Returning to Pages in a Dank Tunnel, Composing, 14/02/2018

Taking a break from philosophy today, because I came home last night after a long day at work. I want to make a legitimately short post today, to talk about some of my artistic work.

Some good news on the artistic front. I have an audio-play coming out in The Twelfth Doctor Adventures, an independently produced series in Britain. Quite a fun fan production that explores a trans companion character.

The series producer JR sent me her script for the first episode, which portrayed their companion, Toni Perkins.* It made a good guide for the character when I was writing my episode, “The Walls Are Alive.” At her best, Toni has a strength with two foundations – her empathy and knowledge of her own fragility.

Books are my home.

* JR tells me the name Antonia Perkins was not an intentional reference. I will never be capable of believing this.

As you can probably tell from the title, I took a crack at another Lovecraftian horror story of the underground spaces that defy human comprehension. I even had some input on the sound design, so JR knows how I want the creepiness of the story to flow from the setting.

Most importantly for the sound, we talked about different ways to make the normal spaces of human existence become disturbing, weird, shocking. The territory that you think is safe actually startles and destabilizes you as a listener. It’ll be a subtle aspect of the story that messes with listeners.

“The Walls Are Alive” is set in a country estate on a human colony world in the far future. Underneath the mansion is a network of tunnels curving through spaces that are typically impossible for humans to traverse.

It was a good use of the Digger aliens I developed for Under the Trees, Eaten a few years ago. I wasn't done exploring the potential of those creatures for fiction, so I was happy to get another opportunity to set a story with them.

The opportunity to contribute to the project came along at a time when I was feeling stressed in my life. My old teaching job was getting tough – I was beginning to suffer from what I realized was improper training and a workplace culture that encouraged instructors to let each other fail as small errors snowballed into serious problems.

Some of my favourite spaces in the Doctor Who fan community
are the queer ones. Not necessarily the gay ones, which have
their own unavoidable problems at the moment. But the queer.

So I was glad to get an offer – even if it was for free – to contribute to a project built in making explicit the values of liberation and queerness that so many fans saw in Capaldi-era Doctor Who.

I think it’s time I focussed more on smaller projects like this for my writing. The last couple of years, I’ve been trying to produce a film version of my play from four years ago, You Were My Friend. But I’ve frankly had a lot of trouble raising the money for it and getting a crew together before I had the money to make it.

Now that I’m working full-time as Anderson College’s Director of Education, I have more money and don’t have to hustle all the time. But I’m also no longer in a position to devote three or four weeks of my life to eight hours of shooting a film on no notice.

But I do have time to devote every week to writing another short-ish novel. Which the latest version of You Were My Friend can be. It’s the kind of work where my talents can work best. And developing connections in the Toronto art and publishing world over the next year can make for a respectable indie author career.

So I’ll be getting back to pages. It’s where I belong.

Pure Conceptual Imagination I: Is Sci-Fi Philosophy? Research Time, 11/08/2015

While I was on vacation, I switched gears again in what I picked up to read for my Utopias project research. Filippo Marinetti’s work is a perfect storm of the beauty, transformative potential, visionary drive, uplift, and terrifying danger of utopian dreaming. 

I’ve written here before of how uncomfortable Marinetti’s writing can make me. One minute, I’m cheering alongside his angry calls to turf cronyist career parliamentarians and bloodless technocrats out of government. By the end of the same paragraph, he’s calling for a government of radically militarized trade unions run by stormtrooper regiment veterans and dreaming of paving every forest in Italy to build countless smoke-belching factories.

Literature is the imagination of a new world, built so we
can learn from that imaginary world. Maybe it's wonderful,
maybe it's horrifying. From Amazon Prime's The Man in
the High Castle, based on Philip K. Dick's masterpiece.

That’s Gervaisian levels of awkwardness.

After turning the old Italian over and over in my thoughts, I started reading a book with a much more benign imagination, Archaeologies of the Future by Frederic Jameson. The book is an exploration of how science-fiction as a genre has tended to understand the human impulse to build utopias in life and thought, the concepts underlying utopian politics, and the content of utopian visions. 

Jameson is primarily a literary theorist, though his knowledge of philosophy’s tradition is expert as well. He weaves descriptions and storylines from fiction works into a philosophical examination of what utopia is, and how its meaning shifts from era to era. 

His training in literary theory weds him a little too closely to the fine details of the idea’s history than I’d like to take in my own work. One long chapter of Archaeologies examines Thomas More’s Utopia, as if the book that brought the word into being had some special insight over and above everyone else who’s thought this way, whether or not they’ve ever used the word.

Writing the history of literature, or the history of philosophy, you need to focus on the origins this way. But we shouldn’t mistake how to do the history for how to do philosophy itself. Philosophy – and literature too – is fundamentally creative. What matters is where you take an idea in the present, to help build the future.

I've always considered the best philosophy to draw as
many of its ideas from literature as from the ostensible
philosophical canon. Frederic Jameson.

Utopia is an interesting concept because it’s more often been developed in literature than in philosophy, even though philosophy is the tradition of creating concepts. And the concept of utopia has primarily been developed in science-fiction literature. It’s the gleaming space palace, the narrative of progress, the voyage to seek out new life and go where no one has gone before. 

As of last October, I became a published science-fiction writer. As of later this month, I’ll become a published philosophical writer. When you look at them as genres of creative writing, they depend on similar imaginative abilities. Think about how I developed the utopian (and more often dystopian) ideas in my novel, Under the Trees, Eaten.

The Digger aliens of the novel offer a new way of life to humanity, taking on their nature and their morality, the morality of intelligent ants. They’re an advanced species of physical individuals with no self-conception of their own individuality. It’s a way of life that offers humanity a way out of the everyday violence of individuals jockeying for power. That’s the utopian element. 

But I developed the end of the book by following through on one of the real-world implications of their natural communism. As for what that is, I don’t spoil the kickers of my own stories. So the Diggers’ supposedly higher morality comes with its own cold brutality, which you could say is the dystopian.

Jameson describes utopian thinking as a product of the imagination. A utopian draws an elaborate diagram, his vision of the world if he could correct with absolute power the essential social and political conflict of his era. 

From Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's adaptation of
Roadside Picnic.

The real-world content of what a utopia could be in all its gritty, material detail is only plausible as a wish. Jameson talks about the end of one of my favourite novels, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic, where the protagonist encounters a literal alien wish granting machine. In the throes of ecstasy and fear, he can wish only for total happiness and abundance for everyone. No more specific than that. Only a wish.

The utopian impulse is the wish that the world could be better. Utopian imagination is to describe that better world. Dystopian imagination sees all the new problems that better world would create. It’s the diagnosis required for the next utopia.

