Letting go (anthology) by M.E. Hughes
Letting
Go: An Anthology of Attempts
by
M.E. Hughes
GENRE:
nonfiction, personal transformation
A
fascinating collection of life stories told by 30 authors from eight
countries. They write of their attempts to move beyond crippling
grief, free themselves of haunting memories, get out from under
abusive relationships. They tell of their struggles – often
painful, sometimes funny - to let go of everything from a fear of
horses, to old family homes, and piles of books and papers
Hoarding
Memories
George
P. Farrell
When I
was a little boy, we lived in a small bungalow on the waterfront, in
a quaint little community of bungalows atmospherically alive with
wandering alcoholics, flea-scratching dogs and spraying tomcats. My
mom grew up there. My dad discovered and fell in love with it,
finding it far superior to the Harlem railroad flats of his youth.
They married at the time Hitler was perfecting his blitzkrieg. I
arrived at the peak of the Führer’s success.
The war
in Europe scooped up my father and took him out of our life while he
was still just a blur to me. He was gone for two years and returned
as a large, semi-stranger from a far-off land whose presence filled
the bungalow and wedged uncomfortably between my mom and me.
Spitting
distance from our house was a little brown-sand beach. In the summer
time, if the tide was high and the day warm, I went swimming with Mom
and Dad in the tepid and semi-polluted saltwater. After splashing
around in the languid seaweed, baking under the hot sun, we all went
back into the little house and showered to rid ourselves of the salt
and god knows what else. The house had a cubicle of a bathroom,
subway-tiled walls, tiny hex-tiled floor, a toilet, sink and, of
course, an enamelled, iron bathtub, which was to play a major role in
my young life.
I loved
my mom. She was very beautiful. Even as a toddler I knew this as I
hugged my arm ‘round her leg, rested my cheek against her smooth
thigh and looked upward at the delightful rest of her. After
swimming, she took me into the shower with her and rinsed me off. I
loved it—the intimacy of our bathing together, the warm water, my
wonderful young mom with the golden blond hair standing over me
naked. I watched her rinsing the salt from her hair, the water
flowing over the pure white skin, which her bathing suit hid from the
sun and the calm tan the sun’s rays had lavished upon her
glistening legs. Her sweet image mesmerized me. It was a period of
calm life, a good time for a sprout to grow.
There it
is. A memory. An artefact to hoard and cherish. Not to be launched
into the attic dust but carefully stored within the mind as
experience. We all hoard experiences. You really cannot throw them
away, even if desperate to do so. You’d have to throw yourself
away. And of course, that’s been done, many times over, always with
the same, sad ending.
AUTHOR
Bios and Links:
Julie
Strong, “Acadie”
Julie
Strong is a physician and shamanic healer in Halifax, Nova Scotia and
holds a medical degree from Trinity College, Dublin; a BA in
classics, Dalhousie University, Halifax; and is trained in
psychosynthesis, a transpersonal psychology fostering wholeness and
creativity.
Her
“Athena in Love” won the 2012 Canadian Atlantic Fringe Festival’s
new playwright award; she received the 2010 Atlantic Writers’
Federation Award for short story; The Medical Post of Canada has
published her articles. She has presented on madness and on the
“Shamanic Roots of Western Medicine” in America and Europe, and
teaches shamanic healing workshops, helping others find their power
animals and spirit teachers. Strong was born in England.
#2 Roz
Kuehn, “Commencing Being Fearless”
Roz
Kuehn received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of
Art in Washington, D.C She is the author of a novel, Various Stages
of Undress (loosely based on six years as an exotic dancer in
Washington, D.C., which was runner-up for the Faulkner-Wisdom
Competition, and a finalist for both the Breadloaf Bakeless Prize and
Bellwether Prize. She has also received numerous Delaware State Arts
Council fellowships, including a $10,000 Master of Fiction
fellowship, as well as a Barbara Deming Memorial Award for feminist
writing. Her memoir, Losing Glynis, is about a coterie of
well-meaning girlfriends who swoop in and make a royal mess of a
close friend’s dying days. She acted as fiction editor for The
Washington Review for four years and currently works as a legal
secretary in a New York City firm.
