On Art and Writing

And the title of this website...

By Walker Larson

Author's note: The following is adapted from the introduction to the author's creative Master's thesis, which was a collection of short stories. The writer dislikes analyzing his own writing style and posing as a writer skilled enough that readers would care about his influences, but it was a requirement for graduation, and the article is presented here primarily for its exploration of the craft of writing and the artistic process, as well as its connection to the title of this website.

“And with this insight he also showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand. It seemed to me as round as a ball. I gazed at it and thought, ‘What can this be?’ The answer came thus, ‘It is everything that is made.’ I marveled how this could be, for it was so small it seemed it might fall suddenly into nothingness.”

--Julian of Norwich

I. The Hazelnut

I can find no better concise image to represent my approach to writing than the quotation above, drawn from Chapter V of del Mastro’s translation of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love (67). Julian of Norwich (b. 1342, d. 1416) was a medieval mystic and writer who claimed that she received sixteen “showings” from God, which she wrote down, and the passage above gives us a foothold in the understanding of writing itself. Writing is the act of finding the whole world in a single hazelnut, discovering the cosmic and universal in the everyday, especially the everyday objects of the natural world. The writer takes the particular, the ordinary, and represents it to the reader in a new way so that the reader may remember that it isn’t ordinary at all, that it is full of broader significance. The writer takes some key aspect of the human experience and condenses it, compresses it into a moment, a scene, a story. As Flannery O’Connor puts it, “The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene” (77). Julian of Norwich also observes that this whole world hangs by a thin thread, dangling over nothingness, which is an awareness that can inform the writer’s creative work. I know it informs mine. By reminding the reader of this miracle, the writer helps them to see themselves and their surroundings—even the universe—anew, and perhaps treasure them again.

II. Influences from Life

I began writing as a child because, like most kids, I was obsessed with imitation. For that reason, some critical influences on my writing, insofar as they made me begin to write, were the fantasy novels of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Lloyd Alexander. I loved these stories, and so I wished to imitate them. The first long work I can remember completing was a story called The Jewll (yes, spelled like that because I had a very poor grasp of spelling), and it was basically a copy of The Lord of the Rings with a jewel instead of a ring (and 900 pages shorter). My book began, “in a small town Ther was a Hobet with the Nam of Roben.” Tolkien’s trilogy was a family favorite. In particular, my father and my older sister, both of whom I looked up to, loved the books, and the work achieved an almost sacred place in our family life. I grew up in a family culture that valued art and literature (I was named after Walker Percy, after all). My father is a writer and a musician, and my mother encouraged us kids to read and to listen to audiobooks (the latter, I believe, helped me to gain an ear for the rhythm of the language). It was natural that I should be drawn to writing; it was in the air I breathed. My father’s influence on my writing was and is so significant that it will require more detailed treatment later, but for the moment it’s enough to say that he helped foster an atmosphere of artistic and literary appreciation when I was young. Writing came easily to me. I did it for fun. I enjoyed inventing adventures like the ones I read in books.

Another significant influence on my work is place. I am profoundly affected by place and geography. For me, memory is very often rooted in the physical, so that when I visit a place, its mood and tone is significantly affected by the memories I associate with it. Further, I love natural landscapes, in particular the landscapes of my home region, southeast Minnesota and west-central Wisconsin. The reader will find that most of my stories take place in this region. Like David at the end of “The Tomato,” I believe in the importance of being rooted in place, of having a home that can become an heirloom. I suppose I have been influenced by the thought of Wendell Berry on this point. Modern people are so many wanderers. Whatever the cause, I find that my local geography is a constant inspiration to me. I am captivated especially by the bluffs in this region—they always seem to be great reservoirs of beauty and secret meaning and the perfect backdrop—literally—for fiction.

