American Gods is -- wait, what?

In casting about for a topic for this year's Magic Realism Blog Hop (and thanks to Zoe Brooks for organizing once again!), I reviewed a list on Goodreads of books purported to fall under the category of magic realism. Not too far down the list, I spotted Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

I read the book several years ago, before I'd really begun studying mythology, and thought it was pretty weird. I mean, I liked it, but a lot of it seemed surreal. And confusing. I was fairly far into the book before I twigged to the fact that (spoiler alert!) Mr. Wednesday was Odin, the Norse Allfather.

So when I saw the book on that Goodreads list, I hesitated. I remembered several key scenes from the story -- the "Russians" living in genteel poverty in Chicago, the car in the lake, the hanging tree -- but not much else.

And then I remembered Starz had recently created a series based on the book. So I began to stream the episodes, in order to refresh my memory, and discovered -- oh haha -- season one don't cover the whole book. There's going to be at least one more season. Welcome to video storytelling in the 21st century.

Also, I was right -- American Gods is weird. But is it magic realism?

We've had our share of "what the heck is magic realism?" posts on this blog hop over the years. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to use Merriam-Webster's definition:

A literary genre or style...that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.

If that's strictly what we're going by, then I suppose both the series and the book qualify. The main character is Shadow Moon, a black ex-convict who runs into a mysterious con man named Mr. Wednesday. Wednesday hires him as his personal assistant. His duties become increasingly weird as things around him get more and more surreal.

Eventually, we figure out that Wednesday is a god, that a whole lot of gods immigrated to America with their followers, and that new gods -- the media and technology -- are staging a takeover. In the America of the story, gods survive only so long as people believe in them.

But back to the show.

The question for me is not whether American Gods is sufficiently fantastic; the question is whether it's realistic enough. It's set in America, but much of the action seems to happen on a different plane of existence. For example, Shadow suffers a pretty severe beating and lynching in episode two. But apart from a nasty torso cut that requires staples, his wounds seem pretty minor. Why isn't his face swollen? Is it because the whole thing happened on a different plane? Or is that just TV not being realistic? (I don't watch a lot of TV, so you'll have to tell me.)

Gaiman has written a number of great books, including some wonderful magic-realism novels. I'm not sure, though, whether American Gods qualifies as magic realism. Fantastic, yes; surreal, for sure. But magic realism? For me, the jury's still out.

What do you guys think?

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These moments of magically real blogginess have been brought to you by Lynne Cantwell and the 2017 Magic Realism Blog Hop. Please check out the other posts in this year's hop!

Finding magic in the real world.

There's a dragonfly hanging around the parking lot of my apartment building. I've been seeing it every afternoon when I come home from work. Usually it simply crosses my field of vision, but sometimes it zips past me to really make sure it gets my attention.

I tend to think of dragonflies as liminal creatures, right on the border between reality and the fantastic. Part of it is their appearance: their bulbous heads, long, slender tails, and iridescent wings make them look less of this world and more of some unaccountable one. Part of it is the way they zip through the air, ducking and hovering in ways that we think we might be able to understand, if only we could read them as well as (or better than!) we read other humans.

Dragonflies need to stay near water, because that's where they lay their eggs. The element of water is linked with the emotions, which might make dragonflies suspect to the rational-minded. And in fact, many cultures have superstitions, most of them unflattering, about dragonflies. I wrote a story about them once -- or rather, I wrote a story in which dragonflies play a significant role. I made the main character a news reporter partly so I had an excuse to do a brain-dump of all the fascinating things I learned about them. (The story's called "Lulie." You can buy it for 99 cents at Amazon.)

But my story was strictly fantasy; the dragonflies in it were real, but they carried a magical message that my main character, Artie, resisted all the way. If "Lulie" had been magic realism, Artie would have been a very different character, and the dragonflies' message would have been less overt than Come down to the family farm and meet your cousin by the light of the moon. It would have been less insistent, more intriguing, and more of an answer to a deeper dilemma Artie himself was wrestling with.

Because magic realism works best, I think, with characters who are on the verge of something: a difficult transition from childhood to adolescence; an insistent need to escape an intolerable situation, whether domestic (physical or emotional abuse) or on a wider scale (war, racial hatred, etc.); or a cognitive dissonance that may be close to manifesting as mental illness (the movie Birdman comes to mind). The characters have to be open enough to magic to not shy away from it. They need to be in a liminal frame of mind.

