On Wonder
Hi, friends.
Hope you are well and warm. It’s been colder here than usual and for whatever reason I’ve felt the time shift this year more than I remember. So it goes. For all the talk of stakes and tension building, sometimes I like a quiet story where very little happens outside of wonder. The world is chaos enough. And it’s a comfort to slip inside a warm little nest of story for a while. And I’ve got a great winter story for us today.
Story.
Grab your mittens and let us hide away inside The Hermit’s Story by Rick Bass.
Craft tidbits.
Have you read Bass before? I teach The Fireman occasionally, when I want to introduce students to modular story - where there is no narrative arc and the pieces could be rearranged and it would have the same overall effect. Alas, it’s only available on JSTOR. But if you have access, you’ll definitely want to check it out.
The Hermit’s Story is a fairy tale of sorts but the magic lies with Mother Nature. The moon, the snow, the frozen lake, the birds. Bass is a master of layering images together until they build to some greater meaning. If the fireman is a meditation on fires and marriage, then this is a meditation on snow and wonder.
It’s Thanksgiving. They are sitting around the table telling stories. The story itself is a frame tale, a story within the story. Nesting stories, if you will.
If Carver is who we think of when we think about sitting around the table sharing stories, Bass is the antithesis of Carver’s spare, dialogue driven stories. The emphasis here is on lush language, on nature rather than man, on metaphor. Save a spot or two, it’s almost entirely rendered in summary dialogue.
The opening page is a full rumination on snow and ice. Whole paragraphs are devoted to capturing the essence of this storm:
An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight, as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption of light but by some chemical reactions within the glossy ice; as if the source of all blueness lies somewhere up here in the north —the core of it beneath one of those frozen fields; as if blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down.
And the color blue:
Blue like a scent trapped in the ice, waiting form some soft release, some thawing, so that it can continue spreading.
The town at the foot of the mountain is usually lightfilled:
Like fallen stars, stars sunken to the bottom of a lake, but still glowing.
Tonight it is
A bowl of silence and darkness in balance for once with the mountains up here, rather than opposing or complementing our darkness, our peace.
Once we’ve read the piece the opening is even more of a marvel. The scent is connected to the dogs. The pockets of swamp gas. The hollow frozen lake itself. We’ll see this image of the stars at the bottom of the lake repeating when Ann and Gray Owl are beneath the frozen lake carrying torches.
The conflict: Ann is outside in a snowstorm showing Gray Owl how to work the pointers she has trained for him, flinging quail into the frozen sky, when they become lost.
Perhaps seen from above their tracks would have seemed aimless and wandering rather than with the purpose, the focus that was burning hot in both their and the dogs’ hearts — perhaps someone viewing the tracks could have discerned the pattern, or perhaps not — but it did not matter, for their tracks — the patterns, direction, and tracing of them — were obscured by the drifting snow, sometimes within minutes after they were laid down.
Though it is a first person story, it doesn’t feel like one. The narrator inserts himself in a few spots. But primarily the way that he influences the story is through the long, meandering sentences, full of dashes and asides, circuitously mimicking getting lost.
The height of tension comes when Gray Owl seemingly falls into the frozen lake. What is Ann to do? She needs the pack that he had with the tent and rations. So she strips down and goes out to the edge of the ice. Brrr. Except, there is not a lake beneath the ice but a warm cozy hollow where she and Gray Owl and the dogs take shelter from the storm.
They snuggled in warmer among the rattly dried yellowing grasses and listened to the tremendous clashings, as if they were safe beneath the sea and were watching waves of starlight sweeping across their hiding place; or as if they were in some place, some position, where they could watch mountains being born.
Bass repeats the same images — the birds above the ice, the snipes below. The stars and light as seen from above and below. So too, the narrator circles back to this God-like view:
What would it have looked like, seen from above — the orange blurrings of their wandering trail beneath the ice; and what would the sheet of lake-ice itself have looked like that night — throbbing with the ice-bound, subterranean blue and orange light of moon and fire? But again, there was no one to view the spectacle: only the travelers themselves, and they had no perspective, no vantage or loft from which to view or judge themselves. They were simply pushing on from one fire to the next, carrying their tiny torches. The beauty in front of them was enough.
We know very little about the narrator, or any of the characters outside of Ann. There is the one line about Roger not knowing how to read…a curious line that at first made me think he was a child. But no. It appears not. And Bass is telling us it doesn’t matter. There is time for that. And grace enough for everyone if
We believe there is still green fire in the hearts of our citizens, beneath this long snowy winter.
Sparks.
Bass supposedly wrote the story after hearing about a frozen lake with no water beneath it. Nature is weird. I saw a video the other day of sheep walking around and around in a circle for days. Consider all the wonder that Mother Nature gives us and build a story around that.
Or. Consider the stories that might come from the Thanksgiving table and begin there.
Revision. Consider the conversations that you have in your manuscript. If they are rendered in direct dialogue, would they carry more weight if filtered through summary? Or if they are summarizied, might they hold more tension and conflict if rendered directly? Should the focus be on who is telling the story or who is hearing the story? What happens it it’s switched?
Other tidbits.
If you want to think more about what the sentence can do, I recommend and teach this essay from time to time: The Sentence is a Lonely Place by Garielle Lutz.
If you are in the querying trenches and are looking for at presses, this twitter thread is full of folks singing the praises of indie presses.
Teachers: Assay has a wealth of information - syllabi, essays, classroom activities for the classroom on their blog.
Have a flash piece in the same vein as The Hermit’s Story? Bureau Dispatch is seeking flash (fiction & CNF) on the theme of Wayfinding until Jan. 31. Florida Review is seeking graphic narratives and comics. (They're also open for fiction, cnf, and poetry.) Got ghosts? Room wants them. Open until Jan. 5.
Ok, scribblers, that’s it from here. The world is full of wonder and mystery. May your travels take you to some magical places. Pencils up~
Marsha