirty-five. I had no idea what he meant at the time, but now I get it. As life disabuses you of your illusion of control, you can come to feel free in a certain way that almost reminds me of childhood.
“As life disabuses you of your illusion of control, you can come to feel free in a certain way that almost reminds me of childhood.”
CM: We often say a memoir feels “honest” when an author freely criticizes herself or talks about events that might not cast her in a positive light. Still, I have to say, your memoir feels honest! Did you think about this question of honesty as you were writing? Is easier or harder to be honest about mistakes or accomplishments? It seems like the latter has its own traps.
AL: Ha, thanks. I mean, the whole impetus for writing the book was, to a large extent, grappling with my own culpability in the turn my life had taken — writing my way towards an understanding of what I could and couldn’t control.
CM: Throughout the book, you discuss the idea of interpretation. You see things and decide what they mean — it’s literally your job. At the same time, people are constantly interpreting you and your life, as I’m sure they will continue to do once they read your memoir. Do you try to prepare for this as a writer? How do you deal with the unavoidable double-edged sword of interpretation?
AL: I think it’s kind of none of my business how people interpret my book, my writing in general. I try as hard as I can to say as precisely as possible what it is I mean. That’s really all I can do. The act of reading, of interpreting, is active: we always bring to any text our own experiences and biases and taste — no two people can ever “read” the same book the same way. I guess what I’m saying is that I think reading and writing are reciprocal processes.
CM: Despite being a child who saw the world as unstable, you’ve kept pushing your boundaries, especially with travel. And many of those experiences seem to uphold the idea that the “rules” don’t always apply — whether its successfully chasing the Caster Semenya story with no initial contacts or the value of being in Israel and sitting down with Mike Huckabee of all people. Can you talk a little about that impulse to keep traveling?
AL: I think the way I dealt with fear for a long time was to thrust myself towards it. I didn’t want to be scared. I didn’t want to be the girl who was up all night, afraid of monsters, afraid of the dark. I wanted to be brave and self-reliant and so I tried to put myself in situations that I thought would cultivate — or necessitate — those qualities.
I’d say that the upside of losing so much that mattered to me is that I have considerably less fear now. I’m not trying to hold it all together, everything has already been blown apart. In addition to all the agony that brought, it also gave me a certain feeling of freedom.
“The upside of losing so much that mattered to me is that I have considerably less fear now.”
I still travel a lot, yeah. For one thing I’m in South Africa for several months of the year, because that’s where John, my fiancé is from, so we go to spend time with his sons and our friends there, and we ride horses which I’ve come to really love doing — maybe because when you’re on a horse, you have to admit you’re not in control, you’re along for the ride.
Considering how unpredictable the past few months have been, it seems almost unreasonable to even attempt to predict the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. But, at a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and, in so many ways, enrich our lives? I certainly think so.
At a time when books — and all of our arts, really — are facing such scrutiny, shouldn’t we take every chance we get to talk about and celebrate those things that inspire us and enrich our lives?
The Pulitzer Prize, which honors the year’s best fiction by an American writer that deals with some aspect of American life, is the Oscar of the literary world. It’s the rare literary occurrence that garners news attention; it’s the book award that results in real sells. Some Pulitzer winners are household names. William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Junot Diaz are all past winners. But, just like with the Oscars, there are occasional surprises that cause shock and delight. For example, few people (seriously, “few” is extremely generous) predicted in 2010 that Paul Harding would win the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Tinkers. It’s commonly known that Tinkers, published by the small Bellevue Literary Press, sold only around 40 copies the week before it won the Pulitzer. In the week following the announcement, Harding’s novel sold over one thousand copies. For every Tinkers-level surprise, there are also some decisions that aren’t so great. In 2012, the Pulitzer jury nominated David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, but the Pulitzer board couldn’t agree on a winner. So, we were left with nothing. Talk about a bummer.
I don’t think this year will be like 2012. There’s too much at stake. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction seems especially crucial in 2017. Every novel and short story collection that I read felt important, and even more that that, these works of fiction felt urgent. Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.
Reading fiction teaches us empathy in ways that nothing else can, and, my friends, we NEED empathy now more than ever.
In looking over some of the hundreds of worthy works that could be nominated, I’m amazed at the quality of work writers gave us over the past year. There were meticulously-constructed debuts, and there were epic tomes by some of today’s most established and respected authors. Comedies and speculative works received notice alongside family dramas and redemption tales. Most importantly, diversity came to the forefront of the conversation. It’s certainly true that we have a long way to go, but writers in 2016 told stories that couldn’t have been told before. These voices were simultaneously brave and bold. We can only hope that future Pulitzer contenders will enlighten us and inspire us just the same.
I want to take a moment to highlight some of the titles that might be close but will likely wind up just missing the cut for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. These books received a lot of buzz throughout the year, and they arrived with some really glowing reviews. They were the ones that touched on important and timely (and, in many cases, timeless) themes. These titles graced the shelves of bookstores all over the country, and booksellers were selling them with passion. These memorable works include: Ethan Canin’s A Doubter’s Almanac (Random House), Kaitlyn Greenidge’s We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin), Nathan Hill’s The Nix (Knopf), Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World (Little, Brown and Company), Lee Martin’s Late One Night (Dzanc), C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Annie Proulx’s Barkskins (Scribner), Patrick Ryan’s The Dream Life of Astronauts (The Dial Press), Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow (Viking), and Alexander Weinstein’s Children of the New World (Picador).
Any one of these books would be a perfectly fine finalist — and winner, for that matter, but there are ten additional books with a little more momentum at the moment. And, as with most things, momentum is tough to overcome.
Let’s get to it. In order, here are the ten most likely contenders for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:
10. Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (Amistad)
Sure, many readers think of Woodson as a children’s book author. And such a classification isn’t wrong. Her YA memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award and was a Newberry Honor winner, too. Jacqueline Woodson isn’t only a children’s book writer; instead, she’s a great writer in general. Another Brooklyn is proof of her talent. It was recently selected as a finalist National Book Award, and reviews have been incredibly generous. If this year’s jury wants to put forth a taut novel about friendship and the struggles of growing up, Jacqueline Woodson could find herself with another award to add to her mantle.
9. Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
I’d love to see a speculative novel or short story collection (I’m thinking of Amber Sparks’ The Unfinished World) win a major literary award. Kelly Link was close last year, and Karen Russell, as I’ve already mentioned, was equally close in 2012. Samantha Hunt’s Mr. Splitfoot could be the book to do it. It’s true that Mr. Splitfoot hasn’t been on a ton of “best of” lists, but let’s not forget the stellar reviews at publication. This is a book that critics loved. It’s also the kind of book that you can’t easily forget. There are some absolutely terrifying scenes in Hunt’s novel, but there are just as many humorous moments. Mr. Splitfoot shows us what it means to be human and it asks us to consider the boundaries we place upon our families — and our fellow humans. Timely? I say so.