Dreaming of a Perfected Society, A History Boy, 15/04/2015

One culture and history comes to an end, and another begins. It’s not only philosophically fascinating. How we conceive and build a new kind of society is the guiding problem of my next major non-fiction book project. 

A hard sell caption: Buy my book here.

I’ve also encountered it in the science-fiction I’ve been reading since I was a child, and the process informs a lot of the sci-fi narratives I’m slowly working on. The aliens in Under the Trees, Eaten express a kind of society that’s utterly different from ours, but their kind of morality is also a lot more harmonious than individualist humanity’s. So they’re, in their own way, guiding us to a better future. 

Thanks to some helpful recommendations from my editor Jeffrey, this aspect of the narrative is now a lot more prominent. As well, it gets into much more disturbing territory once you realize that the aliens’ guidance of their human friends toward a more harmonious morality is just as (or perhaps more) biological as it is ethical.

One of the first works of classic science-fiction literature of which I became a genuine fan was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. I was maybe about nine years old when I read my first book in that series, one of the last, Foundation and Earth. I didn’t quite understand the significance of it at the time. I didn’t know that this was a late-career extension of an earlier series of novellettes and novellas, and I hadn’t read the book to which this was the immediate sequel, Foundation’s Edge. All I knew was that Isaac Asimov was supposed to be a legendary sci-fi author, and this was a book by him. I think my mother bought it for me at a pretty cheap price too.

As I investigated the whole series, both the original stories and the prequels. Prelude to Foundation I read a while after finishing all the previous five Foundation novels. By the time I did, I was actually growing tired of Asimov’s style. After reading and loving Foundation and Earth, I sought out its predecessors, the novels Foundation, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation, and Foundation’s Edge. 

I was at first a little puzzled by the disconnected nature of the early novels, because Foundation and Earth was a long, single narrative. Then I learned that what I owned as the first three novels were originally published as seven or eight short stories and novellas, later collected into these novels. 

Once I read Asimov’s first prequel, I found his sense of humour simple and a little crude. The story did little more than unnecessarily fill gaps in the chronology of his future history, and link characters that didn’t need to be linked. I also found Prelude’s episodic action plot and dull romance narrative uninteresting. By this time, I’d discovered Douglas Adams, so could see far more of what science-fiction could do than Asimov ever managed. 

The covers of my versions of the first three Foundation books.

The Foundation series ultimately offered only different kinds of conservative visions of how to deal with the necessity of social change. The concept of the first stories, which inspired the entire following series, was that through his mathematical science that could predict the broad directions of the future, Hari Seldon understood that the collapse of the Galactic Empire was inevitable. He built the Foundations to shorten the dark ages before restoring the empire. Not work out a new form of government that might be more sustainable than the empire, but to start a new iteration of the old empire. 

A telepathic dictator named The Mule tries to build his own empire even faster than the Foundation could, but the political unity of his state depends on his unique abilities. Once he dies, his empire crumbles, and the ruined Foundation tries to rebuild. 

The Second Foundation, a secret society of specially trained telepaths and mathematical historians, helps rebuild the old order of the Foundation. But they still believe in restoring the Galactic Empire, and were founded as a series of operatives to keep the restoration plan on track. The First Foundation tries to hunt them down, the ironic result of an autocratic power trying to destroy the true autocrats.

The last two books, Edge and Earth saw a hero from the Foundation discover Gaia, a planet with a collective consciousness, not only among all its human inhabitants, but its animal, plant, and even inorganic elements. The planet as a system had a shared consciousness, operating as a holistic awareness. The planetary consciousness supervenes on its members’ individual personalities without overwriting their identities, just as our autonomic functions roil on without the interference of our self-consciousness. 

Through a technobabbly means, Edge’s protagonist Golan chooses this Gaia as the future path of our galaxy, a holistic galactic consciousness. Ecological concerns appear only quietly in the Foundation series, in the image of an Earth blasted with nuclear radiation, Asimov’s vision for the future of humanity that had progressed farthest during his own lifetime. Nonetheless, a literal ecological consciousness emerged in his work as the chief means for humanity to progress beyond its cycles of chaos and authoritarian rule. 

Still, all he could offer was the tiniest gesture in the last years of his life. I wrote a book called Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity, which shows its own glimpse of what that new society could be. And I have a long time yet to explore that new world.

Really Good Science-Fiction, Composing, 07/12/2014

As I’ve written before, I’ve always been into science-fiction throughout my life. It isn’t really, when you think about it, a big deal because so many popular culture involve sci-fi forms and ideas. But even though sci-fi ideas basically are popular culture now, actually identifying yourself as someone who likes sci-fi per se has, at least until recently, put you pretty solidly in nerd cultures, with everything that entails.

But I’m also a published novelist in sci-fi now. Even though I won’t be able to get fully into promoting Under the Trees, Eaten until the new year (it was always going to be a slow build sort of thing anyway, as I’m trying to get my new career in communications and network science off the ground at the same time), I’m still actually part of the field.

So whenever my friend Philosojaysfan* tweets links about his Stanley Kubrick fandom, I’m usually interested, especially when it’s about 2001, which is one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made. This time, the British Film Institute posted a scan of Kubrick’s original letter to Arthur C. Clarke that started their collaboration on what would eventually become 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

* Yes, that is seriously his Twitter handle. Don’t judge him, because you know it’s actually kind of brilliant.

So many pictures of Kubrick make him look intense or
manic, but I prefer the images of him as amused or
bemused.

Kubrick’s movies were really influential on my thinking when I first started to consider seriously the possibility of creating art as one of the major things I did with my life. My own styles and priorities have since become very different than his, but that formative influence, admiration, and love is still there. As well, there are attempts throughout my work to make what I’d call “really good science-fiction.” 

So I thought this and the next few Sunday/weekend posts would discuss some of my ideas about what makes “really good science-fiction” and how I put these into my work. Right now, my two major projects are Under the Trees, Eaten and the Alice script that I’m developing with Lee Skinner. I’ll discuss an idea I had for a comic series a few years ago, and how that developed in my thinking after meeting a possible collaborator in Toronto this summer. And maybe I’ll talk about some ideas I’ve had about a dream project of mine: what I’d do if my writing career ever gets to the point where the BBC would commission me to write an episode of Doctor Who.

What do I think generally constitutes “really good science-fiction”? A lot of it is in that letter Kubrick wrote to Arthur C. Clarke in 1964. There should be a thoughtfulness to it, considering a question that could (or perhaps should) reorient how we understand the universe and our place in it. I ultimately don’t like what Clarke did with the 2001 concept of extra-terrestrial life in the novels that followed their collaboration. He essentially made them superpowerful gods whose mission was to seed the universe with life of all kinds. 

