The term “magical realism” was coined by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in the late 1920s for painters trying to show reality in a new way. A Venezuelan literary critic, Uslar Pietri, first applied to it to Latin American literature, but it was when Miguel Angel Asturias used it to describe his novels when he won the Nobel Prize that it really caught on… and no one has known what to say about it ever since.
In graduate school, we read the “canon” of magical realism, and it included a lot of Latin American authors. However, a lot of people feel like it’s kind of a cliché to include magial realism into a story about Latin or Native Americans or Africans. It’s kind of like the inevitable inclusion of something like voodoo in a story about a person that includes Louisiana and gris-gris and haints all the rest of the associated Bourbon Street nonsense. I grew up rolling my eyes at the tales my Papá fabricated out warm air and cigarette smoke, but for me, and for many others, it’s somewhat insulting to have all of those story elements stapled onto a fiction told by anyone who didn’t live it, if “living it” even makes sense, when talking about tall tales.
All this is to say that critical engagement with the literature of the real and the magical is important to me, and I’m playing with the idea of my next novel (no, no, not the WIP, or the one with the agent, a NEW one. Because isn’t the best place to start thinking about NEW when you’re 2/3 the way through the current WIP and you’re having delusions that you’ll never finish it? Why NOT start something entirely new?)… of having a touch of magical realism thrown in. It sounds so literary; really, it was a literary term, and I don’t feel like my novels are particularly literary. Maybe it’s mainly a marketing term, but it’s just that I don’t feel like what I’ve got in mind is exactly science fiction nor fantasy… maybe I’ll call it speculative fiction? That seems to be a term devoid of cultural associations…
Either way, I’m seriously considering pulling together a selection of short speculative fiction stories from the store that I have, and presenting them, nervously, to the public. Why nervously? Because there’s not a lot of short fiction for young adults, there is quite possibly zero short speculative fiction featuring non-White characters, and I’ve already been told that short fiction isn’t done by YA authors unless they’re “invited” into an anthology.
Of course, I just finished Laini Taylor’s LIPS TOUCH, which will be out from Arthur Levine in October, and Holly Black’s The Poison Eaters will be out in February of next year from Small Beer Press. I shall say to my agent, “Nu-uh!” most eloquently when he says This Is Not Done.
I just feel like whining sometimes, “But SHE gets to do it!” when I read about people taking risks and plunges and having their books show up high on bestseller lists even before most bookstores have them on shelves. How come THEY get to do all of this cool stuff, and I’m told to sit back, take it slow, let the readers come to me? Is it true there aren’t readers for what I want to write, just because of who I am? That just can’t be.
I think I just got tired of waiting to be invited. You have to make your own… luck, if you believe in that, your own chances, your own choices. So.
That’s me, this week. How’s you?
And if you feel like you’re hearing half of a very whiny argument, um, well, you are. This isn’t in response to anything in particular that you might have heard of nor is my whining directed toward anyone you might know. I’m just nerving myself up, look away, as you were.
Seems to me you're throwing down your own gauntlet, Tanita, and you are just the gal to do this very real and magic thing. I think one of the POINTS of art is to do what isn't done. Yeah? And also, one of the POINTS of life is to toss a little magic in with the real…
It's hard to know how to proceed when what you really want to do keeps getting the response of "It's just not done." Take the advice and put aside that dream, chalking it up as one of those things that we want but cannot have OR go ahead, be thick-skinned, and say to yourself, "it's not been done, till now, by me."
I say go for it, because my sense is that the need and desire is strong enough, and *you* are strong enough.
Invite yourself, no, throw the party yourself.
I think about 80% of being successful in any endeavor is going forward pretending that there is no reason for said endeavor to fail. I am forever telling this to new librarians, but I think it applies here as well. And I'd read that collection.
Kelly Link gets to do it–according to wikipedia, her stories are "slipstream or magic realism." I've never heard of slipstream before–it sounds rather pleasant, in a meaningless way.
I hope you go for it and it works out. I am a great believer in making one's own luck, which I think began when I read Taran Wanderer for the first time–do you remember the guy who had the sheep fold built, before he had sheep? So maybe you are in the sheepfold building stage, and the sheep are on their way.
or whatever.
What is your work in progress about?
What would anyone say to that except: More power to you. A selection of short speculative fiction stories and including non-White characters? And from you? That's what you're asking? Let me be clear on my response: Do it. Do it. Do it.
Whether you call it "magical realism"* or what-have-you, I think it sounds great.
{*I had no idea "magical realism" was coined so recently.}