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historical fiction

What I’ve Been Reading, or Sex in Context

by | February 26, 2022 | | 2 Comments

Hild

Much has been said here about how “erotica” and “literary fiction” are often closer than is usually acknowledged. Apparently the way to prevent your sexually-explicit story or novel from being put in the “dungeon” (where no one can see it unless they search for it by title) on Amazon is to label it something other than “erotica.”

More often than not, there is a sex scene or two in any current work of “fiction.” This doesn’t mean that writers in various genres are hypocrites who really write erotica without admitting it. It means that writers who set forth to write a plot that isn’t primarily about sex or even the development of a sexual relationship must find ways to integrate the sex into descriptions of other things.

The sex scenes can’t look as if they were copied-and-pasted in from some other imaginary world. If there is some dialogue in a sex scene, it has to be consistent with the speech patterns those characters have already established. The sex can’t be described in a different style from other activities in the same narrative, and terms such as “dick,” “pussy,” etc., can’t be used if they are never used in the culture in which the plot is set.

Issues of social class and culture don’t disappear in sex scenes. Even in extreme ecstasy, characters can’t afford to forget where they are, and how they are expected to interact in more public settings, and what might happen if their secret tryst becomes public knowledge.

Even if the narrative viewpoint is third-person omniscient, the descriptions have to be consistent with the central character’s consciousness. If modern English is used to represent other languages (including archaic forms of English, and Celtic dialects), the implication that the whole thing has been translated has to be consistent throughout the work.

Recently, I finished reading Hild, a 530-page novel set in seventh-century Britain. [The author, Nicola Griffith, is an English expatriate living in the rainy northwest of the U.S.] The central character, who came to be known as St. Hilda of Whitby, was born in about 614 AD in a culture in which small kingdoms were almost constantly at war, and in which the Christian church was making inroads into the traditional worship of Woden.

Hild’s mother, Breguswith (widow of a minor king who died by poison) is both a traditional healer and a shrewd observer of local politics. When she notices that her teenage daughter is growing restless, she advises her to have a sexual relationship with someone who doesn’t “matter,” someone below her in rank. (Hild is the the local king’s niece as well as his “seer,” who can presumably foretell the future.) This liaison would attract the least amount of notice in a culture in which privacy is scarce, and in which Hild could be expected to enter a diplomatic marriage in the near future. Needless to say, she can’t afford to become pregnant yet.

As it happens, Hild has a beautiful, sexually-experienced female slave, a captive of war that Hild bought on impulse because she wanted a companion who couldn’t leave her. Gwladus (Oo-lad-oos) was naked when offered to the highest bidder, and she was openly advertised for sexual purposes. She was clearly relieved when Hild bought her, and she has been Hild’s “bodywoman” (servant) ever since. Hild came to realize that as a property-owner, she had a right to protect her woman from the local warriors, so she stopped one of them from grabbing Gwladus, who is grateful.

Probably on the advice of Breguswith, Gwladus finds Hild in the dairy, and tells her that she needs to “lie down” in the afternoon, in their private room. With surprising confidence, she tells Hild to undress. Here is the following scene:
—————

Her [Gwladus’] lips were soft. Like plums, like rain.

Gwladus put her hand on Hild’s thigh and stoked as though Hild were a restive horse: gently, firmly. Down the big muscles, up the long tight muscle on the inside. Not soothing but. . . she didn’t know what it was.

Stroking, stroking, down along the big muscle on the outside, up along the soft skin inside. Down. Up. Up more. “There,” Gwladus said, “there now.” And Hild wondering if this was how Cygnet [Hild’s horse] felt to be encouraged for the jump. Her heart felt as big as a horse’s, her nostrils wide, her neck straining, but not quite wild, not quite yet. “there,” said Gwladus again, and ran her palm over Hild’s wiry hair to her belly. “Yes,” she said, and rested there, cupping the soft, rounded belly, and then moved down a little, and a little more, and her hand became the centre of Hild’s world. “Oh, yes, my dear.” She kissed Hild again, and Hild opened her legs.

It was nothing like when she did it for herself. It built like James’ [Christian priest’s] music, like the thunder of a running herd, then burst out, like the sudden slide of cream, like a sleeve pulled aside out, and she wanted to laugh and shout and weep, but instead clutched at Gwladus as she juddered and shuddered and clenched.

————-

On a later occasion, Hild tries to return the favour, but Gwladus tells her, “No, lady.” The nuances of the relationship seem somewhat unclear even to Hild. Is seduction the act of a servant, and would giving her pleasure make her even more vulnerable than she already is? Later, Hild is taunted by Cian, the young man with whom she was raised, who tells her that at least he doesn’t have to buy his bed-mates.

