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- Courage and Invention: Fiction Alumnus Ignatius Aloysius Discusses His Work as a Novelist
Courage and Invention: Fiction Alumnus Ignatius Aloysius Discusses His Work as a Novelist
By Ignatius Aloysius, MFA Fiction Alumnus
With my first novel Fishhead. Republic of Want out just as Covid began, I immediately started working on my second book during our forced isolation, and began shopping the finished manuscript early this year. The response has been slow and I remain hopeful it will find a good home. But allow me to provide some background: We Have Seen the Smokemakers is a genre-crossing literary and speculative work of 208K words, set in a historical context and narrated in the first person plural by birds. When a late September 1871 logging incident spares his life in the woods of northern Michigan, young Metis (Ojibwa) assistant keeper Julius Burdon of Waugoshance Light becomes a vital humane link between events in the American Civil War and a severe Midwest drought that year, which sparks the great fires of Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin, their consequence obstructing the safety of vessels passing through the dangerous shoals at the Straits of Mackinac where Julius works.
I asked the What If ? question long before I built the novel’s premise, albeit with some difficulty, but it led to essential plot- and character-mapping periods, those early steps, which, along with tons of research materials and a long bibliography, made way for a decent outline I could follow, as I edged my way into the scary and complex depths of a full-length work exceeding five hundred pages. I did not think I could attempt such a project without substantial preparation.
Feeling alone, however, removed from social enrichment during the pandemic, I let my thoughts walk me back to my MFA education and its many vital lessons: one being the effort of confidence I’d gained to truly see & sense the novelist’s (and writer’s) world from the inside out; as well, to recognize a written work’s moving parts holistically, while understanding the immense value of emotional depth which a work as long as this one demanded from me. Flatness is an intimate Newtonian persuasion for human balance and science, but I knew it would suppress my novel’s increasing diameter. Another MFA lesson—POV—resided less obviously in the practical meditations of the narrator, who, I soon came to understand, doesn’t always have to be the author’s intuition, but rather a force of its own creation (through my hands, of course, lol), and this window of awareness propelled me to a new framework of avian reasoning, because if such a thing exists as a collective bird consciousness, it does in a speculative and historical world of literature.
In We Have Seen the Smokemakers, I’d envisioned the natural genius of birds to control the novel’s movement through time, not merely from point A through B along the story’s horizontal plane, but rather also from front (present, future) to back (the historical past, of the Civil War and Reconstruction). This dual compass approach asserted a first-person plural voice “we” that also took on a remarkable role of discovery and invention. One final point I’d like to make is this: my MFA education enhanced my passion for experimentation, language, for playing with words, and the necessity for having courage to take chances at the cost of resistance from the industry, itself in flux.