Finally, I was raised Catholic, and in the realm of non-literary influences on fiction writing, my faith is more significant than any other. In order to explain why, I must say a few words about my view of art. Art seeks to apprehend reality, but more than this, to help others apprehend it, to help others see it anew. Great art communicates to the observer the beauty of creation and the grandeur and tragedy of the human condition. By presenting the familiar in a new or unfamiliar way, the artist, with his or her keen vision, is able to show the observer something the observer would not notice otherwise, or that he or she had forgotten. Philosopher Josef Pieper describes it this way in his book, Only the Lover Sings:

Anybody can ponder human deeds and happenings and thus gaze into the unfathomable depths of destiny and history; anybody can get absorbed in the contemplation of a rose or human face and thus touch the mystery of creation; everybody, therefore, participates in the quest that has stirred the minds of the great philosophers since the beginning. We see still another form of such activity in the creation of the artist, who does not so much aim at presenting copies of reality as rather making visible and tangible in speech, sound, color, and stone the archetypical essences of all things as he was privileged to perceive them…all forms of “liberal” activities, above all in the area of the arts, are essentially of a festive nature as long as they contain at least some remote echo of that fundamental attitude of acceptance [of the universe]. (24, 26)

The artist is not inventing a mere fantasy, not subverting reality. He or she is pulling away the veil, so to speak, to reveal something true about reality. In Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy observes the following about writing. “But what is a good writer up to when he’s writing a book that will give the reader pleasure? First of all, he's telling the truth. Bad books always lie. They lie most of all about the human condition” (364) or again as O’Connor puts it in “The Nature and Aim of Fiction”: “The kind of vision the fiction writer needs to have…is the kind of vision that is able to see different levels of reality in one image or situation” (72). I would add that good books do not just state truth and describe reality, they revisit it, investigate it, celebrate it. In this attempt, of course, the writer runs a risk of creating dull platitudes, banal, familiar, or predictable fiction. As Charles Baxter writes, “It is not always enough simply to tell a truth in art, especially if the truth has no dramatic tension or has lost its emotional force. The truth can get dull (37).” However, the solution is not to abandon the truth in favor of lies or “originality,” or shock value, which is the path of the avant-garde, a movement Baxter rightly criticizes. As he puts it, “The tradition of novelty, of ongoing necessary novelty has created permanent confusion in this century” (40). No, rather, the truth must be sought out, hunted, trailed, like a wild—but very real—animal. The writer must cast it in mystery, rediscover its excitement, always remembering the distinction that the priest makes in “Pterosaur,” that the presence of a mystery is not a denial of truth, it is not a fantasy. Concealment doesn’t mean non-existence. The purpose of asking questions is to find answers, but they must be engaging questions. In order to avoid over-familiarity, the truth must be presented in a new way. The writer must open up old and misplaced truths. As Baxter has it, “The truth that writers are after may be dramatic only if it has been forgotten first” (38). The element of the forgotten is key here.

The artist must remind. G.K. Chesterton says in his book Orthodoxy,

All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched (58).

I think he is right. But it is so easy to forget that he is right. The vocation of the artist, as I see it, then, is to help those around him or her to realize—or better, to remember what they already knew—that water is magic, and that this is not just a quaint notion, but a living, dangerous truth. Art, is above all, an exploration, a revisiting, a celebration.

Now to return to the question of faith. Since I was six years old, I have attended exclusively the traditional Latin Mass, an ancient rite steeped in the intellectual, theological, and artistic heritage of the West, and it has helped to form my writing. As Josef Pieper argues, Divine Worship is the soul and spring of culture (and therefore art). In another work, Leisure the Basis of Culture, Pieper tells us that “one of the foundations of Western culture is leisure,” the soul of which is celebration. He continues:

But if celebration is the core of leisure, then leisure can only be made possible and justifiable on the same basis as the celebration of a festival. That basis is divine worship . . . The meaning of celebration, we have said, is man’s affirmation of the universe and his experiencing the world in an aspect other than its everyday one. Now we cannot conceive a more intense affirmation of the world than “praise of God”, praise of the Creator of this very world. (65)

While it is difficult to summarize an argument that Pieper spends 74 pages developing, it is enough to say that art and culture have their source in celebration, in which we remember and enjoy what we often overlook, and celebration has its source in worship. Indeed, the word “culture” derives from the Latin cultura, meaning “cultivation, tillage, piece of cultivated land, care bestowed on plants” through the French culture, meaning “action of cultivating land, plants, etc., husbandry” and also “formation, training” and “worship or cult of someone or something” (Oxford English Dictionary). Dr. Anthony Esolen, in his book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, hints at the significance of this etymological root: “For the role of religion in human life is not little. It is essential: without it, there is no culture at all, because culture is a cultivation of the things that a people considers most sacred” (68). Even in ancient times, pagans would offer sacrifices to gods in gratitude for good harvests—for successful cultivation. According to Barbara Kowalzig and many other scholars, the art form of drama originally developed out of ritual, specifically Greek choral processions honoring the god Dionysus (222). Thus the link between agriculture, religion, culture, and art is profound and ancient.

