Alternate Universes

This was the final class in my speculative fiction course. I’m sad the classes are done and look forward to the next session, which won’t be until the late fall. I met some great people and I even learned a few things.

Now, the class was a little more than a week ago and my notes are a little incomprehensible disjointed sketchy, but we’ll give it a try.

First there was a lively discussion on what exactly was meant by alternate universes. According to my notes, the first thing we discussed was Schrodinger’s cat. At first glance this might be a little puzzling because what does quantum mechanics have to do with alternate universes, but the idea of the cat being both alive and dead segued into the multiple worlds theory.

This theory suggests that there are many worlds which exist in parallel at the same space and time as our own. If you’re a fan of any of the super hero shows on TV these days, particularly The Flash, then you’re probably already familiar with this concept.

This, in turn, led to a discussion of dichotomies, and how there are many more choices than just left or right and how each decision made splits into a different reality with more choices.

We also touched on the butterfly effect, how the simplest of actions can have disastrous effects, and assumptions, the danger of assuming things happen only in one way.

The floor opened to suggestions of favourite times in history, and we settled on the roaring twenties for our example, listing many of the most noteworthy events from that era. Then we were asked to pick a point of departure (POD) and speculate on how things might be different here in the future if something had been changed at that point. What if the 19th Amendment hadn’t passed and women weren’t given the right to vote? What if Yankee Stadium hadn’t been built? What if Lindbergh hadn’t completed his transatlantic flight?

Finally, we were asked to pick an era, find our own POD, and write a story. See if you can guess what era I chose. ;-)

Molly worked her way across the open space in the park, looking for a place to spread her hand woven hemp blanket. Her eye was caught by a frantically waving hand and faintly over the buzz of the crowd she heard her best friend Jasmine calling her name.

Moving carefully so as to avoid stepping on the limbs spread out from various blankets that were also hand woven – some from hemp, some from cotton, some from wool, but all made from natural fibres – she waded through the sea of humanity.

By folding her blanket into quarters she could just fit it on the small square of grass Jasmine was saving for her.

“Can you believe this crowd?” Jasmine asked as Molly eased her bulk to the ground.

“I’m not surprised,” Molly said, puffing slightly. “How often do we get free concerts here?”

“Hey!” a chipper voice called out. “Is there enough room for me too?”

“Hey Rainbow,” Jasmine called back, scooting closer to Molly. “Pull up some grass,” she giggled.

“Have you heard the news?” Rainbow asked, plopping down beside them.

Molly shook her head as Jasmine asked, “What news?”

“Kennedy. Someone tried to shoot him.”

Molly’s eyes widened and Jasmine gasped.

“Why would anyone want to do that? Is he okay?” Molly asked, feeling a little ill.

Rainbow shrugged. “I don’t know. They missed him though and got his wife instead.”

“Jackie’s dead?” Jasmine’s voice rose loud enough that several heads turned to stare.

Rainbow looked at her, contrite. “I’m sorry Jazz, I forgot how much you admired her.”

Jasmine and Molly stared at each other as the tears started to flow. The world would never be the same.

Dreamers of Dreams

My poems are a disorganized mess. I really need to find some way of organizing them and keep track of which ones I’ve shared already and which ones I haven’t. At one time I had a blog dedicated to poetry forms and I was writing one a week, but I found the pace a little hard to keep up and the poems suffered because of it.

Last year I only wrote 25 new poems but I like to think it was quality over quantity. This year I unfortunately haven’t been keeping track, so I can only guess that I’ve written about a dozen or so. Again, I need to find a way of keeping track.

At any rate, if you write poetry the chances are good that you also read a lot of poetry, like I do. And there’s nothing I enjoy more than discovering a new poem or poet. So I’ve decided that I’m going to start sharing some of my favourite poems once a month, starting with a today.

I’m pretty sure a lot of you have read this poem before, but even if you haven’t I’m sure you’ll all agree that you don’t have to be a poet to enjoy it. Whether you write poetry or not, I think all writers are dreamers of dreams.

Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

Arthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy

Extenuating Circumstances

Well for once I have a legitimate excuse for missing posts and getting zero writing in last week.

A week ago Thursday I had to take my husband to the emergency department of the hospital where he was admitted and then four days later had a hemicolectomy. My time was pretty much divided between babysitting the grandbaby and going to the hospital.

It was one of those times when it doesn’t pay to have a writer’s imagination. I’d go home to an empty house and my mind would start working overtime. Sitting waiting for the surgery, which took seven hours, all I could do was try not to think of why it was taking so long.

It was pretty exhausting, but the hubby is home now and doing much better.

But as we sat waiting yesterday for the doctor to get around to discharging him, I couldn’t help but think of all the story possibilities that had presented themselves over the last week.

Like…the conversation I overheard while the hubby was out of the room. His roommate from the first room he was in was an older gentleman with some kind of respiratory ailment. A well dressed man came in to talk to him about his options – there were only a few treatments available, and only a couple would make him more comfortable, none would really help in the long run. He was dying and there was nothing they could do.

And then the man offered something that took me completely by surprise. Euthanasia. He explained it was fairly new in Canada, but it was a viable option. The patient could end his suffering and choose the day and time to do it. I left my husband a note and left the room.

Then there was the woman in the room across the hall after my husband had his surgery and was moved to a different room. At first I thought she was in the final stages of cancer – she was thin and frail seeming, and she had a large room to herself. She had a great deal of family that came, mostly in groups.

But on the hubby’s last morning in there I couldn’t help but notice she had a nurse and I think the man was a physiotherapist. They were asking her questions and helping her sit up, moving her limbs and checking for feeling. Then the man went out and came back wheeling a large mirror. They positioned it in front of her and asked if she could recognize herself.

I didn’t hear the answer but my mind was filled with infinite possibilities of what put her in the hospital in such a state.

And then there was the screaming man…

I never did find out what room the screaming man was in, it sounded like he was out in the courtyard that all the rooms overlooked. But he kept up an almost constant barrage of screaming – not so much screaming in pain as just angry words. The daughter swears he was yelling: “Land ho!”

I kind of felt sorry for him and I was dying to know his story. I did find out from a nurse that he wasn’t going through detox, but that’s the only thing I was able to find out. What was he so angry about? Why was he there? Why didn’t they just sedate him so the other patients could sleep?

So as trying as the last week was, it’s nice to know that despite the fact I wasn’t writing I was still thinking like a writer. :-D

Inspiration From Dreams

There was probably as much, if not more, talking than writing in this class, for what are writers if not dreamers?

We started out this class by going around the table and sharing some of our dreams. A lively discussion ensued over some of the particulars, and some of the common aspects to be found in dreams.

Maybe it was because we’re all writers, but I was a little surprise that there were a lot of common themes in our dreams. Our dreams also tended to be vivid and a little on the dark side. And of course we were given time to write down a dream to share. Here’s mine:

A pandemic virus was systematically wiping out mankind. Only those with a certain genetic marker would survive. I was in Toronto with my granddaughter where we were supposed to be able to get help – my daughter had stayed behind to look after her father and her husband.

There was rioting in the cities. Most of them were gone. I don’t know why Toronto, or at least the part of it we were in, was still accessible.

We were wandering the halls of a hospital – it was very crowded. I’m not sure how I knew, but I realized the nice people who appeared to be helping everyone, were actually separating those that appeared to have the genetic marker from those who didn’t.

There was an overly friendly woman – like one of those falsely, overly cheerful people who want you to join their cult. She wanted me to take my granddaughter to this compound. She assured me we’d be safe there, but I somehow knew they were gathering people for experimentation.

I pretended to be excited about the prospect, and persuaded her to let me go back for my daughter and other (non-existent) female members of my family. I guess they got credit or something for anyone they coerced into getting on one of the buses because she was more than happy to wait for me to bring the rest of my family.

It wasn’t easy to leave the city. Abandoned vehicles lined the streets and we had to avoid military like patrols who were searching for survivors to take to the compound. We weren’t the only ones who knew the compound was a bad place, we came across other healthy people who were also avoiding the patrols.

