writing

This book should have been banned

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin

Cover of book

This book of poetry should have been banned. Its author was serving a 20-year sentence in a federal penitentiary for his opinions, and the poems he wrote in Leavenworth were unrepentant:

“But whether it be yours to fall or kill / You must not pause to question why nor where. / You see the tiny crosses on that hill? / It took all those to make one millionaire.” (From the poem “The Red Feast.”)

Ralph Chaplin opposed the United States entering World War I. Worse than that, he opposed capitalism. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and editor of its eastern US publication Solidarity, he made speeches and wrote poems and songs. The best known is “Solidarity Forever,” which became a union anthem.

But, as economist Scott Nearing wrote in the introduction to Bars and Shadows, “When the war broke out in Europe, with millions of working-men flinging death and misery at one another, men like Chaplin, the world over, regarded it as the last straw. Was it not bad enough that these exploited creatures should be used as factory-fodder? Must they be cannon-fodder, too?” In the eyes of the IWW, the war would only serve to increase the economic power of capitalists.

At the same time, the US Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited interference with military operations and recruitment, and any other speech deemed to support the enemy during wartime. Promptly, Chaplin and a hundred other IWW members were rounded up, convicted, and jailed for speaking out against the draft.

The Espionage Act, amended, is still part of US law and is still being invoked, but from the beginning it has had a contested relationship with free speech. During World War I, as recounted in the book Over Here by David M. Kennedy, one man was arrested for calling President Woodrow Wilson a Wall Street tool, and others faced charges for merely discussing the constitutionality of conscription. A man was jailed for saying the war was for J.P. Morgan “and not a war for the people.”

The law was amended in 1918 by the Sedition Act to further forbid “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, flag, and military. Expressions of opinions in one part of the country might be acceptable, but in other places, where public officials were dedicated to more vigorous enforcement, those same words by the same speaker were treasonous utterances that could bring jail time.

By 1922, however, when Ralph Chaplin’s book of poetry was published, the war to end all wars had ended, and alarmist lawmakers had moved on to other concerns. Chaplin was released after four years in prison.

I discovered this book in the library of my church, where we take pride in safeguarding banned books. We hold the first edition of Bars and Shadows, and the book is still in print today with many later editions by various publishers, and it’s available free from Project Gutenberg.

Chaplin told Nearing he was not a poet, which he said was an “aesthetic creature” who condescended to workers. He favored making culture “with a rebel note.” The thirty poems in the book adhere to meter and rhyme, and they tell us not to mourn the war dead “but rather mourn the apathetic throng” too cowed to speak. He describes the sound of a bugle playing taps to end the day in prison, and his longing for “the smell of grass and flowers,” and he compares his restless heart to the battle song of a storm. On Christmas day, seven sparrows perch at his barred window — so meagerly is his heart comforted. He misses his wife and son.

But his anger abides.

“The paragon of paltriness / Upraised for all to see […] / The smirking, ass-like multitude / Cringe down at his command […] / Is there not one to share with me / The shame and wrath I own?” (From the poem “Salaam!”)

He exalts when a prisoner escapes from the penitentiary, and he longs for freedom.

These poems express Chaplin’s sharply felt emotions and his grasp of the world that inspired those feelings. Sincere, simple words give the poems strength.

This book came into my hands more than a century after it was printed. Now speech is again being limited in the United States: legally suspect words include gay, women, diversity, equity, pronouns not assigned at birth, Black lives matter, Free Palestine, criticism of Tesla, or merely speaking Spanish in public. Who dares not grovel if you could be next? This little book offers a counterforce.

Let us continue to write poetry.

Let me talk you out of writing

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

“If anyone can talk you out of writing, they should.” I think Harlan Ellison said that — at least, it sounds like something curmudgeonly he would say.

Here’s why you shouldn’t be a writer:

You’re not talented enough. Actually, this is a lie. Of course you have talent. We’re all born talented. Children love to make things, and so did you when you were young. Then you may have absorbed the Romantic Era myth of the artist as a hero who effortlessly produces works of staggering genius that are perfect in the first draft. You can’t do that. Neither can I. Neither could they. If you poke into the biographies of the great, heroic writers, you’ll find they studied hard, worked like dogs, and rewrote endlessly.

You’re too scared. This might be true. But what exactly are you afraid of? Making mistakes? Failure? Rejection? There are all kinds of fears. The Writer’s Book of Doubt by Aidan Doyle lists a wide variety of them. I own the book and I’m scared to read it, although the book also explains how fears can be overcome.