So my experience of traditional Catholicism, especially the liturgy, has inspired and given life to my art in three distinct ways. First, as Pieper describes above, art for me is an affirmation, a celebration of the universe in the spirit of a festival, and the traditional Catholic liturgy is the festival par excellence in that it affirms the universe and its Creator, and gives back to Him. The celebration of the Mass week after week is a constant reminder to me of the need to render honor to God through sacrifice and of the link between Divine Worship, celebration, and culture. Second, the Mass itself is a ceremony resplendent with beauty, and one that enshrines and elevates language. It has therefore contributed to the development of my aesthetic sensibility and my appreciation of beauty, including linguistic beauty. Finally, my Catholic faith provides me with themes and ideas to explore in fiction, as the reader will discover within this collection.

III. Influences from Literature

I think no writer has influenced me more than my father, Michael Larson. As long as I can remember, he has composed humorous, thoughtful, exquisite, and haunting stories and poems. I grew up with them. His works deal compassionately with characters facing problems of dislocation, malaise, spiritual thirsting, and mundanity, mixed with the most surprising elements of the mystical or supernatural. But, unlike so many modern stories, they always point to some flicker of hope, to some deeper truth almost grasped. Many of his lyric passages simply sing. They stir the heart and feel like a revelation completely organic and un-manufactured, where an unnamed light has suddenly split the sky, on the verge of visionary. Since his work is not extremely well known, let me present a few examples, the first from a story called “The Piano Room”:

My elbows on the dead keys, I hold my head in my hands. Out of the corner of my eye, through a door further in, I can see the steady flickering of a lone prayer candle. Although I am the one who lit it, the flame persists now with its own meaning. The distance between us is great, but it feels like nothing, and there is a burning in my heart. And in my ears there is the echo still of the quarter I dropped in the donation box. I should have known. I should have recognized by now the shapes love always takes: the small humble hands, the shyness in the eyes, the persistent stirring underneath the sweetly falling dark. I look out the window nearest me and watch the evening trees lose their detail as they recede imperceptibly into the memory of their form. The earth’s longing has become palpable. And here among these particles of dusk, deep in the secret kingdom, a blanket made of peace settles over me. (10)

As is so often the case in my father’s writing, the narrator’s attitude is one of searching, of trying to understand. It is even a voice of yearning. And my father’s work almost always points toward or hints at the possibility of answers, of satisfaction, the lifting of a veil. Words and phrases such as “a door further in,” “longing,” “secret kingdom,” “persistent stirring underneath,” “meaning,” and “blanket of peace,” as we see in this example, are quite emblematic of the spirit that pervades his oeuvre. Larson’s stories are always the journey of a relatable, often broken character through dimness in search of light, and so often they contain the excitement of a momentary flash. That’s the kind of writing that inspires me.

His poetry is equally well-crafted and soul-stirring. Here is a sonnet from the sonnet-redouble poem “Mysteria.”

Across the starry desert sky unseen

The far wind brought her light shaped like a man.

He spoke to her as if she were a queen,

As if she had been born to understand:

“Your world is weaving on a broken loom.

Your children wear the garments of despair.

A king is ever falling to his tomb

Where he will sew the stitches of repair.

To tell you this I have been sent by him

Whom you will see before the others do.

His body will ascend the highest limb

Of time; from there he will descend to you

Again. His heart is always burning down

In stars that form the halo of your crown.

