Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Dreamscape at the Bottom of the World

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The boat moves slowly through the milky haze floating above the waters of the Ultima Esperanza sound. Passengers brave the damp cold on deck for as long as they can, taking in the views of the mystical landscape–the dreamscape of waterfalls cascading over cliffs that rise on either side. When the bitter cold is too intolerable, they slip back inside to warm themselves.

Occasionally a guide will point out the places where animals in warmer times congregate. But not now. Now, only condors watch over us, soaring across those occasional patches of gray sky where the haze clears.

At dawn that Easter morning, I waited at the dock a few blocks from my hotel in Puerto Natales, a town a few hundred miles from the southern tip of Chile. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the trip that day. At first, I lamented the bleak day, the chill that seeped to the bones. I soon realized that something that seemed almost spiritual slipped in with the white wisps of clouds come to earth.

Two nights before, I’d flown into Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in Chile. The flight from Santiago  was the most anxiety producing of my life.  The plane flew over a region largely claimed by nature. Much of the last hours, I saw nothing on the ground—no lights from towns or cities. Only completely blackness.

Suddenly, a force brusquely nudged the plane and the currents of air tossed it about. Through the window, I could see flakes visible as they descended from the inky darkness and through the plane’s exterior light. Snow.

The plane finally dropped lower as it started its descent, but I couldn’t see where it would land. Only one patch of amber luminescence which in time showed itself to be the tiny Punta Arenas airport.

The edge of the that town of just over 100,000 people is battered by the waters of the Strait of Magellan, nicknamed the “dragon’s tail” by early explorers.

The southern region is most of all a place of wind. Brutal wind. On the Ruta del Fin del Mundo (the “Route of the End of the World”) that runs the 152 miles from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales, a monument dedicated to the wind stands at the halfway point.

We took that route to reach Puerto Natales, surrounded by patches of the snow that had fallen the night before. For many people Puerto Natales is the jumping off point into the natural wonders just north of Punta Arenas. An hour or so away from Puerto Natales is a national park which is home to the Torres del Paine (‘paine’ means blue in the indigenous language of the Tehuelche—also known as the Aonikenk—people), a cluster of mountains so stunning that someone once used them in an advertisement for the Canadian Rockies. The snow of the night before dusted the ground around us as we traveled.

The boat continues its journey up the sound, winding through the waters that skirt the national park. Three hours into the trip up the sound, we leave the boat and walked a path through the trees to one glacier. Afterwards, I hike with the other passengers to a lake where the remnants of another glacier float along its surface like irregular ice cubes in a giant punch bowl. We all return to the boat to retrace our journey, sipping whiskey to mark the occasion.

A few years later, this time during the Chilean summer, I will return to Puerto Natales. As before, the boat will sail just after dawn, but on that trip bright sunshine will light the way and the sea lions I had not seen on the previous trip will make an appearance. In only a short while, I will realize, though, I have traveled to a new and different land.

The future is another country to be visited at a later point in the itinerary. I savor these moments now moving toward our destination in Puerto Natales. I don’t realize it now, but I prefer the bitter cold, the frigid moisture. Most of all, I favor the ghostly mist surrounding us without knowing all that it conceals.

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Poetry in Shadows: Puppets of the Wayang Kulit

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Ethereal music from bronze instruments plays a tune somewhat discordant to your ears. An oil lamp or single bulb sends out a light projecting images of kings and princesses, clowns and demons onto a white cloth. A dalang is the shadow puppet master of the Wayang Kulit, who, behind the cloth, calls up the spirit of ancestors, following a tradition of more than a thousand years.

The puppets act out scenes from the Ramayana, an epic poem brought to the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali by Indian traders and sailors. Or the Mahabharata, one of the world’s longest poems that also contains the Bhagavad-Gita.

The play will last three to four hours. Careful if you find yourself drifting off. You may find strangers from the play enter your dreams—Semar who is both a clown servant and a god. He serves Prince Rana, reincarnated from the Hindu god Vishnu. The beautiful Sita, Rana’s wife, also appears, as does the magical bird, Jatayu, who dies when it attempts to rescue Sita. Or perhaps members of the Pandawa and the greedy Korawa families play out their rivalry in an epic conflict from the Mahabharata.

No matter the play or poem, you will spend time deep in a forest thick with greenery, filled with creatures hiding where the sun doesn’t linger. The forest is the scene of banishment or refuge.

