Haunted Legends

I'm a huge fan of oral folklore and urban legends. I teach a short section on Florida's Cracker culture and some of the local oral folklore a couple of times every year here at FSCJ, and my students really seem to enjoy investigating the local legends. I've taken student groups to St. Augustine and Fernandina Beach for guided ghost tours. Northeast Florida is rich with haunted history, and it's been a neat learning experience to watch them unravelling some of that stuff through research and composition.

So it was with great anticipation that I got my copy of Haunted Legends, an anthology edited by Nick Mamatas and Ellen Datlow. The goal here was pretty simple: enlist some of the finest speculative authors in the field to interpret a "true" urban legend. It's this nebulous kernel of belief--that quasi-historical notion that fuels urban legends--that gives so many of these stories their charm. I found the afterwords, attached directly to the tales themselves, very illuminating and a nice touch in explication.

I read every story in the anthology and found them all enjoyable, though a few really did stand out as excellent. In no particular order, here were my favorites:

• "The Folding Man" ~ Joe Lansdale. Pure horror fiction here. Lansdale plunges us ass-deep (there's a catalytic mooning in the first paragraphs that gets things going) into a tale of murderous "nuns" and their eponymous folding charge. A gory, chilling pulse pounder, this could only come from the imagination of Joe Lansdale.
• "Down Atsion Road" ~ Jeff Ford's story is one of the best at really capturing the narrative aesthetic of an effective urban legend. Told in the first person, this story focuses on a community's visible eccentric--a local artist called Crackpop by the kids. Crackpop lives deep in the Pine Barrens, protected from New Jersey demons by a shallow moat and a well-kept secret. It's a legend within a legend, and the partially revealed story of Ginny Sanger provides the chills in the story's third act. I scoured the phone book, paid for an Internet trace, stopped and talked to old people when I'd see them out in their yards along Atsion Road. Nobody had ever heard of Ginny Sanger...Really interesting story.
• "Oaks Park" ~ M.K. Hobson's story is one of the most emotionally riveting tales I've read in some time. This story is about personal grief and the dissolution of family. It's about renewal and cyclical sorrow. There is a watershed moment late in this story--a narrative set in Oaks Park, where I once attended a company picnic--that is really well written and very cathartic for the reader. Highly recommended.
• "The Redfield Girls" ~ Laird Barron's take on The Lady of the Lake is keen. Like much of his fiction, there is a kinetic tension that just builds toward payoff. His fiction has a serious hum to it, and this one, a very sad piece, is entirely satisfying. The writing gets under the skin: The storm shook the house and lightning sizzled, lighting the bay windows so fiercely she shielded her eyes. Sleep was impossible and she remained curled in her chair, waiting for dawn. Around two o'clock in the morning, someone knocked on the door. Three loud raps. She almost had a heart attack from the spike of fear that shot through her heart.

There are many fine, emotionally resonant stories here. I think that's an important point to make in this discussion. Oral folklore is often dismissed as fluff, as inconsequential yarns designed merely to illicit a startled yelp around the campfire or at the sleepover. But these tales' cultural significance--as cautionary narratives and moralistic teaching tools--can't be overstated. They communicate important lessons on what it means to be human. Carolyn Turgeon's haunting "La Llorona" delves into the parental response to the loss of a child. It's a particularly hopeful interpretation of a chilling legend. John Mantooth's superb "Shoebox Train Wreck" is a journey of investigation, an examination of how guilt can scar us in perpetuity, remaking the core of personal identity until death becomes a welcome transition.

Overall, the anthology succeeds in its charge to reinvigorate a collection of world legends, making them bright and shiny for the next generation to investigate, disseminate, and enjoy...

Loathsome, Dark and Deep

I really enjoyed Loathsome, Dark and Deep, from Belfire Press. Here's the review I put up on Amazon a short time ago:

Speculative fiction fans have been reading Aaron Polson's excellent short stories for years now. They've been rewarded with sharp insights into the human condition, vibrant prose, and some genuinely scary narratives.

So it should come as no surprise that those elements translate well into his most recent effort in the long form, Loathsome, Dark & Deep.

Polson teams with Belfire Press to produce an attractive book. The simplicity in design (I really like the understated chapter headings) suits the story well, as this is a gritty narrative of determination and perseverance--Polson's artful spin on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Narrated in the first-person, this is the story of Henry Barlow, a reluctant hero charged with the unenviable task of trekking deep into the Oregon forests to investigate a group of mad men. As an Oregon native, I really enjoyed my trip back to the damp climes of the old stomping grounds. Even while reading this in sunny Florida, I felt the cold in my bones.

Characterization is keen: I studied his face, carrying the hypnotic tranquility of the river to the minute criss-cross of scars. They looked almost like sutures, that Silas had been stitched together from several different men, that his face was patched together as a quilt of skin. For the first time, I felt uneasy around Silas--a cold, crawling sensation slid across the back of my neck.

The voice is well-suited to the post-Civil War setting. Barlow's descriptions and dialogue are concise and clear, and the central conflict of the task is harrowing. Let's just say that the ruined men don't provide the makings of pleasant dreams (...I wouldn't believe men could climb out of the river and try to bite my face off, neither. But that sure as hell happened this morning, didn't it?).