One feels that this poem is speaking of something both ancient and eternally new, something primeval, both lovely and terrible, and of dire importance. There is both suffering and hope here. “Despair” is balanced with “repair,” “down” with “crown.” Once again, Larson manages to combine these cataclysmic and archetypal images with personal, intimate language by utilizing the second-person point of view. The far and the near converge, the new and the old melt into an intense present where the words of the speaker addressed to the unnamed “you” seem to resonate with great power and urgency. This blending of the modern with the old, the intimate with the cosmic is not an easy quality to achieve, and I admire and seek to imitate it in my own work.

I am, no doubt, biased, but it’s passages such as these that have always spoken to me, touched something inside of me, ignited longing. After all, we are all caught between the personal and the cosmic, and that is what kindles desire within us. And it is that quality above all that I have admired and imitated in my father’s writing. As my wife once observed, all art should inspire longing. My father’s work does this supremely well.

In addition to providing me with models of excellent storytelling and wordsmithing, my father has always encouraged me in my literary pursuits. He reads my work, usually compliments it more than it deserves, and makes suggestions for improvements. He urges me to submit things for publication. He even edited my first novel. I owe him a great deal.

I mentioned J.R.R. Tolkien above as an early inspiration, but I want to treat of him here from a more technical standpoint.

As a kid, I was attracted to Tolkien’s work because of the magic and adventure contained in his stories, and they even led me to scribble something of my own, but now I have come to appreciate his work for qualities other than its excitement. In particular, Tolkien has a gift for descriptive language. He paints scenes—especially landscapes—with great detail and the sensitivity of a poet or a painter. Often he is able to create images of mythic proportions using only his words. And he uses these timeless mythological elements to address problems of a modern nature. As Randel Helms describes, “Only slowly as he worked and reworked The Hobbit in the 1930s, and as he rethought the contemporary meanings and values of mythological literature…did Tolkien grasp that what he had discovered…was a means of…exploring and suggesting answers to some of the most profound questions and problems of the mid-twentieth century” (xi). I think—I hope—that in a very small and subtle way, I have learned from Tolkien about the possibility of using mythological images to explore contemporary issues. My story “Pterosaur” is perhaps an example of this.

As a philologist, Tolkien had a deep love for words, and this translated to his fiction, in which one has the sense that the writer has crafted every sentence carefully, with great patience and precision, so that even long passages of description or exposition have been well-wrought.

Twentieth century British writers such as Tolkien and Lewis became the standard for me; for a while, I innocently assumed that everyone told stories using detailed description, elevated diction, and British-isms. I know better now, but certain of those features—particularly the emphasis on description—have remained with me, and I think they have served me well. I have tried to tone down, and sometimes completely excise, the flowery, twentieth-century language from my work, sometimes without success. But in some cases I have allowed it free reign because it is a part of my style and because some of my narrators just talk that way. More recent stories, such as “Secrets Deep in the Ground,” have a more modern flair, tend toward simpler language that springs genuinely from the narrator without the filtering of my sometimes over-wrought voice. My interest in simpler diction was enhanced through reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It was a revelation to me. His prose (not to mention his themes) were startling and profound: stark, austere, simple, and exquisite. As Alan Warner writes in his review of the book for The Guardian, “[W]hat propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description.” Though my style will never be much like his, I appreciate it, and he taught me the power of the well-placed fragment and carved language, offering a new interpretation on Hemingway-school directness and minimalism. And from a thematic standpoint, I agree with Lydia Cooper’s analysis that the novel contains “metaphor for that which is capable of healing a world terribly in need of spiritual or moral renewal” (219).

