A Writer's Odyssey

In 2001 I attended the Odyssey Fiction Workshop at Southern New Hampshire University.  The workshop was a life-changing experience for me.  As part of my visit, I wrote a series for Blue Ear Magazine, a now-defunct internet site for international journalists.

Recently I was approached by Jeanne Cavelos, the workshop leader, about reposting the series for interested readers.  I think it gives them some idea of the things that go on during this intense six-week workshop, which has since moved across town from SNHU to St Anselm College.

So here's the series:

Notes from the Odyssey Workshop (June 18, 2001) Blueear.com

A Blue Ear Books Special by James Hall

What is Genre Fiction?


My first visit to Manchester, New Hampshire, home of the Odyssey Workshop,
reveals an old city recreating itself anew. Driving through this city from
the airport, I saw the dark waters of the Merrimack River rush past long rows
of old red brick buildings where New England mill workers labored a century
ago to produce cloth and clothing. There is an economic hierarchy to the
setting, with the old mill factories themselves closest to the swift-moving
river, taking advantage of its force to produce the power needed to weave and
cut cloth. Higher up the riverbank, the old brick tenements which housed the
mill workers form in a line along the River Road, and higher still, in the
leafy wide streets above the river valley, the comfortable wood trim houses
and Victorian mansions of the mill overseers and their bosses still survive.

Today, however, Manchester is part of an information age economy, not a
manufacturing economy. The mill buildings are being turned to upscale
restaurants, the tenements to shopping malls, and the mansions are owned by
lawyers, accountants, and dot.com millionaires.

In much the same way the genre fiction we are attempting to write here at
Odyssey has transformed itself from its roots in romantic and gothic fiction
and in commercial pulps to a prominent place on the world's literary stage.
Critics like Oxford's Tom Shippey have hailed the 20th century as the great
era of "fantastic fiction," with major works like George Orwell's _Animal
Farm_ and _1984_ , William Golding's _Lord of the Flies_ and _The
Inheritors_, Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_, Ursula LeGuin's _Left
Hand of Darkness_ and Thomas Pynchon's _Gravity's Rainbow_ all celebrating
the power of the fantastic over realism. Shippey himself considers J.R.R.
Tolkien to be the best author of the 20th century.

So what is it about fantastic fiction, in particular the fantasy, science
fiction, and horror genres that has captured the modern and postmodern
imaginations? Tolkien himself makes a stab at an answer in his long essay
"On Fairy-Stories" in _Tree and Leaf_(1965), where he takes issue with anyone
who would relegate tales of Fairie to literary falsehoods or juvenilia. The
good storyteller, says Tolkien, creates a secondary world into which the
reader can enter and through which what he relates is necessarily true. The
creation of this world, for Tolkien, goes well beyond Coleridge's "willing
suspension of disbelief," compelling the reader's belief and changing the
reader's perception of reality after the book has been put down. (Something
that Tolkien's books have done for many of us.)

Ursula LeGuin offers us much the same idea in her short introduction to _The
Left Hand of Darkness_ when she eschews the definition of science fiction as
a literature that extrapolates the future. To LeGuin science fiction is
descriptive rather than predictive, a thought-experiment engaged in to tell
us something about ourselves today, not about events occurring in the future.
Says LeGuin, "In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well
that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word
of it." As a result, when we're reading, we are changed in some
difficult-to-describe way. For LeGuin the conventions of science fiction are
modern metaphors which point to the timeless truths that the imagination
realizes.

These words echo the advice of our workshop director Jeanne Cavelos, who
urges us, paradoxically, to approach genre fiction by reading everything good
outside it as well as much inside it. Read the best works of nonfiction,
read works from different cultures, read what has been done before and done
well in your chosen genre. What you learn provides you with the tools to
appreciate a genre's past, and to then to recreate it in a new, different
way. One look at Manchester, New Hampshire, would tell you that this is how
both life and art work.

James Hall

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this