Tag: creativity

Recompos[t]ing

Suzanne Biro

I’m struggling, trying to get back to writing about my family, about parenting, about marriage, about how we learn to love, all topics of the long project explorations. I wish I wasn’t, but I am.  I don’t know why; I’m trying to figure it out. My body and mind resist.

Instead, I turned toward reworking a flash fiction piece I’d drafted more than two years ago. The story felt sufficiently removed from my personal life and I felt curious and ready to explore its uncanny unfolding. The story is called The Amateur Poet Roadkill Collector’s Night Log. So yeah, that’s what it’s about. The protagonist is male and he writes poems for each of the carcasses he scrapes from the asphalt. I know, very strange.  

The piece arrived as a response to a prompt, a straightforward prompt, to create a hermit crab story[1]. What I love about the story is that it arrived entirely from the subconscious well of imagination. And it wasn’t until after working through its revision I recognised, with surprise, the narrative is very deeply associated with my personal life.

The original draft focused a lot on describing the violence inflicted on animal bodies by machinery (cars). One line in particular astonished me; it felt like it dropped to the page from the firmament.

The vibrating line in the draft referenced a mother raccoon and two babies hit and killed by a car: the curl of their little hands. So like my daughter’s.

I have trained myself, through practice, to keep writing, to never stop to question such a line or argue myself out of recording it or crossing it out or deleting it because it doesn’t “fit’ the story I think I’m working on. I’ve learned these gifts from the subconscious always “fit” the story. In fact they are, often, the story. And if I sit with the story and let it breathe with its vibrating line…well, sometimes I can figure it out[2]. I’m getting better at this.  

The character of a daughter was a complete surprise when writing about raccoons. And what did I mean about the curl of a hand? The image and the comparison felt very strong, tugging me for my attention.  I have thought about this story off and on since its first draft. It was clear the roadkill collector had lost his daughter…to death? To drugs? At one point I went too far in my thinking (thinker-tinker-tanker) and planned to write the story with the roadkill collector character—he is never named, his identity is flattened to his employment role—having been a soldier in a war zone. I imagined the character forced to watch children die by the hands of weapons he held or, at least, upheld…but I could feel this was the wrong path (a feeling not unlike the tension deliberating multiple choice options on an exam…a knowing that one particular answer, at least, is not the right one). I know it’s the wrong path when I get too analytical and conceptual (I note here, “daughter” had morphed to an abstract collective “children”)[3]. Instead, I needed to lean into the emotions I could feel from this image, emotions I often avoid. Loss. Grief. Possibly regret?  

My best friend as a young kid was my next-door neighbour Andy. We raced round the neighbourhood roads and lawns on our bikes playing cops and robbers. We competed for who could climb a tree the fastest or to its highest bending branch, for who could hold their breath the longest beneath the lake’s surface, for who could turn the most somersaults without coming up for air. We dug worms he’d use to fish off the end of the dock. We fashioned ice forts from snowbanks, piled leaves high to catch our catapults. We set up elaborate tracks for running hot wheel cars and in the sandy path we’d rubbed clean of grass with our bare feet running between our houses, we dug marble pits. I lost most of my marbles to him.  

We never spoke at school, adhering to the tacit code boys never play with girls. If I ever smiled or waved to him in the school yard, he looked through me with a cold indifferent gaze past my shoulder to a horizon beyond. I have no memory of walking to and from school with him. He showed me how ants might be laser beamed lit and charred to crumpled crisps with such a simple angling of sunlight through a magnifying glass…something I was never inclined to repeat, feeling terrible for the poor insects…though I couldn’t resist lighting bits of paper on fire. He thrilled using a hammer to detonate the percussion caps on the papery strips meant for his cap gun. Once or twice, he let me wield the hammer.  I didn’t ever cush on him …I would say I was too young for those feelings except I do remember other boys I liked that way[4].  But with Andy I never did. When he was seven and I was eight he was diagnosed with leukemia. He died two years later.

His death was not a surprise for me. It was a relief. For two years I witnessed how his medical treatments—radiation, chemotherapy, surgeries—transformed his pink skin to grey, stole the frenetic energy from his limbs and the bright spark of light from his eyes. He lost all his hair.

The hardest part was that I was no longer allowed to play with him. This was because I had not yet had chicken pox. It was explained how his immune system was compromised and that if I caught and passed chicken pox onto him, he would die.

There were times in those two years of treatments when his hair grew back in…grey…never the lustrous brown curls he’d had before. His energy returned too. We played together-apart, with the fence and our yards between us, devising games and competitions we could move through with the physical distance between us. If he lost a competition, he became petulant and agitated, and I risked losing my playmate for a day or two. So, I often let him win. For me, this trade off was better. He felt he retained his champion status, that he might conquer his illness, and I knew I could keep my friend.  

On one spring day, when I could smell the green of the grass growing thick, the green I crushed beneath my running feet and the cerulean sky cradled puff ball clouds and the sun was yellow and hot and the bright bloom of dandelions had grown into grey fuzzy seed heads that, when snapped beneath my toes, released fuzzy sails to the air, floating the breeze and winking the light, Andy and I were racing each other around the perimeter of our houses. Except, this round, he’d joined me to race around mine. As we rounded the southwest corner, the path and the space between our bodies narrowed and he reached out his hand to curl into mine. We held hands only for a moment. A few running strides. But I recall it as a moment of joy. Pure joy. Innocent joy. And I recall I knew it then too…recognised the moment in the moment. Also, I remember thinking the connection, despite violating the distance rule, could only be something pure and good, something a God would want to happen.

The following spring my mum, drying her hands with a kitchen towel, turned to me and told me to go over next door to say goodbye to Andy. She did not mince words. She said, he would die that night and that it was important I say goodbye. The distance rule no longer mattered.

When I entered the living room, Andy was propped up with pillows and blankets on their sofa. I could tell instantly my friend was …hardly there anymore. His father, sitting across the room, fiddled to put a fishing rod together, dropping the reel and picking it up and mumbling the advantages of various feathered lures and float distances. Standing there, the grey green boy with his fuzzed head webbed with blue veins I could trace with my eyes, I understood two things: that Andy’s dad did not believe his son would die and that Andy was using all his energy to prevent himself from dying so as not to hurt his parents.  A tremendous guilt washed over me then, that I knew these things. That I wished each person would let their belief go so that each might feel relief. That I would never speak my knowings, my opinions, aloud. That I recognised death when I saw it and others didn’t.

Andy died that night. I’ve always been grateful to my mum for telling me he would and telling me to say goodbye. I was ten years old.

Ever since, I’ve questioned the balance of medical technologies against quality of life. In medical research, quality of life is rarely an outcome measure. Length of life is. Mortality is. We do not measure what matters. And we believe keeping a person alive for as long as possible is the goal. I’ve never agreed with that. This is the exploration spinning round the inside of the Poet Roadkill Collector story. It amazes me, how the 750-word exploration captures my feelings. It’s my favourite story I’ve written so far. I’ve offered it for publication. I’ve received my first rejection (Bending Genres). I’m researching where I might offer it next. I wait to see if others are equally moved by it.

The other week, my ex-husband emailed to say he wanted to drop off my cooking spices, he had no use for them.  He arrived a couple of hours later and handed me a large box filled to the brim with jars and containers of spices and teas with their various mixes I’d created. The glass jars were covered in dust; I haven’t lived at the farm for two years. 

I had not seen or spoken with him since summer, when my sister, Nyree, and I went out to the farm to move the last of “my stuff”, a pickup truck’s worth (he loaned me his truck) of the remains of my mum’s things left in the barn after moving her into long term care. It was an emotional day and very hot for lifting and sorting boxes.  When I returned the truck, I suggested we might try to share thanksgiving or xmas dinners together this year, with our girls.

He laughed, a short, high bark of incredulity, marking me as I stood before him, as if I were infected with some combo of leprosy and schizophrenia, his refusal to entertain such a preposterous idea sharp between us.  On the inside, my heart shed strips of tissue and continued to split into multiple planes of our history, of my existence.

The spices I use for my cooking…I buy in tiny quantities because I prefer they’re fresh, that their taste is alive and kicking. I know there’s a metaphor here; I refuse to invite it.  But.  I now understand why I’ve resisted writing into the long project these last weeks.  The exercise I’d worked through, crafting the personal essay describing the dissolution of my relationship with my ex-husband, required I enter places of emotional pain, inhabit them, explore and sit with their incandescent teachings. I need some recovery time, need to build up my courage and stamina to re-enter those memories again to write them. This is part of process too, this patient waiting in order to sing.

And while I wait, I always read[5]. I love to read.

[1] A hermit crab story can be fiction or nonfiction. The writing is form driven—it imitates the way a hermit crab uses another creature’s discarded shell for its home—a story written following a pre-existing form, a form that is unusual for essays or short stories, like a prescription warning label, a recipe or a multiple-choice quiz.  In the story I drafted, I used what I imagined a night log might look like for a person who worked a job cleaning the roads of the animals killed. A hermit crab story is supposed to use the form as a technique to resonate with the subject of the story, for example, a prescription warning label form serves well as a container for a story about addiction, or a recipe form for how to make a kid with mild anxiety disorder (I wrote this story years ago…). In the Roadkill Poet draft, the form receded as to become almost meaningless…instead, the form became the technique to section the story with time stamps (and mile markers) a reader might follow without taking up too much narrative space as the character moves through his night shift.  It simplified, perhaps even flattened (no pun intended) the technique, but the form does its utilitarian work just as the roadkill collector trades the macabre job for a paycheck.

[2] It’s a pleasure trying to figure out what a story is about. Sometimes it’s frustrating too, because I can feel when I’m barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. Then I turn to the forest of trees and wonder, well, which tree (story) is it? This requires patience. It’s through the process of writing the story will let me know what it’s about. It moves through me, the instrument of its making.

[3] Also, I planned, like, in my mind, to write it this way….I never actually sat down to write that version. Eyeroll. Maybe one day I will…there’s another scene from a different story I’ve written, a war scene with a child, a mother and a mine field …calling to me…it would be a short story though; the character of the child needs to be fleshed out…more than a flash narrative.

[4] I recall flirting for the first time, creating an elaborate story about the “diamond” (cut glass) necklace I’d pilfered from the dress up box and clasped round my neck. I lifted it from my collarbones toward my chin so the boy I loved, Steven Chapman (fancy remembering his name?!), was induced to lean in closer for inspection, so close, so close our lips almost touched. Grade one.

[5] Recent reads: a beautifully crafted memoir by Carvell Wallace, Another Word for Love, written and structured around theme, memories related to love with all its prismatic renderings. I cried frequently, resonating with many of the scenes and feelings expressed; Hamnet and Judith, a novel written by Maggie O’Farrell which I loved for its descriptions of Elizabethan era farming as well as its connected scenes tumbling the pathway of bubonic plague bacteria across Europe. Also the making-love-in-an-apple-shed scene; two stupendous stories in recent The New Yorker issues, The Mother of Men, by Lauren Groff (also cried in this one, the paragraph where one of the Venezuelan labourers disappears, for this is the communication in this brilliant story) and The New Coast by Paul Yoon – loved the longing and disorientation I felt reading this story, also the experiences of a child rendered alongside adult reflection; Dreamtigers

by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland, I love how he explores dreaming and creative writing together; and, for the fourth time, because each time I try to make my way through the essays, I come up against a passage I just can’t seem to grasp or integrate and have to put the book down, Mark Doty’s The Art of Description, World into Word. When I pick this one up, I start at the beginning again, and each time I get a little further into this tiny book (I really love The Art Of series published by Graywolf Press).  And here’s a poem I love by Mark Doty, “Brian Age Seven”.

Drew these on the train so they’re more jaggedy than usual. Kinda like it.

Tune(s) Up

Suzanne Biro

Thank you for your many messages. They guided my approach—which I’ll summarize below—revising A Marriage: Framed (CNF <2500 words) AND showed me to trust my own words and my own process. Your belief helps me believe. A blessing.

There was a lot of tinkering (ink -er-ing) trying to take this story to top level writing technique. I continue to tinker. Top level is…a dream, a ceaseless chase. And yeah, the chase really is a lot of fun [Insert: series of horn blasts and voice signals and Tally-ho! Here we go!].  

Last month, I posted my experience pruning A Marriage: Framed, taking it from 3770 to less than 2500 words. The process was fascinating because as I cut the words down, the focal point shifted, a spin that forced the painful emotions at the heart of my 27-year relationship with my ex to surface. Emotions I’d suppressed for decades.