I've been sufficiently intrigued by my dragonfly friend to investigate why he or she has been trying to get my attention (other than as a subject for this blog post, I mean). In Animal Speak, Ted Andrews says Dragonfly, as a totem, is about the power of light:

Dragonflies remind us that we are light and can reflect the light in powerful ways if we choose to do so. "Let there be light" is the divine prompting to use the creative imagination as a force within your life.

Tomorrow is Lughnasadh, the Pagan first harvest. For those of us in North America, the celebration comes at the height of summer. On this Lughnasadh eve, I'm going to try to remember to let my light shine. I hope you do the same.

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This post is part of the 2016 Magic Realism Blog Hop. In fact, it may be the final post, time-wise, in this year's hop -- which means you can click through the list below and catch them all at once! Big thanks again to Zoe Brooks for organizing another intriguing hop.






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These moments of hoppy blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Why I write magic realism.

I'm writing this in anticipation of this year's Magic Realism Blog Hop, which starts Wednesday. Kudos to Zoe Brooks, who has once again organized what promises to be a wonderful event. You'll see a link at the bottom of this post to the rest of the posts on the hop. If they're not showing up today, come on back Wednesday and give it another try.

I suppose you could think of this as a companion piece to my post at Indies Unlimited last week about why I write fantasy. I've dipped my toes in the waters of magic realism, too, and so I thought it might be interesting to talk about how the two genres complement each other.

Well, it will be interesting for me, anyhow, and it's my blog.

Why would a fantasy writer want to bother with magic realism, anyway? It's not like it sells any better. Certainly the critics like it better, if what you're after is literary-snobby critical acclaim. But really, what can you do with one that you can't do with the other?

I can think of a couple of things. For one thing, magic realism is more subtle. Let's say your characters are doing their best not to talk about the elephant in the room -- alcoholism, say, or child abuse, or murder. In fantasy, chances are that the magic solution would be big and unmistakable: a wizard turns the wine to water, or the abuser gets his comeuppance when a magical creature mauls him. In magic realism, you might have a character like Toni Morrison's Beloved -- a baby whose death haunts her mother so much that the baby's ghost comes back. At first she looks like a blessing, but then she grows and grows, becoming so huge that she takes over the family's house and calls all the shots.

For another thing, the gee-whiz factor in fantasy can sometimes hamper you from doing what you'd like to do. In fantasy, non-magical people basically have two reactions to magic: either they're totally wowed by it (or pretend not to care while secretly being wowed by it), or they fear it. Which sets up that old good vs. evil dichotomy: "Burn the witch!"/"No, you don't understand! She uses her magic for good!" Same/same with paranormal creatures: either they're misunderstood, or they should be destroyed. Think Disney's "Beauty and the Beast," or any paranormal romance in which the "good guys" are after the hunky vampire/werewolf/fae.

If you've read any of my books, you know I don't have a lot of use for that classic dichotomy. In my opinion, even the bad guys believe they're doing the right thing. And magic realism allows even the villains to be more well-rounded characters. It puts the magic in the background, so that it becomes part of the fabric of time and place. And that allows the author to paint with a finer brush. If I'd written Seasons of the Fool as a regular fantasy, Dave's wife, Nina, might have been portrayed as the equivalent of the wicked stepmother. As a work of magic realism, Nina takes on depth and becomes a tragic figure (or that was my intention, anyway). Instead of being a stock character or a caricature, she becomes a person who might be reconciled with her kids someday.

Don't get me wrong -- I love writing fantasy. It's a lot of fun. But I also enjoy writing magic realism, and I expect to be doing more work in that genre, too, in years to come.

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These moments of magical realistic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell

Magic Realism Bloghop: Labyrinths.

I was first introduced to magic realism in the Spanish-language literature class I took during my first semester in college. One of the books we were assigned was a collection of short stories by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Borges quickly became one of my favorite writers -- partly because I had to work so hard to understand his stories in the first place, but also because of the elements of the fantastic that he wove into his work. One of those elements is the labyrinth.

Among the stories we read that semester was "La casa de Asterión" -- "The House of Asterion." In the story, which you can read for free at the link, Asterion begins his story by refuting the gossip about him:

I know they accuse me of arrogance, perhaps also of misanthropy, perhaps madness too. Such accusations (which I shall castigate in due course) are laughable.

