In the spirit of adventure; The Cave of the Crystal Skull

What would you do if your consciousness were suddenly and truly expanded, and you could perceive beings and visions from a parallel universe? What would you do with this dangerous knowledge?

The prospect sounds exciting and dreadful all at once—the essence of adventure. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull is an adventure written for middle grade readers that explores consciousness and parallel realms. While a quest involves a search for something of great value as its mainspring, adventures turn on the undertaking of a hazardous enterprise, one whose outcome is doubtful.

Adventures usually begin in happenstance, a happy coincidence or unhappy accident that leads to a situation so hazardous, the main character is tempted to turn away.  Only the concern and care for others is enough to motivate the character to go forward. 

Cousins Sonia and Eric stumble on a cave while exploring Black Mountain. When they encounter “a mystifying crystal skull” and “a menacing pool of bubbling mud,” the cousins recognize they are in danger. Still they vow to continue exploring the cave but to keep it a secret.

However, the powers that lie hidden in the cave don’t intend to stay hidden.

Eric does not question his sudden focus and confidence in his soccer game. Sonia, however, experiences a shift in consciousness so profound, she grows increasingly uncomfortable as she is transported to neighboring realms and begins to question her everyday world. 

Sonia becomes more obsessed and defiant, unable to resist the lure of the cave even as she realizes the risk.  Each time she exits the cave, she experiences a shift in consciousness that expands the boundaries of her known self. She begins to believe the crystal skull might have healing power and when a younger cousin becomes ill, Sonia engineers a plot to test her theory.

While on a quest, the hero must defeat the guardian of the treasure in order to bring the valuables home, in an adventure, there are no “others” who have to be destroyed. That’s part of what makes Huck Finn, Gulliver, and Robinson Crusoe so eternally refreshing. 

As one enthusiastic, middle-grade reviewer noted, there are “no bad guys” in this story. They aren't needed. Adventures tell a different kind of story, one that reveals the character's growing consciousness as she encounters her marvelous world. 

Sally Landaker’s The Cave of the Crystal Skull  is available in Kindle and Print at http://www.amazon.com/The-Cave-Crystal-Skull/dp/B00KLIVVOU. 

Expendable Characters

I first read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in high school. At least, I read most of it.

 I stopped in Volume 4, Part 4 when I realized Petya was going to die.  At seventeen, with friends leaving for Viet Nam, I didn't want to see a young recruit killed in battle.. It was my first encounter with the expendable character in the hands of a master novelist.

It was a bad translation anyway, with high-flown Victorian language. I finally picked up a new copy a few summers ago, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, and I surrendered to the pleasures of re-reading—returning, in part, to the girl I was at 17 while re-imagining St. Petersburg and Moscow, the march of Napoleon’s armies, and weaving all of that into today’s news, the laundry and gardening, stories and essays to be graded.  

There on page 1058, through smoke and dust of war, I watched Petya on his horse, galloping across the manor courtyard, slip sideways in his saddle, the horse rearing, the boy falling to the wet ground, his head pierced by a bullet.  Tolstoy sets the expendable character’s death against the improbable happiness Pierre finds with Natasha in the end.

My husband and I make a game of guessing who the expendable character is in TV crime dramas. These characters play an essential role in film and in mainstream and suspense novels, allowing an opportunity for the villain to demonstrate his villainy. Problem is, they are usually too obvious.

You can spot expendable characters by their vulnerabilities and a spark of goodness that puts them at risk. They are to be found among the marginalized.  The man who has already failed once or the woman who abandoned her children is a sympathetic sinner who can be redeemed by death. A main character’s brothers or sisters, the rookie, the room-mate, are especially vulnerable because they live in the protagonist’s shadows where the villain is also lurking.

Because the reader must root for expendable characters, they need a significant story problem. Petya is the darling, the youngest, favorite to both Natasha and her mother. He is stifling in a world of fading gentry, caring for the women while his older brother marches off to glory. His youth and idealism make him vulnerable to the rhetoric of war, and the reader sympathizes because Tolstoy has already demonstrated that war is madness and war rhetoric is absurd. Petya’s sin is to be naive or callow enough to believe that he can make a difference where his elders have failed; these are sins of youth we have all had to forgive.  

Finally, he’s the rookie soldier. After the defeat of the French when Napoleon’s troops are in retreat, Petya is killed in a local partisan action, a death both random and devoid of purpose. This turn in the expendable character's fate reveals the villainy in Tolstoy’s tale—a deep cosmic irony, cruel at times but also comic as witnessed in the marriage at the end.  

