Theodora Goss

I’ve been writing about all sorts of things related to writing. I thought I’d better write about writing itself.

The title of this post comes from the J.D. Salinger short story “For Esmé – with Love and Squalor.”

Have you read it? It’s one of his most famous short stories. It’s told by a soldier who is training in England, in World War II. One day he walks into a church and listens to a children’s choir practicing. He notices the best singer, a girl. Later, he is sitting in a tearoom when she, her brother, and her nurse walk in. (I’m doing this from memory, so correct me if I make any mistakes.)

Her name is Esmé, her brother’s name is Charles. She is a self-possessed young lady with a vocabulary that is not quite under her control – she uses words that don’t quite mean what she things they mean in an effort to be sophisticated. But she’s charming, an attractive character. Her brother, who is younger, is a typical little boy. Their nurse tries to get them away from the soldier, but they pay no attention to her. Their father has died in the war, their mother is somewhere, I don’t remember where. But it’s obvious that Esmé is used to giving orders and looking after Charles. When Esmé learns that the solider is a writer, she asks him to write her a story. She asks him to put a lot of squalor into it. It’s obvious that she doesn’t quite understand the word. Before she and Charles leave with their nurse, she asks the soldier for his address so she can write to him.

The scene shifts, and the solider who is narrating the story tells us that this is the part with the squalor in it. The war has ended. It’s obvious that there’s something deeply wrong with the soldier, that he’s seen terrible things. But he finds a letter from Esmé, a letter that has taken a long time to reach him. Reading that letter is almost like reading a letter from another world, where there are still children, and there is still innocence, and there is still a future. And it saves him – suddenly, instead of the terrible insomnia he’s been feeling, he feels sleepy.  And you know that he’s going to be all right.

It’s a wonderfully written story, strong and clear. And my point today is that without that, without the wonderful writing, none of the rest of it matters.

If you’re a writer, your first duty, a duty you owe to yourself and your readers, and to your writing itself, is to become wonderful. To become the best writer you can possibly be.

Now that I’ve written that, I feel obligated to suggest some ways to actually do it, to become a wonderful writer. I think everyone becomes a wonderful writer differently. But here, at least, are some ideas.

1. Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.

2. Learn as much as you can. Take every opportunity to learn about writing, whether it’s through classes, workshops, whatever is available to you. This may be difficult, because things like classes, workshops, writing programs, require time and money. But I say this honestly and somewhat harshly – if you’re not willing to prioritize your writing, perhaps you should do something else?

3. Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

4. Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.

5. Be ambitious. Try to be as good as you can, to improve your craft, to become a master of your art. Push yourself to be better, do not rest on what you have done before or what comes easily. If you tell a group of writers, and specifically science fiction and fantasy writers, that you want to be as good as Salinger, as Jane Austen, as Jorge Luis Borges, they may look at you strangely. I know, because I’ve gotten that look before. It’s as though you’ve told them you’re aiming too high, wanting too much. But why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t you take the best writers as your models? Why shouldn’t you want to write as well as Virginia Woolf? With fairies.

I think what I’ve said can be encapsulated in four words:

Engage fully. Be relentless.

I write all this because there’s so much information out there now about how writers can succeed. A great deal on marketing, social media, that sort of thing. And I do think all of that is important. I do.

But if the writing isn’t wonderful, what’s the point?

“See, I didn’t grow up with witches,” said Matilda.

We had walked back to Miss Lavender’s in silence, through the silent, lamp-lit streets. Even the Common was deserted at that hour. We had opened the gate, which was left unlocked, and walked down Hecate Lane to the school grounds. Only a few lights were on, the one above the front door and what looked like a light in the kitchen.

We had not gone in. None of us had felt like going in yet. Instead, we had sat down on one of the garden benches.

Then Mouse had said, “I need to go for a walk.” She had stood up, walked down one of the garden paths, and disappeared into the darkness.

After a few minutes, Emma had said “I’m not sure she should be alone right now,” and followed her. That was the Gaunt in her. Gaunts do things like that. You see, a bunch of Gaunts had died in the Sitgreaves Murders. Figures that Emma would be the one to follow Mouse, to tell her it was all right. Even though it wasn’t.

“An aunt of hers died, a couple of cousins, I’m not sure who else. Some Tillinghasts died too. One Graves. Hawthornes, they’re an old New England witching family. Mandragoras. Grimms. A lot of people who aren’t people, I mean who are from the Other Country.”

