Amanda Baldeneaux: Field Notes on Workshopping with Min Jin Lee
Lit Fest at the Denver Lighthouse annually lands in the first weeks of June, which is fitting as the year slouches toward the summer solstice and the daylight shines brighter and longer each night that readers share their work and their thoughts beneath the festival’s big red tent. Lit Fest is itself a "big tent," offering classes, workshops, panels and readings across genres and from writers across the globe. There’s no literary dogma here: if you write, you’re welcome. This kind of welcoming – of listening to everyone – characterized a week long workshop with National Book Award finalist author of Pachinko, Min Jin Lee. After ten minutes in her workshop it clarified why one of her craft workshops was titled “Interviewing for Fiction”: Lee knows how to listen, and in so doing, how to get people to open themselves and speak towards truth. While her Master Class workshop was titled “Finding Your Themes,” what Lee meant was “Opening Yourself as a Writer and Speaking Your Truth.”
Over the course of the week, each student burrowed down to the core of their pages to find a truth that continuously resurfaced, whether in their autobiographical writing exercises or their readings of classmates pages. Once the truth of the pages became evident, Lee had one piece of advice that she administered to every writer: “have compassion.” Have compassion for yourself, your narrative voice, and your characters, even the ones you don’t like. Lee challenged each of us to recognize the kernel of humanity in every voice on the page and to write it without judgement or agenda. Not surprisingly, the advice to write without judgement became trickiest when writing towards the portion of ourselves inherently present in each character. Lee is familiar with writing characters it’d be easy to condemn in tone and action, but doesn’t. Pachinko chronicles Korean and Japanese characters in Japan during an era when Koreans were treated as outsiders, but she never passes judgement in tone or treatment of her Japanese characters. Maybe this is because Lee has mastered the omniscient narrator – one of her other standing-room-only craft talks – a voice that allows the narrator a god-like distance and observational status on everyone’s thoughts and lives.
Pachinko opens with a line that grows more unsettling in light of current events: “History has failed us, but no matter.” It's difficult not to sit in judgement in a 24 hour crisis news cycle when the ugly pieces of history refuse to stay buried, if they were ever really dead at all. Lee’s voice, as teacher and narrator, reminds us that history has failed us – all of us, collectively, whether in far-reaching means like institutionalized prejudice or in smaller ways, like an incident remembered from childhood of an angry parent releasing stress on us unfairly. History has failed us, but it’s no matter. We find the truth and we speak it, write it, and live by it, inching further and further from the darkness of history’s failures and betrayals with each demonstration of compassion and perseverance. With each day of her workshop, the light lengthened and the darkness of the winter solstice fell further and further behind. It was hard, it was barrier-breaking, I want to do it again.
Min Jin Lee and her Master Class students at Lit Fest 2018: Johanna DiBiase, Gillian Goodman, Sean Lawlor, Min Jin Lee, Angela Boyd, Carla Espinoza, Amanda Baldeneaux, Tom DeFreytas, Emily Johns-O'Leary, Samuel Jensen, and Tommy Kim.
CS Peterson: Field Notes on Readings of the Weird and Wonderful
On the first Friday evening of Lit Fest there was a tasty sampler of speculative writers reading from their recent work. The short pieces were dark, funny, and heartbreaking by turns, and featured works by Courtney E. Morgan, Ben Loory, Diana Khoi Nguyen, and James O’Neill
Courtney E. Morgan read "Skinned," a story from her collection The Seven Autopsies of Nora Hanneman previously reviewed for Fiction Unbound by Sean Cassity. "Skinned" takes place in a world different from ours. It is a visceral story that includes actual viscera. A mother and her small daughter recover from a catastrophe: “When she was finished stitching her own skin, the mother began on her daughter. She stretched the flesh taut over the wet structure of bones and gristle.” Soldiers have destroyed their village and they must flee. Mother and daughter travel across a war ravaged landscape, hunted by the Skinned and their vicious jackals. It is a haunting world and with luck we will see more of it. Morgan’s current project is a novel set in the universe of this story.
Ben Loory read "The Squid Who Fell in Love with the Sun," from his newest collection Tales of Falling and Flying. The story follows in the tradition of an ugly duckling tale: a wee squid, who is different, is ostracized by all the other squidlings, so he falls in love with the sun. Loory gleefully subverts expectations at every turn until something like a tale that is the lovechild of Douglas Adams and Ray Bradbury bursts forth at the end.
Diana Khoi Nguyen read her poem, Ghost Of and a deeply moving triptych of poems on the absence of her late brother. Before taking his own life he had cut himself out of the family portraits hanging in the hall. Her poetry fills the shape of his silhouette on one page with an interiority that might have been. On the facing page the text is interrupted by a negative space in the shape of her absent brother’s body. As she read - the words were interrupted by his empty space, causing her to halt mid-syllable where her voice would catch. The effect was emotionally powerful, words shaped and spoken around a ghost.
Finally Atlas Obscura Denver was represented by James O’Neill, contributor to the Atlas and head of the Denver Obscura Society. He shared the first obscure place he visited, Turkmenistan, and showed photos of perhaps the creepiest theme park on the planet. Be sure to check out Atlas Obscura’s finds in our own state of Colorado.
Lisa Mahoney: Field notes on Modern Fairy Tales
Fairy tales are surging in popularity: being retold with modern storytelling techniques, recast in light of women’s rights, and being completely remade with modern twists. Not to mention new tales being written as modern fairy tales. But what gives a story the fairy tale vibe? In the Lighthouse Writer’s class “Writing the Modern Fairy Tale,” facilitators Jessica Comola, published poet and author, and Khadijah Queen, author of poetry and hybrid prose, examined elements that can make any story feel more fairy tale-esque.
Ivan Bilibin's illustration of the Russian fairy tale about Vasilisa the Beautiful
One characteristic of traditional fairy tales that distinguishes them from modern stories is a depthlessness: the tendency for the teller not to delve into characters’ motivations that would allow the reader/listener to gain insights. Characters do what they do seemingly without consideration, and other characters accept strange things without examination. This gives modern storytellers lots of room for fascinating retellings.
Other characteristics of fairy tales include “just in time” plot devices: the farmer was just about to give away his daughter in marriage to the wrong man, the boy was almost killed by a sword, and so on. Also, traditional fairy tales tend to be told strictly linearly, no jumping back and forth in time for artistic purposes. Often, shockingly lovely or ugly creatures suddenly enter the village, and they are equally suspect. Transformations often have prominent roles in fairy tales: men into animals, straw into gold, but because magic is assumed, these changes don’t need explanation as they would in science fiction, for example. Finally, the moral of fairy tales is not always clear as in other kinds of traditional tales like fables. In Rumplestiltskin, who’s lying and cheating more?
For further reading check out Max Luthi’s scholarly take, Fairy Tale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, and to dive into the current fairy tale conversation, try the World Fantasy Award winning collection of short stories, My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales, edited by author Kate Bernheimer.
Paperback cover of a collection of new and modern fairy tales.
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