You might not know enough about the writing business. As a result, you have unrealistic expectations, whether you want to try traditional publishing or self-publishing. (Writing without the intent to publish is fine, of course, and if that’s your goal, ignore this paragraph.) However, you can learn about the business. The information is freely available, but…

You don’t want to work hard. And it’s going to be very hard work. This might be the most common reason for not writing. I don’t like to work hard, either. It’s lonely, sometimes boring, and, well, hard. There’s always more to learn, and it’s easy to get lost in books and conferences about writing rather than to sit down and write. Or to watch TV or doomscroll rather doing the research, planning, writing, rewriting, more rewriting, and even redrafting. “The first draft of anything is shit,” as Ernest Hemingway probably said.

When I talk to people who aren’t writers, rewriting turns out to be the thing they find impossible to understand. They can’t imagine needing to rewrite a dozen or more times.

When I talk to people who are experienced writers, they whine about how hard the work is, but they’ll rewrite until it’s right, and they’ll do all the other tasks the job involves. They’ve learned how to work hard.

Do you still want to write? Good. I wish you every kind of success, whatever success means to you. If you want more encouragement, I recommend this free comic, Art & Courage: A Guide to Sustaining a Creative Path, created by the Applied Cartooning Lab. It addresses all kinds of art, not just writing or cartooning.

And finally, here’s some writing advice that keeps me going:

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” — Isak Dinessen. That is, you’ll have good days and bad days, sometimes good months and bad months, and letting it affect your self-definition or self-worth will leave you emotionally exhausted. You can’t write if you’re too tired.

For me, writing (and other art) contains within itself a constant source of joy. If you look at the faces of athletes as they enter a stadium or field, many wear big grins. They’re about to do the thing they love the most. They’ll get to work as hard as they can and as smart as they can. They can do their best. You can do that, too, if you choose a creative path, because excellence is always possible. Art lets you bring your whole self to your work.

Using all the senses in writing

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Using sensory details makes writing more vivid so that readers can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what’s happening in a story.

Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that.

First of all, we have more than five senses. Vestibular sense involves movement and balance. Proprioception is also called body awareness and tells us where our body parts are in relation to each other and how to do things, like pick up a heavy rock or delicate egg. Chronoception lets us sense the passage of time. We can also sense temperature and pain.

This article at John Hopkins University Press says there are nine senses. An article at the University of Utah Genetics Science Learning Center says there are twenty, but it counts some senses in other animals. That might be useful if we’re writing about non-humans.

The things that we sense are interpreted through our thoughts and emotions, too.

As writers, how do we use these senses in a story? The correct answer to this and many other questions is: It depends. What’s the story you want to tell? What matters to the characters in it? What is the pace you want? Romance novels tend to be lush, and a mystery might be spare, and in either case, the senses that you evoke will guide the attention of the reader to what matters. An intriguing whiff of perfume at a party with contrasting notes of candy-like violets and earthy sandalwood might signal the start of an affair. A barking dog might make Sherlock Holmes deduce.

When we write, it’s best to go directly to the sensation. A bad example: Becky smelled acrid smoke and knew it would be toxic. Instead, this: The smoke reeked of acrid toxins. The reader will know that Becky was smelling it and recognized the smell. Fewer words are always better than more words, too.

Next, why do these particular sensory details matter? An article by Donald Maass, “Moving Along” at Writer Unboxed, shows how to use sensory details to evoke emotion. I’m going to disagree with him, though. He says the final example is “focusing not on visualizing, sensory details,” but I say it is. Count the colors mentioned. Note the things we could taste and feel, especially the dryness. Consider the snippets of conversation we hear. It gives us the full picture with plenty of vivid sensory details in an unselfconscious way by showing us how these things matter.

***

(Art: stick figure by Core5ivpro.)

Don Quixote vs. science fiction

/ Sue Burke / 2 Comments

When I lived in Spain, I soon noticed that Miguel de Cervantes and his most celebrated novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha, permeated the culture. Think of Shakespeare in English-speaking realms, then dial it up to 11.

The book changed the way Spain thought about itself. It also made Spain reject any sort of non-realism in fiction, such as science fiction and fantasy, for centuries to come.

