Fiction Non-Fiction

*** 100th Post *** WHY I WRITE: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998) edited by Will Blythe

Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.

cg fewstonWhy I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction by Will Blythe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Why I Write (1998) edited by Will Blythe is a great collection of essays by 26 writers for any writer at any stage of his/her craft and career.

cg fewston

But before we get to the book review I would like to break precedence to let you know why it is I write; this next part is absolutely true.

On the side of a snowy mountain in Santa Fe, New Mexico an eight-year-old boy was abandoned by his elder brother and sister for more daring slopes than the practice lift. The boy cried until the utmost instinct of all life made him realize that he was going to freeze to death if he remained where he was. He sought refuge, warmth, a blanket, a hug. Managing the clunky skis over to a café he stood outside motionless, watching the guests remove their skis and enter. Upon stepping through the doorway the boy saw a large, merry family gathered at a table. Could it be his family had been there the whole time to welcome him to safety and laughter?

Absolutely not.

Then the boy realized the second cold fact of his sad, little life. He had no money. Sure, his parents had cash. But in his pockets remained nothing. Not even precious lint. And then he saw it. A remarkable sight to see at such a young age:

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a couple sat over hot coffee by an icy window, filled with shadows passing along in silence. The blond-haired man, probably in his mid-thirties, wore a brown cardigan and leaned on the table with his elbows as he stared at his companion, a brunette in a gray sweater that fed up and around her neck like arms of a small child fretting release. She was not looking at him but at her hands.

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The couple did not speak but shared something, a knowledge of the most important kind. And between them the steam of the coffee rose into absence. Then the boy knew what he wanted. More than warmth, more than food, more than money, more than safety, more than life, more than anything he wanted to tell their story to the world, and he wanted to do it as a writer.

I found my mother after I left that beautiful place in the café. A figure slid over the world with arms wide and caught me where I had returned to the last place I knew where to look. My tears had been frozen for an hour.

Since that day as a small boy, writing has often been a secret locking me in a prison.

cg fewston

“In the end,” writes James Salter, “writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe” (Blythe 40). And as an unpublished, unread, unknown writer I can look once more and know I am not alone.

cg fewston

Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction, edited by Will Blythe, is a wonderful collection of writers who bare their souls to express their great love for writing, and who share a kindred spirit. But the real question is: why do writers torture themselves with solitude, silence, silentium? And I was surprised to find that many writers in this vocation expressed what I have lived secretly with for the past two decades: that writing is a world, a pleasure, and a gift that has a purpose.

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Writing is a world unto itself and demands attention. Pat Conroy writes in “Stories”: “I long for that special moment when I take off into the pure, oxygen-rich sky of a sentence that streaks off into a night where I cannot follow, where I lose control, when the language seizes me and shakes me in such a way that I feel like both its victim and its copilot” (Blythe 50).

Often I have spent hours in a trance lost to my words only to awake to find another world before me on the page. It was as though I allowed myself to become a doorway, a vehicle, much like Conroy, into another realm and once there the world had something important to say.

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Writing is a pleasure. In “Writing and a Life Lived Well: Notes on Allan Gurganus” Ann Patchett writes, “But there can also be great beauty. If that’s the way you want to play the cards, all of the struggle and loneliness of the job can be made into joy. We chose this, after all, we write because we wanted to do it more than anything else, and even when we hate it, there is nothing better” (Blythe 68).

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Lee Smith adds to this discussion in “Everything Else Falls Away”: “For me, writing is a physical joy. It is almost sexual—not the moment of fulfillment, but the moment when you open the door to the room where your lover is waiting, and everything else falls away” (Blythe 134).