We made our way back home only to find the males of our family were dead – my husband and all of his family, and my daughter’s husband. We knew we weren’t safe where we were and decided to make our way to New Brunswick where my sister was. For some unknown reason, it was a safe haven.

After sharing the dreams we wrote down, we talked about methods for remembering dreams and ways dreams can aid in the writing process. Here are a few things we came up with:

Keep your story in mind as you fall asleep.
Use lucid dreaming techniques
“Sleeping on it” really can solve problems.
Set an alarm to wake yourself up during REM sleep.
Look for the elements in your dream that work – a theme or a feeling. You don’t have to use every part of your dream.
When you wake up, you have only a few seconds to remember your dream before it’s lost. If you leave the bedroom, “passing the threshold” as it were, you won’t remember. So stay on this side of the threshold.
Write down your dream while you’re still in bed.
Dream imagery can provide the weirdness that takes a story in a new direction.
Day dreaming can be used as a space for writing.
There is a lot of overlap between how to write and how to dream.

If you’d like to delve a little further into the subject of dreams and writing, here are a few links to check out:

How to Use Your Dreams to Inspire Your Fiction
Dream a Little Dream: Using Dreams in Literature
Deep Lucid Dreaming – wake up in your dreams for a happier, more creative life
Do You Dream In Paragraphs? Mine Your Dreams For Writing Ideas
Use Your Dreams to Be Endlessly Creative


Bartelomeo Cristofori dreamed ... and invented the piano.

Iroha Mokigusari

Yowsa! This form was a bit of a challenge. But then I kind of like a challenge.

Some of my favorite forms are the Japanese ones. Even though they usually have a strict 5/7 syllable count, at least you don’t have to worry about rhymes. All you need for most of them is a good thesaurus that includes the number of syllables in a word. :-)

The Iroha Mokigusari is an ancient Japanese form and seeing as I can neither read nor write Japanese I have to trust the western interpretation of it. It’s described as a perfect pangram, meaning it contains each character of the Japanese syllabary once only.

For our purposes, its best described as a Japanese alphabet poem. It differs from our western alphabet poems (in which each line starts with a letter of the alphabet starting with A and continuing in descending order) in that it follows the normal 5/7 pattern of syllables, and the first and last letter of each line follow the alphabet.

The structure looks like this:

axxxb
cxxxxxd
exxxf
gxxxxxh
ixxxj
and so on…

One example I found of this form was called Nonsense, a fitting title because it’s almost impossible to write a poem under these restrictions that makes sense.

My attempt has no title.

A question that’s dumb,
Can you fly like a buzzard?
Even without proof,
Given your innate hutzpah,
I believe in Raj –
Knew you were always playful,
Maybe brave even.
Only watch for a breakup –
Quicker than ever,
Starlight is shining at night
Under an improv
Winter moon; like a phoenix
You shine like glitz.

The End…Almost

I don’t think I’ve been complaining about the weather too much here, I’ve been saving it mostly for my other blog. Suffice it to say we’ve been enduring a long string of grey, wet, snowy, grey, icy, wet, grey days for what seems like forever. However, that changed late on Friday when this strange light appeared in the sky. It was round and yellow, and gave off not only light, but warmth! It was…awe inspiring!

But while everyone else seemed to spend as much time as possible outside soaking up vitamin D on Saturday, I spent most of my time in my office. This was the big push to get my office organized. I moved the bookcase that was against the wall behind my desk to its new home under the window – it’s just slightly shorter than the window ledge and it fits under there nicely.

I had tried the desk closer to the window, but it just didn’t feel right, so on Saturday I tried butting it up against the wall and that was a little better, but was still a little off. After last Monday’s post, I actually looked up feng shui for an office, and I recalled that several of the floor plans had the desk set at an angle (to face both the door and the window). So keeping that in mind, I gave it a try.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner!

