Dear Subscriber,
I’ve written about “true satire” before in my newsletter. Now that it’s election time again, I thought I’d show what happens in the United States in 2023. First of all, artists like yours truly stick out their tongues and/or plant them in their cheeks to write mature satire about politicians.
As my main writing influences are Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., J. D. Salinger, Albert Camus, and Franz Kafka, my fiction contains a lot of satirical and political content, as well as some of the usual content for modern fiction. I’m not the only one who expresses his/her satirical and political statements in their art.
For example, the rapper from Detroit, Eminem, recently made a freestyle rap on the BEM rap awards. In my modern fiction, I often use song lyrics and artists’ names in my novels and stories. For example, my current paranormal thriller and psychological novel The Borderland contains snippets of lyrics and the use of the identity of singer/dancer Kate Bush as my protagonist’s manic persona.
In most of my Portia of the Pacific Historical mysteries, I use satire to make statements about the sexist, misogynist, and racist realities that folks in the United States lived under in the Nineteenth Century. I take on prescient topics that are alive today, such as abortion, rape, child abuse, freedoms of speech and the press, among others. Of course, this turns off many readers who just want to escape when they read. So be it. The majority of fiction does exactly this: gives you an escape from the real world. My fiction wants you to see that the same issues and problems today were also present in the past. By learning from our past and present, we can improve our future, is what I believe.
As a teacher for over twenty-five years, I know that our future is our youth. I believe if we try to hide the truth from them (to protect them), then we are hiding reality from them as well.
Poem About Our Progeny