Without taking any firm philosophical stand on slavery in general, Hild has Gwladus’ metal collar removed, and she offers to let her former servant return to her home territory. Another close companion has to point out to Hild that Gwladus isn’t showing any desire to leave, so the relationship resumes, more or less as it has been from the beginning.

The author wisely avoids mentioning the ages of Hild or of Gwladus. Considering the cultural distance between modern industrial society and the tribal world of the seventh century, “underage sex”—even girl-to-girl—is probably the least shocking event in the novel. Warfare involving swords and spears is described in gory detail.

Novels like this show that fiction can tackle both sex and violence without being stigmatized for either of these elements, especially if the surrounding culture is scrupulously researched and described in detail.

For those who are interested, Hild is only the first volume of a projected trilogy titled “The Light of the World.” The second volume, Menewood, seems to be complete but not yet published. In the meanwhile, the author has written a shorter novel, Spear, set in the world of King Arthur.

Horse Thief Detectives and Bonnet Bleachers: Making the Past Come Alive with City Directories

by | May 18, 2021 | | 2 Comments

As writers of historical fiction, we strive to make the past come alive for our readers. Historical fiction creates a special contract between author and reader. The author is expected not only to create convincing characters, but to have deep knowledge of the culture and daily life of the times.

It’s not an easy task, but I’ve recently discovered a fun way to immerse myself in the world of the nineteenth century: perusing city directories from a century ago. Historical city directories are available in many library reference rooms, but better still are readily accessible online through historical society webpages, Google Books, Family Search, Ancestry, and other websites.

One might ask, “The people listed in this directory have long since passed on to their reward. I can’t even drop in for a chat and a cup of tea. What use are names and addresses from 1856?”

Of course names and addresses in themselves provide useful information for a writer. Which sorts of names were popular in that time and place? There are fewer Mabels and Clementines running around today. Where did one go shopping for certain items? Who lived in private residences, usually marked by “house” or an “h,” and who lived in a boarding house, marked with “bds,” one quick distinction between the higher classes and the lower?

That is just the beginning of the delights within the yellowed pages of a city directory, however. Let’s take a look at The York Gazetteer and Business Directory from 1856. This compendium contains historical sketches, lists of churches, clubs, post offices, schools, and merchants, “together with interesting miscellaneous articles and useful receipts” and, naturally, an abundance of advertisements.

The entries for service providers alone provides an enlightening portrait of commerce in a Pennsylvania town in the 1850s. Starting with “Attorneys,” highlights of the list include:

Blacksmiths
Coal Dealers
Daguerreotypists
Gentlemen–And as such follow no particular occupation.
Hatters
Inn Keepers
Laborers
Limeburners
Livery Stables
Laborers
Saddlers
Sausage stuffer [only one listed]
Soap and Candle Manufacturers
Turners
Wagonmakers
Whip Manufacturers

(The York Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1856 (York, PA: John Denig, Book Agent, 1856); “U.S., City Directories, 1822-1995,” Ancestry.com, p 17-27, image 19-29.)

[The York Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1856, p. 30, image 32.]

My favorite discovery in this directory is the “Horse Thief Detecting Society of York County.” Am I too far gone in historical research to think that would make a good title for a story? In its day, the society served a useful purpose. What else was to prevent an unethical fellow from riding off with your horse one dark night and quickly selling or trading the animal to an unwitting new owner? Founded in 1850 for members who lived within a 12-mile radius of the Borough of York, the society and others in the surrounding area helped members in the recovery of a horse or paid for a new horse from the insurance fund created by the annual dues. Members were required to brand their horses with the society’s brand. As we see from the clipping at the top of this post, the president of the Paradise Horse Thief Detecting Society, a township close to York, placed a notice for a decent reward in the York Gazette. “$25 Reward,” York Gazette, 7 May 1872, p. 3; Newspapers.com)

By the 1920s, horse thief detection societies were disbanding due to the popularity of automobiles—which required their own more complex form of insurance. The dues that had accrued over the years were divided among the remaining members who owed their windfall to their thrifty ancestors. The 125 members of the Glen Rock society received $15.56 each in 1926, the year my father was born in York City. (“Horse Thief Detecting Society Will Liquidate–$1,945 in treasury,” York Dispatch, 6 Dec 1926, page 16; Newspapers.com)