Not only does it give me extra space behind my desk, it makes it feel like there’s more space in front of it too. Fuelled by my success, I dragged the box holding the parts of my newest bookcase into the living room and put it together. It turned out to be a little narrower and a little higher than I’d expected, but it works on the wall where the other bookcase had been.

My large boss’s chair was still a little big for that space, so I gave it to the hubby – he was spending more time at his desk anyway so it seemed only fair – intending to use the somewhat rickety secretary’s chair he’d been using until I could find something better. Only he had a rather nice pair of office chairs in the music room and with the way his equipment was now set up he only had room for one. It’s actually a lot more comfortable than I expected and is just the right size.

So. The desk area is set up to my satisfaction, but I didn’t have enough time left to get the reading area sorted out. I’m getting rid of the wooden filing cabinet my tea station was on – I wasn’t really using the drawers for anything, it was more just something to fit the tea station on. It’ll fit just as nicely on top of the tiny book case in the reading area, and it makes more sense to have it there. Now all that’s left is a reading chair.

Yesterday the hubby and I made a pilgrimage to Peterborough in search of a chair. We didn’t find a chair, but we did find a new dining room set. LOL I did see my dream chair, but it was way too big for the space I have. And it wasn’t as comfortable as I remember it being. So today, after babysitting, we’re going up to Ikea in Toronto to get the chair I almost bought a couple of weeks ago. Only this time it’s on sale. :-D

With any luck, next week’s post will have pictures.

Speculative Poetry

Speculative fiction and poetry – what an interesting combination!

We started out this week’s class by reading some poetry by Sandra Kasturi to give us an idea of just what was meant by speculative poetry. It’s pretty much the same thing as speculative fiction, albeit in poetic form – words embracing the fantastic, the mythic, and science fiction themes.

This was followed by a discussion of what kind of elements can be found in a speculative poem, and this in turn was followed by some free writing time. The idea was to keep some of these elements in mind as we tried to write a speculative poem. I have to be honest here, I really hate being rushed when it comes to poetry. I like to be able to take my time and mull an idea over. This is the unedited poem I came up with in the allotted time:

bitter rain lashes the darkness
on the deck railing, mourning doves huddle
feathers puffed out
the others come, one by one
summoned
chickadee, sparrow, grackle
they gather, like crystals of ice
summoned
the others come, one by one
thrush, cardinal, blackbird
summoned
the tree above becomes weighted down
the others come, one by one
summoned
nuthatch , swallow, jay
they speak with one voice
their voices weave together
great wings sheltering
necromancer raven
cast your spell,
cast your spell

This is what happens when you rush me. :-)

The next exercise was a little more fun. The instructor introduced the class to erasure poetry. It’s very similar to blackout poetry, except instead of blacking out the text around the words, you erase it. We weren’t able to do any actual erasing, what we did instead was circle the words for our poems. We were also asked to give our poem a title. I found mine in the text, it means “happy meeting place.”

Here’s a picture of what mine looked like on the pages:

And here it is written out so you can actually read it:

Yarrawarra

Questions asked in a deeper understanding
had no boundaries.
Conversations and stories intersect;
ink and bottle showed a broken domestic story.
Uncovered interest objects –
thus, story was kept contextualized.
The history of stories exchange meanings.
Each story is recognized –
universal conversation can describe stories,
embed the meaning of place and history.
Distinct knowledge happens.
Evidence of a girl studying,
understanding the unexpected.
There remains artefacts, living fragments,
of corrugated experiences.
Parallel stories support example.

The final exercise was my favourite. The instructor had us break up into pairs so we could collaborate on a poem, taking turns writing each line. It was actually a lot of fun:

I beg you please
To listen to my words
For each, and every, means something
Different to the individual being
Birth, a start
And life, a continuance
Of wonder, mistake and love
Of joy and happiness
Death, an end
Which itself is only the beginning
For memories, we have a many
To buoy us up when we would fall
To sail away, from each and every tempest
And find a safe harbour
Land, I beg of you please
To listen to my words

If you’re still curious about speculative poetry, check out the following links:

Liminality (a magazine of speculative poetry)
Locus Online
Strange Horizons