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Apr. 6th, 2010 08:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretPesach is finally over. Yay Pesach! Yay bread! To the people I've fallen a bit off the radar from over the past week, I'm sorry and I should be getting back to normal now. That includes the birthday party that I realize I haven't planned. Um... let's push it back a little bit, I suppose?
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good_ficday has revealed its stories. The festival is devoted to fanfic that treats Christianity seriously and in-depth, interrogating the Christian default from a Christian point of view. To that end, writers were encouraged to explore specific forms of Christian worship rather than the sort of ill-defined generic Easter and Christmas commonly depicted in the media. How does a Baptist celebrate Easter... in the future? How would a Mennonite deal with the choices posed by finding a weapon created by the Stargate series's Ancients? What texts does Shepherd Book preach? These are among the questions the writers asked, and some of their answers are terrific.
As I wrote before, I wrote about the Pirate Rabbi. My story is called "If We Were All Wise Men", and the story is pretty much as described in my last post. I'm proud of the work. I think I more or less accomplished the goals I set out to achieve. The thing is drowning in allusions, Bible allusions, Haggadah allusions, Easter liturgy allusions, historical allusions, and I think I did it in the right way, where the allusions enrich the story rather than distract from it. In my other Pirate Rabbi stories, the polyglotness is just there for decoration, but here Hebrew and Spanish and Latin hold different meanings for the story and its characters.
More importantly, I told a love story. Samuel Palache, the daring, duplicitous, and yet caring pirate/spy/diplomat/merchant and his wife Malca, who is an eishet chayil in the truest sense of the term. I loved showing her in the expected contexts- surreptitiously baking matza for Passover, running every detail of the household and keeping everything perfectly ordered, constantly worrying about her son's safety. And I loved taking her out of those contexts and putting her dead in the middle of the action, making her the one who made contact with their informant at the Church, making her a calm, collected accomplice in Samuel's fight scene, having her open the negotiations with the French ambassador. Because of course, the things she does in a domestic context are just as liable to get her killed as the things she does in the spy context. Even the Shabbat candles must be kept apart to avoid rousing suspicion. Shmuel and Malca are a matched pair, throwing the Christian world into chaos in their wake. It's hella awesome.
To the top of the story, I appended an introductory note in which I noted that Reverend Cantalamessa's sermon at the Vatican on Good Friday had given me reason to reconsider my goals in writing the story. And you know what? I wrote up a long rant about Cantalamessa's sermon that I was going to post here, but basically it boils down to there's no defense for what he said and I remain incredibly angry days later about that sermon.
And I cannot tell you how glad I am that this time, rather than just spewing out my own anger the way I usually do, I was able to fight back through positive energy, through telling my own story, a story that uplifts. Am I worried that I run the risk of offending Catholics I have no beef with? A little bit, but my hope is that the story doesn't do that and that if it does, people will be able to engage me in a dialogue about the shortcomings of my story, which are surely numerous.
good_ficday has revealed its stories. The festival is devoted to fanfic that treats Christianity seriously and in-depth, interrogating the Christian default from a Christian point of view. To that end, writers were encouraged to explore specific forms of Christian worship rather than the sort of ill-defined generic Easter and Christmas commonly depicted in the media. How does a Baptist celebrate Easter... in the future? How would a Mennonite deal with the choices posed by finding a weapon created by the Stargate series's Ancients? What texts does Shepherd Book preach? These are among the questions the writers asked, and some of their answers are terrific.As I wrote before, I wrote about the Pirate Rabbi. My story is called "If We Were All Wise Men", and the story is pretty much as described in my last post. I'm proud of the work. I think I more or less accomplished the goals I set out to achieve. The thing is drowning in allusions, Bible allusions, Haggadah allusions, Easter liturgy allusions, historical allusions, and I think I did it in the right way, where the allusions enrich the story rather than distract from it. In my other Pirate Rabbi stories, the polyglotness is just there for decoration, but here Hebrew and Spanish and Latin hold different meanings for the story and its characters.
More importantly, I told a love story. Samuel Palache, the daring, duplicitous, and yet caring pirate/spy/diplomat/merchant and his wife Malca, who is an eishet chayil in the truest sense of the term. I loved showing her in the expected contexts- surreptitiously baking matza for Passover, running every detail of the household and keeping everything perfectly ordered, constantly worrying about her son's safety. And I loved taking her out of those contexts and putting her dead in the middle of the action, making her the one who made contact with their informant at the Church, making her a calm, collected accomplice in Samuel's fight scene, having her open the negotiations with the French ambassador. Because of course, the things she does in a domestic context are just as liable to get her killed as the things she does in the spy context. Even the Shabbat candles must be kept apart to avoid rousing suspicion. Shmuel and Malca are a matched pair, throwing the Christian world into chaos in their wake. It's hella awesome.
To the top of the story, I appended an introductory note in which I noted that Reverend Cantalamessa's sermon at the Vatican on Good Friday had given me reason to reconsider my goals in writing the story. And you know what? I wrote up a long rant about Cantalamessa's sermon that I was going to post here, but basically it boils down to there's no defense for what he said and I remain incredibly angry days later about that sermon.
And I cannot tell you how glad I am that this time, rather than just spewing out my own anger the way I usually do, I was able to fight back through positive energy, through telling my own story, a story that uplifts. Am I worried that I run the risk of offending Catholics I have no beef with? A little bit, but my hope is that the story doesn't do that and that if it does, people will be able to engage me in a dialogue about the shortcomings of my story, which are surely numerous.