Greek myths and urban legends
Today I get to welcome author Michael Williams to my blog. He's written a fascinating mix of Greek tragedy and urban legend in his novel, Vine: an Urban Legend. Given my interest in history, mythology, faith and science, you can tell that's one story I'm definitely eager to read, and Michael gives a fascinating introduction to how and why he wrote the novel in his guest post here. Click on http://www.firstrulepublicity.com/current-tours/vine-an-urban-legend/ to find more stops on the tour, and read on to find out more about Michael Williams and Vine.
Over to you Michael...
Introducing
Vine
The
challenge I set for myself in Vine was
pretty much as follows: for a long time
I wanted to write something that drew from Greek mythology, that revived the
old stories, the old gods, the old forces that might just already be there if
you’re prepared to look for them. For me, myth is still the best way to embrace meaning, or to create it
if there isn’t really any meaning on its own.
Myths are the stories about large things, about the big, unmanageable
forces that shape our lives and sweep through our experience. I think meaning always emerges in story, but
in myth particularly. Myth doesn’t hold
with consensus, empirical reality: it finds its way through other truths. It is
extended metaphor, and calls attention to itself as extended metaphor, as not
literal.
The Greek poets made up Greek
religion, and there is a kind of hope in that. Ours is too often a literalist
time: we are a culture of
fundamentalisms. We don’t listen to each
other politically, culturally, spiritually, because there’s only one way of
looking at things, and by god, it’s ours.
Myth may well be good medicine
for such ailments. Knowing that what you
believe is a kind of poetry you live by, neither more nor less than what a poem
is, and what it means.
Sometimes I’ve regretted not being a Greek of 2500 years ago, because
I would have liked to write a Greek tragedy—a work that dances between myth and
more contemporary story. That recalls a sense
of mythic wonder at the same time as it calls us to attend to the here and now,
to take stock of ourselves.
I finally decided to stop regretting and to write that tragedy anyway.
Hence Vine. Its plot borrowed from Euripides’ Bacchae (stolen in some ways, I hope,
because stealing would mean I’d made it my own somehow). A plot revisioned for a small city, early in
the 21st century. The story
is a familiar one, but in case you don’t know it, here’s how Polymnia, one of
the Muses, tells it in Vine:
The story,
after all, is hard. King Pentheus of Thebes tries to put down the new worship
of Dionysus, a cult that is turning the heads of his female subjects. Pentheus
imprisons the Great God, dismisses him.
For such disrespect, of course the divinity exacts revenge. Dionysus persuades the poor king to dress
himself in the garb of the Maenads—the female devotees of the god. Dressed in regal drag, he may witness the
sacred mysteries. or so the god tells him as he leads the tressed and fabulous
king into the mountains, handing him over to the Maenads, who tear him limb
from limb.
The moral
is this: Imprison the god, and he
returns on you with heavy duty. Push him
down and press him back, stand up for “wholesomeness and family values” until
you can’t help it and the photos emerge of your meth-sotted overtures to a
twelve-year-old boy in an airport restroom.
So it goes, sisters, when you can’t match what you want to be with what
you are.
If I
stopped there, the book would be a retelling.
Not that I don’t like retellings.
What you leave out and what you put in reshapes the myth. I think of Vine more as re-visioning.
And so in the telling, I tried to leave spaces for mystery to
intrude. At the tragic performances in
Athens, after all, the statue of the god Dionysus was reserved a seat in the
theatre.
If the god is coming, best make him room.
So I made room by experiment.
By telling the story in ways I hadn’t told a story before. The most basic elements of fiction are
traditionally plot, point of view, and character. So I decided to open them all up a little.
Plot: Index cards that
contained particular scenes, plot points arranged in patterns, not only in
lines but spatially in the hopes that one scene, positioned out of sequence in
traditional cause-and-effect plotting, might speak to another in a new way.
Point of View: As the book followed the
plot of the Bacchae, I found it
adopting the form as well. Episodes and
choruses—one a chorus of Muses led by Polymnia, the Muse of Sacred Poetry, and
the other a chorus of vagrants led by T. Tommy Briscoe, a homeless alcoholic
Elvis impersonator. The same event
through a number of eyes. Spaces for the
god.
Character: And when space is given,
the characters begin to take on properties.
T. Tommy is T. Tommy and not T. Tommy, just as all of us are ourselves
and not ourselves, responding to a part of ourselves that approaches
mysteries—deep within us or somewhere beyond us, but worth searching for
because it takes us closer to meaning, purpose, and perhaps some wisdom on the
way.
Intrigued? Here's some more information:
Vine: An Urban Legend by Michael Williams
Genre: Mythic Fiction
Genre: Mythic Fiction
192 pages
Amateur theatre director
Stephen Thorne plots a sensational production of a Greek tragedy in order to
ruffle feathers in the small city where he lives. Accompanied by an eccentric
and fly-by-night cast and crew, he prepares for opening night, unaware that as
he unleashes the play, he has drawn the attention of ancient and powerful
forces.
Michael Williams’ Vine
weds Greek Tragedy and urban legend with dangerous intoxication, as the drama
rushes to its dark and inevitable conclusion.
ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Michael
Williams was born in Louisville, Kentucky. Much of his childhood was spent in
the south central part of the state, amid red dirt, tobacco farms, and murky
legends of Confederate guerillas. He has spent a dozen years in various parts
of the world, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin, with stopovers in
Ireland and England, and emerged from the experience surprisingly unscathed.
Upon
returning to the Ohio River Valley, he has published a series of novels of increasing
oddness,combinations of what he characterizes as “gothic/historical
fiction/fantasy/sf/redneck magical realism” beginning with Weasel’s Luck (1988)
and Galen Beknighted (1990), the critically acclaimed Arcady (1996) and
Allamanda (1997), and, most recently, Trajan’s Arch (2010)... plus, of course, Vine (2012).
He
lives in Corydon, Indiana with his wife, Rhonda, and a clowder of cats.
SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS
Comments