Ozmentality

Frederic S. Durbin’s novel Dragonfly was first published by Arkham House. A selection of the Science Fiction Book Club, it was recently released in paperback by Ace Fantasy. A dark fantasy that is a paean to Halloween, it features the adventures of the eleven-year-old titular protagonist in the underground realm of Harvest Moon, which is populated by werewolves, vampires, and far worse. It is, by turns, the stuff of nightmares and a celebration of all that is wonderful about that time of year when leaves turn, jack-o-lanterns light the front-porch steps, a chill comes into the air, and people cavort as creatures of the night. 

A native of Taylorville, Illinois, Durbin has taught English conversation and writing at Niigata University in Japan for the past sixteen years. He is also a regular contributor to publications like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Cricket (for children), and Cicada (for young adults).

OZMENT’S HOUSE OF TWILIGHT: How did you become a writer?

FREDERIC S. DURBIN: From earliest childhood, I was immersed in the world of Story. My parents were both readers. My dad opened our town’s first bookstore, and my mom built libraries at our four elementary schools at a time when they had none. So my parents were book-lovers, committed to books. They read to me, I read to them, and my mom especially was adamant about keeping the TV off when I was awake. I didn’t watch any TV until I was probably six or seven years old—and then very selectively. That’s almost unheard of in our society.
Wanting to write is a natural reaction to reading, I think. How can you love the adventure of escaping into Story and not want to be a part of creating it yourself?

OHOT: What drew you to speculative and “weird” fiction?

FSD: Dad was always writing things, mostly for his own amusement—beginnings of a lot of science-fiction and fantasy novels. I would read those as a kid and draw illustrations for them. He loved Fortean subjects, and I loved to hear him talk about them. I knew names like Roger Patterson, Loch Ness, Roswell, and Tunguska long before I knew who the President was. I’m sure that’s where most of my “weirdness” in fiction came from. I was thrilled at the idea that the world was full of monsters and mysteries. That, plus I got a healthy dose of the good old fairy tales, straight from Andersen and the Grimms, not the cleaned-up versions. 

Dad was a dreamer, but he never finished or polished his writing. It was Mom who taught me persistence and the business end of writing. She was constantly submitting her stories to children’s publishers. That opened my eyes to the concept that you could write stories and get paid for it. So that’s what I wanted to do, as far back as I can remember. 

As for speculative fiction, I think it was the book covers that drew me in. Every day after school, I’d be in our bookstore, and I’d see these fascinating covers that invited me into magical lands and seemed to tell stories all by themselves. Gervasio Gallardo—I’ll still buy any book if he did the cover. Naturally, I wanted to pick up those books and see what was inside.

OHOT: Your author’s bio notes that the images that would become Dragonfly first began to take shape on the beaches of Japan. Dragonfly, though, is a book firmly rooted in Midwestern America, specifically the rural Illinois where you grew up. How did your experience in Japan inspire you?

FSD: That line in the bio is a little misleading. You’re absolutely right that Dragonfly is a rural Midwestern American book, though I didn’t know that until people from other parts of the country started telling me that. It’s like how none of us think we ourselves have any noticeable accent. 

The bio is referring specifically to the timing. I was in Japan when the ideas for this book took hold of me. In fact, I can point to one specific grove of trees on the campus of Niigata University as the place where I first knew I wanted to write this story. “That’s the birthplace of Dragonfly,” I say. But if Dragonfly sprouted there, its seeds are certainly Illinois seeds. 

That’s not to say that Japan hasn’t inspired other writing. One of my Cricket stories is set in a long-ago fantasy Japan, and “A Tale of Silences,” which is my first attempt at literary fiction, is set in a mountain village in Japan in 1970.
 
You can’t not be influenced by where you live. When I write fantasy now, it’s colored and informed by the experience of living in a different culture, of learning a foreign language. I can write about Otherworlds and strange beings better now because I’ve been there, I’ve been one.

OHOT: How has your rural upbringing influenced your writing?

FSD: When you read a book, you can tell what the writer really loves, can’t you? When you read what I write, I think it’s pretty clear that I love trees, green spaces, caverns, ruins, mossy stones, and the way light looks at different times of day and night. There’s a closeness to natural settings in my stories. There are always branches brushing the walls; there’s a sense of soil under the floorboards and ground water gurgling beneath that, and the moon coming up outside. There are lots of animals.
 
One delightful thing about the rural Midwest is that we have the sunny, upper surface of things—big sky, open fields, honest horizons keeping their polite distance. But then we’ve got these secret spaces: old farmhouses with attics and basements, barns, whispery hedgerows, and the creeks cutting across the land, overshadowed by thick, dark timber. Three steps out of the field, and you’re in this hidden world of shadows. The land itself is like a perfect model for a story. 

And in my fiction, there’s very little technology. I write technology much like a hobbit would. Take the machines in Dragonfly—the balloon, for example. It’s plausible, but it’s sort of pseudo-technology, like something from a Dr. Seuss illustration, with impossible pipes held up by wires, etc. It’s technology that I hope satisfies the child’s mind in us, which to me is more important than the adult mind. The plausibility is for adults, but the essence of things has to satisfy the child. In Dragonfly, the bad guys travel around in a coach with big, zigzag-toothed gears for wheels—for going up and down staircases, the text explains. It’s been pointed out to me that that wouldn’t work, the teeth wouldn’t nicely fit the stairs. But it feels really good to my child-mind. See what I mean?
 
