I am still working on this, but wanted to share the first verse.
The violin is what you play when you can’t sing. Red backed fairy wrens know their mother’s song before they hatch to protect themselves from birds of prey. The violin is what you play when your mother didn’t have a song for you, but you’d like to find your own Protection song.
The craft is a challenge, but those who severed her tongue left her hands intact; in time her fingers self-cripple with bow, brush, needle, nib.
“Talk why don’t you just talk!” they scream with impatient tongues that pummel like fists. Silent, she turns away. A conversation is not a competition. and she is battle sick.
Dexterous and nimble, this is how she speaks: stitched ciphers and threaded testimony type, tone, texture, tension. There are many ways to whisper- this happened and I exist.
1. Accuracy and realism
So, I am trying to learn the guitar. Not because I want to learn the guitar that badly, but one of my characters plays the guitar. What does rock n roll sound like in prose?
Honestly, I don’t like playing the guitar, the strings hurt my fingers and I keep trying to hold the guitar neck like a violin fingerboard. The frets are meant to make things easier, but it makes the fingerboard look like a complicated chessboard.
I prefer the violin, which I’ve been learning for 4 months. None of my characters play the violin. Maybe they should?
My neck hurts.
2. Read widely.
Virginia Woolf said that if you read a book a day, the words will flow out of you. I’m juggling four novels for inspiration.
A publisher told me that I should also read genre fiction to learn how to keep the plot moving.
I’m reading Dickens’ Little Dorritt, Grenville’s The Secret River, Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle and Steven King’s The Institute.
The words are flowing from me all right.
So now I have a child with telekinetic abilities, living in 19th century colonial Australia speaking Harlem slang. None of my sentences are shorter than 8 lines and I have too many semi-colons.
Nobody wants to read that shit.
My head hurts.
3. Focus.
I need to finish this draft soon. I also have a day job and I need to get another day job that pays for my cats, and for more books. And for a new bookshelf to store the new books.
But there’s Netflix, Stan, Disney Plus, ABC iview, SBS On Demand… We live in a golden age of streamed television.
Plus, there’s the baby beanie for my friend’s son. My friend has been waiting on it for eight years. I really should finish it soon.
I really am learning the violin. There’s so many ways to sound crap on the violin. I should practice.
Everything hurts.
Soul weary. She feels it all. beneath her worn sneakers and too high arches, a quickening. The earth’s arrhythmic pulse. They who follow her shallow footprints gouge their own eyes and plead congenital blindness. Along the cobbled path, she becomes reluctant mother to adult children.
Soul weary. No annual or compassionate leave to grieve ecological collapse, her country a crematorium for marsupials and monotremes she never knew, folding into burned scrub, while birds fall featherless into a reverse phoenix fire, each species’ death a faded footnote of Anthropocene history.
Soul weary. They call her way-shower instead Of wayfarer, But they’ve always pronounced her name wrong, those who plug their ears and cry deafness. those who follow but forget they have feet. All she ever wanted was to travel buoyant in a worldspace so dense that any light is victory.
Soul weary. Let her rest a moment, let her crawl into the undergrowth of the casuarina cathedral, a dying mammal seeking solace in a narrow space. And may the Cormorants and Great Egret, which sit atop this pine steeple wake her from deathless sleep. Otherwise, let lichen spread skin-wise, let blood turn to algae and fungi cushion her feet.
Word upon Word 