Setting the Tone for Climate Change Literature

I have a habit of writing late at night. I set up a chair at my kitchen window, prop my laptop on the sill, and gaze out at the 2 a.m. Nashville pastoral. It’s the same view every night. There’s the quiet calm of the empty bank parking lot, the dimmed lights of the closed Walgreens, and the distant glow of the McDonald’s yellow, curving M.

Tonight was no different. I set my computer on the sill and began to write a post about climate change and the environment in contemporary literature. The day had been unusually temperate—70 in the middle of January—and I opened the window to take in the night air. The breeze was stronger than usual (the windows shivered in their frames) but the night was lovely.

Not an hour later, I received a text from a friend: “Look outside if you haven’t. It’s about to be stormy.” Within twenty minutes, the wind had kicked up and the lanky street lamp outside my apartment began to sway. Twenty more minutes, and the wind was twisting great sheets of rain around the buildings. Tornado sirens spiraled out over the city. I sat at my window, baffled.

Is this normal weather? What is normal weather? With so many mega-storms affecting the U.S. in the past few years—from Sandy to Katrina to the Nashville’s great flood in 2010—it makes sense to look out the window and think, sure, the wind is dying down and the storm is passing over, but what about next month, or next week?

This Monday, I spoke with Professor Teresa Goddu, who co-directs the The Cumberland Project, a faculty initiative to incorporate sustainability topics in Vanderbilt’s curriculum. Professor Goddu, an American Studies and English professor, currently teaches a class that explores “ecotopia as a conceptual model.”

As I wrote in my previous post, I’m a fledgling convert to the climate crisis movement. I didn’t know where to begin. What did climate change literature look like? More importantly, if the author consciously wrote climate crisis advocacy fiction, could it really be considered art, or was it instead literary propaganda?

Professor Goddu said, “We need to address your use of the term “advocacy.” Literature that addresses climate change is not necessarily advocacy literature. Authors write about crucial issues. Whether they’re advocating or not is something different. Tony Morrison often talks about how, as an author, she lays bare crucial issues in her work, but she has no duty to come up with the answers to solve them.”

Ah, that made sense. Climate change literature, like all great literature, should be written as an attempt to describe and understand the world and the human condition. As the Greek philosopher and writer Nikos Kazantzakis put it, “The real meaning of enlightenment” (for our purposes, literature) “is to gaze with undimmed eyes on all darkness.”

To gaze with undimmed eyes at darkness suits enlightenment and literary understanding. Ideally, however, climate change literature will also galvanize readers into action.

Professor Goddu added, “The question is whether to cater to hope or to fear. The question is how to tell this story so that people will actually listen. Something I ask my students to consider in class is dystopian literature. Is it useful to us? Is the despair that dystopian literature creates helpful? I’m trying to bring in ecotopian literature that works the muscle of creative thinking and open us up to new possibilities.”

Nicole Burdakin, a Vanderbilt senior in the English Honors Program with a double major in Geology, is currently writing a novella for her Honors thesis. The novella focuses on the research efforts of a paleozoologist who also works as a consultant for a polar bear exhibit in a California zoo. Climate change is a peripheral theme throughout the novella.

I asked Nicole why she chose climate change as a theme for her novel.

Burdakin explained, “Climate change and literary fiction work together in that the climate is a metaphor for a lot of character struggles and character development issues. The idea of impending change, the idea of something being irreversible and out of your control—there are a lot of good metaphorical parallels between what’s happening in the climate and what’s happening with the characters.”

Looking back over some of my own work, I see that I’ve subconsciously used consequences of the climate crisis (the worst drought Texas had seen in 70 years, for example) as metaphors for my characters’ personal struggles.

Literature does help us understand the world. Climate crisis literature achieves the same goals, but it highlights different problems.