Dark literature with a dash of suspense, this one is well worth your time...

Gathering the Thread

Last Friday, I read Joe Lansdale's Vanilla Ride in a single afternoon. It's both a testament to Mr. Lansdale's seat-of-your-ass, no-holds-barred, nutsack-full-of-testosterone prose and his excellent sense of pacing. The book, a pretty compelling thriller in which Hap and Leonard tussle with the Dixie Mafia, is short. Most of the fifty-plus chapters rip by at four or five pages apiece. It's a little different than a lot of Champion Joe's prose, as he often fleshes out larger chapters, but it's a very satisfying read.

Lansdale has a real knack for capturing scenes in full with his economic prose, and also for ending his chapters on appropriate narrative notes. Many of these dialogue-laden sentences put a conclusion on the scene, showing that you don't always have to point the way to the next plot development or search for the perfect cliffhanger. A lot of these chapters feel like flash stories, and that's a nice experience for the reader.

It's an important lesson, I think. This morning, I sifted through thirty-seven pages of the book I'm finishing up, trimming and excising and cutting and blow-torching. I'll try to do another thirty-seven tomorrow if I can. I'm trying to make these chapters round into shape, and its hard but satisfying. How does it all fit together?

My creative writing students from the fall had lots of questions about novels, even though we were writing short fiction. They wanted to know if there was much of a difference between writing in the long and the short forms. They wanted advice, but I didn't have a whole lot to give.

I told them to put their heads down and their hands on the keyboards and write--either way, they'll get there eventually.

But I think it also helps to think of the chapters like short stories. It helps with fashioning the overall narrative blueprint, as well as the day-to-day writing.

Maybe next time, I'll have them read some Champion Joe to give them a good example of what I mean...

Beginnings and Endings...

Today feels like a bonafide renewal around these parts. The winter has been cold and blustery, with lots of days in the teens and twenties and even a few snow flurries back in late December. I recall reading Dream State (excellent book, by the way) back in 2005, a few weeks before we moved down here from Oregon; in the book, Diane Roberts wrote, "It can get bitterly cold in North Florida in the winter." I was incredulous, but boy was I off base. We've been cooooolllldddd!

Anyway, today it warmed up around here. I took a leisurely run on the trails in the sunlight, shorts and a tee-shirt, after taking Lyla to her first dental appointment ever. Those are the beginnings, friends: the peninsula is warming, and it won't be long before it's time to get out there and start working in the garden and the yard.

Lyla was wonderful in her appointment. She was surprisingly patient with everything and even seemed to enjoy the fluoride treatment. That kid...man, we got lucky.

On the other end of the spectrum, I'm about to leave for a retirement party for the inestimable Dean Charles Smires, my supervisor in the communications department for much of my time here at Florida State College. When Jeanne and I loaded the U-haul and did the reverse Oregon Trail back in '05, we both came East loaded with equal measure of trepidation and hope. I was pretty nervous about finding my place in an institution as large as ours.

But Dean Smires quickly set me mind at ease. His patient professionalism and sense of humor really make our department (twenty-one faculty, if I'm not mistaken) move smoothly. Dean Smires has always been fair and supportive, energetic and kind. He asks the types of incisive questions of the faculty he works with that help us grow as educators, and he is an old pro at mediating issues between faculty and students.

This retirement is actually probably a beginning for Dean Smires as well, or at least a return to his roots in the classroom. He's a very young retiree, and I expect we'll have the pleasure of his company as a colleague in the near future as he prepares to teach a little and travel a lot.

At any rate, our institution has excelled as a result of his expert stewardship and even temperament throughout the years. Congratulations, Dean Smires, on all of your accomplishments at the college...

Odds and Ends...

Fresh on the heels of the Loughner insanity in Arizona comes a story about a (seemingly) unbalanced individual at Portland State, my alma mater, stabbing a fellow student amid a bout of paranoid confusion. While Andrew Richardson, who accrued thousands of dollars in medical bills, not to mention the unpleasantness of being STABBED, for heaven's sake, and the University are still determining how to deal with the aftermath of the attack, it's clear from the comments following the story that mental illness is still hugely misunderstood in our culture.

Richardson was worried enough about Heath Avery that he filed a complaint with the housing authority at PSU. The question now is whether or not PSU did enough to assess the situation and take the steps to keep students safe after the complaint.

Make no mistake, it's difficult to deter a determined assailant. But it looks like Richardson did his part in making his feelings known here; that's a large step forward in a culture in which keeping one's head down is the status quo.

"They want it to seem like (the campus) is a sanctuary in the city, and it's not," Richardson said. He's correct. From the screeching street preachers and the scores of homeless folks in the library and parking garages, PSU is the most urban of all of Oregon's universities. It's a great place--a lovely, charming place, to be sure--but that doesn't make it safe...