Struggling to understand and move those emotions out of my body onto the page transformed them into “an object” (a writing piece) outside my body that I can interact with and control. I’m less “imprisoned” by my emotions, if that makes sense. I feel almost as if the rewriting of the draft I completed last month was a “therapy” draft. The story moved from being deeply subjective to objective, enabling me to turn to tackling the craft and technical aspects in the writing with a cool(er) and practiced distance[1]. This latter process, I’ve discovered, is essential to move the emotional therapy draft through a series of systematic style techniques so the artifact might approach a work of art. 

I wrote about my nascent practice and understanding for how to work with the subconscious as part of creative writing process in a post last March. Today, I want to build on that earlier exploration with some concrete examples because I’m trying to understand and practice tangible methods for working with less tangible materials. Silence. Air. Thoughts. Dreams.  I was thinking about how a musician works with the silences between notes to modulate pitch and tone, melody and harmony; how a sculptor carves a block of stone to encase a shape of air.  And my mind slid from that image to a memory of being captivated by a sculpture of Leda and the Swan when I was in Italy last fall.

I was rushing through the monumental halls on the second floor of the Library of Saint Mark in Venice in order to see the Mappa Mundi before the gallery closed. Speedwalking past innumerable marble busts, I stopped abruptly, struck by the unique portrayal of the infamous myth, an erotic story about the god Zeus, disguised as a swan, seducing the Spartan Queen Leda. The question about the nature of the seduction, whether coupling between the two was consensual or not, revolves the ages. This specific statue, its image, its energy, has stayed with me because of its beauty, yes, but also its ambiguity …for me, this sculpture is tangible object and emblem of desire-resistance all at once. Leda and the swan are carved to their moment of intercourse and Leda seems, at least to my eyes, both taken by surprise, as if she’s not quite ready to take on a god (she pushes the swan away) and surrendering to her attraction and desire at the same time.  

Roman variant of a possible Attic original of the mid 1st century BC Giovanni Grimani collection, 1587

I hadn’t appreciated why this sculpture has enchanted me for more than a year, until today, when, sifting my thoughts for something concrete (well, marble in this case), this memory surfaced. By embracing the complexity of the original myth and removing the layer of Greek mythology, I choose to think of this sculpture as a symbol of unification between spiritual and human worlds. When creative writing, I feel the spiritual world, or divine might be a better word, is a part of (or accessed via) the subconscious. The vibrating energy I can feel as I draft using stream of consciousness writing (read: writing without thinking too much) is intuition. Intuition is much like a tuning fork. I’ll try to explain this shortly.  

I’ve missed many of the signposts from the subconscious in my writing drafts—they arrive as words, resonances between words and as sensory images. I’m learning how to identify them and practice how to work with them and preserve them to create a net of story words that communicates something beyond words: feelings, energy, magic. Art.

Here’s an elegant and far more beautiful articulation for what I’m trying to say:

“Story form is an object, a translucent, shimmering thing with words tacked to the surface of its swirling involutions. The words glitter with their own reflective colouration; in them you see the momentary reflections of other words. Wires as thin as gossamer connect the words with more words on distant parts of the structure where they set up new colonies with flags, banners, replicas, and maps of the whole. Spin the form and the same words appear in flashes, the eye registers their rhythmic insistence[2]. It is wonderful and miraculous to watch.”

Excerpt from the essay, Anatomy of the Short Story, in The Erotics of Restraint, by Douglas Glover.

 Tune Up Techniques

My revision was guided by generous writers and readers who offered their love and attention and time to enhance my piece. I’ve said it before; creatives work in community. I’ll write more about that in December. My learnings I write here derive collective wisdoms of too many people to name.  Thank you.

Ideally, or shall I say, if this were easier, I might have started revising the Macro aspects of the piece—story, plot, characters, setting, points of view—then moved to the more Micro levels of paragraphs, sentences, rhetorical devices, syntax, diction.

But that’s not how it worked in practice.

There were the metaphors and the patterns and the desire-resistance tensions and the images that slid to occupy both macro and micro levels and, most important, all the space vibrating between. That’s the art object space, the space of Leda-swan. It’s an easy space to get lost in and an easy space to miss.

My tune up process was messy, not linear. Nor did it happen in steps, though describing the process here necessitates a sequential recounting. Revising was pressured by the word count cap, 2500 words max. The restriction served the writing in many ways by forcing disciplined compression (of words, sentences, images and ideas).

The process felt like persistent twisting, moving around and up and down and through the piece, working to understand my intentions and meanings, then shifting sections here and there, and tweaking here and there, and slowly, slowly, slowly, the piece contracted round an essential essence of tight emotional communication, complete with shimmery swirly resonances, into story art (ish…I’m still practicing).

Working with Vibrations

Ok, first, two indispensable applications I think I’ve failed to post on this blog, probably because my use of them is so integrated with my writing process I’ve neglected to emphasise my reliance on them[3]:

  • Word Hippo (thesaurus, word tools, etc.)
  • Online Etymology Dictionary – I love how they write on their site (my bolding),  “Etymonline aims to weave together words and the past, answer common questions, and sow seeds of serendipity.” Sowing seeds of serendipity is exactly why and how I use this site. It’s a creativity generator.

Choosing the right word requires deep attention to what it is I want to say (what I intend a sentence to mean), the connotations I intend to (try to) control in readers’ minds, but also how I wish to communicate it. Choosing whether the flavour of communication should be sweet or bitter, whether the texture of communication should be hard or soft, whether the sense of communication might be cold or hot.

Here’s an example. In the original longer draft, I had an entire paragraph describing the situation where the husband explains he won’t allow his wife to attend the funeral of her friend’s dad. When I cut that paragraph down to convey its essential meaning in one sentence, I wrote, “[He] embargoed my attendance at a male friend’s dad’s funeral believing my intent was seduction.”

Ok, that word embargoed practically leaps off the page with melodrama and elevated (snobby) language. Instinctually I disliked it, but it captured the essence of meaning I was after, which was restriction or “not permitted”. The vibration of my distaste of the word (in this context), even though it had the right meaning, signalled—and I should explain, this feeling is super subtle, very easy to ignore if I’m not paying attention—there might be a deeper meaning.

I sat with the word quietly and patiently and questioned it, exploring its alternative meanings. The idea of ownership surfaced to consciousness …which is a concept I’m exploring in the larger piece. The subconscious offered “embargoed” up…but the flavour (snobby) and timing of it wasn’t right…I didn’t want to introduce the idea of ownership so early in the piece (this sentence comes in at paragraph two). I wanted “ownership” as a concept to build slowly through the piece, mimicking the way the wife experienced this revelation over time.

So, I fiddled with it. I ended up using the word “barred” because it conveys the meaning of “not permitted” and extends it into an implied image (physical bars) introducing the connotation of “prison” without it being overt. It’s also a soft, quiet word in the mouth, so a reader might glide past, carrying its meanings without tripping on them (embargoed is practically a foot stuck out in front of a running reader). The sentence became, “[He] barred me attending the funeral of my male friend’s dad believing I intended seduction.[4]”

This is what I mean when I describe intuition as a tuning fork. It’s the vibrating intuition that guides which words and phrases bring the meaning and feeling and senses and sounds to coalesce in tune with the piece as a whole.

Another example, this time at the sentence level. In the therapy draft I wrote:

The kind of love that made me bump into walls, sliding glass doors and fail to recall what street to turn down to return to my own student house. The kind of love that made me forget to eat, made my skin glow, made me sing greetings to strangers.

I liked the repetition of “kind of love” because of the rhythm it introduces as well as the way it draws attention to the listed descriptions and also, the super subtle question injected by those words “kind” and “of” placed side by side, implying “sort of” …as in, this is the way the wife loved but was it a sort of love? A half in/half out love? I know, tenuous.

Also, “made my skin glow”…vibrated (intuition tuning fork struck)…what did I mean by this? I meant our lovemaking made my skin glow. An opportunity to align that idea with the larger story, which does circle and explore sex. Compression, and playing with the sound and syntax, reshaped it to:   

A colliding into walls, strike sliding glass doors kind of love, amnesiac love, missed meals, abandoned panties kind of love that made my skin glow.    

Working with energy

I wanted the reader to feel the same crescendo of energy and collision-like impact as I had experienced with the real event. So, I needed to recreate it. For this story, I wanted to begin with a quiet energy of curiosity that moved, incrementally, to build momentum through the piece toward a detonating end.   The best way to describe this is by comparing it with music. This tune,  You Look Like Trouble, by Lisa LeBlanc, embodies the energy arc I was after for my piece (and I’ve drawn what I mean in the graphic below).

But how did I do that? Well, I practiced what Summer Brennan refers to as the controlled release of energy by considering the way energy builds up and is released. I felt my way through this intuitively, and my attempt to describe it here is underdeveloped. Mostly, I feel, it was a conscious effort to pace story events, laying out the information that keeps a reader interested and curious and engaged, building on story events so they acquire more and more meaning, modulating sentence length and sound to align with intended meaning as I went (as described above). Layering information.

But also, this short piece is intense. More than one reader described it as a run instead of a walk. As the tension ratchets up with information layers (about who these characters are, their behaviours individually and in relationship), I deployed a technique I use often in my writing (and uh, life), the use of parentheticals and narrator intrusions to break the tension and release the energy.   

Here’s an example of this technique: This tragedy seemed particularly attractive (saviour complex? Fuck. Maybe.).[5]

Working with Metaphors and Imagery

I think of metaphor and imagery as working with dream. For me, this is the most prominent language the subconscious surfaces in my creative writings. The therapy draft revealed many. I adore working with metaphor and image and I avoid letting any go…I feel they’re a kind of magic, the spirit world made manifest with text on a page. But the therapy draft made visible, perhaps for the first time, my subconscious tendency to insert a metaphor or an image as an avoidance technique. Instead of forcing myself to move deeper into painful experiences, I throw up a metaphor and skate right past it. Once this was pointed out to me (thank you Barbara!), I could see where I’d done it, soft bodied ego protecting itself. So, I spent some quality time with my pain and worked to describe it clearly, straightforwardly, in scene.

Quite naturally, after I’d rewritten those pain sections, the imagery refined throughout the piece and miracle of miracles, the ones that remained hung together associatively. In this story it’s repeated imagery of sunlight and storm. I worked to sprinkle this imagery through the piece, augmenting associatiions with words resonating the same sounds and meanings, and tried to follow the energy arc by beginning with sunlight and ending with a lightening strike.   

And I tried to get some beautiful sentences in. There are a few I really like. Playing with sentences had me waking in the middle of the night to puzzle them through. Here’s one that didn’t make it into the piece, but I leave it here for your pleasure and song.

And what is love? Laughter donning roller skates, heedless of the hill[6].

[1] It’s important I make a distinction here. Even though I’m bandying the terms “objective” and “distanced” and “cold” and “systematic”, which raises “scientific method” connotations, the process for moving into technical tune up MUST (MUST!) retain an open heart and keen attention to the body warming when the vibrations of instinct ping. The process is slow and methodical. I know I’m on the right track when I’m delighting in the discoveries (the right words slip into the right place; the sounds; most of all, when unexpected injections of humour are revealed).

[2] I love the way the movement, “Spin the form”, resonates with the words “colonies” and “replica” and “maps” in the previous sentence to deliver an image (implied) of a spinning globe, a twirling world, disco ball like with those flashes.

[3] I used to use a visual thesaurus as well, but default to word hippo these days. Before that I used a heavy hardbacked Oxford thesaurus I “borrowed” from my housemate in second year university. Sorry Jeff, it’s still on my bookshelf.

[4] Also shifted words around to improve difficulty comprehending “male friend’s dad’s funeral”. Thanks Stacey! We decided the passive might be okay in this instance, a sacrifice for clarity.

[5] I am fretting over the punctuation here. I think this is right.

[6] I woke at 1:16 am thinking this question: and what is love? In half sleep, the words/image (as one) arrived: laughter, roller skates. After a trip to the toilet, more words: back to the hill. Later that day I played around with the words a bit to come up with this line…a line I’m happily hooked on because it feeds me, nurtures me, continues to shimmer. Sparkle. Delight.

Leda does love him. She shares his dreams.

Melanzana musings

Being Batty

Suzanne Biro

Three a.m. I woke to a whispering. A rhythmic pulse of shushing fabric trawled me from dreams forgotten. The apartment was hot. I don’t have air conditioning.  I prefer not having it; I’ve always disliked the assault of hot humidity when leaving an air-conditioned building. The ceiling fan above the bed is quiet and sufficient (except when daughter #1 visits and, sharing my bed[1], whinges about hellfires and my inept ill-considered concern for guests: Just get one of those portable units you stick in the window! It’s ridiculous!). I prefer screened windows open to natural night sounds and breezes. The chords of storms. The stroll-bys of marijuana, tobacco. When I woke, I lazily surmised the beating shadow flittering round the ceiling fan was a bat. A big one[2].

