FAMILY TRADITIONS a THESIS in Creative Writing and Media Arts
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FAMILY TRADITIONS A THESIS IN Creative Writing and Media Arts Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri – Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF FINE ARTS by ERIC O. SCOTT B.A., Truman State University, 2008 Kansas City, Missouri 2010 © 2010 ERIC O. SCOTT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii FAMILY TRADITIONS Eric Otis Scott, Candidate for Master of Fine Arts Degree University of Missouri – Kansas City, 2010 ABSTRACT Family Traditions tells the story of young adults who have grown up as Wiccans. Because Wicca remains a new and small religion, the vast majority of its followers converted from Christianity or other faiths, and the number of people who have been raised as Wiccans is vanishingly small. These children learn to hide their religion from their schools and families and confront the negative associations society makes toward neopaganism while handling the disillusion and doubt that comes with any religion. But these difficulties also result in intense bonds between the children of Wiccans, and those relationships form the basis for many of these stories. The works include linked stories of a fictional coven and the author's own experiences of both the absurd and the profound. iii APPROVAL PAGE The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, have examined a thesis titled "Family Traditions," presented by Eric O. Scott, candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Supervisory Committee Christie Hodgen, Ph.D., Committee Chair Department of English Michael Pritchett, MFA Department of English Anthony Shiu, Ph.D. Department of English iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………….III INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….. VII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS……………………………………………………………..……. X LUGHNASADH……………………………………………………………………………… 1 SURRENDER DOROTHY…………………………………………………………………... 5 THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH THE GODS……………………………………………..... 16 THE THOR FISH…………………………………………………………………………… 27 PERFECT LOVE AND PERFECT TRUST………………………………………………... 42 HRAFSPA…………………………………………………………………………………... 54 THE SNAKE AND THE PANDA………………………………………………………….. 71 THE LIVES OF THE APOSTATES………………………………………………………... 85 I ………………………………………………………………………………86 II ……………………………………………..……………………………100 III……………………………………………………………………………116 IV …………………………………………………………...………………130 V…………………………………………………………….………………145 VI ………………………………………………………...…………………159 OVER THE RAINBOW…………………………………………………………………… 175 v FAMILY TRADITIONS: A GLOSSARY………………………………………………… 193 APPENDIX………………………………………………………………………………… 219 VITA……………………………………………………………………………………….. 220 vi INTRODUCTION I didn’t mean to write these stories. When I first entered the fiction program at the University of Missouri – Kansas City, my intent was to work on a novel about angels. I turned in one story from that collection, and while it was well-enough received, something about it never clicked. Those stories have never really gone anywhere. I spent the first few weeks of that semester wondering what on earth I would write about, and wondering whether I had any business in a graduate writing program in the first place. Then, in October of my first semester, a man I knew died of a brain tumor. His name was Michael Shew, though that was not the name I knew him by. His death hurt me a lot, but for reasons other than what I expected; I had known him as a poet of old gods, and I had loved him for that. I had been raised by Wiccans, and I thought he was like me: a polytheist, a pagan. I found out at his funeral that he had never actually been a pagan. That had just been a costume he put on. Really, was a Baptist. That hurt even more than finding out he was dead. I ended up writing a memoir about that called Hrafspa. That story changed a lot of things for me, as a writer. It was the first time I had written a memoir in years, for one; now, memoir comprises about half of what I write, and several of the stories in this collection – Three Encounters with the Gods, Lughnasadh, and The Snake and the Panda, in addition to Hrafspa — are memoirs. The second, more important consequence of that story, was that I finally felt comfortable writing about my childhood and my religion. vii I suppose what I’m trying to do with this collection is to expand some of the literary possibilities for new religious movements. The past decade has seen no shortage of characters in popular media who claim to be Wiccan, but almost all of it has to deal with the supernatural. What’s left tends to be, essentially, pagan propaganda. The existing literature also deals exclusively with pagans who have converted to the religion; very little of it deals with people like me, who