"the cinema of human beings trying to convey
emotional, psychological experiences
to another human being"

Blazing Reader,

In Will Dove's interview with the founders of the United Freedom Party of Alberta he asked:

"If you had three minutes to address all of Canada, every single Canadian out there, what would you say to them?"

Chris Hampton's response may have been his most valuable to the conversation:

"I would like to call on the artist that I think is in everybody," he began. "It's [the artist's] job to inspire. It's our job to bring beauty out of the chaos that they are laying at our feet. Everything that humans do is so divinely inspired and amazing but they can quickly make a muck of it. But it's our job to fix it up....

"And we need, as artists, to inspire. That would be my first message to anybody with a creative bone in their body, please stand up, let's join some hands together, from movies and music on down the line, we need to give people a roadmap and flags to gather around.... There's a lot of hashtags we can rally around but art has the ability to inspire us at every level."

I agree 95% with Hampton. Of course, being a novelist, I'm totally biased.

I didn't agree 100% because he only mentioned movies, not novels. But many of the greatest movies ever made were adapted from novels.

In contrast, many "blockbuster" films are not really art but stimulation. For example, here's what Martin Scorsese said about super-hero action movies in a 2019 interview with Empire magazine:

"I don't see them. I tried, you know? But that's not cinema. Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well-made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn't the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being."

That's what I sought to do with my novel, Much Ado About Corona: "convey emotional, psychological experiences" around one of the most cinematic times in human history — when the whole world was duped into mass hysteria over a fake pandemic.

Much Ado About Corona, too, offers a double-dose of artistic expression: It's not just literature but also visual art. The cover was painted by fine artist Jordan Henderson, who also sketched the five illustrations introducing each part of the novel.

If you haven't read the harrowing story of how we created the cover, check out these three posts:

Please Meet Mr. Strange, Ms. Sane & Dr. Sanitized
https://blazingpinecone.com/strange-sane-sanitized/

Masked Priest Bearing Holy Hand Sanitizer
https://blazingpinecone.com/holy-hand-sanitizer/

Constable Corona Arrests Anti-Maskers For Public Nudity
https://blazingpinecone.com/constable-corona/

—John C.A. Manley

John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/