ghosts and horror

[susanstinson]

I'm reading exquisite ghost stories: The Two Sams, by Glen Hirschberg. Very scary, technically brilliant and morally gripping. I'm going to review them for Strange Horizons.com

I think it's a very bad idea for the US government to run commercials that show children sticking a fat belly buried in the sand with a stick. The fact that it's supposed to be a detached belly that someone "lost" walking on the beach does not change the damage that kind of imagery does to people's relationships with their own, various, warm, living bellies. It's a macabre, nasty image supported by skewed statistics and presented, as so often, in the name of health. Makes me feel as if I were breathing sand.

Comments

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

That's so great -- all praise to your joy in your belly in its various roles, including this one, holding protecting your baby. Such an amazing thing

The thing is, I have a vocation, passion and a gift for fiction and poetry. I struggle with them, but love writing them more than I love any other kind of work. Other people could do a very powerful job in examining these connections. But nobody else could write my novels and poems. I could write this book someday as a political commitment or as part of earning a living. But starting it made me realize that writing fiction let me explore complicated things with more power and in a way that feels more natural and satisfying to me than creating an empassioned, strongly argued work of nonfiction, no matter how aching the need.

Here's a link to an article I wrote a few years ago that refers to some aspects of this stuff, though.

Resisting Fat Hatred (http://www.resistingfathatred.netfirms.com/article.htm)

[tuliptoe.livejournal.com]

Great article!

Have you thought about fictionalizing? You could still examine the issues in a fiction format.

As someone who is NOT a writer I am always pushing the good ones to write stuff that I'm interested in! ;) I know exactly what you mean though. Making the art that you were born to do is such a fullfilling pursuit.

[susanstinson.livejournal.com]

Thanks -- glad you like the article.

Well, I've written three novels and a chapbook of short essays and poetry that center on complex fat women, so I've definitely explored some of this stuff in my fiction. And I probably am going to be writing more short nonfiction pieces related to body size, politics, literature and all soon. I'll definitely post here as those pieces get published.

But one unexpected place that writing and thinking and talking hard about this stuff has taken me has been to the stories and theology of eighteenth century folks on the cusp between puritanism and revolutionary culture in New England. The intense things that these folks believed about the body, the natural world, god, emotion, depravity, light, family, life still seem to me to be powerful forces in so much US culture today -- so that's what I'm working with in fiction right now. It's almost overwhelming, like getting too close to an energy source that so many things draw power from -- something. It feels like a root place to me, another way to uncover how all of this stuff connects.