“I thought people never died there,” said Mathilda.

“Yes, that’s why no one was prepared. My Mom was at that party, you know,” I said. “She told me about it later. She said it was one of the worst things she had ever seen. Tree Women weeping sap. Morgan was there doing triage.”

And then I told her about Sitgreaves.

“He was one of the most talented warlocks that Merlin ever trained. Samael Sitgreaves was his name, and the Sitgreaves back then were just like the Gaunts now. You know, rich and richer. But he did something terrible, and Merlin cast him out.”

“What did he do?” asked Matilda.

“He fell in love with one of the White Women of the Forest, who wear white dresses and shoes of bark. But she did not love him back, so he kidnapped her. He hid her so well that no one could find her, and a year later she died in childbirth. He appeared one night on the doorsteps of Sitgreaves House and knocked on the door. The housekeeper answered, and he gave her the child, told her it was called Sophia, and then vanished. That was the last anyone saw of him, until the murders.”  I kicked at the grass with my shoe.  My mother had told me this story, when she was still alive.  Sometimes I loved to think about her, and sometimes I hated it.

“That must have been Mouse,” said Matilda. “Why couldn’t anyone find him? I mean, people like Mrs. Moth and Miss Gray . . .”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just know they couldn’t. He found a place to hide, and no one could trace him there.”

“So what happened then? I mean, the murders.”

When my mother had told me about it, she had cried. Her sister had died there, and another Graves, a distant cousin that she didn’t know well. She had told me, “But I still remember that she was wearing a pair of bright red shoes, and a hat with red roses on it. It was supposed to have been such a wonderful day!”

It had been a birthday party for Alistair Gaunt, who was turning a hundred. And there were a hundred guests invited, to the party under the large tent in a field close to Mother Night’s house. My mother remembered cakes shaped like winged horses, and fountains that bubbled with wines of different colors and flavors, and dragons that whirled through the air, sometimes knocking off the hats of guests. There was music, played by an odd assortment of instruments that moved by themselves.

In the middle of the festivities, suddenly, he was there. Samael Sitgreaves in a black suit, with a cape over his shoulders.

“Ladies and gentlemen and others,” he said. “Don’t be alarmed. I’ve simply come for what’s mine.” He meant Mouse. She was just a little girl then, two or three years old. The Sitgreaves had been looking after her. And they wouldn’t give her to him.

His own mother said to him, “When you left that child in our keeping, you gave up any right you had to her. She is ours now, and you will not take her away from us.”

And you know, everyone there, every Sitgreaves and Gaunt and Graves and Hawthorne and Mandragora and Grimm, stood ready to oppose him. But he waved his hand, and it was as though something was torn open, and then people were screaming. The dead lay dead, and the living tried to keep anyone else from dying, and Sitgreaves was gone – with Mouse.

“That’s a terrible story,” said Matilda. “What about people like Mrs. Moth and Miss Gray. Couldn’t they do anything?”

“Well, they weren’t there, for one thing,” I said. “Morgan came when she heard the screaming, and tried to help. And afterward, Miss Gray searched for Mouse. She finally found her – she had been hidden in time. She brought her here, to Miss Lavender’s, where she thought Mouse would be safe.”

“You said the Sitgreaves were a rich witching family. Why can’t they protect Mouse now?”

“Sitgreaves killed every last one of them. There are no Sitgreaves left anymore.”

“Except me,” said Mouse.  She walked out of the darkness, and Emma walked after her.  “I’m the last one.”

“It’s not your fault, you know,” I said.  “You were, like, two years old.”

“I know that,” she said.  “But how would you feel having a murderer for a father?”

Emma put her arm around Mouse.

“Look,” I said.  “We can’t do anything else tonight.  Let’s just go in and get to sleep.  Tomorrow we have to talk about what to do.  Because if Sitgreaves is back, and he’s plotting in some way, then we have to do something.”

“Why can’t we just tell Mrs. Moth?” asked Emma.

“And what’s she going to say then?” said Matilda.  “She’s going to ask us how we got this information, and then we’re going to tell her, oh yeah, we forgot to mention it, but we sneaked out at night and broke into Tillinghast House, and then we’re all going to be expelled!”

“No telling Mrs. Moth,” I said.  “But we have to do something, and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.  All right?”