Published in 1605, Don Quixote tells the story of a poor, elderly nobleman driven mad by the fantasy novels of his day, which depicted brave knights and their dazzling deeds. The nobleman adopts the name Don Quixote and sets off on quests. In chapter VIII he famously mistakes windmills for terrible giants and attacks them. In chapter XLI, he is tricked into believing that an enchanted wooden horse has the power to carry him and his squire Sancho Panza through the sky. (Photo: Engraving from an 1863 edition of Don Quixote by Gustave Doré.)

Cervantes’s novel was written when Spain was in a period of desengaño or “disillusionment” after imperial losses, government bankruptcy, a deadly plague, failed harvests, economic disaster, and the defeat of the Invincible Armada. The nation had attempted to fulfill grand ambitions only to discover that it had been tilting at windmills. The novels that Cervantes’s fictional character read were real books that had, a generation earlier, inspired the conquistadors in their exploits: the state of California is named after an imaginary caliphate in one of those books, The Exploits of Esplandian, which was the sequel to Amadis of Gaul (which I translated here). Ambition was not enough, though, and eventually fantasy gave way to sad reality.

Don Quixote changed the way Spain thought about itself — and about literature.

“The problem with Spanish science fiction starts with Quixote,” the editor of a Spanish science fiction ‘zine told me. “Of course, it was a satire of the fantasy adventure novels of its day, and ever since then, perhaps because the satire was so biting, Spain has been the home of realism in fiction.”

School children were taught to scorn those novels of chivalric quests, speculation, and mysterious unknown lands, if they were taught about them at all. Still, a few writers always experimented with science fiction and fantasy, and in the 20th century, books from outside Spain began to inspire a generation.

“Fantastic” literature — science fiction, fantasy, and horror — was slow to gain acceptance as worthy, but in the 1980s and 1990s a growing number of authors encouraged each other and carved out a niche that has since flourished. In the 21st century, books like the Harry Potter and Twilight series appealed to massive numbers of young readers, to the surprise of established publishers and to the delight of the small publishers who had taken a chance on those novels and cashed in. All kinds of publishers took note. The ranks of fandom grew.

Just as in the English-speaking world, Spanish “mainstream” literature discovered it could no longer control access to respectability. Readers had their say.

I’ll be at Windycon this weekend

/ Sue Burke / Leave a comment

I’m attending Windycon this weekend, Chicagoland’s longest-running science fiction convention. This is its 50th year, and it will be held from November 8 to 10 at the Double Tree Hilton Hotel in the suburb of Oak Brook. This year’s theme is Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.

With about 1,000 members, this is a more personal and friendly event than mega-conventions. Note the word “members” — the convention is organized by fans for fans, all volunteers, not by a professional corporation. It also has a literary bent, focusing on experienced and aspiring authors and writers. Topics for panels and activities range from astrophysics to costuming techniques to pop culture. This includes steampunk, dragons, fairies, robots, music, anime, zombies, pirates, ninjas, extraterrestrials, gaming, horror, space operas, urban fantasy, theater, vampires, time travel, and cats.

There’s also an art show, dealer’s room, gaming room, and legendary parties at night.

During the day, here’s where you can find me:

Early SF Authors and the Pseudonyms They Hid Behind — Friday, 6 to 7 p.m., Windsor Room. How would their work have been affected if they were allowed to show who they were? Panelists are Richard Chwedyk, Steven Silver, and W.A. Thomasson; moderator Sue Burke.

Writer’s Workshop — Saturday, 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. Preregistration required.

Author Reading — Saturday, 12 to 12:30 p.m., Ogden Room. I plan to read the essay “Do your neglected houseplants want revenge?” and the short story “Summer Home.”

Reading and Writing Through the Female Gaze — Saturday, 2 to 3 p.m., York Room. Panelists are Lisa Moe, Dina S. Krause, K.M. Herkes, and Alexis Craig; moderator Sue Burke.

The Many Facets of Fandom — Saturday, 8 to 9 p.m., Butterfield Room. How you experience the different brilliant sparkles depends on how you cut the gem that is fandom. Panelists are Jason Youngberg, Alexis Craig, and W.A. Thomasson; moderator Sue Burke.

Familiar or Fantastical? — Sunday, 10 to 11 a.m., Kent Room. What type of world-building do you enjoy with your fiction? Do you prefer far-off worlds or ours? Panelists are David Hankins and Sue Burke; moderator Bill Fawcett.

The Darker Side of Space — Sunday, 11 a.m. to 12 p.m., Hunt Room. The future is not always a garden of roses. Let’s discuss the darker side of science fiction futures. Panelists are Donna J.W. Munro, Chris Gerrib, and Paul Hahn; moderator Sue Burke.