My immediate concern was that the bat would eat the apricot jam I’d made earlier in the evening and left, mostly jarred, save the small bowl uncovered, to cool on the countertop. This lot of jam, made with Niagara apricots and summer clover honey, was the second batch of apricot jam I’d made. I’d fucked up the first lot and I’d done it stupidly, using a candy thermometer to tell me when the sugar reached “the right temperature” instead of relying on my senses (taste, touch, scent) to signal I should have removed the jam from the heat when it bubbled ambrosial[3]. Instead, I ended up with a stiff, dark, apricot paste and what I’m now serving as a variation of membrillo (quince “cheese”). No doubt someone Spanish made this same mistake, though probably absorbed by lovemaking in a back room instead of forcing a scientific bead to the mercury and allowing the sugar to boil past the soft state to paste. Served with great fanfare (yes, this helps with resurrections) and Manchego, it’s an impressive combination.

I’m a bit of a perfectionist. As a child, my father bought me beautiful tubes of artist acrylics so I might paint a good-sized canvas he intended to gift as a wedding present. I painted a grade five rendition of the view from our rented bungalow on the lake. And I fucked up the waves. The foamy crests were ugly little blobs of titanium white over a scraping of ultramarine and phthalo green. The figures of my siblings and I, playing on an ancient swing set, were cartoony flat renditions, garishly accented with slashes of primary colour. When I presented the painting to my father, he said it wasn’t good enough and I’d have to try again. He was also annoyed he’d need to purchase a second canvas[4].

Oh right, the bat!

I ripped the duvet from the foot of the bed and, crouching beneath it, sweated and cursed I didn’t have a partner to share this Chiroptera[5] inspired nocturnal inconvenience, and I stretched my arm out, thin-skinned, vampire vulnerable, and turned on the light. The shadow disappeared. I shone a flashlight into the dark corners of the bedroom, behind the massive wall mirror, the picture frames, the paintings, the gorgeously tiled fireplace with its stopped-up chimney—had it entered there? suddenly I was far less enchanted by the architectural beauty and romance of the fireplace—and surmised the bat had left the bedroom. I clicked the door shut and leapt back in bed, pulling the sheet over my head (I hadn’t looked under the bed or the dresser…surely bats fly higher up instead of lower down[6]) and forced myself to sleep in the sauna. The bat returned. We played peek-a-boo until dawn. It became invisible in any light.

A jazz singer, a marriage counsellor and a soon-to-be-divorcée run into a bat…

Guests for dinner that evening included Chantal who has a most marvellous singing voice, and writes songs and composes music, and Peter, who was my marriage counsellor for ten years before he retired. Since leaving my marriage, he has become a dear friend[7]. Peter is really a poet and enthralled by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Once, to my delight, as I had not heard it before, he recounted the Arthurian legend of the Green Knight. Prophetic in many ways.  

A jazz singer, a poet and a writer run into a bat…    

But wait, what did we eat[8]? This is important because pleasure is important. Pleasure feeds the soul. And the conversations that feed the mind, the threads of politics, philosophy, the meaning of dreams, the ways of creativity, the dissolution of relationships due to disability—humans in mismatched states of disempowerment, development, drive, desire, death (ha!)—weaving frustrations, a few glistening tears, giggling, sorrow, grief and laughter, ignite best over a long drawn out meal, al fresco to begin and ending with mellow flames spluttering softly in the pools of melted wax atop candle stubs in the dining room.

We ate: a block of my apricot inspired membrillo with a wedge of sharp Manchego; slick, salty olive oil preserved Italian anchovies served with sweet butter on sliced sourdough I’d baked that morning (the trick for these snacks, one I’m smitten by since discovering their salt-sea-fat combo when I travelled to Italy last year, is layering an anchovy fillet atop a voluminous smear of good sweet butter…no skimping! – must be a good sized shelf of butter, like a plank, to shuttle the fish on the bread to the pirate of your tongue); toasted almonds; salmon roasted with butter and fresh thyme; a warm salad of quinoa with market vegetables (corn, zucchini, red and yellow peppers, red onion) and, because I can’t help but gild the lily, a ball of creamy burrata torn into bite sized pieces.  

The bat reappeared during dessert[9]. It swooped through the chandelier passing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. Earlier in the conversation, Peter explained how, for decades, he’d been tasked by his mother and aunt to rid their cottage of bats when they made their annual indoor appearance at some point in the first two weeks of August. I handed him a wastepaper basket, tasking him, at aged seventy-six, again. Of course, accompanying the meal, there had been a good amount of wine. When Peter chose the ricketiest chair in my apartment to stand on to reach the bat—it  was resting on the stained glass window in the living room after we’d exhausted it trying to catch it mid-air (Chantal was armed with a laundry basket)—the chair skittered beneath him, he lost his balance and fell, scraping a good section of skin from the top of his right arm[10].  

Turns out when you leave a marriage, a first aid kit isn’t one of things you pack. Probably because the wound, in that instance, is permanent; no amount of plaster or gauze can soak up the blood sacrificed.

Chantal, imploring me with her eyes, suggested everyone should go home and Peter should attend to his wound properly. This was sensible advice. But the bat hung upside down on a blue square of coloured glass above the sofa. There was a long moment of shifting glances sliding the triangular space between us: pleading, earnest, insisting. I retrieved the step stool from the pantry and Peter, the torn skin of his arm open and raw but no longer bleeding, trapped the bat in the wastepaper basket and handed it down to Chantal’s waiting arms (she had been steadying the step stool)[11].

We walked the bat two blocks down to the lake and released it beneath the orange light of a massive apricot moon hovering the horizon.

Speaking of “try again”, one of my creative nonfiction flash stories has been accepted for publication in Lost Balloon, date TBD. The piece accepted, titled, Measures, is one I reworked many many times. I wrote about my approach to re-drafting it as part of an earlier blog post. I also read the piece at a public reading and used the experience of reading it—what I felt from audience reactions—to re-craft it[12].

Preparing for another public reading this month, I read a short story, The Point of Departure, to Chantal, to practice, but also so that she could help me with my performance, my delivery. I’ve re-written this piece a number of times too and have written about its revision process here.

Chantal made the astute observation that an audience needs time to absorb the imagery and ideas of a written piece…pauses and silences help.  Written composition can (should?) incorporate “resting” components as a mental break for the reader, the same way music and song are composed.  After reading the piece to her, she complimented it and then expressed a good deal of frustration about the work being too short….”it needs to open out, be explored. Don’t waste it on a short art piece.” I explained the flash form …that I liked the compression and ambiguity flash pieces force. We argued back and forth (cordially). She, explaining how invested she is in the husband and wife characters, wanting to know what happens and what happened to them, saying this is only the first chapter of something longer; me, explaining that the same story is being explored in the long project, but that it can co-exist in this form, as a flash piece. We agreed to disagree. I’m pleased to know her interest in the characters is so strong.

And though Chantal provided excellent stage directions for improving my public reading, the following video confirms I’ll need to try try again.  I was nervous again and it was another very hot day and I had forgotten my water (again) and I stumbled through and my back was hurting and I’d taken some Tylenol for the pain which left me decidedly stoned and and and…  

The title is missing from the video, but it is, The Point of Departure.

[1] With its wool mattress topper? No, it’s not hot at all. Ha ha ha ha!

[2] Later, I identified the species as the ingeniously named Big Brown Bat.

[3] It seems I’m presented with this lesson over and over and over again. Sigh.

[4] My sister, Nyree, when I recount this memory over lime margaritas last week, remembers differently: YOU were the one, Suzanne, who refused to accept the first painting, wailing about how it wasn’t good enough, NOT dad! The truth, like all truths, lies somewhere along the spectrum between these two memories. I do recall it was the boy next door, five years older than me, who, with patience and kindness, sensing how I was in love with him, taught me how to blend colours directly on the canvas to great effect.  Painting two sufficed as a wedding gift.   

[5] a name of Greek origin meaning “hand-wing” – isn’t that beautiful?

[6] Logic in the wee hours of morning is…non-existent.

[7] It’s not as linear as the sentence implies. And it sounds like the punchline to a pretty good joke about Peter not being a very good marriage counsellor, but the reality is that I credit him for helping me to stay in the marriage for as long as I did, which, ultimately, was best for our daughters (my primary concern). The long project explores and unpacks my decisions, trying to understand the source of witchery that hijacked my brain. Some people call these hormones.  It’s a long story and I’m learning how to write it.

[8] I can hear Nyree’s voice, a line from the movie The Couch Trip: “DO we eat it, or DID we eat it?” in reference to a plated something that looks like vomit. The whole quote, she confirms through text, is a scene where Dan Akroyd’s unhinged character, posing as a renowned therapist (he’s really an escaped patient from a psychiatric ward), is hosting a radio call-in show. A woman caller says, “my husband comes home, no matter what it is, he says, ‘Do we eat it or did we eat it?’ I think he’s learned it in the army, I’m ready to bury an axe in his head!!!” Akroyd answers, trying to get a word in, “Ok. Well…if you…look at it like…zip it up lady! For starters…stop cooking for him!”

[9] The ingeniously named Gooseberry Fool.

[10] “Just a flesh wound!” Peter lamented his “old man skin”, calling it friable. Indeed, it bled badly and looked like it had been fried.

[11] For added entertainment, our bat trapping was not unlike this visual (though, I think with slightly less swearing. Maybe.)

[12] I have recently learned that the use of an m-dash is a dead giveaway for having used AI to generate written content. Also, the semi-colon. I don’t use AI for any of my creative writing. I do use it for professional work. I have a lot of opinions about AI …maybe one day I will write about them but presently I can’t be bothered. Basically, an essay would boil down to: AI will not become a sentient being; humans will become (already are?) machines…a far more dangerous and destructive force.  This opinion is neither unique or new.

Heart Play with a Pause

Suzanne Biro

A Note: The story in this post is accepted for publication in SmokeLong Quarterly and will appear in March 2026. As part of the publication agreement, I’ve granted SmokeLong Quarterly First World Electronic Rights to How to Mourn Your Mother, (hereafter referred to as The Story) for the period of six months starting with the publication of The Story in SmokeLong Quarterly, during which time The Story may not appear elsewhere.

I explained in my cover letter to SmokeLong that I had posted earlier drafts and a recording of me reading this story and I offered to remove it for the time when SmokeLong will publish it. They accepted the story with these conditions which is very generous and progressive of them. And, as I have had accepted stories declined for posting them in draft form on this blog before, I’m removing much of this post’s content earlier, (the draft writing and thinking exercise, and the video of me reading it at a public reading) for the next year or so. I’ll repost again in September 2026.

Once published, I’ll link the published story and accompanying audio in this post and here.

The following is a portion of the original blog post from July 2025.

Performed another public reading, this one at Blizzmax Gallery, heart leaping in my mouth.

I sifted through older works to find a piece suitable for the occasion. The event showcases short stories that may be read in under 5 minutes, equating to around 600 to 750 words. And, because the last time I read I selected a work that was dark, I wanted to read something lighter and funnier this time round.

Laughing.

Turns out, I haven’t written “funny” in some time1. Choosing is not so easy…many of my flash stories are sorrow containers…they await my attention to weave light into them. What do I mean by this? I mean humour or beautiful imagery or sensory details…components that gift a reader better pay off for their time and energy sharing my dark.

Also, I seem to have a lot of pieces that are very …how do I say this….poetically artsy…less story, less fun(ny), syntactically gymnastical…intellectual babies whining to be picked up after a failed roly-poly2. And for stories read out loud, some of my writings tax the listener’s ear and mind3.

So, I chose this 747-word creative nonfiction flash, written in 2023, and wanted to report here, for the sake of interest and transparency, how many publication rejections it has collected so far. I discovered I never sent it out! It was entered in a small contest and made it to a shortlist where it garnered positive feedback from two editors I hold in high regard4. The version below incorporates their feedback.

I practiced reading this story to friends the other day and could feel the tug of certain sections that don’t quite “fit”. So, it’s a good piece to practice my heart work. What is heart work? It’s focusing to feel and know the deeper emotions in the piece, then render them with words. Somehow.

I’m hopeful winding my wayward musings in this post might be soothing in the same way Bob Ross’s leisurely guides through painting technique can be. Or, perhaps this doesn’t transfer to the written medium, I’m not sure…I’m resisting the (very strong) urge to hit the delete button here. This exercise (practice) of writing around a story draft helps me see and understand it best. Even when I print out a hard copy and make notations in the margins, cross out lines and rewrite sentences, the revision doesn’t attain the necessary level of attention required for me to write through reflections and become aware of the deeper workings in the story. So…if you’re interested to read through this writing/thinking (writhing? ha ha) process keep going…otherwise quittez ici5.