They all nodded, although I could see Emma was reluctant.  But after a quick raid on the kitchen for bread and cheese and grapes, we went to bed.  I dreamed that night of the Sitgreaves Murders, the way my mother had described it – with the sudden flash, the clap as though of thunder, the tearing sound.  And then the screaming.  I woke in the middle of the night, in a sweat.  But I fell asleep again soon after and slept without dreams, all night long.

I’ve decided that every Friday, I’m going to write part of the Shadowlands serial. If you want to read parts that I’ve already written, go to Serial. There, you can read all about Thea Graves, Matilda Tillinghast, Emma Gaunt, and Mouse, from the beginning.

This is for you, my sisters.

First, a video of Seanan McGuire’s “Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves”:

Second, some of the lyrics from the song. (Here are all of the lyrics in Seanan’s songbook: “Wicked Girls.”)

This is how it starts:

“Wendy played fair, and she played by the rules that they gave her;
They say she grew up and grew old – Peter Pan couldn’t save her.
They say she went home, and she never looked back,
Got her feet on the ground, got her life on its track.
She’s the patron saint priestess of all the lost girls who got found.
And she once had her head in the clouds, but she died on the ground.”

And here is my favorite stanza:

“Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly.
They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly.
They never once asked to return to their lives
To be children and chattel and mothers and wives,
But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned;
And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.”

I particularly like this one because it gives me a completely different version of Susan, not the Susan of the Narnia books, not even the Susan of Neil Gaiman’s “The Problem of Susan.” This Susan is proud, more like the proud Jadis who ruined Charn with the Deplorable Word. Whom C.S. Lewis cast as a villainess, of course. (I’ve always wanted to write the story of the White Witch from her own perspective.)

And this is the chorus:

“Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane,
Susan and Lucy, we’re calling your names,
All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain
And chose to go back on the shelf.
Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree
You have to break rules if you want to break free.
So do as you like – we’re determined to be
Wicked girls saving ourselves.”

You know who those are, right? Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Alice from Alice in Wonderland, Wendy from Peter Pan, Jane from Mary Poppins, and Susan and Lucy from the Narnia books.

I find that I agree with Tinker Bell too. She’s certainly one of the wicked girls, as you’ll know if you’ve ever read Peter Pan. Considerably more wicked than the Disney version. Even her name, Tinker Bell, makes her sound disreputable (a tinker is an itinerant mender of pots), although of course she’s lovely as well.

You have to break rules if you want to break free.

There are so many rules, so many things society tells you to do, and if you want to break free, you have to decide what you want to do – and be. Particularly how you want to be a girl. Because society tells you how to be one, but you can’t listen to that, not if you want to save yourself. Not if you don’t want to end up in some gray Kansas.

And this is a stanza about girls who are not in any books, doing their own things, being wicked in their own ways:

“Mandy’s a pirate, and Mia weaves silk shrouds for faeries,
And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Kate poses riddles and Mary plays tricks,
While Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear:
Be wicked and lovely and don’t live in fear –”

The last two lines are a sort of anthem, aren’t they? I think I should write them out and put them over my desk. I think I should recite them any time I am afraid.

And this is the last stanza:

“For we will be wicked and we will be fair
And they’ll call us such names, and we really won’t care,
So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes,
There’s a place they can go if they’re tired of chains,
And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost,
But we’ll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost –
We won’t take our place on the shelves.
It’s better to fly and it’s better to die
Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.”

Our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost, but they’ll be our roads. The singers in that video are artists, walking their own roads. And they probably pay a price – we all do. We are less secure, we are more tired, we are criticized. But if you’re a certain kind of person, there’s really no alternative. There’s your road, and no other road will do. And even when it’s broken or lost, at least it’s yours, you know? You can’t live another person’s destiny.

It’s better to fly and it’s better to die free. (Unless you take the risk, I’m not sure you get to fly.)

I’m tired today, and I’m not entirely sure where my road is. But this song reminds me that I’d rather be wicked and lovely and free than just about anything else. And that I’m responsible for saving myself.

My friend Emily Gilman has written a post about this song called “Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves.” Go read it if you’d like another perspective. And maybe we should form a club, wear rings with WG engraved on them or something. Honestly, I think this should be our theme song!

February is going to be a difficult month.

I just want to give you fair warning, in case I complain about it. Because I have so much to do, and I’m tired already even though it’s only the second day. But all the things I have to do are good things to get done, so there’s that. They’re all projects I’ve taken on because I want to do them.

