Interview with Smoky Zeidel

Having review Smoky's book The Storyteller's Bracelet a few weeks ago, I am delighted to welcome this talented writer to the blog to answer some questions.

Who are your favourite magic realist authors and why?

I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Isabel Allende, of course. Who doesn’t? In The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende, Clara’s psychic ability—her ability to talk to spirits, her gift for curses—are as natural for her as breathing. I think the fact so many magic realism authors are from Central and South America is because that sort of thing isn’t looked at as “crazy” in those cultures. They are considered gifts. 

Jose Saramago is another favorite. He’s from Portugal, and his Death With Interruptions is one of the finest (if toughest) books I’ve ever read. You actually fall in love with Death by the end of the book, but I don’t want to put any spoilers here, so I won’t say any more than that.

I hope Helene Wecker follows up The Golum and the Jinni with another magic realism book, because that—apparently her debut novel—was nothing short of brilliant. And I guess I should mention Haruki Murikami. I’m not as big of fan of his as some readers are, but I thought The Strange Library was one of the most fun books I read last year.

What is your all-time favourite magic realist book?

That’s a tough question. I have so many favorites, including those I mentioned already. But if I was stuck on a desert isle and could have only one magic realism book with me, it would be F.G. Hagenbeck’s The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo. Kahlo is my favorite artist, and I read everything I can get my hands on about her. This book absolutely blew me away. I was so enchanted with the ending, I had to go back and re-read it from the beginning so I could look for clues that lead to his ending.

Why do you write magic realism?

 I look at the world as a magical place. Perhaps it’s my more animistic way of looking at nature and life that is responsible, but I see magic everywhere I go. I talk to the trees, the rivers, the rocks, the desert, and they talk back. Oh, not in words, per se, but there is definitely a connection in my mind. My husband and I love to collect rocks, but I never take one without asking its permission. Sometimes, the rock is happy to be pocketed. Other times, I get the distinct impression I should leave it where it is, and I do. So, for me, it is natural to write magic realism, because, to me, magic realism is just what is.

Can you give us your definition of magic realism?  

I define magic realism as magic or supernatural occurrences happening in what otherwise is a “normal” setting and time. Books like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz are fantasy, because, for the most part, the story takes place in another world that does not exist. Same with the Harry Potter books. In both, part of the story is real: Dorothy’s life in Kansas, and Harry’s life with the Dursleys are normal settings with nothing supernatural about them, but most of those books take place in an alternate, very magical setting. But a book like House of the Spirits has Clara talking to spirits who come at her beck and call. While that has an element of fantasy to it, it’s magic realism, because not all the characters can do what she can do, yet those who know of her skills don’t question it at all. It’s part of their everyday existence.

Tell us about your latest magic realist book? 

My novel, The Cabin, was just released by Thomas-Jacob Publishing. In it, James-Cyrus Hoffmann has just inherited his grandfather’s farm, and with it a mysterious cabin deep in the woods on Hoffmann mountain, a cabin he has dreamed about since childhood. When James-Cyrus enters the cabin, he is vaulted back through time to the Civil War era, where he meets, Elizabeth, the brave young woman who lives there, and Malachi, a runaway slave. James-Cyrus’s neighbor, Cora, knows all too well the tragic history of the cabin. When James-Cyrus tells Cora about Elizabeth, Malachi, and his fantastic vault back through time, the two devise a plant to change the past and right a wrong that has haunted the Hoffmann family for generations.

While that might sound more fantasy than magic realism, it isn’t. While the magic in the book takes the characters by surprise at first, they don’t question it is happening, at least, not for long. The story is historically accurate as far as the setting and storyline about the Underground Railroad and the Civil War are concerned. The story itself was inspired by events that took place in my own family, events that were very much of this world.

The Cabin is available in print and in Kindle editions, as is my other magic realism novel, The Storyteller’s Bracelet.

Interview with Stephen Weinstock

I was due to review Stephen Weinstock's novel this week. However due to ill health I have had put that review off until later this year, so in the meantime I invited Stephen to be interviewed instead.

Welcome Stephen to the Magic Realism blog

Thank you, Zoe. I’m so pleased to be invited to be interviewed for the Magic Realism blog.  It’s a wonderful site; I loved participating in the bloghop this summer, and have enjoyed reading articles for a couple years.  I’m happy to help expand the interview section and hope other like-minded Magic Realism authors will step up and discuss their work.

Who are your favourite magic realist authors and why?

