Iris Lavell's Blog, page 15

Episode Ten

‘Jenna?’ Ma heard her childhood name, caught a movement out the corner of her eye and turned. Gone. She turned back to watch this child, this self. The child was nodding as if she were following some instruction. She emptied the basket onto the floor and sorted through the stones that she had collected. 
            ‘How small you are,’ said Ma. ‘Yet how grown up I felt.’
She might have been small to be left alone but had learnt things from Mother, who died in the previous winter. She had learnt the making and containing of fire, the gathering of food, herbs and berries, roots, small prey, and the collecting and cleansing of water. Each had its own incantation. Some she had learnt in the years past, and others her mother continued to teach through dreams and memory.
            It was safe, this place, and Jenna saw now how her younger self spoke so freely with Mother who only answered when needed.
            ‘Should I choose this or this? There is a squirrel there. Should I follow?’ The answer came in a low reassuring voice – yes, follow, but do not go beyond the place where the stream turns to white. Come back then. Watch the sun. When it falls to the top of the Elm turn back and follow the path to the fallen one. If the light is low, make camp there.
The child Jenna was making camp. She felt the brush of her mother’s hair against her own as she bowed down to kiss her on the head. Remember I am with you always. They squatted together placing a ring of large stones encircling a smaller ring. The fire would rise from the inner circle. The fire would be sheltered by the fallen one against which Jenna would rest all night. 
            Jenna took some starting fuel from the basket and piled it into a small airy circle as her mother had shown her. She found the place where the dry wood had been stored along with a vessel for cooking and another for water from the spring. She made a pyramid which she would set alight.
*
Ma smiled at the child, who continued to behave as if she was not there. There was someone else. The woman had been standing behind her, watching her and the child. She said nothing, but took Ma by the hand and it seems that they jumped. Everything sped past. Small villages and great cities sprang up and dissolved as the plants took the earth again, and again. There were wars with sticks and clubs and spears, swords, catapults, guns, fire, great mushroom bombs, guided missiles, drones, and people sitting like sleepwalkers at computer screens, tapping away. People lived and died and lived and died. Life and death turned over, over, plants, insects, oceans, skies, the earth itself. The populations of creatures expanded and diminished. Human babies were born, but there were fewer and fewer.  Human beings experimented with creating other creatures. Strange creatures came and went. Some continued on and grew stronger. Some seemed almost more human than those who created them.
            Ma and the woman were plunging beneath the earth and now they were surfacing, coming up like new plants through the earth, which broke open to let them through. They were emerging from the graves in which bodies lay. Ma felt that she had died before, and lived, but that all of this had come to an end. She saw a man lying motionless, face down upon the hill, with the scavengers closing in. She saw Jenna, alone, sewing by the fire. She was bigger now, a young woman. There was a man coming, a serious man with black eyes, black hair and the palest of skin, a man of religion. He was carrying something on his back and leaning on a stick carved from silver birch.
They plunged again. The last of the graves was shallow. The carcass of a woman was lying with a cat in a pillowcase. As she rose and then looked down upon this she was overwhelmed with sadness, not for herself, but for a boy whose name now escaped her. The woman smiled and took her hand once more.
This time they flew over the forest and she was able to see down into the earth where Dalyon sat in a children’s tea party with his two small companions. They were all wearing feathers and leaves that they had collected from the forest.
Ma longed to stay but there was something else she must see. They flew high above the forest until they came to a small clearing. Something was not right. From high up it seemed that there was a pile of old fur heaped in a small hill. As they drew closer she saw a mother sheltering her two youngsters who lay motionless in their own blood. She was weeping.

Happy Mother's Day!

It's Mother's Day today in this part of the world.

A little bit preachy- my thought for the day (I'm a Mother - today I'm allowed!):

Mothers can help to make the world a better place by giving their love and a helping hand to those around them. Those who are not mothers can help make the world a better place by giving their love and a helping hand to those around them. I am hoping that dialogue, cooperation, forgiveness, listening and love take their rightful place on centre stage today. If you can, get in touch with your Mum today and tell her that you care.

Links to a couple of thought-provoking posts on books

I would suggest you check out these two. The first is by Maureen Johnson who is a Young Adult author. In Huffington Post Books she has an article called The Gender Coverup which discusses the continuing assumptions about books written by male and female authors, and the way in which the covers of books suggest the weight (or not) of the literature inside.

