{"id":884,"date":"2016-06-03T20:43:56","date_gmt":"2016-06-04T03:43:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=884"},"modified":"2016-06-03T20:43:56","modified_gmt":"2016-06-04T03:43:56","slug":"shameful-self-promotion-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2016\/06\/03\/shameful-self-promotion-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Shameful Self-Promotion \u2013 Part 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"scroll1\"<\/a><\/strong>The Lateral Truth: An Apostate\u2019s Bible Stories<\/a><\/em> was first brought out in 2007 by Scroll Press, a small publisher in Prince George, BC, started up by an estimable member of UNBC\u2019s English Department. Alas, Scroll went out of operation last year, which freed me up to bring out a new edition. But at first publication, Scroll interviewed me for the website with some really excellent questions, and here\u2014cut down and updated\u2014are my replies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>Why did you write this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I could not avoid writing this book.\u00a0 I was a natural-born atheist in an Evangelical Baptist fundamentalist family, surrounded by born-again convictions and old-fashioned cover-to-cover tearstained-leaves literalism.\u00a0 I could not buy into any of it, myself, but I was both enthralled and appalled by the stories in the Bible, not to mention confused by the mixed messages they sent.<\/p>\n

There were three good reasons, however, to keep silent about my inability to believe: first, because it would upset my lovely parents; second, because I would get prayed over, which was embarrassing and repugnant; and third, because I was not sure I wouldn\u2019t get sent to hell for not believing in a god.\u00a0 Dawkins is right about the power of that fear.\u00a0 I even hid my atheism from my irreligious friends, most of whom probably saw me as a right fundamentalist fanatic.\u00a0 It was a closet I did not come out of until I was about twenty.<\/p>\n

But while I was growing up, I took a keen (and later a professional) interest in history, archaeology, and anthropology, and ran across many fascinating themes: how mythologies are made, for example; how dogma can seduce, subvert, and destroy, and how one man’s barbaric superstition may be another man’s holy writ.\u00a0 When I eventually shambled into being a writer, it was only a matter of time before I got the urge to try weaving all these strands together.\u00a0 The ideas were already there, rooted in questions I\u2019d had the tact and good sense to keep quiet about as a child.<\/p>\n

So why break silence now?\u00a0 This book\u2019s proximate cause is that I am worried by\"scroll2\"<\/a> how the world is going, amazed by the upsurge of religious magical thinking, dismayed by the growing power of fundamentalisms of various pernicious stripes, not all of them involving a god.\u00a0 At a time when we humans, as a collective, need to be particularly rational, we appear to be getting particularly stupid.\u00a0 These stories could be considered my small contribution to the chorus of humanist voices crying in the wilderness.<\/p>\n

Describe your creative process writing this book<\/strong>. Specifically, how did you conceive this idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

As I said above, The Lateral Truth<\/em> was a book waiting to happen; but it finally germinated almost by accident, when we were living in Hong Kong.\u00a0 Every summer, the South China Morning Post<\/em> and RTHK, Hong Kong\u2019s English-language radio station, would combine to sponsor a short story contest on a given theme.\u00a0 In 1993, the theme was FIVE YEARS AFTER\u2014and I had the idea of writing about Adam and Eve five years after their expulsion from Eden, which turned into an early version of \u201cOmphalos.\u201d (It didn\u2019t win.)<\/p>\n

Over the next few years, I stuffed work on the Bible stories into the interstices of other writing and research projects, plus the upheaval of moving back to Canada, taking up formal teaching, and so forth.\u00a0 By 2000, I had five stories in draft form, plus fragments of and notes for eight others; and in 2001, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts (to whom much gratitude) gave me a generous grant that allowed me to concentrate on Lateral Truth<\/em> for about eight months.\u00a0 It was a great time, divided about 50\/50 between research and writing, and all of the stories except \u201cDeath of a Pagan\u201d and the last two sections of \u201cThe Trickster\u201d were in good draft form by Christmas.\u00a0 The latter stories were finished gradually by 2004, in tandem with the long and painful process of polishing the others, trying to find a publisher, and taking a last fling in archaeological fieldwork in the Sudan.<\/p>\n

