Creation Story, Part II

One day last semester, I complained to my workshop professor about a weekend I had just spent trying to rewrite a short story. I told him I felt like I’d spent three days spinning my wheels without anything to show for it. In response he told me that in order to survive as a writer it was essential I find a way to give myself credit for the daily process of writing, which often includes a good deal of wheel-spinning. He said that all writers must find a way to gain satisfaction in simply showing up with the pen and pad or sitting at the keyboard for the hours they say they're going to work, regardless of what comes of it. This is something I’ve yet to be able to do consistently.

It’s ironic sometimes to think that creating a story can seem so difficult. After all, storytelling is universal across all known cultures. Everyone can tell a story, at least that’s what most people I talk to seem to think. But can everyone tell a good one? I want to ask. This week, as I'm going through my World Cup withdrawals, I'm reminded of a quaint phrase the English commentators have for a player having a bad game. “He’s lost the plot,” they say.

Stories are especially important for those who go against the drift of society's standards or expectations. Daring and new ventures need the context of a compelling story, and completion of a project as improbable as Biosphere 2 was testament to John Allen's famous skills in both telling and choosing powerful narratives. As I pointed out last week, from the time in the early 1980’s when his team first began sharing the idea of Biosphere 2 with the world, Allen identified it with the ‘space race’ and trips to the stars. But the working mythology seems to have been much loftier than just a Cold War paradigm. As Rebecca Reider puts it in Dreaming the Biosphere:

"From the beginning … Biosphere 2 was much more than an ecological project, more than a glass greenhouse, and even more than a model space station … [I]t was to be, quite literally, a new world. (74-75). "

Biospherian Jane Poynter confirms as much in her book, saying: “We had realized the dream of building a new world that we would infuse with our own Synergist values.” (The Human Experiment, 208) And Reider chronicles well how the media, as well as several members of the design team, would frequently invoke Biblical references – particularly the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark – as narratives for the project.

An often-told tale used to illustrate the importance of stories as context involves three bricklayers (or stonemasons in some versions) who were said to have been working in Chartres, France in the Middle Ages. A traveler asks the first bricklayer, who appears to be toiling unhappily, what he is doing, and the bricklayer says something like “earning a wage.” The man asks the same question of the second bricklayer, who seems a little happier but struggling still, and this second worker says, “providing for my family.” But the third bricklayer appears beatific, and he is getting the most work done, too. This bricklayer, in answer to the question, says, “I’m building a cathedral.”

Judging by the effort and sacrifice it inspired, Biosphere 2 emerged as a kind of cathedral for all those who enlisted in making it work. The distinction is that people have a fair amount of agreement as to what a cathedral is, while Biosphere 2 was more subjective in its meaning – a dream that woke the latent dreams in others. Reider’s and Poynter’s books tell repeatedly of individuals who went above and beyond the call of duty on their pieces of Biosphere 2. From world renowned scientists, architects, and engineers, to local construction workers, to the team of disciplined idealists who ultimately comprised the first mission, people worked extremely long, sometimes outrageous hours for little pay; this in spite of the apparent fact noted last week that if you asked twenty different people what B2’s purpose was you might get twenty different answers. Perhaps it doesn’t matter that people agree on a single purpose for a grand endeavor, at least not in the beginning. Stories of B2 would show that it may have mattered tremendously in the end, but that, as they say, is a story for another day. What we do know is that the collective result of the individual passions inspired by B2 was a project whose existence was completely unlikely in the context of the ordinary views of reality at the time.

As I take stock of my first year in the MFA writing program, I realize I am still searching for a narrative that sees cathedral bricks in all of the mud my metaphorical tires kick up. I am working on a story that empowers me consistently in my process. Maybe this can only be achieved up to a point. As Natalie Goldberg says of writers in Writing Down the Bones: “Every time we begin, we wonder how we ever did it before.” It’s always an act of faith. And still I work to find my plot.

All references to Rebecca Reider's work from: Dreaming the Biosphere: the Theater of All Possibilities © 2009, Univ. of New Mexico Press.
All references to Jane Poynter's work from: The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 © 2006, Jane Poynter.

