Ways of Seeing

As a high school English teacher, I’m aware that the students I’m teaching live in a primarily visual culture.  The texts that I’m asking them to read—whether it’s Richard III or 1984—are in competition with the visual stimuli that glows on their computer screens or smartphones or high-def TV sets.   They are bombarded with visuals and visual language every day—and because seeing comes before understanding, these images are incredibly powerful in shaping the way my students (or frankly, many adults) view the world.  If perception helps mold that amorphous thing we call reality, then visuals and all the editing and crafting and contextualizing that goes into making them is altering and at times unhinging reality.

Reading, of course, is in part an act of creation where the participant must visualize and internalize the text in hand; viewing images—whether in a YouTube video or a movie or a TV show—can also be an act of creation and interpretation—but very few students understand how to read visual media.  They are easily persuaded to believe what they see because they don’t understand it as an art form—that it is, in part, artifice.  In terms of news media, it’s clear to see how this is dangerous.  The degree to which the news alters the truth and changes our sense of reality is upsetting—but in some ways, that’s old news. Many teachers are already arming their students with the tools to question what they see and hear in journalistic media.  But there’s more to it than that …

Fictional visual narratives—from “Realty TV” shows to AMC’s serious dramas like Madmen or Breaking Bad—also have a powerful ability to shape our sense of reality.  For instance, I wonder how many of you who are Madmen fans are convinced that the 1960s were just as the show’s creators have portrayed them.  The show’s images and characters are so powerful (and so well crafted) that, to a certain extent, I find myself visualizing that decade based on the show’s terms, which if I didn’t question what I saw, could be problematic.

When we read a novel set in the 1960s, we’ve been trained to see as emerging from a particular perspective—the writer’s.  However, when we watch a TV show, although we should realize that we are getting a specific point-of-view, we don’t think of it that way because we haven’t been trained to think of it that way.  As a culture—and I see this in my students all the time—we give the visual narrative greater authority than the written narrative.  It seems to us to be more authentic, more believable, more real.  And this really concerns me.

As an English teacher, my ultimate goal in terms of the content of my courses is to help my students understand the craftsmanship behind of what they read.  For some time now, to varying degrees of success, I’ve been doing this.  It helps the kids to become better readers and better writers.  However, now, I’m also feeling the need to teach them how to interpret the craft behind the visual narratives they are confronted with every day.  I want them to understand and appreciate a well built film or TV show or photo story, but I also want them to realize these art forms should not have greater authority than the written word—and that if we give them that authority, we can warp our sense of what it real and what isn’t.

Rebecca Makkai was a fellow classmate of mine from Bread Loaf School of English.  Her novel, The Borrower, came out this summer.  It’s about a young children’s librarian who kidnaps a precocious 10-year-old runaway to protect him from an overbearing mother and the anti-gay classes he’s enrolled in.  Kirkus Reviews writes, “Makkai takes several risks in her sharp, often witty text, replete with echoes of children’s classics from Goodnight Moon to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as more ominous references to Lolita . . . the moving final chapters affirm the power of books to change people’s lives even as they acknowledge the unbreakable bonds of home and family. Smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.”  I really think teachers would LOVE this one.

My good friend Amy Stolls, who is the literature program officer at the National Endowment for the Arts and has visited my classes at Flint Hill, has a new novel out called The Ninth Wife.  It‘s about a woman who, on the verge of giving up on marriage, meets a man and falls in love only to discover that he’s been married eight times before.  She goes on a quest to meet all of his eight ex-wives, so that she can decide whether or not she can make the leap of faith to be his ninth.  Carolyn Parkhurst, bestselling author of The Dogs of Babel, writes, “The Ninth Wife is a vibrant, nuanced novel about marriage, identity and the moment when we realize that the shimmer of fantasy pales next to the tumultuous reality of ordinary, everyday happiness.”  This makes for a great summer read—and the summer’s not over yet!

Matt Norman—a good friend and fellow MFA-er—has just published his first novel, Domestic Violets.  I read his very funny novel as a manuscript, so it’s particularly satisfying to see it in its sharp, published form.  Booklist writes,  “Reminiscent of Richard Russo’s earlier work, Norman’s refreshingly witty style is perfectly suited to articulating the trials of a middle-aged cynic. Wonderfully fast-paced, hilariously genuine, difficult to put down, Domestic Violets is an ideal first novel.”  His novel reflects the need for cynical humor in navigating today’s troubled workplace without every being too cynical itself.