There was a naïveté in those Clarke novels that depressed me at the time I read them without entirely knowing why. Kubrick and Clarke’s original collaboration didn’t get into the aliens’ motives for what they were doing at all, letting their actions remain mysterious, and our encounters with them taking on an almost mystical character. Aliens would be so different from us that encountering them would require a temporary suspension of your own humanity, an experience that only our religious mystical traditions have come close to preparing us for. When aliens that were once the causes of world-shattering encounters are treated as technical problems to solve and tinker with, a lot of literary and philosophical majesty is lost.

This is a problem that I have with a lot of sci-fi influenced by the Golden Age period anyway, as Clarke’s very much was. The stories were not about character, ethics, or any deeper meaning, but simply puzzle boxes. Culturally, we’ve figured out how to combine puzzle boxes with all that now, and so the quotidian triviality of puzzle box storytelling only becomes more frustrating to encounter.

Even Immortals Have Their Bills to Pay, Composing, 07/11/2013

As I’ve mentioned a few times, my novel Under the Trees, Eaten has been available for about a month. I haven’t mentioned it a lot lately, because most of my work outside my Communications program has been taken up with preparing and promoting You Were My Friend. The play debuts tonight at the Pearl Company Theatre, and I’ll also have a table set up to sell copies of the novel before and after the show. 

Under the Trees, Eaten is a different beast in a lot of ways, though it shares some similarities to the play. Its central protagonist is a woman, and it touches on some of the same themes in that regard, but it’s mostly, as I’ve discussed before, rooted in a science-fiction and weird fiction heritage. 

I’ve read science-fiction all my life, though my interests has a writer have developed in a very different direction than what I first read in the genre as a teenager. There, I was mostly reading Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, some Larry Niven, authors who worked very much in the Golden Age model of science-fiction, where character development and political themes often took a backseat to world-building and puzzle-solving. I had read some William Gibson during this time as well, but didn’t quite get it at the time.

Probably my first glimmer of what science-fiction literature could do beyond these constraints was when I first read Ursula K. Le Guin. This was for an introductory political science course, of all things, an analysis of The Dispossessed as the depiction of a genuinely anarchistic and broadly communist society where everything went according to plan and there was no military dictatorship or police state. Following up with Phillip K. Dick, Doris Lessing, the Strugatsky brothers, and Iain Banks (with whom I share a birthday) years later showed me much more of what that genre of literature could do. And I think Under the Trees, Eaten is a solid contribution to that model: putting ordinary people, with all their complexity, in sci-fi situations.*

Roger Zelazny, quiet literary revolutionary.

* I’m also indebted to Phil Sandifer and the TARDIS Eruditorum for guiding me conceptually through how such stories work, introducing me to the specific mechanics. Once I knew the tools well in isolation, I could use them even better together.

This is why it was fortuitous a few months ago that I picked up This Immortal, one of Roger Zelazny’s most legendary novels. I didn’t know anything about Zelazny when I was first discovering sci-fi as a teenager, even though he wrote during the same Golden Age period that I falsely believed at the time was the pinnacle of literary sci-fi. Once I was sure of what he did historically, and how it feeds into the tradition of literature to which I want my work to contribute, I think I can appreciate him much better.

This Immortal is about, well, an immortal. The scene is an Earth that is still largely irradiated after a nuclear war, having produced strange mutants that resemble mythical creatures, as well as our protagonist who hasn’t aged in several centuries. It also resulted in Earth’s economic and cultural colonization by a race from Vega.** The storyline of the book is about our immortal protagonist showing a wealthy Vegan around several important historical sites of Earth, and the adventures they get into along with the other members of their party, all of whom have conflicting agendas.

** Unintentional humour from historical juxtaposition. These aliens are called Vegans (pronounced like the star, Vay-gans). Zelazny never could have predicted how that word would develop in pop culture. Don’t let it interfere with your experience of the book.

The deftness of the book comes in the casual ease with which all the cultural and historical context comes out. There is never really an exposition scene for any of the historical backstory. We just watch events in the present unfold, and the history of Earth and all the individual characters flow organically through conversations as events take their course. 

What’s remarkable is that this book came out in 1965, one of the last peak years of the Golden Age of sci-fi literature. This Immortal shared the Hugo award that year with Frank Herbert’s Dune, probably the highest expression of epic world-building sci-fi light on characterization. Zelazny’s story, however, is filled not with royals and tribesmen played at a register so high that the novel may as well have a Greek chorus, as Herbert’s novel was. 

What impressed me was how ordinary all the characters were. They had their politics, their rivalries, their grubby day jobs, and their petty resentments. Even after such an epic event as a nuclear conflict that nearly destroyed the planet, and the other anti-colonial wars that play pivotal roles in the characters’ histories, the most moving moments are when one character breaks down on learning that his wife may have died in an earthquake while he was on this tour.

I mean, it didn’t impress me at the time. When I was reading it a couple of months ago, it struck me as a book quite a lot like most of the science-fiction literature, television, and film that’s produced today. Its technology and world is at an epic register, but the characters are muddy, complex, contradictory. But in 1965, when literary sci-fi was still so predominantly filled with archetypes or plot functions instead of people (and it’s not as though we don’t still have this problem, though it isn’t quite as bad as before), such characterization was revolutionary. 

So I think I can say that, even though I had never read Roger Zelazny until long after I finished the manuscript, Under the Trees, Eaten firmly exists in his tradition of literature.

Stage Debut of a Twisted, Complex Journey, Composing, 30/09/2014

Under the Trees, Eaten got its debut reading this weekend at a time when it was a book you could purchase. I read several excerpts at the Underdog Poets’ Academy, a reading night for emerging authors that my friend Sarah B organizes with her business partner Maddy C in the independent publishing and literature non-profit, Meat Locker Editions. 

The Academy is a monthly reading night for emerging and chrysalitic authors in Toronto and the surrounding area. It happens in the upstairs lounge of a bar called The Central at Bloor and Markham streets, just across from Bathurst Station. However, it’s going bi-monthly for a while, as Sarah and Maddy enter a period when their company becomes, as Sarah put it to me last night, ridiculously busy. Check the link I’ve posted above for more of Meat Locker’s worthwhile projects.

I was happy to share the bill with some worthwhile poets, whose work varied from intense and insightful to ironically hilarious parody. The last time I read at the Academy, I squeezed five minutes of material into the open mike section on a sparsely attended night in late February. This weekend, I read a few excerpts from a performance text that I drew up for a plan I have for a 40 minute reading. That larger plan will be for solo headlining performance and a multimedia show that I’ll need collaborators to develop.

My novella also engages with the sci-fi
tradition of giant insect imagery. All class.

