Mister, I believe in the Promise Land

Been so long I almost forgot how to long in. Truly, though, blogging stopped when I started writing. I can't even explain the words I've been floating the paper boats and twigs the best couple of months. Suffice to say, the real work has begun and while my project is supposed to wrap June first, a mere five or so months away, I feel like the longer I think about this work the longer the whole thing seems to stretch out in front of me.
And tonight, lying in bed feeling absolutely mind f-ed after reading The Griffen and Sabine Trilogy and thinking about how much I like my new boots, I had one of those epiphany omelets where I think I've hit something really grand and really big. Now, normally, when this happens I eventually realize that instead of hitting a vein of originality, I've hit ambition magma and it's just too volcanic and too difficult to wrangle, but this time, the idea is do-able. I just hope it is compatible with Middle Ground.

Fire up the Good Earth tea-it's going to be a long night.

I have to explain the ingredients, the chemistry first. This idea sprung Athena-like outta these other animals:

1. I wanted to a memoir and the land (ie, The Rez) that we both share and can't get away from. I wanted that book to be different than regular nonfiction. I wanted it to be cross between and memoir and a field journal and letters and a pop-up book. Seeing as how I have MG to work on, not to mention a burgeoning editing careers (I'll never get those thens/thans right), a impending move, and a degree that will never be completed (math credits-psshh!) I set that concept on the proverbial shelf to be taken up, I dunno, decades down the road when I will no doubt be extremely successful and required Oprah-reading.

2. This idea had a lot to do with me wanting to capture the physicality of the Rezervation. For me, it a place that is very physical. I had the idea of bring top soil to the Symposium, which still seems campy and probably illegal. But I want, somehow, to show whoever ends up reading this work the artifacts of my life out there.

3. I've had an extremely difficult time dealing with presenting the spirituality of the place. Possibly because I have such a hard time understanding my own spirituality and it's link to my childhood and ceremony and medicine people and my friends. In a nutshell, how to I explain concepts that are 1. On their way to poofing out of existence or have completely transmorphed from what they were when I was a child. and 2. How do I got about presenting those belief to an audience that most likely exists in a much more pragmatic and linear world.

4. Following the above, some 120 years ago some president declared that there was no more wilderness left in the USA. He was wrong. I grew up in one of the wildest places I can imagine. Sure I cafeterias and Pepsi and television like the rest of the world but I also had an entire culture staring in front of me. Instead of proper American History I was told coyote and origin stories. I truly believe that i grew up in a place where wilderness, where magic, still exists. Or existed. It could be gone, I am aging fast. I believe in the shared human condition and the ability to relate but the reservation is its own world.

6. But wait! How can I say magic! Magic isn't real...is it? And if it is, isn't the very word a kind of turn off. It conjures (lols) images of Harry J. Potter astride a broomstick at best and at worst 16 years insisting "No, it's majick with a K!!!" Only Neil Gaiman gets to write about magic. And if it is magic, can't I call it something else....like "energy" or "manifestation?" Maybe I'm just a kook who is having issues detaching from childhood and didn't actually grow up in a fantasy land.

7. I like maps. Like a lot.

8. I met Art Spiegelman a couple of weeks ago and he was lovely. Then I saw him speak. He broke down comic panels and made me realize how much I miss drawing. I've always been a middling artist but I can doodle one hell of a doodle.

Here's the rub: Why wait for an interesting physical text? Why not do it for MG? Why not draw maps of my childhood, as I remember it, to help situate readers. Let's make this a fun adventure, let's show them where I'm from and then direct them to other place they can go. I will draw maps for each MG piece and than bookend the whole work with drawing/maps of the Reservation. My renderings, of course. It's hit me that my perceptions of Rez Land should not be exercises in accuracy. Four piece is overwhelming but even more overwhelming is the impossibility of explaining this place, still so mysterious to me, in that amount of paper. Visuals will give a quick, albeit biased, look at the individual places the pieces take place and place as a whole. This will also be in keeping with the four scared mountains idea I previously outlined. This will also help me structure the piece because I really do want this piece to not just be four random splashes. I want wholeness.

I tire. I will try to upload my rough sketches as they come in.