  1. Well…I did write a very short piece (for friends, for a laugh) about the door in the my kitchen separating my apartment from the bedroom of the young guy who rents the apartment adjacent. The door is dubbed the Sex Door. It’s pretty active; I quell jealousies. The piece I wrote is called Door Play and I think it actually wins the world record for Fastest Literary Magazine Rejection Ever at under 2 hours!!! Wait, I’m wrong. I considered reading this at the public reading…but I really don’t think I can read the word coming (and emulate the necessary vocals), at least in that context (smirk). Is it spelled come or cum (?): a funny read I didn’t write. ↩︎
  2. Just so we’re clear: this is me, not you. And the long project is a counterpoint, it’s all story and basically puts the ass in class, chokes on the word literary and throws up a right mess, but with a few poetic lines ha ha ha. But, I like it. ↩︎
  3. I know, I know (!)…I’ll curb these tendencies. I’m trying to improve sound toward song. And I’m getting better at knowing I’m enough without the window dressing. Sort of. ↩︎
  4. I completely forgot this. ↩︎
  5. Wait, are you leaving? ↩︎
My mum, Camilla–my nickname for her, and the name my kids call her, is Nuddy (a little riff on Nutty I think…I’ve called her this since elementary school). All four of us (siblings) adopted different nicknames for mum: Mills, Cam, and Pong. This pic cracks us all up. Even Nuddy.

Feeling As A Way of Knowing

Suzanne Biro

I’ve written (insufferably?) about how hard it is to wrestle my “thinking” brain into submission. Slowly, slowly I’m learning to distinguish between what it feels like when I write from an “idea” and what it feels like when I write from a deeper sense of intuition. It’s a way of knowing.  It feels texturally different. Like the way it feels waking in the night to grope past familiar furnishings and doorways, skimming walls with fingertips on the way to the bathroom, eyelids heavy and sealed with sleep. It’s trusting you know what’s waiting in the dark.  That when you reach out, a connection is felt. Not so much a spark as a glow. It’s a comforting heat in my gut.      

And so it goes with the writing of the long project. I write—today at least—with a degree of euphoria because it progresses—it glows—forward. Unfolding tentatively.  Gently. When the next section announces itself, it’s imagistic as opposed to conceptual. A few times, literally: the images are actual photographs calling…no, that’s not quite right, pulling my attention toward them for consideration, reflection, elaboration. Other times it has been a particular memory lifting itself from the body into the mind’s eye, a still, a snapshot of dream, a surprising association that feels like a…knowing.  It’s the right “fit”. It’s the breezy riffle shuffle of a deck of cards settling into place.

At each of these inflection points in the writing—perhaps “at a bend” is a better description, I mean the point at which I’ve completed one section of associative writings and I’m not sure where it’s moving to next—I hear my inner voice resisting: no, don’t write about that! A few times I find myself obeying the inner voice and quickly fire off a list of scenes orbiting round an idea, a concept such as “secrets’ for example.  But even as I do this, there’s a sudden tension in the body…a slight rubber band tautness in my spine. I’m learning to stop at this point and step away from the writing.  Usually, it’s when I’m supposed to get going to work anyway, so the day’s relentless schedule intrudes to healthy effect at this point. At this point it’s important not to let doubt creep in. This makes me think of our culture’s perpetuation of a scarcity mindset instead of trusting the world’s relational abundance, but I digress.  What I’m trying to explain is that it’s necessary for me to actively fight my fear my creativity will stop flowing. Instead, I’m nurturing a belief an ember continues to burn and will flame illumination in its own time. Believing is easier than exercising patience. I’m practicing both.   

A fantastic discovery: unspooling the writings this way, deep subconscious workings reveal themselves…I suddenly see connections, surfaced through writing, between and across associations.  Discovering them is a delight.  It feels like there are multiple pathways and in their own way, any of them are right. And I’m keeping it light. Instead of going back and reworking those pages, I continue writing forward…practicing belief, practicing patience, practicing acknowledging and dancing past my inner voice, practicing how to recognise this knowing, this intuition. Feeling my way forward in the dark.

I wish I could share these writings with you here, but they’re nascent and…in progress…they move.

Another advancement: though much of the long project includes childhood stories, marriage, raising kids, etc., I have started to refer to the people from my life as “characters”. From the real world, through curation and composition, they’ve moved into the world of imagination and creation. They are transformed …malleable clay bits I mould and shape. It affords me a necessary distance to cultivate connection, joy (and sorrow), and entertainment for a reader.  This is the first time for me this has happened. It’s a huge relief somehow.  

I’ll end, for now, with a 2-minute recording of a poem in progress, Open-Air Mercado Piña Coladas. I’ve offered this poem for publication, but I recognise it continues to dwell in the thinking realm and I’m pretty sure it will boomerang back my way with rejection for that reason. Ah well. When I recorded myself reading it, I restricted myself to a single take…refusing to allow my vanity to prevail.  It sounds overly performative to me…blargh…and I stumble on one of the lines, a sure sign that line needs tweaking. Ah well. Again. Fuck. One day my poems will sing. Here it is.

Neuroindulgence

Suzanne Biro

Quick preview: this is a long post, steering (dragging?) you, dear reader, through personal memories and thoughts related to books I’ve read, coupled with an embarrassing but brief writing draft, followed by tottering, slipshod connections toward a conclusion I’ve reached before. I can’t promise return on investment. But there’s repeating reference to naked breasts. Female ones, even. So.  

Home now after two weeks away. One week in BC moving daughter number one from Victoria to Vancouver for a summer internship, followed by a week working in Toronto, staying with daughter number two. A delightful day in the middle where I hugged one daughter in the morning and the other in the evening. Trees fluffy with spring blossom. Out west, the sweet scent of budding Black Cottonwood mingled with brine. In Toronto, Eastern Red Buds branched hot pink; spent and ragged-edged magnolias flowered the sidewalks.  Despite the beauty, spending time with the girls, the relief it’s finally spring, travel disrupted my writing routine, making me edgy and irritable. This morning I’m up at 5, determined to recoup the energy and time necessary for the task[1].

And though I didn’t write while away, I read. I’m mid-way through deep reading an essay I’ve intended to analyse for years, The Fourth State of Matter by Jo Ann Beard. It’s one of several pieces of writing I pulled for the trip, selecting a diversity of works to understand their structural elements and track emotional movements therein[2]. I’m trying to slow my reading sufficiently to understand where and why and how my water works turn on, where sentences spark to fan the embers of my humour, igniting laughter[3]. I thought I’d start with pieces that elicited obvious emotional reaction for me when I first read them.  As always, I underestimated the time such close reading requires, hence my half-way point through the analysis of Beard’s essay. The folder of works I carried across the country and back remained unopened, mostly. And as always, I picked up books along the way…

An interesting observation: I had completely forgotten Beard’s essay is about a school shooting. Like, completely forgotten!!! Instead, the lingering images and feelings I retained from the essay were how the narrator loves and cares for her dying dog. I remembered she carries the aged collie up and down stairs and endlessly washes soiled blankets to place fresh, dried ones beneath the incontinent animal. It’s the love and devotion and grief and longing captured in those images that I remembered[4].

And that got me thinking about the selective and specific memories of book length works my brain holds onto. Is there a pattern to them? Are they all images?  Are they predominantly feelings? What makes them memorable for me?

This brief sample list is poor representation of my rapacious yet superficial reading habit; I read widely but not deeply[5]. I’m working to improve deeper reading. Now, I always read with a pencil in hand, underlining passages, scribbling notes in the margins, extracting sentences, passages, into various notebooks, feathering pages with coloured post-it flags.  And, if I’m honest, it’s only when I write through analysis, i.e., not think through it, that I really get a sense of the mechanics and the magic, hence the indulgent footnote #4 (it’s more for me than for you ha ha).  

This list is the “top of mind” list …I’ve limited myself here deliberately. See? this is me not going to my bookshelf to divine more of my memories conjured off their spines.  The clumsy imprecise rendering here is also deliberate…these are the fuzzy bits retained. Sometimes the only bits. Maybe this betrays a sieve-like brain …or worse, a brain-like sieve.  

  • Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel – scene at the dinner table where the protagonist, forbade by her mother to declare her love to a young man who we know loves her back but is betrothed to her eldest sister, cooks her unrequited passion into a spectacular dinner of dishes, including rose petals (!), the whole family share. But it’s the middle sister who “eats” the cooked in love, becoming so consumed with heat and lust and passion, she rushes from the dining room, somehow loses all her clothes in the process, runs across a field in the dark and her naked body, hair streaming wildly, is hoisted by welcoming arms onto a horse ridden by a passing _______ …can’t remember this detail …soldier? Bandit?  Some kind of handsome outlaw anyway. He happens to be riding by with his gang. This scene makes me feel…envy.
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – the protagonist (though, maybe this is a side character?) goes out of his way to eat asparagus every day so that he may smell its telltale odorous byproducts every time he pees. Oh, and a pet parrot that blurts out inappropriate phrases (swearing?) and lives half in and half outside the house[6].
  • The World According to Garp by John Irving – Garp frying onions, building the mirepoix, to make spaghetti sauce which attracts a woman neighbour to his door, inside his house and eventually into an extra-marital affair[7].  Sigh. It always starts with an onion.
  • The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz – the mother’s sly smile, her wig askew after she fakes a fall and injury, a smile like a tiger’s smile (I likely have this detail wrong) after successfully tricking and luring her teen daughter back to her on a boardwalk in a very public place.
  • The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje – when the beautiful Sikh bomb diffuser shows the nurse a wall mural in an ancient church. Lots of candles[8].
  • All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr – spectacular book! I loved it. But I mostly retain an image of seashells sparkling on the walls of a seashore cave that is fast filling with the tide? Good grief.  
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy – Vasilly scything the wheat fields alongside the peasants. Amazed I remember the character’s name. I love this scene…the movement of all the people, men and women, working together as they harvest their way up the hill of wheat (or is it down?). Vasilly’s satisfaction with working his body this way. Seem to recall he’s depressed a lot, how his physical exertion is a balm.
  • For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway – a side character’s name, Pilar, and characters hiding out in arid, treeless, boulder strewn mountainside cliffs….waiting….waiting …waiting.
  • Industry of Souls by Martin Booth – this is my favourite novel…I’ve read it several times…I don’t know why it endures as a favourite…perhaps it’s the structure, a gentle moving back and forth in time as the protagonist, a man in his eighties, must decide whether to stay or leave Russia, whether to return to England. I love how the character moves around the small village he lives in, saying goodbye to all the friends he has made (for some reason, an image of golden light and lazy bees rises in my mind’s eye here). The visits tip the protagonist’s memories and readers follow his thoughts back in time to when he is a prisoner in the gulag, Siberian labour camps.  A few scenes stick out in memory: one where the male prisoners are found by female prisoners and they pair off in various semi-private mine shafts to make love; another when the prisoners dig a mammoth from the permafrost and eat it; and the most enduring clear image of a man who decides to take his own life by stripping down and sitting down in a snowbank to freeze to death (this happens at a train station).  
  • The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy – the scene where the mother character takes her children to a clothing store and they’re crammed in one of the back change room stalls where they overhear the storekeeper women making fun of the mother with nasty comments about the beautiful magnolia (?) flower she wears in her hair…it’s the bit where the mother’s face falls, she’s humiliated but endures this in silence…it’s an image, I feel, connecting to the fall from innocence…this scene always makes me cry.
  • The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck – travelling in cattle cars across great deserted and desert-like fields, tumble weed bumbling by yes, but the scene I remember is the one where the young woman (who lost a newborn?) unbuttons her blouse to breastfeed an old man who lays on a roadside, slowly dying[9].
  • The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck – the scene where the wife of the landowner/farmer pauses the hard work of crop raising to breastfeed between rows of plants, her milk gushing forth and spilling all over the soil …weirdly, this memory is retained because I felt the author had no clue about breastfeeding, describing the milk letdown as happening from one breast at a time.

Okay. I remember others but I’ll resist (more) self-indulgence and stop here.

