Imbolc                                                              Woodpecker Moon

Starting Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.  Kate read it a couple of weeks ago and liked it.  I picked it up along with a couple of others after reading David Wallace’s last, Pale King.  Trying to catch up on at least some of today’s fiction.  I tend to read fantasy, horror and classics, skipping over literary novels of the current day.  Don’t know why, just always have.

When I began writing, I never had any ambition to write so-called literary fiction.  Not that I don’t admire it.  I do.   I haven’t particularly enjoyed Russo, but I like Richard Ford, David Lodge and Dom Delillo among several others.  I liked the Rabbit novels, too.  Still, that sort of writing doesn’t appeal to me.

When my imagination goes to work, it veers off toward magic, the Celtic faery faith, fantasy in the mold of Tolkien and horror like H.P. Lovecraft.  Again, don’t know why, just does.  My work does have a structural base in myth and legend, ancient religions, so I’m never in the modern American fetish with realism.

The closest I could imagine coming to realism would be magic realism and I’ve not yet written anything like that either, though Jorge Borge is one of my literary idols.

Fiction needs solid, clear prose, an exciting premise, narrative flow.  The fictive dream, as John Gardener calls it, must be coherent and internally consistent, but it does not need to anchor itself in the here and now.  Hardly.