Yes, climate change serves as a metaphor for the characters’ struggles and fears, but what’s terrifying is that the climate crisis in reality is not a metaphorical parallel for our problems. It is our greatest problem, one that cannot be pushed back behind our periphery vision for much longer.

Climate change is the fitful baby we hope will quiet down if we let it be. The problem with a whimpering baby, though, is nine times out of ten, the baby doesn’t quiet down. The baby only screams louder.

Though the tornado sirens have quieted for now, they still echo in my head. When is the next time they’ll ring again?

Time to Change the Road We’re On

Hey there literature lovers, it’s been awhile. Let’s just say the obvious: it’s my fault, not yours. I haven’t kept up with you as a good friend should, and all I can offer you are my few feeble excuses. I blame my blogging truancy on the combined forces of post-finals burnout and a holiday-treat-induced torpor, if those count for anything. Regardless, I’m back, and this time I’m here to stay.

First things first, an important update: this semester I signed up for a journalism class that focuses on “telling the story of climate change.” The primary goal of our writings will be to “explore environmental crisis and innovative breakthrough.

The first day was of class was a humiliation. Nalgene bottles lined the tables, their plastic rainbow bodies plastered with bumper stickers from PETA, 350.org, Clean Water Movement. Then there was me, with my brown cowboy boots and single-serve non-recyclable Dasani. I stuck out like a very sore, non-Green thumb.

Next it came time to introduce ourselves. All around me were leaders of Vanderbilt’s Green Movement. Students who had protested our campus’ coal factory, students who had become vegetarians for both ethical and environmental reasons, students who had led initiative in their high school to ban single-serve water bottles.

Now I really felt guilty about that Dasani. I started blushing and the girl next to me piped up. “That water bottle was made from polar bear tears.”

What did I say when it was my turn to speak? “So I’m from Texas, so…I don’t really know much about climate change, per say…”

There was no ugly silence. I was not banned from the room. But I did feel like an idiot, and rightly so.

Then again, there was context for my ignorance. Texas is not the most environmentally progressive state. The majority of our citizens are in some way connected to the fossil fuels industry, and they feel a deep loyalty to their bread-and-butter providers. They’re oilfield workers and Exxon employees. They frack shale and drill oil and proclaim, in their twangiest of twangs, “Global warming? That’s blue state bullshit.”

But I joined this class for a reason. I wanted to learn about climate change, and I did.

Our first assignment, Bill McKibben’s article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” really did terrify me. Turns out, this “blue state bullshit”—this climate change hoopla—is a very real and present danger, one that threatens not just our country (or my lovely Texas) but the entire planet.

So what now?

I admit I have a long way to go. I need to educate myself not just as a human, but as a writer, too.

After all, have I not spouted on about the duty of writers to understand the human condition? What could be more relevant to the human condition than the condition of our planet, on which all seven billion humans reside?

Whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, climate change will affect, or already is affecting, millions of human beings across the globe. To ignore climate change in fiction, them, is to write fantasy rather than literature. To ignore climate change in our day-to-day lives, however, is to submerge ourselves in a far more dangerous escapism, one that leads down a path of destruction not just to nature and our furry polar bear friends, but to human life as we know it.

I used to count myself a good citizen because I turned off the lights when I left the room, because I took quick showers (as long as I wasn’t washing my hair), and because I recycled my newspapers on campus. Damn.

So what now?

As a good citizen—and more specifically, as a good writer—I wish to move forward by learning as much as I can about climate change, to explore how authors have understood the environmental crisis in literature, and to add my voice to the chorus that sings the necessity of not just belief, but action, too.

Bibliopocalypse Bullshit

If you’re a literature lover, you’ve probably grown weary of false prophets proclaiming The End of the Book. It’s easy to shake your head and smirk at the world’s December 21st doomsday preoccupations, but rumors of the publishing apocalypse have bombarded the literary world for a long time now, and such discussions still make us tense with worry.

