Dave’s Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #87: Art and Truth: “Just About Right.”

 

Sossity Chandler

“That’s Just About Right” is a postmodern song. It was written by Jeff Black, recorded in 1995 by the country group Blackhawk, and climbed to number seven on the American country charts. I would call the music neo-country. It does not sound like the music of Hank Williams or even Alan Jackson. Not traditional, with a very low “twang factor,” it could pass off as a pop song, though the mandolin and fiddle playing give it the country flavor. It is, like many of Mr. Black’s songs, subtle. It’s about a man who goes up in the mountains to paint “the truth” but can’t quite nail it and is frustrated by that. Finally he abandons the project. The song puts it this way:

           My old friend, came down from the mountain

           Without even looking, he found a little truth

           You can go through life with the greatest intentions

           But you do what you do what you just got to do.

The truth the man finds is that you cannot capture the truth, not in a painting or any other form. You can only say, as the chorus notes, “That’s just about right.”  I say it’s postmodern because postmodernism emphasizes the relativity and the constructed nature of all systems that claim ultimate and final truth.

And the song inspired a story.  

In the story I wrote in response to the song, my ongoing character Sossity Chandler meets artist Brionna Morgan at the art museum in her home city of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sossity, there to participate in the museum’s Sunday night concerts series, is enthralled by one of Brionna’s paintings. The two of them fall in together, talk about art and creativity. Sossity notices how much Brionna drinks. Before she leaves the woman gives her an invitation to visit if she is ever in Vermont. Sossity is informed by some of the people there that Brionna lost an adult child and subsequently went through a divorce. Her drinking is a result of that.

Two years later, Sossity, who has herself gone through a painful divorce, gives a concert in Hartford, Connecticut, remembers Brionna’s offer, calls her, and asks if the invitation is still open. She arrives at her house. She has done some research and found out her friend is a painter of some reputation with art in many top museums of the world. She is also shown a portrait of her son, who had was killed in an accident, Brionna has managed to stop drinking and put her life in better order. She shows Sossity a vista that she (like the artist in “Just About Right”) wants to paint but can never get exactly right.

The next few years, their friendship deepens. Brionna design the cover for one of Sossity’s CDs and does portraits of her and her children. Sossity buys several of her paintings. They visit whenever Sossity is in her area of the country. During one such visit, the two of them walk a section of Appalachian Trail. Toward the end, they come to a vista Brionna has always loved and wanted to paint. She takes out her sketchbook and draws. They walk on their final destination and check into a motel.

  

When Sossity goes to throw something away, she finds a painting, a simple watercolor, of the overlook lying beside the dumpster. Brionna looks through the window, notes what has happened, comes outside, and says she had not wanted Sossity to see the painting. It has not captured, she says, the nature of the place and is incomplete.The following exchange takes place:

“Why do you want to depict that?”

She did not answer but they both knew what she did not want to say. Sossity thought of Brionna’s son, whom she had never met. His portrait had expressed what lay beneath his physical appearance—soul, spirit, personhood. What stood behind nature would be the answer to why he had died.

“Some things you can represent. What impressed me about the portraits you did of my family is how you showed our personalities. People can see our souls by looking at our faces.”

“That’s what I want to do with this landscape. I can’t capture it.”

Sossity regarded the painting a moment. “Art is never complete,” she said. “We just agree we’ll leave it at some point.” She ran her eyes over the landscape. “I’d say this is just about right—as right as anyone could ever get it.”

Sossity’s words seem to strike home. Brionna nods and takes the painting back into their motel room. Art can express truth—but only to a certain extent. Even the portraits Brionna has done—those of her son and of Sossity and her children—can express the soul only to an extent. Truth, pure truth, the truth behind things, is eternally elusive. “Just about right” is usually the only way we can get it.

The story appeared in Motley Press, which is no longer in print. There are some websites with that title, but apparently none of them are the one that printed my story. This may be another story to resubmit. It seems that lots of journals close after only a short run.

For more good stories, novellas, and novellas, see my Writer's Page.

For your reading pleasure, get a  copy of After Happily Ever After. What happened after Cinderella married Prince Charming? After they met Snow White, were the Seven Dwarves ever the same? In my story, see what happened after Morgianna and Ali Baba got rid of the forty thieves--everything did not go smoothly for them.

I would love to hear your comments.

Have a Happy New Year!

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #86: "The Conduit."

Pierce Brosnan as James Bond

I have several ongoing characters: Sossity Chandler, a popular singing star; Martin Rollins, a guitarist; Jancinda Lamott, a vampire; and Alessia Bernini, who is a streg, a kind of witch or sorceress. Some writers use ongoing characters. Lucy Maud Montgomery gave us Anne Shirley, who continues on from Anne of Green Gables to Anne of Windy Poplars. Ian Fleming wrote fourteen novels about his character, James Bond. And W. Somerset Maugham, wrote a book of stories featuring a character named Ashendon and also made him narrator in the novels Cakes and Ale, The Moon and Sixpence, and The Razor's Edge.  