And there have been some wonderful things happening already. For example:

1. My poem “Ravens” has been nominated for a Rhysling award. It will be appearing in the Rhysling Anthology.

2. My stories “The Mad Scientist’s Daughter” and “Fair Ladies” are on the 2010 Locus Recommended Reading List. Those are the only stories of mine published in 2010, so to have them both listed was especially wonderful.

3. I will be at Boskone from the 18th to the 20th. I’ve received my preliminary schedule, which may change. It looks as though I’ll be on six panels and doing a reading. I’ll post my final schedule as soon as I get it!

4. My first Folkroots column is coming out this month and will be available soon, both in Realms of Fantasy and online. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available!

5. I just received copies of People of the Book, the wonderful anthology of Jewish science fiction and fantasy edited by Rachel Swirsky and Sean Wallace. My story “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” is reprinted in it. Look, isn’t it gorgeous?

So there are wonderful things happening. But I’m tired and I have so much to do and there’s just so much snow on the ground, and there’s still an awful lot of winter before spring comes.

Still, one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that time passes, inevitably. You can’t stop it from passing. What you can do is decide what you want to do with that time. And everything I’m doing matters, it’s all important, it’s all going to become a whole, something larger than itself.

This is a post about Imbolc, isn’t it? About the old festival, also called St. Brigid’s Day, that marked the beginning of spring, when you don’t actually believe that spring is coming because for goodness sake, look at all that snow! And you feel tired and restless at the same time. I didn’t realize that when I began writing it. But it’s about that specific time of the year when something begins to rise in you, like sap.

You’re still in the darkness of winter. Yesterday, I was looking at myself in the mirror on top of my dresser, and I saw myself in that darkness, so I decided to take a picture of it:

The branch of acorns at the bottom of the picture: I picked that up last fall. It’s in a small vase on my dresser, with a candle and a bowl of shells and a talisman with a swan on it. It reminds me that this is all a cycle. And so while I stand in the darkness, the light is coming, and there are already buds on the trees, and under the ground the bulbs are beginning to sprout.

There’s so much winter yet. But the light is returning.

I’ve been wanting to write about Mythpunk since JoSelle Vanderhooft’s interview of Catherynne M. Valente came out.

But I didn’t have time. And then a week later there was a Mythpunk Roundtable with Amal El-Mohtar, Rose Lemberg, Alex Dally MacFarlane, and Shweta Narayan, moderated by JoSelle.

And at some point I found Niall Harrison’s blog posts: Mythpunk and amimythpunkornot.com. All on Strange Horizons.

It was interesting to see that several of the above mentioned me. I also ended up in the Wikipedia definition of mythpunk:

“Described as a subgenre of mythic fiction, Catherynne M. Valente uses the term ‘mythpunk’ to define a brand of speculative fiction which starts in folklore and myth and adds elements of postmodern fantastic techniques: urban fantasy, confessional poetry, non-linear storytelling, linguistic calisthenics, worldbuilding, and academic fantasy. Writers whose works would fall under the mythpunk label are Catherynne M. Valente, Ekaterina Sedia, Theodora Goss, and Sonya Taaffe.”

And Niall Harrison quantified my mythpunkness in one of his blog posts:

“In The Forest of Forgetting by Theodora Goss

“Myth-y? We’re going to need a working definition of myth at some point, aren’t we? Dictionary.com is suitably vague: ‘a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation.’ Plenty of that in Goss’s fiction, from — as Matt mentioned last week — ‘The Rose in Twelve Petals’ to more recent fiction (and more recent myths) in last year’s ‘The Mad Scientist’s Daughter.’ ****

“Punk-y? Back to the dictionary: ‘a style or movement characterized by the adoption of aggressively unconventional and often bizarre or shocking clothing, hairstyles, makeup, etc., and the defiance of social norms of behavior.’ Transpose that to fiction, and in addition to the stylistic points listed in the TVTropes definition, I’d suggest there has to often be an element of the contemporary injected into a story for it to qualify as punk. ‘The Rose in Twelve Petals’ is perhaps Goss’s most obviously confronting story in this respect, although she’s written plenty of more conventional narratives; as Abigail notes in her review of the collection, however, there’s ‘a free-spirited disdain for social conventions” in a good number of Goss’s tales. ***’

And I’m going to be on a Mythpunk panel at Boskone. So I guess I’d better write about it, to figure out what I think about it, right?

