7 Photos Lie on My Mother's Body | Rising & Falling with the Sea

These two were published on April 15th in Thorn Literary Magazine (Spring Issue, 2020 p.22-25).

Rising and Falling with the Sea went through many incarnations. I nearly gave up on it. It helped to leave it alone and come back to it after reading other stories for inspiration. It started in a workshop by Judith Johnson where the challenge was to start a story with a body. The Perkins-Gilman story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) prompted the addition of magic realism & references to mental health. Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) gave me the title, the refrain and the artist view and for the most recent draft I reread Shelly's Ozymandias (1826).

I wrote Seven Photos Lie on My Mother's Body more recently, to have a go at a list story. I like exploring memory as a theme because I have no autobiographical memory and have to rely on photos and other people's memories - both of which can lie.