Like Two Lovers in Conversation, by Deborah J. Brasket
Well, I just finished rewriting the ending of my novel as requested by a publisher. We will see what they think.
Either way, I believe this new ending is stronger–still hopeful, but less certain. More in keeping with the way things are for most of us when things we love go missing, or when struggling with our own demons and addictions.
I’ve decided something else too. Quite a few publishers have wanted to see more of the missing mother in my story, yet I wasn’t willing to do that. It would have unraveled the very premise of my novel, which was, how do we cope when the center holding everything together falls apart? When that upon which we most depend disappears?
I wanted the mother to be part of the puzzle, not a presence herself, but that “absent” presence we feel, even yearn for, but cannot quite pin down, and never really know for certain.
Do any of us ever, really, know our mothers? Don’t we only know them through our own often faulty and incomplete perceptions of them? What they’ve allowed us to see, or what we choose to believe? All knowledge is partial and open to revision. We may know the facts that lay before us. But do facts a person make?
Yet even while I’ve resisted the call to add the mother’s perspective to this novel, I can understand how a reader might want more of her, to hear about her journey as she travels away from her family and through South America. What does she learn as she discovers the world through the new lens of her photography? Does it lend insight into her past? Into herself as a mother and wife and now an artist? How does it shape her anew? Where does it take her?
So I’m beginning a “sequel” to From the Far Ends of the Earth, if we can call it that, since it will cover the same time-space as the first novel.
I think it might be fun to give the mother her own voice and space, to see what shaped her past and how her journey shapes her future.
It’s the thing I love most about writing, discovering what I never knew I knew before I began to write it, as if the words themselves are drawn from some inner well of insight or vision I never knew I had.
“We create ourselves out of our innermost intuitions,” so writes a sage.
I believe that. And I also believe our characters are created in much of the same way. I wonder if we all contain multiple characters within us that make themselves known to us through our writing? Or are we just writing our larger selves?
Perhaps all the selves of all the people we’ve come to know, to experience, in this wider world, once known, become part of us, at least partially?
I believe there is a collective consciousness that we tap into from time to time, and writers, perhaps, most of all.
Sometimes I don’t know where I end and another begins.
My son says I have boundary issues. No doubt he’s right.
Your book sounds very real and compelling Deborah. Kudos for holding to your vision of it. And I like the idea of finding new voices and aspects of ourselves when we write.
Thank you, Brad. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!
Here, here to boundary issues if it inspires creativity and sends you on another literary adventure. How very exciting Deborah, well done, I can’t wait to hear more about the novel, all the best with the next stage and with where the mother takes you next!
Thanks so much Claire. It is exciting and daunting at the same time.
Three things right off the bat: 1 – I remember that painting! Still stirs my soul. 2 – the absent mother is like silence in music…it helps define the story/song in a much stronger way than cluttering it up with words/notes…geesh you’d think professionals (I’m assuming this for the publisher) know these things! and 3 – as I was reading your account I thought ‘aha!she should submit a proposal for a sequel’ – and of course we’re on the same wavelength cuz that’s exactly what you’re gonna do!!!!HA!
So pleased to be a witness in your walk on this journey!
I love how you put it, the mother being like the silence in music. I was surprised that more editors reading this hadn’t gotten that, so it’s reassuring that you did. I’m not surprised you did though, flower-sister! We do always seem to be on the same wavelength.
I couldn’t agree more. I was going to comment something along the lines of “….then find another (better) editor!” but I am quite aware this is easier said than done.
Can’t remember where I read it, but I recall that absent characters, if fully fleshed out and present for the author, will still make their presence known. Their absence can become a powerful energy and the reader will intuit/feel the depth of that power even if they can’t put their finger on why.
Thank you for that, Johnny. I was happy this editor, who wanted the rewrite, had not mentioned the mother at all and seemed quite satisfied with what I had done with her. So maybe this is a better fit. No guarantees, though. They still have to read the revised ending.
Anyone who has lost someone is familiar with ‘that “absent” presence’. And also knows full well what a central role this absence can play. If ‘editors’ don’t get that, well….find better editors? I say stick to your guns. It’s your story.
I have been thinking much of “boundary work” (again) lately as well, so this definitely resonates with me.
I have recently come across this piece by Fanny Howe:
https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_1_1999/fhbewild.html
that seems to be resonating with just about everything that I come across, including what you are saying here. Particularly this:
“Bewilderment circumnambulates, believing that at the center of errant or circular movement, is the axis of reality.”
…because, yes, what if that center is found to be empty….?
And what could be thought of as more central in most peoples’ lives than their mothers?
Thank you once again for adding impetus to the wheels going round and round in my head….
That’s one of the things I love about blogging. picking up and riffing on some theme or idea. I’ll be heading to that link now. Thank you.
This “Bewilderment” concept seem to sync (and even audibly “snick”) into my own concept (which Jeremy Nathan Marks helped me to formulate) of Boundary Work or Writing on The Cusp of Meaning. We are almost (but not just quite) lost in this borderland of our own inner landscape. A place that I think of as frightfully close to the most grey of grey areas–where our sense of self meets our sense of the world around us…..
I am waxing….again….
…wax on…
…wax off…
😉
Jeremy Nathan Marks! I’m sure he was a poet I used to follow on wordpress, an environmentalist living in the wilds of Canada? I’ve love track of him these past few years. Sounds like he’s really taken off. I’ll have to do some research on him. Was it a class you took with him?
I will share one more quote (that I recently also shared with my favorite WP Photoblogger, bluebrightly), and then I promise that I will shut up:
“It is the job of poetry (and photography? [my addition]) to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.”
—Stephan Mallarme
So yes! To silences!
I so love what you have written here, it is very close to my own heart.
Love this on so many levels! My husband says I’m an over-thinker. But, I say I am an analytical artist. Oh! The conundrum!
As to your question about whether we ever know our mothers, I don’t think we do. And now, as I grieve the loss of my dad (in the physical), I find that I could never really know him either.
And this knowing takes me back to two of my favorite shows, Six Feet Under and Dexter. As Scott Buck, a writer on both series often made a foundational point of saying, “We never really know a person.”
I like to compare our personalities to facets inside a kaleidoscope or disco ball. We reflect what we see or imagine others to be.
❤️🦋🌀