Great Expectations

Last weekend I was signing and 'personalizing' a book and I was staggered to find myself writing the word 'seamy' and waiting for the little red Spellcheck line that would tell me if I'd misspelled it. Perhaps I've been on the computer too long.

And many, many thanks for all the kind words about our Miss Susie. Such a loving community of friends.

 

Miss Susie Hutchins - 2002-2012

 Alas, our Miss Susie Hutchins is no more.

So soon after Eddie . . . leaving us catless.

We don't know the cause -- she didn't have the same symptoms as Eddie. But she seemed weak and staggery in the rear end. While we were calling the vet and fetching the carrier, she tore her way through a screen and disappeared.

John searched and searched to no avail.  
Four days later, we found her body, peacefully curled up under a bush.

 

Goodbye, Miss Susie Hutchins -- you were a very fine cat indeed.

The Surprise - A Blast from the Past

 The Scriblet was the 'literary journal' of Plant High School in Tampa, Florida, back in the Fifties and Sixties -- and, though I wasn't on the staff, I did submit a piece for the final issue of my senior year. Sandy Newton (now Lassen, now living in West Jefferson) was the editor and she had saved two copies, one of which she presented to me at the Lunch with an Author event, reminding me that she was my first editor.

 And that was the surprise -- not nearly so embarrassing as pictures.  And what fun to see so many half-remembered names and read their essays, stories, and poems.

 One of the questions people often ask me is -- 'Did you always write?'  And here's the answer from fifty-two years ago...

Oh, the nostalgia! I remember that portable typewriter (green) so well. It saw me through high school, college, and a Master's degree.

And  I'm still pretty fond of this little piece -- I've written some really awful stuff at one time or another which I wouldn't be sharing...

 

Mine was the winning entry (there's glory for you) and Sandy still remembers that she personally had to lick each little star that was placed by my name in the table of contents in each issue. 

Many thanks to Sandy for this very special memory!

On the Same Page in West Jefferson, NC

 The past weekend found me is a corner of North Carolina I'd never visited -- West Jefferson. It's at a higher elevation than my neck of the woods and I took lots of pictures of views. The house where I stayed faces east and I felt right at home, watching the glorious sunrises. (The house is for sale, by the way, as the owner is down sizing. Should any of you be in the market for a little bit of heaven, email me and I'll put you in touch with the owner.)

I arrived Thursday night, in time for a fine supper with my hostess and one of her friends (delicious apple pie, Lynda!) and then we hustled off to hear Lee Smith speak. Lee is a long time favorite author for me and she's a delight to listen to. She's at work on a novel centering around F. Scott Fitzgerald's troubled wife Zelda and her stay at Asheville's Highlands Hospital -- a mental institution. I also purchased a copy of Lee's most recent publication -- MRS. DARCY AND THE BLUE-EYED STRANGER -- a  collection of wonderful short stories that has kept me up reading every night since.

On Friday at ten, it was my turn. I spoke to a very nice audience and following the festival's theme of 'Journeys,' I talked about my journey from Florida suburb to mountainside farm, my journey from occasional scribbler to published author, and the journeys my characters make within each book. All these journeys, as it turns out, have more to do with moving toward understanding than merely covering miles. 

 Later on, my hostess (actually, she was called my handler and was responsible for getting me where I needed to be and seeing that I didn't get into trouble,) her friend Sue, and I walked around the quilt fair. Alas, Vagabonde, I took no pictures. I was surprised to see that almost every quilt displayed was machine quilted -- a change from any quilt exhibit I've ever been to. Machine quilted or not, there were some real beauties there.

My next event was called Lunch With an Author --- at which I had been warned told there would be a surprise. I knew that an old friend from high school days would be there and I was expecting, perhaps, embarrassing pictures from the 1960 yearbook. So off my handler and I went to the boardroom of the library to chat with readers over lunch and see what this surprise was going to be.

I'll tell you all about it tomorrow, as well as about some of the other authors that I met and some of the events. This festival is quite amazing -- art shows, gallery crawl, quilt fair, farmers' market and who knows what all filling this beautiful little mountain town. . .