8. Michael Chabon’s Moonglow (Harper)
If Chabon had not already won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for what I consider to be The Great American Novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, he’d be higher on my list. But, hey, it could be his year again. Moonglow has received all kinds of accolades. One of the best predictors of the Pulitzer Prize is the National Book Critics Circle Award. Chabon was a finalist. Moonglow was also a finalist for the ALA Carnegie Medal, which is a big deal. Another thing working in Chabon’s favor is the emotional heft of his book. Moonglow is the kind of book that breaks your heart and then, somehow, makes you smile. It’s also classic Chabon, with sprawling sentences and crackling dialogue. If the jury connected with Moonglow as much as I did, it could definitely be a finalist.
7. Louise Erdrich’s LaRose (Harper)
Erdrich is one of our country’s best writers. In my opinion, she should’ve won the Pulitzer for The Plague of Doves. Now could very well be her time. She just won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and LaRose was a finalist for the 2017 PEN Faulkner Award. These two citations are good indicators that Erdrich might get that Pulitzer sooner rather than later. It also doesn’t hurt that LaRose is such a moving experience. If the board members are voting with their hearts, LaRose stands a strong chance.
6. Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (Picador)
There’s no denying that What Belongs to You is one of the best books of the year. Greenwell captures sexual desire so authentically, and his characters are beautifully rendered. This is the kind of book where each sentence clicks. Every aspect feels both lyrical and consuming. Take a look at some of the novel’s honors: PEN Faulkner Award (finalist), National Book Award (longlist), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (finalist), and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize (shortlist). It’s among the most acclaimed books of the year for sure. The reason I don’t have it higher on the list is because of the setting, which revolves around Bulgaria. The past two Pulitzer Prize winners — Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Viet Thang Nguyen’s The Sympathizer — have taken place abroad. Greenwell’s novel is such a strong contender that the setting might not be an issue, and if it’s not, What Belongs to You is one to keep an eye on.
5. Brad Watson’s Miss Jane (W. W. Norton & Company)
Sometimes you read a book and get a classic-feeling vibe from it. That’s how I felt about Miss Jane. This Mississippi-set story is relatively simple to follow: Miss Jane Chisolm, born with a genital birth defect, struggles to fit into a world that often doesn’t understand differences, especially sexual ones. Watson captures the southern voices that populate his novel so astonishingly well. It’s also such a timely book that asks its readers to consider the boundaries we place on gender. Miss Jane was longlisted for the National Book Award, and most everyone who reads it loves it. I see it as the most likely underdog.
4. Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (Knopf)
In a year that gave us a plethora of good debut novels, Homegoing is the best of the bunch. It won the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard First Book Prize, and it’s been on so many “best of” lists that it’d be impossible for me to list them all. Debut novels don’t have the best odds of winning the Pulitzer Prize, but this is one that’s totally worthy. Gyasi’s novel is a slim epic, and, yes, “epic” is fair. Homegoing begins in eighteenth-century Ghana, and it ends in the present day. There are discussions of slavery, family, home, and identity. The book feels important and, yeah, even essential. 2016 was wrong in so many ways. A Pulitzer win for Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing would give us hope — and hope’s what we need right now.
3. Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth (Harper)
Ann Patchett, co-owner of Nashville’s beloved Parnassus Books, released her best novel in 2016. And that’s saying something. Patchett’s established an incredibly impressive resume over the years. Bel Canto, her most celebrated novel, won the Pen Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Commonwealth has racked up its own slew of awards, including being selected as a finalist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. I don’t know if likeability really impacts literary awards, but if it does, Patchett has an advantage. She comes across at her readings as being kind and inviting. She’s the kind of writer people root for. It feels like Patchett should already be a Pulitzer winner. Commonwealth, a lovely novel about family and love, is a worthy and likely contender.
2. Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone (Little, Brown and Company)
Adam Haslett’s short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger, which focuses largely on mental illness, was a massive critical success upon its publication. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Haslett’s latest novel, Imagine Me Gone, which also focuses largely on mental illness, is another critical success — maybe more so than You Are Not a Strange. This time, Haslett’s book was longlisted for the National Book Award, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Kirkus Prize. Imagine Me Gone might very well be his masterpiece. In most years, I’d say Haslett would be the winner, but there’s this little book that might be tough to beat…
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (Doubleday)
Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the frontrunner. I hate to say it’s unbeatable because it doesn’t deserve a Titanic-like ending, but The Underground Railroad at least seems like it’s unbeatable. Seriously. Oprah gave Whitehead’s novel her seal of approval by selecting it as her latest book club pick several months back, and the book seems just as popular now as it was then. The New York Times, NPR, and the Washington Post gave the book absolute RAVES. It won the National Book Award (I don’t think it even matters that only six books that have won the NBA have gone on to win the Pulitzer — Faulkner’s A Fable, Porter’s The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, Malamud’s The Fixer, Updike’s Rabbit is Rich, Walker’s The Color Purple, and Proulx’s The Shipping News). Just last week, it won this year’s Tournament of Books. It’s appeared on what seems like every yearly “best of” list. Whitehead’s a dude who’s received a lot of past awards for his other novels, so he’s overdue for a Pulitzer. The Underground Railroad is so timely — so important and so urgent. Yes, The Underground Railroad is the story of a woman trying to escape slavery and all of its evil, but it’s also about rebuilding. It’s about strength. It’s about how evil exists, but it’s also about how we can overcome it. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad deserves the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
And there you have them. Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone and Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth should be close, but Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad is the frontrunner for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Who knows, though? The announcement could come with some surprises. One thing is for sure: 2016 was a wonderful year for the written word.