“All is clouded by desire, Arjuna,” Kresna tells the prince of the Pandawa family. “As a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.”

With one movement of a prince’s hand, giants are defeated.

See my post, Water from the Moon, to find out how I was introduced to the Wayang Kulit.

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Water from the Moon

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“You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.” Billy Kwan, The Year of Living Dangerously

The flickering illumination of a nearby fire filters through a white cloth. Children’s voices accompany the Gamelan, traditional percussive music from bronze instruments. There, on the island of Java, shadow puppets of the Wayang Kulit act out a scene from Hindu mythology.

Click here to watch.

This is the opening of my favorite movie, The Year of Living Dangerously. The shadow puppets come to represent the characters in the movie that stars Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver.

Look at Prince Ajuna. He’s a hero. But he can also be fickle and selfish. Krishna says to him, “All is clouded by desire, Ajuna, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.

The movie contains many stunning and sometimes powerful images. The camera hovers over a mountainous landscape of rich greens as a vehicle moves through it. A grieving mother pours water over her lifeless young son, nestled in white lilies.

In the movie, photojournalist Billy Kwan—a male played by the female actor Linda Hunt who won a best supporting actress Oscar for the role—moves between two worlds in 1965 Indonesia. One world is that of his profession capturing images of a beautiful land on the verge of tragedy. He spends brief moments in the other world trying to improve the lives of one family living in extreme poverty.

Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia. And last night I watched you walk back into childhood. With all its opposite intensities: laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim, toy town and a city of fear.

For a time, Billy navigates both worlds successfully. He occasionally joins in the camaraderie of his journalistic peers while also providing monetary support to a mother and her very young son. When the child dies in spite of Billy’s efforts, and he can no longer ignore the callous exploitation he sees in his colleagues, Billy is thrown into a conflict he can’t resolve, except with one last, desperate act.

Between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were massacred during what was known as “The 1965 Tragedy.” “Water from the moon,” one of the Indonesians in the movie says before he goes into hiding. “Something you can never have.”

I took that phrase, “Water from the Moon,” as the title of my first novel, a story of “what if.” What if we lost our precious democratic institutions? What if the United States ever found itself under dictatorship? The story was inspired by what happened when the longstanding democracy of Chile in 1973 was replaced with dictatorship. The main character of the novel, Adrienne Dylan, struggles with choosing the best way to respond to the increasingly oppressive situation of her home country. She can live an isolated life or put herself at risk working with those who want to change the situation. She can choose to react violently or nonviolently.

Always in the back of Adrienne’s mind is her late father’s possible role in the overthrow of democracy, and in the increasing evidence that he was responsible for the death of her birth mother when Adrienne was a child.

On a recent trip to Guatemala, as a van carried me from Lake Atitlan to the colonial town of Antigua, I wanted to immerse myself in music to drown out the incessant droning of a fellow passenger. I chose to listen to the soundtrack I created for Water from the Moon. Each song evoked a scene, and I soon found myself drawn into the emotional story I had created years ago. I sometimes looked around at the mountains surrounding the Pan American Highway and found it hard to believe that not that long ago, Guatemala found itself in the midst of a civil war that had lasted decades. Recently, it has arrived at a place where shoots of stronger institutions that are crucial for democracy have started to grow.

Here in the United States, we live now in turbulent times, and the upheaval has many of us wondering and worrying about the future. We have limited ability to know what will come. We seek the answer as to the best road to take. It feels sometimes we are looking for a few drops on our parched tongues from some lunar spring thousands of miles away.

Friends are reading 1984 by George Orwell. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Iron Heel, by Jack London. And It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I often consider removing Water from the Moon from the metaphorical bottom drawer and rewriting it for our time. That consideration has never been stronger than in the last few months. Storytelling has great power–to both take us to those dark places and give us the opportunity to ponder what we can do to pull ourselves back into the light.

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Light, Desert, Sky

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Last summer on the way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I avoided the fastest most direct route from I40, opting instead for the ‘scenic route’ just east of the city. I’d taken that same route before, and only agreed to my spouse’s suggestion to take that road knowing that sundown was still an hour or so away.

What I hadn’t counted on was the mute light in the waning hours of the day, making the hairpin turns more treacherous and the shadows a substantial impediment to knowing if someone had drifted over to my side of the narrow two-lane road. In between those white knuckle moments, were periods of stunning beauty. I had never before seen the light play off the red soil like that afternoon. I couldn’t recall among my many trips to New Mexico the strands of muted sunlight bring out the details of the terrain so well as it did on that stretch at that time of day.

