ARTFUL ACADEMICS | By Brandy Renee McCann

Somewhere In Time: Writing The Imagined Future

In November, the planet Pluto entered the sign of Aquarius and it will remain in that sign until 2043. I don’t want to write about astrology, but given the chaos of the last month, it’s worth mentioning as a thought experiment. Pluto (think underworld) is known as the planet of transformation; and Aquarius is associated with grassroots movements, populism, and technological innovations. When the two meet, astrologers say, there is a strong potential for revolution. I take astrology with a grain of salt, but again it’s worth mentioning that the last time Pluto was in Aquarius the world saw the American, French, and Haitian revolutions in a single generation. These movements were borne out of pain and suffering.

Is this the Age of Aquarius? I know not, but it sure feels like we’re living in someone’s dystopian novel lately. The thing I find helpful about astrology is that it is focused on patterns, cycles and spirals of change. While many of us may be feeling scared or overwhelmed right now, we can focus on our one small thing to bring forth a new and better world out of the chaos. Writing in these times, then, is writing possibility. Even in the aftermath of myriad disasters and disappointments, even as we’re writing the past, we look forward. Between our memory and our imagined futures, we write a new world from the rubble.

So maybe, out of our ruined pasts, we writers pack a go-bag; we write a goodbye note to our family scribbled on the last blank page of an old spiral notebook.

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When I first launched from my rural West Virginia home in 1995, I moved an hour away from my family to a larger town, Milton, which sits off the I-64 corridor equidistant between the two small cities of Huntington and Charleston. I had just graduated high school and my aunt Missy was going through a divorce and needed a roommate.  I didn’t drive or cook much, but could walk from our drafty rooms in the old house we rented to the strip-mall grocery store where I worked. It was a Sav-A-Lot; customers of Sav-A-Lot, many of whom used food stamps, were buying generic goods and packing their own groceries decades before it became commonplace at other stores. It was at Sav-A-Lot that I met the man who would quickly become my first husband.

Next to Sav-A-Lot was an antique mall, Somewhere in Time; one day the owner came in to buy snacks, and while she was there she explained she needed some part-time help and asked if I was interested. She’d pay $5 an hour under the table and work around my grocery store hours. It was not the future I imagined, but it was a good deal for me because, like most folks working retail, at the Sav-A-Lot I barely got the hours that I needed to make ends meet.

The antique mall was two stories of booths rented by folks dealing in vintage wares. Mostly they were retirement-aged men or couples, or women of all ages, trying to cobble together an income around their care duties.

My work there was easy compared to other jobs I had worked: I did minimal cleaning and mostly staffed the register. Many days were very slow, especially in the winter, and I took to reading books off the shelves of the Tank-the-Book-Man’s booth. That’s where Tank formally introduced me to H.G. Wells.  Reading Wells’ novel Men Like Gods, published in 1923, my mind went to another time, another place, another future.  In contrast to his better-known dystopian tale The Time Machine, the film version of which I had watched many times on TV, Men Like Gods imagines a future where people communicate telepathically, use wireless technology, and have created an egalitarian society.

I wondered where these ideas came from. For me, this book became a turning point. It was an awakening to a possibility I’d never considered. It was an answer to the vague dissatisfaction I felt with my life—married at a young age, working low wage jobs, wrestling with the programming of my sheltered upbringing.

These days, I’m reflecting on Wells and other science fiction works, like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, as I contemplate what it means to write about possibilities. The works of Wells and Butler seem prescient as we cycle through themes and traumas that we’ve lived before—through wars, genocide, and environmental disasters, butted up against technological innovations and unprecedented social liberties, under the glare of leaders we wished would just go away already.

But these books aren’t only stories of alternative futures, they are markers in my personal cycles of despair and hope. They are key past experiences that help me imagine the future. And they mark times I turned to writing to help me process my life and the world around me [after reading Wells I began writing impassioned letters to friends and family about the possibilities of an egalitarian society- imagine my surprise that people already knew about such ideas but rejected them!]. Each time I spiraled out through another cycle, I matured a little bit as a person and as a writer.

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Writing guru Helen Sword, in her book Air and Light and Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write, interviewed one hundred publishing academic writers and collected survey data from over a thousand scholars from her writing workshops. Regardless of discipline or their own perceptions of their writing practice, Sword found that successful academic writers had certain habits in common, which Sword described as BASE habits:

·      first were their Behavioral habits—they were persistent and pragmatic,

·      second were Artisanal habits—they had passion and dedication to craft,

·      third were their Social habits—they practiced collegiality and generosity, and

·      last were their Emotional habits—they made space for pleasure and resilience.

What strikes me is the spiraling nature of these habits. For example, at one point Sword became convinced of the importance of a daily writing habit, such as the “morning pages” method by Julia Cameron, before learning from many other productive writers that a daily practice isn’t necessary so much as a consistent one. She concluded that finding time to write is an on-going process that changes according to the seasons of our lives. The key is persistence, to keep cycling back to one type of writing practice or another. Likewise, for the other three habits, we cycle in and out of dedication, feeling connected to our communities, or finding pleasure in relation to our writing life. But we’re able to keep going back to each aspect of our writing life because we’ve known the benefits we experience from maintaining BASE habits.

Our past experience forms our imagined futures as writers. And imagined futures are powerful predictors of our actual futures.

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And so, and so, we’ve been in some version of Here and Now before. We live in spirals within spirals, a message from the ancients, a message from the stars. We draft poetry from wooden pews on scraps of paper; or outline letters to congress sitting at our home offices with kids rough-housing in the background; or scribble scenes in an old story told new, spiraling out and around into new growth, fractaling away from the center, even as the patterns repeat, in this time of year when we are tight in the bud, waiting.

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