I would break this down into a few categories.  There were early influences of mine, before I even knew there was Magic Realism.  John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, a plain university coming-of-age novel where the main character is half-boy, half-goat, no questions asked, was a delight to read in college.  Discovering that someone like Borges could make fiction out of the wildest of ideas was a liberation.  And Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, which I might call surrealism before MR, has a quality that transcends it all: it’s the only work of fiction I have ever read that had me painfully, speechlessly, and ecstatically unable to continue reading because I was laughing so hard.

Another genre I love is the newly minted Visionary Fiction, and I feel there is a Venn diagram connection between many works in the two genres.  Castaneda’s work is a great example, and he started me off understanding the possibility of melding storytelling and higher, esoteric truths.

Finally, there is a set of favorites that represent the Magic Realism most akin to my series, 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles.  In the series, a qaraq, a group of linked souls who have lived through 1001 lifetimes, meet up in the present and recall their past life stories, a la Scheherazade in The Thousand and One Nights.  Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife, with its magical premise and subsequent non-linear narrative in time, was a great inspiration to my laying out a karmic history spanning universes in a complex, non-linear fashion.  Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children affirmed a modern use of The Thousand and One Nights as fodder for contemporary magic.  And Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, sits on the nightstand, knowing it will fit in with where my brain is at.

What is your all-time favourite magic realist book?

But my greatest influence is Italo Calvino, and my absolute favorite book is his Cosmicomics, which follows the main character Qfwfq through his incarnations in the universe.  Each story is based on a scientific premise, the ‘realism,’ and is anthropomorphized, its ‘magic.’  So we learn what the universe was like when everything was at a single point, before the Big Bang, and no one could keep a secret.  Or follow the last dinosaur in a time when everyone has forgotten who they were.  It’s really all magical, because the science is so wondrous.  Also, technically speaking, Calvino is part of the French Oulipo school, all about mathematical games, hidden constraints, and word puzzles, but Calvino feels more Magic Realism to me.  Since every chapter of my book has someone recall a past life, they are often about inanimate objects or concepts, so I constantly pirate Calvino’s anthropomorphic literary technique.

Can you give us your definition of magic realism? 

MR is an oxymoron, and its oxymoronic quality is its simplest pleasure and defining quality.  When Marquez started things out with that image of the father unable to recall the names of things, and so every object in the house had a label, he opened up this clash of bizarre and ordinary.  What I love about the clash is that it makes you doubt what’s real and what’s magical.  Is the father’s condition a true psychological state worthy of Oliver Sacks, and so the whole world is realistic?  Or are those banal little signs on furniture and knickknacks enough to decorate a magical location? 

I also love how a basic unrealistic premise, like Gregor Samsa waking up as a cockroach, is all you need.  The author just accepts it as a given (as will the reader), and then the rest is the realistic consequences of that magical premise.  In my series, I assume the soul is immortal and that we live incarnation after incarnation.  If a group of people were aware in one lifetime of all their interconnected lifetimes, what would that do to them?  How would they assemble their history?  How would it change them in their present day ‘realistic’ world?  If you and I discovered we fought incessantly as atomic particles in the young, expanding universe, what would happen to our relationship as a therapist and patient in this life?

Tell us about your latest magic realist book?

The first book in my 1001 series is The Qaraq, the term for the group of linked souls who have shared lifetime after lifetime, and find themselves in suburban New Jersey, with an uncanny memory of their history together.  The suburban setting is the realistic backdrop humorously rubbing up against the magical premise of their immortality.  They wander into trance state recalling a past life story at children’s birthday parties, shopping at the mall, or in the supermarket freezer section (remembering an Ice Age narrative about a strangler ficus).

In the second book, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, due out soon, the group loses their ability to recall the past life tales.  This crisis leads them through a series of revelations about how everyday illusion, the Hindu concept of Maya, blocks their extraordinary visions of higher truth.  They literally grapple with Realism in order to get the Magic back.  The consequences of this struggle are rifts and jealousies and conspiracies within the qaraq.  Given its theme of endangered consciousness, The Qaraq and the Maya Factor is an example of the crossover between Magic Realism and Visionary Fiction.

Why do you write magic realism?