#3 Emily
Tsokos Purtill, The Perfect Mother
Emily
Tsokos Purtill has won several Australian awards for young writers,
including the prestigious Tim Winton Award for Outstanding
Achievement for Young Writers. Her winning story was published in the
anthology HATCHED (edited by Tim Winton, Fremantle Arts Press, 2013).
She holds a bachelor of laws and a master of laws from the University
of Western Australia and has recently returned to writing after
working as a lawyer for eight years in Australia and Paris. In 2014,
Emily was living in New York where she participated in an advanced
fiction course at New York University. She currently lives in Perth,
Western Australia, with her husband and children. She can be
contacted at em_tsokos@hotmail.com.
#4 Joan
Scott, “The Paper Room”
Joan
Scott was born in England. At fifteen she wrote a prize-winning essay
about a trip to Paris. The newspaper prize paid for a baguette and a
croissant. Years later when the writing life paled and the rent was
due, she honed her creative writing skills with London advertising
agencies, taught tango to VIPs, marketed wines and left rainy England
for a Californian drought, where she became ‘Nanny Joan’
resulting in a nonfiction proposal, We Don’t Just Go Places, We
Experience Them, for caregivers and grandparents to bolster
children’s creativity.
Moving
to Boston, she promoted textiles, wrote poems and articles on
beekeepers, burying beetles and ballerinas, then joined corporate
America to build a career in international marketing communications.
While being paid to travel, she continued writing on sampans,
helicopters and hi-speed Japanese trains. She has let go of paper
with her slice-of-life blogs: “When Life Gets in the Way of Writing
the Great British Novel,” and is becoming a fearless flyer,
navigating social media with her psychological suspense, debut novel,
Who Is Maxine Ash? She can be contacted on joanscott.uk1@gmail.com
#5
Martha Ellen Hughes, “Isolation”
Martha
Ellen Hughes founded the non-profit Peripatetic Writing Workshop,
Inc., in 1991. This intensive writing workshop and retreat, lead by
herself, Maureen Brady and other writers, meets twice annually,
currently in Florida and Italy. She has taught creative writing at
New York University for more than twenty-five years and is a
free-lance editor of novels and nonfiction books. She holds an MFA in
creative writing from Bennington College and is a native of
Louisiana. For further information, please visit
www.peripateticwritingandart.org.
#6
George P. Farrell, “Hoarding Memories”
George
P. Farrell was born, raised, housed, clothed and well-fed in the
Bronx, NY. Generally puzzled and baffled by life but always hopeful.
“In
my early twenties I discovered writing as a cheaper and better
alternative to psychological counselling. Discovered the Catskills
was a good place to pursue a writing career and inspecting boats, a
reasonable way to put food on the table. I have written six novels
and a bunch of short stories, as I traveled along my learning curve,
and so far have produced a literary income of forty dollars plus
numerous, very-appreciated pats-on-the-back. I am looking forward,
with some trepidation, to more of the same.”
#7
Marione Malimba Namukuta, “The Battle Within”
Marione
Malimba Namukuta, twenty-eight, single, lives in Kampala, Uganda. She
works as a researcher specializing increasingly in the fields of
population and health, monitoring and evaluating both national and
international projects.
Namukuta
has keen interests in other cultures, a command of several languages
and loves to write and travel. She writes children’s short stories
and is a member of the Uganda Children’s Writers and Illustrators
Association.
#8
Elizbeth Wohl, “Outside In”
Elizabeth
Wohl was a journalist for many years, as an Associated Press
reporter, a Ms. Magazine contributing editor and during the Vietnam
War, a freelance reporter for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
Her fiction has been published in The Quarter, Fiction and other
literary magazines. She lives in Brooklyn and is hoping the wisdom in
this anthology will help her stop revising and let go of her novel.
#9 Nilo
Alvarez, “Spoiled Fruit Bears Bad Seeds”
Nilo
Alvarez was born on Negroes, one of many Pacific Ocean islands
discovered in 1521 by the Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan.
