All is Fair

October teases us with a few cool days. A touch of cold to the air one morning, two, and then it’s gone again.

On a day once again like summer, my mom and I go to the State Fair.

As we walk through the gates and head toward the crowded lanes, I’m taken back to the magic of going to the Fair when I was a child. Instant time travel. A step into a time capsule.

To that one year when we encountered the candle sculptor. When we, my siblings and I, got to see the craft of candle making done before our wide eyes. The sculptor dipping a candle into vat of hot colored wax after vat of colored wax. And then the carving and shaping of the swirls and arches. The finished product. The creation of something tangible as we watched. The skill of an artisan.

Magic.

That year, my mom brought home a candle in shades of brown and orange, with its intricate swirls that we weren’t supposed to touch for risk of ruining the design. We had it for years and years, a decoration, unburned.

I wonder whatever happened to that candle?

Thirty-plus years later, I’m here again, on the same Fair grounds with my mom. But we don’t stumble across a candle maker as we wander through buildings—though I look for one—past booths selling crafts, knickknacks, tchotchkes, toys. Past kiosks selling funnel cakes, deep fried this, deep fried that, and cotton candy. Past the petting zoo and the stockyard. Past the little Ferris wheel.

When I was little, riding the rides wasn’t part of our Fair experience; too many kids, too many free options to choose from. We had plenty else to see and do then. In those days, we came and went from the Fair without feeling shortchanged. For it was an adventure. A stepping into new worlds for brief moments. An outing. A taste of the strange, the wild, the extravagant.

But then a couple of years ago, when my mom and I squeezed in a Fair visit on a busy afternoon, I had gotten a sudden itch to ride the big Ferris wheel—The Texas Star. On that day, without much time to spend, we had gone to investigate the possibility only to find that the line was too long. One marker on the labyrinthian roped lanes read: 3 hour wait from here.

Neither of us had been in the mood or had the time for that on that day. We’d elbowed our way through the crowds and gone to the butterfly building instead.

But on this day, I find that I still have the itch.

We check the line. It’s not terribly bad. So my mom buys us some tickets and with them in hand, we inch our way through the roped off lanes up to the Ferris wheel.   

The tickets buy two rotations. I find out because I ask. I like to know what to expect.

When it’s finally our turn to get in, we sit opposite a woman and her two kids in a pink bucket. As the ride starts and we leave the lowest position and move upward, the bucket swings a little from the hinge that enables us to hang from the metal wheel. I ask the kids if it’s their first time. I  tell them it is mine. The woman says the kids had done the little Ferris wheel earlier in the day. Because of that they can approach this bigger one as Ferris wheel pros.

What innovative and weird things people do, I think as we rise toward the top and I find myself clutching the bucket’s frame—my survivalist brain telling me this isn’t quite safe. After all, it would be a long and likely non-survivable fall. 

From this height (twenty-stories high at 212 feet and 6 inches), the other rides are clearly visible. Crazy swinging, pendulum rides. Wild dropping rides and ones that play off perceived centrifugal force. Rides that spin and twirl from cables or from the ends of long metal arms. Rides much wilder than this one. I point those rides out to my brain and tell it to calm down.  

There’s downtown Dallas off to my left. Down below, the Fair in its entirety with all its moving parts. There, the world beyond.  

My mom asks me if I remember going to an amusement park when we lived in the northeast. I do. We had ridden the rides that time. A day etched in my memory like the Fair day on which I’d seen the candles being made. Or the year when we hosted a friend’s fiancée who was the sales rep for a dishware company whose claim to fame was unbreakable dishes.

That year, we went to the Fair and made sure to visit the tent so that we could watch her demonstration. She dropped the plates, she clapped them together, she whacked them against a table. See! Unbreakable!

Magic.

Other memories click by: me, standing with my head tilted back waiting for the fifty-five foot tall State Fair icon Big Tex to welcome us to the Fair with his famous line, “Howdy, folks, this is Big Tex!”