(I'm reminded of the opening line of another of my favorite short stories, Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart": "True! -- nervous -- very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?" Poe was writing horror, of course, but the reader gets the same feeling that we're about to hear from a narrator who is not altogether reliable.)

Asterion goes on to explain that he is a prince, but that people are so frightened of him that he never leaves his great, rambling house. "Each part of the house repeats many times," he says; "any particular place is another place." His house, in other words, is a labyrinth. In fact, it is the labyrinth -- the one built by Daedalus to imprison the Minotaur. We only learn that Asterion is himself the Minotaur after Theseus has slain him. But Borges has another surprise for us, for unlike the Minotaur of legend, Asterion goes to his death without a fight. It makes one wonder whether Theseus changed his story to make the Minotaur more of a monster and the ending more dramatic -- to make him seem to be more heroic. It is true, after all, that history is written by the victor.

The labyrinth as plot device turns up again in Guillermo del Toro's movie "Pan's Labyrinth." Set in Spain during the early years of the Franco regime, it's the tale of Ofelia, a girl on the cusp of puberty. She and her pregnant mother have been brought by her new stepfather, who's a military officer, to his forested estate. A stick insect leads Ofelia to a labyrinth on the property, where she meets a host of fantastical creatures, including a faun who convinces her that she is the reincarnation of a fairy princess. Her adventures amongst these odd beings play out against a backdrop of the government's brutal crackdown on anti-Franco rebels.

With its host of fantastical creatures and its mysterious and potentially unreliable narrator, "Pan's Labyrinth" could almost be seen as a descendant of "The House of Asterion." And in fact, del Toro has said that Borges' stories were among his inspirations for his screenplay.

Over the past few years, it has become fashionable to use labyrinths as a meditation aid. Those who walk the single, spiraling path into the center and out again have been known to experience a spiritual epiphany. I wonder whether that feeling is akin to the sense of wonder a reader feels in reaching the center of one of Borges' stories.

I'm thinking of tackling magic realism for my next writing project. Maybe I'll incorporate a labyrinth of my own.

Thanks for stopping by hearth/myth on this year's Magic Realism Bloghop. I hope you come back and visit again. And don't forget to check out the other blogs participating in the hop.







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These moments of labyrinthine blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

That fraudulent feeling.

First, some bits of news:

• This past Friday was Lughnasa, and to celebrate, my pal Kriss Morton let me play on her blog for my fourth Fourth-Wall Friday. In this one, I got to tour the NWNN studios on a crucial day during the plot of Scorched Earth. I love writing these things. Figuring out a way to insert myself into my books is just a ton of fun. Kriss, bless her heart, posted links to my other three appearances on this Friday's post, so if you missed one of the earlier ones, feel free to click on through and read 'em all.
• Next weekend's post will be going up early, on Thursday the 7th, as part of Zoe Brooks' second annual Magic Realism Blog Hop. She has about 20 bloggers signed up to participate in this year's hop, including one of my co-minions at Indies Unlimited, Yvonne Hertzberger. Reading everybody's posts last year was fascinating, and I'm looking forward to having another great time this year. I hope you'll join us on the hop.

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This week, Bob Mayer posted at Genreality about feeling like a fraud. He tailored his post to writers, but almost anybody who's high-achieving can fall into this trap.

Impostor Syndrome is a legitimate psychological condition. Sufferers believe that their achievements aren't due to skill or brilliance. Instead, they feel that they simply lucked into their success, and someday somebody's going to figure it out and humiliate them. As you might imagine, anxiety often goes hand-in-hand with Impostor Syndrome, and depression sometimes does, too.

When first identified back in the 1970s, researchers thought the syndrome only affected women, but more recent research has shown that men can suffer from it, too. And minorities are somewhat more susceptible -- which makes sense when you think about some of the opinions on affirmative action floating around out there (i.e., the feeling that minorities are unfairly being given jobs that ought to go to whites).

This syndrome often hits when the person is thrown into a new situation and expected to perform at a higher level than previously -- like, oh, say, writing the first draft of a novel. But it's not just a feeling of being in over your head; any sane person will have some doubts when tackling a new project. It's the sense that you never should have been given the project in the first place.

The American Psychological Association recommends some coping skills for those suffering from Impostor Syndrome -- among them, recognizing that nobody expects you to be perfect (since perfectionism also can accompany the syndrome), and building up your confidence by acknowledging what you've already achieved.