Speaking of family addresses, let’s take a peak at the 1881 directory for the thriving industrial city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Note the advertisement for the services of my great-grandfather, Dr. Henry S. George. His office on Penn Avenue—the Park Avenue of Pittsburgh—marked the high point of his flamboyant career. [J.F. Diffenbacher’s Directory of Pittsburgh and Allegheny Cities 1881-1882 (Pittsburgh, PA: Diffenbacher & Thurston, 1881); “U.S. City Directories, 1822-1995,” Ancestry.com, p. 304, image 158]

It is amusing to find ancestors listed in old directories, but again, one can also get a real sense of city life in the 1880s. For example, if we turn to the list of businesses, we see that the listings for “Saloons” take up nine pages, from page 894-903, a testament to the thirst of Pittsburgh’s workingmen. In other words, there was a whole lot of boozing going on in Pittsburgh!

For me, leafing through these pages—or the equivalent via computer screen–feels like strolling down the streets of the Steel City in 1881. Do I need my bonnet bleached at George R. Lynch and Bros. on Fourth Street? Or shall I grab a fine stiff felt hat at Wm. Grabowsky’s establishment on tony Penn Avenue, where my great-grandfather likely shopped to show he wore only the best? (Directory of Pittsburgh and Allegheny Cities 1881-1882, p. 863, image 445)

As my imagination wanders apace, I stop in on the sausage stuffer and daguerreotypist and perhaps I encounter a gentleman with no particular occupation but the leisure to make mischief with a lady whose bonnet is impeccably bleached.

Before I know it, the past has come alive before my eyes, full of stories to dazzle and delight, all from the pages of directories of centuries past.

Write on!

The Spirit of the Age

by | April 27, 2020 | | 4 Comments

As far as I know, my revised erotic novel, Prairie Gothic (set in 1999) is ready to be released, but I haven’t heard from the publisher about a publication date. The process of revising something originally written in the 1990s prompted me to consider the definition of “historical fiction.” In a recent post on Facebook, legendary BDSM writer Patrick Califia claimed that historical fiction can’t cover an era in which the writer was alive. This is one limitation. I’ve also seen more-or-less arbitrary dates in the guidelines of various publishers (“historical fiction” defined as anything set before 1985 – or in some cases, before 1960.) And then there are theme calls-for-submissions specific to particular eras, e.g. Regency (1811-1820) or Victorian (1837-1901).

Technically, “history” is the past, period, including one’s personal history, which always intersects with general trends. The Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties (with their increasing dread of the New Millennium), and the early 2000s will never return, and they each had their own flavour.

I’ve seen discussions in the Writers list about sexual morality in the recent past. Specifically, I’ve seen questions about when it became socially acceptable (in “mainstream culture,” loosely defined) for women to have sex with anyone other than their husbands. That depends on whom you ask.

Let me introduce you to an early period in my scandalous life, from long before I entered the sex trade in the 1980s.

It was the early 1970s, and I was 21. I had recently moved out of my parents’ house and into my own cheap but adorable (IMO) apartment, the attic of an old house in the Cathedral Neighbourhood, which even then was described as the hip, artsy Greenwich Village of a Canadian prairie town with a population of about 100,000. My apartment had windows that faced east and west, so my bedroom was flooded with sunlight in the mornings, and sunsets glowed through the Indian-cotton curtains in my front room in the evenings.

I was taking classes part-time at the “New Campus” of the university, which required a bus ride or occasionally hitchhiking. (This particular route was travelled by university types, so I felt fairly safe getting rides with people who were usually less than six degrees of separation from me. My dad was a prof.)

My daylight hours between English classes were largely spent modelling for art classes on the “Old Campus,” a more picturesque location within walking distance of my apartment. Models for most art classes had to be nude. The secretary of Visual Arts told me it was hard to find people who were willing to pose naked for strangers, despite the attractive hourly wage. She told me that all the art profs were delighted with me because I was usually available, I showed up on time, and I took direction well. I was young and flexible, and I trained myself to hold still for relatively long periods.

I stayed calm when posed next to a skeleton, a venerable prop of Visual Arts which probably dated from the founding of the college in 1911. The prof would ask me to display myself, front and back, while he moved the skeleton, and the students were instructed to look for similarities. I was thin, so my bone structure was fairly easy to see.

When my parents found out how I was supporting myself, they were not happy. They managed to refrain from full-scale parental rage because they knew this would only alienate me from them.