There’s a simplicity to my writing, too. It’s not the sophistication of the seacoasts. It’s a Midwest solidity—probably an innocence. Look at the characters in Dragonfly, at their relationships. These are Midwestern folks. When Dragonfly’s parents are mistaken about the right way to live, where are they? One’s on the East Coast doing business, one’s on the West Coast making movies, both neglecting their family. That’s probably an unintentional revelation of my own values—and prejudices.

OHOT: Dragonfly took shape around 1992. It’s been fourteen years since you wrote your first published novel. Are there any others in the works? And can fans of Dragonfly anticipate a return to Harvest Moon?

FSD: In order: Ouch, ouch, yes, and sort of. When I wrote Dragonfly, I loved it myself, but I feared it would be unsellable. It was too dark and densely-written for YA, too warm and happy for horror. So immediately after it was written, and long before it was published, I started writing another novel that I believed in but that I also thought would sell. The present working title is The Fires of the Deep, but that’s likely to change; it’s been pointed out that’s really similar to a Vernor Vinge title. It’s a sprawling heroic fantasy that I’ve been working on for, yes, about fourteen years. In various incarnations, it’s gone out to publishers, agents, and friendly test-readers, and no one is quite satisfied with it yet, including me. But don’t feel too sorry for me—I’ve learned a lot, and I think it’s only a draft away from being ready. I suspect it might be my Big Life Work, the first book in a series. The lesson for aspiring writers is: you know all the horror stories you hear about second novels? They’re true! I thought it would be a lot easier the second time around, but it turned out to be a lot harder, and I don’t think I’d better even get into why—that would take a sizable essay. Harder, I said, but not impossible! Like all writing, it just takes time and persistence.
 
There’s another novel I wrote as a National Novel Writing Month book. It seems everybody and his dog is doing NaNoWriMo these days! I wrote it for adults, but I’m now re-casting it as a YA book, which is what it wanted to be all along. I also have a YA novel currently under consideration at Cricket Books.
 
Finally, what I'm really excited about now is a collaborative project I'm working on with two friends, both of them accomplished fantasy and horror writers. We're writing interrelated stories set in the modern world, often using each others' characters. Our working title is Unsung Heroes. The idea is that the eternal battle between good and evil is going on all around us, but most people can't see spirit entities. Monstrous evil beings, existing partly in another dimension, prey upon humans. The force that defends humanity, unknown, unseen in the night mists, is called the Shadow Guard. Powerful and wise, the Shadow Guard recognizes that there are some humans with gifts--psychic powers or unusual physical or mental abilities. These special ones, because of their gifts, are in a position to be able to fight against the predatory malevolents, but at the same time are vulnerable, highly visible to the evil beings. The Shadow Guard recruits and trains these people to be "shadowbenders"--warriors of various skills in the ongoing conflict. It's fascinating to bring three visions, three storytelling styles to the same book, and I truly think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. We’re starting to see some interest from publishers, and we’re all psyched about it, e-mailing one another and trying to get the whole thing fine-tuned. What’s great about it is it’s been a way for us to “play.” We’ve been working off and on with it for about six years, producing new stories when the inspiration strikes. Our big motivation has always been to “wow” each other, to add surprising new dimensions. Then we all started noticing, “Hey! When you’re just having a ball with storytelling, you do some of your best work!” I hope we’ll be able to introduce it to the public soon. [Ed. note: The first Unsung Heroes story will debut in issue 8 of Ozment's House of Twilight] 

About a sequel to Dragonfly: I’ve always intended to do that. The book’s ending pretty much screams “A sequel is coming!” I didn’t pursue it for a long time because I was engrossed in other projects, but not long ago, a writer friend told me about a dream she had. The minute I heard about this ominous figure in her dream, I knew it was going to be Dragonfly’s next adversary—so I’ve got my villain. I recently talked with April Derleth at Arkham House, and she is open to the idea of a sequel, although Arkham House always has a very full publishing schedule. So it will have to be a good sequel. It won’t be a return to Hallowe’en, though. I’m going to pick on another season of the year.

OHOT: Which authors have most influenced you?

FSD: A college friend read The Lord of the Rings for her first time just before Peter Jackson’s movies came out, and she remarked that Tolkien’s writing sounded a lot like mine. (Pause for laughter.) Gee, I wonder why. First and foremost is Tolkien. LOTR transported me to this grand other place. When you’re twelve, these places like Middle-earth become as important to you as the world you live in. That’s why I write fantasy: in the hope of offering such Otherplaces for other readers to adventure in. 

Charlotte’s Web is the first book I can remember that made me cry. It also taught me how a book’s ending can be sad and intensely beautiful at the same time, all accomplished with the power of language and character and Story.
 
Watership Down, when I was in fifth grade, convinced me that I’d just read the greatest book in the world and that my reading life would be all downhill from then on. Thank goodness I went straight from Richard Adams to Tolkien—no one lesser could have redeemed the situation!
 