Here are some basic thoughts.

What is Mythpunk anyway? Well, I think Cat defined it very clearly. It involves working with fairy tale, folklore, or myth. And then you punk it. About punk, Cat says,

“I’ve always considered the appending of -punk to whatever other word to indicate that X is not merely being explored or ruminated upon, but in some sense broken, harmed, and put back together again with safety pins and patches, a certain amount of anxiety, anger, and messy, difficult emotionality expressed in the direction of X. Additionally, I look for some of the aesthetic of punk – they may be three chords used by everyone, but if you shred them hard enough and scream loud enough they can become something new.”

I think Mythpunk is generally written by female writers who grew up on subversive fairy tale retellings. We may have seen the Disney versions of fairy tales, but remember that we did not have DVDs. We did not watch them repeatedly, obsessively. And there was no Disney Princess culture when we were growing up. We were told the fairy tales themselves, and then when we were – probably around twelve, but certainly in our teens, we started reading the retellings. I’m guessing they were as important in the lives of other writers who can be identified as writing Mythpunk as they were in mine. Do you remember Tales from the Sisters Grimmer? And the fairy tale series published by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow? And Robin McKinley’s Beauty? I think we were reading those, and they came as revelations. At least they did to me. And then we read Angela Carter, who blew our minds.

And so we took the traditional material – the fairy tales, folk tales, myths – and we started playing with them, because that’s what our foremothers had taught us to do. In other words, we were not the first wave of fairy tale retellers. We were the second wave, and learned from the first.  And we did it, perhaps, a little differently.  Because those first-wave fairy tale retellings generally did not involve stylistic innovations, and we do stylistic innovation like it’s the air we breathe. In a sense it is, because we grew up when postmodernism was being discussed and practiced. So we practice a sort of Mythpostmodernism. But that doesn’t sound as nice.

Would I actually consider my writing Mythpunk? Well, sometimes. I think there are stories of mine that do exactly what Cat described. “Rose in Twelve Petals” is one, “Sleeping with Bears” is a retelling of “Snow White and Rose Red” although I’m not sure anyone is likely to catch that. And other stories of mine certainly create new fairy tales, new mythologies: “The Rapid Advance of Sorrow,” “Singing of Mount Abora.” “Child-Empress of Mars” is a sort of Mythpunked science fiction.

Is it a useful designation? I think it is, actually. It does seem to be describing what a particular group of writers is doing at the moment. There’s something to writing identified as Mythpunk that does make it distinctive. It’s fantasy – not dark fantasy, not urban fantasy, not whatever it is people are doing now that involves vampires. Fantasy proper, but with stylistic experimentation. It’s Virginia Woolf with fairies and gryphons and blemmyae. With all sorts of strange but wonderful monsters. It doesn’t have the darkness of New Weird and is not indebted to Lovecraft. It’s not really slipstream, because rather than making you uncomfortable it says, “Here are the monsters, get comfortable with them.” It is political because it presents a world where social conventions don’t apply, where to be different is to be normal, and to be ordinary is to be odd. It embraces beauty and strangeness as normal conditions. And it is definitely not interstitial, because as soon as you say something is Mythpunk it is no longer between things, it is a thing.

It started in the small presses because larger presses did not want to take a chance on something so different. Fairy tale retellings – those it could handle. But these were fairy tale retellings with a difference. However, the more Mythpunk is out there, the more not-different it becomes, so you can say, “This is like Orphan’s Tales.”

I also see in it a richness, an almost overflowing of inventiveness and language. In that way, it is like New Weird, which was also rich and overflowing.

Do we really need all these labels, all these punks? We probably don’t need them. But because of them, certain writers and works are talked about. So they enable us to have conversations we did not have before. They allow us to notice writers we might have overlooked. And they allow those writers to speak and say, “This is what I am. Or am not.”

And that’s generally good, I think. It’s part of the inventiveness of our genre, of fantasy writing in general. We are the inventors, the creators of worlds. It would be strange if we didn’t invent literary movements once in a while.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my writing lately, and it seems to me that the best writing I do has three things: beauty, meaning, purpose. I suppose I should explain what I mean by those things.

