Tag Archives: Utopias

Writing Utopia

by Andrew | Leave a comment

Continuing to explore the Four Elements practice in writing, I want to think about Fire in a particular way.

Among other things, I relate Fire to intention in writing – what purpose fires you up and inspires you in a positive way and helps create a focus in your work? Sometimes writing is about tearing things down, but sometimes writing is about creating things fresh and new in ways that represent your ideal vision of the world. And this is where we can add a little Earth to create a particular setting and populate it with preferred characters for whom we makes stories with desired outcomes: utopias.

The dystopian novel is a well-established trend right now, and it’s not even funny to joke that we are living through dystopian times. So that is a good enough reason to make space for something a little less gloomy in our writing, perhaps?

I think, for example, about queer utopias. When I first came out, one of my favourite novels was Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City, whose rainbow vision I ended up living when I moved to a Big Gay Flatshare in central London. I’ve kept on seeking out these idealised literary spaces in both books and the real world. Just last year I very much enjoyed the fluid forms of the novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, whose author, Andrea Lawlor, led me to the classic The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell.

It’s easy for me to make a leap from that book to Salmon Creek Farm, a queer commune in northern California that I stumbled across on Instagram. And then I am led back to Naropa University, where I studied and taught, which was most definitely born of a utopian impulse to bring mindfulness and contemplative education to the West.

And let’s not forget too that utopias also have their dystopian moments; in an odd quirk of serendipity, I received Lit Hub Daily as I typed the previous sentence, and that email led with a story about a shocking little incident in Naropa’s history when poet WS Merwin and his girlfriend were forced to strip naked at a party. Which reminded me of a Naropa Summer Writing Program panel devoted to utopias, where it was proposed that everyone has their own personal utopia, and one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia.

And maybe that is something to work out in the writing – teasing out tensions and conflicts is the stuff of good drama.

I also think the idea of community is important to utopias, and at this moment, when meeting up in person is less than straightforward, I think about gatherings such as Words Away – Kellie Jackson’s monthly salons and zalons devoted to books and the craft of writing.

The great thing about utopias is that they stimulate the imagination – not just for adventures in writing and reading, but for good ways to be together in the world.

 

As a writing experiment: Create a utopia.

First: draw a map of it.

Then: create a constitution or a manifesto for its guiding principles and inspirations.

Next: write a scene where a newcomer experiences the promise of this utopian space for the first time.

Then: write a subsequent scene where the complications or compromises of utopias are revealed …

Throughout, make space for your wildest desires and intentions – your preferred ways of being in the world.

Right Speech

by Andrew | Leave a comment

Enough has been said over the last week or so about Margaret Thatcher, and here is not the place for more opining on the subject of her legacy, not least as I’m just about bored with it and her now, and ready to move on. I’m still laying things to rest, I realise: the recognition of her achievements yet also the remembrance of her divisiveness. Perhaps only something like a fine novel can really make sense of the complexities this life and death presents, and perhaps that cannot be written quite yet (though with The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst wrote a very fine one set during the prime years of Thatcher’s rule).

Much that was said and done this last week was hagiographic (the party political broadcast that was the funeral), or puerile (the ‘Ding, Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ campaign), or censoring (the BBC not playing that damned song in full during the chart rundown), and much else was simply stupid and pointless and rooted in attachments to old hatreds and battles of the ego (those street parties). But a few things were of particular interest to me for the way in which they seemed less reactive and more thoughtful, and a couple of pieces actually made me think more deeply about the things we choose to write about and how we choose our words.

Grace Dent and Tracey Thorn both talked about the misogyny of many things said about Thatcher, while Sir Ian McKellen addressed the fact that sympathetic obituaries were incomplete without mention of Section 28, which he says ‘was designed to slander homosexuality’.

Then Frank Cottrell Boyce talked about the lively antiestablishmentarianism (love that word) provoked in the arts in Britain during Thatcher’s rule, but paused to wonder why the many ‘searing indictments of Thatcher’s Britain’ failed really to undermine her; she was, after all, brought down by her own people. So what should an artist do, he asked?

A few years ago I was interviewing a young woman who had been a victim of ethnic cleansing. Abducted as a child, she’d been raised inside a cold, regulated, racially defined institution. But she’d grown up to be an articulate, engaging advocate for refugees. At the end of our meeting, I asked her how she had known – growing up in such an unloving environment – that life could be more. “I read a book,” she said. What book? A searing indictment of Thatcher’s Britain? “Heidi.”

There is nothing more subversive than a definition of happiness, a vision of how things could be better.

We can’t always be writing utopias. Sometimes only a dystopia will spur change, and we have to let rage have its way in our writing, and we must create violent or critical portraits and even say things that are scathing or wounding or angry. Like Morrissey did this week, for example. I guess it depends on how much you, as a writer, want your work to be defined by rage and indignation. (I’m currently reserving mine for the explanation of how Mark Thatcher became a Sir.) (If I were a knight, I’d be annoyed how my honour had been devalued.) (If I were a knight, I might have to challenge Sir Mark to a joust. Though I’d get someone from Game of Thrones to fight on my behalf. Arya. She’d win.*)

This subversive idea of happiness, probably in combination with a firm yet compassionate piece by Russell Brand, led me to thinking about the Buddhist concept of Right Speech.

Right speech, explained in negative terms, means avoiding four types of harmful speech: lies (words spoken with the intent of misrepresenting the truth); divisive speech (spoken with the intent of creating rifts between people); harsh speech (spoken with the intent of hurting another person’s feelings); and idle chatter (spoken with no purposeful intent at all).

Some of these aims might be quite challenging for those among us who like a bit of gossip or idle chatter (but of course gossip has purposeful intent!) …

But hey, even if voicing rages is what comes most naturally to us in our writing, there’s enough divisiveness in the world, and bombs and explosions and sadness, maybe from time to time we need to stop dwelling in fear and be utopian and spread the love a bit and invest in some of our own Heidis. Or at least try to.

There were other news stories on 17 April, and not all of them were looking backwards. Many were looking forward to ways of creating newness in the world, visions of ways things could be better, utopian even. Yesterday, for example, this was my Heidi.

I’m leaving the final words to my nan, who would’ve said of Maggie what she always said when someone died. Well, her arse is cold now, isn’t it?

And lo, the sun is shining again, between the rain showers, and maybe the long winter’s over.

Further reading
* Right Speech Reconsidered (from Tricycle Magazine)
* Raising The Tone (Writing Experiment No. 61)

* PS Just reread this in March 2020 – Arya, eh?! How prophetic was THAT?!