This is a good thing to do, I think, for a writer. It allows you to develop a character in various ways, through different situations, and through the years. The character I’ve published the most stories about is Sossity Chandler (twenty-eight stories). I’ve had to build a consistent biography for her and have written stories about her at various stages of her life. And it enables you to know a character well. I know Sossity likes whiskey, her favorite oath is “for Christ’s sake,” her favorite musical group The Rolling Stones. I know about her marriage, her divorce, her children, her boyfriends, her very good friends Heather and Lydia, her band, and her early failures and, later, massive success as a singer. It is a good exercise, I think, to develop ongoing characters.

Alessia Bernini

The story I want to talk about here is one about Alessia Bernini. Alessia is a streg, a witch or sorceress from Italian tradition. Strega practice natural magic, not black magic. In other words, they don’t sell their souls to the Devil but rather gain magical skill through study, discipline, and, most importantly, from inclusion in a line of practitioners that goes back, for Alessia’s order, a thousand years. She has inherited, and is guardian of, the accumulated power of the women in the succession before her. She will train a young girl to succeed her when she turns thirty.

Strega are benign. They cast spells only that they think are just and do no harm to the innocent. In the story, “The Conduit,” Alessia must use her power to rescue a local girl who dabbled in the occult and to save a woman who has been enslaved by oculists and used to further their designs—used at a terrible cost to her.

Alessia has known Genesia, daughter of a local mob boss named Corsi, for him Alessia has done spells (though never to further his Mafia interests). Her unstable, mercurial nature has led her to aspire to be, at various times, a Communist, an atheist, and a nun. When she dabbles in Satanism, however, and she and her boyfriend make a pact with the dark powers, she finds it’s not so easy to back out of the associations. They are bedeviled—literally. And feel malevolent power manifesting itself again them. Mr. Corsi has sought Alessia’s help. She is wary. “I’m not afraid of many things, Mr. Corsi. I am afraid of this. When you go up against the powers of darkness, it is no small matter. It’s dangerous—as dangerous as a thing can be.” Still, she agrees to take the job.

When she consults her crystal, she gets confusing images—some that are very dark and troubling but, but some that shine light. After consulting with a mentor, she eventually is transported by magical power to Elizabethan England where she witnesses the hanging of a young woman for witchcraft. But she also notices that the woman does not die. Back in the present, she does research and finds out about a group of people who practiced magical arts in Elizabethan times and were found out and executed. Further research gives her the name of the woman she saw hanged, Moira Whitman. The occultists with whom Genesia deal threaten Alessia, but she is equal to the threat. And the images of dark and light come together in her mind. 

Corsi and his men round up the occultists. Alessia draws a magic circle and reads and incantation they had taken from a captured occultist to summon spirits. They summon Moira Whitman.

Alessia sees the same woman she watched mistreated and scorned in old England. The woman is not defiantly wicked but submissive. Alessia tells her she is safe and they are there to help her. They found out her role was to be a “conduit” for demonic forces to enter the world. Alessia imagines how she was treated—the abuse, perversion, and abjection she must have been put through—to allow demonic powers to come through her. She speaks with Corsi:

“They brought this woman from the past,” he said. “They planned to use her as a conduit—a door through which the dark powers of hell could come to the earth and attack Floriano and Genesia. That would have been a most undesirable situation.”

Corsi looked at the girl, his eyes evaluative.

“She is innocent—a victim of their brutality. No harm is to come to her. We made a covenant and you are required to obey me in this. She can’t hurt anyone herself. The others are the real culprits. You know that a streg cannot take life. But I can say that once those four people you captured are gone, you won’t have any more trouble.”

He nodded.

Corsi and his soldiers dispatch the occultists. Alessia wants to rehabilitate the girl, who has never know good, love, or kindness. She suggests Genesia might profit from caring for her and teaching her to live in the modern world. Her father agrees, saying that is just the sort of thing she needs. Alessia knows Genesia and Floriano will not be bothered by vengeful spirits again. In an epilogue, we learn that Genesia is doing well and Moira is quickly learning the ways of the modern world.

The story appeared in Wake the Witch, an anthology of stories on witches. Get a copy here.

For more stories, check out my Writer's Page.

I would love to hear your comments.

Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer #85: Love and Obsession: “The Zig-Zag Man.”

This story began when I was in the military. It was one of those things that is not that significant but for some reason stick in your mind. Several of my friends were going to get tattoos. I was too squeamish to get a tattoo, but they all went. One of my friends said he wanted to get one of the “Zig-Zag man.” I said I didn’t know what he was talking about and he said the Zig-Zag man was “This really cool guy,” and I certainly would have seen it, but I didn’t get what he was talking about. Turns out, he did not end up getting the tattoo he wanted because that studio did not have that particular template. I did not find out about the Zig-Zag man for several years. Then I saw the figure in an advertisement. Turns out, he was the iconic figure for Zig-Zag papers used by those who roll their own cigarettes. The iconic figure that has been their logo is what he meant.