In many fantasy and sci-fi books, the key to the immortality of the soul is often revealed dramatically at the climax of the narrative.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone builds up the mystery forever, which is why we love it, and then reveals the higher truth in the final pages.  I like the oxymoronic quality of Magic Realism, the casual assumption from Page One that Gregor is a roach, for it enabled me to accept reincarnation and immortality without any fuss (well, a little in Part One of The Qaraq), and then carry on into all the myriad psychological and structural consequences of the assumption.  What if you knew you were immortal, but still had to get the kids to school?  What if you remembered you and your friends’ past lives, even if it meant realizing you had been the sibling of the person you were hitting on at the pub?  Would you go mad?

I am also a structure junkie, my main motivation for creating the 1001 series, and this obsession gets back to Magic Realism ultimately.  Going back to Calvino and the Oulipo, I love the idea that there are hidden structures or constraints that I have to incorporate in each chapter.  There will be 1001 chapters in the series, each with a past life story someone recalls.  Within each of these tales, there is a reference to one of the 1001 Nights from that epic.  This gets complicated once you understand the history and structure and complexity of The Thousand and One Nights, but suffice it to say that I have to slip in a magic carpet or a dreaded serpent and make it work organically within the narrative. 

There are eleven of these hidden structures woven into the books.  Before you call my neighborhood mental health clinic, know that I actually start each chapter by considering these constraints, and they actually help me chart out and provide material for the chapter.  But I’ve always loved arcane, puzzle-like forms buried within books, music, or architecture, and I believe this is part of what makes the 1001 series Magic Realism.  That blurring of lines between the unreal and the real in this genre corresponds to the blurring of lines between what lies on the surface of the text and what lies beneath.  In The Qaraq and the Maya Factor, it’s about how everyday reality blurs the hidden ways of the world, but also how those hidden truths serve our everyday lives.  That’s the fun and the truth of Magic Realism to me.

BIO

In his past life before writing 1001, The Reincarnation Chronicles, Stephen Weinstock created music for theater companies, choreographers, and dance studios (Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham).  He has worked as a musician/teacher at UC Berkeley, Princeton, Juilliard, NYU, and the ‘Fame’ school. For years he had the idea of a novel puzzling out an intricate past life history between a group of souls, but only with the epiphany of using the ancient frame tale structures of The Thousand and One Nights did he decide to jump fields.  By day he still bring dancers to ecstasy with his improvisations, but at night he enters the world of metempsychosis, time-honored storytelling, and worlds ranging from historical fiction to romantic fantasy.

See more of Stephen’s work, and the 1001 series, on his website. http://www.qaraqbooks.com

Join the free email service 1001/Qaraqbooks News, and find out when The Qaraq and the Maya Factor comes out, including a free giveaway: http://www.qaraqbooks.com/subscribe

Interview with Scott Wilbanks

Next week I will be reviewing The Lemoncholy Life of Annie Aster but this week I am interviewing the book's author Scott Wilbanks.

1. Who are your favourite magic realist authors and why?

Thanks for interviewing me, Zoe.  And try not to chuckle too hard at my responses. (Eye rolls are optional.)

Many will think I’m off my rocker for including him on the magical realism shelf, but A.A. Milne would have to be at the top of my list, primarily because his protagonist embodies our greatest virtue—humanity—and yet he is not human. He’s a teddy bear, a living, breathing instructional guide who teaches us how to live in the present with his philosophy of innocence. And while he lacks a beating heart, he is the more alive than anyone I know.

2. What is your all-time favourite magic realist book?

And that would be The Complete Tales of Winnie-The-Pooh, not only for the reason I listed above, but because—for me, at least—it is a time-travel portal.  (And you know how I love time-travel portals.) I don’t merely read the book, I dream it.  

And when I dream, I relive the charms of my childhood. Of those books I’ve read with an adult audience in mind, I’d have to say Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus has come the closest to duplicating the wakeful dream state I experienced with Winnie The Pooh. I didn’t even bother to close the book cover when I’d finished it, and simply flipped back to the first page to start all over again.

3. Can you give us your definition of magic realism?

I learned from the onset that defining magical realism is a slippery endeavor. Everyone seems to have an opinion, and no two are alike. I’m not even sure it can be defined—concretely, anyway.  If forced, I’d simply say that it involves any artistic enterprise in which fantastical elements seep into an otherwise realistic world. 

And while I may have trouble defining it, I do have a tried-and-true barometer. It’s anything within the arts containing fantastical elements that sneaks under my mom’s radar. I’m not kidding.

She’s a realist to the core who doesn’t simply dislike fantasy, she has a deep-down-in-the-bones loathing for it. She wants the world within any literature she reads to be rational, and her range is… narrow. If a novel containing any sort of fantastical element passes her sniff test, it’ll be magically realistic.

