Saturday, July 17, 2010

Fear, Complexity, and the Dark Night of the Soul

Greetings from the waning days of residency, and the waning vestiges of my brain. Tomorrow is graduation and the final banquet. We've been through the typical stages of residency--first there's the elation of coming, followed quickly by the abrupt reminder that you are in fact a raging introvert and don't usually talk to this many people in a year, then settling in for the work ahead, then exhaustion, then raging paranoia and digestive issues. Now we're getting ready to close up this wonderful shop for the summer--my roommate Claire already has her bags packed, which I'm pretty sure has something to do with me.

None of the faculty know how to use words anymore, but fortunately the students do. We had a couple great student lectures this morning. Chris Campbell talked about using fear in young adult fiction--what is your character afraid of? Will he be confronted with this thing immediately or is there anticipation? How does he delay confronting the thing he fears? Will he overcome his fear? It's an intriguing way to think of character arcs. Then in "They Can Handle It," Jamie Kaillo talked about some of the "rules" of YA writing--that it has to be a teen protagonist, that there can't be too many plotlines, that it has to be under 300 pages, that it has to reflect the teen world. She urged us toward complexity in writing for teens, using The Book Thief and Octavian Nothing as examples. It's interesting because these rules don't really hold for fantasy. It's a genre that demands complexity and asks a good deal from its readers. But the popularity of dystopian fiction has made fantasy more mainstream, so will the freer nature of the genre begin to infiltrate contemporary fiction or will fantasy become more rule-bound? And is me wondering this sort of thing aloud what drove Claire to pack her bags?

That's the fear and complexity in the post's title. I don't really know what I mean by that last part. It sounds fancy. The sun streams in my window at 6am, so the metaphor doesn't even make sense to me. Maybe I meant something about Batman.

It's time to go to more lectures, and think about graduation and going home and anticipating when the cycle can start again. There's a lot of elation, really. There's a student who just started here who once approached me at a conference to ask me about Hamline. We were talking about this today and he said I told him, This program is the greatest thing I've ever been involved with in my life. This has nothing to do with anything, except sometimes our boss reads this blog.

10 comments:

  1. Okay, Anne's blog's always make me laugh.
    The student lecture are always some of the most engaging topics of the res.
    I'm excited because after ten days I have so much more direction with my work, both critical and creative. It's like I found a treasure map and I can't wait to go home and start the adventure. That's why I'm packing my bags early-- I love my roommate.

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  2. I like batman. I like my roomates too.

    See, not all the students have retained use of language.

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  3. And let us not forget about the quiet and profound lecture (in the afternoon) about setting. How it is a character in the book. And then to have T.A. Barron speak on that exact same topic. The students here are in tune with the masters. Oh what joy!

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  4. Dark night of the soul? I'm going straight home, Anne, to read St. John of the Cross. And get to work, too, of course.

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  5. Yes, I posted before Bekezela's wonderful lecture. That was fascinating. And Georgia, I hope our semester together does not involve too many dark nights of the soul for you.

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  6. The student lectures never cease to amaze me. I mean, I expect them to be fantastic, but then they're SUPER fantastic. So engaging, important, and often entertaining. It's really a privilege to be a part of this community.

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  7. Anne... you're so silly. I'm sure Claire loves you. =)

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  8. Anne is an awesome roommate and I miss her smile and deep soul. I pack the day before graduation as a way to get ready for the transition back home. My dark nights of the soul come away from Hamline, away from the writers around every corner who understand better than anyone the journey we writers take.

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  10. Anne, I believe your exact quote was the *single* greatest thing you'd ever been involved with in your life. And then you went on to describe the free backrubs and fluffy bunnies, which turned out to be lies, but that first part stuck with me, so I came. Doesn't seem like an oversell so far.

    P.S. Also, the implication above is that I posted something super creepy/offensive at first and then thought better of it. I assure you that is not the case. I just fiend on editing my own posts, and this doesn't let you do that. So, deletion it is!

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