by Kris Faatz
Last summer, my husband Paul and I took a trip to Spain. I’d
never had a passport before or been across the Atlantic. Paul and I had never
thought of Spain as a place we might visit, until we happened to watch a movie about
the Camino de Santiago, the great religious pilgrimage route to Santiago de
Compostela in Galicia. We looked at the footage of woodland trails, blooming
countryside, and turquoise ocean, and then we looked at each other. “Wanna go?”
“Yes.”
I’m a nervous traveler. Imaginary dire scenarios line up in
my head (car wrecks, broken bones, food poisoning, you name it). When Paul and
I arrived in A Coruña, Galicia – a new continent! A different language! Medieval
churches and Roman ruins! – I wanted to be thrilled. Instead, I could only
think about how I didn’t belong there. I didn’t speak enough Spanish. I
couldn’t read street signs or billboards or even a menu. Home was a million
miles away, and if anything went wrong I’d have no idea what to do, and the strange
ground under my feet felt no more solid than quicksand.
Then, early in the trip, I found a story. Paul and I visited
a small medieval church in Asturias, a chapel consecrated to St. Toribio and
housing what’s believed to be a piece of the True Cross. The story was that in
the eighth century, a monk named Toribio traveled to Jerusalem and brought back
a piece of the Cross to serve as holy relic in a new cathedral in the city of
Astorga. The cathedral was built, but when the Moors invaded Spain some two
centuries later, burning churches and relics, the monks of the Astorga cathedral
fled for the mountains, taking the Cross relic with them. They also took
Toribio’s bones; by then he had been canonized as a saint because of his
journey to Jerusalem. The monks built a new chapel, the one Paul and I visited,
and re-interred the saint’s bones there. In a bizarre twist, some five hundred
years after the new chapel was built, one of Toribio’s bones was stolen to
serve as the holy relic in another new cathedral.
Toribio’s story fascinated me. I thought about relics and
stories-within-stories and how an ordinary man, like Toribio must have been,
became revered as so holy that someone thought it was worth breaking into a
tomb to steal a piece of him. As Paul and I explored Asturias, I started
putting pieces together for a story of my own, which would become my second
novel.
My first novel, a piece of literary fiction, took eight years
of struggling and writing and re-writing before I finally decided it was as
done as I could make it. I decided to set my next project in a fictional world,
which shifted it into fantasy. I’d never thought of myself as a fantasy writer
and didn’t know if I could do it.
Working on that second book turned out to be one of the most
joyful experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. There were struggles and doubts,
but the story pieced itself together and I fell in love with the characters and
especially their world. Toribio was fictionalized as Ribas, a good man but very
human priest who has profound doubts about the religion he serves. In that
fictional religion, we learn how a young woman performed an act that,
generations after her death, left her revered as a goddess. Stories inside stories.
I drew on the real geography of Spain, the coast and the mountains and the
flat, hot plains, for my fictional world, and tried to catch as much of it on
paper as I could.
All of this brings me to the question of why I write. My
first novel was a battle; it’s still unpublished, and as much as I’ve wanted to
see it out in the world, I don’t know when or if that might happen. I don’t
know about this second book either. My “quiet” style doesn’t help with pitching
or selling books. Even in fantasy, which ought to have lots of plot twists and
epic conflict, I find myself focusing much more on people: how they feel, what
they say, how they treat each other.
Maybe that’s too quiet – that doubt nags me a lot – but it
seems to be the way I write. And when I sat down to work on my second book, and
these days as I’m working on its sequel, I go back to the Asturian mountains.
Clear air, greenery, steep and twisty trails that only a mountain goat could
navigate at speed, but so much beauty. As I write, I tap into the joy of
discovering a new story, and remember the moment when the deep belief that
built Toribio’s church sank in for me. That belief was rich and ancient, passed
from one person to another for generations.
Stories within stories. Our stories make us human, make us
whole, let us reach across time. Those things are all true, but maybe more
importantly, our stories let us capture and re-capture the experiences that
mattered most to us. Other people will see them differently, no matter how
carefully we describe them: but when we record them, in some way we make them
permanent. Because of that, and the joy of doing it, I write.
Kris Faatz’s short fiction has appeared in the Potomac Review, Kenyon Review’s KROnline, Glassworks,
Reed, Bluestem and Helen, among
other journals. Her first novel, To Love
a Stranger, is a finalist for Schaffner Press’s 2016 Music in Literature
Award. She has been a contributor at the Kenyon Review Writers and Novel
Workshops and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and currently serves as an
assistant editor with Bartleby Snopes
literary journal. In her outside-writing life she is a pianist and teacher. Find
her at http://krisfaatz.com, and read her most
recent published story here: A Funnel of Time.
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