In the face of this cosmic irony, we must act as if everything depended on our actions, all the while laughing at ourselves for believing we might make a difference. 

I kept Petya alive through two translations and many years because, in the hands of a master novelist, the expendable character is as memorable as the protagonist.  

A Poem for my Mother at Easter

Eggs. Fertility. Baby chicks and rabbits--the pagan roots of Easter run through the feminine.



Lemberg Castle with its red roofs and mountain surround.

While I was born in 1950, the egg that created me was born in my maternal grandmother in the late 1800's, not far from Lemberg Castle in Galicia. 

She left everything she knew and loved to immigrate to America when she was only fifteen. Because she died before I was born, what I know of her spirit has come to me through my mother, through the pulsating chains of light we share in our DNA.

This poem in praise of that power.   

 

 Redeemer          

My mother on her knees one Sunday in Lent

bent to check the soil to divine

which bulbs survived the winter’s freeze

to bring the green come Easter.

She wore no gloves in spite of icy air,

and the memory of red polish on her nails

suggests something I couldn’t see then,

some sympathetic magic that could do more

than mend the frayed edges of my coat

or untangle snarls in my hair,

some sacrament that could make new tulips

rise up red against the faded fence

when fasting days finally ended

in the communion of colored eggs

and chocolate. On that day,

all of the ashes would be kissed from my brow,

because Mother on her knees one morning in Lent

bent to resurrect bouquets, indifferent to mud

that drenched  the hem of her Sunday dress.

 

 

 

Teacher Appreciation Week: In Praise of English Teachers

Beginning writers, and some beginning writing instructors, often blame English teachers for stifling their creativity. Published writers, on the other hand, write in praise of the same.

While it’s true that writing and diagramming compound complex sentences on command can be daunting, it’s also true that the same teacher encouraged students to read and report on books and was the only teacher who asked them to write a poem, an essay, a short story.

Nikki Giovanni writes of Miss Delaney who would let her read and report on any book she wanted. The poet Philip Levine remembers how he was deeply affected when his English teacher Mrs. Paperno read Wilfred Owen’s “Arms and the Boy” then offered to lend him the book. In Teaching Critical Thinking, bell hooks writes about the white, middle-aged English teacher whose willingness to challenge cultural stereotypes and authority served as a model for the gifted young writer. Such teachers are both model and Muse; they are gatekeepers, mentors, heralds, guardians, helpers, and companions along the way.

For me, Maryanne Sullivan, who taught English in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, was the incarnation of all those archetypes. I lived in a rural home that had no books, and I’d read every book in the classroom library when she joined our school. She loved to read, write, and paint, and she liked to have fun.

I remember the first time she asked us to write a short story. I’d read The Count of Monte Cristo and empathized with the idea of being trapped, so I tried my hand at writing from inside prison walls, planning my escape. I don’t remember what her comments were, but I know today she heard my heart’s cry.

When my mother refused to let me get a library card, Mrs. Sullivan gained permission and arranged for me to use her personal card at the City Library. While I didn’t have access to the adult sections, the classics were considered to be good for children: I read the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain; I read Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg.

In the classroom, we wrote journals—full pages of anything we wanted. This habit continues to this day, and I include journal writing at the beginning of most classes I teach. She also had us memorize long poems, and while it was painful to deliver “The Raven” or “Little Orphan Annie” in front of the whole class, I developed a lifelong love of oral interpretation.

One spring, we studied haiku. I internalized the form, and it carried me through the long and turbulent summer when my parents separated and we moved away from the farm. Poetry became a centering practice and a way of being in the world.

I never had the chance to properly thank Mrs. Sullivan, or Mr. Adrian, Mr. Clark, or Mr. Duffin—all those English teachers who painstakingly showed me how to craft a sentence, a paragraph, an essay –but today I’m proud to stand in their ranks.

Wrestling with Angels

Sometimes, I struggle with my decision to live in a small town surrounded by wilderness. When that happens, the mountain landscape flatlines; I yearn for crowds, performances, provocative lectures that yield to conversation, jazz bands at 3 am.

For that reason, I’m grateful to have the Ashland Chatauqua Poets and Writers Series within an hour’s drive (if the mountain pass is open). While only a couple of writers are presented annually, over the last years, Chautauqua has hosted writers as various as Li Young Lee, Barry Lopez, Eavan Boland, and Mark Doty, among others. Along with reading, each writer gives a master class for teachers.

I want to thank my friends Vince and Patty Wixon for insisting I attend the October event with poet and essayist Tony Hoagland.

