Home

Home is a theme that I have been writing about for years. I am a pilgrim on this amazing planet and I have traveled and moved far more often than most. The yearning for home and finding community, refuge, and sanctuary is the sound track to my adult years. In the excerpt below you'll see why. I believe that home is in the center of our being and in the Arms of the Divine, a breath apart from meaning the same thing. 

Holy Cow! Press has just published an anthology on this topic: The Heart of All That Is. This beautiful collection  includes poetry and prose from local writers that I know personally such as Margarette Hasse, Cary Waterman, Ethna McKiernan, Jill Breckenridge,  Mary Kay Rummel, and writers I have yet to meet: Karen Herseth Wee, Miriam Weinstein, James Cihlar, Alice Owen Duggan, Molly Sutton Kiefer, Linda Kantner, Julie Landsman, Amy Nash, and Ellen Shriner, and writers that I admire such as Marge Piercy and Naomi Shihab Nye. 

Available at www.holycowpress.org and through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, this collection makes an excellent Christmas present. The work ranges from nostalgia to escape, from roots to homelessness, from where we feel a sense of belonging to where we can spread our wings and fly. 
I hope if you live in the Twin Cities, you'll join us for the book launch on Nov 9 at Subtext Books. 

     While spending a month in Oaxaca, I brought along Neruda's book of poems called Isla Negra. In the foreword, Alastair Reid says that it was not a systematic autobiography in poem form "but a set of assembled meditations on the presence of the past in the present." It followed the chronology of his life. "This is cool!" I thought. "I could do that. I could write poems about the places where I have lived." I made up a list, starting with the first sub-let when I moved out of my parent's home in Pennsylvania after high school. I was stunned to count forty-two places, not including the casita I was currently renting in Oaxaca. The locations started on the East Coast, went to the Southwest, zigzagged all over the West, from Colorado to Seattle, from Montana to California. My travels culminated in an exodus out of the country to Belize and Mexico, over to Spain, the Canary Islands, Greece, and Israel.

    No wonder I related to the Jewish people! When I arrived off the boat in Haifa, I felt as though I had finally come home, returning from exile to sanctuary. This traveling was with a group of people and never felt like homelessness because we lived the same lifestyle. We owned one set of clothes, following our mantra, "Travel light.” We lived a life of self-discipline, ignoring personal comfort, having few material possessions.

    But did I live this nomadic lifestyle simply as an imposition of the dictates of our “guru" or was it the natural result of my yearning to travel as a child? I day-dreamed of hitch-hiking to exotic places, of being a Gypsy and a wanderer. I had an insatiable curiosity about the world and the people in it, a desire to be “footloose and fancy-free.” When I stuck my thumb out on the side of the road, slept on Spanish beaches, or hiked up curving forested roads, I was not aware that here was my day dream come to life. I never thought to myself, “Gee, this is exactly what I asked for when I was young.” 

--excerpt Seeking Sanctuary from The Heart of All That Is, Wendy Brown-Baez

           

Guest Blogger Michael Kiesow Moore: Writing Fantasy

I’d like to begin by talking about how writing fantasy is not different from writing any other genre. Whether you are writing fantasy, romance, mystery, or literary fiction you work with the same writing tools to meet virtually identical goals. Foremost, you have to tell a story. Proust may very well be one of the sole authors who got away without one, but most everyone else has to have one. If you don’t have a story to tell, the reader is going to close the book on you. Under the umbrella of “the story”, you also need to develop your characters, maintain point of view (be it singular or many), attend to the right balance of narration and dramatization, use appropriate tense(s), consciously employ the best chronology for the story, and so on. For the writers of most genres, this would be enough balls to have in the air.

And then there is fantasy. The very connotation of that word holds infinite worlds, limited only by the imagination of the author. Think of the worlds wrought by J.R.R. Tolkien or J. K. Rowling. Middlearth and Hogwarts are but singular side trips to the vast realms. What this means for the fantasy writer is that work unique to this genre is mastery of “world building.” The fantasy writer builds up the world the story takes place in from the ground up. But it is much more than simply imagining a different landscape.

A proper world built from scratch needs a full history, spanning not only centuries but millennia. Does your world have magic? If so, what are the rules? In most fantasies, there are often consequences for using magic, and it is not always simply done. What kind of technology does your world have? Has gun powder been invented? What metals are used? What are the social customs, forms of greeting, clothing fashions? What is taboo in your world, the rituals around death? What religion or gods are believed? Do the gods themselves appear? What forms of government are followed, the politics? What are the curses people use? (This can be a surprisingly interesting question, as the answer can incorporate religious beliefs and speaking what is forbidden.)  This is only the short list of questions that need to be answered as the fantasy world gets built.

Is it surprising to say that many a writer has gotten lost in world building and forgotten that they started out telling a story?  The successful fantasy writer uses world building to advance the story and develop character and not make it an end to itself.

I would argue that the non-fantasy writer also must successful world build. A realistic story set in the Minneapolis of right now has to consciously put that world on the page. Many writers neglect this, and weak writing results. Perhaps what sets fantasy writers apart from writers of other genres is that we take nothing for granted.

Another aspect perhaps unique to fantasy writing is that most stories in one way or another tell the Hero’s journey. In my classes on writing fantasy, I have described the Hero’s journey like this:

The all purpose hero is someone set apart from ordinary humanity through miraculous birth or other special qualities, and undergoes a test in the form of a quest or journey. The quest takes the hero out of the ordinary sphere of human life, often into a new land where different rules apply. Passing through a series of challenges, the hero is helped in the quest by the magic or wisdom of some, and hindered by others. Although the quest seems difficult, when the end is achieved, the challenge is resolved with surprising ease. The hero acquires a boon – something valued, such as new knowledge – which he or she brings back to the human community for its benefit.

You can find examples of this hero template in Mesopotamia’s Gilgamesh, the Finnish epic Kalevala, the Lord of the Rings, and even Star Wars (the original trilogy). Throughout the history of humanity we have always seemed to have a need for a hero. It could even be said that each one of us is the hero in our own personal story.

I am right now finishing the first novel of a fantasy series. Because I am writing for a young audience, I have been conscious of one other aspect that writers of children literature attend to – as if there wasn’t enough to think about already. Much of children’s literature investigate the idea of justice. As Dickens’ Pip put it, “[i]n the little world in which children have their existence there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.” Whether it is rebellion against an injustice, or a goal to set things right, social justice is the flame that ignites the story, and turns what began as mere characters into heroes.

--Michael Kiesow Moore

Michael Kiesow Moore is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. His work has appeared in several books and journals, including Among the Leaves: Queer Male Poets on the Midwestern Experience, Water~Stone Review, Talking Stick, Evergreen Chronicles, The James White Review, and A Loving Testimony: Losing Loved Ones Lost to AIDS. His awards have included a Minnesota State Arts Board fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and poetry nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has taught creative writing at the Loft Literary Center and curates the Birchbark Books Reading Series at the Birchbark Bookstore. For more information visit www.michaelkiesowmoore.com.