Mayer suggests stepping away from the space inside your head to view your achievements as if they belonged to someone else, and then asking yourself the likelihood that an impostor would have been able to amass such a resume.

Personally, I think that above all, you should avoid comparing yourself with other people. No matter how good you are at what you do, there will always be somebody who's better at it -- someone who wins more awards, sells more books or widgets, or makes more money. Comparing yourself with others can motivate you, sure. But if the comparisons tend to make you feel like you'll never be any good and what were you thinking when you got involved with this and maybe you should just quit right now -- just stop. Better to keep your head down in your work, and remind yourself of all the things that make you the fabulous person that you are.

Because, as I've been known to tell my kids, you're unique -- just like everybody else.

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These unique bloggy moments have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Urban fantasy and magic realism: a matter of agency.

I'm participating today (a couple of hours early, my time) in the Magic Realism Blog Hop organized by fellow indie author Zoe Brooks. 

We had a discussion about magic realism here on the blog a couple of months ago; if you missed it, click here and scroll down to the comments.  I won't reiterate that discussion, other than to say that I still think "alternative realism" is a better descriptive name for the genre, mainly because it takes the "taint" of magic out of play.

What I'm hoping to do today is to talk about whether urban fantasy and magic realism could ever find common ground.

First, a couple of quick definitions. Urban fantasy is a sub-genre of fantasy.  Unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings and other epic fantasies, urban fantasy is not set in a pre-mechanistic historical period.  Its setting is the present day, give or take a few decades, and so the characters can use cellphones and drive cars. But just as in, say, LotR, magical creatures appear, sometimes as guides to the clueless humans and sometimes as their nemeses.  In many cases, magical creatures are among the main characters. And magical tools (swords, clubs, bespelled books and scrolls) may be wielded by both the heroes and their enemies.  (Feel free to argue amongst yourselves over whether I've forgotten anything and/or painted with too broad a brush.)

Magic realism can be set in pretty much any time period -- so a present-day setting is conceivable.  And magic of a sort occurs.  The difference, I think, is in who wields the magic and how, and the reactions of the other characters when magic happens.  The magic in magic realism is woven into the fabric of society.  In Like Water for Chocolate, Tita weeps into the batter for the wedding cake she's making for her sister and Pedro, the man whom Tita loves. The cake is thereby transformed: all of the wedding guests who eat it become literally lovesick. Tita's mother beats her for poisoning the cake.  But no magical creature intervened, and Tita used no magic whisk or spoon or recipe; Tita simply cried, and her tears worked the magic of their own accord.

This, I think, is the crucial difference between urban fantasy and magic realism: urban fantasy requires an agent to deliberately effect the magical change.

Another difference is the characters' reactions to the occurrence of magic. Going back to LotR, Frodo and his pals can feel the pull of the One Ring, and they know it's not normal.  But in magic realism, the magic is taken as a matter of course.  Nobody in Like Water for Chocolate doubts for a moment that Tita's tears could have affected them so profoundly.

I should mention one other point. Magic realism is often described as giving a voice to those who have traditionally had no voice: the repressed and the dispossessed.  Tita's controlling mother thwarts her at every turn, so her emotions find an outlet in her cooking. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, the ghost of a runaway slave's dead child literally becomes bigger than anything else in her family.

So could the elements of magic realism be incorporated into urban fantasy? Maybe, but it would be tough going.  Fantasy has certainly given voice to the dispossessed in the past -- think of any coming-of-age story in which a kid grows into his or her birthright.  Magic without agency could conceivably be pulled off; anybody could cry magic tears into cake batter.  But one of the conceits of urban fantasy is that the fantastic is happening right under our noses -- it's just that most of us either aren't equipped to spot it, or are more than willing to explain it away.  The culture of the story would have to be modified so that normal people would accept odd goings-on without batting an eye -- and that strays over the line into parallel-universe territory.

So in the end, I'm doubtful that an urban magic realism fantasy could be pulled off.  If you think otherwise, please leave a comment and let's talk.

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Want to read more about magic realism? Scroll down! (Note that the event lasts through Wednesday, so some of these links won't be live 'til then.)






And as a further enticement to blog-hopping, Zoe's arranged a little giveaway.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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These moments of bloggy alternative realism are brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.