There was a guy. He was slightly older than I was, and he was a friend of Joe, whose academic father had known mine forever. The guy claimed to have a girlfriend whose name reminded me of a doll or an X-rated cartoon. I’ll call her “Barbie.” The guy himself had the family name of a famous Scandinavian composer, to whom he was distantly related. He was proud of his Viking roots, so I’ll call him Erik.

I had come with Joe to visit Erik in his own apartment in an old house in the Cathedral neighbourhood, and we stayed past midnight. Erik offered us “coffee,” but he was looking at me. By then, I could guess what this really meant. Joe also seemed to catch the vibe, and said he had to leave. I told him I would stay a bit longer for coffee with Erik, and find my way home later.

That was our first night together. Erik seemed pleased that I was on the Pill, even though I didn’t have a steady boyfriend. I had been date-raped in my first year of university somewhere else, and I was determined not to risk getting pregnant in a chance encounter with any guy who might not take no for an answer.

Most of the guys I had met were convinced that a Sexual Revolution had already happened, and they valued spontaneity, riding the wave or going with the flow. The Pill gave me a way to control my own fertility without having to explain over and over again that unprotected sex is like Russian Roulette.

My affair with Erik became intense immediately. While my days were spent attending English classes, writing assignments and modelling, my nights belonged to him. The more time we spent together, the more I suspected that Barbie was his invention, or possibly a plastic sex doll in a closet, a form of protection from any girl who might expect him to make a commitment.

Erik claimed to have psychic powers. He was familiar with a tarot deck, and he read my fortune several times. What he saw in my future was alarming: violence, ill-gotten gains, addiction, incarceration, hints of early death. He mentioned that he had been a dope dealer in Sudbury, Ontario (home of the world’s largest nickel mine), where he claimed that everyone needed to stay high to ignore the ugliness of their surroundings. Apparently he had partied with bikers. I wondered aloud if he was seeing his own life in the cards, not my future.

I told Erik what I had told my concerned father: I was doing well in my English classes, which looked like a sign that I was capable of earning a degree with honours. When I modelled for art classes, I seemed untouchable, and no one even dropped a double-entendre on me. My stillness and my status as a live version of the skeleton apparently caused everyone in the room to think of me as an object, and I enjoyed floating out of my body for awhile. I was paid in paycheques by Visual Arts, not in crumpled bills by drunks.

I hated my parents` filthy smoking habit, and rebelled by being a non-smoker living in smoke-free space. I didn’t waste money on luxuries such as dope or alcohol, but I would accept a drink if someone else offered me one.

The more times I asked Erik how my current lifestyle could possibly be a portal to Hell, the more he snorted and rolled his eyes. One night, he suddenly announced that he wanted to marry Barbie because she was a fine girl, an education student who planned to become a teacher. I told him that teaching was one of the future careers I was considering, since it could easily be added to a degree in English. (At that point, I wanted to keep my options open.) Journalism had not yet become professionalized, so I could also imagine myself boldly walking into the office of a tough, squinting newspaper editor, ignoring his foul cigar and saying, “You don’t think you need me, but you do. I can write, and I’m like a bloodhound on the trail of a story.”

None of the scenarios I imagined in my future seemed plausible to Erik. He knew a Good Girl when he met one, and Barbie embodied that role. He wanted me to realize that I was not her.

I tolerated this nonsense, as I thought of it, until the day I went to visit Erik on a whim, and there was another girl with him. He introduced me to Barbie, his girlfriend. I babbled something and rushed out, feeling faint.

That should have been the end of my relationship with Erik, but it wasn’t. He invited me back when Barbie wasn’t there, and I recklessly answered the summons. By that time, I felt unbearably guilty about helping him cheat on the Woman of his Dreams, but I couldn’t bring myself to stop seeing him altogether. Things got worse. He was openly sarcastic about my scholarly pretensions when it was clear to him what I really was. I tried to change his mind, and felt like a failure when his sarcasm intensified.

Luckily for me, I had a chance to go to England for a year with my parents and sisters. I seized this chance, partly to get away from Erik. When I told him my news, I had a faint hope that he would beg me not to go. He barely twitched.

Did Erik marry Barbie, and did they have many obnoxiously well-behaved children? I have no idea. I never saw either of them again, and I was greatly relieved when Erik’s predictions for my future didn’t come true, at least not exactly. In England, I met another man who wasn’t good for me, though I couldn’t see it at the time. But that is another story.
———————

Reading as Studying

by | July 27, 2018 | | 1 Comment

by Jean Roberta

Reading other people’s writing is a good way to see how many different ways there are to approach the same subject. And even if you specialize in erotica, reading outside your genre can show you various ways to get readers engaged with your characters, to reveal character and advance a plot through dialogue, to set up suspense (“foreplay”), to use imagery sparingly or generously, to pace the action in a way that feels natural, and to write a convincing climax (!).

