On this day, when we in the D.C. area are having our second heavy snow storm in a week (the first having deposited upwards of thirty inches of snow in places), and I look out my window at the tree branches weighed down by a foot of the white stuff and at the wall of white blowing past at forty-plus miles per hour, I keep thinking of the Yukon I have never seen.  And I find it is a joy to sit in a warm, cozy apartment, drink a cup of cocoa, and pull out Robert W. Service’s collection of poems, Ballads of a Cheechako. (Copyright, 1909—yes, I like old things.)

Admittedly, Robert W. Service is neither Shakespeare nor Yeats, but, from the slightly gruesome humor of The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill to the desperate My Friends, he has a wonderful ability to make one visualize the isolation of the frozen north and the effect it has on men.  The down to earth quality of his characters reflects the elemental life they must live to survive in their environment, and the rhythm of Service’s ballad form accentuates the tongue-in-cheek humor or the intensity of his pieces.

For example, in The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, the narrator has taken a contract to bury Bill MacKie, “whenever, wherever, or whatsoever the manner of the death he die.”  Bill dies in the far north; the narrator packs up Bill’s coffin on his sleigh and goes off to bring Bill back and bury him.   He finds Bill frozen to death:

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I spoke:  “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.”

Have you ever stood in an Arctic hut in the shadow of the Pole,
With a little coffin six by three and a grief you can’t control?
Have you ever sat by a frozen corpse that looks at you with a grin,
And that seems to say:  “You may try all day, but you’ll never jam me in?”
I’m not a man of the quitting kind, but I never felt so blue
As I sat there gazing at that stiff and studying what I’d do.
Then I rose and I kicked off the husky dogs that were nosing round about,
And I lit a roaring fire in the stove, and I started to thaw Bill out.

In My Friends, the narrator, suffering from frostbite and craving the release of death, is saved by a murderer and a thief who struggle with determination against the elements to take him to the Mounted Police, even though it will surely end in prison or death for them.  In part, the trip is described:

And the camps we made when their strength out-played
and the day was pinched and wan;
And oh, the joy of that blessed halt, and how I
did dread the dawn;
And how I hated the weary men who rose and
dragged me on.

And oh, how I begged to rest, to rest—the snow
was so sweet a shroud;
And oh, how I cried when they urged me on, cried
and cursed them aloud;
Yet on they strained, all racked and pained, and
sorely their backs were bowed.

I don’t know whether these excerpts can do the work justice.  Since they are story-poems, it may be that one needs to read them in their entirety to fully appreciate them.  But I hope that they give one enough of a sense of his work that those who do not know of him, or only know his ballad, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, may be moved, on some snow-bound day, to look up these ballads and give him a read.

***

Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

Photo Credit: miamiamia

If I had ten lives, one of them would be lived as a linguist.

Language, phonetics, and the structure of the ways in which people speak their own languages and of how they carry that into English fascinate me.  Modern Irish (what the Irish call Irish and others sometimes call Irish Gaelic) was my first non-Romance language.  I studied it for two to three years, mainly in order to get a sense of how it affected the way in which the Irish speak and write in English.  (My pleasure in the structures and rhythms of Hiberno-English, along with a fifteen-year love-affair with Irish culture, eventually led to my writing of the novel Tinker’s Damn, a section of which was published in Ontario Review (Spring 2005).)

It is impossible, in this small space, to truly address the wonders and complexities that are the Irish language and how it has affected the ways in which the Irish historically have written and spoken in English.  But, perhaps, one can be given the merest taste, to whet the appetite.

Irish is one of six languages on the Celtic branch of the Indo-European tree.  One sub-branch contains Cornish, Welsh, and Breton.  The other sub-branch contains Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic, and Manx.  (As I understand it, Manx originated in the Isle of Man and is now an utterly dead language.)  I don’t know enough about the other five Celtic languages to speak concerning them—but Irish is complex.  Some examples:  the nouns in Irish carry gender and are declined.  While the verb for “to be” is irregular in many languages, the various forms of “to be”—positive, negative, and question—are at least recognizably connected.  But, compare the forms in Irish:  I am: Táim.  I am not: Nílim.  Am I?:  An bhfuilim?  And Irish numbers may vary in form according to whether one is counting persons, objects, or in the abstract.  And as for phonetics, while most European languages have, for practical purposes, only one sort of sound for the letters b, c, d, f, etc., Irish has two sorts, defined as broad and slender.  One only knows whether a consonant or group of consonants is broad or slender by looking at the vowels they are next to.

What are some ways in which Irish structure has come into Hiberno-English?

In Irish, there is no word “yes” or “no.”  As a result, in English, the Irish have tended, traditionally, to repeat the relevant verb in the positive or the negative.  Thus, if one asks the question, “Did you go to town?,” the answer would come, “I did,” or “I did not.”

Irish verbs have a past tense, but not a recent past tense.  Therefore, in English, the word “after” has been used to indicate action in the recent past.  So, rather than say, “I have gone to the pub” or “I have just gone to the pub,” one might say, “I’m after going to the pub.”

The Irish language does not have one word for “sunrise” or “moonrise.  Thus, these terms came into Hiberno-English as “the rising of the sun” (éirigh na gréine) and “the rising of the moon” (éirigh na gealaigh).  It is a matter of translation, not of poetry, but it does tend to make one feel that Irish must be a naturally poetic language.

