Hi,
I wanted to share today some scenes from an ongoing writing project that I began at the end of this past semester of my MFA that has now taken a life of its own.
It began as a nonfictional exploration of my grandmother’s Latvian heritage and the pagan, earth-based customs and beliefs that are native to that culture.
But I have now been turning towards fiction, and my writing has been moving in a more imaginative direction away from the constrains of my own lived experience. “The world has enough autofiction,” someone said to me at a party last Saturday, and in this season of time I think I agree.
For a long time I was afraid of writing fiction, that I couldn’t render a work of my imagination to be convincing enough, or that I somehow didn’t understand how plot works, how characters move through their desires, how they are thwarted in this pursuit.
But what I have been realizing more and more is that the craft of fiction is an imaginative retelling and refraction of the life experiences that we all have. The details just change, move, real things have the opportunity combine with each other in unreal (or maybe real, or more than real) ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said “fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
I remember too what Julia Cameron writes in The Artists Way, that art is not about “dreaming things up” it’s about “getting them down.” I have tried to let myself write things that feel real to me even if they haven’t actually happened - less mental planning, more writing. If you write fiction, or have tried or wanted to, I would love to hear about your process and how you play with and wrestle the real and imagined.
Intuitive Archive is a weekly newsletter, containing poems, dreams, essays, and musings. I write things at the intersection of embodied experience and all that is unseen.
A monthly subscription of $5/month gives you access to double the monthly letters, i.e. two paywalled letters per month, which tend to be more personal/confessional/experimental in nature than the free ones.
A yearly subscription of $50/year gives you all of the above plus a discount if you chose to pay yearly vs. monthly.
A founding member subscription of $90/year gives you all of the above plus a link to book a free 1:1 astrology reading with me, plus my undying gratitude and admiration.
“The stars are a memory system / for thru them
we remember our origins.”
- Diane DiPrima
For 1:1 astrology consultations, click here.
A woman at the funeral has known Rebecca’s grandmother; she wears long, silk bell sleeves and her arms flutter like a bat. She has blunt bangs over her face and a youthful air. But a frantic one, too. She had met Austa at the Lobenthal Institute for the Mentally Defective in Germany. She hears her brother mutter in the background, maybe she should have stayed there, when one of her bell sleeves falls into the candle and everyone around the table falls into a panic.
After the meal is over, Rebecca gets up and walks around with her, pacing around the wide hall. Rebecca’s mother catches her eye with a small, burgeoning tear, to see that Rebecca is gaining, in some small way, a notion of the essence of her mother, like one drop of an eau de parfum, whom Rebecca’s mother could not truly know while she was alive, and neither could Rebecca.
Clearly, Rebecca’s brother felt left out; he had grumbled earlier at the notion of her writing project. “Writing project,” he mimics, as if simply the combination of these two words were too overly emotional, too feminine, too close. Rebecca’s mother hears him say this and jabs an elbow into his ribs. “We will discuss that later,” she says, pronouncing each word with a trace of spittle leaving her mouth, and Rebecca’s brother, becoming purplish, slid down in his chair.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to intuitive archive to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.