VP Joe and Dr. Jill Biden Score Book Deal With Macmillan
Everyone’s favorite man to meme, Vice President Joe Biden, and his wife Dr. Jill Biden, have signed a three-book, non-fiction publishing contract with Macmillan. VP Biden will be writing two of the three books, and it’s been announced that the first one will be centered on his personal and political challenges in 2015, with a particular focus on the devastating loss of his son Beau Biden to brain cancer. There’s no word on what Dr. Biden’s book will cover, but it will surely add more insight into the years of the Obama Administration, along with the forthcoming projects from Barack, Michelle, and Hillary. Hard to tell if these books will add or subtract to the public’s disillusionment, but I imagine it will dredge up a lot of complicated emotions for readers. Like trying to be happy for your ex for moving on, but still harboring intense romantic feelings of longing. Come back, guys. Please? [Politico/ Aidan Quigley]
Stephen and Owen King’s ‘Sleeping Beauties,’ Is Being Adapted for TV Before It’s Even Published
It’s hard to believe that the heart-melting father/son duo in this picture were capable of co-writing the forthcoming horror novel, Sleeping Beauties. Their latest work due out in September is about what would happen if women disappeared from society. In the book, women in a small Appalachian town are overcome by “a cocoon-like gauze” when they fall asleep. While sleeping, their consciousness goes somewhere else, and if they’re disturbed they become wild and volatile (which sounds like most people getting woken up, to be honest). Anyways, there’s one woman, Evie, who is not affected by the epidemic. The story follows her struggle as the men wonder whether her immunity is a medical miracle or a sign of her possible demonic nature. People are already so hyped about this book that Anonymous Content acted early and secured the rights for adapting the novel into a TV series. Anonymous Content has a pretty good track record, too, with True Detective and Mr. Robot to their name. [Bustle/Kristian Wilson]
Woman Finds Rare First Edition of Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ and Cashes In Big Time
An anonymous woman recently bid £14 on a box of books and soon realized that one of those books would warrant an auction of its own. After returning home with her newly purchased haul, she claims she didn’t give much thought to the collection of fairly common titles, but decided to research their value online nonetheless. She was completely floored when she found that a book from the same 1886 first English edition of Crime and Punishment that she had just acquired was sold in the U.S. for $12,000. She contacted auctioneer Chris Albury, who claims, “I nearly fell off my chair when I received a blurry image and a brief description of this book in an email valuation one morning.” It turns out that it is one of less than 10 copies left in existence. The relic went for £13,500 at auction, and the woman plans to use the money for home renovations and maybe even a vacation. [The Guardian/Sian Cain]
Earlier this year, the online retail behemoth Amazon announced a plan to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore in New York City, at the heart of Columbus Circle. Well, it seems the company has now shifted its offline phase into full gear. Today the company released word of a second planned store, this one on 34th street, right across from the Empire State Building. The store is scheduled to open this summer, during peak tourist season. So, will the store service out-of-towners or find a way into locals’ hearts? [LA Times/Michael Schaub]
The Handmaid’s Tale Audiobook Has Bonus Content
Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handsmaid’s Tale has been enjoying a second coming thanks to the dystopia-like political conditions we’ve been experiencing in Trump’s America. The award-winning audiobook, narrated by Claire Danes, has been available for years, and now it’s been revamped with an afterword from Atwood herself, explaining the inspiration for the book and its relationship to today’s troubling times. The audiobook also features an extended ending. Formerly, the book ended on the haunting lines: “Are there any questions?” Asked by Professor Pieixoto, after she concludes her lecture. Well, in this new version a cacophony of voices shout out questions that all readers have likely wanted to ask themselves. Finally, an essay from Valerie Martin read by Allyson Johnson puts a poignant finish on the project. [The Washington Post/ Katherine A. Powers]
Not long ago I was at a reading for the fantastic short story writer Kelly Link. The first audience question was “How much worldbuilding do you do for each story?” I’ve heard this question asked of many short story writers (myself included) of different genres and styles.
While worldbuilding is an important part of some types of fiction in a couple genres, it’s a largely counterproductive concept for most types of fiction
Worldbuilding vs. Worldconjuring
Worldbuilding is fun until the aliens attack
As a reader, I’m most drawn to writers that invent new realities or tweak our own world into bizarre new shapes. My problem is not with non-realist writing, but in applying the rules of certain types of science fiction and fantasy to all types, and beyond. But what is “worldbuilding”?
Some people will argue, tautologically, that all fiction takes place in a world and thus all fiction worldbuilds. But the way most people use the term is similar to what Chuck Wendig’s definition: “[worldbuilding] covers everything and anything inside that world. Money, clothing, territorial boundaries, tribal customs, building materials, imports and exports, transportation, sex, food, the various types of monkeys people possess, whether the world does or does not contain Satanic ‘twerking’ rites.” Worldbuilding is not merely creating a fictional setting and writing a narrative in it. It is an attempt to flesh out an invented world in way that allegedly feels “real.” In a perfectly executed work of worldbuilding, there would be no gaps in the world for the reader to fill in. Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page). This is not possible, but worldbuilding expects the author to have “rules” that are “logically” followed to their conclusions.
Everything from the goblins’ favorite type of baby wipes to the export taxes on Martian ray guns would be worked out (at least in the author’s mind if not on the page)
In contrast to “worldbuilding,” I’ll offer the term “worldconjuring.” Worldconjuring does not attempt to construct a scale model in the reader’s bedroom. Worldconjuring uses hints and literary magic to create the illusion of a world, with the reader working to fill in the gaps. Worldbuilding imposes, worldconjuring collaborates.
A page from the mysterious Codex Seraphinianus
Let me make a necessarily incomplete analogy to another platform. In painting, worldbuilding is like Renaissance art that attempts to create realistic figures even when they are cherubs, demons, or god. Worldconjuring is a spectrum of other techniques: Matisse implying dancing figures with a few swoops of the brush, Picasso creating a chaos of objects to summon the horrors of Guernica, Magritte shattering our vision with impossible scenes. We should enjoy realistic paintings, but we shouldn’t impose their standards on every school of art.
Worldbuilding is The Silmarillion, worldconjuring is ancient myths and fairy tales. (In fairy tales, we don’t learn the construction techniques of the witch’s gingerbread house or the import/export routes of evil dwarves.) Worldbuilding is a thirty page explanation of the dining customs of beetle-shaped aliens, worldconjuring is Gregor Samsa turning into a beetle in the first sentence without any other fuss.
All stories may need to conjure a world, but only a few benefit from building one.
All stories may need to conjure a world, but only a few benefit from building one.
What Worlds Need Building?
At the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America page, Patricia C. Wrede offers a large list of worldbuilding questions for writers such as “How early do people get up in the morning in the city?” and “What shapes are tables/eating areas (round, oblong, square, rectangular, etc.)?” Wrede doesn’t expect authors to know all these questions, but they give a good idea of the level of detail at which many worldbuilding authors are asked to think.
George R. R. Martin’s Westeros
What kind of fiction needs such details? A prime example might be A Song of Ice and Fire, where the varying religions, political factions, and regional customs are indeed a huge appeal of the books. It’s also no coincidence the series is massive. As we’ve pointed out before, the current five books (of a planned seven) are 12 times as long as One Hundred Years of Solitude, 36 times as long as The Great Gatsby and more than and 80 times as long as The Metamorphosis. As a general rule, the longer we stay in a world, the more worldbuilding might be necessary.
Even in epic fantasy stories, though, it’s questionable how much detailed worldbuilding improves a work. Tolkien is revered among worldbuilding obsessives for going to such lengths as inventing complete languages for his fictional races before even writing the story. Contrast that with George R. R. Martin, who famously describes himself as a “gardener” instead of an “architect,” and who simply makes up some fake words and lets the reader infer the rest. Readers may prefer one series to the other for a variety of reasons, but I doubt one reader in a million prefers The Lord of the Rings because dwarven has more realistic grammar than Dothraki.
And plenty of great fantasy books fall outside of this kind of faux-realistic worldbuilding. Marquez’s brilliant and epic One Hundred Years of Solitude is filled with magical happenings, but the magic exist for metaphorical and poetic effect. One character is constantly followed by yellow butterflies, but there is no explanation for this. There are no “rules” governing who gets butterflies and who doesn’t.