I have leapt from Tolkien to McCarthy in almost a single breath. I borrow a method of characterization from one writer, a turn of phrase from another, a style of ending from a third. It is difficult to trace all of this because I have been inspired by so many little gems from so many various writers. James Galvin’s The Meadow, for instance—I’m sure that a character like Herb Baxter originated from the atmosphere of Galvin’s superb novel, so filled with unusual characters set against a backdrop—no, not a backdrop—growing up from, steeped in, a natural environment, colossal, intimate, dangerous, bountiful. Or again, Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory bewitched me with the beauty of its language and the untampered humanity of its characters. Michael O’Brien—arguably the best living Catholic novelist—astounded me with the simplicity, insight, anguish, and deep spirituality of his novels Island of the World and Plague Journal. The former book is over 1,000 pages, but feels much shorter; one drinks it in like a refreshing glass of water. And of course no Catholic writer can fail to mention the work of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor and I are on a different wavelength with regard to the style and genre of our fiction. Nevertheless, I identify strongly with her overall philosophy of art—specifically “Catholic” art—especially as articulated in her excellent essays such as “Novelist and Believer” and “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers,” where she identifies that the Catholic artist is not concerned with sermonizing—not directly, at least—but with representing reality, including sin and darkness, in light of the Catholic faith (171-72). Gerard Manly Hopkins roused my soul with the euphonic chaos of his language, his zest for being, and his deep, luxuriant contentedness in the overflowing plenteousness of nature. I have an abiding love for alliteration that I learned in part from him. Of course, Hopkins has his darker side, as we see in the Terrible Sonnets. But this is perhaps not surprising in light of Ignatian and St. John of the Cross spirituality in which a “dark night of the soul” is a central characteristic, as Vincent Hanley has noted. And there is Hemingway, of course. Though I have not adopted his minimalist style with the full enthusiasm of our current school of thought about fiction, I nevertheless owe a debt to his cold, clear, oblique prose, just as everyone else does. Shakespeare I have loved, though to call him an influence seems almost disrespectful. My reading and education have expanded my horizons and allowed me to plunder from many more writers even than the ones listed here since it has afforded me the opportunity to read more widely.

Most of the figures listed above are twentieth century authors. I can’t identify as many contemporary writers who I can call substantial influences, but at the same time a writer is always learning, and I feel that many of the present-day writers I have encountered in recent years have taught me much. Zadie Smith showed me how satisfying and thought-provoking an inconclusive ending can be. Her story “The Embassy of Cambodia” hints, through Fatou’s strength of character and ways of dealing with hardship, the optimistic possibilities of the its ending, and the remembrance of Cambodia and Rwanda’s resilience in the face of mass violence, that no matter how dismal the score, there is always the possibility of turning the smash of evil into the floating arc of hope. The indefiniteness of the ending mirrors the pattern of life. Kazuo Ishiguro has shown me how immense psychological, emotional, and societal complexity can be communicated through simple language and everyday, seemingly trivial occurrences. In Never Let Me Go, he also showed me how science fiction elements can seamlessly blend with literary fiction so that the fantastic elements can serve to highlight the drama and artistic vision, rather than the other way around. I attempted something similar in my novel The Skystillers, and so it was informative to see how Ishiguro tackles a like problem. Jhumpa Lahiri incorporates her background as an immigrant into her fiction without allowing it to overcome the story itself, and she understands the drama inherent in each person’s life, even ordinary ones. Her story “A Temporary Matter” turns a power outage and a disintegrating marriage into taut, page-turning tension, conveyed through supple prose. I aspire to imitate Lahiri in finding the heartbreak and ecstasy in the common events of life. Another writer I align with thematically is Will Weaver, especially his emphasis on place and land and inter-generational relationships. Looking back to the early 1990’s, Beryl Bainbridge demonstrated for me in The Birthday Boys the power of the story told through multiple points of view. Her ability to inhabit various consciousness with absolute believability and reveal varying perspective on the same events and characters inspired me. The reader will find a similar use of this technique in this collection’s final story, “Secrets Deep in the Ground.”

Ironically, the contemporary writer who has influenced me the most is not a writer at all. By that I mean he is first and foremost a musician, but his lyrics are of a high literary quality, so that I think it just to call him a writer as well, especially since he writes poems and stories on the side, according to William Harries Graham of The Austin Chronicle. I refer to Gregory Alan Isakov. Isakov, born in South Africa, raised in Pennsylvania, and residing in Colorado, composes indie folk music that is wistful, atmospheric, earthy. He is also a gardener, and nature and the earth are everywhere in his lyrics and sounds. The title for my story “Secrets Deep in the Ground” is actually drawn from one of his songs (“Too Far Away”) where the speaker sings, “Me, I’ve been fine. Work most of the time. Digging for secrets deep in the ground.” I am inspired by Isakov’s storytelling where he casts striking, dreamlike images through the voice of a relatable, grounded narrator. Once again, we have the intimacy of a proximate character encountering the expanse of the cosmos, looking for meaning. The result is visionary. One of my favorite examples, from “Caves”:

you go ahead there’s something i forgot walk slow and i’ll catch up let’s hear the stars do their talking

i used to love caves stumble out into that pink sky remember that bright hollow moon it showed our insides on our outsides

this town closes down the same time every day put out the smoke in your mind let’s put all these words away let’s put all these words away