I sometimes read in spurts because I’ve been asked to review someone else’s work, or I’ve offered to write a review for a specific publication. Sometimes I need to read several books quickly in order to choose one as a textbook for one of the university English classes I teach. Reading with the intention of writing a review, a summary, or a critique is a good way to remember details I might miss if I were only reading for pleasure.

Here is a list of my recent summer reading: very different books I’ve read recently for different reasons (in alphabetical order of authors’ last names):

The Marrow-Thieves (YA novel set in a post-apocalyptic Canada) by Cherie Dimaline (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2017)

So Lucky (slim book with autobiographical elements about the progress of an incurable disease, Multiple Schlerosis) by Nicola Griffiths (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)

Does It Show? (quirky novel in a magic-realist style, second in a series about a set of working-class characters in northern England) by Paul Magrs (Massachusetts: Lethe Press, forthcoming in August 2018)

Perennial: A Garden Romance (slim book about second chances in love and flowers that return in spring) by Mary Anne Mohanraj (Lethe Press, forthcoming)

Warlight (historical novel set in WW2) by Michael Ondaatje, revered Canadian writer and academic (Alfred A. Knopf, 2018).

Forget the Sleepless Shores (collection of poetically-written stories, most with supernatural elements) by Sonya Taaffe (Lethe Press, forthcoming).

Read by Strangers (stories in an American realist style) by Philip Dean Walker (Lethe Press, forthcoming).

Even the spate of books by one publisher (Lethe, which originally specialized in LGBTQ speculative fiction) shows a wide range of styles and subject-matter.

As a reader/reviewer, I keep a set of questions in mind as I read:

1. What is the author’s aim, as far as I can figure it out?
2. Does the style seem to suit the subject-matter? (And if the style looks inappropriate, is that a sign of satirical intent?)
3. Do the characters come to life, even in a fantasy plot? (And there is a difference between fantasy elements in a narrative set in a very realistic or even gritty real-world setting, and “High Fantasy,” a story set in the Land of Faery, or Planet X, or some other completely invented realm.)
4. Am I tempted to keep turning the page? Are the mysteries and the tension eventually resolved?

Regarding the recent stack of books, I can honestly say that they all deliver what they promise.

None of these books are sagas of High Fantasy, but the stories with fantasy elements (The Marrow-Thieves, Does It Show? and most of the individual pieces in Forget the Sleepless Shores) seem no more far-fetched or implausible, in their way, than the narratives that reveal the strangeness of reality (So Lucky, Perennial, Warlight, and Read by Strangers).

The following are some of my impressions from my recent spate of reading, all of which can be applied to writing erotic fiction.

The same-sex attraction in several of these narratives (The Marrow-Thieves, So Lucky, Does It Show? several stories in Forget the Sleepless Shores and Read by Strangers) is presented in a plausible, matter-of-fact way that invites readers of all sexual orientations to care about the characters. Luckily, the current literary zeitgeist seems to have moved beyond the “coming-out” story as well as the interracial romance as something shockingly transgressive. In The Marrow-Thieves, each member of a makeshift “family” of survivors has a “coming-to” story about how they survived and found others like themselves, but these stories are not about wrestling with forbidden desires.

Characters who disguise their biological gender appear in Does It Show? and “The Creeping Influences” in Forget the Sleepless Shores. Whether such characters are cross-dressers, transfolk, or women just trying to survive in a men’s world (as in several Shakespeare comedies), they can easily come across as offensive stereotypes in current fiction.

In the human comedy of Does It Show? all the characters crave more glamour, excitement and love than they are likely to find in a small English town in the 1980s, but a supernatural realm is almost tangible beyond the illusions of “reality.” A transwoman in this context doesn’t seem more bizarre than anyone else.

In “The Creeping Influences,” a female character doing a man’s job seems downright mundane compared to the discovery of two well-preserved bodies in an Irish bog, both apparently murdered in different centuries.

Several of the authors of these books are widely known to be lesbians or gay men. In other cases, I simply don’t know anything about the authors’ love-lives. In all cases, though, same-sex attraction is simply presented as a fact. The worm in the apple is not internalized homophobia or the wrath of God, but miscommunication, or persecution in some form. This approach could be applied to more explicitly erotic plots.

