Writing a Hybrid Novel: The Story of a Process

by Blair Austin, author of Dioramas

I’d like to start off by saying I have no idea how to write a hybrid novel even though I have written one. The truth is, Dioramas found its form by trial and error. Every book is a graveyard of the books it failed to be. I wish this were not true but it is.

Dioramas first came to me as the voice of an old man speaking out of the darkness. From his voice and situation—both of which arrived in a single moment, language and idea at the same time—I knew the world he lived in, I knew the strange, rainy city and I could feel the auditorium full of people listening to him lecture. This was a world far in the future, built on the ruins of our own world, that looked and felt like our past. I even knew it was summer and it was raining outside and because the old man (who later became Wiggins) was speaking about The Diorama of the Taxidermist, I knew that this was a world obsessed with the museum diorama. It was a world with dioramas everywhere—in ever-proliferating museums and also in department stores, in people’s homes, even inside children’s transparent candies. I came to know this all at once when Wiggins began to speak.

The problem was, I had to discover what that first vision, that first diorama of a taxidermist, himself taxidermied, really implied about this city. So begins the story of mistakes that went on for somewhere between seven to ten years, depending on when you start the clock.

A host of different “modes” of telling kept coming up. There were “lecturing,” essayistic sections. There were short sections describing dioramas, with animals and people displayed, that were essentially ekphrastic tries at describing “works” that did not in fact exist, like you’d describe a sculpture or painting you saw in a museum. There were prose poem forays into the meaning of it all that came from the half-gone memory of the lecturer in the form of reminiscences about his past, and finally, a long travel narrative where Wiggins journeys by train across The Diorama of the Town, hundreds of miles across. In short, a kind of controlled chaos that had to be organized in such a way as to pull a reader through. 

I knew I needed a structural apparatus to give shape to the book, so I decided to break the thing up into two, separate, stand-alone novellas. Book One would be called, “Animals,” Book Two, “People.” Book One would be organized around the “logic” of poetry and feel like Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, or so I thought at the time, where the pieces fit together with compelling echoes across the prose poems and a feeling of the deeps all around. I arranged Book One carefully so that there was a pull—you were pulled through and you couldn’t quite figure out why—and a feeling of connected but unstated ideas, repeating image clusters, all (and this was the key, I learned along the way) held together by the struggling consciousness of the fussy old man, Wiggins, whose eye was very meticulous. The book would be how he felt about everything (which, being a reserved person, he would never admit to but accidentally “tell” us); this would be the emotional core of the book. And then Book Two with a train journey would speed along just by virtue of its travel narrative and the building sense of the two men, Wiggins and Emery, coming to understand one another. Ultimately, Book One would “teach” us how to read itself and how to take Book Two.

At issue the whole way was the question of whether it was possible to paint the portrait of an imaginary city entirely through dioramas—its history, its physical characteristics, its people and habits—the entire scene. What would stay or go, then, would depend on how each section advanced that picture and whether it contained Wiggin’s inner life.

But the thing is, I couldn’t get out of the way and kept going down false paths, wrong dioramas, straining toward what I felt the book was about all along: the unsayable. The thing beyond language that we intuit but can’t speak because there are no words for how it feels. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I had it—the thing itself—and would state baldly in the text what I thought the “core” was. Only to return, sometimes years later, to see I’d gone down the wrong path because everything from the very beginning would be, and would have to be by its very nature, hidden in plain sight. Death within life. The inside in the outside, separated by glass. The past in the present.

The biggest problem was, if I reached for story, straight narrative, there would be no reason for the very core of the book to exist: the dioramas themselves, static and nonnarrative, would have to go. On the other side of the coin, if the book were going to be a “pure” one, inscrutable with only the cold dioramas there to see, there would be no reason for character or I’d have to twist myself in knots, beating the conceit to death, only to have in the end a simple, boring conceit to show for it. And in a book of cold dioramas there would be no reason for the central consciousness of Wiggins himself.

The hybridity that resulted was just the result of the effort to balance the push-pull of the book’s two poles, the human and the inhuman, so that each made the other possible and at the same time impossible, existing side by side in every moment. That balance represented by the diorama, between the living and the dead, the inside and the outside. The false binaries of existence would be—I thought, anyway—the book’s very core. I didn’t set out to do this or that. If I’m honest, I really wanted that cold, “pure” book—inscrutable and unknowable and built on the back of poetry—the book I couldn’t have.

I suspected I was writing a conceptual novel. I also told myself I was writing a book of “world-building.” I was both right and wrong, I see now. 

Funny enough, just to get away from all this conceptuality, when the book was ready to go to Dzanc, I began what I hoped would be a straightforward, realist detective novel set in a Michigan truck stop. But, yet again. That wasn’t my path, at least for now. I am going to have to intuit my way through whatever I write. If I’m lucky.

Blair Austin was born in Michigan. A former prison librarian, he is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where he won Hopwood awards for Fiction and Essay. He lives in Massachusetts. Dioramas is his first novel.

Carmen Leal on The Perfect Storm: How are Rescue Shelters Faring After COVID?

When I decided to adopt, I thought dogs were free and that I was doing them a favor by taking the pooches off their hands. I learned that before they go to their new homes, all dogs are spayed or neutered, appropriately vaccinated, dewormed, heartworm tested, given flea and tick preventatives, and microchipped for identification. The adoption fee also helped to cover any additional medical treatments that may be needed and they did all of this through donations, with no government funding. 

I started volunteering in a marketing capacity and helped the rescue for four years. Sadly, on September 30, 2022, ten years and 12,000 dogs after they opened, they closed for good and the ripple effects of COVID were absolutely the biggest factors in their decision. 

