Writing in the Margins

When we speak of marginality or marginalized people, we're referring to those groups who for whatever reason (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation) aren't given space to express themselves in the political or social spectrum as much as they should be or when they are allowed a chance to speak, participate in political process or vocalize their ideas aren't given legitimacy as participants.

I'm doing a lot of reading for my education seminar on Human Relations relating to how we better involve those students who are in the margins in our classrooms and how we can give them positive stereotypes to grow into and aspire to. Many of these activities involve self-expression of some kind because young adolescents (the technical term for what we might also call Tweens, the middle-school age group) need a lot of self- expressive, self-reflective activity because this is the stage where children start really developing their sense of who they are and where they fit in the world.

And this, of course, has gotten me thinking about my own writing. When I was stalled over break trying to work more on "A Rose in the Briars" I tried many of my usual techniques for jumpstarting a stalled brain. I watched the movies over again. I reread pertinant passages in the books. I tried to do some photocollages and changed my background several times. I tried (very unsuccessfully) to do some research. And I realized why all this reading and movie watching wasn't helping me.

When we write fanfiction, we are "Writing in the Margins," bringing out characters that the author could have written in but didn't. These characters exist in possibility but for reasons of brevity or a lack of appeal to a wide audience don't make it into the narrative. (There's a technical term for this, but I can't recall what it is.) Jasper Fforde, one of my favorite authors, brings characters like these into his books by literally putting them in the margins when they have footnoterphone conversations. Thursday overhears two extras from Anna Karenina discussing AK's affair with Alexei Vronskey on her footnoterphone -- marginalized characters being pulled into the narrative.

I can't find the characters I'm writing by reading the original material because they're not there, and if they are, they're in the background, very faintly. Fanfiction has a long history of trying to include the marginalized populations, particularly when it comes to sexual preference -- anyone who's familiar with the origins of widely recognized fanfiction in the 70s is familiar with the concept of slash coming from the notation Kirk/Spock, a widely practiced pairing in the Star Trek fandom.

In the case of A Rose in the Briars, as it is in most of my work, my marginalized population is women. There aren't many female characters in Lord of the Rings, and there isn't a lot written about the ones that are there. Add to this the additional problem that most of the women who are mentioned can't come into my story for reasons of rationality and geography, and therein lies my dilemma. But I think I've finally gotten over it by realizing this is an opportunity for me to break some new ground in LOTR. For instance, last night I wrote several pages about Rhoswen and her friend Faeldes preparing the body of Faeldes' husband for burial. It's a very emotional passage, but a female-centric one. It's women's work, and it allows Rhoswen space to both face what she might one day have to do, deal with the war-heavy context of Gondor and show off some things Tolkien never really talks about; the daily lives of women, how death is received at home, and what princesses do when they're not gracing high tables at feasts and fighting off Witch Kings.

If only bringing marginalized students in my classroom was this easy.