Bill Moran (Good Ghost Bill) is a poet, performer and writer from Austin, Texas – and Bill was in Nottingham to perform for us at Speech Therapy whilst on his recent European tour back in May. Continue reading “‘The Good Ghost Bill Moran’ by Miggy Angel”
Part 5: ‘Dear Younger Me’
Dear Younger Me,
The first, and most important thing I want to tell you is this – growing up is hard, but things will always work out in the end.
Becoming older will teach you a couple of big lessons about life.
There will be times where you will wonder if you will ever recover from some of these experiences – heartbreak, failure, bad habits, illnesses. The answer is, yes, you will. You may not be the same person at the end of the experience, but you will recover, and you will find that you will be better for it.
Often, even as you are growing older, you will feel like a child – lost and confused. You will wonder if you’ll ever stop feeling this way. You won’t, not really. But you will get better at dealing with it.
Continue reading “‘Walking Towards Death’ – 5 Essays on Mortality by Arathi Devandran”
Part 4: ‘Fighting Ageing’
My father stopped taking his cholesterol tablets for two weeks. At his regular health check-up, his cholesterol levels were higher than usual; that was when he confessed that he had decided to abstain from his tablets, just to “see how it goes”. Needless to say, it did not go very well – he was promptly chastised by his doctor and his wife, and he’s been dutifully taking his tablets again.
Then there was the time when he thought it was a good idea to take virgin coconut oil everyday – a spoonful a day goes a long way, or so he was told. As most things in life go, too much of anything is never a good idea, and so he ended up with a hacking cough and cold that lasted for weeks.
My father does this often. He tests the boundaries of what he should and should not do, being purposefully stubborn and insistent in doing certain things his own way (be it right or wrong), and then suffering the consequences of his actions. There is a stubborn mule headedness to him that is usually absent in his demeanor.
My father’s not the only one.
Continue reading “‘Walking Towards Death’ – 5 Essays on Mortality by Arathi Devandran”
I don’t know how to write about Lol Stein. I’ll start there, with an admission of my own limitations, a confession that any review that I write will fail to encompass all that I felt while reading it and all that I feel all these months and years later. Anything I write about it will be mired in my own history and my own memories.
I hate writing reviews because words never touch the experience of reading a book. This review can’t make you feel what I felt, holding the book in my hands, discovering the words on the page, all the moments in which images and scenes have flashed in my mind. But I want to say something about this book. I have so much that I want to say.
Part 3: ‘Discussing Death’
My first memory of death is linked to a man I never knew. My mother’s father died of a heart attack before I was born; the irony is that I know more about his death than I do about his life.
The entirety of the man has been reduced to a single black-and-white obituary photograph that my mother faithfully keeps at her prayer altar. Then, there are the stories. The stories of what an influence he was in my mother’s life, how he used to work with the British Royal Navy (this was in the 1940s and 1950s, in a pre-independent Singapore that seems as much of a myth as my late grandfather), and of course, the stories about how he died, and how that changed his entire family’s life.
It is funny, what death does. It slowly morphs to form the central narrative of a person’s life, as if only through death did his life gain meaning and importance and weight.
Continue reading “‘Walking Towards Death’ – 5 Essays on Mortality by Arathi Devandran”
I started reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale after the 2016 election. The book felt timely as we, as a people, confronted an uncertain political future. To be honest, I was gutted by what happened. I was troubled and grief-stricken that a man who boasted about sexually assaulting women, a man who dehumanized every group of people except straight white men, a man who lied every time he opened his mouth, was elected President of the United States. I know many of us are still reeling, maybe we’re even numb.
I decided that I would turn to literature as a way to cope with what happened. Writers give me hope. Writers are always dangerous because they ask us to empathize with The Other and they engage in complex, critical thinking. At least the best writers do. They challenge the status quo. They force us to rethink our assumptions, prejudices, and traditions.
Continue reading “On Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Yearning”
Part 2: ‘Mixing Memories’
One of my most beloved memories is that of gnarled hands plaiting my long, curly hair, fingers slowly sifting through tangles, gently unfurling errant curls, and tucking them neatly into the beginnings of a French plait. In my ear, the sound of my grandmother’s voice softly admonishes me, telling me to sit still if I want my French braid to turn out properly.