Lord Dunsany with his lyric beauty, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs—they took me to lost worlds of wonder. Burroughs is what little boys did before there were video games: you could do the same scaling of cliffs, the same last-second dodging from dinosaurs’ jaws—but you did it in your imagination.
 
H.P. Lovecraft was a perennial favorite. I’m sure my love of dark atmosphere and decaying buildings comes from him. One reviewer at a semi-prozine took me to task for naming such an unlikely pair as Tolkien and Lovecraft as my influences, but there is a connection. They both wrote of horrible Things sleeping in the Earth’s deep places that ought not to be disturbed. What is the Watcher in the Water outside Moria if not one of the Great Old Ones?
 
If we’re talking authors that directly influenced Dragonfly: Peter S. Beagle, with his Midnight Carnival in The Last Unicorn; Struwwelpeter, by Heinrich Hoffmann (anyone who was terrorized by that cautionary book as a kid will know where Mr. Snicker in Dragonfly came from); and Ray Bradbury, in Something Wicked This Way Comes. In that book, Mr. Cougar and Mr. Dark’s carnival is a whole lot like my Harvest Moon bunch—and the bad guys even fly around in a balloon! Several people have told me my style reminds them of Ray Bradbury’s. Our “way of moving the camera is the same,” as one friend puts it. I suppose it’s natural, since we’re both Illinois boys from small towns. We seem to think a lot of the same things are numinous.

OHOT: You are a regular contributor of fantasy stories and fairy tales to Cricket and Cicada. When you have an idea, how or when do you know if it’s going to work best for a YA audience or an adult readership? Do your fairy tales and your darker works like “The Bone Man” (Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction Dec. 07) come from “different” parts of your psyche?

FSD: I don’t have a clue how the mind works. It amazes me how we can store the tiniest details for years and years without ever once accessing them or consciously remembering them, and then they come back to us, triggered by a scent, a voice, a place, or a glimpsed object from childhood—or in a dream.
 
My gut feeling is that my stories all come from the same place in my psyche. The evidence I’d present is the ones out there and published. When I’m writing YA, I don’t write “for children.” I write stories that grab hold of me, that I’d like to read—period. Look at my Cricket stories: all but one involve murder, monsters, destruction, and/or the threat of death for the main character. Age level affects how much dark detail and violence I actually show, but my core material doesn’t change. When I wrote “The Bone Man,” a friend snickered and said, “I bet this one isn’t going to Cricket!” No—but framed just a little differently, it certainly could be a children’s story. It still appeals to the child-mind in me. That’s precisely why it works at all. When we experience any story viscerally, it’s the child in us experiencing it. So in that sense, I’m always writing for children.
 
About stories fitting different markets, I almost always start out thinking of the magazine I’m aiming for. I wrote “The Gift” for Mooreeffoc. I wrote “The Bone Man” for MFSF. It’s like I hold up a Cricket-shaped basket and catch an idea that’s the right size to fit the basket. That’s why they tell you to study magazines you’re planning to submit to. What happened with “A Tale of Silences” was that I started out writing it for Cricket, and a little way in, I realized it wasn’t the right-sized story for pre-teens. Telling it required too many subtle details about the main character and his life. It spilled over the edges of the basket, but it fit the Cicada-shaped basket I had nearby.
 
But no, I think that all the ideas, all the stories come flowing up from the same enchanted river. And they’re all for “children.”

OHOT: That would come as a surprise to some parents reading a story like “The Bone Man.” You say it could be told from a slightly different angle and be fine for a magazine like Cricket, but I suspect many parents would look at this story and think, “Even with the violent ending toned down, this would give my child nightmares.”

FSD: I was talking about the core horror element in “The Bone Man,” not the plot. If I were writing it for a children’s market, I wouldn’t make the main character a hit man. He wouldn’t have a gun. The beginning, middle, and ending would all be different. I don’t want to give away the story for those who haven’t read it, but I’d argue that what really makes the tale scary—its central idea—could be used in a children’s story. Because, again, it’s the child in all of us who hungers for that sort of thing. If we weren’t children deep inside, we’d have no use for a story like this. When people truly bury or abandon or forget their child-mind, they turn away from fiction altogether. A story, after all, is a bunch of lies, “no more yielding than a dream.” Children live and play there. That twelve-year-old inside us goes and lives in Middle-earth.

OHOT: You mentioned that you grew up reading Grimm’s fairy tales—the real stuff, not the expurgated versions. Do you think a dose of terror is healthy for young imaginations?

FSD: We have to be very careful how we define “terror.” It is most definitely not healthy to expose children to the cruelty, gore, and sickness that run so rampant today in the horror genre. A friend of mine says, “It matters what images we put into our minds, because we’ll never, ever get them out.” That’s true for adults, and it’s even truer for minds that are young, impressionable, and in full absorption mode.
That having been said, it’s also true that no one can shelter kids from scary ideas. Kids will encounter horror. On the one hand, they have life experiences: pets die, relatives die, people get hurt, and you always hear things. On the other hand, kids seek out horror. There’s a monster in the basement, they know, because they’ve got their ears pressed to the basement door, they’ve opened it a crack, they’ve tiptoed down to the third, squeaky step. Kids will find things to be terrified of. I was so scared of a moss troll doll that my mom had to hide it in a drawer. Every year or so I’d beg her to get it out again, and she’d finally oblige, and I’d be so scared she’d have to hide it again. See? It’s the moth to the flame. Kids passionately want to be scared in a safe environment.
 