Named the Philippines for Spain’s King Philip II, eleven of the
archipelago’s original 7,113 islands are under water, the victim of
global warming. In his fiction, Alvarez often uses his small,
friendly town of Talisa, where from the top of the water tower during
his childhood all one could see were waving green sugarcane fields,
planted during American colonization. Few people lived on Negroes;
his aunt, a midwife, delivered all the babies. His mother often took
him to movies and told him stories about her life. What he most
enjoyed were her stories about World War II. Her colourful stories
plus the movies inspired him to become a writer.
#10 Sue
Parman, “The Holy Ghost Bird”
Sue
Parman, a retired professor of anthropology, is the author of
numerous academic books (including Scottish Crofters, now in its
second edition). She has also won numerous awards for poetry, plays,
essays, short stories and art. Her most recent book combines poetry
and art (The Carnivorous Gaze, Turnstone Press, 2014). Her most
recent article is a memoir based on her correspondence with Tolkien
(“A Song for J.R.R. Tolkien,” The Antioch Review, 2015). She is
currently completing, The Death Flower, a biomedical mystery set in
the Amazon. For further information please visit www.sueparman.com or
www.anthro.fullerton.edu/sparman. She lives in Oregon.
#11 Joe
Levine, Finis
Farewell
to a Novel Too Long in Progress
Joe
Levine lives with his wife and daughters in New York City, where he
toils in the spin trade. He wrote “Finis” about his unpublished
novel, A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea, in 2007. After subsequently
sending the book to scores of agents without success, he has indeed
let it go, although the characters live on in his mind. Recent events
in his life have made him realize writing autobiographical fiction
requires research, too—and the quest can be as perilous as any
other.
#12
Evalyn Lee, “Throwing Out the Trash”
Evalyn
Lee attended graduate studies at Oxford University, where she studied
with the Joyce Scholar, Richard Ellman, and the literary critic, John
Bayley. A former CBS producer, she has written on a wide range of
topics, including the Gulf Wars and many investigative pieces for the
likes of Dan Rather, Mike Wallace and Lesley Stahl. Her television
broadcast work won an Emmy and numerous Writers Guild Awards. Her
short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Amarillo Bay,
Diverse Arts Project and Willow Review. She is working on her first
novel, living in London with two kids, one husband and Hugo the dog
and writes: “This is my first personal essay. I mean every word I
have written—if depression strikes, try to let go of shame and
blame. Aristotle got it right: ‘It is during our darkest moments
that we must focus to see the light.’ You are the light of your own
life. If you can't see it, reach out and find others who can.”
Buy
Links:
Bacon
Press Books: http://www.baconpressbooks.com/letting-go/
From a very brief essay, to interesting and sometimes educational short stories and novellas, this collection of internal ruminations by 30 authors offers unexpected and possibly profound insights on making changes in order to move forward with life. Some changes are necessary for survival.
The changes written about cover ground from changing thoughts and ways of thinking to releasing beliefs thrust upon one by others, to physical changes, releasing emotional bonds, and physical possessions as well as ties to location.
Given a chance, each will leave an impression. The readers' interpretation will be individual and therefore the enjoyment received will vary reader to reader. Much depends upon your own experience up to this point in your life and your own relationships with people, possessions and change itself.
The authors write about every type of relationship imaginable. The emotions, including grief, confusion, fear, acceptance and more resonate in the phrasing. Tones vary from light-hearted to very dark.
I am reading this because the concept intrigues me. I was given the anthology in exchange for review.
The changes written about cover ground from changing thoughts and ways of thinking to releasing beliefs thrust upon one by others, to physical changes, releasing emotional bonds, and physical possessions as well as ties to location.
Given a chance, each will leave an impression. The readers' interpretation will be individual and therefore the enjoyment received will vary reader to reader. Much depends upon your own experience up to this point in your life and your own relationships with people, possessions and change itself.
The authors write about every type of relationship imaginable. The emotions, including grief, confusion, fear, acceptance and more resonate in the phrasing. Tones vary from light-hearted to very dark.
I am reading this because the concept intrigues me. I was given the anthology in exchange for review.
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