Jigsaw Part Five

The jigsaw pieces made up a picture. In it were three people, a mother, a father, and a baby girl. The child was newborn, but though so young, Alice recognised her own features. The mother and father were not the parents Alice knew. They were standing in the background, their hands neatly clasped in front of them, their eyes looking over at the other couple.

  Alice peered closely at the faces. The father seemed to blur, his features going in and out of focus so that she could not really say whether he was dark or fair, or handsome or blue-eyed or red-haired or anything. The mother was looking over at the older couple, Alice’s parents, seeming to fix her gaze on the older woman’s face.

  Alice ran her finger over the faces, wondering what the picture meant. The mother holding the baby suddenly turned to speak, and Alice snatched her finger away, and fell back on the carpet.

  “This is you, Alice. This is you, you realise that don’t you? I am your first mother, I had you and gave you away, because I could not keep you. I could not afford to keep you. I would have been beaten up by my father, and by my mother, and probably my brothers. My grandmother would never have spoken to me again. They would all have called me a slut, and I would have been cast out. They don’t know, and never will know, about you. They thought I went off to work in another state for a few months. Don’t you ever tell my secret, Alice.”

  Alice put her finger under the edge of a piece of the jigsaw. She flicked it up and sent it flying. She did this with the next one, then the next and the next. Until the pieces were strewn all around her room.

 

Jigsaw Part Four

She walked along Moggill Road, into Toowong, along Coronation Drive by the river, stopping once or twice to watch something float past. She dodged cyclists as they rang their bells at her, and studied one piece of anti-safe sex graffiti. She walked up onto Victoria Bridge, across the river, past the large concrete buildings, into the Southbank precinct. She had a swim in the lagoon.

After a short sunbathe on the beach, she dressed and walked into West End. The locksmith looked at her locked pocket and shook his head.

“Can’t you give it a bang or something?”

He looked at her with a pained expression.

“You don’t have to go to a locksmith to get something banged on,” he sniffed. “This is what they call a Hooley lock. Only the person who made it can unlock it. Unless.”

“Unless what?”

He didn’t answer her. He tried to open it, just to show Alice how impossible it was. After all of his various instruments failed, he resorted to giving the lock a good wallop. That squashed it flat, but didn’t open it. Alice and the locksmith smiled exhaustedly at each other, and agreed to give up.

When she got home, she took a pair of secateurs and crunched the battered lock apart. Fragments of metal flew everywhere. At least, that was what she thought they were, until she looked down at the pocket and realised the fragments were coming out of it. She stood up from the table and took a step back. Bits and pieces of strange objects were spurting out, at an ever faster rate. She tried to catch some of them, but they seemed to disappear into the corners and crevices of the room, like sparks from sparklers.

She got a broom and began to sweep the floor. Amongst the dust, dried cockroaches, corks and biscuit crumbs she found the fragments. They looked like jigsaw puzzle pieces. When the pocket finally ceased its production, she took all the bits she had found into her bedroom, and shut the door.

Jigsaw Part Three

Alice, of course, fiddled with the lock on the pocket, pulled it this way and that, attacked it with pliers, with a fork, and with a frustrated yelp, her teeth.

  Nothing would budge it.

  She banged on the shed door until her knuckles were sore. She pressed her nose against each of the windows, but her father hid from her each time. Every time he tried to emerge from the shed, Alice assailed him with the bag. He said he wasn’t going to come out until she stopped annoying him about the locked pocket. She said she wasn’t going to stop annoying him about the locked pocket until he unlocked it.

 

  The hours and days ticked by. He managed to get out for a leak and a meal when she was asleep, because, even though she tried to keep her eyes open for as long as she could by drinking fifteen cups of coffee and nearly being sick, she couldn’t stay awake.

 

  On the fifth day, Alice went out. She took her new black bag with her and didn’t tell her father where she was going.

Review of Secret Storms by Julie Mannix von Zerneck and Kathy Hatfield

This joint memoir is testament to the pain and heartache experienced by women who relinquish their babies at birth, regardless of how their lives unfold afterwards. Julie Mannix von Zerneck was born to a highly original couple, her father being a fire-eater and sword swallower, and her mother a radio actress. Their home was often filled with carnival people in the early days, and exotic animals. Her parents travelled widely and wrote books about their experiences, which was both fascinating and alienating for their children left behind.

But she begins the book with a disturbing chapter set in the Eastern Pennsylvania Psychiatric Institute, where she has been placed because her parents view her as suicidal after she took three sleeping pills. She is also pregnant, and her mother wants her to have an abortion, but this is not Julie’s choice. The chapters describing her time in the ward, which is the entirety of her pregnancy, include graphic descriptions of her fellow patients, “Mafia Whore”, “The DuPont Executive’s Wife”, the “Zombies”, and Theresa. Although at first they seem terrifying and mysterious to her, she soon comes to regard them with affection; “Mafia Whore”, a loud and intimidating woman with a startlingly foul vocabulary, becomes protective of the mother-to-be.