That environment is the key. If a child is happy and secure, with parents who behave like parents, he or she has a sense of perspective. There’s a line between real life and the Dark Woods. In that situation, yes, fictional horror can be a delight and, like any good story, can help kids grow. But I make a distinction here between scary stories and the sick, disturbing stories of cruelty—those aren’t good for anyone. And I can only pray God help the children who don’t have a healthy, safe environment. As fantasists, with our stories of dedication, love, and the triumph of goodness, we try to throw those kids a lifeline.

OHOT: At first you weren’t sure if there would be a market for a work like Dragonfly, being that it had too much horror for YA and too much warmth and happiness for the horror market. Some reviews of the book I have read express that same ambivalence—while their overall assessment of the book is enthusiastic, they are not sure how to “categorize” it. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old girl, but much of what she experiences is quite horrific, up to and including the threat of murder and the violent death of someone she holds dear. Arkham House, Sci Fi Book Club, and Ace all marketed it as straight horror/dark fantasy. Do you find it appeals more to a certain age or audience in particular?

FSD: I have no conclusive evidence, no demographic statistics to go on. I can only tell you what I’ve learned from fan letters, from readers I’ve met, and from what I’ve found when I’ve Googled myself. The book seems to have an audience among young women, from junior high through their twenties. I’m not sure what that means. It could be that more girls than boys write fan letters and discuss what they’re reading on their blogs. These readers tend to find the Arkham House edition in libraries, receive it from relatives, hear about it from friends, or find the Ace paperback in a store. It makes sense, I guess, that the female protagonist would appeal to females. There’s a widespread belief that many boys will shun a girl protagonist. I don’t know if that’s true or not; it never was for me.
 
Anyway, I think these younger readers like the book’s honesty and complexity. Many seem to judge by the cover that it’s going to be too “young” for them, but then it deals with dark themes and doesn’t pull punches.
 
The other audience group I’ve encountered are collectors of Arkham House books, and believe me, they’re the most passionate collectors of anything on Earth! The ones I’ve met have been men, my age or older. They’re reading it, of course, because it’s an Arkham House book.
So, I don’t know. I heard from a businessman who read Dragonfly on his commuter train to work; I’ve heard from senior citizens; I’ve heard from a few moms who liked it but are going to put it away until their kids are older (like my troll in the drawer). I think the letter that affected me most deeply was from someone who read Dragonfly at a dark time in her life, and it reminded her that some battles are worth fighting, that there are good reasons to keep walking until you get out of the tunnel. I was stunned, because I never thought of it as an inspirational book. The effect it had on her is simply a testimony to the power of Story. We humans need good stories. Writing books is something that’s very worthwhile. If I’m ever discouraged about my writing, I’ll get out her letter again.

OHOT: The title character of Dragonfly is an eleven-year-old girl. You are a single man, no children, in your late twenties when you wrote it. Why the decision to take on a narrator so different from you, and how did you get into her head and make her voice authentic?

FSD: People have asked me this question from the minute the book was published, so I had time to consider it right after having written the book; and honestly, I cannot remember ever making a decision to cast the main character as a girl. That’s simply who she was when she showed up. The book really began with two names: Dragonfly and Mothkin. She was who she was, and he was who he was. I didn’t sit around thinking of what they should be like.
 
I can try to guess at subconscious, instinctive factors that may have influenced the selection—or arrival—of a preteen girl as the protagonist. For one thing, it has to be a kid. The book is all about childhood fears, so I needed someone who would be feeling them most keenly—a child. But as you get into the book, you realize that she’s actually telling the story years later, as an adult. That allowed me to filter the sharp, vivid, immediate childhood experiences of the story through the experience and insights of a grown woman. I’m glad I didn’t plan that, or even think about, before I wrote the book, because it’s a pretty ambitious thing to try in a first novel. The book is too wordy and overwritten in places—that can happen before a writer is old enough to learn some restraint. On the other hand, it has a dewiness that I couldn’t reproduce today.
 
Second, there’s the fact that men simply like women. When you write a book, you spend a long, long time with the main character. You can only do it if you enjoy being with that character. It’s fun spending time with the female mind. 

Finally, though, we come back to the fact that the character is eleven and twelve years old. There’s really not much difference between an imaginative, book-loving eleven-year-old girl and a boy of the same description. I was that boy, so I had no trouble writing the girl. I just put myself into the part and wrote the character as if it were me. She doesn’t do anything in the book that’s uniquely “female.”
 
I mentioned the trouble I’ve had writing the huge, sprawling novel that I started right after I finished Dragonfly. Ironically, the main character in that one is a man close to my age—but I’ve had a lot more trouble getting him to seem real. I think it’s because I’ve been a kid. I’ve had the childhood fears. I haven’t been through a lot of political intrigue and war—so in the second book, I’m trying to write things I know little about.