The bird shows—raptors flying over our heads and then back to the trainer’s outstretched arm.

The shiny sports cars and gleaming new trucks in the automotive buildings.

Sculptures made of butter. 

Cooking demonstrations. Buy this pan! This set of knives! This perfect seasoning!

Blue ribbons hanging next to award winning jellies, quilts, photos, drawings.

A state-of-the-art robot with tread wheels, fingers that could grasp things, glowing eyes, and a voice box. It was almost real. How much we wanted a robot like that for our own.

How far we’ve come with technology since then.

Magic.

After my mom and I step out of the Ferris wheel bucket, we wander without particular aim, letting our interests guide us.

We see the end of a show with a man in a tight-fitting, red-and-white striped shirt juggling bowling balls. We listen to a puppet show dog sing, “All my exes live in Texas.” We pass a mariachi band. We catch the start of the rodeo. We watch a chainsaw artist add the finishing touches to a wooden bear.

As we wander through the lanes that take us past the Midway games with their oversized stuffed animal prizes, my mom tells me of coming to the Fair when she was a child, of riding the rides and playing the Midway games.

Her childhood experience different from mine. Her adult experience later shared with my child one. Our experience shared together here, now.  

Generations of memories.  

When we’ve had our fill of fun and as the Fair starts to get busy with the early evening crowd, we find our way back to the gates where we’d come in.

“Thanks for coming,” the exit staff member says to us as we walk out of the Fair.  

“Thanks for going with me,” I tell my mom as we get back into the car and head for home.

With the Texas Star getting smaller behind us, I think ahead to the future, to next year or the one after, when I can plan rather than act on impulse, when I can bring my niece and nephew along with me. To see what memories they will make and remember thirty-plus or more years afterwards. To see if the magic will transfer over to them too.

 

 

On Optimistic Fiction:

My older sister and I have been sharing stories for as long as I can remember. From telling each other tales before we fell asleep, to swapping Nancy Drew titles from the stacks we’d both brought home from the library and had already finished, to her (wickedly) reading me the last chapter to Treasures of the Snow and me (wickedly) listening to her read it. (Wickedly because it robbed our mom of the chance to share the ending with us.)

Even now, we exchange titles of books we liked and think the other might like.

Some books and some authors I know will appeal to my sister with the surety I know that once I read her mind. The memory is vague, the details lost, but the certainty that I knew exactly what she was thinking, that for a moment I had stepped inside her mind, has stayed with me all these years the way the feeling of a dream sometimes stays with me throughout the day even after the dream itself fades to mist and disappears.

Recently, we’ve both been drawn more and more to stories which show a character healing from trauma, resolving or taking steps to resolve conflict, learning from mistakes, or consciously acting rather than reacting. And in those cases where the character does react, perhaps flying off the proverbial handle, there’s still a sense of self-awareness or adaptability. In the cases where the character makes the wrong choice, of course, there are consequences, but usually there’s also the gift of a realization, a chance for growth, or an opportunity for forgiveness.

In the same way that we, my sister and I, don’t want to be stagnant in our distress, trauma, mistakes, patterns, actions and reactions, we don’t want stagnant characters either.

We both found Becky Chambers around the same time. I’d discovered the Monk and Robot series. My sister had found one of Chambers’ more space-bound Sci-Fi stories perhaps The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.

After we’d swapped those titles and read all the other Chambers books out there to read (not nearly enough of them), I searched for something along the lines of: “If you like Becky Chambers read…”

While on this quest (some of the recommendations being works I’d already read, others not quite achieving the right gentle feel), I discovered that Becky Chambers’ work is considered “Optimistic Sci-Fi.” (There are several articles (linked below) that talk about her writing and the terms used to describe it.) 

Her stories are not set in utopias. The characters aren’t perfect. The characters don’t always get exactly what they want. No one is spared a bit of struggle or, occasionally, heartbreak. But no one is left broken. No one is left irreparably shattered. Her stories often show how division is repaired. How misconceptions are corrected. How assumptions are tested. How biases are turned to something else.