To much shock of listeners in writing workshops, I, like Smith, often refer to writing as a lover, and the experience one has with a lover, because I know not a deeper sense to express such a truly special joy, a pleasure that in the end desires commitment and sacrifice. Writers know of this great beauty, even as far back as John Keats and John the Baptist, and the world will continue to listen to such forms of grace, because writing is an art and a gift for all of mankind and should be done responsibly.

cg fewston

Writing is a gift with a purpose. Jim Harrison in “Why I Write, or Not” explains:

”You continue under the willful illusion that the world is undescribed, or else you need not exist, and you never quite tire of the bittersweet mayhem of human behavior…

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”Except, of course, for the fatigue brought on by our collective behavior, both political and economic, the moral hysteria we are currently sunken in. Last May without an inkling I found myself saying in a French interview that we are becoming a Fascist Disneyland. This is seeping into our fiction and poetry in the form of a new Victorianism wherein a mawkish sincerity is the highest value…

”In any culture, art and literature seem terribly fragile, but we should remember that they always outlive the culture” (Blythe 148,154).

cg fewston

In No Reverence, a novel I am currently working on about Iran in the 1970s under the Shah, “mawkish sincerity” is a form that I have tried, without success, to incorporate into my writing because it fits well with these modern times, especially in an America, riddled by political correctness and a poor economy, heading to its own possible demise, much like the glorious land of Iran before 1979, the year of my birth.

Nevertheless, the “mayhem of human behavior” is what must be responded to, just like Ernest Hemingway writing For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) against Fascism and exposing the truth behind the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell would also respond to Fascism in his classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), inspired partly “by the meeting of the Allied leaders at the Tehran Conference of 1944” where he believed “Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt consciously plotted to divide the world” (McCrum Web).

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In his own essay titled “Why I Write” Orwell confessed:

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality. Good prose is a windowpane (Web).

Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.

cg fewston

Why do writers write when they are faced with the insurmountable unlikelihood that they will ever be published, let alone noticed, especially if they, in this age, do not have enough Twitter or Facebook followers?

My answer: because if these writers could not write they would literally die, because writing to them is the love that feeds their oxygen, because it sustains their aesthetic hearts during a death struggle with words, because in the moment of sharing a gift in great expectation that, one glorious day, the world would be inspired to peace and perfection is a reason worth writing for.

But the life of a writer can be a splendid thing. Ann Patchett wrote of how her friend, Lynn Roth, visited her and Allan Gurganus. Upon the leaving, Lynn told Allan how “he had the most remarkable quality of life she had ever seen” and he replied, “I never for a moment imagined that it would be any other way” (Blythe 68).

Nor have I.

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Bibliography:

Blythe, Will, ed. Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction. New York: Back Bay Books, 1999. Print.

McCrum, Robert. “The Masterpiece that Killed George Orwell.” The Observer, The Guardian.co.uk, 10 May 2009. Web. 24 July 2012.

Orwell, George. “Why I Write” (1946). Orwell.ru. 21 May 1997, mod. 24 July 2004. Web. 24 July 2012.

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cg fewston

CG FEWSTON

cg fewston

The American novelist CG FEWSTON has been a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (Italy), a Visiting Fellow at Hong Kong’s CityU, & he’s a been member of the Hemingway Society, Americans for the Arts, PEN America, Club Med, & the Royal Society of Literature. He’s also a been Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) based in London. He’s the author of several short stories and novels. His works include A Fathers Son (2005), The New America: A Collection (2007), The Mystics Smile ~ A Play in 3 Acts (2007), Vanity of Vanities (2011), A Time to Love in Tehran (2015), Little Hometown, America (2020); A Time to Forget in East Berlin (2022), and Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being (2023).

cg fewston

He has a B.A. in English, an M.Ed. in Higher Education Leadership (honors), an M.A. in Literature (honors), and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing & Fiction. He was born in Texas in 1979.

cg fewston
cg fewston

Conquergood & the Center of the Intelligible Mystery of Being is a captivating new dystopian science fiction novel by CG Fewston, an author already making a name for himself with his thought-provoking work. Set in the year 2183, Conquergood is set in a world where one company, Korporation, reigns supreme and has obtained world peace, through oppression... The world-building in the novel is remarkable. Fewston has created a believable and authentic post-apocalyptic society with technological wonders and thought-provoking societal issues. The relevance of the themes to the state of the world today adds an extra wrinkle and makes the story even more compelling.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

“A spellbinding tale of love and espionage set under the looming shadow of the Berlin Wall in 1975… A mesmerising read full of charged eroticism.”

