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.