Beauty: I don’t mean beauty in a narrow sense here. What I mean is that, simply in order to interest a reader, what I write should be aesthetically pleasing. It should give the reader pleasure, enjoyment. That’s the price of entry, in a sense. If I can’t write well, in a way that pleases the reader, it doesn’t matter if my writing has meaning or purpose, because the reader won’t read it. The reading experience itself won’t be enjoyable. Beauty can take all sorts of different forms. Transparent prose can be beautiful, if done well. Mannered prose can too. And beauty of writing does not mean that the content itself has to be beautiful. A description of garbage can provide aesthetic pleasure.

Meaning: What I mean by this term is that the story should have some sort of meaning, should provide the reader with an understanding of some sort. Or at least, I think my best stories do. This is separate from the aesthetic pleasure provided by the prose. It’s a more intellectual response. It causes the reader to go something like, “Oh yes. Interesting. I hadn’t considered that.”

Purpose: In a sense, this is the most difficult to describe. It’s about engagement. The reader can respond aesthetically and intellectually without necessarily engaging in a personal way with the story. A beautiful, meaningful story can still leave the reader cold. Here I have an anecdote to help me explain what I mean. This is something I heard one of those corporate marketing types say. (I know, but sometimes they say something useful.) It was this: Nike advertisements are not about the shoes, but about what you can do with them. They show pictures of athletes. They make the viewer think, perhaps I can be an athlete too. I think the stories of mine which are most successful give the reader something he or she can take away. I’ll call it inspiration.

This, by the way, is what Rainer Maria Rilke was talking about when he described the archaic torso of Apollo. It provides us with beauty and meaning, but it also does something more, according to Rilke: it says, “You must change your life.” (Apollo, Nike. Hey, they’re both Greek gods.)

I think those are three things we want from stories: we want to enjoy them, we want to find meaning in them, we want them to engage us, even inspire us. So that, in some small way, they begin – or perhaps we begin – to transform our lives. Ultimately, I think we want that transformation, and we can find it in James Joyce or we can find it in the latest D&D tie-in novel. It has nothing to do with genre, and I’m not sure it has much to do with literary quality the way we usually define it (which places Joyce above the D&D tie-in). We want stories to change us.

So, my stories should have: beauty, meaning, purpose.
My reader should get out of them: pleasure, understanding, inspiration.

But if I start writing a story saying to myself, I’m going to write a story with beauty, meaning, purpose, I will never, ever finish another story again. And if I do, it will be dreadful. So once I identify these components of my best writing, I have to forget them. Instead, I have to substitute the following:

My stories should have: characters, setting, plot.

I have to think as a craftsman. But all this stuff about beauty, meaning, purpose that I’m about to forget, I can keep somewhere in my head – in a sort of box, carved and painted. And sometimes a part of me that I’m not conscious of can open the box, look inside, and remember.

Beauty, meaning, purpose. Now, forget you read the above.

This post will self-destruct in five minutes.

It’s Sunday, so of course we went to the Museum of Fine Arts. I can’t go more than a week without a banana split. Or art. I’m not actually sure which is more important.

This post is going to be mostly pictures, because there’s something else I want to write about, which I’ll get to later today. But here’s a brief synopsis of our trip.

First we went to the café, because we have to go to the café first. That’s not my rule, it’s Ophelia’s. And when you have a six-year-old who wants a fancy cheese plate and hot chocolate, there’s not much hope of looking at art before she gets them.

But afterward we had some time to look at two exhibits. The first was Fresh Ink: Ten Takes on Chinese Tradition, which has been there for a while and which we’ve seen several times already. But Ophelia loves wandering through it. It’s her favorite exhibit at the museum right now. Here are some pictures:

The second was Millet and Rural France. I loved this one. It’s along a hallway, a somewhat hidden hallway between one part of the museum and another. But the drawings are so fresh, so precise. They give me a sense of freedom, of beauty, as though I really were walking through the French countryside in the nineteenth century. Here are some pictures that will do no justice at all to Millet:

Then we went to the gift shop, because when you go to the museum with a six-year-old you can’t not go to the gift shop. And even though Ophelia had already spent her allowance this week, I bought her an art project, and I bought myself the earrings that went with my Christmas present. Here is one of the earrings (pink pearl and green crystal):

And here is my Christmas present, a bracelet based on Monet’s waterlily paintings (pink pearls, pink and green crystals, green enameled waterlilies):

And then we left the museum through what I call the Big Baby Head entrance. There are two Baby Heads, and they both had snowy caps, which was really quite funny. Here is one of them:

It was a very nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon. My favorite way.