Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

The Story in Every Picture

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Three days before the end of 2017, I found myself facing the dilemma of having read only 29 of the 34 books I’d planned to read that year. I had three options to meet my Goodreads challenge: (1) fail or (2) cheat by indicating I had met my target. Instead I choose a third option—read some of the many graphic novels I’d purchased or downloaded. Over three days I read five different novels of varying lengths, each one completed in 30 minutes to two hours. Immersing myself in these often visually stunning and occasionally poignant works was much more of a pleasure than a chore.

A Witch on Chicken Legs and Other Stories

Baba Yaga’s Assistant, a middle grade comic book by by Marika McCoola and  Emily Carroll featured my favorite fairy tale character when I was a child. Baba Yaga is a witch in Russian folklore who consumes bad children and lives in a house on chicken legs. Becoming Baba Yaga’s assistant provides the main character, Masha, the opportunity to find a purpose after the death of her mother by helping bad children become good ones and thereby helping the children avoid her boss’s plate.

Two of the most beautiful were intended for adults–Beauty  by Kerascoët and Hubert–illustrates how important it is be careful what you wish for. Troll Bridge by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran initially feels like a children’s fairy tale but delivers a much more adult message. It relates the story of a boy repeatedly avoiding the consequences of a troll whom he calls “all my nightmares given flesh.” When he reaches adulthood the boy now a man who has betrayed someone he loves gives in to the bitter end the troll has waiting for him. The grotesque scenes mix with beautiful illustrations of nature.

The Intersection Between the Real and the Imagined

The most poignant for me was Becoming Unbecoming . Using black and white and mostly muted tones, the author and artist who goes by Una tells a powerful story of the women in her small town in Yorkshire who were killed by a serial murderer—and how the police made inaccurate assumptions about the woman that kept the real killer from being identified putting more women at risk. She juxtaposes this story line with her own history of sexual abuse. The book was so powerful that I revised my manuscript, Gem of the Starry Skies. The main character Gwen reads the book and relate it to her own experience with being threatened by a boy at her school, a boy who had attempted to assault her at a party.

The Picture that Inspired a Fictional Place

What all of these books have in common is that they tell stories through the power of images. That fact reminded me  how my newest work in progress, set in a rural area, has been influenced by the image above that I found when searching stock images. The picture immediately took me to a place that seemed familiar yet also unreal and mystical. This is the countryside that is the home of the Sullivans—Ash and Naomi—a brother and sister whose lives are changed when an unusual carnival comes to town.

Pictures in my head—conjured from dreams, meditation, letting my mind wander—are  the seeds as well as the foundation of any writing I create. I look forward to what my subconscious will find next and the story it will tell.

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The Magic I Find at the Fair

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As I begin to imagine elements of the story at the center of my next novel, the world of a mysterious carnival, I think of the Arbor Fair, a place I created in my book, The Mists of Na Crainn.

While Lyric walked through the forest, Saoirse and Andrew behind her, colors gradually appeared through the slivers of space between the leaves and branches overhead. Clanking and voices came from all around her. As she cautiously moved forward, the colors became a stall of multicolored textiles—rugs and tablecloths and interesting tunics and long skirts. More stalls appeared beside and in front of that one. One stall sheltered by a tarp held glass containers of various sizes. One hung suspended over a small flame that boiled the blue liquid inside of it. As Lyric passed, the woman behind the table dropped powder into its narrow opening. A foamy sheet emerged from the opening and covered the sides.

The booths in the new novel will not be filled with sellers of goods, but perhaps people who can tell the future, who can conjure up tiny milky ways from collecting bioluminescent insects, or perhaps are unusual dancers or contortionists—something mystical and unexpected.

Like many writers, I look to real life and real places for inspiration. Fall brings with it one of my favorite events that may serve that purpose this year: the State Fair of Texas. I don’t ride many rides (except for the giant Ferris wheel) or play games on the midway, though I watch others who do. Instead, I admire the quilts that hang in the Creative Arts building, walk through the barns to see what animals are there to compete, and eat my fill of fair food.

I often wish that the fair was a better neighbor to the communities that surround it, especially because of the communities it brings together. At the fair, rural culture encounters city culture—and vice versa. Who knew there were miniature Hereford cows? Or that llamas wear expressions of constant disapproval? Will one of these animals this year spark an idea of something unique?

The pastimes of many—knitters, photographers, the people who concoct elaborate fried creations—take center stage at the real Texas State Fair. Fewer venues are better for people watching.

My visit usually ends with a trip on a gondola moving over the fairgrounds. As I look down on the lights illuminating the whirling cars and the crowds of people making their way between game booths, I already see a world all its own.

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The Texas Hill Country: Where Stories and Cactus Bloom

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The Texas Hill Country is a special, almost mystical, place. Cactus paddles dot the landscape and green hills covered with trees—called cedar but more likely juniper—roll along its horizons under ample blue skies.

The area, located southwest of Austin and northwest of San Antonio, is made up of several small towns—Kerrville, Ingram, Boerne, Stonewall, and Luckenbach (which inspired a song by Willie Nelson), to name just a few. Lyndon Baines and Lady Bird Johnson made their home on a ranch just outside Johnson City. Each town has its own distinct history and story.

Castroville is the destination of Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd and the young German girl Johanna raised by the Kiowa in Paulette Jiles’ excellent novel, News of the World. Castroville was founded and populated by immigrants from the Alsace region in France.

The influence of the Germans who settled in Fredericksburg is still apparent in the Sunday houses that line its main street. They are called that because families left the farm to stay in them in order to be in town for church on Sundays. Those Sunday houses are now occupied by shops selling everything from clothing to cookware to boutique dog items. A neighbor in Austin once told me about growing up near Fredericksburg speaking German and learning English as a second language.

Reading News of the World reminded me of how recently (only 150 or so years ago) that Comanche and Kiowa still found themselves embroiled in a constant conflict with Texas settlers. Camp Verde—near the town of Center Point—was the site of a failed experiment in the use of camels to fight them, the brain child of Secretary of War and later President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis.  Further west near Bandera, the Comanche, which had successful held and even expanded their territory against the Spanish, experienced their first defeat in the Battle of Bandera pass.

In one of my ‘bottom drawer’ novels*—Guadalupe of the Angels—I set many scenes in the hill country and felt the narrative of that book bubble up from that landscape every time I journeyed through it. Stories seem to embed themselves in the scenery there and it’s easy to let them settle into the brain for inspiration.

The best way to experience them is to find yourself at dusk on a front porch in the countryside, watching deer run across the landscape, hearing the low drones of insects in the evening and solitude. In the state of Texas, there are few better places to be, especially to stoke the mind to go off into peaceful journeys of creativity.

* Any finished novel which may or may not see the light of day–if it’s in the process of being revised or on its way to the recycling bin.

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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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