And finally, of course, there are the many words from Irish that have come directly, or nearly directly, into the English language:  Shanty, whiskey, bard, slob, slew (as in a slew of new products—sluagh)), gob (mouth), keen (as in keening after a death), banshee, smithereen ( in Irish, literally, a little nothing), galore (from go Leor, meaning enough, plenty).

What I’ve written above is, of course, barely even the merest taste of this subject.  For those who want to learn more, I highly recommend the following books:  English As We Speak It in Ireland, by P.W. Joyce, Wolfhound Press, ( first published in 1910; reprinted 1991); Teach Yourself Irish, by Myles Dillon and Donncha ó Cróinín, (copyright 1961); and Learning Irish, by Mícheál ó Siadhail, (copyright, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, first published 1980).

***

Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle,Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

Note: A special thanks to Eleanor Max, my former Irish teacher, for checking the correctness of what I have written here. -JS

As a writer, I find myself perpetually at odds with the adage:  write what you know.  Too often it is taken literally, as an injunction to approach only subject matter that comes from one’s own experience.  Frequently, this results in fiction that is simply veiled autobiography.  Unless the life is extremely colorful, and/or the writer is extremely insightful, such fiction is, more often than not, narrow, self-absorbed, and emotionally shallow, rarely creating or even attempting to create that vital connection between the mundane and the universal.

Thus, we get stories about “how my boyfriend left me” or “my wife cheated” or “my uncle was a drunk” which lack the depth to express something broader about the nature of love or the nature of the relationship between men and women, or anything new or substantial about our common humanity.  Or we get stories by college professors about college professors who want to write stories.  Solipsism.  Some are quite adequately written, but they are “safe” and, ultimately, unmemorable.

I propose to turn the injunctive phrase around.  Don’t write what you know.  Know what you write.  That is, learn about the world, engage the world.  And then, in writing, make the empathetic leap.  Step into the body of the other, of someone different from yourself.  Live and write in their shoes.  Be them in your head until you have put them on the page.

Perhaps not everyone has the same natural degree of empathy or of ability to make the leap successfully.  But, to me, the interesting writers are those that write beyond their personal experience, who attempt that empathetic leap to other experiences, even to other peoples, other cultures.  And I am convinced that a deeper understanding of our common humanity, and a consequent deepening of the writing, will be gained by the attempt.

***

Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle,Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.

Photo Credit: Julia Freeman-Woolpert @ SXC.hu

Why do I write?  Today, I write because characters keep roaming through my head—characters with pasts and futures that I must put down on paper or no one but me will know they exist, and they’ll fade away.  Last year, or the year before, the driving motivation was often a Swiftian anger at the world’s ills and hypocrisies, which expressing to a public relieves.  But, when I began, in my teens, I just wanted to have fun.  To play.

There was nothing dramatic in the decision.  Reading, discussing literature, and writing were in the air all around me while I was growing up.  My father, my mother, and my brother (who is nine years older than myself) all read to me.  The three of them talked about literature around the kitchen table.  There were always books—history, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, art, dance, mythology, poetry and fiction, above all, fiction—read to me, handed to me, suggested to me.  Also, although neither of my parents published, my father wrote stories and poems.  My mother wrote witty, artistic letters that could have been short stories or the basis for them.  And she came to my father as one comes to an editor:  to suggest a small revision or flourish.  My brother also wrote creative fiction, pieces like his own version of The Odyssey, or a satire in which a poor country’s ambassador to the UN writes home to his president.

The attitude toward writing was that one should have a sense of play.  Not take it too seriously.  Just take in the technique of this or that writer, and feel free to try it out for oneself.  And that’s how I began.  Playing with styles, with words, with ideas.  I wrote a story in the style of Louis Carroll; a dialogue in the style of Tom Stoppard in which two actors argue about whether they should take bows for acting in his play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; a story in which Oscar Wilde’s entrance into heaven depends upon the literary assessment of his works by a jury of fellow writers.

Then two things happened.  I taught myself to draw.  And I became a lawyer.  (I blame the latter on my father, who handed me Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense when I was twelve.)  After writing legal decisions all day, it was easier to draw or paint than to sit again and try to write.  So, for many years I thought about writing but did little more than make scattered notes.

What got me back to writing?  There’s nothing like a few deaths to make you realize you can’t put things off forever.  My mother had said of my art, “that’s nice, Jess, but you should be writing.”  When she died, I thought, if not now, when?  I began again.  I had a world view and I used poetry to express it.

At the same time, I kept telling my father about an idea I had for a novel, and he kept telling me, “don’t tell me the story.  Write it down.”  Then he died.  And that was the kick to the backside that got me to sit down and write the novel.  That novel has now been completed, but the characters, and different, newer ones, still wander through my head, expanding their histories and adventures.  Somehow I’ve moved from playing with ideas to creating universes and, in some odd sense, living in all of them as well as the real one, simultaneously.  I suspect what keeps me writing is creating those worlds.  That’s why I write.  This year, anyhow.

***

Jessie Seigel is an AIW board member.  Her fiction has appeared in such publications as Ontario Review, Gargoyle, Elan, and the anthology Electric Grace.  Her poetry has been featured bi-weekly in the Boston Jewish Times. She is an associate editor at The Potomac Review.