Creation Story, Part 1

Creation Story, Part I

Create: (according to my Webster’s New Universal Unabridged): “1. to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.”

Create, creative, creation. My graduate program, this blog space are touted as creative writing. Last December I met a woman who asked me what that meant. I don’t think I ever gave her a satisfactory answer. In some ways, I’ve never struggled so much to feel creative, in others, I’ve never been so clear in my ability to create.

‘Something unique that would not naturally evolve.’ I’ve been reading a lot more about the original Biosphere 2 project; Rebecca Reider’s book, Dreaming the Biosphere, and Jane Poynter’s, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2. The more I read, the more I come to view Biosphere 2’s existence as a creative (rather than scientific) achievement. Then again, Jane Poynter writes: “If you ask twenty people who were part of the project what the aim of it was, you would receive close to twenty different responses.” (p. 103). And also, “The Biosphere was a big Rorschach test with everyone seeing through his or her own lens.” (p. 65).

At Biosphere 2’s inception, the founders and the mainstream press frequently invoked the US manned space flight programs for comparison. It may have seemed grandiose, but the original B2 mission was in many ways a greater testament to the power of a creative vision than the lunar landings. For one thing, B2 was more ambitious technically and scientifically – the ultimate goal was a self-sustaining miniature Earth capable of being exported to other planets. For another, B2 was created and controlled by John Allen. He had a Harvard MBA and an engineering degree, but his previous two decades had been mostly spent leading a series of communes and a traveling theater troupe; the Mercury and Apollo programs were directed by actual rocket scientists. Both the books I mentioned above devote whole sections to exposing the unfairness of the media attacks on Allen and the Biospherians based on their unorthodox lifestyles and lack of scientific credentials. In truth, the B2 creators and participants appear to have been a remarkably talented, committed group; and the scientists they attracted were top-notch, too. But, the fact remains that a man and his followers with resumes more suited to Burning Man than Man on the Moon were responsible for creating a $200 million project with the stated objective of space colonization – and convincing a billionaire and several respected scientific institutions, this University among them, to commit their resources to it. The commitment to creative vision, not to mention the sheer chutzpah of that, is mind-boggling.

Somewhere at the other end of the creativity spectrum lies a woman I met last December in Amarillo, Texas. This woman – we’ll call her Martha -- spent most of her previous two decades as a fundamentalist Christian missionary in far Eastern Europe. Now, through happenstance and in-laws (which may be synonymous), I found myself in her living room having tea and cookies as she asked me what I did. It was when I told her about my MFA program that she asked me, “What does ‘creative writing’ mean?”

I’ve thought about it a lot lately, and I would love to have said something witty or profound. Or maybe I could have turned it back on her and said, “You tell me.” As it is I explained that I was in a program with different genres, including poetry and non-fiction, and that my focus was fiction.
“What do you mean by ‘fiction?’” she responded.
I paused, not sure if she was putting me on or not. “Ah, fiction is made-up, not true.” She asked me for an example. I said, “I’m working mostly on short stories for now, maybe novels and screenplays later.”
“What do you mean by ‘novel?’”
It was clear to me from earlier conversations that Martha was at least normally intelligent. So I tried to imagine that she was incredibly naïve, like a cloistered nun, or maybe George of the Jungle. But there was something about the way she kept smiling without making any attempt to suggest answers that made me feel defensive. She had the strange quality of being inquisitive without seeming curious.

Everyone else in the room was looking at me, and I stifled an urge to give my wife the “Is it me?” look. “A novel is a type of book, a long fictional story," I said.

“Hmmm, that sounds so smart,” said Martha, pronouncing smart like it was exotic and vaguely indecent, like it was Shakira’s ass. “I’m not that smart. Why don’t people just say ‘book’ – why do they have to sound so smart?” She kept smiling the whole time.

My department head, Aurelie Sheehan, is working on a novel. I met with her last week to talk about some of my ideas for this B2 writing project, and when I was leaving I asked her how her work was going. She paused and seemed to leave the room for a moment to think. “It’s like an alternate reality,” she paused again. “Which is good.”

I agree. That sounds good.