Edification – Yellow things, collapsing things
Edification – Newsletter #85 – August 29, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
I had a new flash piece called “The Shining Sun Was Yellow,” published this week in Re-Side Zine’s luscious “Yellow”-themed issue. My story appears on pages 31-2; the issue is flush with gorgeous poems and other work and I’m very grateful to be included. My story was written back in the winter, but with so much yellow and golden imagery, it fit perfectly with the theme.
“The boy dumps the bin perilously close to the baby and toys sing themselves back to life. Rainbow buttons blink over a landscape: The sea was green, the sky was blue, the shining sun was yellow! An old-fashioned doorbell rings beside a mirrored door: Who is it? It’s you! Baby rocks on all fours and brother toddles off, indifferent as before. Their mother pinches the bridge of her nose and rubs at the late-afternoon headache there. For all its calamitous noise and color, the pile is a portrait of her fatigue. She must be dully present, half-vigilant in the middle of a mess she has repeatedly cleaned. All these toys she brought home from the factory. She poured yellow suns into their molds, soldered soundboards where their shining songs live, snapped the ribcages of their battery cases together. She likes toys better unassembled, silent, upside-down on the line.
“Her eyes stray to her phone; the boy senses competition in the gesture and rushes back to shove his baby brother. Mother heaves herself from the chair. She repeats, for the third time in as many minutes: Do you need a time out? The boy throws his shoulders up in imitation of his father’s grudgeless shrug. He knows time out only exists as a bell in his mother’s throat. Why don’t you play with your toys? Having outgrown relationships with inanimate objects, he seeks to animate Mother. If it is only a ringing bell, it is a response.”
[Read more]
I’ve been feeling the burnout expressed in this story with a peculiar acuteness this month. My writing’s been trudging along – I’m about 6,000 words into a new novel idea, which is past time to properly outline and chart my progress in an Excel file (that’s about the extent of my “process,” folks).
Instead, I’ve been frittering around the edges by writing backstories of my characters in a paper journal, just to flesh them out in my mind before I get back into the story.
I took some time to write an essay about my childhood home collapsing after being broken into by drug addicts. This happened over the summer, but feels like a lifetime ago. My husband and children and I took a spin over to the farmhouse and it felt like the entire property was caving in on itself. Thieves had staged my dad’s chainsaws on the back porch to carry out, but something tore them away – probably the kitchen/dining room floor caving into the basement and dropping the refrigerator, dish-cabinet, stove, and everything else into a fetid pool of water.
I don’t know what I expected; maybe being able to go in and retrieve a few knickknacks? It didn’t happen. I barely got out of the car. The back door was still standing open and the house reeked of shit and rotten who-knows-what. I looked in the door and a broken back window into my parents’ old bedroom where I could see the stone mantel collapsed over their bed.
Something surreal: It was almost as if the house knew I was there. Its wood planks groaned and reverberated down the hollow place where the stairway had been. Is there a ghost story in this?
I did not go in. I carried the chainsaws to the car and we left. There was no point in getting the kids out of the car. Mosquitoes were eating me alive within thirty seconds.
You know what bothers me? That I didn’t close the door. It’s like leaving a corpse with its eyes open. Didn’t expect that anthropomorphism. Never do.
My parents intend to have the place properly demolished, they say, but I have no idea when or how. How do you pull down a house with things still inside it? How do you write a flash essay about such an ending? A house is a memoir; a house is a life; a house is a death.
Fleeting thoughts: There is a massive upright piano, built of walnut and real ivory in 19th century Cincinnati, that is ruined and will be hauled away in the debris. Leaded mirrors, documents from a land charter “bounty” after the Revolutionary War, who knows what else. Entropy comes for history and leaves flotsam in its wake.
In my overwhelmed state, I’ve been considering ending my newsletter. Is it worth it? What am I even doing? Every week for the past several, I’ve lost subscribers, which tells me that everyone is overwhelmed and out of shits to give.
So let me just say I’m sorry to vent and blah-blah all over you. (That’s what I’ve allocated my Twitter space for, after all.) I don’t know what you want out of this newsletter besides my blah-blah. I think that’s about all I’ve got.
Do I have any readers who write their own newsletters? What do you do with them? Should I cut it back to once a month? Am I annoying you?
I have newsletters I love that are clearly monetized and elegantly spare. They come once or twice a month. They don’t blather. They don’t drink all your rum and cokes and then pull your shower curtain down when they lose their balance in your bathroom (true story for another time. Oof).
What I’m trying to say is I don’t know how to make a business out of this. All I’ve got is a Mae Westian swagger and this shedding feather boa.
I’m trying not to be hasty. Art is a long game.
Yesterday in my writing time, I stared at a green tomato on my kitchen windowsill and thought poetic thoughts while drawing it. In the course of an hour, it significantly changed color.
Drawing always reminds me of who I am, and where my poetry comes from. It comes from the light, the air, the shimmer, the succulence of this world. I’ve literally been drawing since I could climb out of my crib and get into my older brother’s crayons. My mom said she would come into the room at the crack of dawn to find me sitting at his play table, coloring away and humming songs I made up myself. After I draw for even an hour, it feels as though my brain has clicked back into place, back into the old tracks, the old foundation.
So maybe I will reset my brain by watching fruit ripen this week. Maybe I’m in there somewhere, jostled loose by this calamitous, late August heat. I’m going to try not to collapse.
Talk soon,
Edie
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