And for all the worldbuilding love that The Lord of the Rings gets, Tolkien’s work would fail the worldbuilding guides I’ve linked to here. He may have set the table for high fantasy, but he doesn’t even pass contemporary fantasy author Brandon Sanderson’s first “law’ of magic. The focus on worldbuilding has moved far beyond simply creating some interesting backstories and complex politics to increase the drama of the tale, to expecting a writer to have mapped out every detail of a world as if they were producing an encyclopedia instead of a story. Would the mythic The Lord of the Rings be improved by more discussion of elvish trade agreements and Mordor dining room etiquette?
Was Star Wars improved by midichlorians and trade negotiations?
A Crazy Fan Theory about Crazy Fan Theories
The problem I see with worldbuilding is that readers have come to expect books to meet a standard that the author can’t possibly (and probably isn’t trying to) meet. When I’ve taught fiction classes, I’ve often seen that when students encounter a book outside of the modes of actual realism or faux worldbuilding realism, they don’t know how to evaluate it. They believe that a different way of seeing reality aren’t invitations to see reality in a new way yourself, but simply failures of worldbuilding.
(As an aside, it isn’t a coincidence that the celebrated SFF “worldbuilders” are Western writers, typically white, while imaginative writers from so many other cultures get lazily lumped together as “magical realism.” Worldbuilding insists on a certain concept of supposedly logical “realism” that pretends it is the only way to see the world.)
lazy ass eagles
At the same time, fans of worldbuilding works focus not on the arc of the story, the struggles of the characters, or the aesthetic power of the fiction. They focus on the inevitable moments when worldbuilding breaks down. My least favorite example of this is the “crazy fan theory.” These normally begin on a site like Reddit, then spread like Kudzu across the internet. Why didn’t the giant eagles simply fly Frodo to Mount Doom? Well, it would be a really boring story if they did! That doesn’t satisfy fans, who instead create fan theories that “explain” and “fix” and “change the way we see” famous works like The Lord of the Rings. (These crazy fan theories exist for basically every popular book or movie that has ever been produced.)
The urge to “fix” or “explain” art is one we should always be suspect of.
“Bad Worldbuilding” Is Just Bad Writing
None of this is to say that there aren’t many stories that are poorly written. That are set in dull worlds with corny characters and unoriginal plots. But are these problems truly one of worldbuilding? Take Charlie Jane Anders’s often-referenced “7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding.” Anders is a great writer and a smart critic, and I agree with the substance of almost everything she says. One dimensional alien/fantasy cultures are lazy and lead to bad fiction. Stories need a sense of why the events are happening now and not some other day. Anders’s advice is solid.
But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem? A work of fiction set in 2017 will also be bad if the characters lack nuance, the political messages are heavy-handed, and the story is wrapped up in an overly-logical bow. Good writing is complex and ambiguous, not simplistic and heavy-handed.
But do we need “worldbuilding” as a concept to explain why moral simplicity, characterization without nuance, or a lack of a tactile sense-of-place can be a problem?
At the same time, the appeal to “realistic” portrayal of alien or magical beings doesn’t have anything to do with realism. Magical creatures don’t exist! If aliens exist, we don’t know what they are like yet! Human history doesn’t illuminate the history of fictional creatures. It’s quite possible that an alien race might have a monoculture, and the creatures of actual mythology and folklore were often portrayed simplistically. The call to make make such races more complex is not to make them more “true” to the reality of dragons, Martians, or giant eagles. It is a call to make them more human, and thus more interesting to human readers.
Fairy tales were very unfair to creepy dwarf culture
Storybuilding Vs. Worldbuilding
Ultimately, the logic of worldbuilding always succumbs to the more important logic of storytelling. George R. R. Martin liked the idea of a planet that goes through decades-long winters, but he also wanted it to seem like medieval Europe with similar wildlife and political structures that would, in “reality,” not survive decades of winter. What matters in a story is the story, and what serves the story is useful. The Machiavellian political struggles of Westeros are the story of ASOIAF, and so the complex politics of the region matter where the grammar of Dothraki or the breeding habits of Westeros mammals do not. The mythic sense of civilizations passing is part of The Lord of the Rings, so the history of the races and kingdoms matters even if their biological plausibility doesn’t. Harry Potter’s class might be a fraction of the size it should be, but the small cast of characters works better for the story that Rowling wants to tell.
It isn’t a world that a writer is creating, it is a story. The goal of the writer is not to clutter the path with every object they can think of, but to clear the way for the reader’s journey.
The World of Fiction Beyond Worldbuilding
The main reason I think worldbuilding has become a problem is that it leads people to believe that “realism” is the primary point of fiction, even fantasy fiction. But representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction. Surrealists, magical realists, post-modernists, and countless other movements or styles create fantastic worlds that function on other levels — mythic, philosophical, Freudian, etc. — that are at odds with this idea of worldbuilding.
Representing reality — whether “real” reality or a fictional one — is simply one way of telling a story, just one house in the city of fiction.
One of my favorite novels is The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. It’s about a man who misses his bus while looking at insects at the beach, then gets tricked into living in a village where each house lies in a big hole in the sand. The villagers spend their days on the Sisyphean task of shoveling sand to avoid being buried alive. The book is amazing, thought-provoking, and bizarre. And it could only be ruined by worldbuilding (how could such a village survive in modern Japan without being discovered? Wouldn’t sand actually just collapse on all of them?) You have to accept it on its own terms.
#ThatDuneLife
Julio Cortazar is not failing at worldbuilding by not describing the tax rate of vomitted rabbits, nor is Ray Bradbury violating the rules of SF by having the implausible buildings on Mars. They are simply doing something different.
The reader who expects worldbuilding is frequently the reader who expects fiction to have “answers.” The one who wants all mysteries to be solved, all stories to have “a point,” and all ambiguity to be swept under the rug. Worldbuilding may expand a world, but the concept is narrowing the paths available to writers and to readers.
UPDATE: I’ve published a follow-up article that addresses some of the questions and critiques in the comments here. If you want to argue more about goblins and aliens, give it a click!
A telephone psychic told Elvis Babbitt, the 12-year-old narrator of Annie Hartnett’s debut novel Rabbit Cake, that she couldn’t be sure whether or not Elvis’s mom killed herself on purpose. She drowned while sleep-swimming, and that is all they can know. Intent would not materialize. It’s a tough lesson for a child to learn: Sometimes the most important questions are the ones least likely to be answered.
Over the course of Rabbit Cake, Elvis has a lot of questions that are not answered. When she is ten, her mother goes missing and is found, two months later, caught in a dam across state lines in Georgia, twelve miles from their hometown of Freedom, Alabama. Everyone in their family copes in different ways. Their dad begins wear their mom’s lipstick. Lizzie, her teenage older sister, lashes out at her friends and begins eating in her sleep. Elvis tries to take care of them.
The title itself comes cakes shaped like rabbits that Elvis’s mom would make on many special occasions. And they eventually turn into a coping mechanism, too, when Lizzie attempts to set the Guinness World Record for Most Rabbit Cakes Baked.
