Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Space

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My memories of childhood and my father are most vivid around his love of the space program. Even though he worked nights, he often got up very early to watch the latest launch, sometimes with my younger brother beside him. Once I decided, for some reason, that I would stay up all night. At 5 am, before I finally went to sleep, I woke my father in time for him to see a space craft rocket into space.

Space. Aside from two astronomy courses in college, I never really gave it much thought. I’ve written before about how much the sky and stars and moon have inspired my life and my writing. But I’ve never been good at identifying constellations or ever wanted to own a telescope. And until my astronomy class, I never knew that the moon maintains an irregular orbit around the Earth.

Something changed all that. The Cosmos series and Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Recalling those awe-inspiring trips to the Fort Worth planetarium when I was younger. Seeing recent vivid images of the universe produced by NASA.

In previous posts, I have written of my fascination with the moon, stars, and skies. Only in the last few years have I thought much about the science of the universe. I just finished writing and revising a novel of a girl named Gwen introduced to astronomy by a great teacher. Gwen uses that interest to create comic books and finds herself, at times, traveling to faraway place in the universe. For two years, I’ve journeyed with her and I will miss her when I move on to world of my next novel.

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The Magic of a Circus of Dreams

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In our times, the circus is transforming. A famous circus closes its doors forever while Cirque de Soleil continues in all its many forms. Small circuses bring novelty and entertainment to small communities even as their reliance on animal acts—especially when those animals are abused—sparks outrage.

I have two memories of circuses growing up. The first is of a terrifying moment when a gorilla escaped and climbed into the stands where I sat with my family. In my panic, I tried to scale a poor woman sitting in the row in front of me, trying to make my getaway. My mother pulled me back into my seat and assured me that the gorilla was a man dressed in a gorilla suit.

More pleasant is the second memory of something that took place later that night. The evening approached midnight. All the acts but one had finished. I looked up at the ceiling, at what seemed to be the highest point in the tent. Through the darkness, a spotlight illuminated a woman dressed in gold grasped a gold swing, surrounded by a dangling gold moon and dangling gold stars.

The woman seemed so far away, so high above me. Without a doubt, it was the most enchanted moment in my life as a child. I sometimes remember it as a woman dangling from moon and stars, swinging and performing feats in the night sky itself.

One novel that helped me connect back to that moment was Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. I loved the story of two dueling magicians, one female and one male, both wards of men caught in a perpetual and deadly rivalry. But what I loved most about the book was the circus itself.

All over the tents, small lights begin to flicker, as though the entirety of the circus is covered in particularly bright fireflies. The waiting crowd quiets as it watches this display of illumination. Someone near you gasps. A small child claps his hands with glee at the sight…Rather than a single tent with rings enclosed within, this circus contains clusters of tents like pyramids, some large and others quite small. They are set within circular paths, contained within a circular fence. Looping and continuous.

Lately I’ve been inspired to create my own story of a mystical circus—The Carnival of Moon and Stars is its working title. Unlike, The Night Circus, there are no magicians caught in a rivalry that they can’t control. Instead, a simple canvas tent hides a mystical world that is refuge for a girl named Angelique, a girl with a secret . A teenaged boy named Ash, a boy who spent his life on a farm just outside a small town, sees the tent in the distance from his bedroom window. He is drawn to it, hoping to discover something outside of his small world.

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Magical Realism: The Magic and the Real

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Ava Feather for Blog

 

Remedios the Beauty represents purity while walking about the Buendía household without wearing a stitch of clothing. Remedios the Beauty, always oblivious to the men who lust after her. And in a magical moment, Remedios the Beauty, while hanging clothes on the line, is suddenly caught up in a brisk wind and ascends into the heavens.

After reading this passage, I was hooked.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize winner for Literature and the best-known writer of what has come to be known as “magical realism,” created Remedios in his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The ascendance of Remedios is the ‘magic.’ The ‘real’ of Remedios may be a story of girls who actually disappeared. Those girls, unmarried and expecting babies, ended up in convents, out of sight of those who would judge them. For me, the breathtaking passage where Remedios ascends will always be bound up in the other story of girls made invisible by circumstances.

Isabel Allende combined ‘magic’ and ‘realism’ in her House of the Spirits—ghosts stand in for strong feelings. Salman Rushdie incorporated the dualistic real/magic in several of his books, and wrote about the concept of magical realism in an article in the New York Times Book Review shortly after Garcia Marquez’s death.

The term ‘magical realism’ is not without controvery—many Latin American writers feel pressured by some to write in Garcia Marquez’s style even as they reject it for their own writing.  Many of those who do don’t like the term; I’ve heard suggest ‘hyper-realism’ as a substitute.

It doesn’t matter to me what it’s called, I’m drawn to books that include the fantastical standing in for the real. I frequently insert fantastical elements into my own writing. In The Island of Lost Children, flying and mystery rivers and horses made of sea foam also represent something more profound.