My new friend, Allison Moon, who I met while at the Lambda Literary Retreat, is self-publishing her first novel called Lunatic Fringe, which is a lesbian twist on the classic werewolf story.  Take that, Twilight!  She’s making creative, out-of-the-box choices in her writing and in the way that she’s publishing and promoting her work.  I’m really excited to follow her and her career.  I can’t wait to get my copy of the novel!

Close friends from my MFA days, Art Taylor and Tara Laskowski (also husband and wife), continue to publish superb short fiction.  Art also reviews crime novels for The Washington Post and is the marketing director for George Mason’s Fall for the Book.  Tara is the senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly.  Recently Art’s crime novella “Rearview Mirror,” won the 2011 Derringer Award for Best Novelette from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and Tara published her story “The Etiquette of Dementia” in the most recent Mid-American Review (Fall 2010).

It’s a great feeling to see my friends getting published and getting recognition.  I hope some of you, out there, will join me in enjoying their work!

Left to Right: Andy Peters (Queer Y/A Fastasy Writer), Robin Talley (Queer Y/A Writer), Katherine Forrest (Retreat Faculty, Mystery Writer), Yours Truly

Here, in DC, I have many lovely and supportive writer-friends, and many wonderful and encouraging gay and lesbian friends, but I know—really know—no gay or lesbian friends who write seriously.  Last week, I spent seven days at the Lambda Writers’ Retreat at UCLA getting to know many amazing LGBT writers and learning even more about craft in my workshop on genre fiction led by Katherine V. Forrest, a pioneer lesbian mystery writer and editor.

I’ve been in and out of a lot of fiction workshops and literary communities, and frankly, before I arrived at LA, I was worried that this experience would be no different.  By this point—after cycling through both undergraduate and graduate writing workshops, which for the most part confused and befuddled me—I’d written off that sort of experience.  I craved direct instruction on craft, something I’d never had in a fiction workshop.  I’ve been critiqued out of my mind by my peers, but never explicitly lectured to about the do’s and don’t's of craft.  For the most part, I’ve had to figure out craft on my own.  Thank God for Katherine! For the first part of the workshop, she offered concrete guidelines on writing genre fiction.  Then, when we began critiquing novel excerpts, I had the most supportive and honest workshop I’ve ever experienced.  It was downright therapeutic for me.

What amazed me the most about the Retreat, however, was that so many people with so many different backgrounds, inclinations, and identifiers could come together and support one another without the uneasy undercurrent of competition.   I know this sounds a bit sentimental—believe me WASPy stoicism runs deep in my blood—but what I witnessed was a community of people whose first impulse was to love and accept one another, not be suspicious of one another.  Perhaps, it’s just that I’ve lived in DC too long, but that experience was really unique for me.  It has a lot to do with the strength of the LGBT community and with the way Lambda Literary is getting things right.

Writers and artists of all types need to support one another like this more often—but as it becomes increasing competitive to publish, this sort of experience, I imagine, will become even rarer.   My hope is that, in the future, MFA programs and the like will begin seeing that part of their responsibility to their students is to help them form a strong sense of community.

Ultimately writing is a solitary experience, but being a writer doesn’t have to be.

The cork board view in Scrivener

Most of us do not think in a linear fashion and most creative acts don’t emerge from a tidy, cause-and-effect process.  Essentially, creativity springs from an emotional place; ideas break the surface of our subconscious like slippery fish that we have to catch and hold on to before they dive deep again.

It seems odd then for writers to use word processing tools, such as Word, that don’t support the way our minds work.  Word is a very product-oriented program, and by that I mean, since it allows for sophisticated formatting and style options, it can make the final product look sharp; however, what it offers tends to support only the goal in writing, not the process.

I wrote my first novel in Appleworks (yikes!) and my second, Dodging and Burning, in Word.  Since Dodging has a two alternating first person points-of-view as well as several “found texts” woven into its structure, it was a complex book to write, edit, and format.  Also, since I write mysteries and mysteries are always two stories—the story of the investigation (present) and the story of the crime (past)—balancing plot and character development is a challenge.  Don’t get me wrong, I love complex narratives and yearn for them as a reader, but the combination of two voices in addition to past and present narratives nearly brought me to tears at times.  I had to check and double-check notes, and if I made one alteration, it often set off a chain reaction of other corrections that had to be addressed.  The result is layered and engrossing, but the journey to that point took some sweat.