Reviewing the list I didn’t really see a pattern, in any technical sense. Sure, could boil these down to “imagery” but they don’t quite slot into that category (asparagus pee?). But yesterday, thinking about Beard’s essay and the dog who can’t help but pee inside, I suddenly connected it to a short piece of writing I drafted earlier this week in response to a writing prompt. Perhaps reading Beard’s essay was a subconscious nudge to write this response, drafted during a12 minute timed write. I’ve transcribed it here, resisting the incredible urge to edit it. The writing prompt was, “write about shame”:

Probably most of us walk around with shame ballooning inside our bodies…a water balloon weighing us down, threatening to burst and make a horrible puddled mess, one shame bursting on the next. And I don’t want to talk about my big shames tonight so maybe a simple story about a little one. I used to wet the bed when I was little. But not so little this might be acceptable. I was well into my grade two year and still failing to rise from deep sleep to get to the toilet in time. The shame would wake me though, wet and warm, gathering at the back of my thighs and knees, pooling beneath my buttocks. My mother trained me not to wake her so I changed the sheets on my bed in the dark, remembering to layer a thick bath towel folded in case it might happen again.

I went to my first sleep over in grade two. It was spring because my friend and I were allowed to sleep in the camper pop up in her driveway. Of course my mother had phoned my friend’s mother before I arrived because I could read the curiosity and the pity on my friend’s face. I’d chosen to wear my favourite pajamas, Little Dollies I think they were called, a pair of short bloomer-like shorts with an A-line tank top, frilly bits round the hem. My mother had instructed me to wear a diaper. Cloth in those days. She’d pinned it to fit me before I’d left home then folded it in my bag till I’d need it at night time. At night time I changed in the bathroom, dragging the thick diaper cloth up the length of my legs to rest at the hips. The safety pins were capped in pink and they jutted visible beneath my pajama bottoms. When I met my friend in the hallway she looked me up and down. No words passed between us but it was pity I read, again, on her face. My shame coloured my cheeks red.

The next week, when we played barbies, she and her sister stole my red barbie boots, knowing I would never argue for my rights to them, the shame a lever they now knew how to pull.   

Soooo…reviewing my remembered novel scenes after connecting my writing response with scenes from Beard’s essay, closer scrutiny does reveal a pattern…but a pattern unique to me[10]. The scenes in the list evoke an emotion (or series of emotions in relation to one another) that ties in with my own emotional experiences …and they are less literal connection, more emotional resonance, pinging off in ways also unique to me.

The process of identifying the emotional resonance between these remembered scenes and my own experiences, is analogous to reading through my own draft writings to gather fragments where I detect emotional vibration/heat, and learning to thread them together, piecing them in a way that leads a reader through the repetitive rise and cascade of my personal emotional experience.  I have come to this conclusion before, but writing through these scene memories in this post, I’ve progressed a key learning: how and what a reader connects to and remembers is as unique as a fingerprint. Before now, I’ve understood this theoretically; now I understand it practically. My job, as a writer, then, is to infuse my writing with as much emotional authenticity as I can, knowing it will touch every reader differently and never knowing, or ever being able to truly predict or guide, how or why. This eases my anxiety about connection. Somewhat.

Thank you for reading.

[1] I’m trying to make peace with my energy levels declining with age …or is it that day job work siphons too much from me?  I don’t know.  I haven’t risen for 5 am writing practice for over a year, slipping my wake up to 6, then 6:30 am, believing I’ll get to what I need to in the quiet evenings. But I don’t. I’m knackered by then and/or I continue trying to fit it all in, experiences I mean, by attending webinars, learning a language, volunteering and meeting friends…all essential to living a good life, yes, but leaving too little room for creative work. So, 5 am wake up begins again. Creative work is priority.

[2] Writing I carried across Canada and back, in addition to Beard’s essay: Report from the Bahamas by June Jordan (have done a deep dive on this one in the past, warrants another); Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace (I was delighted to discover his judicious-footnote-use – a compadre); The Race Goes to the Swiftest by Barry Lopez (in my packing haste I thought this was his essay about sexual abuse, but no, that essay is Sliver of Sky; The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick; Two Hearts by Brian Doyle; Onion Heart by Rupert Dastur; Triangle by Larry Brown; A Story About The Body by Robert Hass; a Substack post, American Letters 5: Swim to Shore by Alexander Chee; pages 14-18 of Midnight’s Chicken by Ella Risbridger. Listing these here, I realise my idiocy, believing I might bend time to accommodate such deep study in only a week of vacation while moving Lillian between apartments, visiting my sister and her partner in Squamish, and my uncle in long term care, not to mention the time change and travel days. Still, carrying writing around…there’s a comfort in it, a sense of optimism, of potential, the eternal hope it will just absorb through my skin.

[3] I always return to Douglas Glover’s rubrics for structural analysis, as well as his emotion writing exercise. Really, DG’s words are never far from my mind.

[4] The essay is an exploration, and I would go so far as to say “an artifact”, of the experience and impact of trauma. An essay composed of fragments, culling moments from across a swath of time, laid out non-linearly with subtle-to-the-extreme time stamps—accomplished technically using brief switches in point of view and super brief tense changes. The use of mostly present tense despite different time points, creates the sense of disorientation and disconnection for the reader. The form mimics the experience of what it feels like when life as you know it is blown to pieces. Trauma is ever-present even when it happened long ago. It’s a stunning work of art.

I burst into tears with this scene: when the narrator, post-shooting event, directs a stranger to the classroom where the chalk writing of one of the dead remains on the chalkboard. The stranger loses her composure seeing the chalkboard, but that’s not where I cry…I cry reading the subsequent scene (accomplished simply with a new sentence) when the narrator returns to the empty classroom, “an hour later”, the stranger gone, and notices the smudge of palm prints on the chalkboard, “I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly and blurred.”. Again, the form (this time the use of an image) delivers the meaningful impact: an image of loss …a body and soul once present has been erased…the image depicts the intimacy of the relationship the stranger shared with the person who wrote on the chalkboard before being killed, now reduced to a word, “ghostly” …there was connection through touch, through relationship, and the smudge is the image of the stranger’s hands attempting to re-touch, to re-connect with the body and the relationship now disappeared. Life, joy, love: fragile, vulnerable and ephemeral as a prof’s chalk writing. An image of deadline in its most literal sense.  Devastating. Also, spectacularly beautiful and precise. When I read writing like this, I suppress the wailing urge to toss the pages to the air, collapse in a foetal position and give up. But here I am, still writing.

[5] I ought confess that for the first year and a bit after leaving…a partner of 27 years, the home we built together, a garden I loved… I had trouble reading…concentrating, focusing, was very difficult…of course I read, but in snippets…and shorter works…it’s only in the last few months I’m regaining my reading stamina.     

[6] I also remember part of the first line of this book, a handy phrase to trot out when literary types play that game at dinner parties where they test whether you are sufficiently read if you dare to suggest you might also be a creative writer.  Bitter almonds seem to satisfy them. Oh, and unrequited love. A pervasive literary (and life) theme it seems. A secret password of sorts. That parrot technique is a great idea.

[7] I first read Garp as a teenager and this scene of him cooking spaghetti sauce—my absolute and enduring favorite food, despite all the wonderful things I’ve had the opportunity to taste—fixed a desire to love a man who would cook for me and love me back the same way (but without the affairs). I’m still hoping for such a man. Like Garp, he will also have to be a writer I think, as well as a spectacular lover. An aside: last week I pilfered my copy of The World According to Garp from Willa’s bookshelf and delighted reading a good chunk of it on the train home to Kingston.  And I hadn’t appreciated at all when I first read the book way back when, how much of it is about writing and becoming a writer. Reading it again is a delight. There’s a line comparing writing a novel to long distance running which particularly resonates (like Garp, I also ran cross country in high school; it’s endurance).

[8] I adore Ondaatje’s writing …but I admit, for this specific scene, I think the movie version scores higher for the romance factor.

[9] Remembering this scene, I wonder if it also imprinted on Irving’s mind, serving as the model of a similar, though far more sexualised scene, in The World According to Garp. I think so.

[10] Thank you, Captain Obvious (eye roll). My ex-husband always complained I was slow…perhaps this is what he meant.

Get’n Fun Back in Funktional

Suzanne Biro

Woman riding a Narwhal. She arrived in my mind seven years ago through the invitational creative exercise of active imagination1. Swimming and flipping and delighting in a dark indigo sea dotted with chunks of luminous ice, while the “I” of me observed, the narwhal appeared. In my dreamy inner-mind dialogue with the image, the narwhal chided me (yes, less criticism, it was delivered more softly, with humour) for how I’ve forgotten how to swim and encouraged me to explore the depths. Then, some truly frightening images floated from the ink-blue dark, half rotted faces of people I love and other shadows swirled, threatening to reveal themselves. I was instantly frightened. Then, up popped the narwhal, splashing through the shadows to explain I needn’t be afraid, the water will catch me, they (?) will not let me fall2. I started to cry. Not pretendingly. In reality. Tears rolled my cheeks but I remained suspended in active imagination so I asked, can I learn to swim again? The narwhal laughed, and said, of course! The water is in you always! The water is in you! Yes, the narwal was emphatic. How? How do I learn? The narwhal flipped and turned amidst the sea ice, one coordinated muscle arcing. It’s words echoed over and over as I surfaced from dream to consciousness: Let go! Let go! It’s fun to let go!

A few days later3, the narwhal appeared again and I asked the image why it had come. It answered: To navigate the depths, to help me go deeper. The narwhal dove fast then, it’s dapple grey skin deepening to a green glowy sheen. The image shifted to show a girl riding the narwhal, holding tight as it dragged her fast and swift beneath the surface. The narwhal’s horn pierced the depths effortlessly. What else do you have to tell me? The narwhal replied, It’s fun, it’s fun to pierce the depths, don’t be afraid! I wondered if I’d be able to breathe and the narwhal actually laughed, almost scoffed and, voice deadpan, Of course you’ll be able to breathe.

I wanted to capture the image, but I didn’t feel I’d be able to render it well enough drawing or painting. Instead, I opted to model it using beeswax, investing a tiny fortune in different colours4. And when the beeswax arrived, I stuck the little packets in a box with a bunch of other art supplies where they waited, patiently, for my creative hands. Turns out, the time for that was last month, seven years (!) after the narwhal and the rider arrived in my mind’s eye. In Jung’s approach, creating a tangible representation of image–out of the subconscious dream world and into this one–is an essential part of the process5. Reflecting on the little model I created, (a little more cartoony than I’d like, also, in the original image, the rider was a young girl in a red dress, in the hand modelling she became a woman nude), it kinda aligns with last month’s post about fishing the subconscious for emotion and feelings…I think, no, I feel (that’s better), I’m finally ready to explore those depths with the curiosity and joy and play required for the task6.

Another creative practice serendipity: a friend from bookclub asked me to guest instruct her grade twelve creative writing class. She explained they were covering a unit about creating characters. She warned they were a quiet and shy bunch, a cohort having suffered crucial social development years in pandemic isolation. My goal was to get the students reading their own writing aloud–even it it was just a favourite word–by the end of the class. And to have fun.

And it was fun! We co-created characters, listing various gestures and personality quirks, super powers and pet peeves, desires and obsessions as they were called out. We wrote the list on blank sheets of paper, passing the papers round the classroom after each prompt so that no character “belonged” to any one writer. Instead, iterative dimensions of character layered upon what had been written on each paper offered to hand. We shared some of the character creations aloud. Then, lists of descriptions completed, we crumpled the papers into balls and threw them round the room, followed by a mad dash to pick one up as “an assigned character” to write about. The final writing prompt was: what does this character’s best (or) worst day look like? (Or, if a writer felt inspired to write something else, that was encouraged too.) We wrote together for ten minutes while instrumental music played7. Afterwards, we went round the room and everyone shared their favourite line they wrote, then, several students volunteered to read their drafts entire. The pieces were lovely…full of energy and humour and sensory details. We laughed a lot.

Last month I wrote a poem about being a Canadian tourist in Mexico. I visited Mexico two years ago. That poem’s been cooking since then. I’ve tucked it aside for now, to let it breathe on its own for a bit before I go back and fiddle with it. I read it to a friend who said, Just. Don’t touch it!

Turning again towards long project writing I realized I’ve spent time practicing at the sentence level with shorter pieces … and I have no idea where to begin at the story level for a longer work. I was reminded of Nina Schuyler‘s descriptive analogy of writing process. How, at the sentence level, you’re working at ground level, but then you have to climb a mountain to get a better bird’s eye view of the paragraph level, then the chapter level, then the whole story level. And in writing any creative work, you run up and down that mountain, tweaking and refining over and over and over again, until there is a synergy of sounds and symbols and patterns energizing a wholistic work of art. I feel like I just laced up a stiff new pair of hiking boots on badly blistered heels in the base camp parking lot.