have had this as part of their identities since they were children. My goal, therefore, was to create a new sort of pagan literary fiction that dealt with the issues inherent in being a part of this religious movement without pandering to it, and without turning those characters into supernatural beings of some sort. My upbringing proved to me that pagans were normal ; I wanted to write stories that didn’t make us out to be super- humans or monsters. Three of the short stories here – Surrender Dorothy, Perfect Love and Perfect Trust, and Over the Rainbow – form a linked cycle, centering on the character of Dottie Howard. Dottie has been the most interesting part of this work to me. I wrote Surrender Dorothy as a stand-alone story, and intended for it to stop there. However, something about Dottie – and later Andy Walstead, the other central character in these stories – kept drawing me back to her. Her development is one of the things I’m proudest of in Family Traditions. Finally, a word on the title: a "family tradition," sometimes called a "famtrad," is a specialized term in paganism, meaning that a person inherited his or her paganism from some ancient family source. (The stereotype is one’s grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, who learned it from her grandmother, all the way back to the Stone Age.) I’ve always thought this idea pretty ridiculous. Wicca is a new religion; it was made up in the 20 th viii century by an English civil servant. I don’t think that makes it any less "real" or justifiable than any other faith. I don’t have any old grandmothers who have passed down their secrets of the Goddess to me. What I do have is the religion of my parents, and the dozens of aunts and uncles in my pagan family, which has been passed on to me. In the end, I think that’s the only family tradition that counts. ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This would have never come together if Christie Hodgen had not been willing to indulge me when I came to her, timid and uncertain, with the first draft of "Hrafspa." She, along with Michael Pritchett and Robert Stewart, guided me through writing all of the pieces in this collection, and I feel very lucky to have been taught by such talents. I'd also like to thank Loring Leifer and Joe Miller for their help on "The Snake and the Panda." Finally, thanks to Anthony Shiu for joining my thesis committee on such short notice. A surely incomplete list of others who read, critiqued, and otherwise helped me shape these stories: Craig Workman, Helen Stead, Lindsey Quinn Osman, Liz Tascio, Christo Whelan, Lindsay Waples, Sean Malone, and the incomparable Karla Deel. Thank you all. Several of the pieces in this collection have previously appeared elsewhere. "Three Encounters with the Gods" appeared in issue 8.2 of Ashé! The Journal of Experimental Spirituality ; thanks to Sven Davisson for giving me my first publication. "Lughnasadh" and "Hrafspa" both appeared in Killing the Buddha. I was so pleased when Nathan Schneider told me "Hrafspa" had been accepted, I literally jumped up and down. Many thanks. Matt Wilson, the Missouri State Prosecutor based in Kirksville, let me know just what the penalty is for throwing a brick through a window at Truman State University, for which I am very grateful. Finally, I give the greatest of thanks to my family, to Coven Pleiades, and to my most frequent and favorite reader, Megan Kennedy. My love and my thanks. x DEDICATION and EPIGRAPH For Sarah, Joe, Alaric, and Megan, and all the other children of the Pleiades "In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies." -Henry David Thoreau "That's not what's bothering me – it's how to do it. These things must be done delicately, or you hurt the spell…" -The Wicked Witch of the West LUGHNASADH We five stood in a furnished basement in the suburbs of Saint Louis, next to a plastic Christmas tree and a Frazetta painting. We held hands like we have since we were children, when the adults wouldn’t let us talk during ritual for fear that we would invoke the spirits of Bugs Bunny and Luke Skywalker. We snickered as the priestess called the quarters of the Yule ritual by pressing play on a boombox. We told ourselves that this is not how we were supposed to worship the Goddess and the Horned God, that this was something foreign, silly. We pursed our lips and were dissatisfied at our inheritance. No, our parents’ living room was our church. That’s where our families would gather on the Full Moon. With our wooden athames and rayon robes, we would follow along as Eric’s mother cast a circle around the couches and coffee tables with an iron scimitar, while his father traced pentagrams in salt and water. We would follow the path from the east to the north calling in the spirits of elements: Megan’s sister in the south, perhaps, Joe’s father in the west.