Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.
“The Poet ought rather to chuse Impossibilities, provided they have Resemblance to the Truth, than the Possible, which are Incredible with all their Possibility.” - Henry Fielding, quoting Aristotle in The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
I’ve decided to post the rewrite of my dystopian novel series The Zones as I progress at the young adult writing website Figment. Here’s my profile page. The site is mostly meant for young adults to share their work, but I’m hoping to make contact with my target audience there.
I have been writing without doing any self-editing (save for fixing typos if I see them), so this will be a rough and probably somewhat sprawling draft as I work on discovering the real story behind the outline I’ve made.
For somewhat self-pitying fun, I made some mock-up covers for my work-in-progress. The pictures are from Aurora Photos and the photographer is Maia Flore.
I also made one for my completed novel. The photographer is Rolf Brenner.
My local PBS radio station, KQED, recently did a story on multi-racial people on its morning talk show, Forum. I wasn’t a guest, but I got to be in the slideshow on the website.
In the picture, I am holding a giant decorative wooden spoon from the Philippines. The caption says it’s been in my family for over 34 years because it’s been around as long as I can remember. It may be as old as 50 years, I’m not sure. It hangs in my dining area, along with its companions, the giant wooden fork and the wooden carvings of Filipino people with nipa huts and palm trees.
It’s a reminder of my heritage, and that has always been indelibly linked with dining for me. Filipino food is the food of parties in my family. I’ve adapted a few recipes to be vegetarian, and it makes me really happy to cook those dishes for my family. My brother Richard, for example, loves sarciado. His wife and daughter are vegetarian, so I got to share our heritage with them by making my veg sarciado for them.
Some more about my background: My grandfathers, Mateo (paternal) and Jesus (maternal), came from the Ilocos Sur region of the Philippines. They came here in the 1920s. At the time, Filipinos were considered American nationals, so it was easy to immigrate. (That changed in 1934.) Still, few Filipino women made the trip over, so many Filipino men of this immigration wave married women of other backgrounds. My two grandmothers, both named Rose, are of Latina background. My father’s mother, who died when he was four, was of Puerto Rican background; my mother’s mother, my nana, who is still alive and wonderful, came to the U.S. from Ecuador when she was a toddler.
It was illegal at the time for Filipinos to marry whites, so both sets of my grandparents married in Oregon. My nana tells stories of the discrimination she and my papa faced — she was spit at for marrying a Filipino; they wanted to buy a house but were denied it because my grandmother wouldn’t pretend her husband was her houseboy — and my mother remembers feeling ashamed of being Filipino because of the racism she witnessed. For this reason, I feel it’s especially important to preserve and be proud of my background. I don’t want to forget the sacrifices my grandparents made and the difficulties they faced.
I began writing this post a year ago, the day my niece was murdered. I received the horrendous news before I finished it. Ironically, it was supposed to be about the responsibility of writers to their humanity, about the need for writers to be aware of fiction’s relationship with reality when it depicts pain or tragedy or atrocity. I will try to re-gather my thoughts and finish it now. (Normally, I would delete the first paragraph, as is my habit since Simon Winchester pointed out my tendency to think out loud for the first fifty words or so before getting to my real point. However, I want to retain what I wrote that day.)
Films with a true literary point of view — not just those based on books, and not biographical films about writers — are rare. The reasons why aren’t hard to speculate upon; reading is on the decline, supposedly, and the act of writing isn’t exactly one that’s harrowing to watch. However, if there is a medium to explore literary themes, I think film is the one that best suits it, as novels about novel-writers tend to be unbearably self-referential and lack the steady eye of someone on the outside. Literary films move something that is generally unseen into a primarily visual medium, reminding writers that what they do is not done in a vacuum, just like living.
One of my favorite literary films is Stranger Than Fiction, starring Emma Thompson as acclaimed novelist Karen Eiffel, and Will Farrell as her creation, the utterly pedestrian Harold Crick. It is magical realist in what I regard the truest sense of the genre: it makes the impossible real in order to elucidate a truth or to make an event or an emotion appear as big as it feels. In this case, the novelist’s feeling for her character as a actual person becomes real.
When Eiffel sees Crick for the first time, the intake of breath as she sees his hair, eyes, his shoes, is a wonderful moment, one that is infused with the truth about the magic of creating — and one that places on her the burden of responsibility for what she writes. For now she sees the consequences of what she creates — this real person who will find happiness if she allows him, who will lose everything as well if she allows that.
