Behind the Words: February & March 2023

Part journal, part trivia, part self-initiated interview revealing (almost) all my secrets.

I've always enjoyed reading the IMDB trivia on a movie, or the afterword by an author in which they spill some little truth about their inspiration or experiences writing what I've just enjoyed. That's the idea behind this monthly share - I want to give you a peek behind the last page, for whatever that's worth.

And if you don’t want spoilers, you can click on the titles to jump to the writing, then come back and get all the behind-the-scenes goodness.

Fiction:

The Stars That Fall

Last year, I was outside in the backyard of our old home. It was late, and I was looking up at the sky because how can you be outside at night and not?

I got lucky. Precisely where I was looking, a meteorite appeared, streaking down toward the nearby lake at such speed and proximity, that I saw it burning. I suspect that had I been a few hundred yards closer to the lake, I might've seen where it landed. I may have even heard it.

In any case, that image was burned into my mind for a long time before I decided to write about it. I imagined what might have happened if the "star" had missed the lake and if I had caught it instead.

I wrote this story for my kid. When I read it to him, it didn't have a title, and he suggested I call it: "The Cute Little Star, Part 1"

I asked him what Part 2 and Part 3 should be called, and he said, "The Lost Fairy, and A Friendly Hero."

So, stay tuned for those.

Also, I really struggled with the ending of this piece. I wonder if you can tell?

Hang in There, the World Is About to Change

My partner has a very creative mind, but he doesn't particularly love to write. Over the years, he has thrown a number of one-liners at me that I then spin into stories, and this is one of those cases.

"You talk too much for a cat."

I wrote it down. It sat there, without anything growing from it for a very long time. And then, one day, I looked at it again, and I saw a woman at her kitchen table, working on a time machine, while her big orange tabby worried over her.

The orange cat is a tribute to my sweet boy, Goodman Grey. He was born with a heart condition and didn't live nearly long enough, but he brought an absolute lifetime's worth of joy to us while we had him. One of my dear friends drew me this:

The time-travel piece of this story is taken from a greater story idea that I'm playing with: A not-apocalypse; A science-fiction, magic-realism, alternative-future concept that I am overly excited about. There will be more short stories connected to this world that I hope to share soon.

And lastly, if you have been on my newsletter (this one) for a few years, or if you know me personally, then you already know that what Ash is going through is taken largely from my lived experience. The pandemic kept me from being at my mother's side while she was in the medically induced coma that preceded her death, and the what-ifs (What if our presence during that time might have changed things?) have haunted me. There are some key differences, of course. Ash never got to be with her mother before she died.

I did. I had the opportunity to urge my mother to hang in there - by phone, by zoom, and at the end, just once or twice in person when the visiting restrictions were finally starting to be lifted.

I worried that this piece might be too much - too personal, too self-indulgent, and that the reader might feel uncomfortable…that they might sense that my trauma was being spread out on the table for them to see, especially for people who know what my family went through at the start of the pandemic. But alongside that worry was a knowing that I’m not the only person who has been through something like this. It helped me to write this. Maybe someone can be helped in reading it, too.

Beware the Bridges Not Guarded By Trolls

Look. I had a rough week and didn't get around to writing new fiction, so I went digging into my archives for something to share and found this old thing. I wrote it in 2017! And I liked the idea of sharing it because the new fiction I'm working on features a troll. A slightly different kind of troll, one that's sitting in an alleyway and sharing a cigarette with the bewildered scientists that are trying to explain his sudden appearance, but still. A troll.

I've been fond of flash fiction for as long as I've been writing "seriously"- which is since I was about 13 - and the fuzzy line between poetry and flash fiction is a world that I love to explore. This piece, like much of my poetry, came out of a single line: "beware the bridges not guarded by trolls." Unfortunately, I no longer remember the moment that inspired that line, but I suspect it involved a bridge, and reminiscing about one of the greatest films of all time…"Troll Hunter" (not to be confused with the new movie “Troll” which is absolutely awful don’t even get me started).

Dreamscapes:

Home is How the Roses Feel

If you don't know where the dreamscapes come from - I recommend reading this first.

So, I offered personalized dreamscapes to my newsletter subscribers a few months back, and I got a request from someone to write about a place that embodied home, safety, and receiving love. Tuning into that, I immediately saw a platform in a field of flowers. A field of every kind of flower. All growing together. For pieces like this, I rely heavily on visualization. I tend to close my eyes, and write what I see, following the "narrative" in what changes or is revealed the longer I look at the scene.

October Song

Earlier this year I applied for an art grant. The gist was that I'd write these dreamscapes centered around a local state park that I had fallen in love with. I didn't get the grant, but I can still move forward with the project, just not on as grand a scale as I had originally hoped. This piece was what I included in the application as an example of the kind of writing that would come from the project. And it was directly inspired by a visit in the fall to this local park.

I'll be sharing more dreamscapes of this magical space as the year goes on, and hopefully, I'll still put together an exhibition!

Here's a photo I took from that visit that helped me reconnect to the time and place while I was writing this:

Poetry:

For

Much of the poetry I write starts with a phrase that leaps into my head, fully formed, and stubbornly rattles around in there until I write it down. Such is the case with this piece.

"I would die for the hills that the sun hides behind"

There are some really beautiful hills in this area of New York, and when the light is right, I experience a touch of euphoria that inspires me to all sorts of poetic rambling. The rest of the poem came from that same place - looking out at the elements of this winter landscape that enchant my soul.

December 24th

Like "For" this piece began with a line that popped in while I was driving.

"In the field, there are mice."

Gray, cloudy skies can wear so many different moods, and that evening the sky was doing something exquisite. There was this suspension of time quality to everything that pulled my awareness to the land around me, and to the idea that, probably, In the field, there are mice. This poem existed with just the mouse portion for a long time before I thought about exploring a similar scene, but one from my childhood.

That pink carpet is one I know well. And the holiday memories I have are both magical and fraught.

The owl is still something of a mystery to me. She is a force of nature, a guardian, a predator. Something terrible and wonderful that neither the mice nor the child is really aware of.

A love poem

This piece started as a journal entry. It was an honest attempt to create a list of self-soothing tools and resources to lean on when I wasn't feeling so great, which has been fairly often since 2016. Somewhere along the way I became attached to the words, and so I got selective. I saw an opportunity to share what felt like a love poem to the world, my cats, and my family, and from that moment it was no longer just a journal entry to me.

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