As for the \u201ccreative process\u201d itself, I spent a great deal of time reading, not just the Bible, but Bible commentaries, historical and archaeological materials, and lots of apologetics, both liberal and fundamentalist.\u00a0 After all, I wanted to be certain I was not misremembering the strange superstitions taught to me as a child, and especially wanted to avoid attacking straw men.\u00a0 When I got around at last to the writing, most of the stories had been in my head for so long that they more or less wrote themselves.<\/p>\n

\"scroll3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What were some of the challenges and highpoints you faced writing this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had to stop worrying about what my beloved fundamentalist extended family would think.\u00a0 This book would hurt some of them, and I was torn about that; but the issues were as important to me as to them, and I saw no good reason to continue being silent.<\/p>\n

On another level, while most of the stories were very clear in my head, a few of them had technical problems that took a while to sort out.\u00a0 Most of these difficulties concerned selecting which of the many entrancing details of each extended narrative I should focus on.\u00a0 But the hardest story of all to start <\/em>was the one that turned out to be the longest and darkest and arguably the most blasphemous: \u201cBridegroom of Blood in the Wilderness of Sin,\u201d my unadmiring look at how Moses \u201cfreed\u201d the Children of Israel.\u00a0 The difficulty was to find a workable point of view.<\/p>\n

I tried Aaron, but he didn\u2019t work for me, and anyway he died a little too early in the chain of events.\u00a0 I wrote several thousand words in third-person omniscient\u2014a stilted disaster.\u00a0 I tried several other characters named in the Bible, including Phinehas, and I experimented with shuttling around among several first-person characters, both believers and skeptics, which just got messy.\u00a0\u00a0 In the end, I chose to write as myself, a natural-born skeptic, in the head of one of Aaron\u2019s unnamed daughters-in-law.\u00a0 Somehow the story took off after that, and became immensely satisfying to work on. \u00a0That, incidentally, provided me with one of the high points of writing the book, the realization that I had at last found my way into the volume\u2019s pivotal story.<\/p>\n

\"scroll4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Who is your intended audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Alas, most of the people who know the Bible well enough to catch the in-jokes are exactly the ones who won\u2019t find them funny.\u00a0 So I suppose I wrote this book mostly for people who will dislike it, and won\u2019t want to read it.\u00a0 Silly me.\u00a0 Fortunately, there are some atheists, agnostics, apostates and assorted infidels who may share my questions and appreciate the jokes; and I was also writing for, say, liberal theists who might be interested and stimulated by the refractedness of the vision, and readers with a general interest in religion as a social and historical phenomenon.<\/p>\n

What books and authors inspired or influenced you in writing this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nobody inspired or influenced this book directly; but I\u2019ve had a stimulating time over the last thirty-odd years, reading such writers as Bertrand Russell, Kurt Vonnegut, James Randi, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer, Martin Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, \u00a0and the marvelously lateral Marvin Harris.<\/p>\n

I also did a great deal of reading around biblical topics, on both sides of the spiritual divide: for example, Donald Harman Akenson, Morton Smith, Tim Callahan, Karen Armstrong, Richard Elliot Friedman, Elaine Pagels, and\u2014to remind myself forcefully of the fundamentalist position\u2014Gleason Archer and Josh McDowell.\u00a0 Bart Ehrman\u2019s intriguing books came in handy for the last rewrite.<\/p>\n

What books and authors inspired or influenced you as a writer?<\/strong>
\n\"scroll5\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 I am primarily a storyteller<\/em>, with a great fondness for vivid, traditional, straightforward narrative, and not much patience for self-indulgent navel-gazing postnarrative forms.\u00a0 In my own voice, I can hear faint, odd echoes of many old favorites: Sinclair Lewis (Elmer Gantry<\/em>); H.G. Wells (The History of Mr. Polly<\/em>); Booth Tarkington (Alice Adams<\/em>); J.B. Priestley (Angel Pavement<\/em>); E.F. Benson (the Lucia novels); George Orwell (Keep the Aspidistra Flying<\/em>); Dorothy Parker (the whole lot); and Jane Austen (ditto, in spades).<\/p>\n

