Tag Archive for: J.K. Rowling

Watch Out for Falling Heroes—T.K. Thorne

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 Writer, humanist,
          dog-mom, horse servant and cat-slave,
       Lover of solitude
          and the company of good friends,
        New places, new ideas
           and old wisdom.

 

 

The past few months, heroes have toppled under
the sledgehammer of truth. I’m not talking about the confederate statues; I’m
taking about personal heroes. Among the fallen are L. Frank Baum, author of The
Wizard of Oz books, who advocated
exterminating native Americans; John Wayne, who made disturbing
remarks about blacks and Native Americans: J.K. Rowling, who has made
remarks some
interpret as transphobic; and Dr. Seuss’ —of all people—whose cartoon art
included racial
stereotyping.  Classics like Tom
Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and Gone with the Wind are coming
under scrutiny for racial stereotyping. 

 

This is really nothing new. Gertrude
Stein, an American poet and literature icon, sympathized with France’s Vichy
regime (a puppet state for the Nazis). Ezra Pound, a major American poet, became
a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. T.S. Eliot, a famous British essayist and poet was an
elitist, writing that “a large number of free-thinking Jews is undesirable.”
He did not espouse tolerance or even traveling widely and thus, presumably,
exposing oneself to other cultures. 

One of the real angsts about the historical book
I am writing now is that one of my heroes stumbles on his pedestal. When he
visited Birmingham sometime in 1963, his brother set them up with prostitutes
(both were married). I worried about putting in that chapter, but the story was
true and germane to the book. I grappled with whether to cut it or leave it. In
the end, I decided it was true, and the truth was more important to tell.
 Is he still a great man? A man to be followed and listened to?

I stopped drooling over actor Sean Connery when he
said he thought it was “absolutely right” to hit women when they wouldn’t “leave
things alone.” The “father of our national parks,” John Muir, had no place for indigenous
peoples in his “pure” wilderness and was clear about his racist opinions about
them and about blacks. Bill Clinton led record job creation but sullied the
office of president with his shenanigans. John F. Kennedy was just as bad in
that department, yet his words still inspire. Nixon created the Environment
Protection Agency (EPA) and opened China, but also dishonored the office he
held. Thomas Jefferson had slaves. Abraham Lincoln plainly said he had no
intentions of freeing slaves. And the paragraph above regarding prostitutes refers
to Martin Luther King. Even Mahatma Gandhi, surely an icon of peace and
civility, said the Jews under Hitler’s heels “should have offered
themselves to the butcher’s knife.” 

What? 

What, indeed, are we to do? Everyone has flaws.
No one is perfect. If you think someone is, you just don’t know about theirs. And
one person’s “flaws” is another person’s “strengths of character.” Judging
people is simultaneously harmful (“Judge not, lest ye be judged”) and
necessary. We can’t choose a better path without acknowledging and turning away
from ideas and behavior that will harm our social, cultural, and personal
evolution . . . or our world.

Should we separate the person from their
creations (art, writing, leadership) or do we turn away and disregard their accomplishments
or creations because of the creator’s flaws? Is it a matter of strict
lines in the sand? Should we make allowances for time, context, and culture?  Is justice  about punishment or mercy? Does it matter if
the theft was a loaf of bread and the thief was hungry?

I suspect dealing with this is akin to the
concept of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not about forgetting, turning from what
is true, or acting like something didn’t happen. It is about letting go of the
grip wrongs have on us; letting go of our own
emotional angst and moving forward.

So maybe the answer is not to ban books or art
(because ideas are next) or even to shun the art, works, or accomplishments of
the flawed (because ultimately that is everyone), but to be aware and negotiate
the complexity. What young children with forming ideas are exposed to may need
to be more strictly scrutinized than what adults read. It’s important they be
exposed to material that reflects the diversity of the world. Confederate
statues are still art and reflect historical people and events, but do they belong
in public squares as “heroes?” Can we appreciate the beautiful and charming aspects
of Southern culture while remaining clear-eyed about the racism that dominated that
way of life? Can we admire the stunning culture of the Japanese, while
rejecting the blood thirst of feudal rulers and war mongers? Can we accept and
understand structural racism can exist along with good, decent police officers?