My point is that Word didn’t make editing my novel any easier.  Initially, I wrote each chapter in a separate document, but it was frustrating maneuvering between chapters.  So, I decided to clump it all into one document, which was a little better, but still I struggled to get a global perspective on my novel.  Encountering it only page by page hindered my ability to zoom out and see the larger framework of the narrative.  I could pick away at my sentences and paragraphs all I liked, but I couldn’t get a hold on the shape or pacing of my entire project.  (Writers can become sentence or detail obsessed and neglect the plot of their narrative.  There’s so much contemporary fiction, but so few good stories.  And Word only promotes this problem.)  Anyway, I found myself printing my novel again and again, and spreading it across the floor and rearranging it in different stacks.  I really wanted a program that would allow me to do that sorting and rearranging virtually.  After doing some research with the help of my computer savvy partner Jeff, I found a program called Scrivener.

In Scrivener, your entire project is contained within a single document.  In this document, you can break down your book into scenes, chapters, and parts—and easily rearrange them.  Also, Scrivener has provided character chart and setting templates to help you with pre-writing.  In fact, it provides different types of project templates including screenplays and essays.  It also has a “cork board” view that allows you to label all your components and visualize them in a more accessible fashion, much in the way that I was attempting to visualize them when I spread my pages across the floor.  When you are ready, you can compile your work and export it into Word or a Word-compatible RTF document, or into an eBook format.  I’m still working on compiling Dodging and Burning—which I had to import into Scrivener and break into its components—into a format that suits me, but with my next novel, which I’ve already started writing in Scrivener, I anticipate the formatting to be less of an ordeal.

As I’m learning more about the program, I keep wondering if my students—particularly my Creative Writing students—might benefit from it.  For that matter, my other English students also might find it helpful (or even freeing) to use it to write their essays.  It’s a program that allows and, by implication, encourages process writing—something all of my students need to do with greater regularity—and it allows for both process and product to occur within the same document, keeping workflow seamless and visually organized.

What I like most about Scrivener, however, is that it feels designed to serve the creative mind.  I don’t have to fight my word processor to find my characters or structure my plot—that, to me, is such a relief.

At the door, you are given a playing card and asked to wait in a speakeasy-inspired lounge.  After a drink or two, your card is called.  You are instructed to wear a Venetian-style carnival mask (à la Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut), to not touch the actors, and to remain silent for the duration of the experience.  An elevator transports you to the floors of the McKittrick Hotel, and once you step out of it, what part of the show you experience is entirely up to you.  You may wander from room to room, exploring the décor, searching for clues, and soaking in the brooding atmosphere.  Eventually, you’ll stumble across a scene being silently (but muscularly) acted out, at times overtly erotic and violent, at times quiet and sad, always fascinating.  When the scene ends, you may choose to follow one of the other characters to another narrative moment.  Several times, the actors draw you into a group scene, and again offer you many choices to make and directions to go.

Eventually I stumbled on a scene that approximated Act II, scene ii of Macbeth and could easily identify Lady Macbeth as a character.  Finding my footing in a narrative arch that I knew, I decided to follow her to see how Punchdrunk interpreted her story.  Eventually, she began to repeat her actions—as if she were on a video loop.  To see the scene reset was a singularly haunting experience; this repetition along with the silent actors, the deary nostalgia of the McKittrick hotel, and the swelling Bernard Herrmann score, all suggested to me that what we were seeing wasn’t something that was really happening before us, but a memory, a pantomime of the past, ghosts endlessly retracing their steps in limbo.

To further this effect, the fragmented experience of wandering in and out of scenes that you vaguely recognize but struggle to place is dreamlike.  When I exited and removed my mask, the irony of the show’s title occurred me, because for the past two and a half hours, I felt as though I’d been sleeping, having a remarkably complex dream—the sort that teases you with signs and symbols but rarely yields an absolute truth.  I also felt that I’d seen something completely fresh—and something that implicated the audience in a new way.  But, as much skin and blood as you see in some of those scenes, the experience didn’t strike me as voyeuristic.