But perhaps the most direct influence\u2014and the only writer whose general advice to younger writers resonated with me\u2014was Kurt Vonnegut, to whose memory Lateral Truth<\/em> is dedicated.\u00a0 Here, among many other sensible things, is what he said, in an essay in Palm Sunday<\/em>: \u201cThe writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo speech you heard when a child.\u201d\u00a0 This, for me, was a kind of speech strong with the cadences of the King James Bible, and the British precision of my granny and her Canadian-born daughters; and it is sometimes their voices I hear in my head when I read over something I\u2019ve written.\u00a0 This is not as scary as it might sound.<\/p>\n

Discuss how and why you have re-visioned biblical stories here. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Lateral<\/em> in the title says a lot.\u00a0 Many of the motifs are entrenched in Western culture, but only from a certain angle (usually the most flattering), and through a cheesecloth of reverence: Moses, for example, is entrenched as a great liberator, Bethesda as a symbol of healing, Job as a metaphor for patience.\u00a0 I look at these stories sideways, minus the cheesecloth. \u00a0What I see is not always pretty.<\/p>\n

I must say, though, some of the stories did not need a sideways look\u2014full frontal was horrifying enough.\u00a0 For example, the vicious events in The Gibeah Wives<\/em> are told pretty much straight as they come in the book of Judges, but I found a fair sampling of cover-to-cover literalists whom the story took by surprise.\u00a0 I know for dead certain it was not one of those we covered in Sunday school.<\/p>\n

Why do you believe satire is important?\"scroll7\"<\/a> <\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m reminded of Somerset Maughm\u2019s story, \u201cJane\u201d, where the title character is considered to be a priceless wit because she simply and directly tells the truth.\u00a0 Few of the stories in The Lateral Truth<\/em> were explicitly intended to be satirical\u2014rather, I meant to take iconic or striking scenes from the Bible, and follow them through to their logical human consequences.\u00a0 The fact is, some of those consequences were ludicrous enough to give the appearance of mockery or \u201cholding up to scorn,\u201d as in the dictionary definition of satire.<\/p>\n

Your characters reveal challenges that many can relate to\u2014for example, the trials and tribulations of labour. Can you discuss how and why you came to depict these and other issues? Discuss how and why they resonate and are relevant today.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Folks is folks, world without end.\u00a0 Trust me, I\u2019m an archaeologist. \u00a0\u00a0We\u2019ve always needed food, water, warmth, sex, companionship, esteem, security, a bit of a laugh, and something to keep our brains busy.\u00a0 Generally, we\u2019ve also always wanted our kids to grow up safe, and our teeth not to hurt.\u00a0\u00a0 Those issues are always going to be relevant, even to those of us who live in a cocooned, medicated, and well-fed bit of the world, where dentists abound, and no longer use the Black and Decker toolkits of my childhood.<\/p>\n

The mention of labour is very interesting.\u00a0 Thinking about it, I see I\u2019ve got a surprising number of childbirth references in The Lateral Truth<\/em>, which was not exactly intentional.\u00a0 But you can hardly get more resonant and universal, not to mention primal, than childbirth.\u00a0 After my first child was born, I remember walking down the street thinking with wonder that every<\/em> person I saw represented some woman going through a version of what I had just gone through.\u00a0 That blew my mind.\u00a0 (Though, for the record, my own experiences in that line were rapid and relatively painless.)<\/p>\n

\"scroll9\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You have a wonderful ear for dialect and the phrases and expressions your characters use evoke oral stories and the oral storyteller. What advice would you give aspiring writers about writing dialogue and using dialect?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Again, I would invoke Vonnegut\u2019s commonsense advice to use the natural rhythms of the language you first heard as a child.\u00a0 In my case, conveniently, I grew up with the grand, rolling rhythms of the King James Version, which were just what I needed for these stories.\u00a0 Also, it is pretty clear that the stories in both Testaments are rooted in oral tradition\u2014a tradition that continues to be oral, because that is how I and millions of others first heard those stories, clustered around the knee of a story-telling Sunday-school teacher.<\/p>\n