Somehow, even more years later, it led to a story idea. I came across an advertisement of a young woman in a very short skirt getting waiting for a job interview to begin. Above her left knee is a highly visible tattoo. The advertisement was for a dermatologist who removed tattoos and promised her procedures left no scars and traces of the tattoo ink. If you were a former wild child now going into the world of business and investment, she could get rid of that embarrassing tattoo you got in your younger days.

That made me think of tattoos, my old friends going to the parlor, and of the Zig-Zag man. I began to write. This story would be about two girls in love. I think I made it a story about lesbians because I remembered a line I had liked by a lesbian poet, “I lick the ink from your tattoos.” The outline for the story began to form in my mind.

The story begins with Olivia waiting to have a Tattoo of the Zig-Zag man removed. She had gotten it at age seventeen when she came out as a lesbian and began a relationship with Courtney. One night they are rolling joints with Zig-Zag paper and, influenced not a little by the marijuana they have smoked, decide to get tattoos. “We can’t get married, but we could do the Zig-Zag man as an unofficial wedding ring,” Courtney quips. And they do, Olivia on her knee, Courtney on the upper arm.

Their relationship lasts seven years and might have lasted longer but that Courtney gets busted for possession and for dealing drugs. The city is in a crack-down on drug dealers. Her lawyer advises her to plead guilty in hope of a lenient sentence, but the judge throws the books at her. She gets seven years. Olivia says she will wait, but soon both of them see the impossibility and break things off Courtney’s lawyer says she will be out in three years but she ends up serving the entirety of her sentence.

This sends Olivia into a tailspin. After a long period of unsuccessful relationships, she finds Brianna, a college student. They move in together. By now Olivia has become a successful member of a firm that rescues struggling business. She is well-off, owns a house, and has Brianna. The future looks rosy. Brianna likes the tattoo of the Zig-Zag man and laments when Olivia gets rid of it. But she says it’s not appropriate for the job. Not long after that, Courtney is released after serving her seven-year sentence. Olivia invites her over.

Courtney is the same as she was pre-prison:  quirky, funny, entertaining. She still has her tattoo and humorously chides Olivia for breaking her “vow.” They learn she was both drug-free and celibate in prison. “If you’re a dyke,” she said, “everyone wants to beat you up. The butch women want to pound you into being their submissive lover. The tough straight women want to beat the hell out of you so you know not to come on to them. So I spent all my time there working out so I could protect myself. I got into fitness and body-building. They have people come in and do aerobics classes and yoga. I started going to those too. I pretty much lived like a Buddhist nun. I was celibate—decided I simply would not have any relationships while I was there, and I didn’t. I did yoga, meditation, I studied, and made my body strong. She currently teaches yoga and fitness and works with a local dance troupe that does hula-hoop routines.

Olivia notices that Courtney has charmed Brianna. When she mentions this, Brianna calls her silly. And life goes on. Olivia’s aggressive handling of business bankruptcies lands her firm several millions in profits. Brianna has some troubles in her life and Olivia uses her straightforward, non-nonsense manner to school her. Things continue on, though she noticed Brianna has purchased and hung a picture of the Zig-Zag man above her desk. “I miss him,” she says.

As the months progress, Olivia senses something is not right. Brianna mentions that she has told some of her problems (especially her family's rejection of her) to Courtney. “She’s a good listener,” Brianna remarks. In an epiphany, Olivia releases she is not that. She she has never listened to Brianna but immediately given her sound, sensible advice on how to handle problems with which she deals. She feels bad about this but doesn’t know how to change her behavior.

One day she pulls up to meet with a client and see Brianna and Courtney sitting together at an outdoor restaurant. Brianna is talking animatedly. Courtney is listening. Olivia knows with just a glance that she has lost Brianna. Her own straightforward, domineering manner has driven her into the arms of Courtney, who will listen and sympathize. As she watches, she knows she has lost and there is no remedying the situation. As she walks to meet with the client, she notices, on the sleeveless shirt Courtney is wearing, on the fleshy part of her upper arm, the tattoo of the Zig-Zag man.

The story appeared in the anthology Tattoos. Get a copy here. Lots of good reads in that text (of course, mine is the best story in the anthology).

For more titles, check out my Writer's page.

And for a great Christmas gift for the readers in your family, get a copy of Sinfonia: The First Notes .on the Lute: A Vampire Chronicle, Part 1. Nelleke Reitsma is a very good lute and guitar player. She should be. She's had 300 years to practice.

I would love to hear your comments.

Happy reading.