The Four Horsemen of the Bibliopocalypse came galloping down years ago. They rode their brimstone-snorting steeds with a blazing fury, each one more frightening then the last. First there was Radio, and then came Film, TV, and finally—that fearful, ever-morphing chimera, Internet.

Suddenly the nightmarish paranoia of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 became depressingly naive: who would burn books if no one even bothered to read them?

As an undergraduate searching for a job in publishing, believe me—I’m nervous. In the months before Y2K, wild-eyed neurotics (including my fairly rational parents) stockpiled jugs of water, lined their pantry shelves with SPAM, and stacked sardine tins into squat, shiny pyramids. Our family probably had enough dried bean varieties to create a full-scale modge-podge of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Who can blame them? Don’t we book lovers suffer similar hysterics when we hear prophecies of the literary end-times?

If you’re panicky, like me, you just might be another juvenile, aspiring writer, terrified that you’ve missed out on the literary lifestyle you’ve idealized for the past two decades, ever since you mouthed your first intelligible word, “book.” You’re on the edge of tossing out your literary delusions and your late-night, idealism-soaked desires to write The Great American Novel. This very afternoon you’ll get serious! You’ll start submitting your sparse resumes and bland cover letters to the kind of respectable jobs your parents always wanted you to have. The kind of job that promises a stable family life and dental insurance. Imagine it, writer. You might be a lawyer. Or a banker. Or a consultant. You might be about to make yourself miserable for the rest of your life—but don’t do it. Not yet.

Then again, maybe you’re not a writer at all. Maybe you’re a reader. You won’t panic, but you’ll begin to feel nostalgia creeping over your skin, like lichen over an old gravestone. In a moment of introspection, you’ll consider how it must have felt to watch the first automobiles roll down a city street, how soon they would replace the carriages. Out of everyone, you would have been the one to miss the horses. You would have been the one to take giddy pleasure in stroking their velvet noses, in the hot flush of their breath against your palm. One day you’ll wander into a used bookstore, if that still exists where you live, and you’ll drift through the dusty quiet. The place has the hospice-ward hush of a nursing home. You’ll say hello to the books, touch your fingertips to the papery skin of their pages, and whisper kind, soft things into their yellowed spines. The books are frail strangers, but you think you might be able to save one, take one home and treat it gently. After all, it doesn’t have long for this world.

Hey, you. Stop. I meant it. Take a moment. Back up. Breathe.

Feel better? I bet you don’t. But you should. I’ll tell you why.

Last week, Esquire columnist Stephen Marche claimed that we have come to “The Golden Age for Writers.” There are more options for writers now than ever before: tiny presses publish books that win major national awards, and self-publishing has become a viable and slightly-more-respectable option for aspiring authors. Marche even has the audacity to show us statistics that might make us writers (all terrible defeatists when it comes to our own monetary success) optimistic. People are actually reading these days, and they’re reading good books: “The percentage of Americans who told the National Endowment for the Arts that they read literature rose in 2008 (their most recent survey) by 3.5 percentage points to more than half the population — the first gain in twenty-six years.”

That’s a comfort for writers and booksellers, but readers have reason to clink champagne flutes, too. According to Marche, competition has sparked innovation:

“Go back and look at those old magazines and you will discover something shocking: They’re mostly boring; they’re also often just plain sloppy. With a few notable exceptions, almost every magazine in the world is in its best shape ever, right now. Good old-fashioned competition — from the Internet and the expanding marketplace — has forced them to improve. They’re better written. Vastly better designed. More entertaining. More accurate. Richer.”

See? I told you there was hope. We have better readers for our writers and better writers for our readers.
And the Four Horsemen of the Bibliopocalypse? I don’t think we have much to fear from them. After all, we’re the type that like horses, right? Perhaps we can warm to these snorting furies. Besides, this Internet beast, strange and wily creature that it is, offers the promise of a beginning more than the threat of an end. I say we saddle up and see where we can go. It might be nice to have a change of scenery.

