by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 24, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
More and more, I feel the need to go to a free and magical isle, whether in spirit or on foot.
Yeats Country: The Hills Above Glencar, Ireland
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping
slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket
sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
wbyeatsfoundation.org
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 19, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
Revenant: a person who has returned especially, supposedly, from the dead (Oxford Dictionary)
Hugh Glass, does not die, but comes close, when he is brutally mauled by a mother grizzly on a bank of the Grand River in 1823. A fur trapper with the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, his wit and skills and some strong Sioux medicine enable him to survive the fall and winter. Glass is abandoned by two company men, Fitzgerald and Bridger, charged with making sure he’s given a proper burial. The thing is: they don’t just leave him to die, they take the only things that might enable him to live: his rifle, his knife, his flint and steel. But live he does; if only to pursue them and get his stuff back.
Written with plenty of detail and historical authority, Michael Punke leads us through the plains and river valleys east of the Rocky Mountains: the land of the Sioux, Arikara, and Mandan people. The Sioux and the trappers have been allies in a war with the Arikara, and it is an old Sioux medicine man who really saves Glass’s life by killing the maggots that have burrowed inside his festering back wounds.
This is a historical novel that reads like non-fiction. The author, Michael Punke, explains in his Historical Notes that the main events are true to history. I haven’t read an omniscient viewpoint for a long time–agents and editors stress that scenes by narrated by one character in limited omniscient–so I notice when we pass through several minds within a chapter. It’s not distracting; just different. The writing is almost objective–written like a journal article. We never go deep inside this man, who suffers agonizing wounds to body, mind, and spirit. And I ask myself: what is Glass thinking besides how to find his next meal?
Michael Punke is a D.C. lawyer and deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Switzerland. He wrote this novel in his spare time, ten years before it was adapted for film. I read the novel first.
The award-winning film is “based in part on the novel” and a small part it is. The main characters, Hugh Glass (Leonardo Dicaprio), Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), Jim Bridger, and Captain Henry are here, as is the main theme of revenge. But everything else is bolder, much more complex, and visceral. By adding other key characters and subplots, the screenwriters dramatize what falls fairly flat on the page. This is where we begin to understand what Glass is thinking as he rises from the dead to pursue Fitzgerald through spectacularly perilous country.
Besides incredible directing by Alejandro González Iñárritu and brilliant acting, what’s memorable is the cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki. Filmed near the Rocky Mountains in Alberta and Argentina, the film presents what we can only imagine frontier life might have been like in the 1820s. (To view stills and read more on the locations click here.) This is no romance, thought heart-wrenching spiritual moments lead us to the abyss more than once.
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 17, 2017 | Book Review, journal, mythology, writing and publishing
“If we do not raise our arms and will the mists to rise we will stumble forever in the fog.”
I first read The Mists of Avalon, written by Sci-fi Fantasy author Marion Zimmer Bradley, close to thirty years ago. It was a Christmas gift from my sister. No doubt she saw a connection; for this is a book about sisters.
An epic narrated by women, it unravels the story of how the new Christian religion eclipsed magic in Britain. Viviane, Ingraine, and Morgause are the three sisters who birth the kingdom of Arthur. Great granddaughters of Taliesien, the Merlin of Britain, magic is in their genes. Viviane, the eldest, becomes priestess of Avalon and Lady of the Lake; while Ingraine conceives Arthur and then marries her lover, Uther Pendragon, with the magical aid of Merlin.
Ingraine, feeling her heart pounding in her breast, knew it was true, and felt confusion and despair. In spite of the fact that she had seen Uther only four times, and dreamed twice of him, she knew that they had loved each other and spoken to each other as if they had been lovers for many years, knowing all and more than all about each other, body and mind and heart. She recalled her dream, where it seemed that they had been bound for many years by a tie which, if it was not marriage, might as well have been so. Lovers, partners, priest to priestess–whatever it was called. How could she tell Gorlois that she had known Uther only in a dream, but that she had begun to think of him as the man she had loved so long ago that Ingraine herself was not yet born, was a shadow; that the essence within her was one and the same with that woman who had loved that strange man who bore the serpents on his arms in gold…How could she say this to Gorlois, who knew, and wished to know, nothing of the Mysteries? (64).
