Information Quest

Those who know me understand that I'm a hopeless case when it comes to tracking down obscure and hard-to-find information for my fiction.

In Garden of Heaven, for example, the main character's journal entries for specific dates mention the weather. Since these dates are many years ago, I could have made up anything. Who's going to know?

However, it was a lot more fun for me to use weather resources on the Internet to look up the weather reports for the towns in question on those dates and make the novel match up with real life. I often feel sneaky doing that because I suspect most readers will think that weather is just as fictional as the rest of the book.

Now, in working for a National Register application for a former general store built in 1858, I feel the same excitement as the information quest begins. Called the Pendergrass Store, the building is now part of the Crawford W. Long Museum in Jefferson, Georgia. As usual with these projects, the facts don't fall out of a hidden box in the attic or display immediately in an Internet search.

To the researcher, nothing stalls an information quest faster than a book, site, or old news story that purports to be about a subject, but then leaves out the answers to the most likely questions people will ask. As I read these hopelessly incomplete scraps of information, I wonder what the people who wrote them could have been thinking when they chose to focus on the mundane and leave out the important.

Information quests also stall out when one finds out he's arrived at--for example--a company web site that briefly mentions the establishment's history only to find when asking follow-up questions that the company has just cleaned out its dusty file room and no longer has the answers I'm seeking. (Murphy's Law for me is that whenever I throw anything away, I will always need the information in it within a few weeks.)

As a reader, I often marvel at the information people are able to track down, especially for histories or historical novels. Maybe for those authors, the hunt was part of the exciting challenge of writing those books. It certainly is for me.

Awakening the Hero Within

Carol S. Pearson's Awakening the Heroes Within has been around since 1991. Through its presentation of twelve archetypes for finding ourselves, the book continues to speak to us. (See Pearson's website for a handy overview of the archetypes.)

I especially like this passage: "The heroic quest is about saying 'yes' to yourself and in so doing, becoming more fully alive and more effective in the world."

Consciously or subconsciously, we recognize archetypes in literature, art, and in the stories of daily life. They resonate within us like tuning forks in harmonly with specific energies of life. This book, I think, helps us understand that attunement and more consciously use it.

Pearson writes that "the quest is replete with dangers and pitfalls, but it offers great rewards: the capacity to be successful in the world, knowledge of the mysteries of the human soul and the opportunities to find and express your unique gifts in the world."

One reason, I think, why books and movies based on Joseph Campbell's hero path schema are so successful is that they not only focus on the thrills and chills of the quest--which make for good fiction--but on ourselves. As we read or watch, we understand intuitively, at the very least, that these stories are about us.

Copyright (c) 2008 by Malcolm R. Campbell. Visit my new website for my upcoming Hero's Quest book Garden of Heaven for a sneak preview.
-

Writers Notebook: I also have a weblog called Writers Notebook. The latest post is "Do You Dread Banned Books Week?"

Perspective

I mention the waterfall in this old Glacier National Park photograph in both The Sun Singer and Garden of Heaven. It's called Morning Eagle Falls. An Internet search on the name, or on nearby Feather Plume Falls, will bring up dozens of photographs as well as accounts of people's hikes past the falls en route to Piegan Pass.

Both books also mention the little valley just below the falls, a place where a considerable number of wildflowers can usually be found along the creek. Most photographers apparently don't notice the flowers. It's interesting how one's perspective here alters what they include in the photo. The falls attracts the hikers' attention, so much so that there are no photographs on the Internet showing what the photographer would see if he simply turned around and looked the other way.

In nature, as in the rest of life, the showy thing gets most of the attention!

This photo was taken by T. J. Hileman in 1938. Now, if you were to hike this way in June, you would find--all these years later--that snow still collects there on the left side of the falls as you head up toward the pass. And, the snow bank is large enough to catch everyone's attention.

What I know about rap will fit in a thimble

My nephew, David Campbell (aka STRAT) died August 5th in Florida while his parents and my wife and I were on vacation in Alberta. We were stunned by the news, brought to my brother and his wife's Waterton Lakes Park hotel room by an RCMP officer who arrived long after dark without foreshadowing.

We cut our vacation short and went to Orlando for an August 11th memorial service that drew so many poets and singers from the local arts community that the crowd swelled out of the room into an overflow room as well as the hall. Our "open mike" brought 40 of them to the front of the room to speak from their passionate hearts of their memories, dreams and reflections about STRAT.

It was a world I hardly knew, the focal point of my nephew's life that I hardly understood. If he hadn't been my nephew, I never would have known of his talent, for what I know about rap will fit in a thimble. But he had an original voice and amongst all the other sadnesses queued up in my thoughts is the one that I as a writer best understand: he had a voice many more people should have had a chance to hear and now it's silent much too soon.