Why furry fiction?

[altivo]

*taps keyboard to see if it is on*

I admit I'm not entirely sure whether to take the Amazon Author Central invitation seriously. I've been writing for quite a while, but only a tiny bit of my fiction has ever made it to general publication. I'm confident that most readers would have little interest in my non-fiction, and it's all out of print now anyway.

The question of why anyone would write anthropomorphic fiction comes up pretty regularly. People who devour Patterson, Higgins, and Grisham usually do not find fantasy or science fiction suited to their tastes. Those of us who write in this narrower genre have an equally narrow audience.

We do have some very well known writers as models, though. Richard Adams (Watership Down and other novels,) William Horwood (Duncton Wood and many others,) and Brian Jacques (Redwall and sequels) come to mind as modern exemplars. Looking back through the years, we can't omit Orwell's Animal Farm, or Salten's Bambi, or Grahame's The Wind in the Willows either. I find it interesting that all but one of these authors was British, and all but two of them wrote with an adult audience in mind rather than children. Critics and educators alike have a tendency to lump all fiction that features anthropomorphic characters into children's literature, just as they often assign all animated films to the children's audience. I think those critics and educators are short sighted and very unimaginative if they can't see the adult messages that underlie works like Watership Down or Bambi.

Human history and prehistory is filled with stories that use talking, rational animals as their enactors. There is something that links those legends and tales directly to our souls and makes them stick with us (or at least, with those of us who aren't critics and educators.) The Native Americans told each other about Coyote and Loon around the fire or under the moonlight, and Aesop taught his lessons of ethics and wisdom by using animal characters more than two millennia ago.

We are all animals, after all. No matter how much we try to separate ourselves from our animal brethren and cousins, they manage to remind us that they share a good portion of our heritage. When the protagonist in a story is a coyote or an owl, it lets us skip past some of the assumptions we make about humans, and see things in a different light. Or at least, I think it does and strive to make use of that leverage in my storytelling.

For those with deep curiosities (or idle ones for that matter) I can be found on Twitter (Altivo) and have an older website that links to some of my podcasts and reviews: The Clydesdale Librarian. I do try to respond to questions and comments when received.

Comments

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Manga are so "in" now with the kids that Scholastic has to have them. As you no doubt realize, not all manga are suitable for the subteens, but fortunately more are being produced that are acceptable now.

I generally like the long narrative, and Watership Down is a favorite for me, but The Wind in the Willows and Black Beauty color my earliest memories. My mother read those to us as bed time stories, along with Mother West Wind's How Stories and Kipling's Jungle Book. My grandmother used to read Joel Chandler Harris to me. Now he's considered so politically incorrect that you can hardly find him.

I think furry fiction makes me more wistful than connected much of the time, but I keep writing it anyway. XD

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

The first 'furry' gift I received in the mail was a box containing a large Baloo and a Complete Tales of Uncle Remus book (among other sundry items).

A memorable gift from my grandmother was a book by J. Allen Bosworth, Voices in the Meadow. I lost that little treasure over the years and finally ordered one to read through the library (McHenry Public actually has one, according to das net). Though not a milestone in children's literature, it was nice to read again, and eventually I bought a copy online.

Wistful works.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Wistful for me is especially Thornton W. Burgess, most specifically his longer books in which Peter Rabbit goes to visit the seashore and the big meadow and learns all about the real plants and animals found there. Gods, I loved those.

I can't read Black Beauty or Bambi without hearing my mother's voice and picturing the room I shared with my younger brother at the time. It had ugly wallpaper. ;p That room is also associated with having measles and having to stay home from school, which made me pretty miserable at the time.

We have some furry authors today who are superb writers, though alas, I feel some of them focus too much on erotica. They would be capable of works to exceed those of Richard Adams if they turned their efforts in that direction. Of course, they are probably doing better in terms of popularity and income with the erotica, so I dare not criticize too heavily. Meanwhile my own non-erotic writing languishes for want of a market...

I don't know J. Allen Bosworth, but I'll look him up. And if you liked Grahame's The Wind in the Willows then I strongly recommend Jan Needle's The Wild Wood to you. It's hard to find in the US, but worth the effort. Needle retells Grahame's novel, but from the viewpoint of one of the ferrets, dovetailing his account of the other side perfectly into the incidents Grahame related. It's fantastic, and beautifully done. The ferret, whose name is Baxter, was actually an employee of Toad for a while, and was the chauffeur who drove up to the door in the new car on the day on which Badger arrived to "take Toad in hand." Baxter was sent away, the car rejected, and his job lost. My longer review is here.

[mondhasen.livejournal.com]

Erotica: it's a matter of where you start looking from as to what you'll find. I used to hop about the net looking for various furry stories, and kept finding myself on yiffstar. hmmm. Not my grandmother's furry for sure.

I think you'll understand that the beauty of working at a library is access. Though I don't have any more access to the media than any patron we serve, I do see a lot of books come through circulation and can make spontaneous choices from this large selection. Today it was The bear: a novel / James Oliver Curwood. Just because... well, the book was mentioned on another Curwood book, Baree, The Story Of A Wolf-Dog. I'll give it a go.

But when OSL fails, there is HELIN, and from HELIN I will order The Wild Wood (tomorrow, as the ref librarian has bailed already).

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Indeed, access is nice. Though I'm getting a bit disappointed with using OCLC to make ILL requests. Half the time they send the wrong thing. ;p

Curwood is grand. I loved Baree but haven't read The Bear yet. Let me know how it is, I can probably find it.

Yiffstar isn't *my* furry either. ;p Do you know Fur Rag? While you can easily find the erotica there as well, there seems to be quite a bit more writing in other genres, all with furry characters. You'll even find excerpts of my own stuff.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Aha! The Bear is a retitling of The Grizzly King and I did read that years ago. Still, do let me hear what you think of it. XD