 

Review continued at Maggie Ball's website, The Compulsive Reader.

Jigsaw Part Two

So making a bag out of a piece of vinyl was a cinch. But he wouldn’t let Alice watch while he did it, which was unusual, as he normally taught her how to make things as he went. No matter how much she pleaded with him, he would not give in.

  “No, Alice. Just this once, I want to keep my methods a secret.”

So her father went into his shed and didn’t emerge until he had finished.

  Alice loved her new bag anyway. It was shiny and black and had lots of room for all her books, her purse, hairbrush, sanitary pads and period painkillers, a notebook and pens, and lip balm. Then there was still room enough for lunch and a drink bottle.

  One thing puzzled her and that was the pocket inside. There was a tiny lock on it.

  “What is this for, Dad?”

  “Never you mind.”

  She frowned at him.

  “What do you mean? It’s my bag, and I can’t know what this pocket is for? That’s silly.”

  “One day you’ll know. Not yet.”

  “Come on, Dad. Tell me what it’s for. Come on.”

She proceeded to tickle him. But he gave her the slip and ran into the garden, round the vege patch, skipped over Rufus the Papa Great Dane, and shut himself in the shed.

Jigsaw

A long time ago, Alice’s father was a man who made things. He could make anything at all. Give him wool and he knitted a jumper or crocheted a rug. Give him fabric and he sewed you a pair of trousers or a dress. Food he could weave magic spells with, and create luscious fantasies, even with brussel sprouts and broad beans, which Alice spat out when she was young enough to know better. He made tiny cupboards with old bits of wood, huge bookcases with fallen tree trunks, grew vegetables of every type and raised Great Danes.

'The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook'

The Secret Adoptee's Cookbook


There have been a number of Australian memoirs written by adoptees over the last twenty years—Robert Dessaix’s A Mother’s Disgrace, Suzanne Chick's Searching for Charmian, Tom Frame’s Binding Ties:An Experience of Adoption and Reunion in Australia, for example—as well as international adoptee narratives by Betty Jean Lifton, Florence Fisher, and A. M. Homes amongst others. These works form a component of the small but growing field of adoption life writing that includes works by “all members of the adoption triad” (Hipchen and Deans 163): adoptive parents, birthparents, and adoptees. As the broad genre of memoir becomes more theorised and mapped, many sub-genres are emerging (Brien). My own adoptee story (which I am currently composing) could be a further sub-categorisation of the adoptee memoir, that of “late discovery adoptees” (Perl and Markham), those who are either told, or find out, about their adoption in adulthood. When this is part of a life story, secrets and silences are prominent, and digging into these requires using whatever resources can be found. These include cookbooks, recipes written by hand, and the scraps of paper shoved between pages.

Article continued at M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture. This is in the latest issue of the journal, under the theme of 'cookbook', and edited by Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell.

The wave

The wave reared over me silently, and broke over my head in slow motion. I didn't notice it at first, until I realised I was grief-washed, the sideways feelings suddenly making their presence felt. I am trying to describe this feeling in my body, my skin, the other organs, because I know that it affects you, too, but you ignore it, out of fear or something else that I don't understand. I understand fear. I have sat with it, endured it, watched it eke away. C S Lewis said grief felt like fear, and perhaps it does.

Review of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing

The core message of Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing is that teachers and students need to maintain communication in order for the teaching to be most effective, and the author gives numerous examples of how to do this throughout. The personal components of the teacher-student relationship cannot be neglected if students are to develop fully as writers.

Carl Vandermeulen is based at the University of Wisconsin and has taught writing, photography, and teacher education. His book is another in the series New Writing Viewpoints, edited by Graeme Harper, and aimed at teachers and researchers.

In the introduction Vandermeulen explains why he wrote Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. He taught a poetry class that he thought would be successful, but failed miserably because there was a mismatch between his role as teacher and evaluator in that particular class, and his previous role as something quite different, an advisor and advocate. The clash of the personal with the impersonal produced a situation where not only the writing work suffered, but the relationships were strained. Vandermeulen advocates the advice of Tom C Hunley who teaches creative writing at Western Kentucky University, and whom he cites: that ‘introductory courses need to focus on fundamental – and personal – kinds of growth that enable the process of writing and of becoming a writer’ (x, which cites Hunley 2007).

 

Continued at TEXT.

Eggs I

I hated eggs when I was a child. But my parents thought they would help me grow into a big strong girl, and so they gave me one egg every morning.

