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Subtitled Reading and Writing
Dear readers,
I spent an afternoon with Judy Noble this week.
Judy and her husband Bud were the sparkplugs that put Findley Lake on a regional map for day trippers with their restaurant Curly Maple, that drew visitors from 100 miles out, to Findley Lake for home cooking and such rarities as elderberry pie on mismatched china.
Quitting when you’re at the apex is an art form and when the hullabaloo grew to be too much for Bud and Judy, they opened Wonderments, an instantaneous “keystone” business---one of those one-of-a-kind curated shops “on trend” in Findley Lake’s downtown, creating a vibrant triangle with Our Own Candle Shop and Secret Cubby.
After 12 columns starting in May, I am taking the “quitting while you’re ahead” example to heart. I have told my esteemed editor Robin Gross: this will be my last column for Tapestry.
Of course I have no evidence that I have readers (aside from my sister Candace in Hamburg,) despite leaving my email address at the bottom of each weekly column. I have tried to be provocative but not incendiary, to provoke thought in a readership along a political spectrum from right and center to left, readers who might be attracted to my request to “suspend their disbelief” and surrender to the rhythm of my meanders.
Like many of you, (women in particular the data clerks tell us,) I was a voracious and omnivorous reader in my salad days. My mother Constance-the-wise supplied me with a bushel of sheep’s-nose apples every fall; I crunched through them as I devoured pages of story.
Interestingly, my parents never censored my reading. They, like many, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club. To their collective credit, I read Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda when I was 12.
Since reading Mary Renault’s fiction written in the 50’s and 60’s about Crete, “The Bull from the Sea,” “The King Must Die,” and “Fire From Heaven,” spoon-feeding us the delicious details of our prehistory, I have a taste for trilogies and quartets, most certainly accounting for the reason I spent the last thirty years of my life writing a trilogy of historical novels.
My subject and place? Right here in the northeastern US during the 19th century, which I find as fascinating as stories about Crete or royalty. World-shaking things occurred to us as a species here in the 19th century. It was my privilege (and a challenge) to make them come alive for contemporary readers.
As for being an avid reader, after a particularly big family dinner, say Thanksgiving, I would hide out in a favorite reading closet to get out of the dreary task of washing dishes and “cleaning up.” My mother and grandmother would call my name throughout the house while I remained perfectly still, not to risk breaking the cocoon of story.
As I aged, my taste still leaned to trilogies, where the world of fantasies and adventure abound: Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, CS Lewis, Pullman’s His Dark Materials. And then, more recently—under the guise of keeping my younger grandchildren company in their worlds—Hunger Games as well as “Emergent/Detergent.” (I could never get it straight so I waved my hands and said Emergent Detergent and everyone under fourteen knew what I meant.)
More adult trilogies like the Alexandrian Quartet by Lawrence Durrell introduced me to a world I longed to inhabit, to know those codes like the Kaballah and other arcane practices from an insider’s point-of-view.
For modern readers Elena Ferrante burst upon the scene with her breezy conversational style. I will always be a big fan of Tariq Ali’s even though we are contemporaries and have read back-to-back at the same bookstores…my hero because certain tour de force stand alone and can never be repeated or copied. His “Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree” about 15th century Spain where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived side by side for an uncounted period of time, collaborating across the arts, conjures a world I enter every time I read this book. The eloquence of the Alhambra stands as a testimony to that Golden Age until Queen Isabella (she who launched Columbus’ fleet) declared Jews and Muslims apostates and nonpersons before the law.
The first one into a subject will always be the pre-emptive model, never the copier. My book on the mysterious world of silk for instance, or my second book on linen, were the first into these worlds of intense textile rigor. I can still shiver remembering how close Alessandro Baricco’s “Silk” came, to becoming the pristine apex on silk, forever the prime reference, rather than my “Burning Silk.”
And now that I have whittled my audience down to those who can follow swift meanders coursing down a particular mountainside, Mount History Buffs, I can’t help but allow the swift current to drag me along!
A similar thing happened in the 1200’s known as the Albigensian Heresy whose premise that good and evil are well matched, offended the Catholic Church, largely because “the good” was held to be unattainable without “prayer, indulgences and good works.” All of these aids to salvation were available for purchase from an often corrupt clergy.
The sand in the ointment however was that—while the perfectii of the Cathars abstained from excessive consumption and made their lives a model of pure living, a rebuke to the clergy—the priests of Rome sold indulgences, kept wives, and were gourmands of every vice. It made perfect sense when Crusaders were returning from unsuccessful missions to take down Constantinople, to turn them on to these heretics. (Twenty thousand famously died by the sword in Beziers in one day.)
Three centuries later, these same people, popularly referred to as Huguenots, masters in the secrets of many crafts—book printing, silk making, annealing metals for strength and flexibility—were declared criminals in the eyes of France with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes which had extended religious freedom to all peoples living inside France. With one stroke, thousands of Huguenots ran to the borders, taking their knowledge to other countries, while thousands more were imprisoned inside France, pursued and tortured.
I mention these examples—not to vilify any particular religion, not at all!—but to point out that extremists of any belief produce jihad, the notion that people with different beliefs must be destroyed by any means necessary for all of our salvation. This lay behind the Nazis extermination of six million people in the generation just before mine…recent history.
Irresistible bait for both a certain type of reader and writer! Is it any wonder historical fiction continues to be a force majeure in the literary world? And now that speculative fiction—imagining a different outcome to our histories--is tantalizing our imaginations…?
My editor put it to me succinctly: “Do you really want to write yet another story where an intelligent and resourceful wife is brought down by a negligent or jealous husband?” (Hear me roar.).
“Do you really want to write another story where Native Americans are defrauded from their legacy of wealth (tobacco, land, oil) when so many native American writers have written it, and well?)”
(Of course not!—and I have no right to write their history.)
Of course my characters are Metis, the product of French, Dutch, European and Native heritages, and therefore fair game for an author like me from similar backgrounds.
During the thirty years when I was writing (one novel at a time) the Textile Trilogy, I confined my reading to contemporaries who were doing new things in fiction (female protagonists for instance) and to the research relevant to my own writing.
Now, in the quiet that can follow a long arduous endeavour (my life’s work as a writer), I was asked to write a weekly column for Tapestry. This will be my last column, an even twelve on Labor Day weekend, as I hope to finally apply myself to a memoir for my descendants who might ask what kind of mischief this ancestor named Destiny found worth her while.
And I shall ever be the envy of other scribblers—Gene Cuneo, Brian Kinal, Mark Twain, Halcyon Mueller, Rebecca Brumagin—that I was given the assignment of writing whatever I wanted, weekly, in the summer of 2024 for the Tapestry, the long-running newsletter of my hometown Findley Lake.
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