Imagery (the description of anything which can be seen, heard, smelled, touched, tasted, touched or felt) is sensual by definition, and therefore erotic. Imagery is the heart and soul of both horror fiction and sex-stories. The two collections of single-author stories (Forget the Sleepless Shores and Read by Strangers) include both spine-tingling creepiness and realistic sex scenes.

Perennial, the one book defined as a “romance,” has no explicit sex, but this could have been added without detracting from the sweetness of a story about two lonely strangers getting to know each other, and supporting each other through hard times.

In Warlight, the eventual revelation of hidden truths on a personal and collective level is both jaw-dropping and characteristic of a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story. (The narrator is a fourteen-year-old boy when we first meet him.) There are no explicit sex scenes in the novel, but erotic attraction is shown to be a major motivator of human behaviour which might otherwise be hard to explain.

In short, reading and writing go together like – well, you can think of an appropriately raunchy set of pleasures. It’s probably no coincidence that when I haven’t been reading, I’ve written several stories this summer, and I have plans for several more.

My Fiction Detox Diet: Or Where to Find the Real Meat in Writing

by | October 18, 2016 | | 2 Comments

by Donna George Storey

This month’s column was inspired by another author interview I read thanks to the recommendation of Erotica for the Big Brain’s Terrance Aldon Shaw. TAS pointed me to “Back to School? How to get your novel published,” an interview with Jonathan Kemp (author of London Triptych, a novel about the lives of three gay hustlers in three different time periods) from Gasholder: The cultural guide to King’s Cross and beyond. The interview touched on some issues I’ve been thinking about as I continue writing and researching my historical erotic novel, in particular the meaning of “success” as a writer.

First, let’s get the title of the article out of the way. The interview with Kemp doesn’t really reveal new secrets on how to get your novel published, but rather advocates the values I think most of us here at ERWA follow in our writing: write a lot, be patient, stay true to your project, and do it for love not money. (For the record, if you are writing for the money and love doing that, that’s cool with me!) So clearly the interviewer or an editor decided to make the article more clickable with a classic “what’s in it for me?” hook for the wannabe writer-reader.

However, rather than get-rich-quick tips to finding a superagent, readers will find observations from Kemp’s experience teaching creative writing such as this:

Q: Do students think they’ll wind up famous?

A: There’s a lot of starry eyed-ness around creative writing; and yet what always drove me to it was the opposite. Jean Genet said, “the only two things a poet needs are anonymity and poverty”: there’s that sense in which the true spirit of literature is being compromised by capitalism, and the need to be rich and famous is driving the desire to write a book, rather than the need to express the human soul or psyche.

I myself am also nostalgic for the days that probably-never-were when literary writers did it for love alone and disdained profit or acclaim. From what I’ve read, even Genet dined out on his outcast celebrity on occasion. However, as writers we know that the hard work of storytelling does require some ego and expectation of reward to overcome all the obstacles inherent in the creative process. Writing for the market does not necessarily mean you’ve compromised your values, although it can. I’ve written dozens of stories for themed anthologies, which I’ve definitely shaped for a certain market, but tell myself I always put something true in my stories, something I want to say beyond the glory of a byline. Still I won’t deny that at an earlier phase of my writing life, the validation of publication was an important goal.

Perhaps it’s the lot of the fairly oft-published writer, but I don’t have stars in my eyes about authorship anymore. Publication, even by a “prestigious” press, isn’t enough. Writers have to earn my admiration. Frankly, these days I tend to avoid fiction, especially the ubiquitous bestsellers with “girl” in the title that invariably deal with murder, addiction, sexual abuse and other titillating violence that seems to be the surefire path to fame and riches. Good writing always makes me want to sit right down and start writing myself, but the predictability and sensationalism of these novels just makes me feel stupid, if I can even make it through the book (I often end up skimming). “Beautiful” writing doesn’t do it either. I need to feel my reading experience enriched my life and didn’t just show off how clever the author was. All too often, the mainstream fiction of today does not satisfy me.

Fortunately, I’ve found a steady source of nourishment in a different genre of writing: specialized nonfiction. I suspect that few of these authors have made millions. Still I regularly finish these books with a deep sense of gratitude for the love, care, and amazing amount of time and research these authors have put into their work.

I’m immensely grateful to Brian J. Cudahy for his books on public transportation in the New York Area (Under the Sidewalks of New York: The Story of the Greatest Subway System in the World and How We Got to Coney Island: The Development of Mass Transportation in Brooklyn and Kings County). His painstaking research and obvious love of subways and trains has recreated an important part of city life of one hundred years ago for me. Kathy Peiss’ Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture traces the history of cosmetics, once considered the lying trick of prostitutes but now seen as a way to express your “true self.” And Aine Collier’s The Humble Little Condom penetrates the silence around birth control, which is not only useful to get a sense of how a couple might control fertility in 1900, but puts the current controversy about this issue in perspective. These books have made me think about the world in new ways. I wish more fiction did the same. (In all fairness, some does, but not nearly enough).