So there is the question, then — if literature is an expression of our humanity, what does it mean to create people and make them suffer? We can say, with that sense of removal that the real world offers us, that these people aren’t real and after all horrible things happen to people all of the time — shouldn’t literature reflect that? But what if you’re not removed? What responsibility do you have to your own humanity when you write fiction? What did it do to Thomas Hardy to kill Tess Darbyfield? Or to George Eliot to estrange from each other and then kill Tom and Maggie Tulliver? When writers create and love and nurture these people on paper and then create and document their suffering, what are they doing, really?
I can’t say for certain. Writers strive for verisimilitude as much as they do for the necessaries of fiction — conflict, emotional arcs, resolution — even as they realize that life rarely shapes itself as neatly as a novel’s narrative. That double-consciousness, of wanting to reflect life and and at the same time needing to bend the mirror, is the writer’s constant state; we’re constantly butting up against conflicting pulls: the real, the unreal; the possible, the impossible; comedy, tragedy.
Next Wednesday, the Lisbeth Salander-inspired line goes on sale at H & M, and Mariah Huehner and I will be at the doors when they open. In honor of this shopping occasion, I’m making some ShopStyle looks based on descriptions of Lisbeth’s clothes in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is the first one, inspired by what Lisbeth wore to a client meeting.
“Salander was dressed… in a black T-shirt with a picture of E.T. with fangs, and the words I AM ALSO AN ALIEN. She had on a black skirt that was frayed at the hem, a worn-out black, mid-length leather jacket, rivet belt, heavy Doc Martens boots, and horizontally striped, green-and-red knee socks. She had put on make-up in a colour scheme that indicated she might be colourblind. In other words, she was exceptionally decked out.”
I had some fine professors in my very long tenure as a college student, including an author who would later be poet laureate of California (Al Young) and the author of one of my favorite non-fiction books (Simon Winchester). They were writers of formidable talent, and I learned from them in their classes, Contemporary English Literature and Literature and Empire.
However, I don’t know if I could have come to terms with taking a lower division English composition class from David Foster Wallace. Every time I used a footnote, I would feel self-conscious.1 Katie Roiphe examines his syllabuses2 from his classes at Slate. I especially like this excerpt, from a syllabus for a course called “Literary Interpretations”:
If you are used to whipping off papers the night before they’re due, running them quickly through the computer’s Spellchecker, handing them in full of high-school errors and sentences that make no sense and having the professor accept them ‘because the ideas are good’ or something, please be informed that I draw no distinction between the quality of one’s ideas and the quality of those ideas’ verbal expression, and I will not accept sloppy, rough-draftish, or semiliterate college writing. Again, I am absolutely not kidding.”
You know one thing I love about the Pre-Raphaelites? They gave women real-size feet, not the little pointy dainty things you see in Victorian illustrations.
In this syllabus, he also encourages shy or introspective students who think best by themselves to talk to him one-on-one about their analysis of the reading: “Clinically shy students or those whose best thoughts whose best, most pressing questions and comments occur to them only in private, should do their discussing with me solo, outside class.”
Very few professors that I knew took the differences in learning or participation style into account. Al Young, in fact, expressed surprised when I made a comment about Snow Falling on Cedars (about the symbolic function of the eponymous snow) that he found especially cogent, saying that because I had been so quiet up until then, he thought I wasn’t “getting” the material.
The reply that popped into my head — and that I didn’t say — is that I am like Mr. Ed: I don’t speak unless I have something to say. The inference of this unspoken declaration was that my classmates did not have something to say, so I thought it best to keep it to myself. My classmates, if I recall, spent a good deal of time talking about their personal lives as it related to the texts, something I wasn’t interested in as a structure for discussion of literature.
Though, I must admit, I also wasn’t inclined to talk to professors one-on-one very often, either. My preferred method of proving myself was in writing. It’s the medium I’m most comfortable in. It was in that medium that Al Young discovered that I am a “quintessential Californian,” as he put it.
—— 1. I should note, that using footnotes is not part of Modern Language Association format, which most universities use, though I did use them from time to time, mostly — now that I think of it — to insert Pre-Raphaelite paintings that I found tangentially relevant to the point I was making.
After some thinking, I realized why I didn't finish this book (even as I racked up late fees from the library): I found the subject matter, the history of the region of England called Sunderland, interesting, but there was nothing about the...
tagged:
graphicnovels, nonfiction, and started-not-finished
Lovely art by Camilla D'Errico (who should be listed as a co-author) provide mood and texture for this story of a troubled young girl whose fantasy life becomes a bit too real when she visits a website called Make5wishes.com. The authors ar...