It is fitting that even the book’s title refers to a coping mechanism, as the novel’s focus is on the way these characters grieve and cope. Hartnett evokes this powerfully. She understands that one of the most difficult parts of the process is continuing to have the power to handle the daily obstacles required to keep oneself and those one cares about safe and healthy.
That is not, of course, how Elvis digests things. Hartnett tightrope walks over the gulf between what her character understands and what her audience will with remarkable dexterity. When Elvis is staying up late in order to supervise her sister in case she sleepwalks into the kitchen, it is clear both how necessary it seems to Elvis and how destructive it is in the long run. And she sometimes doesn’t have access to quite how troubling some of what she sees is.
She relays the information plainly and clearly.
“I found my sister drinking milk straight out of the carton. The milk had gone sour…I tried to take the milk carton from her but she wouldn’t loosen her grip. Some of the curdled milk splashed onto the floor, and not even [the dog] would lick it up.”
This is a tough image to handle. There is a youthful innocence woven into the fabric of language that cuts deeper. She is aware that her sister may get very sick from what she is doing, but the concerns are so factual, almost plain. She knows what food poisoning is but does not seem to know how bad it can be.
Outside of the Babbitt’s home, Freedom is a rich world. Some of the book’s most vibrant sections take place in the local zoo, where Elvis volunteers. There too the violent and scarring is often immediately juxtaposed with the endearing. In the beginning one chapter, she is describing the black bears at the zoo.
“Nacho and Yoyo had been raised as circus bears. We tried to treat them as wild animals now and never went into their enclosure when they weren’t locked in their sleeping cages. [A zoo employee] told me that sometimes you could catch Yoyo doing her dance routine, standing on her hind legs and rotating in a circle. Yoyo the Ballerina Bear had been her stage name. She’d been kept chained up when she wasn’t performing.”
Again, Elvis’s reportorial style of narration relays heartbreaking information to the reader without much fanfare, which only makes it hurt worse. Elvis is not given the luxury of staying naïve to the underbelly and neither is the reader.
The book’s limitations, sometimes, also spring from Elvis’s perspective. This comes through most obviously within the context of Lizzie’s and her father’s relationships. There is only so much a character can know about what another person won’t share with them, and her youth is a secondary limiting factor. It makes perfect sense, in that if Elvis did understand more about Lizzie’s relationship with her best friend it would be difficult to believe. But that does not make the lack of insight easier to swallow for the reader.
The book’s loose structure is provided by a grieving chart that a counselor at Elvis’s elementary school gives her. The counselor says it will take 18 months to complete the process and gives Elvis a two-month buffer to account for the space between when her mother went missing and when she was found. Elvis is a science-driven kid, and a structure like that makes sense to her. Eighteen months is a long time, but it is not the longest. It insists upon the existence of an unseen track, and it insists that at some point, the track will end.
In other words, it provides hope that there might be hope. In the face of all the bad that comes her way, the chart is always there to reassure her that, sometime in the future, she will feel better.
An end will come. For better or worse, an end will come.
In her collection Wait Till You See Me Dance, Deb Olin Unferth deals in turns of phrase and turns of luck. There are dips into wells and lifts over dunes, and the step-ball-change of shifting intentions. A shooter describes a family on a beach dodging bullets as “Keatonesque.” In the story, “Draft,” a description of the scraps of an incomplete story quickly sprints from “shifting dots of sunshine on the floor” to “botched, bloody murder.” It is a limber collection with the dexterity and precision to launch in most any direction. If Unferth’s book is a dance floor, it is a dance floor unmoored, the dancers in constant and immediate danger.
Perhaps the greatest peril here is that of love, both in its presence and absence, the way it can appear and disappear, conjured and then obliterated. “Who can explain the recession of love?” asks one of Unferth’s narrators. “Love’s sneaky decline?” In her story “The Magicians,” Unferth writes about Houdini’s “elephant room”: a room too small to fit an elephant, and yet, of course, it populates itself with an imagined elephant the minute the listener hears the story. She writes, “by calling it the elephant room he had made me imagine the elephant in that room…It became the elephant room by magic.” Unferth’s stories engage in this sort of sorcery, populating rooms with love even if love is crushing, is absurd, is too large to fit through the door.
Hilary Leichter: The story “Your Character” is such an amazing meditation on the randomness and brutality of creation, the way a character’s fate can spring from a simple turn of phrase. And maybe the way a real, human life can also spring from an arbitrary series of sentences smushed together. Why did you choose to put the story in the second person? I wondered at who might be speaking, and whom they might be addressing.
Deb Olin Unferth: I’ll tell you how that story came about. I was working on a novel, and getting insanely frustrated, so I typed into a google search “how to write a novel,” which seemed the best way to go about it in the moment. I read around on a bunch of different websites, mostly about how to write horror and fantasy, and then I stumbled on a novel-writing forum, which seemed to have thousands of people contributing (is this inspiring? I’m not sure). One thread, under the “plot” category went something like, “What to do with your character if you’re stuck.” And there were hundreds of responses, pages and pages of them, a string of sentences, each beginning with “Your character,” such as “Your character is hanging by a piece of yarn over a fire.” Very similar to the ones in the story. I loved it and began hearing the story in my head before I’d even left the thread. I wrote it all out very fast, modeling mine after the ones in the thread and even just taking some more or less word for word, and then I spent a long time arranging them so that I felt the story had its own little arc — such as you come upon a series of sentences about water, or a series about sleeping, or a series about the love interest, and so on.
HL: The stories in your collection range from a paragraph to many pages long, and yet even the tiniest of the bunch feels complete, a perfect morsel. How do you know when a story is done?
DOU: Yes, the shorts — like “Your Character” — I tend to see whole before my eyes before I write them, or as I’m drafting them. Many in the collection are like that: me hearing something in my mind and getting it down. The longer pieces are different and take immense plotting and developing. I often think a story is done long before it is, or a story is done and yet it sits in a corner for years, mostly forgotten. I don’t have a good system.
HL: When you set out to writing, do you have a sense whether a story is destined to be closer to flash fiction, or something longer?
DOU: Yes, I usually know. Sometimes I try to squeeze one into another — grow out a short piece or squash a long piece and it rarely works.
HL: In “Granted,” we see two historians struggling to spend the grant they received to travel to an unnamed country. They must spend it all, and can’t seem to spend enough on anything. I love the way this piece unravels around the title and the premise, until it ends up somewhere extreme and surreal. A similar thing happens with the story “Likable,” in which variations on the word in the title are almost weaponized so that we might end up at the final sentence, a gasp-worthy moment. What is the seed for these kinds of stories? Do they start with the title, with their exuberant conclusions, or somewhere else completely?
DOU: “Weaponized,” I like that. The repetition I like the most in prose is perhaps Steinian, or maybe that’s just how I think about it. My thinking is: each time I come upon a repetition of a word or a phrase my experience of it should be different. The meaning of it should shift so that each time I see it, the word surprises me with its newness. By the time I reach the end, I want the word to have come to have many meanings, many connotations, and to produce many emotions.