The Wired’s article says, “In a world numbed by cynicisms and divisions, Chambers’ stories are intended to repair—to warm up our insides and restore feeling.”

I haven’t read my sister’s mind since that one, oddly-remembered time (I’m not sure I ever even told her that I’d read her mind, I’d assumed she’d had access to mine at the same moment and that we’d shared that experience and it didn’t need discussion), but I also don’t have to because we can talk. And we have talked many times about how we crave the restoration of feeling, how frustrating it is in fiction (and real life) when a character doesn’t learn or grow. We talk about the power of story.  

There are many, many, many, many wonderful books out there.

And when either of us finds one that shines especially brightly, we share it.

And when we can’t find those gleaming, soul-repairing stories, we mourn a little together.

For we long for restoration.

What I love about Chambers’ books—and books like A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries, Ann Leckie’s books, Piranesi by Suzanna Clarke, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series—is the hope. Is the sweet, overflowing, unrepentant hope that is offered. That something hurting in the character can be salved. Even if sometimes that hope is still wrapped up a little in suffering. Even if not everything gets fixed. It’s the hope that something better can be both imagined and realized. The world doesn’t have to end in a nuclear explosion. But if it does those left don’t have to resort to cannibalism or extreme survivalist violence.

None of these stories are set in utopias. The worlds depicted are often as unyielding and destructive as our own (sometimes that nuclear explosion has already happened). But as the characters move around in their ugly worlds, they themselves do not become ugly. In fact, they often become the glimpse of beauty, the healed and healer, the loved and loving.

The stories hold a message that says, “You might have been hurt, you might have been treated unfairly, you might not have gotten what you want in the way you wanted it, but you are here. You are alive. You are understood.”

It’s the sense of being understood, of being seen, of being heard that touches me most. To be understood and to understand at the same time; to feel that two-sided coin is to receive a gift.  

One day (probably mostly due to a lack of sleep and also to a series of rejections from various areas in my life), I was feeling beaten down, low-of-spirit, and in need of understanding. Now I have many good friends who care about me and will listen, but it can be complicated to truly understand someone or to be understood. Sometimes being misheard is more frustrating than not being heard at all. Sometimes an experience in its entirety (ie., one’s entire life and all the layers therein) needs to be shared to be fully understood. At that low moment what I was dealing with was complex and multi-layered and it would have taken too long to bring someone up to speed. So, because it was also beyond what I consider to be reasonable telephoning hours, I took out my journal and wrote:

Wanting someone who understands

What I’ve done, what I do, not to help me fix anything

but to listen, to hear, to really understand.

So I come to myself

And say, here. I am the one who knows all that.

And if I don’t exactly listen,

At least I write.  

At least I write. There is power in writing. There is power in reading. There is power in story.

What stories do, what writing does is speak to the sheltered and hidden places deep within us. The complex and complicated areas. The places that we fear to let see the light of day whether because of shame, worry of ridicule, time, or something else.

Barnaby Frost by Laurel Lee - Illustrated by Dennis Adler

What story does is provide universal themes for characters—and those who read about them—to walk through, to learn lessons from, to demonstrate how a great loss can be experienced and survived, it speaks to our greater human experience.   

What “optimistic” stories show are the flowers growing up through the cracks in the cement. Enemies being reconciled. Anger being resolved. Trauma being addressed and comforted. Characters being accepted for who and what they are. Character (and reader) being seen and understood.

These stories don’t end happily ever after. Not necessarily. But they also don’t rule out that possibility.

Even in the moments that get me most down, I usually can remember my great fortune and my up close and personal experience with beauty. For I’ve been touched by kindness, was brought up with love, have and have kept wonderful friendships, traveled to interesting places, done exciting things, and utilized the unusual ability/opportunity to pursue the activities, topics, and work that interest me. How very lucky I am.  