A curious note: in common with many other apostate children of religious families, I love the King James Version, and abhor the more recent dull and ugly translations, with their grisly efforts at modernity and relevance.\u00a0\u00a0 This is one issue on which I can agree with my late Uncle Mark, a fundamentalist minister who resigned from the board of Bob Jones University over their use of versions other than the \u201cdivinely inspired\u201d KJV.<\/p>\n

As for dialogue advice to aspiring writers, two simple things.\u00a0 The first is to eavesdrop shamelessly, listening like a writer, and keeping a notebook handy.\u00a0 The second is to make a habit of reading your ms to yourself at reasonably frequent intervals, out loud.\u00a0 <\/em>If you\u2019ve been listening hard enough, hearing your own material out loud<\/em>\u00a0 gives you a good indication of where problems might lie.<\/p>\n

\"scroll8\"<\/a>You have created strong female characters. Can you elaborate on how and why this is important (for you, for your writing)?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My agenda in The Lateral Truth <\/em>is humanist, rather than feminist, though I see humanism as embracing fairness and respect for all genders.\u00a0 People are individuals, some of whom are strong and some weak, regardless of their gender identification.\u00a0 The same goes for my characters, so inevitably some of them are strong women.<\/p>\n

I will add that there have been many strong women in my life\u2014friends, sisters, aunts, daughter, mother, mother-in-law, cousins.\u00a0 This includes, of course, the many female fundamentalists to whom I am related, who are theoretically in subjection to their husbands, but are nonetheless powerful and assertive human beings.\u00a0 Lord, yes.<\/p>\n

You challenge stereotypes here. How can writers unsettle stereotypes without perpetuating them? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Stereotypes are, almost by definition, two-dimensional.\u00a0 You can play with them by adding a third dimension, either by using them as POV characters (eg, Adam, Martha), or by seeing them and their actions through the eyes of other characters (eg, Samson, Moses). \u00a0Also, you can often look past the default stereotype to find an entirely different archetype\u2014Moses as Dark Messiah, Jacob as Trickster, Job\u2019s wife as the bereaved mother in myriad pi\u00e9tas.<\/p>\n

Some of the stereotypes I challenge in The Lateral Truth<\/em> are the default images of certain biblical characters.\u00a0 Samson the action hero, for example: a positive metaphor in every respect but his weakness for loose women.\u00a0 The message is that holy violence is admirable, but women are bad, a snare that good ol\u2019 boys would do well to avoid.\u00a0 In my version, seen through the eyes of his cousin, he is a psychopathic fathead responsible for his own stupid downfall. \u00a0The story\u2019s subtext, further, is that the original stereotype may be usefully manipulated for cynical ends (by the Levite, in this case), but its usefulness does not make it true.<\/p>\n

Martha, by contrast, is commonly seen as a negative stereotype: the houseproud fussbudget, out of touch with her spiritual side.\u00a0 Mary, who drops everything to listen to the Master, gets a pat on the head in the consensus version.\u00a0 For me, however, Martha is simply being responsible and caring, and she deserves a better press.\u00a0 And, though the biblical account does not really give the end of the story, I challenge the stereotype by extrapolating to the chaos that would follow if everybody behaved like Mary.<\/p>\n

Why is it important to create sympathy for your evil characters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

That rather begs the question.\u00a0 There were a few evil characters for whom I did not<\/em> want to create sympathy: Moses, for example, who gets an entirely undeserved good deal in most other literary treatments I\u2019ve ever seen, though he comes across in the Bible as a kind of Bronze-Age Jim Jones.\u00a0 Hitler, Torquemada, and the warring deities in \u201cDagon\u201d also have no redeeming qualities. \u00a0The prophet described in \u201cThe Last Breakfast\u201d is an archetypal huckster.\u00a0 Etc.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the genocidal slaughterers featured in \u201cThe Gibeah Wives\u201d should be<\/em> sympathetic characters.\u00a0 They are a demonstration of the truth that ordinary people\u2014good people\u2014will do monstrous things if persuaded that some god or other wants them to.\u00a0\u00a0 (I make no distinction here between religious and political dogmas: Mao, Hitler and Stalin were brothers under the skin to Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.)\u00a0 The mass murderers in \u201cThe Gibeah Wives\u201d are sympathetic precisely because they do what ordinary humans habitually do: permit their rational and empathetic natures to be subverted by magical thinking and malign authority.<\/p>\n