“Each time I come upon a repetition of a word or a phrase my experience of it should be different.”
I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and now I live with a philosopher. Definitions are the lifeblood of philosophy. What would philosophers do if they didn’t have anything to define or if they weren’t considering different shades of meaning? They’d have to take down their shingle.
HL: I first encountered your prose while working on NOON with Diane Williams. Can you talk a little bit about how NOON has influenced your writing?
DOU: I talked at length about how I met Diane Williams and how essential she was to my becoming a writer here, and every word of it is still true. I would add to it that I have watched her discover a new generation of writers in recent years. Her touch is perfect. No one knows the sentence better than she, no one can track sound across a page or hear the off-note in a line like she can. I simply and baldly love her without reservation.
HL: Many of your stories here feature teachers and students, and the complicated ways those relationships can unfold. There’s this great line in the title story of the collection: “I was what is called an adjunct: a thing attached to another thing in a dependent or subordinate position.” Can you speak a little bit about how your own experiences as a teacher have influenced your writing?
DOU: I once had a book called What Color Is Your Parachute that is supposed to help you figure out what you should do to support yourself without wanting to kill yourself. They help you determine your best money-making match by having you do a series of convoluted exercises and filling out huge numbers of charts and making bigger and bigger charts. So I did it all, I had charts taped together all over my floor (yes, on paper), and at the end of all of it — and it took weeks — the book declared very simply that I should be a teacher. And that was exactly right. I love being a teacher! In fact summer gets to be a little hard on me psychologically with no teaching.
But some of the worst days of my life have been spent teaching. By that I mean, the most depressing periods in my life, I was usually in the middle of a semester and had to turn up and turn it on and bring it on with a smile. I remember crying in the bathroom many times when I was an adjunct. I remember students coming in and seeing me blowing my nose and wiping my tears. Being an adjunct is the worst. I channel some of that into my stories.
HL: In your story ‘Voltaire Night,” the teacher and students in a writing class take one night of the semester to share the worst thing that has happened to them: in the past week, month, in their entire lives. I want to do reverse Voltaire Night with you. What’s the best thing that happened to you this week?
DOU: That’s easy. In addition to being a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, I run a prison creative writing certificate program at a prison in southern Texas. One of my students made my husband and me wooden boxes — a jewelry box for me and a “manbox” for him, where he can toss his keys and change when he comes in the door. I have never been more touched by a gift.
Yeah, you can’t get away with Voltaire Night anymore. No one wants to talk about the bad things that happened. I’ve noticed this. It’s always “most embarrassing moment” or “most looking forward to,” etc. I tried last semester to get my students to tell stories about the worst thing that had happened to them and they looked at me like I was deranged.
This year’s PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award will honor the Women’s March, according to a statement released today by PEN America. The award, which honors “exceptional acts of courage” in demonstrating freedom of expression, will be presented at PEN’s annual gala on April 25th. Bob Bland has been asked to accept the award on behalf of the Women’s March.
On January 21st, 2017, women of all ages and their allies, donning pink pussy hats and carrying homemade signs, turned out on an unprecedented scale. 673 marches were organized, bringing together an estimated five million people on all seven continents. The rallies were entirely peaceful, with not a single arrest made. Speakers at the Washington protest, including Gloria Steinem and Senator Kamala Harris, underscored the March’s mission statement, which reads:
“The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women’s rights are human rights.”
The PEN award recognizes that the March embodied more than a protest against President Trump, becoming a show of support for diversity, women’s healthcare reform, LGBTQ, religious, reproductive rights and other issues.
PEN America’s press release quotes its executive director, Suzanne Nossel:
“The Women’s March began as a quixotic idea shared with friends on Facebook. In the hands of 99.9% of people, it would have ended there, as a pipe dream. But Bob Bland and the group of women who joined her forged a powerful, diverse coalition that worked with immense drive to win over skeptics and build the support of an extraordinarily broad coalition of which PEN America became part.”
PEN America has told Electric Lit that Bland alone has been invited to accept the award on behalf of the March, but that it hopes other organizers will be able to attend the ceremony. Bland is the Brooklyn-based fashion designer who, the night after the election, went on Facebook to suggest a women’s protest. Her efforts were combined with Teresa Shook, a woman based in Hawaii who created a Facebook page for a rally that quickly garnered over ten thousand RSVPs. Shook’s event was originally called “The Million Woman March,” which prompted criticism of her and Bland’s efforts and the absence of women-of-color in the planning process. Three nonwhite women with substantial organizing experience — Linda Sarsour, Tamika Mallory, and Carmen Perez — were asked to join the protest as co-national chairs, alongside Bland.
2017 marks the third year the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award will be handed out. The award incited controversy in its inaugural year by honoring the satirical French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, after the deadly attack on the magazine’s Paris office. Some PEN authors, including Michael Ondaatje and Francine Prose, pulled out of the gala because of the paper’s history of offending various religious groups in France, particularly the Muslim community. The 2016 award went to Lee-Anne Walters and Dr. Hanna-Attisha, the pair who exposed the lead poisoning water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Though it may seem like an impossible task, the blog over at Global English Editing has taken a stab at compiling the 20 most popular literary works throughout time. Below is a fascinating infographic that goes as far back as 10th Century BC with I Ching and fast forwards to modern written works like Fifty Shades of Grey (sorry, history). So do you think these are the most popular books in history? Read the whole list and its fun facts and see for yourself!
She could see Creed’s place now, up ahead, not more than another three quarters of a mile.
On the big flat stone at the top of the path she stopped to rest, pushed back her sticky hair and wondered again what he would do when he saw her — what he would say and how he would be and what he would look like too, close-up, after all this time.
For years now, for most of her life, she’d seen him only from afar, mending his walls or checking on his sheep or coming down off the high fell with a bucket to the spring above the waterfall, a bulky hatted figure.
A few times over the years she’d thought about going up there and knocking on his door and saying to him, Michael it’s me. Ruth. From the valley. Come. Sit with me at least.
Once not long after her thirtieth birthday she’d come up this far along the path with a box of her brother’s old dominoes in her pocket. All the way along the river and up over the slick black rocks on the west side of the beck to the top, with the game’s smooth pieces chinking against each other and her thumb fidgeting with the sliding wooden lid, she’d rehearsed what she’d say to Creed when she reached him: that it was crazy, idiotic, them living like this — the two of them in this vast forgotten garden of bracken and stone and pasture and bog, like the very last people on earth, but never speaking, never coming close to one another.
She’d pictured them both at his table, her brother’s dominoes spread out between them in various arrangements, not speaking perhaps (neither of them had much practice at that) but at least sitting together in a not-uncomfortable silence. Then up here at the big flat stone at the top of the path she’d lost her nerve. In the distance, his thick-walled bothy with its arrow-slit windows had looked so closed-in and stubborn and hunched against the weather and the world, so like a fortress for his feelings, that she’d lacked the courage to go on and had turned around and gone back down.