Under the Trees, Eaten is a book that does a lot of things, and I designed my set of excerpts to demonstrate as much of that as possible. The excerpts I read began introducing the mystery and suspense, but also profound moments: Marilyn’s first meeting with a native of the isolated and alien town of Seul-Coeur faces her with hostility and implicit threats of violence. As they fly to the town, their small plane is attacked by a strange green lightning that envelops her guide Pierre.

Yet there is also a deep moment in conversation between Marilyn and Pierre, as he describes his experience ice fishing and the dangers of bear attacks at particular times of the year. A bear has a soul, he says. “It is a soul that seriously considers eating you, which is why you need the gun, but it is still a soul. There are very few people who understand that about a bear.”

The line got just the reaction I hoped it would: laughter and thoughtful nods, one right after the other. I think the deepest truths in human life occur side by side with laughter.

Under the Trees, Eaten is also a very feminist book in that it has a female protagonist intruding on the framework of a Lovecraftian story (most clearly expressed by the sections in which her father narrates his tragic adventure in the area, which takes place three years before the main narrative) in a creative destruction. I read a scene at the end of chapter three where Marilyn and Pierre confront each other about his continued caginess. He stands over her, in a moment that I explicitly code, through Marilyn’s own accusation, as an expression of the body language of domestic violence. 

Not going to lie. I had the audience eating out of the palm of my hand at that scene. I think I lost a couple with my description of the otherworldly mutilated moose Marilyn discovers in Pierre’s barn. But my audience was intrigued.

In theatre news, Mel tells me that rehearsals on You Were My Friend are going swimmingly. We plan to meet later this week to go over the media plan, and my team will likely (given our assignment schedule) get started on promotion in the next week or two. It’s coming together quite fast, really, but the official debut is in five weeks. It will approach faster than I can feel.

Brief Hiatus, So Buy My Book, 25/07/2014

Just a short note to let any regular readers and random happenstance readers know that Adam Writes Everything is going on a bit of a hiatus for a few days, which is a massive gap compared to the actual purpose of the blog.

By the time this post is published, I'll be on my way to Eclipse festival in a campsite in the middle of nowhere in Quebec. With my best girl by my side, my copy of Spinoza's Ethics in my hand (and maybe I'll take some Negri along too; I'm not sure), and our friend Dreamboat driving the rental car up with his compact-size girlfriend L, I'll dance, rave, philosophize, and promote my book with a campsite full of hippies and party people.

I probably won't get back to the internet until the following Tuesday or Wednesday. It'll be a good break, especially after this past week. Until then, here's the link to my publisher's website, where you can buy my book, Under the Trees, Eaten.

Why I Am Such an Excellent Writer, Composing, 15/07/2014

Having done some promotional duties for one of my fellow artists yesterday, I thought it best to promote my own upcoming projects as well. As my difficult hunt continues for such an apparently simple thing as a day job with a reliable income stream, I at least have a writing career that, while it doesn’t yet produce a lot of cash, at least reminds me that I have something valuable to contribute. 

One of my personal favourite under-
employed philosophical writers, the
title of this post is a play on his
ironically egotistical chapter headings
from Ecce Homo.

Not everyone who is underemployed has this kind of fallback for their sense of self-worth. For almost two years, I’ve had the qualifications and the references for a good start to the career that I chose, and that I was continually told that I could make a great life from. Those qualifications were the result of seven years of hard work: one year and change for my MA, eight months of preliminary research, and four years of my doctorate. Realistically, I’ve spent the last two years trying to get that career started and coming up empty in terms of steady employment. Like a lot of academics in my generation, despite my best efforts and the assurances of people who have actually worked with me that what I do is valuable to the discipline, the university sector simply does not want me.

Now, like a lot of former academics, I face the difficult task of convincing employers in the private sector that my years of experience as a writer, researcher, and teacher (and in my case, as a contractual editor, a customer service phone jockey, and having helped run one of Canada’s largest university newspapers for two years) is relevant to their faster-paced working environment. Also, that I am sincerely devoted to my career change, and will not rush back to academia the minute a poverty-waged four-month teaching post opens up. There is the additional problem that I will not know precisely what my new career is until I land my first job. I'm qualified to work as an editor (which I'm doing freelance now, but is not a reliably sustainable income) and as a researcher (which is the bulk of my current applications). 

Even so, the most creative part of my career(s) is beginning to take off. For one thing, my novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, is slated for release later this month. I’m beginning from an independent publisher, but BlankSpace take their work seriously, and they take their ambitions seriously as well. They’ll be pleased to know that, as I’ve discussed Under the Trees, Eaten with members of Toronto’s literary community, they’ve heard of the label, and it’s all good things. If the work I publish with them ultimately opens a pathway to future success with larger labels, I’ll always have BlankSpace to thank.

In fiction, my favourite inspirations are
writers whose ideas I can take in
directions they never would have gone
themselves. Lovecraft writing a female
protagonist and a comprehensible
alien? Never.

Going through the proofs this weekend was the first time that I’ve revisited my own manuscript in a while, and it felt like I was reading it with fresh eyes. I wove enough thematic complexity into the work to please anyone who generally enjoys anything science-fiction. The heritage of H. P. Lovecraft is clear in the basic premise and the nature of the central extraterrestrials in the story. 

At the same time, Under the Trees, Eaten grows beyond its primary inspiration in many ways. For one, I cannot sensibly equate the radically Other with the utterly unknowable as Lovecraft does.* The mysterious creatures of my novella are indeed terrifyingly different than humans, more terrifying and casually violent in ways we would find abhorrent. But they move with a calm rationality, and their reason, though radically different than that of humanity, is still a reason and can still be understood. This is a fundamental aspect of my research in environmental philosophy: that humanity must lose its hubris that its own reason is the only reason that can exist. Lovecraft, in his xenophobia, was all too guilty of this small-mindedness.

* And as many of my least favourite traditions of European philosophy over the last hundred or so years have done as well, but that’s another story.

My theatre work continues as well. You Were My Friend, which will play at the Pearl Company Theatre in Hamilton this November, features many of the same feminist approaches as Under the Trees, Eaten. One of Lovecraft’s greatest weaknesses as a writer, after all, was his inability to craft a woman. My novella’s very spine and backbone is its protagonist, Marilyn. Her story searching for the truth about the death of her mother and the mental breakdown of her father is the central driving force of the story.

You Were My Friend is similarly rooted in the complexity of women’s lives and families. It has a cast of two, both women. The story begins when one of them, Vicki, is cast out of her mother’s home before she even has the chance to finish high school to fend for herself, all because of her relationship with a man in his mid-20s (who disappears from her life at this very moment of crisis). It is the story of a young woman who is thrown, quite literally, to the wolves because her actions don’t conform to a puritanical sexual morality. 