A Family Interruption

 So, I was going to tell you about the weekend (which was wonderful) but my sister-in-law convinced me that we could drink champagne (actually sparkling wine) from the afternoon into the night and as long as we didn't switch to some other tipple, we wouldn't feel bad in the morning. A kind of scientific experiment, she said, and she's a nurse so she should know. . .

 We gathered yesterday afternoon to celebrate my nephew Drew's 40th birthday -- sister-in-law Fay, her daughter Amelia, and her son Asher, Justin and Claui, and our (spiritual) son and daughter-in-law, Cory and Kasie. 

Plus (of course) dogs. Justin was preparing hot peppers to smoke for his famous pepper sauce; Fay was reading to Asher; football was being watched -- it was a glorious, messy family hodge-podge  and, what with the scientific experiment, I'm not actually up to saying more.  

Things should be back to normal tomorrow  and I'll tell you about my weekend.

Uh Oh!

Willa Discovers the Internet

Willa Says...

Web World

Metafiction

 I learned something new last weekend. I learned the term metafiction which some have described as fiction looking at itself. Here's how it happened.

 While I was at the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival, I made a special point of going to Tony Earley's reading. (I've mentioned Tony before and how much I love his writing.) He read an unpublished story about Jack -- that Jack, the Jack of the Jack Tales,  -- Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk -- you probably know Jack.

The Jack Tales are simple folk tales that came over from England and have been told throughout the Appalachians. The author Richard Chase collected a good many. In these tales, Jack is sometimes simple-minded but always victorious. And the other characters -- the millers, the giants, the maidens, the old man on the road -- are stock one-dimensional characters.

 In Tony's delightful story, the stock characters rebel against their assigned roles. The maidens (oh! those maidens) have a lot to say about Jack's treatment of them in the old stories.  

I was entranced. And when the reading was over, I asked Tony to let me know when the story was published so I could get a copy. 

"It's going to be in The New Yorker sometime soon," he said.

Now, Tony has had stories in this august publication before but I expressed surprise that The New Yorker would be interested in a Jack Tale.

"Well," he explained, "it's because it's metafiction."

"Oh, ahh," I said, nodding and trying to look wise, "metafiction."

(As it happened, I had to hurry off to another event and I wasn't forced to betray my woeful ignorance.)

As well as being a graduate of a MFA program, Tony is professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt. He knows this stuff. My last encounter with literary academia was about forty years ago and I have a real feeling this term wasn't in use then.

So I went to Mr. Google and quickly found some good definitions: Oxford English Dictionary says that metafiction is fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques.

Another source speaks of a book, either directly or through the characters, being 'aware' that it is a form of fiction. A book looking at itself in a mirror, as I said.


I also learned that many of my favorite books fall into the category of metafiction -- Tristram Shandy and Northanger Abbey to begin with -- metafiction before there was the name.  Here's a short list of some more:

 Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Sophie’sWorld - Jostein Gaarder
Possession – A.S. Byatt
French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell – Susannah Clarke
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams





There are several excellent links that explain metafiction at length but I'll leave it to those of you who're interested to ask Mr. Google. Me, I'm just tickled to have learned a new and useful word!

9/11

A Short Time to Stay Here

  In A Short Time to Stay Here Terry Roberts brings an obscure bit of WWI history to vivid life. A tiny mountain town in North Carolina , a batch of German detainees quartered at a once-grand hotel, and the inevitable conflicts that ensue provide an intricately layered backdrop to a beautifully imagined and timeless love story. Read it for the history; read it for the setting; but, most of all, read it to make the acquaintance of these fascinating characters.

 The setting is Hot Springs, NC, at the elegant Mountain Park hotel -- the same setting I used in Under the Skin. It's World War I and a group of German merchant mariners are detainees, quartered in and on the grounds of The Mountain Park. (A very civilized group as you can see from the picture below.)

 Visit Terry's website to learn more about the book and how to win a two night stay at the Mountain Magnolia Inn of Hot Springs (also featured in Under the Skin.)

Another Time - Another Place