Posts made in June 14th, 2012

• Looking Through the Glass

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.
  

  Carol Wolf is the author of Summoning and Binding, Books One and Two of the Moon Wolf Saga

  I once had the honor of spending an afternoon talking to writing guru Len Berkman. He said he’d never met an artist who hadn’t had the experience at some point of being displaced from their own culture, and made to feel an outsider. Thus, the sense of looking on the world without being entirely a part of it is an element of what makes one an artist.

  I grew up in Switzerland, and then in Holland as my father worked for an international firm. As part of the expatriate American community I had a strong sense that the country I was living in was not my own, that their ways were not our ways. I remember being woken up in the middle of the night because an American Western was playing on television, and we kids were brought in to watch it because it was part of our culture, not to be missed.

  I was nine when we relocated to the U.S., by which time I had a very clear vision of America in my head. It had drinking fountains that dispensed orange juice (my teacher at school in Amsterdam told me this), everyone spoke English, and everyone acted and believed like “us.” My first day at school I parked my bike in the boy’s bike rack, and discovered that I was still a foreigner. The fuss they made!

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• To Seek Out New Life, and New Civilizations…

  Writing on other cultures that are not your own.

  If you want to write effectively about cultures not your own, you have to walk a mile in their shoes.

  I like writing about cultures that aren’t my own.  I like experiencing things that can open my mind and expand my frame of reference for both my writing and my life.  Finding commonalities between these ‘strange, exotic’ cultures and my own is all kinds of grist for my mill.  I admit I may have it a little easier than some of my Night Bazaar colleagues in this regard, because all the ’strange, exotic’ cultures I write about are of this world.  (I can’t imagine the work it would take to create a culture not my own from the ground up, then have to anticipate the mores and reactions of its inhabitants.  I’m much more comfortable using what’s already around.)  They may have more freedom to create, but I have the advantage of working with what’s already there.  All I have to do is use it.

  That’s the key, really, to my approach–absorb as  much information about the culture as possible before attempting to duplicate or describe it.  Google and the Internet are invaluable for the academic research, but I find being there is the  best way to go.  As human beings we always want to find some qualities in any culture we can identify with, and I’ve never had a problem doing that.  People and their responses to situations have a tendency to universality.  In the words of Khan Noonien Singh, “There has been technical advancement, but how little man himself has changed.”

  

  I almost want to thank God for that lack of evolutionary progress.  Making ‘strange, exotic’ cultures accessible to the subway commuter is a hell of a lot easier if a man is a man is a man. (more…)

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