This is hard. We are not wired to do this very
easily. We are wired to want simple choices—good/bad, dangerous/not. We want
(need?) our heroes to be perfect. And if they aren’t, we want to put our hands
over our ears and shut our eyes. But they aren’t perfect. We aren’t. Our
country isn’t. We can be patriots and criticize. In fact, we must if we are to continue
making things better and stay true to the ideals that  many have given freedom
and blood for. At the moment, we are so polarized, that one side cannot imagine
saying anything good about the other, no matter what it is. Picking a path
through this jungle is hard. It is much easier to stay divided, to cheer only
for our team. But life is not like that. Life is change. It is complex and contradictory, even our
heroes. We must make decisions as we pick our way through stony, thorn-filled
paths. We must make choices. Sometimes they are obvious, but often they are not
clear or perfect.

Sometimes they will just be the best we can do.

 T.K. is a retired police captain who writes Books which, like this blog, go wherever her interest and imagination take her.  TKThorne.com

 

 

 

Let’s Hear It for the Girls!

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by Mary Curran Hackett, debut author of Proof of Heaven
If you’re the only person who hasn’t heard about, read, or seen The Hunger Games then it’s safe to say you live under a rock—or probably more rightly—you don’t live with a teenage girl. If you haven’t, don’t feel badly. I am usually that “one person” (hyperbole, I’m aware) who is usually living under said rock, too. (In fact, I am notoriously late to every party—Mad Men, for example, I only just started watching. Downton Abby. Ditto. Thank God for Netflix.)  But, thanks to my daughter, Brigid, I was swept up into The Hunger Games mania early on and so, like hundreds of other moms, I was at the movie theater at 9 a.m. on the day of its release—along with a theater FULL of girls.
And yes, while the movie was exhilarating and didn’t disappoint readers and fans alike, that’s not what I was thinking about when I left the theater.  As my daughter talked 100 mph without, it seemed,  inhaling once, about the actors’ portrayal of the characters, the interpretation of the setting, scenes, and sanitization of the violence, and of course, Katniss and Peeta’s self-sacrifice and determination—I wanted to shout out to her: “YOU GO, GIRL! YOU GO! Get excited about books! Get excited about seeing your books on the big screen! Get amped up when talking about character development and setting.  You are every author’s dream, hon! An engaged, enthusiastic, passionate FAN.” As both a writer and her mother, I wanted to hug her. (But she’s a teen girl. So I knew better to wait until we were out of eyeshot of the hundreds of other girls, who wouldn’t be caught dead hugging their own moms.)
Through the entire drive home, I couldn’t help but think that my daughter, her friends, and all girls like her are the future of the reading world. They will be reading our adult fiction books five and ten years from now! It’s not very long at all. (They may even be reading our books now for all we know. I’ve seen my daughter with books I’ve only just heard about—and she and her friends were some of my first readers of my own novel Proof of Heaven.) Needless to say, they are an eager and hungry group, and there are soooo many of them. Best of all, they are a loyal, tweeting, networking lot at that. I don’t remember having the collective reading experience that my daughter has had. When I was a kid, we didn’t read long trilogies or series together and wait endlessly to see our favorite heroine to hit the big screen. In fact outside of Disney princesses, I don’t remember many female heroines at all in my favorite books or movies (leave out the obvious exceptions—Nancy Drew, Laura Ingalls, and Elizabeth Bennett).  And we certainly didn’t tweet or blog or even find out about books the way girls do now. Long story, short: If these girls are the future of the reading world, our future as women writers is a bright one. 
What our girls read, how often they do, and how they extrapolate meaning and context and apply it to their own lives is nothing less than, well, extraordinary.  My daughter’s generation was the generation born into a Harry Potter World. The first books she first read were by strong, determined, and innovative women. J.K. Rowling’s genius dominated my daughter’s young reading life, as did a quick succession of female writers whose books my daughter devoured daily. Brigid’s world has been filled with women authors writing about strong female characters—who are capable of doing so much even against so much adversity—like Suzanne Collins’ Katniss in The Hunger Games. And thanks to these formidable women writers and their memorable characters, our girls have been trained, in a way, to seek female writers with strong female leads out. If you don’t believe me, believe the ratings. The Hunger Games debuted as the third highest grossing film of all time on day one of its release. Thank you, girls. And thank you, Suzanne Collins, for creating such a memorable female lead. You, and all female writers like you, have blazed a wonderful trail for the rest of us. (Ahh, if only Mary Ann Evans could see us now! I doubt she’d ever want to change her name to George Eliot to sell a book!)
I guess without even realizing it, I’ve been thinking a lot about woman writers lately. Maybe it’s because I’ll be participating in Fifth Annual SWAN DAY International, celebrating women in the arts all over the world this coming Saturday, March 31st. On this day, we’re supposed to pause and reflect on what is women’s role in the arts now and in the future. I’ve paused. I’ve reflected, and I can safely say, as they do in The Hunger Games (sort of)…I think the odds are forever in our favor, ladies.
Mary Curran Hackett is married and the mother of two children. She received an MA in English Literature from the University of Nebraska and a BA from the University Honors Program at Catholic University in Washington, DC. Born and raised in Danbury, CT, she has traveled extensively and lived in various places throughout the U.S., but her favorite place in the world is home with her kids, husband, and her stacks of books. Like her character Colm Magee, Mary suffers various heart and brain ailments, but thanks in part to her brother, a physician, as well as her own doctors, she now has a pacemaker and a heart that beats on its own at least most of the time. PROOF OF HEAVEN is her first novel.