Today she was wearing her brown work boots and her black coat and her blue dress and she hoped she looked respectable. She didn’t want Michael Creed to open his door and look at her and think she was a fright.
She’d been a child when his wife died, ten or eleven years old.
She remembered the two of them coming to her father’s church. The wife’s dark hair. Creed a young man, broad-shouldered and strong, with a neat beard.
Her father had gone up there a dozen times afterwards and tried to comfort him but Creed wouldn’t let him in the house. She remembered how tired and discouraged her father had looked the last time he came home.
‘What happened, William? What did he say to you?’ her mother had asked, rather fearfully, and they’d all watched him hang up his coat and press his lips together and set down his Bible on their kitchen table and tap it lightly with his fingers. He’d looked as if he was debating with himself whether to repeat in front of his family what Creed had said.
‘He said, Janice, that God had greatly disappointed him. He said that he had begged Him for His pity and His mercy and had been refused. He said there was nothing now I had to tell him that he wanted to listen to and if I ever came trespassing on his land again and tried to talk to him about God’s love, he would come out into his yard and stick his shotgun in my crap-filled mouth and shoot me.’
Creed stayed away from the church after that, and if he ever came face to face with her father down in the valley he turned around and walked the other way. He began to avoid anyone who attended the Sunday service, which in those days had been nearly everyone. At some point he moved out of the farmhouse he’d shared with his wife and into the bothy further up the fell. Eventually he stopped coming down into the valley for anything. It was as if, not being able to look God in the eye and spit in His face, or inform Him personally that he was sending Him to Coventry forever, Creed had settled on the next best thing. Or perhaps he’d decided that there was no face to spit in and he was living in a world of fools; that from now on, he was on his own.
He mended his walls and birthed his ewes and when autumn came he drove the new season’s lambs up along the high straight track that had once been the Romans’ way north to the border, sold them to be slaughtered, picked up his supplies and walked back the way he’d come. Anywhere he had to go, he took the old Roman way, never the path down into the valley, the track along the river that took him past their house and the church.
What would he look like?
Like the other men she remembered in their fifties and sixties who used to live here? Bull-necked men with brick-red faces and bow legs and giant hands?
When he was young his hair had been brown, chestnut-colored, she remembered that.
Not as dark as his wife’s but still brown. His beard had been brown also.
And hadn’t he had one brown eye and one grey? She thought so. She thought she remembered her sister Pam remarking on it once when they were girls.
Her sister Pam and her brother Frank always asked after him when they came. ‘And what about Michael Creed?’ they said. ‘Do you ever see him, Ruth? Is he still up there?’
‘Yes,’ she told them. ‘He’s still up there.’ But what if he wasn’t? What if since the last time she’d glimpsed his bulky shape in the distance, he’d died or given up at last and gone away, like everyone else?
What if she got there and knocked on his door and there was no answer and when she pushed it open the place was empty and cleared out and there was nothing up there but his sheep and a couple of starving dogs?
In winter, months went by sometimes without a sign of him. Then there’d be a storm, a heavy fall of snow, and he’d be up there with his dogs, digging out his buried sheep. The dogs trickling over the white hillside, showing him where to put his shovel so he could bring them out alive. In spring, around lambing time, she woke sometimes in the dark and saw the pinprick beam of his flashlight moving over the sloping fields as he went about checking on things.
Over the years her father’s scattered parish had dwindled away.
One by one the farms had emptied out. The old had died, the young and the middle-aged had moved away. Where there’d been two shops and a pub, a school and a recreation room there were only the carcasses of buildings. When her father died, no one was sent to replace him. Where there’d been people and families and children there was only her left now, and Michael Creed.
Who would have thought a place could fall in on itself so quickly? That so monumental a ruin could be achieved like that? Almost, it seemed to her sometimes, it had happened in the blink of an eye, or in the course of one brief night while she slept.
Hikers who came up this far poked their faces in at her window. They seemed amazed to see curtains, chimney smoke, her boots at the door. Once, coming back from the church, she’d found a young couple in woolen hats and waterproof jackets on the step at the back of her house, picnicking on crisps and sandwiches and hot tea from a thermos. They’d hardly seemed to believe her when she said she lived here, and when they’d gone she thought of them telling their friends about the woman they’d found living way up at the far end of the valley by herself, using the words she’d overheard her sister Pam and her brother Frank whispering to each other when they came and thought she was outside, words like squalid, primitive, unhygienic.
For a time, she’d let her brother and sister drive her back with them for a few days. But in town she discovered, as the years went by, that her clothing attracted attention, that her appearance shocked people. One cold Christmas when Pam came to collect her she’d got in the car wearing both her dresses, her blue one and her knitted fawn one, one on top of the other. Pam had been ashamed. All that week Ruth saw her making silent signals with her eyes to her friends. She discovered also that she’d aged more quickly than these people. Carting water off the fell to her house in a bucket, hauling fodder from the pasture on a sledge for her cow Charlotte, chopping wood and breaking sticks and stuffing them into the stove and picking up scraps of slate off the hills to mend her roof — it had all made her age more rapidly than Pam and these other women who came to Pam’s house and tried not to gawp when Pam said, ‘This is my younger sister, Ruth.’ Like Pam, all the women still had dark hair and neat unbroken fingernails and attractive teeth. She couldn’t imagine how they managed it. She cared a little about it, this difference between the way they looked and the way she did, but not much. She told Pam she’d not be going back with her again. She was happy where she was, she’d no urge now to leave.
She’d stayed on to look after the church. When no one came to replace her father, it had been impossible for her to think of leaving it untended and unused. In winter she put holly in the alcoves. In spring, hawthorn and valerian. On Sundays she stood in the cold in front of the empty pews and read aloud the lesson. She patched the roof and polished the colored window in the nave and the blackened script engraved on the brass plaque her father had screwed into the lintel over the door when he first arrived here from the coast. It was still her favorite Psalm: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord.
In the back behind her house she grew swede and onions and potatoes and spinach. She had apples and blackcurrants and gooseberries from the trees and bushes her mother had planted. In winter an arsenal of things preserved in jars. A taxi came nine miles up the valley track once every three months and drove her to Penrith for her shopping. Her sister and her brother visited twice a year from Carlisle. She had no phone and no television but she had chickens and her cow and a sewing machine and her father’s books. She knew that there was another kind of world and she could see that it had its attractions but she did not want to live in it. She wanted to be here.
She liked it here. She was forty-two and she had not been lonely, not really. She had never lived her life expecting it to change.
Around her neck she wore the small wooden cross that had belonged to her father and as she walked she touched it every now and again to make sure it was still hidden beneath her dress.
She’d tried to leave it behind but in the end she’d not been able to.
She’d unhooked the clasp and dropped the chain into the palm of her hand and tipped it onto a plate and stepped out of the door but when she got to the path she’d felt so naked and afraid without it that she’d gone back and put it back on and slipped it inside her dress, telling herself that Creed wouldn’t necessarily see it. However things went, she would do everything she could to hide it from him.
As she walked her legs shook.