OHOT: Having been a lifelong fan of Lovecraft, how did it feel to have your first novel brought out by Arkham House?

FSD: Like an impossible dream come true! When I first finished the book, I sent it out to all the big houses, one by one. After a round of rejections, I put it away and worked on other things for awhile. At the advice of a writing workshop leader, I went to a university library and used Literary Marketplace to locate about fifteen or so publishers who might possibly be interested. Since Arkham House begins with “A,” it was near the top of my list. I took the information down, but I regarded it as this legendary place, a dwelling in “inapproachable light.” I never thought I’d have a ghost of a chance there, so I didn’t send them the book until I’d exhausted just about every other publisher on my list. Finally, I thought “What have I got to lose?” and sent it to them. A blurb I read somewhere said Arkham House didn’t want to see unagented manuscripts; it typically no longer did single-author books except for those of the old masters; and it generally preferred collections of short stories by well-established writers—not novels from unknowns. If I’d read that before sending my novel off, I never would have sent it.
I submitted it from Taylorville, using that as my return address, and I went back to Japan to teach. When a letter eventually came from Peter Ruber, my mom saw his name on the envelope and mistook him for one of my college friends; it sat on the kitchen table for a week or so, until Mom had several more letters to forward to me. That letter said they were quite interested and would be making a final decision soon. Now Mom knew what to look for, and when they made that decision, she called me in Japan in the middle of the night. I’ll never forget that feeling—and telling my writing students the next day in class that my first novel had been accepted. That was the first year the university had let me teach creative writing, and the students were thrilled for me! 

The more I learn about Arkham House, the more honored I am. I’m in such amazing company among writers they’ve published. Part of me still can’t believe that I’m communicating directly with April Derleth, daughter of August Derleth. And I will forever be grateful to Mr. Ruber, who pulled Dragonfly out of the slush pile and went to bat for me.

I haven't posted in a while, so here's the first for the New Year. I've been busy teaching three sections of College Reading and Writing (known in common vernacular as freshman composition). The new semester starts up in about a week (oh, winter break, how fleeting thou art). Seventy-five new students...Boy, that's a lot of names to learn.

My humorous fantasy piece "Where There's Smoke, There's Heartburn" finally sees the light of day in the latest issue of BLOOD, BLADE & THRUSTER. It can be viewed or downloaded for free here: http://www.bbtmagazine.com/bbt-3/. My story has the fine distinction of appearing between the Cosplay girl and an interview with Joe Hill. Also noteworthy: This is, alas, BBT's final issue. It also features an interview with George RR Martin and some fine stories and poems. The cover art, as always, is eye-popping. Well worth checking out, even if I weren't in it. (And it's FREE!)

The new issue of WEIRD TALES hitting the stands this month (Issue #347 of the longest-running pulp magazine) includes my poem "The Faeries' Hoax." It was inspired by some reading I did on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his father, who was committed to an insane asylum where he drew pictures of faeries on letters to his son. Doyle Sr. allegedly thought he was drawing them from life. Of course, years later Doyle Jr. was taken in by the Cottingley Fairy Hoax, and an idea for a poem was born...

Finally, check out www.everydayfiction.com. EVERY DAY FICTION runs a new flash fiction story (under 1,000 words) every day. They have published two of my stories in the past three months.

I wish you all a Happy New Year (and since we'll have a new president by the end of it, 'twill be a Happy Year indeed).

I'll be attending the World Fantasy Convention in Saratoga Springs, NY next week (Nov. 1-5). On Saturday at 10:00 AM, I'll be on the panel "Tolkien as a Horror Writer."

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            Ever since the movie 300 came out and did record-breaking box office, historians and professors have been pontificating on talk shows about its historical inaccuracies. The film’s blatant historical distortions were also a favorite saw of many film critics—especially critics of the snootier New Yorker variety.

            I’m here to tell you that many of these learned and well-intentioned arbiters of historical faithfulness missed the point. They managed, thanks to a certain scholarly myopia, to overlook the obvious.

            The obvious element they missed is simply this: the framework of the story itself. The movie begins and ends with a voice-over narrator, the lone survivor who is also the Spartans’ bard, minstrel, storyteller. He is recounting events to Greeks who were not present, and what we are seeing portrayed on screen is the legend forming in the minds of the storyteller’s audience.

            The movie’s stylized look should make it apparent we are not in “reality” here. From the stark, otherworldly scenery to the “monsters” to the near-superhuman Spartans themselves, this is myth brought to life. A myth inspired by historical events, granted. But what the scholars are doing, strangely enough, is to criticize the legend for not being an accurate portrayal of the events that inspired it.

            What may have thrown some critics is that they harbored expectations generated by other recent adaptations of history and legend. In recent retellings of the war of Troy, the Beowulf legend, King Arthur—to cite a few—Hollywood moviemakers took a deconstructionist approach, striving to realistically portray (at least “realistically” by Hollywood standards) the historical events that gave rise to those legends.

