Stourbend Editions – STOURBEND

One artwork in the form of another – ‘ekphrasis’

A Christmas present: It’s a collection of elegant, artful essays, A Dream of Stone, by Marguerite Yourcenar (2025). She was a mid-twentieth century Belgian-born novelist (1903-1987) whose name I cannot recall ever having heard before opening the package. Each chapter, an artistic piece of writing on its own, discusses some other work. The first, for example, concerns “The dark brain of Piranesi,” building on a nineteenth century poem by Victor Hugo about the architecture and etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi a century earlier: one “song” to the “tune” of another, itself built on a third. Another essay concerns the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s great creation, a third about how time transforms sculpture, a fourth on a dream that the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer recorded in his journal.[1]

The book got me thinking about another form of writing, one that takes the words off the page – or off the wall – for the benefit of those who cannot read because they cannot see. Imagine yourself without sight. Now listen to the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by John Keats. What picture do you see? How does the voice sound? Is it male, female; old, young; with a London accent or a foreign one? Is it foreign to Keats’s accent, assuming we can hope to know how a London accent sounded a century before technology recorded sound?

Art museums in many cities have attempted something like this – precisely for the benefit of visitors with impaired sight. Audio descriptions – a form of ekphrasis – make that possible. In 2024, a dear friend organised a project, called Ensemble, to give sighted people like me a chance to hear various paintings and sculptures at a gallery in south London. Each work of art came with two audio descriptions. One was by the artist, the other by a professional audio describer, that is, a professional writer. Visitors to the gallery could listen in turn to the two descriptions and form a mental picture of the work. But they could not see the work of art, only imagine it. The gallery walls were bare.

‘1599’ and all that – the particular and the universal

The critical success of the film and of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, was the spur.

Several years ago, I bought James Shapiro’s 2006 Ballie Gifford award-winning book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, planning to make time to read it, someday, maybe.

Now, I have read and written about the novel Hamnet and found there an imagined version of the domestic half of the Shakespeare family’s story. It was a tale in which William is largely absent and the telling of it didn’t even mention his name. Time to read about the other half.

Shapiro (2005) tells a good story, bursting with facts that even many Shakespeare scholars may never have heard. It reads like good history. Its analysis of Shakespeare’s writing illuminates the craft. It’s a good read, but beyond that, it has a mission.

What’s a PhD in creative writing? What knowledge does it create?

‘Hamnet’ and … Shh … don’t mention it!

Hamnet tells the story of the family of a boy who perishes in the horrible plague year in England of 1596. We readers know a lot of science that the characters couldn’t have known, which might have saved young Hamnet. We have means of communication – of bodies as well as of information – unavailable to these personages. We have knowledge of language – reading and writing – that many of the people of that age lacked and might have helped them to communicate over distances and time. But they too had books and (physical) bookshelves, though fewer in number and more precious than mine, or ours.

But not more precious than life itself, in this case the life of the eleven-year-old Hamnet. …

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Analysis: ‘The Diplomat’ – telling a story through what’s not told

In 2023, when Netflix dropped the first season of its trans-Atlantic political drama “The Diplomat,” critics immediately spotted the likeness to an earlier, fabled series: “The West Wing.” …

In our household, we watched Season 1 when it launched. It was clever. The similarities with “The West Wing” were obvious, but the substance in plot (engaging but not energizing) and argument (the gender gap is important but not compelling) wasn’t quite up to the heights I recall from viewing all seven seasons of Aaron Sorkin’s creations between 1999 and 2006. For “The Diplomat,” created and largely written by Debora Cahn, we let our Netflix subscription lapse with few regrets about not seeing the second season.

When Season 3 emerged, we were ready to renew our Netflix subscription and watched all three seasons with barely a pause. We soon found that the plot – and substance – thickens. Without wanting to spoil your thrills, let’s consider two aspects of the writing, one of style (ellipses), the other of matters of import (geopolitics).