Her damp face boiled with heat, her blue dress clung to her like another skin, her heart thumped like a big beating wheel. She took off her black coat, folded it over her arm, and carried it. She wished she could turn back here and go back down to the beck and splash her face and cool her throat with the icy water.
Above her, a pair of peregrines rose in circles and vanished high up over the crags, into the blue. From beneath she could see the yellow flashes of their legs, the black streaks of their tails and wingtips and as she watched them she imagined looking down out of the sky at the dark speck of herself moving slowly over the pale brown hills towards Creed’s bothy. The ground was boggy here, up on the higher ground after the path gave out. As she plodded through it the stiff grass brushed her bare knees.
She wished she didn’t resemble her father. She wished she wasn’t tall as he’d been. She wished she didn’t have his springy hair and large beaky nose and pointy chin. She didn’t want Creed to open his door and think of her father and think that after all these years she’d come to him on some kind of religious mission. She didn’t want him to be surly and unwelcoming. She didn’t want him to slam the door in her face or bellow at her through one of his narrow windows and tell her to be gone. She didn’t want him to pull his gun on her. She wished she’d come up here that other day, with the dominoes. She wished this wasn’t her first time. She wished that the ice had been broken between them before now — that she could at least have become an ordinary neighbor to him. Come on, Michael, it’s just us now. Sit with me. Everyone else has gone. The old have died, the young are all in the towns. My brother Frank, remember? My sister Pam? They’re in Carlisle. Pam’s a nurse. Frank’s at one of the big hotels. The Glaisters have all gone. Partingtons too, and Capsticks and Pickthalls and Hawksmiths, all upped and gone.
She wondered what Creed made of it all, this emptying out. She wondered what he felt when he turned up at the slaughterhouse with his new season’s lambs, or went into the places he visited for his supplies. She wondered if the people there exchanged secret glances and if he was made to feel uncomfortable. She wondered if he felt like she did and if in spite of everything that had happened in his life, he was always glad to come home.
There was more wind up here. It cooled her face and made a rushing sound through the stiff grass and the bracken, a sound her father always used to say was the same sound he’d grown up with, the sound of the sea. When he said that, her sister Pam used to beg him to take them all on holiday somewhere to the coast, to Morecambe or Blackpool, somewhere sandy and warm where they could stretch out on towels and go bathing and eat ice cream and see the lights and a show, and every year that they didn’t go she told Ruth that the first bloody chance she got, she was off out of here, away from this boring fucking dump of a valley, these prehistoric hills and struggling miserable little farms.
Up ahead now, only another hundred yards, Creed’s bothy sat like a dark stone resting in the bottom of a deep smooth-sided bowl. All around it the tawny ramparts of the hills rose to the sky. There’d been no question this morning of setting off towards anything else; there’d been no question of the nine mile walk along the river to a road where she might sit for an hour and wait without a single vehicle passing. With each step now she felt her own slow, dragging gravity. Across the marshy ground she proceeded with difficulty and sometimes she stumbled.
His yard was bordered by a woodshed and a privy and the L-shaped dwelling part of the bothy itself. Turf and ferns and a spongy blanket of moss grew on the thick shaley roof slates. The bothy door was painted brown. Bronze lichen grew on his walls like rust. A trio of his black-faced sheep burst out from behind them when they saw her coming, bunching together and jostling each other in their hurry to get away, as if she was something dangerous.
Oh Jesus, what would he say to her? Would he be appalled by the sight of her? Would he know who she was? Would he hold that against her? Would he look past her through the open brown door and out beyond the opening in his yard across the soggy uplands and the pale brown hills and down into the long tapering valley with its scattered emptied farms and ask her how in glory’s name it had happened? Would he turn sarcastic and ask her if she’d had a visit from the Holy Spirit?
At the corner of his yard a rowan tree grew out of the stones. She leaned against it, breathed. The hour’s walk, the climb, had taken her half the day. Her hair felt prickly and dry as gorse. There was bog cotton in it, grass and cuckoo spit. Blood leaked out of her, filling her boots and coating the ground. She’d known since this morning that something was wrong.
She could no longer recall the Scotsman’s face, only his sandy hair and his pale body.
When he was gone she realized she didn’t know his name or the name of his town or what job he did in the rest of his life or if he had a wife and children. She wasn’t used to conversation and they’d hardly talked.
He told her he’d come over Rampsgill Head and round Blea Tarn and after that the fog had come down and he’d had no compass and had to continue on his hands and knees, worried that he’d turned himself round and wasn’t where he thought he was and that on one side or the other there might be nothing but crag and scree and a sheer plunging drop to the bottom. When he saw her light he’d thought at first it must be the sun or the moon, a small whitish glow in the murk.
In the morning he’d thanked her for the hot breakfast and her warm bed. He was glad the ugly weather had brought him to her door, he said. He’d had a nice time.
She could see nothing now, even in the daylight everything was dark and all she could feel was the raised lump of the cross at her throat. She wished she hadn’t worn it. She was afraid again it might make Creed angry, that anything like that might disgust him still, that he’d send her away. She began to tug at the chain and fumble with the clasp at the back of her neck. Her last mad thought was that she wished there was some way she could tidy herself up. At least put a comb through her hair.
Creed’s dogs found her in his yard.
He didn’t recognize her but he knew she must be one of the Reverend’s daughters from the valley, whichever one had stayed behind. He could see the beveled edges of a crucifix beneath the blue fabric of her dress. He couldn’t remember her name but over the years he’d seen her many times, a dark point down there, moving between her house and the church. He’d seen the cars that once in a while fetched her away then brought her back along the track beside the river. Her lips moved a little and he wondered if she was praying. There was blood on the stony earth of his yard. A large clot, dark and ragged like liver on the hem of her dropped black coat.
Creed was brawny and white-haired and tall. He lifted her up and carried her inside and put her on his bed. In his whole life he had never seen so much blood.
At the sink he rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed himself and slipped his right arm up inside her. He moved his hand up past the torn and pulsing placenta and found the breeched legs, the curving beads of the small spine. Ruth’s eyelids fluttered and Creed didn’t tell her that she’d come too late. He knelt by the bed and stroked her hair and told her in a soft voice that she was a good girl, a brave girl. He repeated the same whispered words over and over the way he did with his sheep when they couldn’t birth and they were suffering and miserable; and when he was sure there was no more time and no other way he boiled up a pan and went in under the breastbone with his razor and brought out the child, a tiny curled-up girl with a pointy chin and a small beaky nose and a glistening cap of sand-colored hair, and when the long night ended and morning came and Creed had done everything he could with his boiled cloths and his needle and his fine cotton thread, when he’d tried every desperate thing short of a prayer to stop the blood and there was nothing at all, now, that could be done and it was over, he went and stood for a long time looking out through one of his arrow-slit windows at the sloping fell aflame in the dawn with the child in his arms.
She was light as a leaf and just as beautiful.
He’d call her Rowan, after the tree in his wall.
He wished his wife could see her.
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