Later that weekend, on Museum Hill just outside Santa Fe, an afternoon cluster of storm clouds became more dramatic through the dark lenses of my sunglasses. The mountains in the distance stood out more prominently, as did the vortex center of those clouds that at that moment discreetly held the rain and the raw materials to fuel the lightning and thunder that flashed and boomed shortly after.

I’m not a trained photographer, so I didn’t get the photos that would do justice to either of these phenomena. All I can do is share painter Georgia O’Keefe’s vision of what she saw of the desert from her home in Abiquiú, New Mexico.

These observations made me think of writing in terms of illumination and darkness. Consider one example: a girl and her brother and their friend discovering the world. Illumination comes from the father of the boy and girl as he explains the implications of race in their community. Later, darkness threatens the girl and her brother, and in the shadows a mystical character reveals himself in order to save them both.  The book, of course, is To Kill a Mockingbird, and the characters are Scout and Jem Finch and their friend Dill. The mystical figure is one of my favorites from literature, Boo Radley. What reader of the book can forget Boo in the shadows, watching over a bed-ridden Jem?

We writers are weavers of light and darkness, daybreak and sundown. We hide the danger in spots of low-light along treacherous roads and call up turbulence just when everything seems calm in those bright blue skies. The safest story would have been for me to drive along the well-traveled freeway with nothing to hide. The struggle between darkness and light, shadow and filtered strands of sun make for a much more interesting ride.

In the end, I conquered my fear like any protagonist I would hope is worth reading about.

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Lessons from a Memoir Workshop

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Earlier this month, I sat among twenty women in a beautiful garden on the banks of Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, a volcano in the distance. The beauty of the scenery didn’t distract us from the task at hand—five days learning from writer Joyce Maynard how to become better writers. While the workshop, Write on Lake Atitlan, focused on memoir, the sessions provided valuable information no matter the type of writing. Over those days, Joyce worked through the essays we’d submitted in individual sessions. After a couple of days, she depended more and more on workshop participants to identify some of the common mistakes we made in our lessons on writing.

Here are some of the lessons I learned:

  • Short sentences are powerful. We often rely too much on strings of word to convey a thought or move a narrative forward. Joyce shared the advice of Verlyn Klinkenborg, who wrote an entire book on short sentences. His advice: remove connectors like ‘if,’ ‘and,’ and ‘but.’ Pare down words instead of adding them. Rely more on direct language. Avoid being evasive. Construct sentences that focus on simple words choices. I found this advice particularly helpful, as one of my weaknesses has been overwriting.
  • Avoid clichés. Clichés are well-worn words and phrases—like ‘apple of my eye.’ Creating shorter sentences requires more attention to the words we use. A cliché, a form of lazy writing, takes the punch out of those short sentences we aspire to write. Our work improves as we search for unique words to substitute for those clichés.
  • Pluck out those ‘to be’ verbs. In revision, I try to weed out every ‘was’ or ‘were’ unless there is absolutely no other alternative. Often, the process is simple—as simple as ‘flipping’ the sentence. “The only sound in the room was the beating heart,” flips to “The heart beat the only sound in the room.”
  • Find a ‘container’ for your story. Don’t try to make it about everything. Choose the elements that fit into that container that you can name—e.g., “my mother’s decision to remarry”—and leave out everything that doesn’t fit.
  • Be mindful of story arcs. Most writers who study the craft understand this. A story isn’t that this happens and this happens and this happens. Instead, the arc begins with a situation, followed by an event that results in a change or has an impact, and ending with the changed situation. An essay contains the entire arc. Larger works are made up of individual chapters that add the pieces to the arc with a tease at the end of each chapter to keep the reader reading.
  • Put yourself in the story. As a fiction writer, I had resisted the idea of writing a memoir. After a few days in the workshop, I started to rethink my resistance. Even though I don’t deny that I include parts of myself in what is largely a fictional protagonist, I often prefer to act as observer in personal essay, telling what I know of the stories of others. I’m working on adding my own story to the larger story of an essay.

I may never take that step of writing a memoir, but there’s no doubt that my writing following the workshop will change for the better. As with my other experiences on that beautiful volcanic lake, the learning comes with a dose of mystical inspiration.

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