The other is a discussion about the value of art by Nathan Mercieca, and the blog is called Measuring Art. Nathan describes his blog as 'your standard Artsy, Leftie blog' and describes himself as 'a Musicology Grad Student living in London'. His blog explores the value of art in a world that tends to place primary value on capital and financial gain. Particularly relevant post-GFC, and in sharp focus in that part of the world, I expect.

Creativity begets creativity - Castaways Sculpture Awards Western Australia

For me, one of the ways to keep open to writing possibilities is to engage with other art forms - music, theatre and film, performance art, and visual art. We are so lucky in this part of the world to have free access to so many of these art forms. Our local councils and community groups organise and support some great events - concerts, outdoor cinema in the summertime, street festivals and, one of my personal favourites - sculpture on various beach fronts. In March, we were treated to Sculpture by the Sea at Cottesloe, and in May the Castaways Sculpture event featuring recycled materials will be held on the Rockingham foreshore. Go along to see it if you can, and get inspired for that next poem, short story, opinion piece or novel.

Episode Nine

Ma was gliding high above the world where the air was thin. She could clearly see mountains with snowy tops, although she felt no chill. She had never been this high before but she knew this place.
She was plunging to earth. Curved lines appeared and disappeared as the white moved past. Far below was a deep blue, reflecting sky. The gentle hill was travelling past, grey-green and treeless, to the plain and the deep blue, sapphire-blue of a body of water with no end. Pass through, and she would pass to the sky on the other side.
  She made a soft landing, felt the briskness of the air, smelt the familiar scent of pine needles. She had allowed herself to float face down upon the grass, arms out, palms flat against the cool dampness. Her whole being drank it up. She stood and walked gently upon the earth. Tender small blades of grass, so delicate that the light shone through, stayed and bent, flattened with each step, then rose up again. Closer to the lake, the ground was wet, marshy, soft, and it sprang back, filled with water in the impression of a bare footprint. At the edge, the lake met the ground and dropped away into the deepest cobalt blue. There, the soft blades of grass were yellow-green. A slight breeze bent and restored each blade. A small beetle, red and black with orange legs finer than the finest human hair, climbed upon the blade and it bent.
            Leading up to a wooden hut was a narrow path, along which some small stones made of a kind of bluish metallic substance, were scattered amongst the grass. There was a light inside shining at the small square window and a wisp of smoke that slid upwards into the blue until it became so fine that it disappeared. A lace curtain blew in at the open window. The door was ajar. A small girl, no more than six or seven, emerged with a basket. She was wearing a dress with an uneven hem, and though the air was cold, her feet were bare. She crouched and picked up some of the little stones along the path, turned them over in the palm of her hand, felt them against her cheek, and dropped them one by one into the basket. They made a faint sound as they dropped onto the material and then as they clinked against one another. Stones were selected. Some were examined, felt and discarded.
            Inside the hut, a fireplace glowed and flickered. Beside the fireplace was a small wooden table covered in heavily embroidered cloth – bluebells, snowdrops, buttercups and twining leaves. A flat, rectangular piece of glass had been placed upon the table in the centre.  There were swirls of gold embedded in the glass. Indentations of varying sizes had formed in the surface, and in some had been placed small objects – the shell of a red and black beetle with orange legs like the finest hair, a dried seed pod, yellow-beige, cracking open at the edge, a spool of black cotton thread. Some of the indentations were waiting to be filled. Some would remain empty.  This plate was made in this place, fired in this fireplace, in a process that had been lost to the child.
            From the small stones the girl had collected in her basket that morning, one would be chosen to rest on the glass plate.
 
Ma remembered. Father had been away for three days and nights. He was hunting again and would need to find enough to survive the storm that was coming.

A great link for writers to a keynote address by Neil Gaiman

Thanks to Roseanne Dingli for posting on the FAWWA Facebook page about this keynote address by Neil Gaiman at the Digital Minds Conference. Five Key Lessons for Authors and Self Publishers. Might go to an ad first.

Am I a writer? I become what I do..

I’ve been thinking about what it takes to become a writer lately, and it seems to me that all it takes, and this is not a small thing, is to write on a regular basis. The practice of writing is principal to the becoming, just as the practise of anything is critical to the person that we become. In a literal sense, the brain is mapped by repeated patterns of thought and behaviour. The technical term for this is neuroplasticity, and what modern brain scanning techniques show is that the more a behaviour or thought is repeated, the more the brain will physically adjust to ensure that the mechanisms for that behaviour, or pattern of thinking, become increasingly efficient.
This has implications for self-belief, because if we disrespect our right to write, or to practise that art form, we weaken the neural pathways that enable us to do that very thing. We are continually in a process of becoming, or un-becoming, something.

