Guest Blogger: Kathe Koja

Kathe Koja is a Detroit-based writer and producer. Her 15 novels include The Cipher, Skin, Buddha Boy, Talk, Under the Poppy and its sequel, The Mercury Waltz, to be published in late 2013. Her production company, Loudermilk Productions LLC, creates site-specific performance events, including "Under the Poppy," "Bottom's Folly," "The Tower Project," and Christopher Marlowe's "Faustus."    

Into the Dark

As you read this, I'll have just returned from Chicago's DePaul University, where – besides visiting an avant-garde haunted house, and meeting some of the student-artists – I'll have given a performative reading of my short story "At Eventide," wherein a young woman confronts the man who tried very hard to kill her, with only a boxful of art to stand between them.

Scary, for sure, and apropos for this bleak time of year. And in a bedrock way, it reflects the greater and ongoing human condition: it can get very dark indeed past our little electric campfire, and in the end, all we've got is imagination to keep that darkness at bay. 

In my own work, writing fiction or creating performance events, I allow space for the darkness, always. Whether it's a young adult novel like Going Under or a straight-up horror novel like The Cipher, or the historical novels Under the Poppy and The Mercury Waltz — or the current Loudermilk production, a reimaging of Christopher Marlowe's "Faustus," where the cocksure young Faustus barters the soul he barely believes in for a shadowy promise of everything and more . . . always, the possibility of the darkness is there. Because without it, without allowing for the hard truth of possible loss, or ruin, or an unhappy ending, how can a happy ending really mean anything at all? 

Detroit knows a thing or two about the dark: knows the cold ash of old fires, the hard and sullen silence of neglect. It also knows a great deal about making: making do, making a way, making one thing into another, remaking itself again and again—"Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus," right? It's why we're here, both the determined natives and the ambitious transplants, instead of a less demanding, blander landscape, where the only change is just more of the smiley-face same, like a million beige polyester-blend cardigans neatly piled to the ceiling …. Some people would call that hell.

Certainly it's scary in the dark, and sometimes very hard to see where you are, or where you're going—in a play or a story; in a city. There are pitfalls, deadfalls, temptations, false turns, false friends, it might seem like you're lost past reclamation. But if you stay tough and nimble, and let imagination guide you, you make a way, you make your way, you keep on going until the dark grows a little less so, then less, then lighter; and then you can see. You have all the scars you may have garnered, you know more than you did when you started. And you've become immeasurably stronger, and maybe even wise.

Not a bad happy ending, that, in a story, or a city. And a lot more satisfying than a nice beige cardigan could ever be.