The Gardens Below, Or Sundown

Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2018 The aG rdens Below, or Sundown Bronte Christopher Wieland Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Fine Arts Commons Recommended Citation Wieland, Bronte Christopher, "The aG rdens Below, or Sundown" (2018). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 17358. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/17358 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Gardens Below, or Sundown by Brontë Wieland A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee: Charissa Menefee, Major Professor David Zimmerman Susan Yager Bonar Hernández The student author, whose presentation of the scholarship herein was approved by the program of study committee, is solely responsible for the content of this thesis. The Graduate College will ensure this thesis is globally accessible and will not permit alterations after a degree is conferred. Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2018 Copyright © Brontë Wieland, 2018. All rights reserved. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE .......................................................................................................................... iii CHAPTER 1. FIRST .......................................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 2. WAITING .................................................................................................. 43 CHAPTER 3. LOST ......................................................................................................... 91 CHAPTER 4. FALLEN .................................................................................................. 116 iii PREFACE The Gardens Below comes from uncountable sources—academic, personal, interpersonal, and beyond—but the seeds of story were planted in the spring of 2016, when I began my first semester teaching English 250 at Iowa State University. One of my most active and perceptive students wore on his arms tattoos that were wholly incongruous with my understanding of him within the context of the classroom, and I began to ponder how we as people control what we show to others and what happens when we change but our bodies don’t and vice versa. What happens when mind and body represent seemingly irreconcilable people? What if a person has no control over what stories their skin tells? From there, it only seemed natural to explore the meaning of memory, memory loss, storytelling, and mortality through living, moving, magical tattoos. Ecaterina, who narrates the story, sprang from this environment of curiosity, and she is curious and thoughtful and observant as a result. The Gardens Below has grown from these ideas into my attempt to tell the truest story possible of family, art, love, expression, acceptance, hardship, wonder, and death in the world we now inhabit as I see it. My academic work has focused on many large-scale social and environmental issues through historical, scientific, and literary lenses, and many of those topics—climate change, post-9/11 militarism and jingoism, the protection of water and environmental racism, colonialism, healthcare, to name a few—appear in The Gardens Below not as central questions but as artifacts and components of the characters’ social environments, reflecting both the interconnectedness of these issues and the way they often take a backseat to the most pressing moments of our lives. If one social concern is most central to the ideological underpinnings of the novel, it is a question of bodily autonomy and sex work. Ecaterina’s iv mother, Bianca Constantin, spends much of her life in pursuit of a better world for the bodies of women only to have her body and mind slowly taken from her by an Alzheimer’s-like disease, and at the end her family learns how far their communities must still progress before her goals become a reality. While the action of the novel primarily takes place around Ecaterina and her relationships to Bianca and her brother, Michael, Bianca’s ideas and work populate the family’s environment and their stories. Likely, readers will be tempted to question my motivation and inspiration, as a man, for writing such a story, and this concern is just. The subject matter of The Gardens Below is in many ways deeply personal. Like Bianca, my mother is the owner of a pole dancing studio. While writing the poling parts of the story, I wanted to convey positivity and acceptance as an expression of how much I respect the dance—simultaneously as art, fitness, and profession—and as a response to the pervasive prejudice our society holds against sex work and all related expressions of the liberation of bodies, regardless of gender or gender assignment. This book also represents how integral I believe it is that revolutionizing our relationships to our bodies be a shared responsibility. The onus of reshaping how we interact with human bodies is on us all, especially those of us in positions of privilege, and I would be remiss to exclude that thinking from my writing. I hope to have done justice to the representations in my novel, though I am all too aware of the ways that this story extends far beyond my own lived experience. This limitedness applies also to the setting of much of the action of the story: St. Vitus Regional Hospice Care. Bianca, knowing her illness is terminal, finds a new home in the hospice and spends the rest of her life there. While I have indeed taken liberties with some of the details of how a standard hospice may function, I have also committed myself to v portraying it as an environment and a home as accurately as possible. In service of this, I have been volunteering at the Israel Family Hospice Home in Ames, IA since September of 2017 and researching hospice care in the US for much longer than that. This has been an illuminating and humbling experience, as I see the daily workings of the hospice as place and I experience the myriad ways that death affects all people. This volunteer experience has been invaluable to my work on the novel. Without a doubt, one of the most unique and challenging aspects of The Gardens Below, for both the reader and myself, is its treatment and exploration of memory through two inextricably linked avenues: the experimental use of a nonstandard present tense and the magic-like, animated tattoos caused by Bianca’s disease. The novel is written in what I have called an “eternal” present tense, obscuring the familiar temporal reference point of a story and blending past, present, and future into a narrative mélange that mimics the way memory often relies on context and community. Ecaterina’s numerous recollections blend in and out of time, creating a narrative fluidity to connect periods of her life. In the 2015 edition of Steering the Craft, the late Ursula K. Le Guin argues that “verb tenses have so little connotation of actual presentness or pastness that they are in most respects interchangeable.” The “eternal” present tense is a response to the very idea of a set temporality, and it questions if memories are indeed timebound as we tend to treat them. This present tense also aids in decomposing and deconstructing the linear constraints of a novel and thereby mimicking the non-linear process of learning someone else’s life. Just as we learn the lives of new acquaintances and friends in an order of their choosing, readers learn the story of this family in the order that the narrator, Ecaterina, chooses to tell it. In this way, she maintains control, to some degree, of both her story and her body. Bianca’s tattoos vi enable the exploration of memory in a similar way within the narrative. They are physical, visual representations of memories lost to her decaying mind, and they require her to renegotiate her relationship with her own body while restricting the agency she has in telling her own stories and sharing her memories with those around her. Like the tense of the narration, the tattoos are indiscriminate of linearity, and they lead the narrator through endless cycles of memory and recollection. While most of the narrative of The Gardens Below is decidedly “realistic,” moments of magic, the unreal, and strangeness are at the heart of both the reader’s and the characters’ experience. In other areas, the novel is speculative in that—set just a few years in the future—it looks forward to possibilities our world may face. It is also speculative in how certain of the social issues mentioned above are treated. At times, I am hopeful and have manifested my desire for a better world in these pages—particularly, I hope this comes through in how I have attempted to make the characters’ relationships as transparent and as healthy as possible. At other times, I am less hopeful, and so the world of The Gardens Below doesn’t always mimic ours beyond the superficial and the tattoos. This duality of hope and fear has its roots in the works of Ursula K. Le Guin. My treatment of memory and relation has been largely influenced by the works of Alejandro Zambra, who also reintroduced me to a love for the compressed narratives of short novels. There is an ineffable magic to short novels under 200 pages, just over novella length but not quite thick enough to feel like a full novel. The form requires an admirable simplicity of character and style, and its impact is all the more powerful as a result. Novels like Zambra’s Ways of Going Home, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, Yuri Herrera’s The vii Transmigration of Bodies, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child all embody what I have attempted to achieve with this novel.

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