On the other hand, my life is also not set in a utopia. I’ve been on the tearful end of heartache, experienced loss (real and imagined), lived with physical pain, been shown my limitations, fallen off both sides of the fence of misunderstandings, plagued others and myself with my personal flaws, kept repeating unhelpful patterns, and had what I worked for, longed for, dreamed of kept just out of reach of my grasping fingers. How unlucky I am.

I’ve had both. Because that is life. That is the experience of living.

Not everything is all bad. Not everything is all good.

But story is powerful. 

For nearly twenty years now, I’ve formally dedicated my focus to the craft of writing. For much of that time (and still), my desire is to have my novels traditionally published. For all of that time –even during a dark, voiceless period when I thought I’d lost touch with creativity, even after my dad died and grief whispered, “What’s the point?”—after rejections, after brush-ups with reality (like needing money to live), after pounding on doors that turned out to be walls, I’ve always come back to a new page, a new book, a new character because not to write is, for me, not to fully live.

Always, I’ve come back to story.

Now certainly, it would be so nice for my dream to come into realness. It would be nice to be paid for the work that I do. It would be most nice to share my writing with more people on a larger scale.

But story goes beyond that. It has to.

After being invited to visit their school, Kurt Vonnegut wrote back to the students at Xavier High School in New York to say that while he wouldn’t be able to visit he could advise them (among other wonderful things) to, “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

Being creative is an integral part of the human experience. No matter what the outcome. At the end of the letter, Vonnegut gave those students an assignment to write a six-line, rhyming poem and to share it with no one. Then to go even further than that by tearing it into pieces and throwing it away. He said, “You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

After I read that, I write a six-line, rhyming poem. And it does something. It makes me smile for a moment. And then I tear it up and throw it away. Did my soul grow? Maybe it did, a little bit.

In general, I write to explore myself and existence. I write to understand others. I write for fun. I write to release feelings. I write for the sheer joy of making things up. I write for many reasons.

And because my publication dreams are still important to me, I also actively query agents for my books and submit my stories to magazines.

I get a lot of rejections.

A lot.

Really a lot.

And when the despair within me cries out, “Why am I not good enough?” or “What am I doing wrong?” or “Just tell me why you said no” another part of me remembers Becky Chambers and her optimistic science fiction. Another part remembers Kurt Vonnegut’s words.  

There might certainly be some fatal flaw in my stories—an inadequate something, a failing to maintain tension, an uncompelling voice, a boring plot, a slow beginning, an inability to fit some cookie-cutter mold, a lack of commerciability, a tendency to ramble on and on and on. My stories might in fact, not be good enough. But even so, I write. And as I do, more and more of my stories lean to hope. They encourage gentleness. They hint at a better future. This is not to say that my (poor) characters don’t get themselves into binds, don’t experience hardship, don’t have tension, conflict, or goals. But “world-ending stakes” aren’t all that matter. Not to me.

Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” I suppose that could be adapted to include an entire genre. For there’s a lack of Optimistic Fiction. The kind of stories my sister and I crave most these days. Sci-fi or otherwise.

So I write.

And the stories I’m writing are because the “If you like Becky Chambers read…” list doesn’t satisfy me. The stories I’m writing are taking shape the way they are so that there will be one more story I can send my sister to read that shows restoration. One more title to share.

Maybe, as far as traditional publishing is concerned, my dream will never be realized because there is something essential, something door-unlockingly vital that I’m missing. But maybe there’s not.

Characters don’t always get what they want. Neither do I.

But maybe that’s beside the point.

Maybe I’m writing the stories my sister needs.

Maybe I’m writing the stories I need.

 

 

  

https://www.vox.com/culture/2020/3/18/21183867/becky-chambers-books-science-fiction-read

https://www.wired.com/story/is-becky-chambers-ultimate-hope-science-fiction/

https://tolstoytherapy.com/books-if-you-like-becky-chambers/

https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/a-conversation-on-radical-acts-with-award-winning-sci-fi-author-becky-chambers/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kurt-vonnegut-xavier-letter_n_4964532