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 10, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
galwaysalbum.com
The Quays is one of my favourite bars in the whole world. Naturally, it’s in Ireland. If you ever find yourself wandering Shop Street in Galway, you must go in and explore.
Excerpts from
To Charm a Killer. WL Hawkin
inter-bar.com
Stepping through the portal of THE QUAYS was like plunging back through time. The pub was enormous and packed with people, all laughing and talking and drinking. It was nothing like she imagined: three floors joined by carved wooden staircases, gothic arches, and stained glass windows, even thick church pews, and over the enormous bar hung the steering wheel of a wooden sailing ship. Maggie, who had never been farther than Vancouver, stood momentarily stunned.
“They went to France, packed up a Seventeenth century church, and rebuilt it here,” explained Primrose. “Well, go on then. Have a wander.
Later, Maggie has her first real look at her fey friend’s tattoo when they sit down for a bite to eat.
Primrose whisked off her cap as they settled into one of the wooden snugs and Maggie was startled to see that her shaved head was tattooed in colourful swirling symbols. Seeing her fascination, Primrose bowed forward to reveal the heart of the design—an intricately patterned mandala etched on the top of her skull. Three violet trees with intertwining roots formed the centre, while their branches connected in a circular knot. Between the trees were coiled spirals in emerald green. Another circle of knots wrapped around the first and split near the base of her skull into two trails that merged at the top of her spine.
“That’s amazing. Does it go all the way down your back?”
“Aye, and ends in a serpent’s tail. St. Patrick did not rid Éireann of all the snakes. A few of us survived.”
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 4, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
Are you waiting to read Neil Gaiman’s latest book: Norse Mythology? I am.
As Gaiman wrestled with these stories, he says, he had no idea he was writing a topical book. But then, as political events unfolded in the second half of 2016, he could not help but draw parallels. “For me, it was Ragnarök,” he says, referring to the apocalyptic end of the gods. It begins with a long winter, continues with earthquakes and flooding, and then the sky splits apart.
The view that Brexit and the election of President Trump have brought about chaos and even a sense of impending doom is widely held, but Gaiman’s version of it is particularly eloquent. “I remember the 80s and the nuclear clock and the cold war and Russia and America and [thinking] ‘I hope you guys don’t press buttons and it would be very nice to not live in the shadow of everything ending’,” he says. “But at least at that point, what you were scared of was just one action. Now one is scared of the accretion of a million actions and a million inactions.”
He says there is “a strange kind of magical thinking” afoot and tells me about waking up the morning after Brexit in a hotel in Scotland and checking the result, then having “that sort of moment at the end of Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston sees the Statue of Liberty … I was going, ‘Oh, no. Are you really … ’
via Neil Gaiman: ‘I like being British. Even when I’m ashamed, I’m fascinated’ | Books | The Guardian
by Wendy Hawkin | Feb 3, 2017 | journal, writing and publishing
Fridays seem to come faster and faster as the world shivers with a blink and a breath…and sometimes a bang.
Faerie reveals that evil exists, but cannot triumph. Though shadows threaten and shroud, there is a way through…a glimmer of light; an ever-expanding force of truth and goodness, of thoughtfulness and kindness.
Though it may take a fight.
Lettie Hempstock is one of my most favourite characters. In The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman (one of my most favourite books by one of my most favourite authors) Lettie Hempstock fights evil beside a nameless, friendless seven-year-old boy. And we stand beside her.
In the myths of Faerie, there is hope and heroism that transcends worlds and enlightens.
Lettie Hempstock held me tightly. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, and I was going to say something, to ask why I shouldn’t worry, what I had to be afraid of, when the field we were standing in began to glow.
It glowed golden. Every blade of grass and glimmered, every leaf on every tree. Even the hedges were glowing. It was a warm light. It seemed, to my eyes, as if the soil beneath the grass had transmuted from base matter into pure light, and in the golden glow of the meadow the blue-white lightnings that still crackled around Ursula Monkton seemed much less impressive.
Ursula Monkton rose unsteadily, as if the air had just become hot and was carrying her upwards. Then Lettie Hempstock whispered old words into the world and the meadow exploded into a golden light. I saw Ursula Monkton swept up and away, although I felt no wind, but there had to be a wind, for she was flailing and tipping like a dead leaf in a gale. I watched her tumble into the night, and then Ursula Monkton and her lightnings were gone (89).