My grandmother was very good at French plaits, and, as her beloved youngest granddaughter, I took it upon myself to have my hair done whenever I could. It was one of the many perks that came with living with my grandmother, who was my principal caretaker during my childhood years, while my parents were off working and doing other adult things.
Continue reading “‘Walking Towards Death’ – 5 Essays on Mortality by Arathi Devandran”
Barbara Loden is Wanda, as they say in the movies. Her inspiration for the screenplay was a newspaper story she had read about a woman convicted of robbing a bank; her accomplice was dead and she appeared in court alone. Sentenced to twenty years in prison, she thanked the judge. Interviewed when the film came out, after it had been awarded the International Critics Award at the 1970 Venice Film Festival, Barbara would say how deeply affected she had been by the story of this woman—what pain, what hopelessness could make a person desire to be put away? How could imprisonment be relief?
–Nathalie Léger, Suite for Barbara Loden
From an early age, I knew I wouldn’t make it in this world. So I connected with women who, in my mind, shared that feeling. Plath and Woolf with their suicides speaking of a deep pain. Barbara Loden and her film Wanda in which the title character wanders alone and unloved.
Wanda is poor and she is voiceless and she is invisible. I understand the not-thereness of her.
Nathalie Léger felt a connection to Wanda as well. Tasked with writing an encyclopedia entry about actress Barbara Loden, she quickly became obsessed and expanded her inquiry, writing Suite For Barbara Loden, a gorgeous and dizzying investigation and excavation. Léger delves into Loden’s life, at times embellishing and inventing, and analyzes every layer of Loden’s only film, Wanda. The book is fact and fiction and memoir and film criticism; it is a love letter to Loden and the singular film she created.
Continue reading “On Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden“
‘What a fine weather today! Can’t think whether to drink tea or hang myself.’ – A.P. Chekhov
Three weeks after I left school for good, twenty-five Facebook messages exchanged in a group chat and eight texts doled out in the absence of Wifi later, a road trip had been planned for myself and a group of female friends. It was to symbolise the Last Summer: our final farewell to school, with the charm of gin and an Angel Olsen soundtrack which was lacking in the leaver’s dinner, in posing for umpteen photos in a lurid eBayed dress, thinking how much less gorgeous than everyone else I looked, and burying my pride in a disappointing chocolate mousse.
“It’s been a decade,” Jaya said as she arrived with Martha and Tess and the others in the road trip cohort that evening, standing in sundresses pulled over swimsuits, the car-park with the huge marina billboard and dilapidated blow-up cinema beside it looking suitably macabre for a adulthood send-off. “It’s been forever.”
“Since you’ve driven?” I asked.
“Since I’ve seen you guys.”
This was not accurate; it had been four days since our last reunion. But ever since school ended, this was how it was: impossible not to quantify everything in terms of forever. Two dollars for a bus ticket to the ends of the earth, please.
Continue reading “‘The Summer Vacation Spent Indoors’ by Sarah Murphy”
Part 1: ‘Watching My Father Age’
For as long as I’ve known him, my father has been the strong one in the family. He was indefatigable; during my teenage years, he worked several jobs, survived on three hours of sleep daily, and still had enough patience to deal with an ailing wife and a mildly hormonal teenager.
My father never fell ill. While most of my early memories of my mother are linked to hospitals and needles and antiseptic cream, my early memories of my father are of tireless hard work, and the absence of any kind of disease.
When I was younger, my father would carry me when I was sleepy. I was tall, even as a child, but that never stopped him from swinging me onto his back, hoisting as gracefully as one could a gangly, all-arms-and-legs kid, and striding to wherever it was that we had to go. He would never utter a complaint, he would never say I was heavy, and he would never turn me away.
Continue reading “‘Walking Towards Death’ – 5 Essays on Mortality by Arathi Devandran”
Part 5: ‘The Everyday’
I am heading home after a long day at work, and I receive a frantic text from S, a dear friend. She has received upsetting news – the father of a good friend of hers has been diagnosed with cancer.
“I feel so helpless,” S writes. “There’s not much I can do for her, except remain available for her, and provide her support.”
I pause before replying.
I had been in her friend’s position before, of being told things that had made my world come crashing down around me. Of facing the insurmountable task of needing to be strong, even though all I had wanted to do was to crawl into a hole, to hide myself from everyone, from myself.
