Alexis von Konigslow's blog

I used to think that writing was an all-alone endeavor: I thought that all you need is a laptop and some time. I don’t know why I thought that. It’s not true, it turns out. I’ve had help. This help has been life-changing.

I should explain the context of this post first: in the past few weeks, my son has more than doubled his tooth count, gone through some sort of cognitive leap that’s making him loathe to leave his socks, and our building owners have noisily gutted the apartments next door. I feel like my brain has been torn into sections. So I’m going to write my signoff post in fragments, and hope that readers can follow. I apologize for being weird, but I’m having trouble stringing ideas together.

We learn so much from each other, particularly from other artists.

This month, I’ve been thinking a lot about rhythm, and what rhythm does to story. It’s so important, and it’s not a static thing either: it changes as the tension increases, as different people talk, as moods shift and as people change. It’s so hard to nail because it’s such a shifting target. It’s also so apparent when it’s used well. I thought that Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me was a stunning example of the ebb and flow of rhythm. As I was reading it, I kept thinking that I want to be able to do this, this thing that he’s doing that I can’t even properly explain. So I went looking for help.

I wish that I could say that I’ve spent the month reading and re-reading Virginia Woolf novels, but I haven’t. It’s been a month to make you reel, and I’ve been reeling through it, through work, construction next door, apartment evacuations, teething, so much teething. Instead of reading Virginia Woolf, I’ve been re-reading my favourite kids’ books to get ready for the next stage of bedtime stories with my son. It’s been really nice, really nostalgic, but also kind of sad. These books have been bringing back so many memories. Childhood can be rough at times, and my little guy is still so new - he’ll have to go through it all. I wish I could prepare him. I wish I could prepare myself for watching it all happen to him.

I started by reading The Witches by Roald Dahl.

Recently, when I was in the park with my son, he found me a stone (as he often does). He presented it to me. We’re in the finding and naming stuff stage, so I told him, “stone.” He said, “No. Star.” I teared up and blamed allergies (as I often do). His favourite book is How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers. We read it easily twenty times a day. He knew that what he’d found was a stone because we often find and name stones, but he was pretending to be the Boy Who Loved Stars.

I have a certain amount of scientific literacy, and I like to puzzle things out; I’m not afraid of new notation or difficult terms. In other words, I’ll wade right into the technical stuff. Usually, this is a good character trait, but it can quickly get out of hand. When I have free access to WebMD and parenting forums and a crying baby in my arms, for example, it can be a distinct problem. The best traits can be ugly. Some of the people on the forums know how to zero in on my insecurities too. Other people can make our best selves ugly. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. Emotions are rough. For a set of things so common and inescapable, they’re hard to think about.

***

If you've been reading along, you'll know I’ve been really interested in literature’s ability to help people to change, and the literature that I always felt changed me most was what I read when I was young. I remember so often putting down a book and thinking that I’d just been changed forever. I love YA lit. I fell in love with it again last winter.

Okay first, I want to say that I try. I do! I will freely admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about here, so this post is a half-formed thing (ha!) in which I’m trying to figure stuff out.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Such Stuff as Dreams by Dr. Keith Oately. I read the book months ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Dr. Oatley wrote that readers can sometimes change their personalities when they read literature, particularly literature that they judge to be artistic. He wrote that his results ‘’imply a process in which the artistic component of literature temporarily unfreezes one’s personality system, as its narrative components allow the person to incorporate others’ experience in their own personality system and restabilize it.’’

When I decided that I was going to look into the link between science and storytelling, the first person that I contacted was Dr. Gwen Healey. She’s very connected to her Arctic community, and her community places a high emphasis on storytelling, and she uses all of this in her scientific research.

I’ve known her for a very long time, and I’m very grateful for that. She’s from Baffin Island, close to the farthest North you can get in our northern country, and I only got to meet her because she came to Ontario (which she calls the South) (!) to do her undergrad. We studied physics together. She’s brilliant. She also has an incredible amount of insight into why storytelling matters, even in, especially in, the sciences.

I’ll leave it at that, and include our interview below.

***

The most horrifying things that I’ve been reading lately haven’t been horror fiction, but non-fiction. I’ve been reading about climate change that’s accelerating faster than anticipated, potential earthquakes that could affect millions (including people I love), and instances of mass animal deaths that nobody can explain, among many other upsetting things. I don’t know what’s going on.

The above title probably makes it sound like I’ve been unhappy, but that isn’t at all the case. I’ve been through a major life change, though, and it’s hard to describe what that has felt like. Obviously, I’m trying. It’s a bit cliché, but what can you do.

I hate to keep mentioning my kid here, but he is by far the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in a very long time (read ever). I’ve been starting to write about his birth and how my life changed after. The project has morphed from the genre of memoir, I guess, to horror fiction. I can’t really explain why. I’m into fiction and I like to make things up, but it’s also hard to express the depth of the emotion that was involved.