I had one yesterday that further contextualized my previous post about reading The Decameron.
I took Professor Gavaler’s class entitled “21st Century North American Literary Genre Fiction” (check out his superhero blog here) in my last year at Washington and Lee University. Professor Gavaler presented us with an engaging myriad of texts, articles, and selections detailing the colliding worlds of genre fiction and literary fiction. It’s a complicated scenario, to say the least, and in saying simply that, I’ve revealed where I stand.
However, all crises on Infinite Literary and Genre Earths aside, one of Professor Gavaler’s selected texts remained at the forefront of my mind:
Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners.
I have little faith in my skills of describing such a beautiful book, but here’s the gist: Link synthesizes the supposedly segregated worlds of literary (read: psychological realism) and genre (read: formulaic and/or non-realistic), creating fantastic short stories where humans, the devil, ghosts, and some other wondrous beings behave in very realistic ways.
So when I was visiting relatives in Phoenix a few weeks ago and popped into a nifty little bookstore called changing hands, I successfully sought out Link’s newest work.
But another title caught my eye en route to the register.
I immediately noticed the similarity between the covers (though Kleon’s predates Link’s by three years and they are designed by different artists), and I began to devour both of the texts in a quest to find deeper connections.
Kleon’s rapid-fire text is intended to serve as a springboard for anyone doing anything creative, and I believe Kelly Link’s most recent collection of short stories operates in the same vein, albeit less overtly. Lots of her short stories, particularly in this work, revolve around chaos personified/a more passive or grounded individual accidentally wrecking the best-laid schemes of a planner/creator/master figure/best friend. Confused yet? Me too. This portion of the rambling is still under construction, and will involve itself in future posts.
In a subsection entitled “Start Copying,” Kleon lays out some necessary guidance:
“Nobody is born with a style or voice. We don’t come out of the womb knowing who we are. In the beginning, we learn by pretending to be our heroes. We learn by copying.”
No need to fear, honor-bound readers. He’ll assuage your concerns.
“We’re talking about practice here, not plagiarism…Copying is about reverse-engineering. It’s like a mechanic taking apart a car to see how it works.”
He goes on to exemplify how the Beatles began as a cover band (one of my favorite examples of gateway creative exercise), and how anyone can follow suit in their own artistic endeavors. Find who to copy (easy), and what to copy (not so much). Despite our best efforts to imitate that which we strive to be, we just end up making something original. Kleon quote Conan O’Brien:
“It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.”
This reminded me of an earlier section of the book (“Climb Your Own Family Tree”), in which Kleon asks the reader to find an artist they admire and to “[s]tudy everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can. Climb up the tree as far as you can go. Once you build your tree, it’s time to start your own branch.”
Finally, 500 plus words later, I’m getting around to the punchline.
In researching Kelly Link, I discovered that she recently wrote an introduction to a new edition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. So like any sensible researcher, I went out and bought a copy.
Link enjoys the collection of short stories so much that she constantly has copies in stock at home and always leaps at the opportunity to teach “The Lady of the House of Love,” so on my tree (which has yet to assume a tangible form) Carter has become one branch from Link.
Of course, Link’s thorough introduction to the text presented another author, one whom both she and Carter admire: Giovanni Boccaccio. So, now that I’m full circle, I suppose it’s back to devouring The Decameron. I’ve already found that Boccaccio studied under the tutelage of a friend of Dante’s, so perhaps I’m due for The Divine Comedy after this.
At some point, I’ll return to Carter, and then Link, to find more connections.
formerlyfunctioning 