The Reluctant Read

Have you ever read a book you were certain you would despise?

Someone forced it on you, for one reason or another—class or a kindly but pushy relative—and every ounce of you resisted. You took the loathsome lump of a novel in your hands and a frown unfolded from every crook in your body. Your mouth turned down at the sides, your shoulders slumped, your stomach boiled with an unpleasant acid, and you turned to page one.

Stupid, you thought. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Trite. Dull. Idiotic.

But, if you were lucky, something else started to happen. That relative of yours, who’s actually very intelligent aside from his prescriptions for your life and your reading habits, maybe have given you something good. You squinted your eyes at the page. The acid in your stomach slowly subsided, then transformed. Your dull aching dread became something light—a nervous, floating excitement—and suddenly, beautifully, you were hooked.

Watch out. A book like that can be dangerous. Afterward, you might find yourself irrevocably altered. You might return to that book, year after year, and find it like a lover you can’t quite bleach from your heart.

This week, I finally sat down to read Maile Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, that grim frown of reluctance present even as I flipped past praise from The New York Times and one of my favorite and most respected authors, Richard Ford.

The truth is, my reluctance to this particular work was born from my own embarrassment. Last year Ms. Meloy came to read at Vanderbilt, and though I enjoyed the reading, I was having a fit of awkward. It comes on sometimes, despite my best intentions at nonchalance, and there I was, fidgeting and unable to speak, when after she sat in the hallway outside the reading room, selling and signing copies of her book behind her plastic foldout chair. The book was around $15—a price I didn’t feel like paying at the time—and there I was in front of her, feeling the money drawn from my hands, and gasping out stupidly that I loved Montana, too! She signed it “For Liz, a fellow Big Sky fan,” and I left feeling outraged at my own jellyfish spine, convinced I would never read her book, more out of principle than anything else.

Over the next few months, I glowered at the book on my shelf. I felt upset when The New Yorker published her story “The Proxy Marriage” in May, and even more upset when I actually enjoyed it. When another story of hers, “Demeter,” was published in The New Yorker two weeks ago, I decided to bring Both Ways home for Thanksgiving break—not to read it, but to pass it off to someone else, so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. The book was abandoned to a countertop, and then my cousin—also a writer and reader—picked it up.

“I don’t know about that one,” I said, eyeing it narrowly as she flipped through the first pages. “Don’t blame me if it’s bad.”

But soon she had finished the first story, and over the course of the day, juggling her 6-month-old on her arm, my cousin read Meloy’s book. At 11 p.m., she was still reading. All I can say is that I was confused. When I went to bed around midnight, my cousin stayed up with the book.

The next morning I asked her how it went. Guess what? She’d loved it.

So I began to reconsider. After all, it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. After all, my revulsion at the read was petty, idiotic, and nonsensical.

“You’ve got to read it,” my cousin said. “Really.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.

I packed it in my bag, drank a glass of wine as I waited in the airport, and flipped through the pages to the first story. Then I read the second story, the third, and the rest of the book over the next week.

Oh my Lord, was it good.

As George R.R. Martin once said, “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

For me, good fiction occurs when you are shocked into the consciousness of a fully realized character, in a fully realized situation. Good fiction opens us up to new identities. What’s so wonderful about Meloy’s Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It is that it allows the reader not just to have new experiences, but also to return to something recognizable—to encounter a long lost feeling—really a kind of subconscious tone of experience that’s been buried deep or glossed over by its banal surface. Her stories strike deep emotional notes subtly, gracefully, and with almost no visible artifice. It’s astounding.

As Curtis Sittenfeld put it in his review of Meloy’s collection, “They are people who act irrationally, against their own best interests — by betraying those they care about, making embarrassing romantic overtures and knowingly setting in motion situations they’d rather avoid — and Meloy’s prose is so clear, calm and intelligent that their behavior becomes eminently understandable.”