No matter how many job applications I may send out, their fate is ultimately out of my control. This was true when I was looking for university work, and it’s true now that I’m transitioning into research and editing work in the wider private sector. But if there is one place where I’m not adrift, it’s the words that come from my fingers on these keyboards. 

That’s why, no matter how difficult or demoralizing my work in this economy might become, I keep working, in my spare time, on this blog, the philosophical publishing projects that it often tracks, this novella (and the other ideas for fiction works), and this play (and other theatrical ideas as well). It is the one area of my productive life where I can maintain some measure of control. I wish more people adrift in our economy could have a similar anchor.

Science-Fictional World Building, Composing, 12/06/2014

Under the Trees, Eaten developed from a simple point. The head of BlankSpace Publications asked me if I had any ideas for a sci-fi story the size of a novella, and I came up with one by the end of the day. I had been reading some philosophy that made a very creative ontological use of H. P. Lovecraft, and having long been a fan of his stories, I wanted to create something that would overcome some of the limitations of the Lovecraft milieu. 

So I developed a concept for aliens that made them strange to humans, but not horrifyingly destructive, and a storyline that included a major role for the evil and pain that humans inflict on each other. And I developed a protagonist narrator who was not only a woman (non-existent for the Lovecraft corpus), but who could adapt well enough to her circumstances with just enough genre-awareness that, while she still stumbled a bit, could emerge victorious. 

The conflicts she facts go beyond just the characters in the book to include actual threats to her narrative voice within the book herself. Her father, occasionally speaking from three years before the story’s main events, buts into her narrative with his more conventionally Lovecraftian style, essentially trying to steal his own daughter’s narrative. Beyond that, the aliens themselves are a meta-diegetic force in the story who also, at least for a moment, overwrite Marilyn’s power to narrate her own life and existence. 

Between my own work as author and Jeffrey’s suggestions as editor and chief, we have a tight and wonderful novella to inflict on the public later this month. While I’ll be promoting it at as many bookstores around the GTA as I can over the summer and fall, Jeffrey is preparing for an internet-based blitz. It includes a blog at BlankSpace that regularly publishes short, creepy excerpts from the novella’s text as brief previews.

It also includes a meta-fictional element that I’ve been preparing this week, The Seul-Coeur Logs. This is a blog that will publish ancillary material to the central event that gets Under the Trees, Eaten’s plot moving, the plane crash over the isolated, alien-influenced town of Seul-Coeur, Quebec that killed Marilyn’s mother in 1997. The posts themselves will be written as if they were from the files about the plane crash that Marilyn’s father Paul collected from then until his death (this isn’t a spoiler; he’s dead at the book’s first sentence). It’ll include extended versions of his own increasingly unhinged rantings, pseudo-scientific explanations of the physics behind the alien habitat, and interviews with air transport security officials, which might include a character I’ve thought of including in a possible sequel to the story.

And of course, this blog will be following the story as well, and explaining, spoiler-free, some of the ideas behind each new update on The Seul-Coeur Logs. All these websites – BlankSpace Publications, Adam Riggio Writes, and The Seul-Coeur Logs – along with the book itself, will take part in building the world of Under the Trees, Eaten. The motives of writing Under the Trees, Eaten included my own concerns about science-fiction storytelling, and the characters themselves shape their narratives in ways that suggest they are familiar with the notion that they don’t live in the real world, but in a science-fiction narrative. Understanding the meta-narrative elements of the novella will help a reader see how I put it together, and seeing the cogs and wheels that assemble the whole is part of the fun.

Available This June . . . . . Composing, 22/05/2014

Cover design by my friend Miss K.

After a long process lengthened by the fact that everyone involved in its production and publication also has day jobs, I’m happy to announce that my debut fiction novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, will be released at the beginning of next month, available from BlankSpace Publications. So for this post, I thought I’d provide a formal introduction to the book, how it came to exist, and what you can expect to see in it.

I’ve already spoken about the project quite a lot on this blog, particularly its Lovecraftian influences, twisted visions of Canadiana, and deeply feminist themes. So here are some facts about the history of its composition that you might be interested to know.

I composed this novella on the recommendation of the head of BlankSpace, The Inestimable Jeffrey, who, after a series of conversations we had in late 2012 about the possibility (or rather, impossibility in its current form) of publishing my novel about Newfoundland, A Small Man’s Town, wrote me an email one evening asking if I had any ideas for a science-fiction story. I read that email early in the morning, shortly before going to my day shift at the answering service where I used to work. By the end of my shift, in between answering phones 20-30 times per hours, I had written the initial pitch for Under the Trees, Eaten.

The composition of the story took place in what was probably the most hectic and stressful period of my life. I would work on it for at least an hour almost every night before bed, usually averaging about five hours of sleep each evening. The entire first draft of the closing chapter was composed in a two hour binge where I literally could not stop myself from writing until the story was finished. TIJeffrey and I passed the manuscript back and forth a few times over the last year, polishing the prose, changing a few details, coming up with a wonderful new knocker of an ending, and even pitching an idea for a sequel over the last few weeks.

I seriously want to write this sequel. I’ve come up with some corking good ideas for it. This is why, if you are reading this post (or any of my posts about Under the Trees, Eaten), you should buy my book. Because its success will indicate whether we’ll publish a follow-up.

I primarily wanted to develop a story that would be equally morally frightening as it would be scary in the traditional sense of creepy tones and otherworldly monsters. It’s literally the story of an ordinary woman discovering an extraordinary place, where the presence of aliens in a mysterious underground cavern has warped the surrounding wildlife and physical phenomena. What’s truly disturbing about her environmental encounters here isn’t just that she travels through a land where the trees glow with a crimson-purple fire that slowly proliferates among their branches, where insects and plants have impossibly-shaped bodies, and aliens live in caves that twist into the curled dimensions between atoms themselves. No, what’s really freaky is how quickly she gets used to it, and how some of these phenomena even help her find her way when she’s lost. 

In some of my previous posts, I describe how H. P. Lovecraft was a serious influence on Under the Trees, Eaten, and in many ways, that’s true. But my story goes beyond the limitations of his style, as any new art should. For one, the aliens have a much more complicated relationship with humanity than simply being inspiring terror. My conception of the aliens in this story takes their moral difference from humanity more seriously even than Lovecraft himself did. For me, the aliens are certainly monstrous — they exist in dimensions that humans can’t even perceive, and moving through them permanently alters a person’s mind. They think about the world in a way that’s totally different from the human perspective, and my own story takes seriously the possibility that we’ll come out the worse from the comparison.