Excellent and engaging writers that they are, these nonfiction authors are clearly privileging history and information over the effort of showing their brilliance as superior creative geniuses. I find this dedication to teaching us more about the human experience far more inspiring than the self-conscious pursuit of canonization as a literary genius. These authors rarely, if ever, make the cover of Time magazine a la “Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist.” But for me, they have enriched and entertained and brought the past to life, magicians all. I’d like to thank them and the dozens of authors I’ve already consulted about life a hundred years ago for their labors of love. I appreciate what you’ve done more than words can say.

Write on!

Donna George Storey is the author
of Amorous Woman and a collection of short
stories, Mammoth
Presents the Best of Donna George Storey. Learn more about her
work at www.DonnaGeorgeStorey.com
or http://www.facebook.com/DGSauthor

The Gift of Time

by | June 26, 2016 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

As I frantically grade student essays from my spring class, which has already ended aside from the exam, I look forward to my sabbatical from teaching, which will last from July 1, 2016 (Canada’s national holiday) until July 1, 2017.

I will have a year to write a book of non-fiction, but I’ll also have time to write new stories and revise older pieces that are unpublished or no longer under contract. I feel as if I have inherited a fortune, counted in hours rather than dollars.

Like most writers of a certain age, I have a large pile of old work. I am usually amazed by the voice of my younger self when I reread something I wrote many years before. When I was in high school, I wrote a surrealistic one-act play about three teenagers: two girls who are very different, the good-natured boy who doesn’t really understand either of them, and their competition for his attention.

When I reread this piece with the intention of bringing it up to date, I was aghast at the retro slang and technology from the 1960s: blackboard and chalk in a high-school classroom with a portable record-player that could be plugged into the room’s one electrical outlet. Rock-and-roll blaring forth from a vinyl record revolving under a scratchy needle. Manual typewriters, like the one on which I first typed this piece.

Hopeless, I thought. This play was written in an era which will never return, and it can’t be made “relevant” (such a sixties term) to Generation Z (or whatever they are called now).

During the recent LGBTgenderqueer/2-spirited Pride Week in the prairie city where I live, I was interviewed in the media as a local Elder of the queer community. This has happened before, and it always amuses me. I was just old enough to drink legally when the first “gay” organization was formed here, but I wasn’t “out” yet. I sometimes point out that I am not one of the first-wave pioneers, the small brave band who are still alive at my age or slightly older (including the few men that survived the AIDS crisis of the 1980s), but who “came out” when this could mean losing everything: parents, children, friends, job, religious affiliation, a place to live.

The search for “roots” in communities that were formerly more marginalized and persecuted than they are now looks to me like a healthy respect for historical truth, and many ordinary people have a piece of it. Youth, in itself, could be considered a disadvantaged and misrepresented life-stage. Someday, the experience of growing up in the early 21st century will be valuable to those who weren’t alive then.

So maybe my older work needs to be “updated” by being presented as historical fiction. (The awkward phrases, like rotting boards in a “character house,” could still be repaired or replaced.)

To give a sample description of the “temps perdu” in my life, here is the opening scene from my out-of-print novel, Prairie Gothic, completed in 1998 and available as an e-book from 2002 to 2006:

The ugly concrete building in the warehouse district looked deserted, and it wore no sign of any kind. If Kelly hadn’t seen glimmers of light from between the shutters at the windows and heard the bass thump of recorded music, she would have thought the address in the newspaper was a misprint.

In her second year of university, the fresh-faced young woman was developing a taste for research. She was learning that you could find out whatever you wanted to know if you looked in the right places. On this breezy spring night, the place she wanted to check out was the Den, more often called the club or the bar by the regulars. It was the only gay bar in town.

As Kelly pulled open the heavy front door, a blast of music hit her in the face, carrying the smell of beer and cigarettes. A spasm of anxiety made her breathe faster, and she wondered again how smart it was for her to come here alone. Bars didn’t attract her as a rule. Booze and guys usually lost their appeal for her by the end of an evening, and hanging out with a horde of increasingly drunk and loud fellow students seemed like a waste of time to her.