Voyeurism is about the viewer’s control over or objectification of the viewed (“the object of the gaze”).  In this case, the audience is doing the looking safely behind our masks, but from what I could tell, it’s the creators of Sleep No More who are masterfully manipulating the viewers, not the other way around.  Ultimately, it’s a sort of seduction—all good art is a seduction of some sort—not voyeurism.  When you enter the McKittrick, you are on their terms, and you buy into it—or at least I did—and in return, they offer an experience that sparks the dark corners of your imagination.  It produced a great sense of mystery in me, not the guilt of seeing something lurid and forbidden which I had anticipated.  Of all the twists and turns I experienced that night, that was the most surprising.

If anyone reading this entry has seen the show, I’d love you to post your impressions as well.  I intend on returning to the show if I get the chance.

The reason why I intimated that I wanted an XBOX (I was too ashamed to openly ask—Thank you, Jeff, for knowing me so well!) was because of a game called L.A. Noire.  For the past two years, I’ve taught a senior seminar about crime fiction and film adaptations of crime fiction.  In the class, we focus on hard-boiled crime novels and film noir, and their social, historical, and aesthetic implications.  Obviously, the crime story, whether in film or in print, is a particular type of narrative that I find compelling.  A reviewer at VG Lounge describes the game: “Every single nuance that you can imagine from human conversation is faithfully recaptured in various scenes throughout L.A. Noire, which give interactions in the game an almost hyper-realistic quality. The technology is just icing on a well-layered cake though because the story in L.A. Noire is packed with twists, turns, and a lot of “oh $#*t” moments.”  The meticulous style and realism of the game as well as its focus on storytelling caught my attention.

All of this leads me to a bigger question about the future of how narratives are conveyed.  Although I believe that we will always need stories rich in character and complexity, stories that challenge us and our beliefs, stories that attempt to tell the truth about our lives, I’m less certain about the forms those stories will take.  Film and television took on storytelling in the 20th century, but both have their limitations.  Deeper, more resonant character building is difficult to achieve in one-hour or two-hour time frames, although serialized cable television shows, such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad (Thank you, AMC!), are offering us more novelistic character arcs.

So, I’m curious:  Do video games have the potential to provide us with rich storytelling experiences?  I’m not sure, but there are some exciting possibilities, especially in exploring how readers (or players, in this case) complete a narrative experience.  At this point, most video games seem like purely escapist, button-pushing experiences, but it seems that narrative is becoming a more important element in some of them.  EW reviewer Darren Franich writes: “At first, L.A. Noire seems to largely capture the tone of [hard-boiled novels and films] without quite grasping their deeper meaning … The streets of Noire‘s ’40s Los Angeles look great, the dialogue has a pleasantly no-bull cynicism, and the gameplay has a nice diversity …  But great noir is about more than just tough guys and boozy broads, and after a few hours of playing the game, I sort of felt like it was the videogame translation of Sin City: All the affections of noir with none of the soul.”

As I start exploring this game, I may find it more a pleasant and, at this time of year, much needed distraction than anything especially new, but I’m intrigued by its potential:  What happens when the reader begins to interact with the characters?  What happens when the narrative window becomes a door that we can step through?  What happens when we can choose our way through a narrative—what if we’re placed in the position of making difficult emotional decisions, however virtual they may be?  Who knows, but I wonder …

I encourage my students to contrast Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies to highlight the tension between reason and emotion, between the need to construct a civilization with a agreed-upon set of values and the raw force of our individual perspectives.  I do this, not because I think its a problem that this tension exists, but because we as a society don’t really understand it.  We are increasing becoming a culture in which feelings become facts, and attitudes become truths—and that IS problematic.

In a Mother Jones article, “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science,” Chris Mooney argues that reason is always going to be tainted by emotion, that the first interpretation of facts is often, if not always, self-interested.  We want the facts to conform to our sense of reality, and therefore, we rationalize more than we reason.  The Romantics were right—our emotions are a powerful force of Nature and can never be completely tamed.  Ultimately, we are not masters of ourselves.

However, more so than ever, we can’t allow our emotions and our beliefs go unchecked.  Our troubled political environment is a great example of this.  In Mooney’s article (which I do highly recommend), he points out the losing battle of emotions over facts: “Because researchers employ so much nuance and disclose so much uncertainty, scientific evidence is highly susceptible to selective reading.  Giving ideologues or partisans scientific data that’s relevant to their beliefs is like unleashing them in the motivated-reasoning equivalent of a candy store.”