In his extended workshops “Five Powers of Poetry,” Hoagland teaches the foundations for writing poetry as a distinct neuroskill set with muscles that can be built through regular practice We explored the first power: the immediacy, persuasive powers, and pleasures of making images. Because images carry complex messages with both intellectual and emotional content, Hoagland says, they are the source of much of the pleasure of poetry.

 “Get students to write one line that gives them pleasure,” Hoagland advised as he launched us in a series of exercises imitating other poets and invoking imagery. Because so many of my recent writing attempts had fallen flat, I felt a little intimidated, but Hoagland’s exercises were so simple, I quickly fell into improvisatory mode, imitating snippets of poetry and rhetorical phrases borrowed from other poets.

Before long, I’d written one of those lines that gave me pleasure:

What matters is

a bag of groceries left

at the bottom of the stairs--

the hallway dark

no one watching. 

In an instant, language and imagination had connected. The phrase contained an entire narrative because the image was as undeniable as the values in a black and white photograph.

I was writing, and nothing matches that pleasure.  

“Not to be able to express yourself is a penitentiary,” Hoagland said, and I had felt it over the last weeks. If wrestling with one small phrase was enough to set me free, then I had books and books filled with phrases to play with when I got home—plenty of angels I can wrestle with over the long and isolated months of winter.  

For more information about the Ashland Chautauqua Poets and Writers Series, visit: http://www.chautauquawriters.org/ 

To learn more about the “Five Powers of Poetry, visit:

http://www.fivepowerspoetry.com/thefivepowers.html

 

 

 

100,000 Poets for Change in Yreka, CA

On Saturday, September 29, 2012, four women poets--Dori Appel of Ashland, Oregon, Maria Elena Fernandez of Mt Shasta, California, Flannery Clouse of Yreka, California and I--met to read in a coffeehouse, Nature's Kitchen, in Yreka.

This was part of the international movement, 100,000 Poets for Change--an event that fostered 800 events in 115 countries.  Organized online and largely through FaceBook, poets and musicians gathered in Madagascar, Mali, and Mauritania to build global social and cultural awareness and to encourage solidarity among artists and musicians.

Yreka is a small mountain town surrounded by ranches and wilderness. I was curious to see what issues would emerge and how we might fit into this global community.

At first, when asked to read, poet and owner of Nature's Kitchen, Flannery Clouse said, "Since change is inevitable, I'm for it."  We laughed at our dilemma. As a writer, I don't see myself as attempting to change cultures and societies when I write--my only focus is to shape images, ideas, impressions into language and to shape that language into a satisfying whole.

In preparation for the reading, we all had to think about what change we wanted to see and to look at our writings to discover what social and cultural issues were already there in the work.

In the course of the reading, a theme emerged from our personal writings that had political heft. In one poem, Fernandez exposed the depth of Demeter's pain at her daughter's kidnap and rape. I read "Leda Talks Back," a poem that pulls back the curtain of Romanticism reveals the ugly truth of that rape.  These poems stand as voices against the recent political "War on Women."

Clouse (above) even surprised herself by writing a long and blatantly political ditty for the occasion. In one verse, she dealt with the current view expressed by one conservative who is still being supported by many of the Republican mainstream:

     Akin has said
     If a woman's raped right
     She can't have a baby
     Because she's too tight.
     Roe vs. Wade
     Must be unmade
     Because we all know that
     All of this rot
     About a woman's say
     In her body's parley
     Is a freakin' feminist plot.

For more information about the global event, visit: http://www.bigbridge.org/100thousandpoetsforchange/

"What will happen if we stay here . . . "

Fed up with the heat and smoke-filled air from fires in the mountains surrounding my home, I managed to get away for a few days camping in the Crescent City/ Brookings area--the tsunami region on the Pacific Coast.

I half-expected to find the beaches strewn with radioactive debris from the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Instead, I found the cooling mists of renewal, the continuing play as the sea arranged and rearranged its assemblage of bones, shells, feathers, and seaweed. The sea, the great artist, granted its dignity to old strands of kite string, to sand-creased plastic bags, even to the bottles we humans have so carelessly discarded.



Because I kept busy walking and running in the surf, I barely touched the novel I brought with me, but I did take time to read each night from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry edited by J.D. McClatchy. I kept returning to these lines from the German poet Ingeborg Bachman that echoed my feelings as I picked up plastic and glass from the sand:

          What will happen if we stay here,
           homesick to the root of our flowing hair,
           and ask: what will happen  
           if we survive beauty's trial?