Day 7
30 days/30 minute (minimum) practice
Pieces whispering to be written. I place my hands on the key board and breathe. Surprise yourself, I say. My hope, this 30 day practice will habituate me back into a stronger practice so I can breathe life back into characters awaiting. Like tender hearted Clarice on a journey to find her aunt, a woman who birthed Clarice and then left her to a brother. Clarice whose source story was withheld due to the impervious violence she was born of. Clarice who will travel to a Caribbean island to find her Aunt Norah who left years ago to follow a woman lover to fight a revolution that was never her Aunt’s own.Or the character of Cora in a short story called “Good Evening Beautiful Woman’ whose restoration and liberation is bound up in a sliced off thumb by an old lover. And Pauline in a story called ‘She Don’t Know’ balled up behind a goat pen hiding from neighbours marching up the driveway to see the child, her child who survived being pelted from a vehicle her father flipped into a drain. And the character of an old man dying who acknowledges for the first time violence committed to a boy that is him and that is not him.And Rebecca, a young woman who takes her baby across the island every afternoon to meet a local fisherman. She finds herself each day dodging the company of other medical student wives to be immersed in a world deeply foreign and intimate.
I can feel all these characters and many others stirring in my belly and trembling through the tap tap tap of my fingers. Thank you dear practice for breathing new life into characters still breathing.