Shawn L. Bird

Original poetry, commentary, and fiction. All copyrights reserved.

Fishtailing February 15, 2011

Filed under: book reviews,Literature,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 12:06 am
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Wendy Phillip’s YA novel Fishtailing is a collection of poems that tell a painful narrative about teen life. The inner turmoil expressed in the poetry paints the undercurrents that the adults either ignore, misunderstand, or are overwhelmed by. The needs are so great, and the students are so many, the adults’  insensitivity is understandable (survival instinct more than anything) but it’s frustrating as well. You want to shout, “Can’t you tell what’s going on here?”

Wendy is a graduate of the UBC MFA in Creative Writing, and I see their interdisciplinary approach echoed in the way poetry and story have combined in a way that is more profound than a strict narrative would have been.  The masterful way  each persona is crafted delineates a clear voice for each character as the woeful tale unfolds.

Wendy’s years working in high schools is very apparent. This feels real. These kids feel like the complexly burdened teens that stare across their desks at me.

It’s a book that offers a challenge to teachers of teens. The challenge may be too difficult for them to cope with though. Ignorance is bliss.

 

stay out of the settling pond January 28, 2011

Filed under: Literature,Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 9:04 pm
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“If we don’t change the world to suit us…then it’ll change us to suit it.” (Charles de Lint’s Memory and Dream. p. 17)

I keep coming back to this quote.  How often do we float with life, letting it act upon us instead of molding it the way we want it to be?   If we don’t want to be battered and beaten by the battles around us, we need to make the decisions that allow us to get out.

Finish school.

Get training.

Leave the deadbeat.

Take the anti-depressants.

Apply for the dream job.

Write the book.

Go on that trip.

We have to take control of who we want to be and make our life happen.  We have to get over the small fears to experience the greater benefit.  If we don’t, we have no reason to complain when life sweeps us along the gutter and dumps us unceremoniously into the settling pond.

 

A poem by Wendy Phillips January 20, 2011

Filed under: Commentary,Grace Awakening,Literature,Poetry — Shawn L. Bird @ 7:40 pm
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From Fishtailing by Wendy Phillips. This novel by UBC Creative Writing alumnus Wendy Philips is crafted in a series of poems in persona of several characters. There are students, teachers and administrators represented.

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Kyle
Teacher staples my motorcycle dream
to the display board
Tricia wanders over
reads it
I watch
She turns
stares
raises an eyebrow
drifts to my table
Told you Farr would like it she says
Not bad.

I swallow a lump
Wanna ride sometime?
She lifts her chin
narrows her eyes
I look away from the glare
Yeah she says, today
walks away.

So
poems are good
for something.

I like this poem because it captures something that I see often.  Suddenly the communication options open when people master a new medium.  Finding new media opens up an audience they would not have reached otherwise.  I often set up a “Poet-tree” in my class.  It fills a wall.  A trunk and branches are on the wall.  Students can take green leaves and leave a poem on a wall.  It’s a non-credit thing, and some years it gets very little interest, but other years it is a hot-bed of creative communication.  Students from other classes will come in to read the poems, because hearts are bare on the wall, and voyeurs watch developments with avid interest.

A young man who has poetry in his arsenal has a powerful tool to capture the hearts of the ladies he admires!  If he can set his poetry to music, he has even more power.  The ladies will be virtually powerless from his charm!

Yes Kyle, poetry is good for something.  In Grace Awakening Ben takes full advantage of the fact!  😉

 

Flight December 15, 2010

Filed under: book reviews,Commentary,Literature,Reading — Shawn L. Bird @ 1:42 am
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Just finished reading Sherman Alexie’s Flight. I was asked to read it for assessment of school use. The first chapter had me adamant that it was completely inappropriate. By the end I was thinking, “Well…maybe.”

Alexie is just so gritty. His characters are coarse and vulgar. They grate against sweet, prudish, slightly virginal English teachers. However, they also reflect a reality that a lot of our students know only too well. I’m not into censorship, but I don’t have to teach a book I don’t like either. That’s a nice thing about professional autonomy. Not having prescribed curriculum or literature means we have a lot of freedom to teach process and encourage analysis using literature that is particularly relevant to our teens. For some kids, this will be a powerful reflection of their world.

Sherman Alexie is a Native American writer from Washington State. His books explore his world and observations of the interaction of his two communities. He has challenging ideas to both and this book reflects them.

It is the story of Zits, a kid whose native dad left, whose white mom died, and who has been shuffled through the foster system. He has to come to terms with his identity, his abandonment, and his anger. The method is essentially a series of parables. Zits travels through time to inhabit the bodies of whites and natives from Little Big Horn to his father.  Watching the ‘native experience’ through other eyes leads him back to the beginning, and gives him a chance to make different decisions in order to attain a different outcome.

Alexie is accessible as a Native writer. His young characters are funny, ironic, and believable, but they’re gritty. Their lives are hard. Their experiences have been horrible. Alexie doesn’t sugar coat the misery, but he forces the protagonist (and therefore the reader) to decide whether he will allow the past to rule his future or whether he will carve a new path. 

