“Myth is a wild way of telling the truth.” – Martin Shaw

You may be wondering…what is Imagine A Woman about? I’m wondering that, too. Because as much as I can share what it’s “about,” I also know that it will become what it’s truly about when you, dear reader, hold it in your hands and begin to interpret it based on your own perspective, your own psyche, your own body - just like any good story passed down through generations.

What I can tell you is that one of the central stories of this book is the experience of being silenced and then learning how to speak. Writing these poems, the mouth became a larger-than-life symbol for me. It represented three forms of expression, or life force: that of voice (breath), love (sex / desire), and food (sustenance / life).

The first story that came to represent the mouth, and its accompanying silence or speech, is “Snow White.” In the fairy tale, a girl is silenced by the evil stepmother through a confusion of death / banishment that we’ll summarize as ‘attempted murder.’ When she finds refuge in the forest, the stepmother disguises herself to offer her a beautiful, tempting apple (are we feeling the Eve references?) - in other words, she is put to sleep, sent into the darkness, banished to silence…through her mouth. A vessel of discovery (aka a handsome prince, but let’s please remember that he is just a symbol for so many different forms of waking into our lives) revives her.

While threads of this and other stories appear in different poems throughout the book, the central poem for “Snow White” is “The Mythology of the Call Girl,” published in Spring 2022 in The Northern Virginia Review. In parallel with the “Snow White” story, this poem was inspired by nursery rhymes.

Sometimes lines of poetry and prose return to me over time, even though I don’t know why they are there, or what they are for. I might have written them down somewhere, or just played them on repeat in my head as one tosses a golden ball of light up and down, back and forth.

“When you’re writing a poem, you carry it with you day and night, for months or even years, often underneath the surface of waking thought; when you walk the dog or drive the car, a word for that poem may enter your consciousness when you do not know that you are thinking of it.” - Donald Hall, Old Poets

The few lines that became, over the course of years, “The Mythology of the Call Girl” were thus:

we speak in threes:
one is decisive
two is conflicted
three is a hunter or wanderer

At the time, I didn’t know why these simple lines would keep returning to me, insisting. Why did they matter so much? They didn’t seem particularly deep or brilliant (a hint to the fact that narrow definitions of what’s ‘worthwhile’ or ‘valuable’ in literature disguise deeper truths), nor did they seem to have anything further to offer - something to expand on or transform them into what I thought a poem or story was supposed to be. I also didn’t understand why the concept of ‘threes’ seemed so important to the whole.

Eventually I noticed that it reminded me of a children’s book I had loved reading to my toddler: 1 is One by Tasha Tudor, a counting book that was strangely familiar to me - not one I recognized or remembered directly from my own childhood, but that seemed to reach me from a cavernous source of speech, somewhere in the darkness beyond my own heart and mind.

Around the same time, I was doing research on my notes and ideas for Imagine A Woman, reading books like The White Goddess by Robert Graves, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell…I learned that quantities of three had meaning in storytelling as well as in life. A common example is the concept of the Hero’s Journey, summarized here with a new layer of understanding by one of my favorite writers, Susan Cain:

“We’ve all heard that the great human narrative is the “Hero’s Journey,” in which a hero has an adventure, confronts a great challenge, and emerges transformed. Much of Hollywood storytelling - and thus our conception of our own life stories - is based on this progression.

But we’ve forgotten our other great narrative, which we might call the “Soul’s Journey”:

in which we realize that we’ve all come into this world with a sense of exile from the place we were meant to be; that we feel the pain of separation from the state where we loved and were loved beyond measure; and that it’s the mysteriously sweet experience of longing that will help us return there.” - Susan Cain, The Quiet Life

In Sanskrit, three terms represent ‘the brink’ of transcendence, the being through consciousness and rapture: Sat (being), Chit (consciousness), Ananda (bliss or rapture). Aligning these with the three lines I kept repeating, I saw being as the body (one is decisive)…consciousness as the mind (two is conflicted)…and rapture as art (three is a hunter or wanderer). Going further, I saw that women’s roles in fairy tales also align with three options: maiden, mother, and crone.

To transcend maidenhood, there is a choice of whether or not to have sex (to enter the woods, to speak to the wolf, to put on the slipper). Once that threshold into womanhood is crossed, there is a choice of whether to have children, whether to become a mother. If you choose not to, or if you age out of fertility, then you become the crone, or witch - an irrelevancy that can be viewed as a form of death, making you vulnerable to exile or murder.

In Imagine A Woman, these so-called choices offered to women are revealed to be, like the shiny red apple offered to Snow White, a trap.

“She was dead either way, but I guess they figured it was still good to know what kind of woman she’d been.” – Britney Spears, The Woman in Me

The word trap, from Old English treppan, to tread, is modern slang for mouth - as in, “shut your trap.” Its various definitions include, “a position or situation from which it is difficult or impossible to escape,” and “any of various devices for preventing passage of something often while allowing other matter to proceed.” These definitions, too, have their relationship to the ability to speak, or to transcend the idea of a crone as irrelevant, someone who might as well be dead, and instead escape into the making of creative work beyond the labor of mothering.

“Can a woman artist – however virtuosic and talented, however disciplined – ever attain a fundamental freedom from the fact of her own womanhood?” - Rachel Cusk for the New York Times (gift link)

All of this worked together to unlock the opening lines of the poem…The nursery rhyme introduced us to rapture / I disappeared into it…when I opened the trap, my tongue was an apple / I learned to count by tapping my fingers against my cheek…compelling me to try a different form for the words - a different body, a different throat - than I was used to seeing on the page. The poem became two voices, a rhythmic call and response, the lyrics held together by the counted beat of numbers as symbols for traps and transformations, choices and escapes.

It’s hard to be concise about the importance of being able to speak, in any form - by writing, singing, humming, whispering, telling, making of all kinds. Last week, reading Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, I came across this entry:

“My suffering is inexpressible but all the same utterable, speakable...The very fact that language affords me the word “intolerable” immediately achieves a certain tolerance.”

I would replace that last word ‘tolerance’ with the word ‘healing,’ which begins to approach the meaning, the essence, and the sustenance of what writing is for me. Healing, after all, is another way of being awake, and learning to speak a story until we understand it, leading to still more pathways into the darkness of the woods, toward further healing.

.

December’s story is “Sleeping Beauty.” I can’t wait to share how it impacted another key poem from the book, and began to transform my relationship to one of my greatest childhood fears.

Thank you for reading,

D.

archive

October 9: Frankenstein Edition

September 9: on longing

August 9: productivity and process

July 9: on wolves and women

June 9: book announcement

if you are not yet a subscriber, sign up here

find me on instagram