Final Countdowns, Twist Endings and Refrigerators, Composing, 07/05/2014

As part of the publicity for my upcoming sci-fi novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, I’m going to discuss a few ideas I’ve had about its composition and editing process here on the blog. We’re just in the last stages now, and my editor at Blank Space has given me a wonderful recommendation on some changes to the ending. We’re furiously working through the last few edits to the manuscript this week (while also working on our day jobs) so we can release it for this summer and I can start touring.

My promotions will take me wherever the GO Transit network or the cars of amenable friends will go. So my late-starting career as a novelist is finally taking off, at least in terms of having a product to push. I also have a philosophical essay coming out in an upcoming issue of Social Epistemology, but that’s another story.

Because of the inland, rustic setting of the story, I designed
the aliens to resemble ants. Their social practices also fit
well with the philosophical undercurrents of the narrative.

The changes we’ve been discussing don’t even affect the story’s ending itself. It just adds another wrinkle to the motivation of a central character, a wrinkle that nonetheless demonstrates the inadequacy of humans, particularly men, to understand the complex features of their world, and their otherworlds. While we’re pitching the book as a pulp story, from the start I always wanted it to be more than a pulp story, simply because I never want my work to risk being dismissed as ordinary. Ordinariness, to me, is a killer of creativity. 

You see, every project I conceive always has multiple motivations. I think it’s a side-effect of just having so many concurrent thought processes going through my mind at once. In terms of pure pulp factor, Under the Trees, Eaten is a fast read that’s an entertaining collision of Lovecraft tropes with a female protagonist designed after the fashion of Joss Whedon. But that combination of pulp and feminist characterization also contains an important ethical dimension. It was of the utmost importance for me that the protagonist Marilyn not end this story as a victim of any kind. 

Quite frankly, I’m really rather sick of stories that make women into little more than victims or pawns in the plans and machinations of male characters. I even included a reference to Women in Refrigerators in an earlier draft, but it ended up having to be cut. 

I decided on an ironclad rule for my fiction that no major
female character would be victimized for the sake of
developing the narrative or plot of a male character.

The story is about Marilyn being manipulated by the men that surround her in her life. First, she’s manipulated by her dead father. Not in a literal sense, but insofar as she finds herself on a quest defined by validating his memory, solving the mystery that consumed and eventually destroyed his life, discovering the nature of the otherworldly plane crash where his wife died. Of course, if Marilyn's father Paul were the central protagonist of this story (and he is a minor protagonist; he narrates sections of chapters two through four), his wife would be a woman victimized for the sake of his story. There’s Pierre, the mysterious fellow from the town of alien-human hybrids who has a multi-layered hidden agenda for Marilyn. And there are the hostile townsfolk who will commit whatever violence is necessary to hide their secret, who naturally want this outsider American woman crushed and jammed inside the nearest fridge. The narrative is constantly threatening Marilyn with victimization or co-optation into a man's plan. 

At the end of the day, Under the Trees, Eaten should express this fundamental ethical and moral point: for all that this capable, intelligent, and increasingly enraged woman is pressured into fulfilling the plans and goals of various men around her, she does not, and will not. The new twist we’re adding to the motivations of some of the male characters will better indicate precisely what her own ethics are, and why the efforts of the men of the story to control her will always be inadequate. Marilyn is not an instrument, and if you attempt to make her one, you will be sorry.

IowaLit 4: The Limits and Dreams of Ambition, Composing, 19/02/2014

Continued from previous. Yet literary singularity remains a paradoxical matter, at least in the account of it that I gleaned from Eric Bennett. The perfect articulation of a literary singularity is a description so precise and detailed that no general description or summary could be fully adequate to it. There is always some remainder. 

Derrida's embrace of seemingly insoluble paradoxes
include his decision to make a living as a writer, despite
considering language inadequate to reality in many ways.
Typical negative theologian.

Literature of the evocative image actually strives for a remarkably ambitious goal, which the Derrida-influenced streams of literary theory would actually take to be impossible. One of Jacques Derrida’s most intriguing concepts in his philosophy of language is that any linguistic expression is inherently inadequate to reality itself. The words of language are themselves generalities because they are applicable to more than one unique situation. In any description at all, there is always some remainder, some facet of the described reality that escapes the ability of language itself to describe it. Yet in the atmosphere of institutionalized middling that is Bennett’s experience of University of Iowa’s creative writing program, the supposedly unambitious evocative paradigm strives for a genuine impossibility.

Language puzzles people, I think more than literature. Despite the overrated break between analytic and continental philosophy over the last hundred or so years, one can make a solid case that the major philosophical discourses and controversies of the 20th century revolved around the nature of language. For examples, see any of the following list: Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Bertrand Russell (though his work is often misunderstood by ignoring his dual focus on both language and mathematics), Alfred Tarski, Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Carnap, Ferdinand de Saussure, Jean Beaudrillard, Saul Kripke, Willard van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, Elizabeth Anscombe, David Lewis, John Searle. I’m sure I’m missing plenty of people.

That century was even more inventive in its innovations in the forms, techniques, and subject matters of literature. Compared to the innovations of the last century, the 21st would seem rather bland in comparison. Literary creation is far more corporate, and authors no longer innovate quite so wildly, and when they do, those experiments do not receive the same popular enthusiasm as the experimental works of, for example, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Thomas Pynchon. Bennett’s essay is not only an advertisement for his own book on the genesis of the Iowa program, but is also part of a collection exploring the tensions between the MFA program establishment and the major New York publishing houses. The 21st century seems dominated by corporate priorities instead of artistic ones.

You need not restrict that last statement to the world of the arts alone.

Art and commerce have always had a
problematic relationship, but sometimes the
art is too amazing to worry too much about
all the problems. This caption brought to you
by Netflix, where you can watch Breaking Bad
until you starve to death on your own sofa.

Yet the literature of evocation quietly hides this mad ambition. Writing a wildly ambitious novel is openly and obviously a grand gesture. I have always had sympathy with artists who strive to create works that serve for the cultures of this century what Joyce, Marcel Proust, Beckett, Pablo Picasso, the Beatles, or F. W. Murnau supplied for the last one. And what Paul Cézanne, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herman Melville did for the 19th century. Perhaps we’ll remember David Simon, Vince Gilligan, and Death Grips that way in decades to come. Writing the Great American Novel (or even the Great Canadian or Kenyan novel) is an ambition that includes all the skills of literary, narrative, and philosophical creation in a single, enormous project. Its writer becomes a bonfire that can be seen from a long way away. 

But here is the calm, sedate, humble style of evocative literature strolling out of Iowa with an ambition to do what some of the great thinkers of the last century have called impossible: craft language that is ontologically adequate to reality and life itself. The genre mashups that characterize my own Under the Trees, Eaten and some of the other ideas for short novels that I’m mulling over, have a different focus, which is less ambitious in this regard. 