The hopeful message is what wins me over.    He has used the graphic language and rebellious attitude of the first chapter or two to grab his audience.  The time travel is confusing enough to keep them curious.  The ending is satisfying.  We all want to believe that everyone can have a happy ending.

 

Memory rippling over fire July 29, 2010

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Literature — Shawn L. Bird @ 12:28 am

Memory distorts with time, like air rippling over a fire—what is gone becomes only more precious, becomes only more precious, becomes a yearning, a perfect dream.  Every word of those letters, every moment I shared with him, has been memorized in the language of a dream continuously visited, revisited.  The letters are gone but only haunt me more; I close my eyes and remember the words by heart.  I have nothing of the girl I used to be, aside from those old dreams.  I have become a ghost of myself.” (p. 88.  The King’s Rose  Alisa M. Libby)

Well Alisa, I couldn’t have said that better myself.  I bet Auntie Bright could completely relate to this sentiment!

 

after the Eclipse July 2, 2010

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Literature,Reading,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 2:22 am
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The problem with spending time in a fantasy world is that sometimes it’s very hard to leave and return to the world of reality.

I have a friend who was raised in a huge Catholic family. Her dad was an illiterate farmer. He valued farm chores. He did not value education, and he especially did not value reading. Being discovered shirking one’s chores with a book was asking for a beating. I can kind of appreciate the anger. When your children have escaped into a book or movie, they are out of your control. They are being exposed to ideas that may differ from your own. A lot of people fear ideas that are different from their own, and that is why we have censorship. Ideas are free. Control is not.

I came out of the Eclipse matinee today, lost in the world of love, hard decisions, glorious Pacific scenery (the very roads of the Fraser Valley that we were driving last spring break), and the passions of youth. I have felt a little bittersweet all day, as I fight not to go back and read through the series again. (I just read them all last weekend for about the twentieth time, afterall, and I watched the movies 3X this week already).  My emotions have been highjacked by Twilight again.  It doesn’t matter that it has been a long time since I was engulfed in those passions of new love and the difficult decisions that last a lifetime, but it doesn’t seem like it. Whether those feelings were thirty years ago or three years ago, the intensity of them doesn’t change. Auntie Bright and Grace discuss this at the end of Grace Awakening,

. “Have you heard how the archaeologists have excavated three thousand year old honey from within the pyramids?”
(Grace) nodded and whispered, “Yes, they discovered it was still perfect, because bacteria don’t grow on honey.”
“Exactly. Like ancient honey, a first love remains ever incorruptible despite the passage of time. Though the boy may no longer exist, the memory of him is always pure and sweet.”

Like Bright, I’m feeling somewhat lost at the moment in the ache and joy of nostalgia. Those intense feelings are always just below the surface, and the Twilight Saga has woken them for many women, of all ages. Whether our heads remember all the details, our hearts recall each nuance of confusion, joy and adoration.   Stephenie Meyer’s created world pushes us back to that place.  It can be a wonderful place to revisit.  Being in love has a narcotic effect on the system.  It does us good to re-awaken those passions by escaping from our dreary every day.

Perhaps someone watching my vacant stares and unexplained flashes of smiles might be distressed.  Perhaps that fact that my thoughts are unknown would pain some people.  Not being quite in control of your head can be a problem.  On the other hand, it is amazing as a writer to know that words have that kind of power!   I bow to the brilliance that can take control of my emotions away from me, and remind me of  love’s power.

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I am so glad to have spent the last twenty-five years with the amazing and brilliant man who happily attends Twilight movies with me, discusses books, gives me valuable  writing critiques, tolerates my foibles, loves me beyond reason, and yes, does laundry. What a blessing I’ve been given.  I am reminded of this whenever I float out of the cloud of love and adoration rekindled by Twilight.

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I hope Grace Awakening leaves readers in a haze, wishing they were still lost in the story, spending time with Grace, Ben, Bright, Jim and the others. I hope they find themselves in the realm of memory, remembering the boys and men who first touched their hearts and awakened them to the grace of love.  I hope the fantasy rekindles their hearts to their reality.

 

June 19, 2010

Filed under: Literature,Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 6:39 am
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It’s odd how you can leave a friend for nine years, then feel surprised when he turns up looking a decade older.  In fact, you feel betrayed, as if he’s aged you along with him, and personally dragged you a decade closer to the grave. (Ian Weir.  Daniel O’Thunder. p. 61)

I chuckled when I read this paragraph. 

I suppose it shouldn’t surprise us that our friends and family members are aging as the years go by.  It’s always a surprise when some young relative appears to have shot up several inches in height, dropped a voice an octave, or turned from girl to woman.  We ponder that we ourselves haven’t changed at all, and yet those kids prove just how much time is going by.

Gathering with old friends also reminds us how time doesn’t matter.  We may not have seen each other in a decade, but the relationships are easy and natural.  Shared history makes an easy link and conversations are picked up as if they were left yesterday. 

Time marches on, but what are we doing with the time?  Are we marching closer to the grave without anything to show for our time here, or are we making the most of the years, leaving a legacy for those who follow?

