TRUE FOR BEES: A CREATIVE DISSERTATION by Susan White Norman APPROVED BY SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ___________________________________________ Dr. R. Clay Reynolds, Chair ___________________________________________ Dr. Matt Bondurant ___________________________________________ Dr. Matthew J. Brown ___________________________________________ Dr. Charles Hatfield Copyright 2016 Susan White Norman All Rights Reserved To my brother Michael TRUE FOR BEES: A CREATIVE DISSERTATION by SUSAN WHITE NORMAN, BBA, MA DISSERTATION Presented to the Faculty of The University of Texas at Dallas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HUMANITIES - AESTHETIC STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT DALLAS December 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you…to God through whom all things are possible; to Randy and our children: Randy Jr., Reid, Alice, and Millie; to Clay Reynolds, my committee chair, for never letting me get away with less than my best and recognizing my promise when I could not; to Matt Bondurant, Matthew Brown, and Charles Hatfield for supervising, reading, and advising; to my friends and colleagues, particularly: LaToya Watkins, Scott Branks, and Sobia Khan. October 2016 v TRUE FOR BEES: A CREATIVE DISSERTATION Publication No. ___________________ Susan White Norman, PhD The University of Texas at Dallas, 2016 ABSTRACT Supervising Professor: Dr. R. Clay Reynolds This creative dissertation is comprised of a novel titled True for Bees and a scholarly apparatus that offers background for the creation of the novel. The novel is a work of speculative fiction, set in the near future, and focuses on the plight of the western honeybee, as well as explores the potential implications of climate change and food scarcity. The critical essay examines the role of perspective in a speculative novel, situating True for Bees within the evolution of narrative technique in the modern novel. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………...v ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...vi PART I TRUE FOR BEES: A NOVEL……………………………………..................................1 PART II TRUE FOR BEES: A MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE………………………………271 WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………….306 VITA vii PART I TRUE FOR BEES: A NOVEL 1 It’s true for bees as it is for human beings: Life brings sickness with it. --Virgil, Georgics Chapter 1: Universes What was once Myakka State Park, Florida. “Your mind travels your whole body, Willa. It doesn’t just stay up here.” Hormidas had his thumb on her forehead. “It goes out into the world and comes back again. Rides the current and comes back to tell you all about it. You communicate with people, Willa. You do. And they with you. Whether you want to or not. It’s not just yours, your mind. It’s only part yours. The rest is shared. Don’t ever forget it.” He removed his thumb but Willa could still feel it there. Cold and hard. They were sitting on a low, horizontal tree trunk. Its scraggly foliage hung just above the ground. The cypress trees above them stole the sunlight, and the tree adapted by growing not up but sideways, reaching out like an arm toward a small patch of swamp that permitted, most afternoons, a bit of dappled sunlight. It seemed to Willa that this tree had gone to an awful lot of trouble for such little reward. Hormidas said Myakka State Park was becoming a rainforest, like the Amazon. A line of small, yellowish swamp ants trooped past them. They were busy building an enormous hill at edge of the river. “It’s only when you see the mass of them,” Hormidas said, suddenly, startling her. He pointed a bony finger at the ants. “The whole of the hill, blackening 2 the ground. That’s when you begin to see the whole creature. They’re as connected to one another as your hand is to you.” He shifted his weight on the tree trunk. His watch chain was a smiling loop outside his filthy pants. She had no idea how old ‘Midas was. He could’ve been sixty. He could’ve been a hundred. Wrinkles slashed deep grooves across his forehead but he moved like a younger man, like someone her father’s age. Hormidas hopped off the tree and began following the trail of ants to the river’s edge. Willa followed him. “We’re just building a different kind of hill,” he said, yelling louder than he needed to, over his shoulder and back at Willa. “All of us. Even if most of us don’t know it.” Willa could feel the anxiety outside the swamp. People had long been protecting their food supplies, but there’d been a new wave of lawlessness. People, floaters and criminals alike, had to rely upon their