A dream fragment.

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About 3 minutes after totality, 10:54 PM.

For no particular reason other than I’m impatient for spring and green growing things, and I happen to have a head full of ideas about god, nature, and reincarnation, and it’s driving me insane. And it was my turn to post on Homeless Moon.

Ta Phrom Temple, Cambodia. ‘Cause I happen to be reading Geoff Ryman’s The King’s Last Song.

Caspar David Friedrich, Ruin at Eldena

Frederick Catherwood, Teocallis, at Chichen Itza

Rob Alexander, The Temple Garden. The obligatory Magic card art.

Old Sheldon Church Ruins, Beaufort County, South Carolina

This one’s mine. From the ruins of Xaman-Ha, Yucatan, Mexico.

Barred owl, strix varia

The story of the Spirit Owl is simple but eerie. One cold afternoon in the late winter of 2005, I glance out the office window of the Berkshire Hills farm where I work, and sitting in the branches of a crabapple tree not twenty feet from the front door is this beautiful, deadly-eyed owl. I point it out to my employer, the wisewoman and herbalist, who tells me straight-facedly that this owl’s presence comes as no surprise—it is a messenger, a bearer of news from the spirit world, and she has seen it here before, years ago, sitting in that very same tree. I don’t believe her. But I get my camera and go downstairs to take a picture. This owl has nerves of steel. I step out the front door and inch closer, pressing the shutter intermittently, a little too chilly and too freaked out by the whole situation to get a steady shot. Only when I am practically on top of it does the owl perform a stately turn and swoop silently off into the pines.

All this happens in broad daylight, mind you.

I go home that night and get out my bird books, determined to find a rational explanation for the owl’s uncanny behavior. National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to Birds: Eastern Region has the following to say about strix varia:

This owl is most often seen by those who seek it out in its dark retreat, usually a thick grove of trees in lowland forest. There it rests quietly during the day, coming out at night to feed on rodents, birds, frogs, and crayfish.

In other words, barred owls are nocturnal—they don’t come out in daylight.

The next day, in defiance of its very nature, the owl is back again, sitting on the same branch staring at the door, at me peeking through it, exactly as though it expects me to shed my human disguise and fly off with it into the shadows. And it’s there again the day after that.

What does it mean? What does it want from me? Why won’t it look away?

But on the fourth day, the owl doesn’t return. With the immediate affront to my rational sensibilities removed, my feeling of ontological horror fades. After a few weeks, I give myself permission to dismiss it and go on about my life. And that was the end of it. Or so I thought.

Now it’s almost exactly three years later—the early spring of 2008. I show up at work this morning, glance out the office window, and there’s the owl again. In the same damn tree, practically on the same branch. Only this time, it doesn’t quite seem to want to meet my eye. As though it were ashamed of me.

Is it the same owl? It can’t be. How long do owls live? Kept in captivity, according to this site, barred owls have been known to survive up to twenty-three years.

It sure looks like the same owl.

I took a picture (much nicer this time, if I do say so myself), and compared it with the blurry photo of three years ago, and compared that with a murky, distant picture I found in the archives, which my boss snapped when the owl first visited in the early spring of 2002. It’s hard to say with the older photo, but the two shots I took are practically identical. I compare them with the identification photo in the Audubon guide, and there, the distinction is clear: our owl has the same penetrating, coal-black eyes, the same mottled pattern on the breast, but it’s sleeker, with less rust color in the feathers, more white. A quick google image search confirms this: barred owls look alike, but there is quite a bit of variation between individuals. All of which leads me to only one conclusion.

It’s the same owl.

What the hell is going on? Is this truly, as the wise-woman suggests, an owl of ill omen? Is it some restless ghost that returns to the site on the anniversary of its grisly murder? Is it the spirit of an ancestor in animal disguise, come to watch over my shoulder and make sure I dot all my i’s and close all my HTML tags?

Actually, I’ve been thinking about this since I got home, and I believe I have the answer. Most of it, anyway. Enough to preserve my rationalist worldview for now. It’s the three year cycle in the owl’s eerie pattern that really throws me. But even that too can be explained away, with a stretch. If you’re of the ilk who’d prefer to think magic is real, well, just don’t read past the cut.