However, the girl craved adventure. She hoped that this bar would be more like a decadent jazz club in Berlin in the 1930s than any of the hangouts she knew. She believed that she could best explore this exotic milieu without the burden of anyone else’s fears or desires.

Kelly noticed the huge area in the wall of the entranceway where the plaster had been kicked in during a famous fight. Two months later, it had been badly fixed by a hung-over dyke who claimed to be a drywaller by trade. Since she had donated her time and was currently dating a woman on the board that ran the bar, no one complained openly about the look of the wall.

A very tall, very thin young man asked Kelly for ID, but he looked friendly. Besides, she told herself, she could never be intimidated by a man wearing lipstick and mascara, even if he did apply them better than she could.

The interior of the bar was so dark and smoky that it took a minute for the young woman to notice the eyes watching her. A young man in tight leather pants turned from the cigarette machine to look over the newcomer. Once his cool gaze had skimmed over her breasts, his narrow hips swivelled back toward the faded jeans of a much older, heavy-set man who stood beside him like a guard dog protecting his turf. Both men radiated a sensuality that Kelly had rarely noticed in males, and she felt strangely miffed by their indifference to her. She remembered wishing that guys would leave her alone. In this place, she thought, they just might.
~~~~~~~~

So much has changed since this scene looked contemporary. Yet, considering the recent massacre in an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on “Latino Night,” no one can afford to be complacent.

What do other writers do with older work that expresses a bygone zeitgeist?

Deal-Breakers

by | May 26, 2016 | | 3 Comments

by Jean Roberta

Writing fiction set in the past (even a past era of the writer’s own lifetime) is a challenge because, as someone once said, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

When writing a story set in the 1920s, I introduced my teenage female narrator to a handsome boy in her class in high school. His parents were friends of her parents, and now that her father is dead, his father is providing a salary for her mother, who works as his secretary. The boy likes the girl, and she is delighted to discover sexual pleasure with him when they are alone together. She is terrified of getting pregnant too soon, but he assures her that they are planning to marry anyway, so if they “start a family,” they only have to arrange an earlier wedding.

Realistically, my heroine knows she isn’t likely to get a better offer. She is also practical enough to know that she – a very intelligent person who is not male and not white – can’t leave home alone to seek her fortune and expect to be better off than she is in the relative safety of the community where she grew up.

In the real world, my young storyteller would probably settle, as so many women did in her time. Yet she really doesn’t want to marry her boyfriend. His chivalry often slides into condescension, even though she gets better grades in school than he does. Sex is a revelation to her, but does the ecstasy of his touch really mean that he is her soul-mate? She hasn’t had enough experience to know.

She has heard mutterings about sexually-experienced women: hoochie-coochie dancers who drink illegal booze in joints that cater to dangerous men. She doesn’t know how or where to apply for a job like that, but she knows how all her nearest and dearest would react if she did.

I don’t really know what better future I could provide for my character than marriage to her boyfriend, followed by childraising and membership in his church, one of the things they disagree about. The spell of historical fiction should not be broken by the intrusion of twenty-first century options and values.

Still, I want more for her. She wants more for herself, and she knows on a gut level that there must be a companion for her somewhere in the world who is more than “a good provider” with conventional beliefs.

I’ve always had trouble writing happy-ever-after endings, and I sometimes think this is because men and women still don’t really have equal status, even in Canada where we’ve had it in theory since the 1980s, according to a marvelous federal policy called the Charter of Equality Rights. However, the problem isn’t just a gender clash. Many a lesbian relationship has ended with hard feelings on both sides, and communities of gay men are also full of gothic stories about deception, heartbreak and violence – so I’ve heard.

In traditional romance plots, the lovers persevere despite threats to the relationship from other people and from each other. They have faith that in the long run, being together will be much better for both of them than being apart, and so it turns out. Most people claim to admire long-term relationships, but only if no one is being exploited, abused, or diminished in any way. That’s a big if.

In fiction, as in life, I worry about exaggerating the fault-lines that exist in every relationship, but I also worry about limiting a character’s potential by keeping her in a trap. There were several notable differences between my parents besides gender, but if they hadn’t stayed together for the first seven years of their marriage, I would never have been conceived. To honour my own roots, I should probably value sacrifice and compromise, even in a fictional world.

One of the appealing qualities of a short story, as distinct from a novel, is that not all questions have to be answered. The plot can end on a hopeful note, with an implication that the central character(s) will boldly go to an unknown destination. So I keep writing in order to discover new plots. Maybe some day I’ll have a clearer sense of when a happy ending requires an escape, and when it requires a commitment.
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