magical thinking

There is an essay in Zadie Smith's collection, Changing My Mind, called That Crafty Feeling. It is a version of a lecture she gave to the students of Columbia University's Writing Program in 2008.

Section 4 of that essay is titled, Middle-Of-The-Novel Magical Thinking.

Simplified, it's the point where, when writing a novel, or in my case a collection of short stories, something strange happens.  Everything you encounter, flows freely into your writing.

By everything, she means: your home, the street, dialogue on the bus, the newspaper, your pets, your partner. Just...everything.

Zadie writes: "...there is nothing in the world except your book. The middle of the novel is a state of mind.  Strange things happen in it." 

Here are a few strangely magical things that have happened lately:

1.
One of the stories I'm working on doesn't have a title yet. The options, presently, are: Confessions of a Chronic Voyeur, Slash of Red, Out There, Identification, The Naming of Things.

I think The Naming of Things isn't the best choice.  

The strange magical thinking part:

I stopped to pick up some wine to celebrate a couple of well timed epiphanies after a meeting with my mentor, Sarah Selecky and found this document sticking out of the garbage (pictured above) outside the LCBO It's an outline for a film titled, The Power of Naming and Identifying Information.

3.

The story without a title yet is, partly, about a woman who has reoccurring dreams of a plane crash. In the dreams, she sees bits of things falling from the aircraft and landing around her. A plastic glass, part of a shoe, handles from suitcases, a slice of apple. 

The strange magical thinking part:

While listening to CBC Radio One on the Saturday morning drive out to the drop zone for Safety Day, I heard a news story how a piece from one of the planes that crashed on 9-11 was found wedged between two buildings in New York City.  

4. 

After the news, I switched the station to CBC Radio 2 where Stuart McLean was doing a reading before The Vinyl Cafe.  The story was all about the Sunshine Coast in B.C. and following it, they aired the show he had taped in Powell River.

The strange magical thinking part:

The story without a title yet, partly about a woman who has reoccurring dreams of a plane crash, is set in the Sunshine Coast.

5. 

The story without a title yet, partly about a woman who has reoccurring dreams of a plane crash, set in the Sunshine Coast also involves a character who suffers severe, life threatening injuries.  To better write about her condition, I decided to make a list of "things that are watery".  I thought it might help evoke images of what it feels like to lose a lot of blood, experience weakness, be in shock, lose consciousness, etc. 

The strange magical thinking part:

Aforementioned mentor, Sarah Selecky tweets writing prompts.  Her prompt from today was: Write a list from 1-20 titled, "Things that are watery."  

In no way have we discussed this character with the injuries, or how I came up with "things that are watery" or how she did or why she posted that very prompt...today.  

It's got to be the magic.   

6. 

Another story in my collection has a protagonist named Val. I recently changed the name of Val's daughter from Jamie to Molly. (Molly is working much better). I did this before reading Tenth of December, the title story in Tenth of December a new collection of short stories by George Saunders. It is worthwhile mentioning I am a big George Saunders fan.

The strange magical thinking part:

In Tenth of December there are characters named both Val and Molly.

7.
This one doesn't really fit with the others, but I'm going to include it anyway.

The other morning, I saw a photo of two newly hatched baby penguins on Facebook after several weeks of absence from the site. Rushing out to work, I quickly saved the .jpg to my computer. The next day, I realized I had not saved the image incorrectly.

There were no penguins.

I went back to Facebook to try and find the photo that I had seen it on a post via a friend of another person, or maybe it was an ad for a Japanese writer, I think, but I couldn't remember his name, even though I thought I saw him in that "The Strategist" section of the Globe and Mail last week.

Nothing.

Sweet little creatures lost in a virtual vacuum never to be seen again.

Look at this photo.

You see the urgency I had in finding it.

At work I googled "baby penguin images" and it gave me 28,000,000 pics to choose from.


I enlisted the help of my tech support colleague and from his computer, tried a couple of targeted searches on Facebook.

Nada.

For fun, I showed him how I had googled the search earlier and...there they were.

"Quick, save it!" he said.

And there they are.
Just a couple of newly hatched Gentoo penguin chicks in Antarctica.

And they, along with a few other things right now, are most certainly magical.

P.S.
Photo by Richard Sidey was National Geographic's Photo of the Day on January 8, 2013.