4. Why do you write magical realism?

Strangely enough, it all goes back to Tolkien. He’s the reason I became a book-a-day nerd by the age of fourteen—all of it sci fi and fantasy—while simultaneously fuelling my outside-the-lines imagination.

It was inevitable, then, that fantasy would inevitably splatter all over the page when I decided to try my hand at writing. It presented a challenge, however. I wanted my mom to read whatever it was that I wrote so I decided to infuse the magic in a world with trees and people and sounds she’d understand.

5. Tell us about your latest magic realist book?

My current work-in-progress recounts the misadventures of a young, Southern man who is burdened with the world’s only confirmed case of chronic, incurable naiveté—the result of a curious subtype of ADD and a lightning strike at the age of four.  A veritable magnet for con artists, he is reduced to becoming a shut in and a night owl.

Thank you, Scott.

Scott's online/social media links are:

Website: scottbwilbanks.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scott.wilbanks.7

Twitter: @scottbwilbanks

 

Interview with Dennis Vickers

This is a new development for this blog: interviews with writers of magic realism. First up is Dennis Vickers, whose book Mikawadizi Storms I reviewed a few months ago. Any other authors interested in doing an interview should check out the interview tab above. 

Welcome, Dennis. Before we start, here's a bit of introduction: Dennis is a member of the Magic Realism Books Facebook Group. He has quite a few books to his name, check out his Amazon Author page for more info.

1. Who are your favourite magic realist authors and why?

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude was the first Magical Realism book I read. I found the story charming, but didn’t think much about why until later. I also enjoy Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie.

2. What is your all-time favourite magic realist book?

Surprisingly (given Laura Esquivel isn’t among the authors I listed above) I thought Like Water for Chocolate was a marvelous story. I especially like how Esquivel infuses the magic into the characters. It’ s probably the MR book I think about most and the one I’ll most likely reread one day.

3. Why do you write magic realism?

The real world is filled with events that are beautiful or delightful in a way that seems removed from everyday life (one definition of magical), but we often don’t notice. Sometimes twisting or exaggerating these events highlights them. For example, greed often leads to consequences greedy people struggle to deal with. In my last novel, a greedy mining engineer’s hands grow, leading to all sorts of difficulties for him. This story element is my way of drawing attention to the everyday development that greed leads to life-draining consequences, usually debilitating absorption in the acquisition and retention of money.

4. Can you give us your definition of magic realism?

Magical realism is a literary genre in which two cultures are presented together, usually embedded in characters that represent both. One culture accepts magic as an everyday factor; the other rejects magic. Thus, some events are everyday events from one cultural perspective, but magical from the other. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, José Arcadio is shot in his bedroom. Blood flows out of his ear, down the street, around some corners, up the stairs of Úrsula's house, and through the rooms there, until it finds her. Garcia Marquez tells this story as if there’s nothing unusual about it, and indeed, it’s an everyday occurrence that a person would come to know that a tragic misfortune has befallen a loved one – from one perspective it’s quite real. Yet, of course, blood doesn’t do that – from the other perspective it’s magic.  

5. Tell us about your latest magic realist book?

Mikawadizi Storms tells the story of a freelance journalist who reports on the controversy surrounding an open-pit iron ore mine dug into idyllic woodlands just up river from an Indian Reservation. The plot mirrors a conflict that unfolded near where I live: Gogebic Taconite sought to put the largest open-pit iron mine in the world in the Penokee Hills upstream of the Bad River Ojibwe. Interestingly, the outcome predicted in my novel, i.e. the Earth rejects the mine, is in fact what came about – the Penokee Hills hold too much ground water for such a mine to be feasible. No doubt the conflict will resume one day when the value of iron ore has increased to the point where massive pumping of ground water seems a good idea.

I am struck by how many people are involved in conflicts like the Penokee Hills mine, and so I structured the novel into forty-six small stories, each a chapter focused primarily on one character. I found the subtle perspective shifts implied by that structure to be useful when presenting the worldview of the Native American characters, many of whom were intently concerned about the mine but only indirectly connected to the main plot (namely the politics of mine approval and the actual construction of the mine). Magical Realism elements include sentient animals (with a ghost cat), karmic developments (for example, the greedy mine engineer with growing hands), an old man who transforms into a butterfly, all set against the background of conflict between perspectives of the indigenous culture and the mining company.