C is for Colonial Writing

Wow. Google is fast sometimes. Today I am better trying to understand the meaning of "colonial writing". In my searching for articles on this topic, I find the reference I made yesterday to this same phrase already indexed by Google. This is like an infinite loop, trying to learn more about a topic but the reference that comes up is one I already made. Not true of course, there's a ton of entries waiting to be read, it's just odd finding one of my own entries listed as an answer to one of my own questions.

But yet again, I digress.

As a non-writer learning to write, I keep coming across all these new words and phrases. Researching, which is really just another word for "learning on the job", is fast proving to be as interesting as the actual effort to take what I learn and produce something original from it. And - hopefully interesting to others not related to me.

New Grass Growing is fiction from my own hand about what I know. For the most part anyway. The parts I don't know about, like a reasonable portrayal of rezball-playing Indian girls in Salmon, Idaho, is what needs to be better informed by the research I am doing. That is the entry from yesterday that Google has already found, not even 24 hours later.

Not yet published, New Grass Growing is not even the first book. It waits for its turn, slowly maturing, waiting for its time in the sun and of course, its time high up on Amazon's bestseller list. At least this is the story I tell myself, as I daydream in the midst of the five mile run walks I take to clear my head and conjure up new ideas.

I keep encountering fascinating topics screaming out to add their complexity to what I am trying to do. Sherman Alexie is one of those topics. He is not new to me. I read his books way back in the day (1996-ish?), well before the notion of writing had entered my head. I was a mere reader then and someone turned me on to Sherman Alexie. Then after reading what I could find by him, I went off in other directions. Now, nineteen-ish years later, he pops up again in a new context, with a much more complex meaning. Is this an omen? Should I pay more attention to this? Well...what he discusses in numerous places, the phrase 'colonial writing', is one that I definitely pay attention to. Trying to understand it is likely a better statement.

All this as a rambling discourse to set up today's word - "colonial writing", as always, brought to you by the letter "C". Concisely put, but within my narrow frame of understanding, colonial writing seems to be someone from the "conquering class" writing in a patronizing style about someone in the "conqueree class". The very first thing this reminds me of is just about everything from Walt Disney. I am hopeful that I can avoid the "hard to describe" style that is Walt Disney as I go about trying to write about rezball-playing Shoshone girls from the Lemhi valley countryside near Leadore, Idaho.

My space allotted to this entry grows short. I want to leave a link to those with inquiring minds. It's a link to the most interesting research piece I found about this notion of "colonial writing". For me, it had several "aha" (sp?) moments - Louis Owens is (possibly was) an English Professor at the University of New Mexico. He wrote an essay "The Song is Very Short: Native American Literature and Literary Theory", that I read and reread and found fascinating both times. Other than Mr. Alexie's own words found in several interviews, the words in Prof. Owens essay, are the best words I've found so far, that give me an inkling of what this notion of colonial writing is all about.

Until tomorrow's brisk exchange over the letter "D" and its mystery word, I write farewell.

River and Ranch Lives On In New Grass Growing!

Discovery is a very enjoyable piece of the writing effort. Discovery happens most commonly in the act of research, at least for me anyway. For example, in my most recent book, New Grass Growing, the Chinese Premier makes an appearance and does something. This was something I wanted to work into the plot and so I did. It's my book after all right? I was googling for the spelling of the current Premier's name, or maybe they have a President. Let's call it general research to support this piece of plot, given that Chinese culture is not on my everyday list. Not only did I discover the correct spelling of his name, I found some history of what he had done. This history included a two week farm stay in Muscatine, Iowa back in 1985. While I did not use that bit, it lent great support to the plot segment in which he is mentioned. Needless to say, this was a great and unexpected discovery.

My favorite type of discovery though, is the unearthing and fleshing out of a character. More than anything I'm calling this a miracle of the human brain. The sheer "amazingness" of creativity and the unknown spring from which it pours when the time and surroundings are right. For every encounter with "writer's block" that one may encounter there is almost always an even more compelling encounter with a blank page that is suddenly filled almost without effort. I stare at this suddenly full page and marvel at it, because this was not what I was thinking of when I started, yet it is what happened when I stopped and took a breath. It's different and better and lends a whole new layer of plot to my effort. Where it came from I do not know, but when it happens I love it. The writer's equivalent of a runner's high.

As River and Ranch matured and took shape, characters emerged and developed themselves over their time in the book. I found my ending for River and Ranch and realized that there was much more unwritten that wanted to come out. So I continued writing. New Grass Growing is one result of that effort. It continues the story of Cale and Dana and their life surrounded by friends and family and the big blue mountain sky that looks down on Salmon, Idaho.