Different factions select and arrange facts to support their perspectives, and the news media continues to encourage this behavior to boost their ratings.  News has become entertainment because partisan conflict sells ad space.  Period.  Although, of course, news media has always been partisan to a degree, it has never before been so omnipresent in our daily lives, and never before encouraged and funded so many talking heads, who are less interested in truth and more interested in establishing a contentious position that makes for a “good fight” on a nightly talk show.

I do what I can to combat this.  I emphasize to my students the power of emotion and the fragility of facts.  I encourage them to write essays which are more an act of exploration than a exercise in writing to a predetermined conclusion.  However, many of them are uncomfortable with writing as journey, because we live in a world where we value conviction more than we value truth.  Our culture—particularly the news media—is constantly reenforcing the notion that you should pick a belief and defend it no matter what.  We are being told that conviction and resolve are what make us Americans, anything less would be unpatriotic.  This is a simpler way to live our lives, but it’s also potentially dishonest.

An open search for truth isn’t easy because we are always having to guard against self-interested emotions and be willing to shift our perspectives, to allow ambiguity in, to be uncertain.  I want my students to become comfortable with that struggle, respecting the power of their own emotions and taking into consideration ALL of the facts when forming an opinion.  But this takes a great deal of practice and a willingness to create and destroy and create again without losing sight of their purpose—honest expression.

Kierkegaard

As an English teacher, my first and most immediate response is: “No.”  Now, that may sound surprising (and I’m sure it sounds cynical), but I believe that change is entirely up to the individual.  Experience—those potent and indelible moments in our lives—are much more likely to change us than a great book.  Of course, even then, we don’t have to change because of what happens to us.

But books CAN change us if we permit them to.  However, it’s difficult to be truly open to change; we crave certainty too much.  Many times we read not to be challenged or to explore a new perspective, but to confirm what we already believe to be true.  Often when my students read a text, they want it to resonate with their particular outlook on life.  They want a book to comfort them, to shore up their egos.  I understand and sympathize—I’ve often wanted the same thing.

But if you find a book comforting, then it’s not changing you.

Is finding a book comforting bad?  Well, no—but it’s also not good.  It’s about affirming the status quo.  It’s a neutral event.  If we were only to read these sorts of books—and they are the most popular books, those which first call out to us from the front tables of chain book stores—then reading is nothing more than a pleasurable distraction.  And although I have nothing against escaping reality from time to time (in fact, we all should!), when it comes to choosing a book to study and, even more so, to teach, I want something which will challenge me, because it is only such a text that has the potential to change us, should we be open to it.

In an educational setting, we should always be choosing challenging texts.  My best teaching experiences have happened when the text I’ve selected strikes my students as unfamiliar at first: “But, Mr. Copenhaver, I have no idea what he’s saying … I’m sooo confused.”  Then, I’m able to help them through it, to lift the veil a little and reveal that it does have something to do with them.  I truly believe that working through a difficult text, wrestling with complex sentence structure or complicated symbols or even thematically abstract subject matter, if you’re open to it, can refine your heart and your mind.

Of course, many individuals reject challenging texts and scoff at them, labeling them elitist or unnecessary.  Although there are books which deliberately obfuscate to seem intellectual or mystical, there are many which are difficult because the ideas they are addressing require them to be.  More often than not, what we have come to think of as the classics—from Wordsworth’s poems to Virginia Woolf’s prose—yield true and mysterious fruit, if you’re willing to take the time with them.  (There are also great contemporary texts, such as Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which if mined, can offer similar truths.)

When I was in college, I took a course titled “Sin and Redemption in Christian Thought” and my professor made us outline everything we read.  Yes, everything.  We finished the course with Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, a complex philosophical text, which seriously baffled me at first, but with my professor’s guidance and my endless outlining, I found my way through it.  In the Preface, Kierkgaard even addresses the difficulty of his own exposition, explaining that its rigor is necessary to truly edify the reader.  After that experience, I understand why.  I’ve carried what I learned from The Sickness Unto Death through my life; it has altered me.

