What’s in a Name?
According to Juliet, nothing. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” she tells Romeo. But I am not a rose. I am – among other things, including loyal Shakespeare fan – an author, and thereby, all unexpected, the owner and subject of a homepage. That needs a name ….
Oh God, what do I do now? My own domain! Now there’s a title to awaken slumbering anxiety. It sounds like a kingdom, or a ranch at least, and all I want is a platform to make potential readers want to read my book. Oops, there’s another word: platform. It’s something you can fall off. Yeps, I’m a word person, not a techie, that’s why I write. Atmosphere Press, my publisher, of course has a clever techie to do the job.
So – what is in a name – specifically my name? I thought I had an unusual name, but when I clicked around the vast homepage landscape I discovered various sites with names so like mine that we would have to be careful to avoid confusion. We found this one – obviously – so moving right along.
I am Frances Terry Fischer, maiden name Culler, but for half my life I was only Terry and still am to my family and many of my oldest friends. That was fine with me, Terry, not Frances. As I understood it, the Catholic church insisted on a saint’s name when I was baptized and my grandmother had a girlhood friend Frances, who she loved. That worked, then Terry, the name my mother chose, could also be short for Theresa, giving me any number of saints in the lineup. I eventually left the church but kept the saints. My favorites, family favorites too, are Francis of Assisi – who talked to the animals and wrote beautiful psalms of praise – and Therese of Lisieux, Therese of the Child Jesus. I read her own story for the first time when I got the book as a gift on my ninth birthday, and several times since. But beyond the saints, name confusion reigned. Some of my teachers insisted on Frances, others let it go with Terry, some of my report cards say Frances Theresa, some Frances Terry, some Terry Frances; it seems no one was terribly particular. I thought it was cool that the author of The Secret Garden, my favorite childhood book, was named Frances, but see – so was this talking mule, Francis. I loved those movies, we all did, but I talked a lot – still do – so not hard to guess the nickname that led to. Some friends called me Franny and that was okay. Several close Danish friends have gone back to that one without even being told. Any of these beat the one my mom named me for – a cartoon strip, Terry & the Pirates, forcryingoutloud. But talk about compensation; one of my absolutely favorite authors is Terry Pratchett, another Shakespeare fan and creator of the Discworld, home to wizards, watchmen, witches, unforgettable characters, among them Nanny Ogg, second among the leaders witches do not have, with whom I strongly identify – Franny Ogg, if you will. So now it seems I am moving on to every writer’s treasure trove: Authors who have inspired me.
Let us start with Terry Pratchett. I have to read his books again and again because he is no longer with us to write new ones. He died in 2015, only 67 years old, so I did not get to send my text of Nanny Ogg’s song to him. In several of his wonderful Discworld books, characters accompany whatever they are doing with a song, but we never get the lyrics. That is a clear incitement to readers to fill in the blanks and many did, but I got going too late. I hope he would have enjoyed A Wizard’s Staff has a Knob on the End – text below. Pratchett also writes about writing in A Slip of the Keyboard and I enjoy that just as much, but nothing beats visiting the Discworld. Up there in the literary oversoul – I love to imagine it – Shakespeare shakes with soulbelly laughs when Nanny Ogg’s son Sean delivers his version of Henry V’s rousing speech to the troops, and ends it with, “Um … please?”
It’s like that all over. Besides being a brilliant humorist, thinker-upper of plots and linguistic equilibrist, Pratchett has no illusions about the failings and foibles of humankind, but he is benevolent, nods and smiles, sometimes sadly. His endless curiosity led him to collaborate on several books with no less brilliant – if you like that sort of thing – sci fi author Stephen Baxter and also with Neil Gaiman. Remember Good Omens? I would never read either of them without Terry. Or … almost. Gaiman’s book about the Nordic gods and heroes is the best.
I doubt you would catch Virginia Woolf anywhere near the Discworld. Her subjects are the near people, places and things in her own world; I imagine her prose sounds just as she talked. It is earthbound, tender, beautifully phrased, truly a stream of consciousness. Every writer needs A Room of One’s Own, how much more so back when Virginia, as other intellectual and literary women, were not encouraged to find their voice, far less free than women today.
I have read Virginia Woolf ever since I met her, age 20, when I was an undergraduate and she was Mrs. Dalloway. My appreciation has grown over the years. I guess my favorite is her last book, Between the Acts, about the annual village pageant in 1940, a historical pageant in a year of disconnect, and my favorite in the audience Mrs. Swithin, also called Flimsy, whose aging mind can wander both back and forward, but who is no less astute for that, as are her good instincts. Between completion and publication of Between the Acts Virginia took that suicidal dip in the River Ouse.
Swedish Selma Lagerlöf centers much of her writing around the beloved family seat, Mårbacka in Värmland, but her best loved character, pubescent Nils Holgersson, whom the leprechaun that guards his family’s farm – every farm had one – has made leprechaun size so he can go adventuring far from home on the back of the farm’s big white gander; and an earnest group of religious villagers found a settlement in Jerusalem, also that book’s title. Selma had been there and studied the settlement she bases the story on. Selma Lagerlöf won the Nobel Prize way back in 1909, the first woman to receive it. I had humble good fun ‘adapting’ her short story The Holy Night as a Christmas play for – and of course acted by – school children. One of my major successes. Selma Lagerlöf moves me in much the same way as Virginia Woolf. I only discovered her after several years in Denmark, when my Danish was good enough to read her in a language close to the original. What a gift.
Toni Morrison not only moves me, she wrings my heart – mine and several million others, including my well read mother-in-law. Margrethe was a woman who felt she had let down all six of her children time and again and it pained her. A scene early on in Beloved almost did her in; here she could not think, oh, it’s just a novel. Then again, who could? Such is the power and the beauty of Toni Morrison’s writing. The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as National Book Critics Circle Award all honored her brilliance, her sense of history and ability to write about it so it doesn’t sound anything like a lesson, but you can’t get it out of your mind. I think I started with Song of Solomon, then read backwards and forwards in no particular order; her books are all different, all ‘new journeys’. I’m glad she got to be 88.
The near, people, places and things, families and friends especially, are also the center of books by Maeve Binchy and Anne Tyler. I am a fan of both. At first Anne Tyler was referred to – not just positively, do you think? – as a housewife who writes. Uh huh. Don’t most successful people have homes and families? But you get the level. Don’t know, certainly don’t care, if her Pulitzer Prize for Fiction or National Book Critics Circle Award caused an embarrassed grimace on a few faces. Those of us who have read, enjoyed, nodded, smiled and blushed a bit too at her direct and wise prose just cheered. Anne Tyler is the only one of the six here who is still alive and writing, so I plan to keep enjoying her books and also the films based on them as long as possible. Maeve Binchy died in 2012. Good thing she left us many books – including her light touch on a serious subject, non-fiction Aches and Pains. Good films of her good books are in CD and streaming heaven so we can still enjoy them too.
I only recently learned that Maeve was also the irreverent Irish Times columnist whose highly descriptive take on Irish life was read and loved by her contemporaries. Her early articles became popular for “puncturing pomposity”, as a long-time colleague put it. I wish I could have read them! Maeve explained in the Irish Independent why Irish people are thought of as being good writers: “We don’t like pauses and silences, we prefer talk and information and conversations that go on and on. So that means we are halfway there.”
My list of engrossing authors also goes on and on, but I will not, just here. It includes poets too, many, even a couple of Danes, most favorite William Butler Yeats. Another day.