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Well, if this isn’t a bizarre confluence. Norilana Books just put up the preliminary table of contents for Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness, and would you look at that, Erin Hoffman and I are both on the list (!), along with Interfictions alums Catherynne M. Valente and Vandana Singh, and quite an impressive array of other great writers.

Read outside the genre.

I hear it a lot from Jay, but I have heard it from a whole lot of genre writers. And I do. Frankly sometimes it seems like I read outside the genre—or at least, at the outskirts of genre—more than I read in the genre. Which you’ll no doubt have noticed if you’ve been reading my HomelessMoon posts lately. I’ve digressed about all kinds of semi-canonical magic realists, surrealists, realists and liars. “Interfictionality” notwithstanding, I wonder if I am not knowingly wedging myself into an untenable place lost somewhere between classic, literary, populist, genre and didactic fiction.

Am I reading too much outside the genre? Should I be more actively seeking out that particular sliver of contemporary experimental sub-genre where I perceive my closest kindred to be? I sample variously from Fantasy, Electric Velocipede, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, The New Yorker, Weird Tales, the big three, and whatever smallish webzine might happen to catch my eye on a given afternoon. On the other hand, I practically bury myself in the works of dead Latin Americans. That’s just an example. Right now I’m reading something firmly literary: The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve been skimming past the long passages of epic description and zeroing in on Tom Joad’s conversations with the many strangers he encounters on the road. I’m looking for the southern tragedist in Steinbeck, the cutting characterizations of Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, but with a little bit of the melodramatic flair filed off. Sure, Grapes of Wrath is a big fat book with small font—but take away the sweeping description, and Stienbeck’s prose becomes surprisingly focused and simple. He reminds me of Ray Bradbury sometimes, in a Dandelion Wine sort of way. But heck, there aren’t any space aliens in Dandelion Wine, except the ones implied. Grapes of Wrath doesn’t have any at all.

Here’s a thought experiment. A writer just starting out who has read nothing but Robert E. Howard his entire life—how would such a writer do in contemporary genre? Now, how would one do who has read only Steinbeck, and no genre fiction at all? Worse or better? Hard to compare the difficulty of writing well in two such different styles. But one style, I would say, has a more universal appeal–one which can be applied with success to more situations, settings, tech levels, cultures, because it deals with people on a human level, the details of how they live and why. That’s my rationale, anyway, for studying Steinbeck first when there are so very many names of genre writers already on my list of must-reads. But I do wonder if I’m wrong. I have met quite a few writers in genre and otherwise who find Steinbeck dry and archaic or worse.

There’s a scene about fifty pages in, where Tom Joad, a relapsed preacher, and a half-crazy scavenger are sitting around a campfire fed with the clapboards of the house Joad grew up in, and Joad skins a rabbit for their supper. It’s one of those scenes I think everybody who ever went to high school half-remembers, the kind of thing English teachers try so hard to make you appreciate that it backfires and you end up hating it. I think I got a part of that scene on the SAT. It was that kind of thing, taken all out of context, that made me swear off Steinbeck—that and Lennie’s endless pocketfuls of dead mice in Of Mice and Men. Getting clubbed over the head with the corpse of some cute little animal as heavy-handed metaphor for the death of innocence. But coming back to it after all this time, with the much more concrete purpose of trying to learn how to write that kind of prose, the kind of character produced by that time and place, is quite a different experience.

“God Awmighty,” said Joad, “it’s more’n four years sence I’ve et fresh-killed meat.”

Casy picked up one of the cottontails and held it in his hand. “You sharin’ with us, Muley Graves?” he asked.

Muley fidgeted in embarrassment. “I ain’t got no choice in the matter.” He stopped on the ungracious sound of his own words. “That ain’t like I mean it. That ain’t. I mean”–he stumbled–”what I mean, if a fella’s got somepin to eat an’ another fella’s hungry–why, the first fella ain’t got no choice. I mean, s’pose I pick up my rabbits an’ go off somewheres an’ eat ‘em. See?”

“I see,” said Casy. “I can see that. Muley sees somepin there, Tom. Muley’s got a-holt of somepin, and’ it’s too big for him, an’ it’s too big for me.”