Last month I received three rejections from literary magazines. Two for a short creative nonfiction piece and one for the introductory chapter/essay to the long form project. I know I’m not supposed to say so–that it’s all a part of writing practice, that I “need a thicker shell”–but the rejection breaks my heart8.

When I’m sad I always turn to reading. Pat Schneider’s Writing Alone and With Others, as well as any essay written by Ursula K. Le Guin, always offer a grounding, resetting perspective about what really matters: love of creative work. The process. Running up and down the mountain. For fun. By way of Pat Schneider, I’m introduced to this wisdom, a consolation, about submitting creative writing for publication from Marge Piercy, “Never say ‘submit’! Say offer.” Yes, absolutely right. So, let’s end here with one of her poems:

For the young who want to

By Marge Piercy

Talent is what they say
you have after the novel
is published and favorably
reviewed. Beforehand what
you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting.

Work is what you have done
after the play is produced
and the audience claps.
Before that friends keep asking
when you are planning to go
out and get a job.

Genius is what they know you
had after the third volume
of remarkable poems. Earlier
they accuse you of withdrawing,
ask why you don’t have a baby,
call you a bum.

The reason people want M.F.A.’s,
take workshops with fancy names
when all you can really
learn is a few techniques,
typing instructions and some-
body else’s mannerisms

is that every artist lacks
a license to hang on the wall
like your optician, your vet
proving you may be a clumsy sadist
whose fillings fall into the stew
but you’re certified a dentist.

The real writer is one
who really writes. Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

That line about a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting, makes me laugh. And though I agree with the final line, I feel you have to love the work AND you have to infuse the work with your love. This is the way love swims the Möbius loop to pierce the heart of a reader.

  1. I try to practice active imagination semi-regularly. Here’s a quick guide to explain the Jungian technique for fishing the subconscious. A few years ago, exercising my mind this way, I found it relatively easy to descend into a floaty state, meditating somewhere between dream and wakefulness. The images, most often animals (a bluebird, a spider, like Charlotte in E. B. White’s classic, a bee, a butterfly, a tortoise, the narwhal, etc.) surfaced and I was able to dialogue with them. It has been more challenging to succeed with the exercise lately (the last year or two?). Often I fall asleep. A sure sign rest is needed. More worrying is that I can’t get past the chatter brain of thoughts being expressed in words…I can’t seem to summon the images as easily. ↩︎
  2. I know it seems like I’ve rather lost my mind, conversing with the images therein…but, ha ha, isn’t that kind of the point? My own mind, carved and chiseled by culture, by categorization in language form, so easily manipulates, obfuscates …these exercises are meant to transcend those boundaries and restrictions as a gateway to creativity. Besides, it’s kinda fun. Except for the scary rotting face images…a risk I’m willing to take in the comfort of my home. ↩︎
  3. 10 days – I checked my dream/active imagination journal. The narwhal images appeared in June 2018. ↩︎
  4. Beeswax is really wonderful to work with on a small scale. The wax warms in your hand to become malleable and releases a honey scent with a hint of camphor. As the wax cools to room temperature, it hardens again. ↩︎
  5. And really, isn’t this what creative writing is too? ↩︎
  6. She wrote pleadingly. ↩︎
  7. The character I had was a horse thief able to communicate telepathically with horses, but alas, addicted to maple syrup and always had sticky hands. ↩︎
  8. This, on top of continuing violence and injustice and ecological destruction…and this f’ing winter that drags on ….and that living in the city I won’t hear the spring peepers calling from the flooded fields…threatens a dark funk I won’t be able to pull myself from…finding and sharing beauty and joy and love and a fantastic funk song and love of writing in community is the only antidote. ↩︎

Missing Your Missives

Suzanne Biro1 Comment

I’m learning to work with my subconscious[1] for creative writing. My ability to do this…no, that’s not quite right, I mean my ability to control this—with attention and technique and love—is a recent accomplishment[2]. Gonna use this post to unpack and articulate my two-phase process (and celebrate my progress to a nascent phase two, because man oh man, it’s been a long time coming. Years!).

Phase One: Fish into the subconscious to dredge its messages to consciousness

The most interesting writing** I generate arises four ways. Sometimes these methods overlap with one another. Note a couple of these approaches apply some sort of restriction/constraint to the writing process[3]:

  1. Swiftly written stream of consciousness writing in response to a prompt (i.e., write to the line blah blah… or, write an answer to blah blah question…or, write the scene between character A and B when…). Swiftly written means timed (short, < 15 minutes, though I have stretched drafting to < 30 minutes)
  2. Using another piece of writing, a sentence’s or a poem’s, syntax or rhetorical device or structural form, as a template with which to slot in my own words, images and thoughts.
  3. A line or an image that floats to me when I’m relaxed and engaged in another task (e.g., walking (exercising in general actually), showering, washing dishes, staring out the window, lying in bed[4]).
  4. From dreams[5].

For me, applying a restriction when writing provokes my brain to think sideways. By this I mean punts me off my comfortable (well-trodden) neural pathways and avoid my default “thinking/meaning making” mode. The restriction stimulates “dreaming/imagining” mode (which is the natural state for #3 and #4 in the above list[6]).

**What do I mean by interesting writing? Here are some recent examples:

TypeGenerative methodExample pulled from breezy drafts written in the last month
Image< 12 minute response to a writing promptA woman dragging her carcass of a body on the back of a smile, marionette strings with which her dead weights were held up
ImageDreamA massive black bear sitting on a stony shore, calm grey lake water, catching shiny silver fish. Then it’s holding an infant, and I hear rather than watch the bear’s jaws crunch through the baby’s neck and my thought is, ‘Ah well, I guess that’s done.’
Thought or IdeaFloater while exercisingPeople often use water words and imagery when they talk about the subconscious (e.g., stream, flow, ocean of awareness, diving deeper, swimming below the surface)
Comparison< 15 minute response to a writing promptWe’re taught to read…26 letters in the English alphabet and the millions of words they generate…but we’re never taught to read each other …and though we’re never taught, we do read these betweens (facial expressions, gestures, vocal tone, etc.), read them better than words sometimes.
MetaphorUsing a sentence by Peter Orner as a templateWe started up, as you do lying to yourself: in the net of a valid excuse.[7]
Analogy (ish)Stream of consciousness journaling when too tired before bed (not in the list above, but also, kind of a restriction …or imposed handicap)I am a broken heart. It’s just sometimes I believe you can mend it. It’s the belief that destroys me.
Surprising wordUsing a sentence by Jonathon Keats as a templateTympanic   (I know! I swear this word dropped from the universe onto the page…I wasn’t even sure it was a real word. I looked it up later. It is.)

Now, ideally, I should be able to write this way for longer periods with practice and without the necessary restrictions to provoke the interesting writing. But the truth is, I’m really challenged with this. Many writers can access the subconscious more easily …it’s a state that seems more natural for them.

A thought: the challenge accessing the subconscious might be the reason many artists and writers use alcohol or drugs—the inhibition substances enable—to create art. Substances lower the socio-cultural pressure gates, sanctioning a more permeable membrane between consciousness and subconsciousness. It’s a delicate balance to manage and risk of addiction is…high (no pun intended), so not an ideal pathway.

Substance use also alleviates deep emotional pain, a pain all humans endure to some degree…I’ll come back to this shortly.

So, there’s phase one. And I can confidently claim creating writing drafts that surface magical subconscious gifts. What I’ve been stumped by, until recently, is how to work with the gifted images to integrate them into a completed piece (story or poem).

Here’s my default strategy in a nutshell. The other week I was walking with a writer friend, discussing writing. Not for the first time, she said, “I have to tell you, I noticed it in your writing way back then, and you continue to do it: you overthink your writing,” we were wading a substantial snowbank and it interrupted her train of thought, “You need to….”  here her voice trailed off to silence. Cliffhanger!!! Trying to keep my desperation in check, cough cough, swiping the snow from my legs, I asked, “More emotion? More feeling?”  Yes, she said.

Truth is, I was flummoxed. Wasn’t I doing this already? Actually, no.[8]

Now, I’ve read enough craft essays at this point to understand there’s a chasm wide difference between applying a technical move to integrate emotion and the sublime skill of layering emotion in a piece to create a work of art. This is the same difference I can taste in dishes and desserts that are technically proficient but nevertheless lack a quality I swear to gawd I can sense on my tongue: dishes cooked without love. What does this taste like? Flat.

Here are fragments I’ve cherry picked  and pasted together to serve my own understanding and purpose (is this allowed? probably not) from Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant essay, The Semiotics of Sex, from her collection, Art Objects, Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery:

“…it is worth remembering that the conventional mind is its own prison…Literature…packs in it supplies of energy and emotion that all of us need…Learning to read is a skill that marshals the entire resources of body and mind…I mean the ability to engage with a text as you would another human being…The love between you offers an alternative paradigm; a complete and fully realised vision in a chaotic unrealized world. Art is the realisation of complex emotion.”  

I won’t go into it here, and I’m loathe to kind of even talk about it, but I must for the sake of Phase Two. Much of the work with my therapist involves me learning to feel emotion in my body. Those deep emotions mentioned earlier that many people resort to drugs or alcohol to suppress or annihilate? Turns out I use high level thinking and analysis as a (socially acceptable) way to bypass feeling anything too deeply. Joy is acceptable and, no doubt, I’m exuberant, especially after a martini. But pain?  Oh, I’ll cognitize the fuck out of it.  Once I understood this, I asked my therapist, failing to mute a whiney earnest wretchedness, am I disabled?

Here’s a drawing of my own creative writing issue process I figured out with my therapist[9]:

Phase Two: Switch from horizontal to vertical symbol translation and FEEL it goddamnit

This is less…concrete…than Phase One because I’m only just beginning to understand and practice writing this way. Here’s how I worked it out.

A few months ago, I posted a creative writing piece in progress, Measures, and used orange text inserts denoting my analysis and thinking about the images and surprising words that came through the breezy drafting bits (but, I note, not the ‘idea’ driven bits).

Originally, the piece was generated as a response to a writing prompt—but not timed—leaving me ample opportunity to twist a narrative around an idea. Which I did. That draft, despite the lack of constraints, held a few scarce subconscious breadcrumbs that I didn’t recognise at the time. I have many many drafts like this (soft whimper).

When I was preparing to read Measures at a public reading, I collaged the original draft together with other fragments of writing I’d done using constraints. I was rushing the edits (a self-imposed constraint). As I collaged, I could sense parts of the text vibrating some energy. I know, weird, but that’s the best way I can explain it.  Those vibrating bits, I recognise now, signal subconscious missives. Maybe other people feel this differently, perhaps it’s simply noticing or a feeling of curiosity. However they’re identified, they’re the bits I have to attend to with care and devotion…a kind of nurturing love.

Phase 2 A

So, what does this look like in practice? It’s leaning into the feelings and emotions arising from the vibrating images and surprising words or metaphors. Instead of staying with surface logic, descend into the body, slow down, notice, INVITE the complex emotions swimming around my insides[10]. Name them – here’s a handy emotion wheel as reference. Map them (i.e., in the body – gut? heart? lungs? heat? cold? tension?).  

For me this requires undisturbed focus best achieved comfortably propped up with pillows in bed. Because this is deeply discomforting work. Feeling sorrow, fear, shame, pain, anything deeply conflictual…it’s only with intentional effort that I sink into these feelings and pinpoint which ones adhere to the piece of creative writing I’m working with. The initial emotion identification process is much less writing and far more, well, active attention to feeling[11].  

Once complex emotions are recognised, named and mapped, the task becomes layering the cascade of emotion into the piece. Because it isn’t just one emotion, it’s the movement from one (or several) emotion to the next. Emotion doesn’t just arise out of nowhere, it’s a relational reaction; it’s the energy of the between (often between people, but can also be between perception, say, a scent, and memory, or between animals and humans, or between landscape and humans…the list goes on…the important bit is that the emotion arises out of relationship).  This is the experience, the relationship energy, I want my reader to feel. I’m creating an experience of complex emotion and I’m communicating, to borrow Winterson’s line, with text as I would another human being. It’s an intimacy.

Phase 2 B

How to do that? Here’s where it gets interesting. As a kid, I used to love those puzzles of what appeared to be hundreds of coloured dots on a page but when concentrated on a certain way and intentionally altering the angle of focus, the two-dimensional field of dots coalesced and popped what appeared as a three-dimensional image. Suddenly a 3D stag was running at me from the page[12]. The optical illusion puzzles are called  Autostereograms (yes, I had to look this up).

