A Dream In Letters

A Personal Essay by Rowen Bahmer

A novel approach to understanding poetry

Perhaps fantasy, as a genre, has been overused in modern writing. The fantasy model, with its massive inheritance of preconstructed world-concepts and philosophies, is a relatively easy genre to create in, and is almost guaranteed to be appealing to a wide enough audience to be profitable. Yet sometimes it is beneficial to rejoice in the typical; sometimes the everyday, average literature is not just worthwhile, but necessary. Sometimes even a genre as overdone as fantasy has something worthwhile to offer.

When I lived at my Grandparent’s house in California, Patricia McKillip was as much of a household name as any author could be. At any given time, a book of hers could be found next to a couch or lying on a coffee table. I loved reading, and I loved fantasy, but an eleven-year-old me with little interest in romantic or “feminine” literature was never interested in the frivolous stories the art on the cover of a McKillip novel implied. It was only after my mother and I moved across the country, and our collection of books decreased exponentially, that I began to contemplate reading one of her books.

The Bards of Bone Plain relies heavily on a much-belied literary strategy: the flashback. The primary story, occurring in the “present,” focuses on Phelan, a student of a bardic college who must write his final paper in order to graduate. The flashbacks focus on the topic of his research: Nairn, a famous bard who became lost to history and should be an “easy A” for Phelan. In this manner, the flashbacks are not of events already known to the characters, but of events as the characters are learning them. As the characters in the book become more entrenched in their research, McKillip shifts the reader’s focus from the story in the “present” to Nairn’s story, submersing the reader in Phelan’s experience as he performs his research. As Phelan begins to make connections between events in his time period and the research he performs, the audience becomes anxious to understand the next piece of history that will move the story forward. The flashbacks are therefore not awkward pauses in the storyline, providing exposition the audience should have already had access to, but a natural progression of the story.

Writing that Vibrates With the Soul

I don’t remember ever reading McKillip's writing for the first time- it seems to me now as if her words have been ever-present in my soul, an inherent part of the creation of my being. Some authors are capable of vivid, intensely visual action. They concern themselves with emotive details that lead the reader to react and feel as if they were “actually there.” George R. R. Martin has often mentioned his focus on intense detail in his writing, which results in a harshly realistic, distinctly physical narrative. McKillip seems to take the opposite approach-her writing focuses primarily on internal features of the plot. Never in first person, but constantly perceived through the lens of the thoughts and feelings of whatever character happens to be the focus, McKillip’s imagery feels more like an impressionistic painting than a harsh reality. McKillip’s writing isn’t something I could react to, because I was completely absorbed in it.

I never understood the value of poetry until I read McKillip’s prose. Describing a lover’s feeling, she states “She spoke, and his heart started up again, erratically thumping. Low and melodious, her voice sounded like some fine, rare instrument” (McKillip 56). The words in this phrase are nothing new. Descriptions of nervous hearts and similes between music and the spoken word are common to love, be it poetry or prose. Here though, McKillip creates a juxtaposition between the two that emphasizes the lover’s feelings regarding his beloved. It is not just in the obvious descriptions of people that McKillip emphasizes the lover’s inadequacy: the very form of the sentence highlights the disparity between the two characters. Nairn, the lover, describes himself with a short, stopping sentence. He then describes his beloved, Odelet, with a sentence that flows rhythmically from one idea to the next.

Formalism before Formalism

I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I learned the function of poetry, I also learned the value of the formal qualities of writing. Most of McKillip’s stories are only about three hundred to three hundred and fifty pages long, and yet each story contains a depth and scope, both of plot and pathos, that I have yet to see in the longer works of other authors. Through prose so artistic it waxes poetic, McKillip makes sure that not a single word is wasted. Her stories are efficient, but not in the way a textbook or manual is efficient. In the final pages of the book, McKillip reveals that one of the characters is immortal. She does this with the use of a name, and the statement “Phelan glimpsed the shadow of the endless road in his eyes” (McKillip 324). Rather than casually observing details of the event, I was part and parcel of it. I observed, with Phelan, the "endless road", and in that instant, I felt like I almost understood the pain of immortality. McKillip never needed to tell me what immortality was, she never gave me an extensive monologue from the character about his experiences traversing the Earth for hundreds of years. Instead she just gave me one character’s view of another’s eyes and a metaphor, and that was all I needed.

The Beauty of Dreams

I don’t know if words can accurately describe the experience of reading The Bards of Bone Plain, Od Magic, or In the Forest of Serre. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I feel like saying “I have had a dream-past the wit of man to say what dream it was” (Shakespeare 4.1). What I can say for sure is that I have experienced thoughts and feelings in McKillip’s prose that taught me that words have power. In the frivolous halls of speculative fiction, I found the doors of poetry that had been shut to me no matter how much Shakespeare, Frost, or Eliot I read. There’s nothing wrong with literature, or the literary canon, but there is something exquisitely beautiful about a book I don’t have to be “taught” how to love.