How will it end?
Thoughts on endings + opportunities to connect in person
Hang out with creatives this Sunday!
Come hang out with other creatives this Sunday 4/6, 1:30-3:30pm at the picnic shelter in Wilson Park in Carrboro, NC.
A scratch of writers* is a casual hangout with free books, lots of seltzer, and great conversation with other writers. And you don’t have to be a Capital W Writer—storytellers, yarn spinners, and book lovers also welcome! We’ll meet up at Wilson Park, 1:30-3:30pm.
*A school of fish, a bevy of quail, a scratch of writers—that’s what we decided at the very first one a group of writers is called!
Free storytelling event on April 8
The next Story Jam is on April 8th, 5:30-7:30pm at the Durham SW County Library. This is a free, casual get together for storytellers and story lovers. Come at 5:30 to practice your story or 6:15 if you just want to hear stories. The prompt is Spring Cleaning. Full details here.
Carrboro/Chapel Hill folks: I won’t be able to carpool, but be in touch if you can offer a ride/need one.
Free storytelling class for underrepresented voices
There are still a few spots left in Story Connection’s FREE storytelling class for underrepresented voices, which starts April 15. More info on this about this grant-sponsored offering as well as registration link are here. Please circulate!
How will it end?
I am a picky reader. I have high standards, but I also read depending on my mood—sometimes I can open a great book and put it down immediately, knowing the tone, topic, or vibe simply doesn’t match what I’m craving in that moment.
I’ve always read to enter other realities, to learn about places, people, and eras unknown to me, but lately I’ve been favoring displacement and disorientation even more than usual. I want novels that take me as far away from the here and now as possible.
This is how I ended up reading The Once and Future Witches, a fantasy novel in which, well, there are witches doing a lot of witchy stuff. Straight up magic.
At this point I should note that I haven’t read fantasy since I opened The Hobbit at age 10 and closed it 40 pages later. Fantasy frustrates me. I don’t have any magical powers. I gotta get through life without flying dragons, invisibility cloaks, and other things that would really come in handy right now. I don’t have much of a stomach for stories full of tools I can’t use1.
The protagonists of The Once and Future Witches are three sisters fighting for the right to vote, for their own liberation and independence from patriarchal structures. And yes, they are witches—they have spells galore. Spells they use to thwart evil men. I couldn’t put it down.
As if suddenly becoming a person who reads fantasy isn’t weird enough, I had another shock halfway through the book: I realized I was rooting for a happy ending.
I have never liked happy endings. They’re fucking fake! How often do things really, truly, neatly come together? Like, never. Saccharine, tidy, upbeat endings—especially at the end of complex stories—are a total letdown. I read to be entertained, but also to learn how to muddle through this messed up world, not be sold on the myth that it’ll all get tied up in a bow.
But watching these witches get crushed by ruthless, power-hungry, uncaring men2 really fucked me up. If these sisters didn’t escape the oppression being inflicted upon them, if they ended up subjugated, enslaved, deprived, disregarded—well I did not know how I was going to survive that ending.
I kept thinking of that part of The Princess Bride, when the grandson demands that his grandfather tell him who gets the villain Prince Humperdinck. “Who kills Prince Humperdinck at the end? Somebody’s gotta do it,” Fred Savage says. “Is it Inigo? Who?”
The grandfather confesses that nobody gets Humperdinck, that he survives unharmed. Savage exclaims, “You mean he wins? Jesus, Grandpa, what did you read me this thing for??”
The world is a scary, uncertain place right now. There’s a kid part inside most of screaming, “Jesus Grandpa!”, hoping to hell there are some happier endings up ahead.
I won’t tell you how The Once and Future Witches ends. I will only say what I tell my students when we talk about endings.
Fiction is artifice. In real life, our stories go on indefinitely, till the one final ending3. In fiction, we create a container, a size and shape of our story, and we manufacture an ending. We pick a place to cap the story, to draw a line in the sand and call it.
But the story goes on past the ending that we write. Even for fictional characters, there is more story, with more endings. Those who triumph may falter later on. Those who falter may yet rise again. These days, that gives me hope.
Keep writing, friends.
I realize this take is a bit simple and fantasy has many merits. It’s just not really my thing.
And a few women who were foot soldiers of the patriarchy
Spoiler: it’s death!