The 3D puzzle is analogous to the process I used to layer complex emotional change into my working draft. Here’s an attempt to clarify my process (I’m still working on this….in a few months I might completely change my thinking, but for now, this works):

  1. the effect of the movement of feelings in the piece is like seeing/feeling the 3D image
  2. the subconscious missives in the form of images, metaphors, surprising words etc. are the dots
  3. The intellectual meaning or the question the draft might be revolving around is like the 2D field of dots   
  4. the success of the story is proportional to the elegance with which a writer can layer all these aspects together, the coalescing of components – that movement from 2D to 3D….which, I suspect, is sensed and felt by the reader as opposed to through the mechanism of critical analysis.
  5. How is this done? By blending technical aspects (don’t let them take over!) with subconscious/dream aspects (the signposts of emotional energy)
  6. achieving the elegance of coalescing is the practice

So, this was how I approached the rewrite of Measures, a 905-word creative nonfiction piece. It’s my first intentional emotion blending attempt. When I was puzzling to layer the emotional movements in the piece, a specific line surfaced from the depths as I wrote and fiddled with the syntax (a subconscious gift!) and I burst into tears. A couple of friendly readers, though not all, experienced the same at the same paragraph in the piece. I’ve submitted the story to a few places for publication, waiting for submission windows to open at others…but really, reader reaction means, for me, the writing sings.

[1] I noticed I use the word subconscious as opposed to unconscious. I use subconscious to refer to information just below conscious awareness. But unconscious kind of means that too, though I think of unconscious information as deeper, more inaccessible. Like, my body doesn’t need to think about breathing or my heart beating to keep it upright (most of the time…falling in love or stubbing my bare toe on a concrete parking block changes all that, at least for a short moment). I admit, I took another deep dive into the differences and theories of mind conceptualizing unconscious and subconscious. Short synopsis: originally, the two words were used interchangeably as part of psychological theory. At some point, “unconscious” became synonymous with scientific rigour, while “subconscious” was significantly downgraded (ha ha, no pun intended) to parlance related to woo woo pseudoscientific pursuits, like, you know, tarot cards and ouija boards. So, there’s a classist-type interpretation of the two words. But, in other contexts, subconscious and unconscious refer to different levels of information below our conscious awareness, the former being slightly more accessible than the latter.   Accessibility is thought to be achieved through intentional reflection practices, talk therapies, etc.  [Here’s two whole paragraphs on this subject deleted. You’re welcome.]

[2] Okay, control is probably too strong a word here because the process of working this way, working with a subconscious (and yes, with the switch to using the indefinite article I’m proposing the subconscious is not mine alone, but rather a collective and fluid energy we all swim in…who’s woo woo now? ha ha ha) retains a high degree of mystery and hangs in dreamlike suspension (hang and suspension redundant? no, here dreamlike suspension is a thing, a state of being, maybe even a place).

[3] Though a word count cap is, technically, a restriction, I’ve found this insufficient for accessing the subconscious.  Fewer words in a piece forces grammatical and syntactical discipline. Also, an efficiency of imparting information. But I can still think my way to a finished piece without layering in emotional heat (this is explored in Phase Two). This might also be why fragments written in emails and texts can sometimes fish out unexpected images, words….certainly humour bits I wouldn’t have thought of intentionally except for the challenge to provide a witty reply.  

[4] Best, for me anyway, if not listening to a podcast or distracted by any visual media. Music seems to be okay, though floaty lines are heavily influenced by lyrics so this is a risk…it’s best if I’m not distracted at all. For the last year and a half or so, I’ve eschewed most media, including film, shows, news, in order to nurture and invite….access?…subconscious messaging.  Also, ‘cause I just need the quiet.

[5] I keep a dream journal. I have since 2018 and kicking myself for not starting earlier. BUT – this is hard for me…I rarely remember my dreams …must apply intentional effort to remember them. When I wake, they’re dissolving very very fast. And if I wake in the night, too often I think, oh, I’ll write that down in the morning. Of course, by then, it’s long gone. Despite the dream journal an arm’s length from my pillow, I fail to reach my hand out in the dark. I remember my dreams better when I’m on vacation (I take this to mean that it’s only when I’m relaxed and rested that I’m really able to dialogue with dreams…work-life is too energy taxing. It’s a frustration for sure).

[6] Dreaming may not be “a restriction” per se – but could argue “not being awake” is.

[7] I love this line – it’s got two people in it, a narrator who is lying to themselves and colluding with the reader on this (reader senses the inclusion and also wants to know why), plus the metaphor “net” surfaces connotations of “caught in a trap” of a valid excuse. The reader senses the push-me pull-you tension of an excuse that is likely not valid or at the very least is a trap….but see? Here I have veered off into super analytical mode, ultra meaning making….I run the risk of using my usual approach and creating a “thought up” story as opposed to a “dreamed up” one.  I feel the sentence would be a great first line of a story….ripe for using the timed write method to see what else will surface in a more dream-like way…get more text from the subconscious to the page before meddling with it.

[8] This blog is, I know, ultra thought concept driven. I don’t count the posts I write here as my “creative writing” work. Here, I’m exercising (exorcising?) my analytical tendencies …with the faint hope this will make space in my brain (and body) to allow the dreamwork to happen.

[9] Another friend, when I showed her this drawing explaining my thinking behind it, said, “wait, you drew a model of your analysis of your overthinking?” I erupted gales. A sense of humour is also an acceptable coping strategy for managing deep emotional pain. Subject for another post, this one is too long. Hopefully you’re still with me.

[10] You have no idea how difficult this is. I’m working on it.

[11] Am I also researching epigenetic biological embedding of experiences, relational neurobiology and the ontogenesis of shame, internalised oppression and morality? You betcha. [my gawd, she really is f-ing nutty nut bar]. Don’t worry, I do all of this half-assed.

[12] An AI generated overview of how to “see” the stag –  Parallel (or wall-eyed) method: Focus your eyes as if looking at a point behind the image, not directly at the image itself; Cross-eyed method: Try to cross your eyes slightly to focus on a point beyond the image. Not gonna touch the AI grenade here…except to opine that feelings and emotions are often beyond words and language (why we need dreams and art as translation mechanisms) and I don’t believe AI will learn to fish the subconscious the way humans can hone their ability to.

A Collaboration

Suzanne Biro

“I like the way we make our dreams happen.” Lori Richards

I’m delighting in the astonishing culmination of a collaborative art venture with my friend, artist, Lori Richards. Our creative works—Lori’s paintings  and my writing—are exhibiting together for a short time at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. She generously invited me to write prose poem (like) pieces towards her paintings and I leapt at the opportunity[1].

The vernissage (new word for me, it means a preview of an art exhibition) was last weekend but we dreamed the idea—a wish—to combine and show our art works many many years ago. The exhibit is called Seedbed.

Lori and I walk together almost every week.  As our feet pound the leaf and petalled paths, the sidewalks, the pavement or the snow, we recount, gesturing to the winds, drawing models in the air with our fingers, the celebrations, the frustrations, the lamentations and the longings of creative process. Despite working in different mediums, our practices are very much aligned. Lori is a professional artist. She has been, and continues to be, a steady champion of my creative writing as I squeeze it in as best I can round my day job[2].

Leaping is the right description for the approach I used for Seedbed. I’ve written ad nauseum (emphasis on nausea) about how crippled I am when it comes to pushing my creative writing out into the world (submitting for publication). I didn’t have this issue in the past…it developed over the last few years …I don’t really know what it’s about, but I feel like I’m about to break through my own barriers[3]. I think I’ve been saying that for a year or so. Sigh.

For this project, writing prose poem-ish pieces for each of Lori’s seventeen different paintings, I wanted to practice less preciousness with my writing. And I wanted to experience (force myself) to let go of them as is. I created a few rules for myself to keep the creativity light and fun:

  • Gaze at the painting, but only for a short time
  • Use stream of consciousness writing (I wrote freehand for most of these in my notebook, and the pieces, as they were being written, often included arrows and connecting lines)
  • Adhere to first instincts (as in, whatever words or images pop up, write them down and don’t tinker very much or at all)
  • As soon as a piece feels finished, send it to Lori as “done”

This phase of development and creation worked relatively well, though I was surprised by the writing emerging. The pieces are whimsical and, in several cases, nonsensical. But, adhering to my own rules, I let them be.

Do look at the paintings at the gallery website – my reproduction here fails (dreadfully) to capture the vibrancy of colours.

There was only one pairing of works where the process was reversed, where my writing inspired Lori’s painting. Interestingly, (or maybe the better word is fortuitously), this became the title pairing in the exhibition: Lori’s seedbed painting and a breathy paragraph of my own that floated to me the week I made the decision to leave my marriage. Though Lori thinks of the Seedbed series as beginning January 2024, I feel it began closer to the creation of that garden focused paragraph in the fall of 2023. It was then Lori created her first “bed painting” (several paintings in Seedbed include an image of a bed). This first painting felt (feels) emblematic for me, for what I was/am moving through. That painting now hangs in my bedroom.

It has been wonderful experiencing the generative iterations of the series since. There have been additional bed paintings created beyond the exhibition submissions…they continue.  I feel magically connected—in a way I can’t articulate—with each painting as they appear. The closest I can come to explaining my feelings is with the word blossoming.

And I wasn’t nervous in the days or hours leading up to the vernissage. The gallery’s curator displayed the works beautifully. She and the staff also produced a lovely brochure of a selection of paintings with their ekphrastic accompaniments. Both Lori and I were expected to speak briefly about our process and collaboration, and I planned to read two very short pieces[4]. But when I arrived at the gallery a cold panic sloshed in my stomach[5]. The gallery space filled quickly, bodies tumbling inside from the frozen February afternoon. I’m told there were 80 people but they all sort of blurred together blobbing round while I smiled and nodded and prayed the wine I was drinking would kick in. It didn’t.

When it was my turn to speak, I accepted the microphone with grace. I stumbled on the word ekphrastic (it is very hard to say)….garbled gravel in my mouth…my heart thrashed against my rib cage and leapt the base of my throat, but then, deep breath, pause. Reading my own words, my body calmed and settled from the very first sentence. My voice steadied and held. I’m told I was poised. I wish I could say I recovered soon after the short performance, but I felt rather sick with the adrenalin hangover for the remainder of the day and into the evening.

Still, it has been an accomplishment. And a progression. In the days since, I’ve felt delighted with the experience. And (perhaps?) even a little awe for the courage it took to leap.  

[1] Ekphrasis is a written description, real or imagined, of a work of art. Another dear friend, Barbara Ponomareff, who I met years ago when I offered to carpool us to a wonderful (and remote) writer’s retreat, has published several exquisite ekphrastic works in The Ekphrastic Review.

[2] I’m blessed with continuing encouragement from so many people; you know who you are, I sing your adorations for sticking around, thank you.

[3] Intend to write about “next level writing” in the March blog post, so, stay tuned. Also, I promise to curtail the whining and actually get some pieces submitted.

[4] Another dear friend, also a weekly creative-conversation-while-walking companion, Carolyn Smart, very kindly suggested which work to read. And I’m tickled to learn that painting, Pink Room with Moon, sold to another Canadian poet on the strength of an Instagram promotional post even before the show was launched. So many collaborators throughout the whole process… why do we ever believe we work in isolation?

[5] Threatened a colonic…wholly inelegant I know. Vomiting might have  been preferable. But the body chooses its own exit strategies. I managed to keep uh everything intact (emphasis on in).

Seedbed introduction (Lori in the background and Tiffany, gallery curator, to the let).
Seedbed reading
Pink Room with Moon reading

Heart Work

Suzanne Biro
I worked really hard to get 52% in first year physics and even celebrated that pass with gusto (meant I could keep my bursary). But it seems I missed the lesson on momentum – looking after my friend’s two labs last week, I was launched from a standing position, cartoon-like, when they lunged at a passer by. They even dragged me two feet. I must weigh the same as they do, I think that’s how it works. Ego more bruised than my body.

I don’t know where to begin. With the pain or with the love?

We are born to love[1]; pain shapes the way we do.

The long form writing project I continue to work on (slowly, oh so slowly) has become an exploration of how pain and love develop over a lifetime to shape…well, decisions, behaviours…everything of human being.

The subject of my exploration is me, an N of 1. But nested in my family because the twisted strands of DNA encode a legacy of pain and love across and through generations. Also, my own children, the ongoing experience of raising them. We forget this, thinking of ourselves as separated bodies encased in skin, as individuals in isolation, ignoring how we bathe in oceans of influence from lives and cultures past and present, as well as the speculations of futures.

My long form creative writing project explores questions like, how the fuck did I get here? Why the fuck did I choose to do that? And weaves the territories of my parents’ lives through my own with questions like, fuck, how could they have done that differently? What the fuck happened to them to make them act like that? (Note: technically this is referred to as “reflection[2]”, writing from the point of view of “I” now, having gained (some?) wisdom).

