What to Write in an Age of MAGA.
My novels consist of:
-A story where a Greek God visits Earth.
-A snowed-in cozy murder mystery.
-A woman with the power to actually see promises.
-President James Garfield in the afterlife.
-A piece so experimental, sometimes even I have to refer to my old notes to remember what I was thinking exactly.
-A group of refugees in a bombed out city post civil-war trying to mount The Tempest.
And just a few days ago, I began my next novel; the genre is space opera. (I think, the definitions can be so fluid for such things.)
Do you see a partial pattern?
I’ll make it easy for you; almost all of my novels involve an element of the fanciful, the alien, the Divine.
One might also say a cozy mystery, though fully human involves a larger than average suspension of disbelief.
What I have not written to date is a searing indictment of, or soaring literary account against a moribund society replacing freedoms with oppression, vitality with violence.
In other words, I haven’t yet used my fiction as reflection of the deteriorating state of American societal and political norms. (Or for that matter the revelation that we have always been much closer to collapse than we like to tell our kids.)
This isn’t to say I never will write such a story. I have no such idea in the cue, but speaking in broad fashion there are whispers of whispers of ideas along this line. They are just not in the realization/acceptance stage.
Should they be? Should I, as an author, or you, if you are also an author, take on such genres and topics as part of our responsibility to the situation, and those who are/will suffer from same? Should we set aside whimsy and fantasy and weirdness and redirect our collective pens at the swords of encroaching tyranny by way of the stories we tell?
Should we be more timely?
I don’t know, should we?
That’s not the cop out it seems to be.
We creatives should continue to write, to create, to paint, to sing, to perform that which speaks to us most. There is nothing so dangerous to and rebellious against a tyranny than free, unfettered expression of self. A commitment to ballet while the world crumbles around you should not be confused with the proverbial Nero fiddling while the empire burns. It is a refusal of silence, a denial of diminution into passive, obedient cogs in the death machine that builds itself around us daily. Hourly.
Is there an element of escapism in providing readers, viewers, audience members tales of elves and starships, magic wands and mechanical men? For certain, and I would question anyone who refutes the utility of the periodic escape from this world.
Yet it is without a doubt more than that. It’s but one movement in the Dylan Thomas symphony to rage against a dying of our light.
Somebody will write the “important” fiction. (A term I use so loosely as to be laughable.) Perhaps at some point you will. Or I. But it won’t mean a damn if you lose yourself to write or read it.
Live.
Ty Unglebower 