My own literary works are philosophically informed art, but don’t strive for this kind of singularity. I’m too comfortable in the pulpy world of science-fiction to fit into the culture of Iowa as I understand it. My work in this realm, like the works of philosophy that I most admire and value, aims to provoke a reader to think differently about their life, and perhaps even change it, even in the relatively minor details of their thought and ethics. When some brilliant writer of the Iowan model finally does accomplish the impossible and craft language completely adequate to the singularity of reality, I’m not sure what can happen after that, how the form can move on. Literature whose motive is to change the world will always be vibrant because the world will always have problems to solve, and those solutions will constitute further, different problems in the future. Evocative literature seeks to reflect the world perfectly. But philosophical literature seeks to change it.

IowaLit 3: Using Stereotypes to Overthrow Stereotypes, Composing, 18/02/2014

Continued from previous. Canadiana is one of those words that every Canadian understands when they hear it, and can actually give a pretty reasonable definition if you ask them. St. Augustine would encounter no problems here. Such literature would be a paradigm for how Eric Bennett describes the University of Iowa model, as Canadiana short stories and books would be composed almost entirely of vivid evocations of a time and place, usually an isolated, rural place, and a time before the intense connectivity of modern technology. I’m reminded of Margaret Atwood’s novel Cat’s Eye, in part about the difficult task the protagonist has of tracking down a former childhood friend. Set today, this sequence would usually last no more than a moment of searching on the internet for a Facebook page. 

Part of what I actually enjoy about Atwood's
fiction is how much, in her later work, she fought
those awful stereotypes of Canadian literature
that she catalogued so well.

The point is that Canadiana has virtually no positive connotations, at least to a contemporary audience. It’s dull, boring, and about a country that doesn’t really exist anymore, the all-white anglo-British wasteland carved out of wilderness where nothing changes and nothing even really thrives.* Atwood didn’t call her book of literary theory encyclopedically describing and defining Canadiana Survival for nothing.

* So not only is Canadiana boring, but it’s implicitly racist too, often overwriting and invalidating the presence of francophone Canadians, as well as the existence of indigenous peoples and non-British immigrants. The Canadiana model whitewashes this land.

But the form of Canadiana is the linguistic evocation of the place with such vividness that each individual description becomes a singularity, each story and novel a unique point on this continuum of desolation. The literature of Canadiana is the apex of what the Iowan approach demands of creative expression. And the exhausted emptiness of Canadiana today demonstrates the emptiness of the Iowan approach to literature.

Yet we don’t live in a world that has seen new literature completely robbed of philosophical and political ambition. For one thing, even the typical Iowan model produces political relevance: the ability to craft a literary singularity that defies all reduction to an ideological position politicizes the apolitical itself. Paul Engle the cultural Cold Warrior achieved all he wanted in this regard. The question is whether there is a way forward from the model, and Bennett’s central critique (aside from the usual questions of whether any politically radical notion or action can survive CIA sponsorship) is that the Iowa style has stagnated. Institutionalizing creative writing within a university degree system that requires a continual influx of majors tailors an education in writing to the less-talented participants. The techniques that are most often taught are the easiest to master, and the more talented who could handle ambitious approaches are left to fend for themselves. 

It would have been strange enough
for a Lovecraft story to have a female
protagonist at all, let alone one as
strange and powerful as Jo.

I crafted my own approach to overcoming a stagnating field of fiction in my own novella, Under the Trees, Eaten, which has been called a twisted revitalization of Canadiana, ironically enough. The story is, in part, an engagement with one symptom of literary stagnation, the reliance on genre tropes. Current alternative literature is seeing a boom in works dealing with the ideas and iconography of H. P. Lovecraft. I’m not an innovator in using iconography plainly inspired by Lovecraft for my own original work. The comic series Fatale is probably the best example of this trend that I can think of because it uses Lovecraft’s imagery in relation to a style of character that would never have fit in Lovecraft’s world, a femme fatale with psychic powers of the sort found in more futuristic science-fiction genres. 

The first extension of Lovecraft’s genre after his death was by August Derleth. Although popular at the time, Derleth’s stories are recognized as rather retrograde. While Lovecraft created the legendary iconography of Cthulhu, Derleth synthesized all these elements into a unified, internally consistent mythology. Essentially, Derleth completed the Lovecraftian mythos, turning it from a set of related images into a canon. Most people now understand this to be a terrible thing to do, because it means there could only be one style of Lovecraftian stories, those which were consistent with the details of the mythology. Thankfully, writers have since learned how to overcome this terrible act of creative limitation. We ignore it.

So Under the Trees, Eaten introduced a realistic contemporary female character (with just a hint of implicit genre-awareness à la Buffy) into a Lovecraftian horror story featuring a smattering of Canadiana tropes and my own gleefully pessimistic approach to human drama. It’s the simple story of a woman coming to grips with her parents’ deaths in the context of a Lovecraftian contract with otherworldly aliens, through scenes describing imagery and events with the meticulous and evocative detail of the Iowa style according to Bennett's account. Pulp meets feminism meets literary singularity. To be continued . . . 

The Fear of Being Canadian, Composing, 01/02/2014

Last weekend, I did my first public reading from Under the Trees, Eaten, a brief excerpt culled from chapters two and three that took me six minutes. I read during the open mike portion, just to test some public reaction to the story. Open mike readers have five minutes, so I apologized for going over. Sadly, I didn’t get to the part where Marilyn, my central protagonist, discovers the eyeless, mutilated moose in her host’s barn. A minor regret.

The reading was at the Underdog Poets’ Society, a regular poetry and literature night organized by my friend S in the upstairs room of The Central, a pleasant bar just around a dark corner from Honest Ed’s on Markham Street in downtown Toronto. S said something I found very curious after the readings were over for the evening. She described my book as a new take on Canadiana, but which revitalizes the idea.

Margaret Atwood's literary criticism did an excellent job of
defining the essence of Canadian literature. This way, we
can all understand what we want to run away from.

I think I’m fairly typical among my generation (and the previous generation) of Canadian writers in a very distinct way: I don’t want to be Canadiana. When I was in high school, there was always the smattering of Canadian literature spread throughout the English curriculum, they were good books, but all revolved around some very well-known themes. I read Margaret Atwood’s Survival a few years ago, just to get a solid sense of what my country’s cultural context was, whether my initial perception of the stereotype had any truth to it. 

