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.

Pancakes

Another micro fiction of mine called Pancakes was published by Paragraph Planet and it appeared, unsurprisingly enough, on the 25th of February 2020 - Pancake Tuesday.

Harvest

Harvest is a microfiction in Crack the Spine's themed anthology Neighbors, launched in February 2020. 

This was a strange little one for me. The prompt originally came from a creative writing workshop called Write On - Creative Writing Workshop (September 2019) run by the author Z. Nia Reynolds at the Waterloo Action Centre. Such a lovely supportive workshop with a range of writing activities - some of which I begrudgingly engaged in but all of which paid dividends in learning.

Writing to prescription is not my strong point so if asked to choose an item from a bag and use it as a prompt to write there and then, I panic. I have a contrary nature - I like boundaries but if they feel too tight I push against them or try to flip them over.

On this occasion I got a glass jar from the bag and although it was more of a Crème brûlée type, thoughts of jam jars and recycling, conservation and preservation came to mind. So my first line starts with the narrator holding a jam jar to collect and preserve someone's last breath. 

Maybe something to do with pollution levels of where I live in Tower Hamlets? This article talks about how our children are 'growing up with reduced lung capacity' because of this pollution. 

Some neighbours are better than others.