It had taken me several years to come to terms with my mother’s diagnosis, even after she was given a clean bill of health.
Continue reading “‘Living With Cancer’ – an essay in five parts by Arathi Devandran”
Part 4: ‘On Hope’
I could not go with my mother to the doctor’s that day. Something urgent had cropped up at work, and I could not excuse myself in time for her appointment.
The feeling of guilt was familiar, but I had gotten used to it over the years. I had begun to understand that, as a caretaker, as part of a support system for someone with a long-term illness, I had to determine the limits of my capabilities as well. A caretaker was useless if she needed caretaking herself.
And the years of hospital visits and doctors’ appointments had almost desensitized my mother. Almost, because one can never be completely nonchalant about ill-health. But she had gotten used to it, and she had gotten used to dealing with most of it alone.
She rang me in the middle of the day while I was busy with work.
She was silent on the phone for a long time.
“The oncologist has officially declared that I’m in remission.”
Joy is a strange thing.
It hits you unexpectedly, from all directions, overwhelming, all-encompassing, until it settles so deeply inside you that you feel it radiating, throbbing, filling you.
Continue reading “‘Living With Cancer’ – an essay in five parts by Arathi Devandran”
Part 3: ‘The Scare’
Dearest,
You know what the worst thing about cancer is? Once you’re touched by the disease, there is no turning back.
It has been four years since Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer. Four years since she went through her treatment. Four years of living with cancer, where in one way or another, we are reminded of its viciousness every day.
There is no respite. There is no end. Because from the moment the doctors tell you that you have the disease, it affects every moment of your life thereafter. It becomes a part of you. It is the shadow you can never quite get rid of, the awful feeling in the pit of your stomach that never goes away, the thing that wakes you in the darkest hours of the night, drenching you in cold sweat.
You might think this is only the case for the patient–the person who has been branded with this dreaded disease–but what few people know is that, when cancer touches one life, it touches everyone related to its first victim.
Those things that I wrote above? I go through them too. Cancer has become an indelible part of my life, and I’m not even the one suffering through it. The haunting may be different, but it is no less difficult, no less torturous, to deal with.
A week ago, Mum had a spate of dizzy spells. We didn’t think too much of it. These things happen, and then they go away. But, in her case, the dizzy spells didn’t go away. The alarm bells began ringing, fast and furious.
They did all the tests they could. Dad and I stood by helplessly, watching as she was poked and prodded by needles, wheeled to the X-ray room and then to the MRI scanning theatre.
Hours later, the doctors came and told us they’d found a tumor in her brain. Possibly malignant. Brain cancer.
And then they left us to deal with it. While our world came crashing down, the world outside of that little ward continued at its steady pace.
I think back to that moment – me leaning against a table because my legs had suddenly lost strength, mind racing, trying to figure out how the family was going to get through this again; my father, sitting next to my mother, holding her hand while she cried; and the sound of my mother’s crying, a low keening wail that was coming from a place that seemed so broken, so devoid of hope.
Thinking back on that day, I cannot remember many things. I cannot remember what we talked about after the doctors gave us the news. I cannot remember what we wore, what we ate for lunch – nothing.
But I can remember that single scene, like a tableau etched in a dark corner of my mind, and the sound of my mother’s cry.
***
They came back into the room again, hours later. Only to tell us that they had looked at her older records from years ago, and that they had spotted this tumor then too. It wasn’t new. It wasn’t a metastasis. It wasn’t cancerous.
Continue reading “‘Living With Cancer’ – an essay in five parts by Arathi Devandran”
What’s My Name?
Our names: our school pegs, our register entries, an ID badge, a passport, a bank account, a driving licence, how we introduce ourselves. Of course, all of our names are given to us, some a gift, others a curse, some that don’t quite sit right with the face in front of us, or for the body that the person inhabits, but it’s something we all have. Continue reading “‘What’s My Name?’ – an essay exploring identity and adoption by Anneghem Wall”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 
Poetry as Experience
by Amee Nassrene Broumand
Note: Creators, would you like to be interviewed for one of my Burning House Press blog posts? See the details at the end of this post.
Continue reading “Poetry as Experience” →
Share this: