Name of fiction work? And were there other names you considered that you would like to share with us? I chose Repairing the Hive, Ekstasis Editions, 2020
http://www.ekstasiseditions.com/recenthtml/repairingthehive.htm
I think most fiction writers, who live with the characters in their heads while writing, regard their invisibles as unborn babies. When born, we are reluctant to let them go. Hard to choose a favourite. The chief contenders for this blogspot were Say my Name, memoir of Charlie Louie, about love and loss, Bozuk (Broken in Turkish) the story of Turkey as an enlightened crossroad, no longer the case as the balance has been tipped, and The Empress Trilogy, a series of books about Victoria growing out of colonial times and racist attitudes.
After a little thinking and delirious dreaming about where to travel, I decided to go into the park beside our house at night to talk to THE SPIRITS OF THOSE GONE BEFORE US. Right here. This land.
During the millennial year, I was given a calendar of unusual terms. One was The Cheddar Letter, which meant a letter shared among friends like a Japanese renga poem. It came from cheeses that use milk from different dairies.
For Repairing the Hive, released this pandemic year like petals in the Grand Canyon, I decided on different voices to tell the story of reconciliation in a family and group of friends as they emerge into a new era.
The trilogy began in the early nineteen hundreds, when bigotry was often polite but always assumed and families lived with secrets. In Repairing the Hive, the secrets are out, karma repaid, and reconciliation begins.
It also begins and ends with two views, one over Oak Bay to the Juan de Fuca straits and the other, The Selkirk Waters, haunted by the ghosts of Victoria past, and many herring ( Lekwungen meaning where the herring were harvested) where I live.
What is the date you began writing this piece of fiction and the date when you completely finished the piece of fiction? From beginning to end, this period is twenty years, 2000 to 2020, as I worked on other things, poetry, non-fiction, and short fiction, but the trilogy was the infrastructure. I actually began Repairing the Hive first, the conclusion, and then went back to write The Empress Letters and Tempo Rubato, the first and second books.
Where did you do most of your writing for this fiction work? And please describe in detail. And can you please include a photo? I like the far view, drink coffee on our roof every sunny morning and cocktail/ beer at four thirty before Anderson Cooper my TV buddy and brother of Carter, who died tragically. This year I have been given a short fiction award in his name (the Carter V. Cooper Award) and it is very synchronistic as we are related by marriage, one of Anderson’s relatives having married my great-grandmother, a horticulturist and maybe opium smuggler/ rumrunner, the seed generation of the Empress Letters.
https://duotrope.com/listing/7069/carter-v-cooper-short-fiction-award
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/08/16/brother/
My computer sits beside a window looking on the same park, where early Victorians had picnics and paddled in the Selkirk Waters, also known as The Gorge.
I am a morning person and my workday begins after coffee, say nine, until lunch at one. Obsession takes hold and sometimes I vary, but my best energy is in the am. PM is for cavorting in nature and other cultural interests: reading, painting, music and kissing babies.
At night, I am toast, wasted. Lots of writers work at night but I am soaking up pleasure and entertainment at night and sleeping like a baby, or the dead.
What were your writing habits while writing this work- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? My habits include one cup of coffee, think walks and two baths a day. I can’t give enough credit to baths. Sometimes I write while wet and my husband complains about the puddles between my bath and my office.
I love music, but unlike many painters I know who get their rhythm from music, I am hyper attentive, hyperactive and do not like distraction. I COULD NOT write in a café like many. No idea how they do that without stopping to talk to everyone.
One of my kids used to say “Earth calling Mother” when he needed to bring me back from reveries, reading and writing.
I used to hand write and then type. Now I write directly on my computer, which I can revise so easily.
Please include just one excerpt and include page numbers as reference. This one excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer. P 182-184 Repairing the Hive
M. Beaudoin led the way into the woods, carrying an armful of bread, pâté and wine. When he found a spot that was free of blackberry prickles and condoms in the arbutus grove, he spread out a plaid blanket. I remember thinking it could have been one of my kilts opened up.
There are moments in life, I now realize, when we have a choice. No decision short of ending a life is irrevocable, but just as inevitably as the children of revolution have walked themselves into the woods to be shot, I went to M. Beaudoin’s picnic in Fag Forest. I didn’t have to. I could have said no or shouted or run when my hands went cold, but I didn’t.
I ate bread that tasted like cardboard and refused sips of wine he offered from his bottle. I didn’t share glasses or bottles with anyone, the irony of what I was intending to do passing with the scant clouds overhead. The weather no longer assumed the shapes of my febrile sexual imaginings, but were reconfigured into the face of God singing “Lucy in the sky with diamonds,” or was the cantor M. Beaudoin, his face collapsing in wrinkles as he bent close to slip his tongue in my mouth? “Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly.”
I thought of Anne Frank taking off her clothes the last time, folding them neatly at the door to the crematorium as I took off my sister’s sweater and my mother’s slip. I thought of sheep lining up for the abattoir. My skirt fell to the ground. I folded everything I had taken off in a pile with my skirt on the bottom to protect the things I had borrowed from needles and leaves. It was a warm day, but I shivered. My skin prickled with goose bumps.
I comforted myself with the thought that sex with M. Beaudoin probably wouldn’t make any difference. One of the girls at ballet had told me dancers and athletes often destroyed their own maidenheads. Just as I could pee in the woods without messing my shoes, I could let M. Beaudoin in without any perceptible changes in my outward appearance. I imagined opening wide for the dentist, pulled my trembling knees apart imagining a plié so deep my singing teacher could have ridden his bicycle inside me.
M. Beaudoin did not undress at first, but sat cross-legged on the blanket watching me. When I had taken off my clothes, he removed the ribbon from my hair and hung it in a low branch. He arranged my hair around my shoulders, covering my breasts.“Your breasts are bigger than I thought,” he said with a pout and, more shocked than I would have been had he slapped me or pulled out a knife, I felt a terrible rage creeping toward my too responsive cheeks. I was suddenly angry with my parents for trusting me, for not loving me enough to stay home or make me go with them to my sister’s graduation. I was angry with M. Beaudoin for acquiescing in my great experiment with independence.
I closed my eyes and lay down, picturing myself in the dentist’s reclining chair, “in a boat on a river/with tangerine trees and marmalade skies,” anywhere but Fag Forest with a man who wasn’t good enough to be a professional musician.
M. Beaudoin then took off his clothes and lay down beside me. I could smell the wine on his breath. I could hear his wheezy asthmatic breathing and the joyful bird noises of children chasing each other up and down the slides and jungle gyms in the playground. I didn’t want to be a woman anymore, especially with him, but I was too polite to stop it from happening.
“Take me in your mouth,” M. Beaudoin hissed in the same ear he had been filling with endearments all those months, guiding my face to his penis. I opened my eyes and there was my mother on the other side of the sky. “Lucy,” my giant billboard mother said, “What is the best thing to come out of a penis?” I looked at M. Beaudoin and saw a man naked for the first time in my life. His body was thin and pale with a little wobble of a tummy, just like a boy’s except for the hair and wrinkles. ”The wrinkles” I answered and my mother-in the-sky laughed.
My reaction to the wagging erection trembling at right angles to the rest of him was hysterical giggling. When I withdrew my hand, he took hold of himself, pumping furiously. M. Beaudoin paid no attention to me. I kept my eyes on my laughing mother.
After a few moments of frantic milking, he shuddered and moaned and a little spurt of cream squirted from the mouth on the naughty puppy between his legs, covering his hand and his groin with viscous gloop. I remember thinking that. Viscous was a new word I had learned in biology. I turned my face away, biting my lip in a futile attempt to stop my nervous laughter.
“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” M. Beaudoin rolled over and collapsed in the little sleep after the little death, his flaccid penis resting like a drooling Chihuahua against his thigh. A bump on the ground erased by psychic wart remover, I no longer existed. I got up and dressed as quickly as I could while he lay there, snoring, exhausted from his effort. Then I ran. Fag Forest raced past me, slippery as a mural with wet paint. I got on my bicycle and rode hard for home without looking back or sideways. It’s a miracle I didn’t get hit by a car. “Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone,”John Lennon sang as I sped through stop signs, pumping as hard as I could in my well-polished shoes. I had escaped from the woods and I didn’t go back.
I discovered track and field that summer and my singing lessons were history. M. Beaudoin was history. I didn’t tell a living soul about him. A year later, Lily disappeared. The police dragged the lakes and waterfront and searched the woods looking for her body, but there was no sign of her anywhere. All they ever found was her hair ribbon hanging with several others on the branches of an arbutus tree in Fag Forest.
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emotional experience of writing this specific excerpt? I imagine it is a familiar story to many girls who trade their innocence for the approval of an adult. In my case, I lived with narcissists who barely noticed us, unless we bothered them.
I had a similar experience to Lucy’s as a young actor seduced by an adult more than twice my age because he paid attention to me, because surely my innocence was a small price to pay for what he offered, real listening, I thought, and a part in a movie where I would be included in a family of actors.
It was never about sex. It was about longing for love. Lucy’s indiffertence to M. Beaudoin is her realisation that this is not love.
How many girls are seduced because their parents don’t love them? That is what goes through my mind and I pay attention in my life, to the children I care about. You are loved, I say in every way I can. Sometimes it is just letters across oceans, but I say it.
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/beatles/lucyintheskywithdiamonds.html
Why is this excerpt so emotional for you as a writer to write? And can you describe your own emoitonal experience of wrign this specific excerpt? This scene is emotional for me, not personally but for all the girls and women who are taught not to value themselves. My mission is to let them know they are valued.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? And can you please include a photo of your marked up rough drafts of this excerpt. I don’t delete much from a narrative BECAUSE I TELL IT THE WAY THE MOVIE PLAYS OUT IN MY BRAIN. Mostly an editor might say as scene isn’t necessary AND I HEAR THAT.
My revisions come from sloppy writing because I let the stories spill, the actors in my brain improvise, my strength and weakness as a writer.
Recently, a juror wrote my writing was full of surprises. I understand that because I too am surprised by what comes out, as I let the deep language speak.
I have encountered quite a bit of nastiness in my lonely life as a poet. When I was younger, haha, some men phoned and said I must have slept with the juror when I was given an award. Most recently, I must have slept with Gloria Vanderbilt, and she is dead. That amuses me.
For years, I dedicated myself to volunteer work including the oxymoronic literary community. Now I mind my own business, pursue my own delights and help where I can, mostly where it regards children.
The good news is I have an equally cockeyed outspoken granddaughter whose English teacher recently wrote that her writing was “Full of surprises.” I respond Yes! You go, Miss Olive!!!!” Tell it like it is and someone will hear you.
Can’t provide roughs anymore. Everything goes directly into the keyboard, where I revise.
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