 

reality and fiction June 18, 2010

Filed under: Grace Awakening,Literature,Mythology,Reading,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 3:56 am
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…the difference between fiction based on reality and fantasy is simply a matter of range. The former is a handgun. It hits the target almost close enough to touch, and even the willfully ignorant can’t deny that it’s effective. Fantasy is a sixteen-inch naval rifle. It fires with a tremendous bang, and it appears to have done nothing and to be shooting a nothing.

Note the qualifier “appears.” The real difference is that with fantasy—and by that I mean fantasy which can simultaneously tap into a cosmopolitan commonality at the same time as it springs from an individual and unique perspective. In this sort of fantasy, a mythic resonance lingers on—a harmonious vibration that builds in potency the longer one considers it, rather than fading away when the final page is read and the book is put away. Characters discovered in such writing are pulled from our own inner landscapes…and then set out upon the stories’ various stages so that as we learn to understand them a little better, both the monsters and the angels, we come to understand ourselves a little better as well. (Charles de Lint. Memory and Dreams. p. 323)

I wish de Lint’s words were my own, because they’re so profound. Consider: “harmonious vibration that builds in potency.” Oh how I hope that Grace Awakening offers the reader such a lingering mythic resonancy! How I hope that as they grow to understand my characters, they understand themselves better, just as I have grown from the process.

When someone asks why on Earth I chose to write a novel with a fantasy twist, I want to be answer as eloquently as this! I am reminded of Bella’s comment in New Moon, “Could a world really exist where ancient legends went wandering around the borders of tiny, insignificant towns, facing down mythical monsters? Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute ghost truth? Was there anything sane or normal at all, or was everything just magic and stories?” (p. 293) When it became clear that the story I had to tell required me to embrace myth, it was an epiphany. Once the mythology began to weave between the lines, my words flew beyond me. They started unfurling so much more than the germ I’d started with. Mythology reveals great truth, and I learned a lot from Grace and Ben, Jim and Bright, and the others in their world.  I suspect there is much more to learn.

I’m really looking forward to hearing what sorts of things the rest of you learn from Grace et al. If you’ve read Grace Awakening, I’d love to hear what harmonious vibration is resonating with you.

 

I will never be… June 14, 2010

Filed under: Literature,Pondering — Shawn L. Bird @ 6:49 pm
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…we are never the people we think we are. We are the ones we pretend, with all our hearts, we can’t become. (Jodie Picoult, The Tenth Circle. p. 171)

How many times have we said it? “I will never be like my mother!” As teens we plan to completely re-write our history and do things entirely differently, and yet, faced with unruly children, we find our mother’s words coming out of our mouths and see our mother’s actions in our own.

If this is true for us, then our mothers echoed their mothers back through time. My motherhood style may have originated with my great, great, great, great, great, great grandmother. It is a much bigger task to pull away from generations of history. It’s nature versus nurture. Generations of genetic history are revealed every time we remind a kid to clean his room or to feed the dog.

But there is nurture to contend with as well. We can reprogram a lot of our essential nature with parenting classes or a well-rounded education, but left to ourselves we can never get very far from the words our mothers uttered from the moment we were born, just like they didn’t get away from their mothers’ words .

It’s a little daunting, isn’t it? It helps to remember amid the overwhelming realities of life: your mother loves you. Even though you’re as screwed up as she is.

 

Messages (#1) June 12, 2010

Filed under: Commentary,Grace Awakening,Literature,Writing — Shawn L. Bird @ 12:54 am
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“It’s the person, Ma, not the place. If you left here, you’d have been the same anywhere else.” It is truth enough, but I can’t stop now. “If I ever leave this place”–I swallow–“I’ll make sure I’m better here first.” (Markus Zusak. I Am the Messenger. p. 283.)

The narrator of I Am the Messenger has a mother who is unhappy with her life because she married and stayed in the small town where she’d grown up. She wants a bigger life. Her son hits upon a significant truth when he gives her this message. He is addressing the idea that, “Wherever you go, there you are.” What a profound truth that is.

You need to be the best you on the planet, because you are the only you on the planet! If you find that everywhere you go, trouble follows, you need to think about the leader. If you consistently end up hanging out with jerks, why do you keep finding them? If your boyfriends are always nasty, why are you constantly dating nasty guys?

In Grace Awakening, Grace is told, “You are the common denominator in all your life experiences.” Think about that. You are the one single consistent factor in your life. You can’t blame anyone else for your problems, because your response to the events around you is what is important. Action is power. You are the only one who can change your life.

Markus Zusak, whose The Book Thief has become a huge international success, has crafted a completely different book in I Am the Messenger. This much lighter novel is about helping those who need some small intervention for their lives to be improved.

Each of us has a responsibility to make a difference. We don’t have to help everyone on the planet, but we can help someone. We can visit a shut in, write a note to someone who needs some encouragement, drop off groceries to those in need, cover tuition for someone who otherwise could not better her life through education.  We can share a smile and a positive attitude.

It’s Me to We in action.  What will you do today to care for those in need?