Here, Isakov mixes dramatic images with the normal cadences of everyday speech. The speaker sounds like the man off the street, yet one cannot escape the impression that he is talking about profound spiritual realities. These realities are often contemplated in or funneled through nature: the bright hollow moon unveils the interior life of the speaker and whomever he is addressing (“showed our insides on our outsides”). We have the sense that hearts have been exposed, though what they showed remains unspoken. Similarly, the speaker mentions, almost casually, the talking of the stars; what the stars might say is left to our imagination, but we know that it cannot be less than earth-shaking revelations, even though it is paired with such simple statements as, “You go ahead…walk slow and I’ll catch up.” Whether or not the speaker refers to a literal cave is difficult to say, but the picture he paints of stumbling out from the dark into a suddenly lit sky, filled with wonder, is mythic or visionary in quality: the heavens open up; what came before is not to be compared with what comes after. One is reminded of Plato’s allegory of the cave, or, to bring things full circle, Tolkien’s fellowship emerging from the Mines of Moria, finally safe, yet terribly stricken and transformed with grief. Finally, Isakov recognizes the moments where, confronted with this darkly beautiful world of ours, and this cosmos full of meaning, words fail us, words are not enough. “Let’s put all these words away.” Yet somehow he is using words to communicate those things words cannot say! Now that is good writing.

Isakov and I are both deeply impressed by the natural world, its splendor and mystery. I appreciate and draw inspiration from the way in which Isakov sees the elements of the natural world—even simple things like dirt and plants—as wells of meaning and beauty. I take a leaf out of his book—or, better, from his tree—and try to use nature as a locus of mysterious meaning in my stories.

In my analysis of contemporary writers, I have found that many of them, though certainly not all, Isakov being an example, are attracted to two themes: sex and despair. While it is evident that life and fiction have a lot to do with these two themes of sex and despair, it is also evident that life and fiction have a much broader scope as well. But this pattern of hopelessness seems to be the germ of a lot of modern fiction. “Happy endings” are looked upon with scorn. Novelist Heather Sharfeddin has joined a consensus when she asserts that “instead of giving us the foundation for coping with difficult real-life problems, [happy endings] falsely solve them in our imagined worlds. They deepen our sense of discontent with real life and build false expectations.” But I am not so sure. I question whether the denial of the possibility of a solution (a solution is termed a “false expectation”) is the proper approach to a “difficult real-life problem.” Nevertheless, this is a common mentality. In “Dysfunctional Narratives,” Charles Baxter writes,

In writing workshops, this kind of writing is often the rule rather than the exception…For people with irregular employment and mounting debts and faithless partners and abusive parents, the most interesting feature of life is its unhappiness, its dull constant weight…In such a consumerist climate, the perplexed and unhappy don’t know what their lives are telling them, and they don’t feel as if they are in charge of their own existence. No action they have ever taken is half as interesting to them as the consistency of their unhappiness (10).

Baxter notes well the trials we all face. But I find writing that responds to these hardships by seeking answers and solutions and envisioning a better future to be more inspiring, more constructive than writing that does the opposite. I align with what LeeLee Goodson writes in a recent article, “Has The Happy Ending Fallen Out of Style?” She concludes, “the traditional happy ending—an ending that expresses excessive optimism—might well be unrealistic or passe, but an ending that offers even a little hope can endure” (70). Idealistic, Disney-type endings are of little use, of course, but there is still a place for hope in fiction—perhaps now more than ever. In our admittedly dark era, the truly “revolutionary” writer is the one who writes with a grounded but genuine optimism and who sees human life as more than a meaningless struggle against tragedy.