            Zack Snyder’s approach—and that of Frank Miller in his graphic novel on which the movie is based—is the polar opposite. These are the events as later storytellers would imagine them; it is not a deconstruction but a conjuration. Case in point: when the Persians released a rhinoceros on the battlefield, it likely would have been the first time any Spartan had seen such an animal. Thus the rhino that lumbers across the screen looks like some prehistoric beast or a monster out of Lord of the Rings. This isn’t just a rhino; it’s the archetypal Rhino. Ditto the archetypal Elephants, Warriors, God-Kings.

            As far as I know, no critic was silly enough to point out that “the historical Xerxes was not nine feet tall.” Such a statement would be the sort made by an imbecile. But the underlying reason for Xerxes literally towering over Leonidas is part and parcel with other “inaccuracies” that are roundly criticized. In the retelling of the story, a divine god-king might well have been imagined as a giant, physically reflecting his metaphoric stature.

            To underline my argument, it may be helpful to recall another film based on another Miller graphic novel: Sin City. That movie was also stylized, raising up cops and thugs, crime bosses and prostitutes, to the mythic proportions of superheroes and villains. The reception of most critics to this work was favorable, in some cases enthusiastically glowing. To my knowledge, nary a critic lambasted Sin City by saying, “The city portrayed here is inaccurate; there is not a city in the world like this. There are not child molesters who look like goblins with yellow skin. There is nowhere in America a prostitution ring run by women who are ninja warriors.” That would be the criticism of a babbling idiot. Yet critics and scholars have been lining up to lob such gripes against 300.

Granted, Sin City was not named New York City or Las Vegas, but it clearly referenced such modern-day American cities in a highly romanticized, black-and-white way. The approach in 300 is parallel, congruous, one-and-the-same with the Sin City treatment, only the referent is not a modern-day Gotham but an event that occurred three millennia ago.

            A brief caveat: While I think it misguided to criticize 300 on historical grounds, I realize that some people criticize it for a perceived political message. Some have pointed out that the rousing speech to rally the troops at the end sounds cobbled together from sound bytes of President Bush’s speeches promoting the war in Iraq. I will not deny that the president—with the necessary help of speechwriters, who have a far better grasp of the language—has manipulated words to couch questionable foreign policy in the feel-good rhetoric of fighting for freedom and democracy.

            Yes, but these could also have been words spoken by those in the minority in the 1930s who argued for the United States to join their allies in opposing the expansionist aims of Germany and Japan. These could have been words spoken by revolutionists in the American colonies. These are words that could have been spoken by any opposition movement against any dictatorship or oppressive government. Let’s not surrender these words to self-serving politicians. Or else we’ll be good as admitting that such rhetoric has been poisoned beyond rehabilitation by those who misuse and abuse it.

            A final note—if I may return to the historical issue for a moment: I understand that any Spartan speaking such freedom-and-democracy rhetoric would have had a far different, greatly curtailed understanding of democracy—the vote of propertied males. The general consensus of our founding fathers was a small step forward, hobbled with its own flaws and limitations. We have evolved our concept of freedom to include people of all races and classes and both genders—though in some cases that evolution has occurred only within the last eighty years. Perhaps we are reading too much into, imposing our own values on, the actions of primitive Spartans. But it cannot be argued but that those cruel warriors gave cultured Athenians the protection necessary to begin the process toward the legal freedoms we possess today. And this metaphoric, mythical story may be useful in reminding us that these freedoms are never secure—there will always be those, often within the very system meant to protect our rights, who will try to curtail those rights if we passively allow them to do so. One need only turn on the news for a few minutes to be reminded of that: CIA “family jewels,” FBI abuses of Patriot Act powers, NSA abuses of warrantless wiretapping, a president’s overstepping of executive authority in ways too numerous to recount here. It is often forgotten that the founding fathers, while concerned about Americans protecting their new country from foreign invaders, were equally concerned that they protect their freedoms from tyrants who always, inevitably will try to rise up from within.         

 Carl Adrain Ozment
November 13, 1925 - May 24, 2007

Within a year of my Nan's death, my Grandad followed. Always a fiercely independent, stubborn man, he made it clear to all of us that, with Nan gone, his work on Earth was done and he was ready to go too. He seemed to linger that last year just to make sure his family was going to be okay. Then he said his goodbye and, soon thereafter, went to his reunion in the Great Beyond with his wife of nearly sixty years.

Grandad served on a submarine in World War II. He received a Navy send-off, with the playing of Taps and a 21-gun salute. Another great American is gone, entrusting the future to our hands.

Here are the words I wrote for the funeral. Since I could not be there, my dad--Grandad's only son--read them:

Grandad had an affinity with animals. He was a dog breeder, an exotic bird breeder, a fish breeder. The labyrinth of old pens in the sprawling yard in South Phoenix was a place of mystery and wonder to explore, when we were kids. Grandad and Nan always had dogs, up until the last few years. Even then, all the stray cats of the neighborhood honed in on their yard. When a dog—even a strange dog—met Grandad, that dog immediately knew who was boss. Dogs knew he was the authority. He passed that affinity for animals down to his children and grandchildren. I’ve heard near-miraculous stories of Karen bringing a dying animal back to life. I seem to recall a chicken everyone thought was dead. She warmed it up in the oven and soon it was running around in the yard. She may have missed her calling as a vet.