Ellipses

First, some technical background to this technique: This rhetorical and punctuation device serves two purposes in writing texts. The first, signified by three dots – like this: “…”, often indicates that the speaker – e.g., a character in a work of fiction – has paused, waiting for the thought to form. The second might use the same symbol, but some style guides recommend putting the dots in square brackets: “[…]”. Such ellipses signify that the writer has decided to drop sections of a quoted text to concentrate the logic of an argument. It often involves leaving out clarifying detail or less important premises of a syllogism to connect the grounds of an argument to its claim of truth.

Like TWW, “The Diplomat” uses both to great effect, except that the second takes place in dialogue. …

Keep reading

https://open.substack.com/pub/donnordbergwriting/p/the-diplomat-telling-a-story-through

Analysis: ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

What a strange novel Giuliano da Empoli has written!

Historical fiction is quite a popular genre. It mixes real-life history – and characters who were people in real life – with fictional characters and made-up storytelling. According to Wikipedia, “An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period.” …

What we see in The Wizard of the Kremlin, is a work of historical fiction, yes, mixing real life with invention, but one involving a narrative about events that were unfolding in real time alongside its writing.

Keep reading

https://open.substack.com/pub/donnordbergwriting/p/the-wizard-of-the-kremlin-strange

Fiction: the foundry of moral imagination?

In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens presents a retired hardware merchant, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, as a rationalist and disarmingly naïve utilitarian. He seeks to banish emotion from all decision-making and has tried to raise his five children to do the same, naming each after prominent utilitarians. The list of characters in my edition[1] labels his youngest son – his namesake, Thomas without the “Mr.” – as “a selfish, ill-natured whelp.” The opening chapter starts with Mr. Gradgrind haranguing a schoolmaster:

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum uses this novel and a few others, as well as the poetry of Walt Whitman, to address a question I puzzle over almost every day. Why do we bother with fiction?

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The route to publication – cover creation

A famous aphorism about life in general draws its analogy from books:

You can’t judge a book by its cover

It’s a warning against leaping to a conclusion, or judging people or things by their appearance. It reminds us that beauty is more than skin deep, and that two swallows don’t make a summer.

There’s much empirical evidence in the book trade, however, that – like it or not – the cover of a book sells the story, even if it doesn’t tell it.

And this: We also know that artificial intelligence is worming its way into all our lives. Here’s a tale of cover creation, from first-hand experience.

Many of the writers I know moan about covers and publishers. Rarely does an author – other than a completely self-published one – have editorial control over the cover design. Big publishers have professional design crews, who often seem to bully writers. Many independent publishers use templates that permit only small modifications of art and typeface.

Living up to the aphorism, such formulas of cover design point to something generic, to which genre the book adheres. The cover is a tool of categorization, a typecasting, not a description of the individual distinctiveness of a piece of writing.

But what happens if we throw artificial intelligence into the mix – as a cost saving tool and to break the stranglehold of templates and categories? Having just been through the process with my novel, The Fleetwood Half-Orphan Asylum, here’s an account of what transpired and what it inspired. …

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Enacting and exploring ideas in fiction: ‘The Overstory’ and ‘The Portable Veblen’

By Donald Nordberg, manuscript accepted and published in 2024: New Writing 21(1), 73-93. doi: 10.1080/14790726.2023.2222098

Abstract: Philosophically engaged fiction often employs ideas in ways that reflect the exploitation-exploration dilemma in developmental psychology: by exploiting well articulated theories by enacting their conflicts, or by exploring the uncertainties of puzzling ontologies or moral complexities. We can see this in action in many works, but some novels of ideas seek to defy such categorization, with lessons for readers and writers. This paper analyzes two recent works – The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) and Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (2016) – to show how they deal with related concerns and settings through very different approaches. While Powers offers an enactment, its complexity seeks to evade the book becoming a simple polemic. McKenzie’s protagonist explores her muddled identity, philosophy and much else while flirting with the enactment of ideas when she does not comprehend.

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Enactment or Exploration: Two Roles for Philosophy in the Novel of Ideas

By Donald Nordberg, manuscript of a paper published in Philosophy and Literature (2023), Vol. 47, Issue 1, pp. 108-127; doi:10.1353/phl.2023.a899681; © Johns Hopkins University Press, please cite published version

Abstract. I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction.

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