Young Tom rubbed his hands together. “Who got a knife? Le’s get at these here miserable rodents. Le’s get at ‘em.”

Just from that few lines, I already know these characters. Of course it’s not like they’re earth-shatteringly unique, or even particularly real. What they are is small and simple and backed up by truth—sketches that fit into a spectrum of characters everybody knows. The man of action, the philosopher, the pragmatist. Steinbeck’s doing like I do: hanging faces on ideas. But he makes it work. Which is more than I can say.

Honestly, it’s not like this scene is even particularly outstanding among the ones that come before and after. I don’t know why teachers feel they ought to harp on it so much, except for the gory obviousness of that damn rabbit. I can just flip to any old scene and get the same depth, with the same economy.

Tom looked. The glow of light was nearing over the hill. “We ain’t doin’ no harm,” he said. “We’ll jus’ set here. We ain’t doin’ nothin’.”

Muley cackled. “Yeah! We’re doin’ somepin just’ bein’ here. We’re trespassin’. We can’t stay. They been tryin’ to catch me for two months. Now you look. If that’s a car comin’ we go out in the cotton an’ lay down. Don’t have to go far. Then by God let ‘em try to fin’ us! Have to look up an’ down ever’ row. Jus’ keep your head down.”

Joad demanded, “What’s come over you, Muley? You wasn’t never no run-an’-hide fella. You was mean.”

Muley watched the approaching lights. “Yeah!” he said. “I was mean like a wolf. Now I’m mean like a weasel. When you’re huntin somepin you’re a hunter, an’ you’re strong. Can’t nobody beat a hunter. But when you get hunted—that’s different. Somepin happens to you. You ain’t strong; maybe you’re fierce, but you ain’t strong. I been hunted now for a long time. I ain’t a hunter no more. I’d maybe shoot a fella in the dark, but I don’t maul nobody with a fence stake no more. It don’t do no good to fool you or me. That’s how it is.”

“Well, you go out an’ hide,” said Joad. “Leave me an’ Casy tell these bastards a few things.”

So, what am I getting out of reading dead canonical New Yorker guy Steinbeck instead of, say, the latest Lucius Shepard novella? Am I, as it sometimes seems, setting myself up to compete on a level I can never seriously hope to reach? When I took Grapes of Wrath out of the library, all I was hoping to do was give myself a little background in the speech patterns and setting flavors of the Dust Bowl era, in which I happen to be attempting to write. Instead I find myself wrapped up in the way Steinbeck paints characters. And, just maybe, undercutting my connection with the cutting edge of genre. There is a fundamental difference in approach between literary and genre-minded fiction, regardless of the era in which it is written. Now, maybe things like slipstream and interstitial and magic realist fiction have lately been breaking down that difference. But they don’t make it go away. How would my experience of working-class 1930s America change if I were to put down Steinbeck and pick up Stephen King’s Green Mile? Stephen King writes great characters too. And it’s not as though I can crib directly from either one. From Steinbeck I need to ratchet up the weirdness and the plot focus and tone down the chauvenism and the random dead animal symbolism. From King I’d probably have to scale back plot a bit, get blurrier, less obvious, and yeah, still would probably need to go weirder.

If I were to go looking for representations of ’30s America in edgy magic realism/slipstream/interstitiality, on the other hand, well, I wouldn’t know where to begin. The trouble with attempting to teach myself to write by reading inside my own chosen/percieved genre is that my genre happens to be ridiculously heterogeneous, and just because something gets categorized in the same place I categorize myself doesn’t mean it’s going to be anything like what I write.

So the way I rationalize it, I’ll just keep reading whatever catches my fancy, and if I’m sabotaging myself, well, it’s probably too late, because I slipped off that cliff long ago.

And now Al, moving humbly near, saw that his brother was not a swaggerer as he had supposed. Al saw the dark brooding eyes of his brother, and the prison calm, the smooth hard face trained to indicate nothing to a prison guard, neither resistance nor slavishness. And instantly Al changed. Unconsciously he became like his brother, and his handsome face brooded, and his shoulders relaxed. He hadn’t remembered how Tom was.