People, too, showed deference and respect to Grandad—he was the final authority, not just to us grandkids but to our parents, too. You didn’t cross the line or contradict Grandad. Once, when we were driving our ATC’s up and down the road between Grandad and Nan’s cabin and my folks’ land, the neighbor preacher raised a fuss. We’d leave ruts in the road or something. He came over to complain and Grandad said, “You giving my grandkids a hard time?” That was the end of it: the preacher backed down apologetically. He could recognize authority—God and Grandad.

 

I’ve heard stories that Grandad was a rough, hard man when he was younger, a stern disciplinarian with his kids. He mellowed out as he got older. Thinking back over all my memories of him, I can’t actually remember him yelling at us. I know he did, that Doug and I probably got the belt, when we were raising a ruckus—but those memories have gone back into some inaccessible part of my brain. Or maybe the threat of Grandad’s belt was enough that we never let it get that far—Doug may be able to remember better than me.

 

All my memories of Grandad, he is a benign authority, sitting regal in his easy chair, like a venerable king observing the merry-making of his subjects. When you walked past him, he might reach out and pinch you, or come up behind you when you were at the table coloring and give you a noogie on the top of your head. Hands never raised in anger but only to make you laugh. I remember him stopping the truck on the drive up to their newly-bought land in Heber, to pull Doug and me out of the back seat and toss us into a snow bank.

 

I remember him staying up late playing Solitaire or watching Johnny Carson, but he was always the first to rise. Long before anyone else stirred, he’d be sitting at the kitchen table, no light but the first gray light of dawn. Even the morning after Nan’s funeral, when I woke on the bed of couch cushions I’d made on the floor, Grandad was sitting there beside me in his easy chair. He looked down at me and said, “Hello, young man.”

 

I loved to hear my Grandad talk. He had that Oklahoma accent that in some people can sound mean or slow, but my Grandad, to me, always sounded smart when he talked. “He’s like to get hisself in trouble, that boy is,” he might say, and even peppered with the regional dialect, the statement carried weight and authority. I liked to talk to him about books and the authors I discovered on his shelves. I wish I’d talked to him more.

 

My Grandad loved to read, though from my earliest memory he always used a big magnifying lens—the Sherlock Holmes kind. Until his eyesight got too bad, he would go through paper-bags full of books. One day when I was in the third grade I pulled a book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, one of his favorite authors, down off his shelf, and it changed my life forever. Now I write the kinds of stories he liked to read—westerns and fantasies and science fiction—and I just wish he could read them.

 

Grandad and Nanny. If she was the flowing river, he was the riverbed, cutting its course through a river valley. And the thing about rivers and beds is that they shape each other, over the years. The riverbed shapes the river by the contours of the land. But the river smoothes rough stones, widens the banks, and the two together change each other and reshape the land. Nan and Grandad are both gone now, but they aren’t. The river valley they formed is here, and the river carries on, now three generations on. Their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are now making their own marks on the land. One is protecting us in covert operations on faraway seas. A couple are protecting us right here at home. Some are exercising their creativity and skills in the arts, or taking care of hospital patients, or teaching college students, or raising children, or sharing their life-earned wisdom with others. One or two may have hit a rough patch, but they’ll straighten out. It’s a pretty solid valley Grandad and Nan left.

 
Grandad is again sitting in an easy chair, only this one’s a lot easier. And Nan’s sitting beside him again. And one thing I know for sure. Grandad is proud of us all.

Martha L. Ozment
April 18, 1934 - April 29, 2006

I began this poem the evening I learned my Nan (Martha Ozment, my paternal grandmother) had passed away. I finished it the night before her funeral. The meter’s shaky here and there; one or two of the rhymes may feel forced. But this is the poem I read at her memorial service. I have not changed, nor will I ever change, a word.

Sparklers in Heaven

And there came a day when we lit the fuses

But the firecrackers would not light,

And we tried to plug in the Christmas tree,

But the tree stayed dark as night.

That day we went to hunt Easter eggs,

We searched and searched but none were found.

We blew on the New Year's noisemakers,

But they did not make a sound.

We folded up the Santa suit and laid it

By the witch mask in a drawer.

The joyful cackle through snowy beard or

Witch-wart chin fills the room  no more.

We put needles on the coat-hanger wires

But not a single balloon was popped.

We threw the planes with wooden wings,

But like airless things they dropped.

We tried to dig for earthworms,

But the drought had gone too deep,

And we closed up all the storybooks,

left Brementown Musicians fast asleep.

An ice-cream truck came rolling by,

But it played a funeral dirge.

We would've chased it as in days of old,

But no one felt the urge.

And the celebration evaporated

Like a rain puddle on a summer day

Because the leader of the celebration

Had gone away.

"Nanny!" all the children cried, young

And old and young at heart,

"Where's Nanny at? Where's Nanny at?"

Somewhere where we cannot see

A new celebration has begun,

And firecrackers are bursting in multi-

Colored crescendos bigger than the sun.