Pain and love are not opposite ends of a spectrum; I understand them better as points of radiation. The rays of light, the spears of dark, overlap, intersect, bend and shape, illuminate and shade our experiences, our beliefs, our behaviours, our choices. And not just our own. This would make it simpler. Our love and our pain shape the vibrating energy between us, in all our relationships. All relationships, with the non-human animal and natural beings in the world as well (I include landscapes, rivers and rocks and sky and trees and more, as part of this comprehensive definition). And relationships are ever moving and changing, breaking apart and reforming.  Writing is one way to explore and understand the dynamic process, the influences and impacts, of love and pain[3].  

Shakespeare does not begin the play Romeo and Juliet with a focus on the passion between the lovers. Even before the first scene, the prologue hints the pain dooming the lovers to an early (and dramatic) death (with a scientifically prescient nod to trans generational trauma epigenetics!), “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/ A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life”. And it ought be noted[4] Shakespeare’s very first scene, in a story about love, is set in “a public place” where conflict erupts in violence. In this work of art, love is sandwiched between violence and death. A more general question: does it have to be? Or, is it always? And that got me thinking about other novels and stories …I’ll get to this shortly.

The long project I’m working on continues to reveal its underbelly as I work with it.  There was a lot of love in the house I grew up in. And there was a lot of pain. And it’s essential the writing capture both. It’s an audacious research question to ask, even gutsier to explore as a theme in writing: how do we learn to love? 

Okay, okay, let’s be clear, I’m not asking how romance develops, how we fall in love with each other. I’m interested in the hypothetical, launching into the imaginary, can we learn to love with an ability to transcend our pain?

At the root of it all, when we “teach” love to our children as we raise them, how do we do it? In order to love (in its highest compassionate, empathetic, unconditional form) do we need to have experienced pain? To this last question…my gut says yes. Absolutely necessary. But why?  Is there a love world I could imagine where pain is an unnecessary precondition[5]?

Then I remembered Dune, the 1965 science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, and the Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear repeated throughout the novel:

“I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration[6].

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over me and through me.

And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

In the novel, the litany is called upon when the protagonist Paul is made to endure torture as a test of his presence of mind.  The litany and story doesn’t exactly transcend pain in the name of love …it remains quagmired in imperialism and an extraction economy[7]…BUT, the litany hints at the necessary discomfort and mind work one must endeavor to move through (or work with) pain, become calm, and progress with clearer (inner eye) sight “to see its path” (i.e., a learning has taken place, in short, mental growth).

A better audacious research question: as humans, as beings vibrating with the emotional between, how do we learn love can be bent through our pain and made brighter, deeper, even more true or real on the other side of it? Working with our pain, perhaps, is how we learn to love better.  Perhaps the only way[8].

Of course, my long project won’t answer these questions. But exploring how love develops out of childhood is the first step on the path.  

Off the top of my head, I can think of a few short stories illuminating moments of pain experienced in childhood—betrayal, shame, and fear—where the stories leave the reader with the sense of reverberating impact on the child’s subsequent lives.

Betrayal

Anton Chekhov’s <2000-word short story, “A Trifle from Real Life” focuses its moment of illumination on a conversation between a child, Aliosha, and an adult, Nikolai Belayeff. Nikolai, the boy’s mother’s boyfriend, persuades Aliosha to trust him with a secret (the boy visits his father regularly, against his mother’s wishes). Then, Nikolai, using the information as a point of leverage in his own relationship, reveals the secret to the boy’s mother. Aliosha stands there, stupefied and traumatized (the boy is described as being unable to hear his mother’s words) his trust trampled. I was amazed when I went back to read the story for this post how overtly Chekhov writes the boy’s painful lesson, “This was the first time in his life that he had come roughly face to face with deceit; he had never imagined till now that there were things in this world besides pastries and watches and sweet pears, things for which no name could be found in the vocabulary of childhood.”

The story’s title with the words “a trifle”, signals the teaching: how little consequence adults place on the small moments of teaching during a child’s development. I would not have noticed the subtleness of this illumination myself; I read about the technical move[9] Chekhov uses, a deft point of view switch, to lead the reader through the assumption an adult’s experience supersedes a child’s experience. Have lots more to say here but this post is getting waaaayyyy too long and I have more stories to get through.  

Shame (specifically, sex shame)

“A North American Education” by Clark Blaise is a story about the sexual awakenings of a thirteen-year-old boy, Frankie Thibidault. Importantly, the story is a reminiscence from an adult Frankie point of view. It relays a series of attempts to “educate” himself about, and satisfy, his body’s physiological longings. Through each scene, the reader is close witness to Frankie’s crescendoing exposure to sex (yes, the scenes do play out like this, gradually building upon one another to the story’s climax), and how his exposures are (repeatedly) shaped by secrecy and shame.

The enjoyment of sex, making love with a person you love, is one of the most glorious (and natural) experiences a human can share. This story, which, incidentally, begins with several paragraphs of family histories going back generations (a nod to influential experiences, including genetic, familial and cultural inheritances), layer moments where normal sexual development becomes twisted through the actions and beliefs of the people we love. In this story, it’s Frankie’s father who shames him while also providing an education about how women might be treated (in this story, no surprise, not great).

I’ve written about Lauren Groff’s “The Wind” in a previous post. It is a stunning, perfectly executed short story exploring the way violence in childhood ripples across time, affecting generations to come. Using a deft and subtle point in time switch, the story happens in the past but moves swiftly at the end to current time, signalling how pain spikes and spirals not just one life, but lifetimes. The narrator is a granddaughter, relaying her mother’s brutal exposure to intimate partner violence and how that exposure causes a misremembering (or selective remembering), the episode too painful to endure.  The first word of the story is “pretend” and it is the granddaughter who is coming to terms with the violence her mother witnessed but cannot hold.

This story powerfully shows how violence (and here, I broaden the definition to include wars and conflict, forced displacement, etc.) might REQUIRE generations to shoulder the burden and dull the pain to pass through a prism of love. And of course….any disruption of that process toward love (compassion, empathy, forgiveness etc.) spears the wound again…[10]

So, this got me wondering whether there are any stories (I’m sure there are lots, I just can’t harvest them from my brain at the moment) of developing love, teaching love to our children. And whether there are any marrying pain and love, the interaction between the two. And bingo: Grace Paley’s flash fiction (less than 1000 words!) “Justice – A Beginning” came to mind.

In this story, the protagonist, Faith (note the hopeful name – believe!), is returning from jury duty. She describes the courtroom, watching as the mother of the convicted “leaned on the witness bar, her face like a dying flower in its late-season, lank leafage of yellow hair, turning one way then the other in the breeze and blast of justice.” I love that description, breeze and blast of justice. Not just the alliteration but the conceptual connotations: how easily, breezily, the sentence of guilty is handed down; how utterly devastating, like a bomb’s blast, to the family of the convicted. The narrator continues, completing the image, “Like a sunflower maybe in mid-autumn, having given up on the sun.” (Note the homonym with “son”). I imagine Paley selected the image intentionally. Sunflowers, because they grow by tracking the movement of the sun, can symbolize God’s divine light guiding believers on their spiritual journey. This, coupled with the protagonist’s name, is an intentional layering of meaning in the writing. It’s also an image of something beautiful and hopeful dying.

It’s clear, on my own reading anyway, Faith doesn’t agree with the guilty verdict, “She probably said Oh shit or even Fuck.” In a few sentences, Paley paints a picture of the world of ambiguity (injustice) we live in: yes, the convicted held a gun to rob a grocer, but he was hungry (I assume because it is a grocer and not a bank he robs, a leap maybe)…demonstrating with story how the motivations are never so simple, but justice is served in binary, guilty/not guilty.

The final paragraphs of this short story move to domestic scene and exchange of love and humour between Faith, her adult son and his girlfriend Judy. The camaraderie and the humour are a beautiful counterpoint to the devastation Faith felt earlier as a juror. But she wants to be alone, “She needed to think more about the jury system, mainly her companion jurors. Also the way that capitalism was getting to be a pain in the world’s neck. She thought she might try to make a poem out of that opposition.”

In the end, her son’s attentive love coaxes her from her bedroom: with humour and a deep understanding of each other’s moods. That line, about making a poem out of opposition…it’s the key isn’t it.

With my own writing, exploring how I learned to love and how I work to transcend my pain …this is the block of marble I’m chipping away at, carving into book length sculpture, something, at least, I can view and hold and circle slowly, in the round. And maybe, just maybe, illuminate a way along the darker path of understanding. Pain is a gift…shaping me to love differently, in different ways. And better.

[1] Even when other physiological needs are met with food , water, shelter, human infants fail to thrive (and risk death) without physical contact and touch  (loving attention).

[2] Some reflection techniques via Judith Kitchen, written text chunks or weavings such as: retrospection (looking back assessment); intrusion (stepping in narrator commentary…I notice, I employ this technique regularly…like, um, even here, now); meditation (rumination, kicking a dead horse etc.); thinking around (finding a different perspective or a different viewpoint or opinion or even a different description i.e., wide panoramic view versus close up); imaginative alternatives to what did happen (even wishes?); speculation (imaginative alternatives to what could happen, again, wishes?); self-interrogation (asking questions on the page); projection (ascribing a feeling/thought/impulse to someone else…a good way to describe characters as well as the narrator through judgements and opinions, as one example); digressions (wander and wonder lift offs…v. guilty of these and a reader might not be so forgiving, hence all this information couched in a footnote).

[3] I’m most curious, in professional work as well as creative work, exploring the energy, the communication, of what I’m starting to refer to as “the between” …that our concept of “individual” confined in a single body, might occupy and steer too much of our attention. Instead, we could be attending to the “in relationship” forces as the necessary conditions impacting health, wellness, creativity and, most importantly, love. Community forces. Come Unity.

[4] Here, I am deliberately eschewing the palpable grief, despondency, even apathy, colleagues stateside, and here in Canada, expressed these last weeks regarding the recent US inauguration, as well as the upcoming provincial and federal elections here in Canada, as well as wars and deaths and conflicts and legacies of violence happening in different places across the globe. Also, the climate crisis. There is much written and spoken and viewed on these subjects; here, I want to approach them from the perspective of understanding the root causes of pain (that shape such disruptions and destructions), how they might be illuminated and explored through art…with my eternal hope and belief art will propose (and draw) solutions.

[5] And wouldn’t this world be Hallmark card syrupy and one dimensional?  I mean, humour alone would wither and die… An addendum: mere hours after hitting the publish button on this post, I pluck from my “to read” pile of books The Evolved Nest, written by Darcia Narvaez and G. A. Bradshaw, and right there, in chapter 1, read how Indigenous groups “lived with Nature’s gift economy, where food and care are shared in response to another’s need rather than being withheld as a means of control.” Followed by the crazy synchronicity (with my own musings in this post) of these lines: “Biologist Humberto Maturana suggests that humans originated and evolved as…a species shaped by a biology of love…With the rise of anthropocentric civilization, however, two other forms of humans emerged from the violation of the biology of love: an aggressive form, …and an arrogant form…The result is today’s dominant trauma-based culture.” Let’s skid past my lack of imagination then and seize this hope: we’ve had a society of balance and reciprocity with the land and one another before, it is possible to recreate it.

[6] Can’t help but see la petite mort in this line. Also, should note, Dune is also set within a foundation of warring noble families and the Litany, according to a wiki fan page, is a nod to another Shakespeare play, Julius Ceasar.

[7] You’re losing your thesis Biro, pull out, pull out!

[8] It’s only in the writing of this blog post that I’m realising the necessity of rendering “learning to love through pain” in my writing. And I continue to run from the pain (metaphorically and pragmatically). It’s stopping me from finishing pieces and stopping me from sending pieces out for publication.  Which feeds a vicious cycle of shame and inadequacy and hopelessness. I am very very fortunate that my process is buoyed by people who believe and support and continue to promote my work. The idea a writer works in isolation perpetuates a fallacy. We need community to lift us up.  When I write to touch someone, what I’m really asking for is to be touched in return, aren’t I? Or, having been touched by so many artist and writers’ works, I am moved to gift something of myself in return. Fear of pain bends my loving attention. Got. To. Get. Over. That. (Or through. Or with.)

[9] Long Shots to X-Rays: Distance & Point of View in Fiction Writing by David Jauss – this was a post on the AWP website. Unfortunately, the link is now broken – it’s a stupendous craft essay.

[10] Dark Biro. Just. Don’t.

Text exchange with a friend today. Couldn’t help but share. I’m afraid of heights so no bungee jumping or zip-lining. Burning Man…maybe. South America? Definitely.