He goes on to say that her characters act with “a kind of banal, daily desperation”—perhaps that’s the feeling I recognized in myself, when reading her prose.

Every page I turned I heard myself apologizing to Meloy in my head—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—how could I have dismissed her, this?

At the same time, though, I’m happy with how things turned out. If you’ve hardened your heart to a book, and the prose stills find a way to maneuver through that tough casing, you know you’ve come across something great, something beautiful, that will be a part of you for a long time. Maybe forever.

Hurricane Stories (Mine and Yours and Ours)

NYC Subway System flooded from Hurricane Sandy

September of my junior of high school—back in 2008—a Category 4 Hurricane, Ike, hammered the Gulf Coast. In Houston, oaks and pines cracked at their spines, falling on houses, cars, and power lines. Gray water rose high in the streets-turned-canals. Power lines hung limp, like forgotten party streamers, from their crooked poles.

The whole city shut down. My neighborhood lost power for two weeks.

At first, it felt like an adventure. The air was cool from the storm, and we opened all the windows to let in the breeze. Dad pulled out his old camping gear from the garage, and we used his small cook stove to heat up soup and boxed mac and cheese for our meals. We even had two large tanks of water in our attic, leftover supplies from the days when my Dad had prepared for the end of the world at Y2K.

The first night after the storm had died, Dad and I took our dog out on a walk through the dark streets. Wet leaves coated the sidewalks and splintered branches littered the ground. All of the houses were dark, and the neighbors had moved their cars into the garages. What can I say but it felt post-apocalyptic?

For the first time in a long time—with all of Houston’s many lights blotted out—we could see the star scape overhead. The moon drenched the houses in silver light. It was marvelous (though incredibly stupid and dangerous, now that I look back on it, with all those downed power lines, still static and alive).

Then reality set in. The city grew hot and the mosquitos bred in the water. We had no fresh laundry, no way to bathe ourselves, and nothing to do but tell stories, read books, and slowly surrender our minds to the inevitability of cabin fever.

What I remember most is not having a news channel, and getting information by word of mouth from neighbor to neighbor, from my grandfather, too—who is not a reliable source.

But those were the days before Twitter, the days before Instagram.

Now, with Hurricane Sandy, the power of social media has proved itself once again. I can only tell you in words, not pictures, what the streets looked like during Hurricane Ike. Who knows where the hard copy prints of photos have gone. If they’re not on my computer, they might as well not exist.

These days, though, the world has changed. Social media has stepped in to cover every part of the Hurricane. Our generation is that of the citizen journalist, and more than that—the citizen storytellers.

Fake picture of a scuba diver in the NYC Subway System

A whole new blog—Instacane—has been organized to collect the pictures of Sandy uploaded by the popular picture app, Instagram. That’s a new form of journalism. Flooded parking lots lined with the iconic NYC yellow taxi cabs, now underwater. The subway system, filled with green water, like a morphed image from Titanic, and the cars bobbing up from the depths of an underground parking garage. It’s another world up East, and the Twitter/Instagram generation is doing its part to document the damage.

Along with the journalism, though, there’s been quite a storm of story telling, too. Fake photos have flooded the web. Sharks swimming through the streets of Puerto Rico, purple swirling storm clouds around the Statue of Liberty, a scuba diver swimming through the flooded subway system—these fakes have heightened the stakes of the storm, and after all, isn’t that fair, too?

I think of Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, and the story “How to Tell a True War Story.” According to O’Brien, sometimes a story has to be exaggerated or changed to get to the real heart of the capital-t Truth. Truth is emotional truth, not just a statement of facts. The picture of the swamped McDonalds (originally an art installation) demonstrates that feeling of an American normalcy dominated by uncontrollable and frightening forces.

The new social media have allowed us to enter a world where we can share our most painful, frightened moments—our vulnerability—with the rest of the world. It allows us, more importantly, to take comfort from that shared vulnerability. We are, all of us, in this world together.