Life Writing Course

Maureen-Helen, Author of Other People's Country and member of the BLPG is running a life writing course through the Peter Cowan Writers' Centre in June. Details are as follows:

Episode Eight

Dalyon tracked along the passage between the surface and the cave many times, taking care each time he reached the bottom to avert his eyes from the gaze of the forward-looking dog. Sometimes he took a peek from the corner of his eye, but the dog never stopped looking at him. He learnt to close his eyes so that the dog could not see him, and he found that he learnt the indentations and position of the steps more clearly this way. He felt the dimming of light as he moved away from the cave room, felt it by the way the steps were placed and dented as well as by the changing colours inside his eyelids, then sensed the lifting of darkness through another series of steps and opened his eyes there to see what was coming towards him. He felt the emptiness of the cave when it was just him walking through the passageway, and he felt Jilda’s presence, and Lucan’s different presence, even when they were standing still and holding their breath. The darkness helped him. Once he sensed a small animal in the darkness, that froze until he passed by. It scurried out of the way as soon as he had passed.
At first Dalyon thought of returning home, but Ma was close and willed him away.  It was too late to go back. He knew that she was gone from there, and so was the cat.

Four - Mountains
Ma’s body may or may not have been breathing.  If they’d cared to do so, Terry and Bob would have needed a mirror to find if her breath would leave a mist. Her heart was so quiet that it would have taken someone with better ears than Bob and Terry to find it. To their eyes it looked as if she was lying heavily in her bed, unaware that the cat was crying with hunger, and the boy was gone.
They were wrong. Ma was aware of everything all at once. She was aware that Terry and Bob’s story had already been written and that all that was left was the telling. She was aware that Bob would kill the cat now that the boy was gone and she was aware that to their eyes, she was lying in her bed, unable to rouse herself. She was aware that when Bob killed the cat that Terry would turn his face away from its struggling, but that he would take its flaccid body and drop it into the flowery pillowcase afterwards. She knew that Terry and Bob would get the short-handled shovels that they carried in the saddle-bags on the back of their bikes, and that they would dig a narrow hole into which they would drop her body, throw the pillowcase with the dead cat, and cover them both with the earth. Terry would place a cloth over her face to avoid its immediate contact with the dirt, because he considered himself to be a decent man. He would stand and say some words involving an ancient deity, while Bob looked around the house for things that he could steal. She knew that before they could do all that, they would have trouble with the network of tree roots that ran beneath the earth, less than a meter down. After they had buried her and the cat in their shallow grave, Terry and Bob would wash, take a long drink, eat, and when they could wait no longer, begin their long journey back. She saw that they had been in contact with the home compound which knew, and was monitoring, Dalyon’s whereabouts. She knew that they would do nothing about him at this time. She knew that her boy was travelling with two companions who would guide him, that there would be one who would actively pursue them, and that Dalyon and his companions would be each other’s strength.
None of this held any importance at all. Things would come to pass. Things had come to pass. Ma was flying far, far north, over a cold country that she knew well. The destiny of Bob and Terry was already written. Dalyon’s destiny was already written, as were those of the other children. So was her own. There was someone, or something, else of importance. It was all woven together to create what no-one, not even Terry and Bob, could foresee.
  
 

Booklength Project Group timetable for the year

Stairway to the moon without a tripodI have cut and pasted the meeting timetable (posted last year) for the Book Length Project Group, for your convenience. We are a networking group for people working on a large writing project such as a novel, collection of poems or short stories, novella or non-fiction work. A couple of people are doing a Ph.D. at the moment too. We motivate and help each other out with information and suggestions. We have just started to swap large amounts of work with other 'friendly readers' in the group, although this is not obligatory if people don't wish to do so. Our members range from new writers to experienced writers. We have been going for twelve months.

We start at 10am(ish) and finish at 12.30(ish) and the cost per meeting is $5 for FAWWA members, and $10 for non-members. We meet at Mattie's House at the FAWWA premises in Swanbourne. There is no expectation that people attend every meeting - the group is for meeting with like minded individuals, and people come along when they can make it. Sometimes the groups are large, and sometimes not so large. If you are interested in attending contact FAWWA.

To be more specific, dates for 2013 are as follows, all being well (any unexpected changes will be notified by email and on this blog site, so it might be worth checking the day before)

20 January 2013

17 February 2013

17 March 2013

21 April 2013

19 May 2013

16 June 2013

21 July 2013

18 August 2013

15 September 2013

20 October 2013

17 November 2013

15 December 2013