Protagonists also need to have flaws, to be human. Can you give some \"scroll6\"<\/a>examples from your book to illustrate this?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, the most common flaws among the good guys in The Lateral Truth <\/em>are either na\u00efve optimism, cowardice, or cynical resignation.\u00a0\u00a0 Adam is a nice enough guy, with great hopes for the future, but he\u2019s a sucker of positively biblical proportions.\u00a0 Job\u2019s wife, irremediably damaged, refuses to love. \u00a0\u00a0The nameless narrator of \u201cBridegroom of Blood\u201d keeps silent in the face of evil; her husband Eleazar embraces the tyranny and becomes part of it.\u00a0 And so on.<\/p>\n

You have many humorous scenes. How and why is humor effective in fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of my many rejection slips for this volume complained that the stories weren\u2019t funny enough to keep people reading\u2014as if blasphemy is only permissible when it adds \u201chey, just kidding.\u201d\u00a0 Nuts to that.\u00a0 Some of the stories were not meant<\/em> to be funny.<\/p>\n

But yes, I did incorporate a lot of jokes in some cases, for a number of good reasons.\u00a0 Jokes can take readers by surprise, and jolt them into a lateral view.\u00a0 Jokes are insidious; they can be as viciously sharp as outright abuse, but more subtly.\u00a0\u00a0 Most of all, jokes can break up the po-faced reverence with which religious motifs are usually approached.\u00a0 That is a good<\/em> thing, especially as I strongly suspect some of the ancient texts were intended to be funny in the first place.<\/p>\n

On a more personal note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

When did you first start writing fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apparently, I told great stories when I was a child. \u00a0I don\u2019t remember that.\u00a0 The first writing I remember was a poem about Takakkaw Falls in Yoho National Park, written on a paper towel when I was eleven.\u00a0 We were on holiday in a trailer, and a paper towel was the only writing material my mum could find.\u00a0 I wrote lots of really bad poetry in my teens, along with a few attempts at short stories.\u00a0 Going to university stopped me dead in my tracks for a few years as far as writing goes, but I always thought my time would come.\u00a0 It came when I was 31, as displacement activity while I was finishing my PhD thesis and having a baby.\u00a0 The irony of it!\u00a0 Nowadays I yearn for displacement activity to delay getting down to writing.<\/p>\n

\"scroll10\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How long did it take you to write this book?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first story was written in Hong Kong in about 1993, and four more followed at long intervals over the next few years, along with copious notes for others.\u00a0 In 2001, a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts allowed me to get nine more down on paper in one hugely enjoyable burst of energy; but the last story written, \u201cDeath of a Pagan,\u201d was not finished until late 2004.\u00a0 Then there were two major slice\u2019n\u2019dice revisions, one in 2005 after the Julian story was finished, and another in 2006\/2007, to get the volume ready for press. Altogether, that comes to eleven years for the writing, and another three for polishing the manuscript and finding a publisher. And now, another seven years or so to bring up the 2nd<\/sup> edition.<\/p>\n

What was the most difficult story to write and why?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Without question, \u201cBridegroom of Blood in the Wilderness of Sin,<\/em>\u201d the novella about Moses and the Children of Israel.\u00a0 I described, above, the problems I had finding a workable POV; but it was also a pain in the neck because the narrative covers four long, complex books of the Old Testament, all of which screamed to be included.\u00a0 Lots of nifty stuff had to be left out, alas, or I\u2019d still be writing the damned story.\u00a0 I also did not want \u201cBridegroom\u201d to turn into one of those fatuous exercises in giving naturalistic explanations for the Ten Plagues, or the Crossing of the Red Sea, or the Manna in the Wilderness.\u00a0 I have, however, been toying with the idea of using the novella as a springboard to a full novel treatment.<\/p>\n

What advice would you give writers just starting out?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read a lot, write a lot, and be prepared to slog through hard times.\u00a0 Oh, and good luck.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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