I spent the morning fulfilling one of my resolutions for the new year. I reformatted the text on the Kindle edition of An Autumn Harvest and lowered the price to $0.99. I also formatted the book for hardcopy purchase via Create Space and reformatted the Smashwords version as well. Everything should be in place and available for purchase/download prior to the weekend.

I'm enjoying Peter Straub's A Dark Matter quite a bit. At about the halfway point, I find the character depth and varied narrative viewpoints really well rendered. Straub, much like Stephen King, has an excellent way with conveying youthful exuberance in his characters.

And finally, I'd like to say thanks for all of the thoughtful e-mails after Oregon lost a fantastic national championship game last Monday evening. No, I wasn't despondent, but it did take Jeanne and I twenty-four hours to bounce back. We put a lot of emotion into that game and this season, and we couldn't be prouder of our home state of Oregon and its fine football team, the Ducks. Time to turn our attention to hoops now, and get ready for 2011 on the gridiron.

But thanks again for the e-mails. Loads of great pick-me-ups, which were much appreciated...

A Fine Line

Before Saturday, I had planned to write a short essay in examination of Oregon's football team and its rise to national prominence. However, after Saturday's reprehensible shooting in Tucson, Arizona, I'm not too much into hashing that out. Instead, I'd like to simply state that my thoughts are with the families of those who lost loved ones.

I was taken aback by an interview that I looked at this morning on Today. Lynda Sorenson took a math class with Jared Lee Loughner. Back in June, she wrote a couple of e-mails to a friend that now seem chillingly prescient. She wrote that Loughner was a classroom disruption, and that she sat near the door because he was the kind of student that might show up with a weapon and she wanted a chance at escape.

She expressed her concerns to the professor, who immediately informed his superiors. A few weeks later, Loughner was removed from the classroom.

A similar situation took place years ago, when Nikki Giovanni sought to have Sung-Hui Cho removed from a creative writing class. Giovanni told NPR at the time:

"I requested that he be be taken from my class because of his behavior. I don't know what we could have done differently. I've taught students who were clearly psychotic ... You can't kick people out of school because they're different, and you can't kick them out because they would be weird."

Giovanni's correct, but there are obviously limits to the amount of bizarre behavior an instructor needs to tolerate. I've worked at universities and community colleges in Oregon and Florida continuously since 2002. I've worked with thousands of students in that time, and I've encountered many who had emotional or behavioral issues--some pretty severe, in this layman's estimation.

Only three times did I need to involve security in the conversation. I've asked students to leave class for being disrespectful, rude, and saying outright bigoted things to myself and to other students. In my first year at Mt. Hood Community College, I had a student that came to every class with large headphones covering her ears. Unfortunately, the adapter hung loosely at her side (I've been told by some in the mental health field that's a coping mechanism for folks suffering from mental illness), not plugged into any i-pod or radio. I've had to break up a fistfight between two men over their discord on abortion.

I had a student follow one of his classmates home, and that constituted a serious intervention involving not only campus security, but the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office. I mention all of this just to show how common it is in our culture to encounter folks like Jared Loughner. The CDC lists the following on its website:

•Percent of noninstitutionalized adults with serious psychological distress in the past 30 days: 3.2%

I'll be honest with you: it's a challenge sometimes to maintain control when a student presents a persistent behavioral problem. I try to create an open, inviting atmosphere for discussion of current events. We write about such topics as immigration policy, stem cell research, identity theory and sexuality--stuff that is both emotionally charged and topical. I love it, and I prefer using the challenging topics to the canned arguments in the textbook. It's the best way to contextualize the students' present reality, and to give their writing purpose.

But man, sometimes it's a can of worms that is probably better left alone.

After the shootings at Virgina Tech, our college installed two-way communicators between all classrooms and campus security. It's a sad reminder, every day, of the environment we live in. Those communicators offer little hope for me that things will be okay if an imbalanced student comes to class with bad intentions.

So what can be done? I think vigilance is important. I think instructors, administrators, security and students need to understand each other better. Just because someone pays tuition does not mean that I am mandated to work with him or her. That's the reality of the situation--one I've made abundantly clear to a pair of students at the Deerwood Center in the last eighteen months. Each of those students' behavior improved and we finished the course on decent terms. But I did, at one point last summer, forward all student correspondence to security after the level of threatening rhetoric made me uncomfortable.

More than anything, however, the atmosphere in higher education needs to undergo a paradigm shift to focus more closely on hiring mental health experts to work side by side with others in the counseling areas. There's this unspoken belief that, because it's "higher education," students should understand how to "behave." The belief extends to the notion that classrooms are safe and college campuses are largely populated by mature students. This is just simply not true.

By improving upon mental health interventions and treatment, I think you make everyone safer. Perhaps, if Sorenson's instructor had been able to convince Loughner to visit Pima Community College's mental health services, an intervention might have changed things before he brought a gun to a political discussion at a local grocery store. Perhaps, if Loughner's mental state had been accurately assessed, he wouldn't have been able to purchase the gun at Sportsmen's Warehouse in the first place.

As we discuss and debate some of the political ramifications that this horrible event have revealed, let's not lose focus on the role that mental illness continues to take in American culture...

I Love My Ducks!