Notes from a Swing State E-Book

Zoë Brigley

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

These creative nonfiction essays consider girlhood, motherhood, violence at home and abroad, violence against women, the consolation in writing, trauma, and redemption. The essays celebrate and interrogate popular and literary culture: for example the film Breakfast at Tiffany's, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Alun Lewis's love letters, and David Bowie's 'Life on Mars'. These timely meditations on women, ethics, and writing bring insights that only an immigrant and traveller like Brigley could provide.

Leseprobe

Contents

About Zoë Brigley

Title Page

Dedication

I. Girlhood, Motherhood, and Beyond

Arches

The Origin of the World

Frankenstein and Reproductive Rights 200 Years On

Motherhood *is* Valuable for the Creative Life

Not Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Just a Woman with Nothing on Her Skin

Turtle Hatching

II. Power and the State

Notes from a Swing State

The Missing Line

The Heaven Girls and Murder Alley: A Family Story

Life on Mars

Fuck Self Help

Fright House

Nine Stories with Guns, and One Without

III. Craft and Art

Good Bones

On Dream Language and Not Confessing

A Song Like a Branch of Cherries

The Little Cage of Ellis Bell

Miriam the Prophetess, or Seeking Justice for Non-binary Folx

New Worlds, New Imaginaries: #metoo and #timesup

Further Reading

Images

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Images 8

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Parthian Essays

Copyright

Zoë Brigley (also Zoë Brigley Thompson), originally from Wales, is now assistant professor at the Ohio State University. She has three poetry collectionsThe Secret(2007) andConquest(2012), and her most recent,Hand and Skull(2019). She also co-edited the volumeFeminism, Literature and Rape Narratives(2010). She is currently editing theBloomsbury Guide to Poetry in the UK and Ireland.

NOTES FROM

A SWING STATE

Writing from Wales and America

Zoë Brigley

Oh yes, I’m broken but my limp

is the best part of me. And the way I hurt.

Gwyneth Lewis

I. Girlhood, Motherhood, and Beyond

Arches

In the west of Utah, there stands a natural arch of entrada sandstone. Locally, it is known as the ‘Schoolmarm’s Bloomers’ or the ‘Chaps’, but most people know it as the Delicate Arch. At one time, it was a sandstone fin. But gradually, the middle eroded, opened like a mouth to the long red desert and mountains beyond.

The first time I visited the Delicate Arch, I was driving cross-country with my husband Dan. We had been married just over a year, and in that time, I had miscarried two babies. I had given up trying to have children and suggested the drive to San Diego as a distraction for us both.

I was pregnant when I first went to live in the States, but a few days after I arrived in the US, we found out about the miscarriage. We had been called in to the obstetrician’s office for my second ultrasound. Later, in a poem, I described what I saw on the screen as a ‘tiny moon’. It wasn’t moving, simply floating: slowly circuiting the fist of the womb.

Dan turned to the screen eagerly. He still didn’t know. He hadn’t been able to come to the first ultrasound screening back in Britain. He had never seen the baby alive – the quivering that signals life. Nothing was moving on the nurse’s face.

Afterwards, I blamed the physician’s assistant who had called us in for an ultrasound without checking the baby’s heartbeat. We would never have been there, would never have seen the foetus dead on the monitor, if we’d had a more experienced doctor. She looked at us awkwardly afterwards, made us stand foolishly in the hall while she looked up some pamphlets on miscarriage.

We didn’t realise it then, but this wouldn’t be the last time that we lost a baby. After another failed pregnancy in the spring, I couldn’t bear the thought of spending the long, hot summer in the small Pennsylvania town where we lived. So we started out to drive across America.

We had driven through the Midwest, lolloping hills in Kansas, the dreary flatness of the plains, and the Rockies rearing up from the even land like stern faces. By the time we reached Utah the land was changing again: red sandstone, ravines, boulders, pillars, fins, and cliffs. By the side of the road, a sign that read NO SOLICITING was pocked by bullet holes. Like most visitors, we stayed in the town of Moab. There was a motel called the Red Rock Lodge decorated in 1970s brown and cream. The view from the window showed nothing but hot, red rock. ‘Like being on Mars’, Dan said as we crawled into bed.

The next morning, we woke up at 5am and it was still dark. We drove into Arches National Park up the long, steep, winding road. You come to a plateau at the top and then the whole place opens out to a long, wide valley framed by sculptural shapes like long-bodied sentries.

Near the car park is the old log cabin that belonged to the family of a Civil War veteran named Wolfe. He came from Ohio in the nineteenth century, lived out in the emptiness for a good number of years and then returned to where he had come from. After the miscarriages, I began to wonder whether I too should admit defeat and catch the next plane back to Britain. Sometimes, I even imagined that the land itself had a hostile aspect, deadly with its winter snows, tornados, and devastating storms.

Arches was different though. Not a hostile land exactly, but rocks that had persisted for aeons, and were quite indifferent to human suffering. Crossing the bridge over the Salt Wash, a huge crow swooped down and landed on the handrail of the bridge, not so much threatening as curious. It held its ground as we passed by.

There was no one around when we started hiking. We clambered up the steep, tilted slab of sandstone, the sunrise radiating the Salt Valley. It took a good thirty or forty minutes to scramble up and we still couldn’t see the arch. At last we came upon a ledge with a sheer drop alongside, like a final challenge.

Writing in his 1968 memoirDesert Solitaire, Edward Abbey sums up the Delicate Arch, and the power it has over those who behold it. He writes: ‘If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of its ruts of habit, to compel us into a re-awakened awareness of the wonderful – that which is full of wonder’.

Seeing the arch so suddenly was wonder-full. But I asked myself, what is it about unexpected empty space that is so beautiful? Perhaps it signifies openness – a space that invites another in with generosity and selflessness. Or maybe it’s just that emptiness conjures the spaces that most need filling in our own lives. Those things that we most desire and cannot have. The people we have lost. Failures that we lie awake at night regretting. Perhaps above all, it is lack made beautiful.