fiercest instincts. Hormidas said this was normal, considering. But in their swamp, near the water, Willa, Cass, and Hormidas were protected. There was only one way in, which meant they could see people coming. The ocean, which was once fifteen miles away, now bordered the swamp on one side. It offered the best route of escape, if it came to that. Willa had been taught, through regular drills, how to portage her own small canoe through the swamp while carrying her pack and supplies, west three quarters of a mile to the ocean. From there, they could paddle north to St. Petersburg, which was nearly overcome by the Gulf of Mexico. There was a compound there led by a man Hormidas knew. Willa and her father Cass had never met Brother Mutte, but Hormidas told them Brother Mutte was the first person they should 3 seek out should anything happen to him. “He will keep you alive,” Hormidas said. “He knows how to survive.” Hormidas said Brother Mutte was a false prophet but that he was a good leader all the same. Willa didn’t know what this meant, really, although she pretended she did. She knew what true and false meant. And she knew what it meant to be a prophet because she herself was one. She figured at least Brother Mutte was prophet, even if he was a false one. Willa and her family lived alone. Willa suspected that they way they lived was dangerous, being without a group for protection, but she didn’t feel threatened. They were prepared for anything, and they were usually able to find food. The ranger’s cabin they lived in had been abandoned for years. The park’s small sections of grassland had given way to wide tangles of trees and shrubs, impassable brambles and vines, and what was emerging was an inviolate, tropical swampland layered with life. Before Hormidas came and taught them how to catch fish, and where to get cheap corn to press arepas, how to trap small game and raise goats for milk and butter, before he taught Willa about revelations and healings and took her to the abandoned grocery store parking lots and the beach revivals, before all that, Willa and her father Cass were starving. Willa’s mother, Katherine, had already died in the ranger’s cabin two years earlier, when Willa was eight. Her mother was only fifteen when Willa was born and small enough that they were often mistaken for sisters. Malnourished and susceptible to everything the swamp mosquito carried, Willa’s mother was always sick. Willa remembered the feel of her prickly flesh, which was often raised in small, unhappy looking bumps. Willa remembered her as cold to the touch; she would read books or sit alone outside for long periods of time doing nothing at all, eased by the 4 humidity. Katherine wouldn’t take food from the mouths of Cass and Willa, so she often went without. But even so, she was always humming and whistling. The sounds that came from her were incongruous, too loud for her narrow frame. Willa thought her mother lived in a secret world and she so desperately wanted in. But before she could come to know her, her mother died. She just nodded off in the rotten, leather swivel chair that once belonged to the park ranger. She slipped away from the world without a sound. She had one of the ranger’s old maps spread across her lap, and she just lowered her head and died. Willa thought her mother was sleeping. Katherine made crayons for Willa from candle wax and food dye, and Willa sat across from her body at the card table they used for meals, coloring, until her father returned home. Now Willa scrambled to catch up with Hormidas, ‘Midas she called him. His gait had carried him far ahead of her, still following the trail of ants. “Do you think someday I’ll see her again, ‘Midas?” There was no need to be specific. He knew what she was asking. “Sure. Sure you will. And you can see her now, if you want. Nothing’s stopping you. The connection is still there, always there. You’ll see her soon enough, clear as you see me here. And you’ll remember she was always there. Just like it was with the filament. Like it was with Champion.” Later that evening, Hormidas and Cass took Willa to do a healing. The afternoon on the river had passed quietly, as did their dinner of river gar, milk, and arepas. The day had dropped out of sight and night fell over the swamp, which is much like sunrise everywhere else because in a swamp, everything comes alive at night. 5 “She might be angry,” Hormidas told her as they waited on the porch of the ranger’s cabin for their ride. The swamp was alive with a cacophony of life: insects, the beating bats and night birds, the scurry-scurry-plop of nutria. “People with stomach ailments are often angry,” he said.