One writer who dealt extensively with the modern sense of despair is Walker Percy, and though he died in 1990, he is still a more contemporary writer than many of the others referenced in this introduction. Percy has influenced me, especially through his novel The Moviegoer, not stylistically, but through his approach to the modern world and how to write fiction about it. In particular, he brings a new approach to writing fiction with a religious or spiritual dimension without becoming platitudinal, preachy, or obvious. Paul Elie has recently described The Moviegoer as “a novel of perception and sensibility, dealing with the search for authenticity in a scripted, stylized, mediated world.” Percy was interested in how a modern person lives in and works through ordinariness, everydayness, and feelings of meaninglessness. How can characters find truth in a post-truth world? Percy’s protagonists are searchers, but often terribly handicapped, limited, living in a world that, to them, to the reader, to Percy, has become absurdly meaningless. “’The Moviegoer’ becomes atypical through its scrutiny of the typical. It takes ordinary experience—'everydayness,’ Binx calls it—and makes it the subject of fitful philosophical inquiry” (Elie). “Everydayness,” “malaise”—Binx is trying to escape these things, which have been institutionalized by a modern world that has sought to explain everything away. What Percy’s protagonists, and I believe Percy as a writer, seek is to find meaning not through some earth-shattering epiphany—which would no doubt please Baxter, who has some legitimate critiques of these—but through somehow finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Here we return to some of the themes outlined at the beginning of the essay, that the work of the artist is in part to help others rediscover the wonder and meaning that surrounds them, hidden, veiled, in the most commonplace of things. Percy fulfills this calling very well. His characters search for precisely this. Elie writes, “Nearing thirty, Binx is gripped by ‘the possibility of the search’ as if for the first time. The novel was a surprise even to its author. As he wrote it, Percy, like Binx, was forced out of himself and compelled to court, as O’Connor wrote, ‘mystery and the unexpected’ as never before.” I think Percy ties together in a more philosophical way that blending of the ordinary and the mythic that I find so inspiring in the work of my father and Gregory Alan Isakov. Reawakening ourselves to the possibility of meaning and hope, overcoming the stupor of routine, challenging the assumptions of a world that seems to believe it can explain everything away, and recognizing the mystery and grandeur echoed in the natural world—all of these I have learned in part from the writers and life experiences discussed in this introduction, and they have become goals I strive for in my writing. The idea of the unexpected, mysterious, and hopeful runs through the stories in this collection: death, family bonds and growing up, loss, heritage, the end of the world and the uncertainty of the future, forgiveness. Of course, one cannot stick a simple label or “theme” onto a story and completely explain its meaning because a story is an experience and a dream as well as a message, but the reader will find that these motifs make up at least a part of the substance of the stories within this collection.

Good stories poke through the fabric of our everyday reality and touch something beyond. That is the idea of the “alternate universe” that Robert Boswell writes on in his book The Half-Known World. As just one example, I tried to incorporate this idea at the end of “The Bunker” where the final scene is told with a different narrative distance, a different “angle of perception” or “degree of depth” to use the words of David Jauss in Alone With All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom about the Craft of Fiction (30), and the scene itself pushes the edges of what we expect and can imagine the characters doing. Curtis, the narrator, and his daughters go outside and simply lie in the grass, staring up at the sky, for no obvious reason. This is an anomaly, even within the world of the story. But even more importantly, with the mentioning of distant thunder there is a hint that the world really is about to end, that we’re on the brink of an apocalyptic vision—or at least that we could be. The “unknown” that I was trying to drive at is this sense that, in a way, we’re always living on the edge of the apocalypse. The world and the things in it are not under our control, cannot be fully understood, can be lost—like the Curtis’s wife says, “Everything is always slipping away.” And, frankly, none of us know for certain that the world isn’t going to end tomorrow. The image of Julian’s hazelnut returns with full force: this world is “so small . . . it might fall suddenly into nothingness.” The result of this realization is to make the everyday, the commonplace, sing with a new significance, become treasured once again. We see things with a new clarity and joyous appreciation when we remember that they could be lost; this occurs for Curtis, and, I hope, the reader as well. Within this framework, a small vibration in our consciousness, a passing incident—a face, a glance, a smell, a mystery—can grow in amplitude until it shakes the stars themselves. Meaning is found in the mundane, and the cosmos suddenly emerges from the commonplace.

Works Cited

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