Balloons the size of supernovas

Are exploding one by one

To herald a new celebration

That has just begun.

Children hunt for pearls of great price,

Their baskets overflowing,

And the lanterns on the Story Tree

With an inner light are glowing.

And the celebrants all giddy-faced

Are washed of every stain

As they see the harvest coming in

From the seeds they sowed in pain.

Overhead a host of seraphim
Dart and dive like kites and planes,
In notes too high for human ears
Singing "Holy! Holy! Our Lord reigns!"

And the noisemaker is a trumpet blasted
By an angel from on high,
And to a brand new celebration
All the hosts of Heaven fly.

The newest guest hands sparklers out
To the angels each and all,
And the stars of a thousand heavens pale
When they light that heavenly hall.

The Master of the celebration
Is turning water into wine,
And a feast to rival any Christmas table
Is spread out for the guests to dine.

And the Host of this celebration is
The spirit at the heart of Holiday--
Born on Christmas day, rose on Easter day,
The King on Halloween to whom
Frightened children pray,
Bestowing hope for new beginnings every
New Year's Day, every wedding day,
Every birthday, even
Every funeral day.

We might strain to listen with other ears
And for a glorious moment might fainlty hear
Familiar laughter from a distant shore
Unclouded by pain, or loss, or fear.

Where's Nanny at?

She, the guest of honor at that celebration
We can imagine but not yet see,
Is a holiday-keeper after God's own heart
Who is finally Home, finally Whole, finally
Free.

As a longtime observer of (and sometime-participator in) pop culture, I am proposing a controversial theory based on intriguing evidence.

I am a poet, a sensitive soul, a bit of a romantic. Had I previously been asked whether one should trust the heart or the head, I would’ve invariably favored the heart.

 

Today, three-and-a-half decades into my life, I will defend the head.

 

My shift in loyalties comes from experience. Too often my privileging of emotion over reason has led to folly and heartbreak in religion, relationships, politics, finances—in short, virtually every sphere of life. I’ll provide examples from the first two; they should be sufficient to support my thesis.

 

When I was a high-school freshman, I had a religious experience at a retreat up in the Arizona pines. I “gave my life to Christ.” It was an emotional conversion; with a leap of faith I resolved to believe. I still think I had a spiritual experience, an encounter with the Numinous, there among the ponderosas. However, it occurred within the context of a charismatic church; my heart had drawn me in among the most fanatical sort of fundamentalist evangelicals. Immediately I was taught to believe that their brand of religious experience was the only genuine kind, and that their path—their set of doctrines and dogmas—was the only way to it. So I adopted many regrettable prejudices, and my heart enlisted my head to justify them.

 

Thus it was that an honors student with a formidable IQ found himself arguing that evolution was a hoax perpetrated by atheists, that homosexuals were an abomination, that anyone who did not follow a specific formula—reciting words like “I am a sinner. Jesus, you died for my sins. Please forgive me”—was destined for Hell.

 

Religious mania led to another heart blunder. When I was twenty-one, I married an eighteen-year-old girl who felt God had told her she was supposed to marry me. Feeling no “checks in my spirit,” I let my heart acquiesce. So began a marriage that lurched and sputtered along for nearly seven years. She was the first to use her head. She left the church, left me, and joined the Army.

 

Within three months of her departure, I—now twenty-eight—met another eighteen-year-old and soon fell madly in love. It was a rebound relationship, surely—the very epitome of following heart over head. She was a troubled soul living in a foster home; she had recently tried to commit suicide. My heart was perhaps also swayed by the chivalrous notion that I could save her, be her knight in shining armor. All our friends, family, and colleagues clearly saw it was a relationship that could not last, their perspectives unclouded by the irrational beatings of lovers’ hearts. Smitten, I proposed to her not six months after we’d met.

 

She was the first to come to her senses. She called the wedding off and left me on a cold, bleak, January-in-Minnesota day. I watched her walk away across the snow-blanketed lawn, then went to my bed, wept into my pillow, and finally learned not to trust my heart.

 

The heart’s passion can be a great asset when applied to an endeavor the head has reasoned through. But reason must first scout out unknown territory. Until then, the heart, like a hound, should heel obediently at the foot of intellect. If the heart assumes the lead, it will dash blindly onto the strongest emotional scent, pulling the head along to rationalize the most dubious convictions. Left to run wild, the hound will tear into garbage like it had found treasure; it will stick its nose into badgers’ holes; it will come back stinking to high heaven after a run-in with a skunk. 

 

Seven years of college, culminating in an M.A., disavowed me of the narrow-minded stances my head had uneasily adopted, deluded by oaths my heart had taken. Study in the sciences showed me the absurdity of denying evolution. Making friends with people who happened to be homosexual demonstrated that there was nothing abominable about them. Now that my head is the first and final arbiter, I have an outlook less prone to privilege or prejudice. I met a woman my age—strong, independent, who did not need “saving.” My head, duly assured over time that we were a good match, only then set loose the heart: “Okay, boy, you can love her.”

 

You see, I have not banished or forsaken the heart. I have put it in its proper, subservient place, and that has made all the difference.