COVID kicked off the perfect storm and we lost staff who needed better-paying jobs with benefits, our volunteer pool dried up, and giving plummeted. It’s a miracle we stayed open as long as we did.

Mandatory closure of our daycare, boarding, and grooming meant that the income from those profit segments were no longer there to pay the rent, utilities, and salaries. We reopened but never bounced back. Clients who were unemployed or working from home didn’t need daycare. Travel came to an abrupt halt so our boarding business all but disappeared for a couple of years.  

During our final year we had the largest number of owner-surrender dogs ever. These weren’t pandemic puppies that people decided they no longer wanted once they returned to the office or they discovered how expensive it is to be a responsible dog owner. Some were surrendered because of the expense or divorce or relocation, but there were many people who got caught in the COVID crunch and could no longer keep their beloved family members. 

The number one reason was housing-related. The saddest ones involved landlords selling their properties and in too many cases the new owners would not allow dogs. If they did, there was a weight limit or a breed restriction. 

There are many costs to rescuing and only a tiny fraction are paid for through adoption fees. Veterinarians, vaccinations, gas prices to transport dogs, utilities, rent, dog food, and even small items such as microchips skyrocketed. 

A lack of funding for animal welfare organizations is not new. There will always be financial challenges for independent recues and shelters who do incredibly important work within their communities.

The good news is the number of heroes who are dedicated to ensuring no healthy animal is euthanized and that the sick and wounded receive the treatment they deserve. Thank goodness for people who want to create a world where every dog can be surrounded by love. You don’t have to adopt to save a life. You can volunteer, foster, give money, or in-kind donations. Every little bit truly does matter. 

Carmen Leal is a storyteller and the author of multiple books, dozens of articles, devotionals, and human-interest stories. Carmen relocated from Hawaii to Oshkosh, yes, there is a story behind the move, and has become an awesome dog mom. Carmen and her husband have become reluctant gardeners and know a crazy amount about Wisconsin weeds. She is the mother of two sons, two incredible grandsons, and Coconut, the best imperfectly perfect rescue dog in the world.

The Gods Are Not To Blame or Why Greek Myths Are for Everyone

One of my fondest childhood memories is watching a play with my classmates – we were probably in SS1 then (the equivalent of 10th grade ) – in our boarding school’s assembly hall. A travelling university theatre group had made a stop at our school to stage Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. It was a stunning performance in English and Rotimi’s Yoruba language. That play introduced me to Yoruba gods and sayings. After the perfomance, we were told that it was a retelling of a Greek play: Oedipus Rex. How could it be, we wondered, that this very Yoruba play about Odewale who was cursed with killing his father and marrying his mother, was a retelling of an ancient Greek play?

I don’t recall when I eventually did read Oedipus Rex, but I recall being fascinated by the idea that something written in a different time, for a different culture, resonated so well in a Nigerian context, over a thousand years later. It was mind boggling. Even now, when I think of it, I find it difficult to imagine the characters as anything but Yoruba-speaking Nigerians. 

Perhaps, had my classmates and I been more astute, or more mature, had we read more Greek myths, we would have understood that like our Nigerian folktales, myths are living things. They are not the past, they do not expire. And therefore, like our folktales lend themselves to adaptations. There are no “official” versions of Greek myths. In fact, different versions appear to contradict themselves.  For instance, the myth of Hades and Persephone – the myth I reimagined in The Middle Daughter – has versions where Persephone’s tricked into eating the pomegranate seeds that keep her bound to Hades, and versions where she eats the seeds willingly out of love for her abductor (Stockholm syndrome?).  

Additionally, all the stuff that Greek myths are made of: desire, revenge, oppression, lust for power, love are things that humans – since the beginning of time – have grappled with. The myths remind us that after all is said and done, we as humans have more that connects us than not. There’s nothing new under the sun. 

Furthermore, myths (like our folktales) always speak to the now whatever and wherever our ‘now’ happens to exist in. That is their superpower. That is why they transcend time and culture and race. They give us a lens through which we interpret our own experiences. The myth of Cassandra is one that Ngugi Wa Thiongo, the Kenyan writer used in a radio interview some years back, to describe the writer’s role in his country: doomed to prophesy but never to be believed. It was so apt, so natural, it seemed like the only way to express his frustration at the chaos he’d warned about playing out.

Arguably, it’s not just Greek classics and myths that do this. Any piece of fiction that is well written transcends time and place. Someone once said that it is in writing the particular that we approach the universal, or something to that effect. How true that is. I have read American and European texts set in the most provincial cities, with characters that would seem to have little in common with me, and yet the stories seem to have been written specifically for me, as if the writer had bored themselves into my mind and reproduced everything I was thinking.

Texts are not defined by the origins of the writers but by their content, and how well they articulate the human condition. That’s why we read. Not just to be entertained, but to assure ourselves that we are part of a community, that we are not stranded, islands on our own. That’s how I experience reading. 

Chika Unigwe was born and raised in Enugu, Nigeria. She graduated from the University of Nigeria, KU Leuven (Belgium) and has a PhD from Leiden University, Holland. Author of The Middle Daughter (Dzanc Books, April 2023), Unigwe’s previous work includes novels On Black Sisters Street and Night Dancer as well as the short story collection Better Never than Late. She was also a contributor to Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know; Lagos Noir; New Daughters of Africa; and Regiones Imaginaires. Find her online at ChikaUnigwe.com and follow her on Facebook, Instagram (@chikaunigweauthor), Twitter (@chikaunigwe), and LinkedIn