Just recently I finished a lovely book, The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender by Leslye Walton. From the very beginning the reader knows that Ava is born with wings, and the presence of wings keeps Ava trapped in her own home because of her mother’s fears for her. The ending is stunning. Through this book, I dipped my toes in a familiar yet alien universe. My review of the novel is here.

I have read many books considered magically realist, among them Beloved by Toni Morrison, Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. The Museum of Extraordinary Things by Alice Hoffman—who often writes novels considered to be in the magical realism genre—is a book where the fantastical is only an illusion.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” So begins One Hundred Years of Solitude. The image of ice and its importance in the memory of a man facing the firing squad—those words and similar images made me return to the book not once but three times. I’m not sure the meaning of ice in the world of Macondo, but I’m certain it’s important in conveying something outside the most obvious thing.

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Chiloé

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Emerging in the early morning fog, a woman in a dress made of blue-green algae rises from the water off Chiloé. She steps on the shore, her skin perfumed by the sea, her golden hair churning like sea foam. She turns toward the waters from where she came, begins a ritual dance and combs through her hair. Her actions bless the sea life in the waters from which she emerged. The fishing that day will be bountiful.

If she had turned toward the shore, the catch would have been more meager.

The woman is La Pincoya, a Chilote—native to the archipelago of Chiloé—goddess of the sea. Some call her a sea sprite. Another of La Pincoya’s tasks is to transport with great tenderness those on the island who pass away. She carries them to the mystical ship the Caleuche where they begin a new life of eternal happiness.

To reach Chiloé, travelers can choose a 14-hour bus trip from Chile’s capital of Santiago, or take a less than two-hour flight from Santiago directly to Castro, a town located on the Grand Island of Chiloe, the largest in the archipelago. Another option is to fly to Puerto Montt, close to Chile’s lakes region, and drive to Pargua to a ferry that transports them and vehicle to Ancud, Chiloe’s northernmost city. Seals often accompany the ferry on its relatively short 30-minute voyage. Once in Chiloé visitors find brightly colored houses on stilts called palafitos, and in various location 16 wooden churches that are considered UNESCO world heritage sites. I saw images of the ship and other Chilote myths on the walls of a church there. The northernmost island is home to Chiloé National Park, an ecotourism site.

File0002 - CopyBecause of its uniqueness and how the mythical appears in unexpected ways throughout Chiloé, I have often thought of setting a novel there. In the novel, Chiloé is the place where a woman goes to start her life again four years after a tragedy that kept her from completing her doctoral dissertation about the island’s myths. She meets a man—Chilean but also an outsider to Chilote culture—who lost his younger brother in the country’s past political upheaval. Recently, the waters off Chiloe, a community dependent on fishing, were poisoned by a serious algae bloom that threatened its main source of income, its very survival. Sea life of all kinds washed ashore, poisoned by the algae. That tragedy also has a place in the narrative.

In this novel, I want to reflect on how people recover from tremendous loss and how mystery works in the background of their lives. Chiloe, with its myth and unique scenery seems the perfect location to explore the fragility of life. I have to admit that most of all, I want an excuse, though I don’t really need one, to return to a place that fascinated me from the first time I visited there more than a decade ago and one time since. I plan to go back next year. The novel is only one reason why.

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Imagining Ireland

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The Torc waterfall in the Killarney National Park, Ireland
The Torc waterfall in the Killarney National Park, Ireland

One evening before an All Hallow’s Eve, I found myself driving alone in the dark on a road not that well-traveled that time of night. Because it was the night before what we know as Halloween, the playlist of the radio program focusing on Celtic music was made up solely of dark songs suitable for the holiday.

One song in particular eerily fit the moment. It told the story of women, kidnapped by faeries and held with their babies in a cave. The song was of women singing to their loved ones left behind in the hopes that their families would find them.

As the song played, a line appeared in my thoughts: “You’re part faery, aren’t you?” The line wasn’t found in the song but came somewhere from my imagination. It inspired the premise for the story of young Lyric Doherty and her friends Andrew Devlin and Saoirse O’Suilleabean, The Mists of Na Crainn, a young adult novel still in progress. The three share a common purpose, to find the knowledge denied to them–science, math and other aspects of how the universe works.

This May, I make my first trip to Ireland. Even though I largely completed Mists sometime ago, I knew it would never be complete until I had the opportunity to visit the place that inspired its setting and some of the characters, Ireland and its mythology. The Village Na Crainn, where magic is everyday life, isn’t exactly like the Ireland where we’ll land in a short time but I anticipate visiting there will have an impact on the novel’s final draft.

What also came with preparation for the trip is a new beginning based on some very good feedback from someone who read early drafts. With time and this trip, I hope the novel takes its final leap toward publication for anyone to read. I look forward soon to sharing this world, created by me but still fascinating to me.

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