Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

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Jan 18 2018

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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Written by Kim · Categorized: Magical realism, Storytelling, Witches, Writing · Tagged: Graphic Novels, Pictures

Feb 26 2017

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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Written by Kim · Categorized: Inspiration, Storytelling, Writing · Tagged: darkness, desert, light, Santa Fe, storm

Sep 11 2016

Embracing Our History

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memphis-strikers-2-copy

Today, the National Museum of African American History and Culture ( NMAAHC ), part of the Smithsonian Museums in Washington, DC, opens to the public. I’m looking forward to visiting this institution dedicated to telling the story of a people, their struggles and triumphs. I have written before about the prejudice of members of my family that transferred to me and which I’m still confronting, at times.

In fall of 2014, my spouse and I went on a driving tour through the south to visit some of the important civil rights sites and museums in Memphis, Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham. When I go to important places in the civil rights struggle, I want to see, to be sad, to reflect, to learn. Yes, even at times to have my gut wrenched.

I do not go to feel guilty. The National Coalition Building Institute has a saying: “Guilt is the glue that holds prejudice in place.” The more civil rights memorials and museums I go to and stories I read and hear, the more I feel able to do the work of understanding and evaluating my own attitudes. I also don’t leave the burden on African Americans to explain it to me.

As a storyteller who wants to create diverse worlds, the journey through the history of African Americans is a helpful process. And as I strive to move readers, I benefit from being moved.

Both my husband and I trace our ancestries through documents showing that at least one of our relatives sold one human being to another. What African Americans have experienced is not something they as a people should just ‘get over.’  We would never consider telling World War II or Vietnam veterans to ‘just get over’ the wars they experienced that changed their lives forever.

The history experienced by African Americans is our collective and painful history. As we move into the future, institutions like the National Museum of African American History and Culture help us build that future without denying our past.

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Civil Rights, Storytelling · Tagged: African-American, Museum, Smithsonian

Aug 25 2016

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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Written by Kim · Categorized: Fantasy, Magical realism, Novels, Storytelling, Writers, Writing · Tagged: alice hoffman, erin morgenstern, gabriel garcia-marquez, laura esquivel, leslye walton, salman rushdie, the night circus, toni morrison

Jun 06 2016

Alice and the Heroine’s Journey

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Mia Wasikowska is Alice in Alice Through the Looking Glass.

There are few pastimes more satisfying to me than settling into a theater seat and watching a 3D movie. The best 3D movies take me to a place where I’m immersed in a new world, usually a visually stunning one. Riding on the back of a dragon-like creature soaring over a canyon. Walking a path deep in a forest of odd creatures or familiar ones made luminescent. Navigating the streets of a quaint village. Entering a hobbit house. It’s like taking a brief vacation to an unfamiliar land.

Even in these movies, story is just as important as the immersive experience. The young orphaned Hugo living in a train station in Paris and discovering the world through a mentor. The threatened homeland of the Na’vis and how they fight back. The unexpected examination of good and evil of Maleficent. I admit that if I want to enter these mythical worlds, I may be willing to overlook some issues with the storyline but not all.

When I decided last week to see Alice Through the Looking Glass, early reviews had me thinking that I would be more satisfied with the visuals than what the story had to offer. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Yes, the cinematic world I found myself drawn into was close to the most beautiful I’d ever experienced. A view of a pastry filled table ready for a tea party is replaced by a shimmering world of time and timepieces. A girl with experience captaining her own ships guides a Chronosphere over a churning sea. But more than the visuals is what’s at the heart of this story that has been overlooked over Johnny Depp’s odd Mad Hatter and his personal problems: this story is about a girl who is smart and courageous. Alice opens as the captain of her deceased father’s ship, finding her way out of a dilemma while the males in her crew prefer to surrender to the pirates. She challenges the man who wants to relegate her to a clerk’s position in what was her father’s company. And she enters the worlds with dangers lurking without hesitation.

The Writer’s Journey web site describes the Hero’s Journey as:

“[A] pattern of narrative identified by the American scholar Joseph Campbell that appears in drama, storytelling, myth, religious ritual, and psychological development.  It describes the typical adventure of the archetype known as The Hero, the person who goes out and achieves great deeds on behalf of the group, tribe, or civilization.

In Alice Through the Looking Glass, Alice as heroine fits that pattern with two exceptions: she doesn’t hesitate to heed the call and she doesn’t require a mentor. She reasons out her own trail and learns from her mistakes.

Unfortunately, many will avoid the movie because of reviews that miss this aspect, and others will shun it because of Depp’s character. Interrupt the latter any way you want. This is a movie I want to show to children of either gender to give them an opportunity to decide for themselves.

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Written by Kim · Categorized: Movies, Storytelling · Tagged: Alice Through the Looking Glass, Hero's Journey

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