Saying Goodbye Gracefully

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by Evelyn David

I’ve always been intrigued by the paranormal (see our Brianna Sullivan series), so when Medium, a television series about a psychic who assists the Phoenix, Arizona police department debuted in 2005, I was quickly hooked. I followed the series from NBC, who cancelled it after five years, to CBS, who cancelled it last month. I looked forward to the series finale with a combination of sadness and anticipation of how they would wrap it all up. Sigh. What I got last Friday night was an unholy mess. *Spoilers Ahead*

Multiple time jumps, fake dreams, an airplane crash, a Mexican drug cartel, cars exploding, eight years of amnesia, seriously there wasn’t a cliché they missed. There were moments when I expected Bobby Ewing to come out of the shower and tell Alison that all her dreams were just that – dreams and not psychic revelations. Even the last few seconds in the episode where Alison joined Joe in the hereafter after forty-some odd years apart didn’t work for me – instead of satisfaction that the couple would be together forever, it just felt like the writers were pouring salt on a wound. I didn’t want to learn Joe died and missed his kids growing up. I didn’t want to know Alison had to spend more years without him than she’d had with him. I didn’t particularly want to know about the kids’ grandchildren. I’d much rather have seen another episode that showed the characters doing the things they’ve done for the last seven years – Alison dreaming her dreams and waking up Joe in the middle of the night, Joe struggling to earn a living, and the kids fighting around the breakfast table. I wanted more of the same. Even if the series was cancelled, I wanted to be able to keep the family alive – well and happy – in my imagination.

Which got me to thinking about how authors treat the last book in a series. Lesson learned: You need to put the same amount of energy and creativity into ending a series that you put into that first book – the book where you were trying to engage readers into wanting to see more. Finales need to be respectful of both the characters and the audience. Do it well, and readers are anxious to read new books and new series you present. Do it poorly, and the bitter taste can wipe out all your earlier hard work.

J.K. Rowling understood the Herculean task she faced in ending the Harry Potter saga. While some readers might quibble with the length and events of the seventh book, most were extremely satisfied that she not only gave a powerful climactic battle between the forces of good and evil (the recurrent theme in all seven books), but she also provided an epilogue that gave a glimpse into the future of the main characters that her audience had grown to love. She didn’t ignore the harsh realities of the world she had created, and in fact, killed off several beloved characters. But to her credit, she was respectful in her treatment of their deaths and their demises made sense in the context of the storyline.

Ending a series is never easy for authors or fans. Fans will always expect more than the writers can give. They don’t want the series to end so any ending is often less than satisfactory. Most authors love the characters they’ve created and the line between fiction and a place at the kitchen table is mighty thin. Both halves of Evelyn David talk about Mac, Rachel, Brianna, and even Whiskey the Irish wolfhound, as if they were extended members of the Dossett and Borden families. So when we decide, if we ever decide, that it’s time to bring a series to a close, we know what we need to do and what we absolutely shouldn’t do. In the meantime, we’re still enjoying their adventures and plan to continue plotting murder and mayhem with them.

Stiletto Faithful: what finales, in books or television series, did you think were handled well? Which sucked?

http://www.evelyndavid.com
——————
Brianna Sullivan Mysteries – e-book series
I Try Not to Drive Past Cemeteries– Kindle – Nook – Smashwords
The Dog Days of Summer in Lottawatah– Kindle – Nook – Smashwords
The Holiday Spirit(s) of Lottawatah– Kindle – Nook – Smashwords

The Sullivan Investigation Series
Murder Drops the Ball (Spring 2011)
Murder Takes the Cake – Paperback – Kindle
Murder Off the Books – Paperback – Kindle
Riley Come Home (short story) – Kindle – Nook – Smashwords