Of course, Atwood’s study of Canadian literature in the 20th century was a key text in cementing the popular acceptance of that stereotype. Canadian literature focussed on narratives of hard-nosed, culturally conservative, always white protagonists who either strained against the rural small-town cultures and environments of their homes, or lived within them experiencing conflicts with nature instead. Reading authors from this era, even big cities like Toronto and Vancouver feel like conservative, insular small town. The title says it all: Survival describes Canadian literature’s dominant themes, all revolving around harsh struggles with an unforgiving nature. Even the nationalist themes of Quebecois literature similarly focus on the terror of a brutal nature. Canadiana, in this sense, is a desperate huddle against a blizzard.

After Survival, Canadian literature slowly began to change. Mordecai Richler was probably a harbinger of all this, or at least its prophet. His classic period dealt with themes of modern urban neurosis, and most importantly to my mind, with Jewish people. Canada felt a little less white and Catholic when Richler wrote. 

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Canadian authors changed their themes. Perhaps seeing the bland uniformity of their country’s literature laid out so blatantly in Survival helped spur a generation of people to do something different. Just looking at the books that have crossed my own shelves over the years, Timothy Taylor tells sprightly urban stories, Rawi Hage spins gritty tales of immigrants in hard contemporary concrete, and Lisa Moore brings small-town eccentricity into a post-Trailer Park Boys age, while also writing battles with a harsh nature that take people out of the forest and onto the North Atlantic oil platform, a new kind of nautical disaster story. Even Atwood’s own post-1970s material tends to be more progressive, especially when she explores more science-fictional themes. And her women have always been some of the best I’ve read. The Blind Assassin is a beautiful piece of perversion, and Cat’s Eye is a fascinating document of a time when it took a reasonable amount of work to track down people you haven’t seen in years. The reactive phase seems to be over, and Canadian literature better reflects the complex country we are now.

Where does Under the Trees, Eaten fit in? Even though I hated those man-vs-nature stories in school, it’s a story about the strangeness of the forest, and how easy it can be to get lost in it. Pierre, the central male character, appears straight out of the Magical Red Man strain of Canadian literature. At first, you think he’s going to appear as a symbol instead of a character, as indigenous peoples were often depicted in Survival’s account of Canadian literature. But as the story goes on, he’s just one more ordinary guy whose life is turning upside down, and who’s getting into more trouble than he can handle. 

Under these haunting Canadian woods of Tom
Thomson lie the most terrifying creatures.

The action of the novella revolves around a small town in rural Quebec, Seul-Coeur, and the last two chapters feature the narrators, Marilyn Griffiths and her father Paul (three years apart) getting lost in the wilderness. Paul is a typical unprepared American urbanite who gets sick from the local fruit and nearly dies from dehydration. A book specifically about him would be a typical Canadiana story of a man being destroyed by nature. But the nature that destroys him is the 11-dimensional curled spacetime of an alien cave under the forest, a woodland that’s truly alienated because it’s actually filled with mutants and aliens.

But the central narrator isn’t Paul. It’s Marilyn. And Marilyn is fairly unique among female protagonists of Canadian literature in that she doesn’t take any shit, whether it’s from a bossy funeral director, a xenophobic small-town mayor, or transdimensional ant/worm/squid aliens. She’s prepared for a hike through terrifying woods, can deal with the otherworldly neon lights emanating from trees, praying mantises with hexagonal heads and three jaws, and the occasional partial lapse of gravity. Set in the deepest, strangest woods, I can see how Under the Trees, Eaten would join a tradition of Canadiana. But I can also see how my work has already grown beyond it.

Art Morphs Into Whatever Shape It Requires, Composing, 4/12/2013

Most of the creative work that I completed yesterday was assembling the script for the public readings of my novella Under the Trees, Eaten. We’re in a last blitz of logistics at Blank Space to prepare the book to be available for download before Xmas, and I hope to do at least one promotional performance in Hamilton, and maybe a couple in St. John’s when I’m there over the holiday season proper. 

However, this isn’t going to be a normal promotional reading of a novella. I’ve been to those. The author mingles, reads some selections from the novel on stage so the audience gets a hint of the tone and style, then mingles some more and presumably sells some books to the audience. Now, that chronology of events is what I hope to do, basically. But the actual show is going to be very different.

First, I’m trying to adapt a musical background for my reading. My friend Huren is an independent musician currently based out of Toronto, but originally from Hamilton where I first got to know him over the last couple of years. I’m talking with him later this week about musical ideas for a 40-minute reading performance. Because Under the Trees, Eaten is a horror story, it includes some very strange, terrifying images, and disturbing events. After all, one of the key plot elements is the literal destruction of a man’s mind by exposure to 11-dimensional space in an extraterrestrial cave under a twisted Quebec forest populated by hybrid and mutant creatures. I’m glad Huren makes some very dark electronic music.

Unfortunately, my public reading won't have quite the budget of a Tool
concert, but it's important to have goals for future work.

But what counts is what I’ve done with the manuscript for the sake of the performance. I’m not just performing selections; I’ve changed the order of some of the events. The book Under the Trees, Eaten is 38,000 words long, and is intended to be read in one to four sessions in your living room on a dark winter night. The script for my promotional readings of Under the Trees, Eaten is about long enough to be read in 40 minutes. Instead of simply reading selections, I wanted to make the performances a live trailer. 

One purpose of a trailer is to actually to tell prospective viewers the story of your narrative in short form. It doesn’t literally spoil particular plot twists and developments, but there are some things a trailer can reveal that don’t really count as spoilers. A trailer can introduce the protagonists, their motivations, the setting, the premise of the story, and suggest a moment of crisis and conflict, usually ending on some kind of cliffhanger. A successful trailer makes you care enough about that cliffhanger to check out the complete narrative. Basically, a trailer tells a shorter version of the main narrative that’s necessarily incomplete to hook you into spending some money on discovering the full story.

That’s why I rearranged the story of Under the Trees, Eaten. I still begin at the beginning, but cut an 8,000 word first chapter down to 1,500 words, just long enough to introduce the two protagonists and the motives that drive the central narrator. Further selections move through the plot points quickly, building tension much more quickly than the book. Again, you’re in a bookstore or an art gallery watching performance art, not relaxing with a cup of tea under your favourite lamp. Some moments of strangeness, comedy, and terror later, and we’re back at the prologue.

What’s that? The prologue? Yes, the performance ends with the prologue. The prologue was written as the most terrifying hook to begin the story, a point just shy of its climax, but slotted at the physical beginning of the novella. It’s the moment in the story where the main narrator herself is at risk of having her mind destroyed by the 11-dimensional space. The first pages of a book are often the samples given when considering an online download. I wrote them to intrigue and frighten a reader, suck them into reading the whole book. Given that I’m crafting a live trailer, of course I’m emphasizing the biggest hook. 

You’ll want to read Under the Trees, Eaten. I definitely think you will.