A text which challenges, it seems to me, is more likely to work its DNA into ours as we struggle with it, our ideas coupling with new ideas and evolving our sense of self.  As a teacher, I will continue to bring these sorts of books into my classroom, because I want to offer the opportunity for my students to change.

Using the Hipstamatic camera app on my iPhone, I took this close-up of one of the ads on the flyer.

My partner Jeff and I have been redecorating my office in anticipation of the arrival of new furniture which I purchased recently (See “Creating Space to Write”.).  On Saturday, we ripped up old wall-to-wall carpeting that had been installed over 10 years ago by the previous owners of the townhouse.  As we pulled the carpet pad back, we noticed a loose board in the pine flooring.  Curious, we lifted it up.  Inside we found a treasure trove.

The townhouse was constructed in 1901, and for quite a few years, it served as a boarding house.  It still feels compartmentalized, each room its own little bubble of life, like a dormitory.  So, it’s not surprising that one of the boarders who lived here would leave behind traces of his or her existence.  Under the floorboard and coated with fine dust, we found a letter penned by a woman named Catherine; a hand-drawing of Harold Lloyd, a famous silent film comedian; three empty Chesterfield cigarette packets; two Hershey bar wrappers; and an ad for women’s cosmetics, all dating back to the 1920′s or early 1930′s.

This is the sort of thing I live for.  The past has always held a fascination for me, particularly the first part of the 20th century, when life was rapidly, breathlessly becoming modern, the American infatuation with progress crashing into older, more conservative sensibilities.  I even set my first novel during the 1920s, and my second during the 1940s.  Finding fragments from a life lived during the 1920′s and 30′s—especially fragments which seem so unconscious (not orchestrated for posterity)—is food for my imagination.  So, I took the time to transcribe Catherine’s letter.  Here’s what I could piece together:

Dear Pal,

Please don’t think I have forgotten you I only wish you thought of me as much as I do of you.  But you know everything is with … it is quite unfors … me … to see you … then I do … wish you could … how badly I want … you I have a lot … you.  If you can a … to come to see me real soon let me know and I will be at home any day you say.  The weather have has been very hot and sulky here we haven’t … any rain for nearly three … so you know how hot … I went to the movies and saw dancing sweeties.  I mean it was a really hot picture.  I just wish you could see me now.  It is 3:00 AM and I still have my night gown … I haven’t even combed my hair … writing this letter with …  me and I got ink all … night gown and leg.  Some … [a]sk?)  We were Chapel … s Sunday. W… the water … stagesant [stagnant?] do to hot weather … [wou]ldn’t allow you to take any showers on account of the shortage of water  For there hadn’t been any rain for a long while.  Gee it surly is lonesome here all day with nothing to do … time I realy hate my self … answer soon as I want … from you—  Catherine

So, who is Catherine?  Did she live for a time in my office?  Did she smoke Chesterfields and blow smoke out the window, hiding them when the landlord came around?  She must have loved Hershey’s bars, but why hang on to the wrappers?  Why did she keep a doodle of Harold Lloyd?  Who is the “Pal” she addresses in the letter?  Or maybe it was “Pal” who lived in my office.  After all, the letter is folded as if it had been mailed.  But what would he be doing with a cosmetics ad?  Of course, there’s no reason why Pal couldn’t have been a woman, right?  One thing is certain, though, Catherine missed Pal and felt insecure about their relationship: “I only wish you thought of me as much as I do you.”  There is irrefutable residue of her emotion.

Like the letter, the lives of these people are so full of ellipses—ellipses that no amount of research can fill.  I believe it’s the job of the writer of serious historical fiction to use his or her imagination to fill in the ellipses left by time.  History is recorded almost always by those in power and most certainly with posterity in mind.  It’s up to the writer of historical fiction to see beyond the facade of history and imagine how life was lived by those not in power—women, blacks, gays, etc.

The contents of the hiding place underneath the floorboards in my office

This reminds me of a passage from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:

“For fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science my be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners … But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

Shortly after this passage, Woolf imagines the life of Shakespeare’s sister, Judith, who she invents to demonstrate how it’s only through imagination that we can begin to understand the truth of the past.

Catherine and her lover have already begun to stir in the corners of my mind.  I’m sure that I’ll write about them, and it will be 99% invention, but no less true, no less significant.  I must recreate them to say something about the past, to give a legacy for what has been forgotten or edited out of the history books.