Whether it’s Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans six years ago, Hurricane Ike in Houston four years ago, or Hurricane Sandy in New York and New Jersey today­—global weather patterns have grown more erratic—and who knows who it will be tomorrow.

The least we can do is continue sharing what we have: our knowledge and our stories.  Whether that means taking a picture of the flooded parking garage across the street, or photoshopping an ocean predator swimming beside a car, it’s all ultimately achieving the same goal. We are telling stories, and we are (hopefully) eliciting change.

Twitter Fiction: “Shrapnel”

This week I’m posting my first ever fiction story to appear on this blog. It also happens to be the first short story that I have ever written to fit the  140-character Twitter format, and was published via @pancakebooks (stupid name, I know) earlier this week.

My inspiration for this form comes from Jennifer Egan’s short story “Black Box,” originally published on Twitter and then in The New Yorker.

Voila. Hope you enjoy.

Shrapnel

The day before my grandfather’s entire platoon was wiped out—all except for him—they spent the afternoon digging trenches in a Korean graveyard.

A man from a nearby village had begged them to stop. It was bad luck, he told them. No good would come of it. They would be cursed.

But the Chinese were on the other side of the hill. It was war. They did what they had to do, and my grandfather was the Lieutenant.

He told them to keep digging.

In all likelihood, they unearthed bodies as they dug. Yellowed bones, human hair. But my grandfather didn’t talk to us about those things.

He was a storyteller. He told us instead of another discovery: a jade Buddha, sea green and the size of his hand.

When the Korean man from the village saw it, he started crying.

Who knows how long the Buddha lived there, under the earth—centuries? My grandfather was the Lieutenant. He put it in his knapsack.

A souvenir.

That night the men used the grave stones for washboards. They ate from their mess kits, joked about home—how they’d never eat rice again.

A private in my grandfather’s unit, Eddie from Kentucky, stayed up one night to finish a book. Get some sleep, the guys told him.

It was a damn good book, though, and he’d wanted to finish it. Eddie read the last chapters by the beam of his military-issue flashlight.

The next morning, the Americans were overrun. Bullets strafed the air. Smoke rose in plumes, then clung to the ground in low, dark clouds.

A bullet slid through Eddie’s chest and pierced his lung. He died choking for breath, unable to speak.

But he finished it, my grandfather said. What was the book? I asked. The Call of the Wild, my grandfather said.

The rest of my grandfather’s unit died around him.

My grandfather was lucky. He heard the grenade as it dropped over the wall of the trench, as it danced down the concrete steps.

One, two—and he lunged sideways—three.

When I was young I ran my finger across the scars, over the jagged shrapnel that racked his body and crawled like spiders under his skin.

By the time he died—62 of cancer—he’d had 12 operations. At 58, the metal still wriggled inside his leg, searching out an artery.

After the war, my grandfather came home and went back to college. He met my grandmother, they married, and life happened.

They had three girls. One, two—and a gap of six years—three.

My grandmother still tells the stories my grandfather told her about the war, about his childhood.

I try to pay attention to how they warp and bend over time. How her memory matches up against mine, against my aunts’, against my mother’s.

Who’s to say who’s right?

Memory works like shrapnel. Long after a callus has grown over a wound, memory still cuts inside you. Drawing up new pain or lying dormant—for a time.

Often, my mind goes back to that jade Buddha. My grandmother says it was stolen from my grandfather on his way home from war.

And yet I can’t believe this.

Did I not see it as a child? That soft, green belly, that laughing mouth? Winking at me from some high shelf, or the back of a dark cabinet?

The last few days he was in the hospital, he hallucinated that he was back in Korea.

I was only six at the time, but still. Hadn’t I seen the Buddha, clenched in the grip of his sweating hand?

Begging for one last miracle, all the while still crouched in the trenches, the ping of the grenade hitting against the concrete steps.