Ian Skewis, Associate Editor for Bloodhound Books, & author of best-selling novel A Murder of Crows (2017)  

“An engrossing story of clandestine espionage… a testament to the lifestyle encountered in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War.”

“There is no better way for readers interested in Germany’s history and the dilemma and cultures of the two Berlins to absorb this information than in a novel such as this, which captures the microcosm of two individuals’ love, relationship, and options and expands them against the blossoming dilemmas of a nation divided.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

A Time to Forget in East Berlin is a dream-like interlude of love and passion in the paranoid and violent life of a Cold War spy. The meticulous research is evident on every page, and Fewston’s elegant prose, reminiscent of novels from a bygone era, enhances the sensation that this is a book firmly rooted in another time.”

~ Matthew Harffy, prolific writer & best-selling historical fiction author of the “Bernicia Chronicles” series

“Vivid, nuanced, and poetic…” “Fewston avoids familiar plot elements of espionage fiction, and he is excellent when it comes to emotional precision and form while crafting his varied cast of characters.” “There’s a lot to absorb in this book of hefty psychological and philosophical observations and insights, but the reader who stays committed will be greatly rewarded.”

cg fewston

GOLD Winner in the 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Awards for Contemporary Realistic Fiction

FINALIST in the SOUTHWEST REGIONAL FICTION category of the 14th Annual National Indie Excellence 2020 Awards (NIEA)

“Readers of The Catcher in the Rye and similar stories will relish the astute, critical inspection of life that makes Little Hometown, America a compelling snapshot of contemporary American life and culture.”

“Fewston employs a literary device called a ‘frame narrative’ which may be less familiar to some, but allows for a picture-in-picture result (to use a photographic term). Snapshots of stories appear as parts of other stories, with the introductory story serving as a backdrop for a series of shorter stories that lead readers into each, dovetailing and connecting in intricate ways.”

~ D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review

“The American novelist CG FEWSTON tells a satisfying tale, bolstered by psychology and far-ranging philosophy, calling upon Joseph Campbell, J. D. Salinger, the King James Bible, and Othello.”

“In this way, the author lends intellectual heft to a family story, exploring the ‘purity’ of art, the ‘corrupting’ influences of publishing, the solitary artist, and the messy interconnectedness of human relationships.”

“Fewston’s lyrical, nostalgia-steeped story is told from the perspective of a 40-year-old man gazing back on events from his 1980s Texas childhood…. the narrator movingly conveys and interprets the greater meanings behind childhood memories.”

“The novel’s focus on formative childhood moments is familiar… the narrator’s lived experiences come across as wholly personal, deeply felt, and visceral.”

cg fewston
cg fewston

American Novelist CG FEWSTON

 

cg fewston

This is my good friend, Nicolasa (Nico) Murillo, CRC, who is a professional chef & a wellness mentor. I’ve known her since childhood & I’m honored to share her story with you. In life, we all have ups & downs, some far more extreme than others. Much like in Canada, in America, the legalization of marijuana has become a national movement, which includes safe & legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use & research for all.

“This is a wellness movement,” Nico explains. The wellness movement is focused on three specific areas: information, encouragement, & accountability.

In these stressful & unprecedented times, it makes good sense to promote & encourage the state or condition of being in good physical & mental health.

To learn more you can visit: Americans For Safe Access & Texans for Safe Access, ASA (if you are in Texas).

The mission of Americans for Safe Access (ASA) is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research.

Link: https://www.safeaccessnow.org/

TEXANS FOR SAFE ACCESS ~ share the mission of their national organization, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), which is to ensure safe and legal access to cannabis (marijuana) for therapeutic use and research, for all Texans.

Link: https://txsafeaccess.org/about-1

Stay safe & stay happy. God bless.

 

Nico Murillo Bio ~ Americans & Texans for Safe Access ~ Medical Cannabis

 

 

cg fewston

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