They would poach or boil it, and put tomato sauce on the plate. I would take tiny spoonfuls, and try to ignore the taste as I chewed and swallowed. Then I would try big mouthfuls, to get through the meal more quickly, but that gave me an explosion of the foulness, the egginess, the white and yellow repellant smoothness. Sometimes I would be unable to keep it down, and flood the breakfast table with my undigested horror.

My parents would also try egg sandwiches, but the bread was never enough to mask the hateful flavour. It became a battle of sorts, with my parents eyeing me defiantly, daring me to come up with another complaint, another reason to not eat such a healthful foodstuff, or another vomit.

I took to hiding the egg sandwiches behind a large cupboard in the dining room. When my mother was in the kitchen, I would silently rise from the chair, and, keeping my eyes on the door, stuff the vile matter into the narrow gap between wood and wall. Sometimes it wouldn’t all fit, and bits of egg would scatter on the floor, or stick to the painted wall. I would frantically scrape it off and poke it back, pick up the squares of bread and force them behind the cupboard with the dust and cobwebs and dead spiders, as far as I could.

When we were sitting at that dining table one evening, a movement on the wall near the cupboard caught my eye. It was a big, black cockroach, the second most revolting thing in the world after eggs, and it was heading towards the space behind the cupboard. My mother saw it and put down her knife and fork.

What I am reading now

Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer

 

 

 

 

Slowly working through:

Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2nd ed.)

Investigating Subjectivity: Research on Lived Experience by Carolyn Ellis and Michael G Flaherty (eds.)

Autoethnography as Method by Heewon Chang

and dipping in and out of books like:

How to Write A Better Thesis by David Evans et al (3rd ed.)

How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul J Silvia

as well as zillions of articles...

Tempted by Orhan Pamuk's The Innocence of Objects which arrived today, delivered by the friendly courier

Origin

Where does this story begin? Does every story have a beginning, or do some just emerge out of a continuous running narrative? Or should that be narratives? Are we constantly making stories every minute of every day, or is there only the one grand narrative of the human condition, to which we all contribute? Did this particular story that I am about to tell begin when I was born, or did it begin much earlier, when my birthparents met, or when my birthmother left home to travel, or even when she was born? Or did it begin when my adoptive parents married, and no children came?

Or perhaps the story begins when I was told of my adoption, when the story that had been forming behind me, of a life written by others not myself, suddenly stopped, caught in the transition from secret to revelation?

Did the story begin when I started writing it myself?

This pain

This pain begins like a small movement in my belly. I barely notice. Then the feeling grows, and bits of it get stuck around a bone, pull insistently, make me notice. Grows some more, and then I have a hard time concentrating on what I'm doing, have to stop and take a breath. Then it grows again, and I know that I'm in for a bad couple of hours or so. It makes a run for it, enlarges into a wall, until I have to get up from my chair and take the pain and the body it inhabits for an endless walk. There is no sitting or lying down with this beast, this Thing, this mountain of lava. It will eat me unless I go inside myself and ride with it until it's seen the light of day. I must endure it, as the drug has failed. I have only myself to use against the biting, rasping saw of it.

Gadgets

You are not a gadget, he said to me as his hand hovered over mine.

I feel like one. Sometimes.

The café was noisy, as usual. But his eyes on my face were intent, which was not usual. He didn't look away.

We'd seen a lot of each other lately, but I'd not thought anything of it. All the other men I'd drunk coffee with had drifted away, so why should this one be any different. Except, his hand lowered on to mine and stayed there.

Were we in a romantic movie? I felt any moment that someone would yell cut and we'd sit back and then start again. Over and over until it was right.

But there was no yelling, it wasn't a movie, it was the noisy café, and he was grasping my other hand too.

Review of The Event of Literature

Terry Eagleton is a literary theorist and critic, public intellectual, Marxist, and author of numerous books, including a memoir The Gatekeeper (2002) and the extremely widely read Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983). He studied under Raymond Williams at Cambridge, and has held positions at various universities, lately being Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster.

He also has a sense of humor, which reveals itself at surprising moments throughout this latest book. If you are unfamiliar with his work I would recommend reading Literary Theory first, and perhaps others, to familiarize yourself with his ideas and style of thinking and writing. This latest book seems to be aimed at those with a special interest in literature and literary theory, rather than the general reader. Or, as the author notes in his preface, those interested in thephilosophy of literature.

Review continued at Metapsychology Online Reviews.

Silence

There was no response when she banged the tin. For five minutes she hit it with a spoon, as she always did, but no Spooky. She shrugged, thinking she'd wait five minutes and try again. It was a bright blue day, and quiet. She listened for the usual sounds of the noisy miners, aptly named, and the currawongs. The air seemed awfully still. She lived far from any main roads, so no traffic noises, which she loved. But this morning there were no other noises either.