I am currently taking a fiction workshop with Jan Clausen as part of my master's program at New York University, and our assignment for this week (along with writing, you know, amazing stories) was to answer these questions: why do you write? What sustains your writing? Who is your audience? To whom is your art responsible?
I grew up reading adventures, mysteries, and spooky stories about kids getting caught up in things bigger than them, things borne from the big bad crazy world beyond. And something about these stories hit home for me – as a suburban Midwesterner growing up poor in a single-parent family with plenty of time on my hands due to my mom working two jobs to support me and my younger brother, I was bound to develop hobbies which could be pursued in isolation, and reading became my most ready method for fantasy. I was able to be anything I wanted in books, and as twee as that sounds, it rings true for me and is probably something that I could have articulated consciously even at that time. So as soon as I moved from young adult novels to big hefty Stephen King paperbacks left over by my mother’s voracious reading habits (I was only nine years old when I completed The Stand, a novel about an apocalyptic plague-ridden America engaged in a huge epic battle between good and evil) I knew that I had been hooked by the allure of popular fiction. So flashy! So exciting!
Only later, perhaps in high school, did I discover "literature," and as such the merits of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Joyce and the rest became clear to me; this was great stuff! This was art! How frivolous I had been before, reading about ghosts and zombies, assorted demons, the end of the world. I could have been reading about feelings, the human experience, et al. "So much to catch up on," I said to myself as I launched into the western canon.
How disappointing, then, when I discovered that reading was no longer as fun. I mean, sure, there were many wonders along the way, joys of discovery and recognition – yes, Nick Caraway, that’s exactly how I feel as a transplanted Midwesterner living amongst the New York elite, always at odds with my origins yet trying desperately to understand; yes, Jack Gladney, I also feel dissociated with the modern world and uniquely vulnerable to unseen dangers lurking in our increasingly advanced and subsequently perplexing world of media and technology. But while The Great Gatsby and White Noise are certainly a cut above the rest, I feel that my experience with literature since encountering more intricate theoretical and historical contexts (oh the woes of the English major) has been one of negotiating a relationship between intellectual satisfaction and the more visceral pleasures offered more dramatically by the fantastic genres of fiction. As such I have been drawn in recent years to writers who successfully bridge the gap between entertainment and intellectual responsibility; Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, Brian Francis Slattery, George Saunders, Jeffrey Ford, Aimee Bender, Kevin Wilson – these are the names that excite me. People who can write about zombies, imaginary cities, robots, and exploding cows in a way that makes me think and feel something in the same way as Fitzgerald, for example, when calling upon the lost beauty of France in the wake of a dying marriage, can create images so beautiful that I know that they’ll be with me forever.
Must there be zombies? No, of course not. But there’s no reason why they can’t be there, either. Seth Grahame-Smith’s recent Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is largely a reprint of Jane Austen’s text, but with zombies and ninjas thrown in semi-randomly. Has he raped the integrity of Austen’s text, or made it more fun? Is it somehow less relevant, now, for its inclusion of the undead? I’d like to think that my audience, as a fiction writer, is composed of people who see the humor of updating a text like Pride and Prejudice with a little, shall we say, flavor, but don’t inherently see the addition of flavor (at least in the form of zombies and ninjas) to be completely necessary for the enjoyment of the text.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this: reading should be fun, and sometimes we take ourselves too seriously, and I want to write for people who are willing to enjoy literature on a more inclusive level, willing to give everything an equal chance. People who don’t run away, for example, at the first sign of a ghost lurking patiently in the hallway. Because there’s a lot that I think we’d miss if we didn’t look under a few rocks. I think my artistic responsibility, as it were, is to a version of myself sitting in a room as a child and encountering the world through fantastic and imaginary people and places, trying to make sense of it all through an exploration of emotion and experience that was largely metaphorical: ghosts as a physical representation of loss, zombies reminding us that we’re all going to die someday. The exploration of imaginary places being a literal reflection upon the unknowability of our own world.
And ninjas because, well, they're just cool.