One, two—yes, hadn’t I seen it then?—three.

The Case for Lilac Prose

Dear literature lovers, have you grown sick of simple sentences?

Deadened to the doldrums of dry, dusty prose?

Benumbed by the banal?

You’re not alone.

I, and at least one other guy, agree with you.

And after all, don’t we have a right to be upset?

These days American literature has taken on the drab and isolating austerity of an Edward Hopper painting. Once bold and fresh, the pared-back writing style of literary greats like Hemingway and Carver has grown limp and weary—flaccid as a neglected houseplant in the fits of winter.

This Wednesday, The New York Times published another installment of Draft, a series of essays that hone in on the “art and craft of writing.” In this week’s selection, “A Short Defense of Literary Excess,” the 24-year old British author Ben Masters (who’s pretty cute for the literary type, in case you wanted to know) wrote about his love for writers who revel in the musicality of a poetic sentence and the long hours of tinkering that can occur in the process of perfecting the rhythm and diction of phrasing.

In the article, Masters describes a few of the great baroque stylists: Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, and others. For Masters, these authors open the doors to the house of literature, allowing it to breathe and expand.

Writes Masters, “Excess serves very different functions for each of [the authors], whether as an expression of wonder, adaptability, individuality, free will; or as a means of self-fashioning; even as a survival tactic. But whatever it embodies or performs, the sentence in their hands is expansive rather than constrictive.”

So what do you think of this Masters?

Is he pretentious?

Does he waggle his roseate pinky finger as he sips from his china tea cup? Who knows. But I don’t think so. I think I agree with him.

American prose has become unplayful and stiff, like a collared shirt flattened and then doused with too much starch. After all, when was the last time we frontier-forgers won a Nobel? Not since 1993, with Toni Morrison’s gorgeous, sometimes surrealist prose.

Just as this article came out, I was in the middle of reading The Street of Crocodiles, a book by a Polish author, Bruno Schulz, who was Poland’s preeminent writer in the years between World War I and World War II. Schulz, a Jew, was shot in the head by a Nazi in World War II, and we only have his slim oeuvre of fantastical stories and eery drawings to let us know how much we’ve missed by that loss.

Take these two sentences, the very first from The Street of Crocodiles.

“In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears.”

When was the last time you read something so gorgeous, so wonderfully unexpected and vivid?

Schulz’s book, The Street of Crocodiles, is a collection of short stories that act as a kind of fantastical memoir of his own childhood and the growing mania of his father. Just as his father becomes obsessed with the cockroaches that steal around the house, the exotic birds he raises in the attic, and the inanimate objects he infuses with lungs and breath and evil intentions, Schulz’s narrator uses madness’s close cousin—the fantastic—to describe this childhood from the perspective of a man looking back on his youth through the lens of that same vivid, childish imagination.

Just read how he describes the boredom of being cooped up in winter: “The days hardened with cold and boredom like last year’s loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with a lazy indifference.”

Translate that into popularized prose and you might get something like: “The winter was cold and he was bored. He looked for something to do. He went into town and walked around the stores.”

Yikes, no!

John Wood, a writer and literary critic, writes in his book How Fiction Works why language is such a tricky thing. The medium too easily lends itself to the common. For Wood, the trouble with writing arises “because language is the ordinary medium of daily communication—unlike music or paint.”

How, then, to create art?

For some, the answer may be found in creating poetry from prose, thereby elevating the way we communicate to a higher plane.

But really, that’s not an answer, because just think of all the writers who have attempted excess in prose and instead been sucked down inside the quagmires of their own pretensions.

The best authors are those who can alternate between the high intricacy of the ornate and the dry marrow of the simplistic to create dynamic, destabilizing prose that truly captures the way humans think, act, and dream their worlds.

What do you call a mix of purple prose and bland, Puritanical austerity?

I, for one, call it Lilac Prose, and I think you should, too.