A Storyteller's Process: Competition Winner Janine Lehane

Photo by Peter Reid.

On the process of writing Now You are Come

I am so pleased to have won the Summer Solstice Wild Words Competition, 2020. I was drawn to Bridget's prompt, the Margaret Atwood quotation about water, and I began to think of associations that were meaningful to me.

I come from a thirsty country, yet I was still surprised by the number of experiences I remembered that involved water and overcoming interior or exterior obstacles. I think of my piece Now You Are Come as a collage of these memories.

The piece is made up of collection of experiences that are themselves composites of similar experiences (although, I skipped school just once, and my mother would never have asked us to stop playing the piano. She loved to hear us play!) Some aspects of the work are fictionalized.

Key events or memories insert themselves often when I am writing: The death of my father and appreciation for my friends are among them. I wrote the poem “Lake Moondarra” as I recalled its warm water and swimming with my friends as a teenager. In this poem, I matched some of the harsh and biting experiences of living inland in Australia with some of the bewildering perceptions of adolescence.

By the end of my collage, I imagined that I was water, the muddy red water of a flood in Northwest Queensland, as it coursed down a previously dry riverbed

I called the work Now You Are Come after a phrase from Thomas Haynes Bayly's song Long, Long Ago. I remembered playing the song as a child, and I recalled the sound of my grandmother's piano as I wrote. The theme of the song seemed to underlie the whole collage: When you are with me, when the possibility of reliving our love exists, my longing ends.

I think that being a writer is my vocation (along with being a visual artist), so I write often: As I write, I solve problems, gain insights, try to get in touch with my higher self, find solace, and have fun! I try to write in a way that allows the reader to experience my own lived or imagined experience.

I admire Bridget's philosophy as articulated in her Wild Words newsletter, on her website, and in her videos. It's a wonderful feeling to have someone appreciate an artwork that I have created, and so I thank Bridget Holding and the Wild Words team members for this award.

Janine Lehane

Asheville, Western North Carolina, USA

September 16, 2020

Janine’s winning entry…

Now You Are Come

I.

The rains had come.

The river flowed by carrying gifts of felled trees for the foresters, debris, including a poor distended cow, drowned in who knows what flooded pasture upstream, and household items, a frightening variety.

Standing high up on the embankment, and cautioned to remain behind the barrier, we stared and wondered and mourned the swift procession of cast-offs: another summer cyclone bringing flooding rain and a guilty infusion of adrenaline. We checked the water levels with the measuring rods embedded in the river banks beside swamped roads and causeways.

Implacability. That's what scared me about the river in flood, a mute giant slaking the land, forgetful of its own power. Spectacle and colossus.

Mesmerized, I wanted to breathe the scents of the wet land, the torrid river forever.

The river climbed its banks, spreading, enveloping bushes and trees. Grass and bark strips slid outward from clumps collected in branches—streamers in earthen colors—snakes looped the boughs, birds quieted.

We craned over the wooden barricade at the end of the street. Red silt stained the flattened grasses on the far bank. Granddad shifted position, hands clasped behind his back, deliberate in his movements and speech, answering our barrage of questions with a smile.

Through various grades of unhappiness he had swum, from mild through extra-stout.

Barefoot, we trod the wet road back to the house. The radio on the verandah rang out the mournful strains of “Nobody's Child.”

On the kitchen table, marbled laminate, the radio shouted information for fishing and boating enthusiasts: Conditions unfavorable in the wide bay region.

Tell

me

the tales

that to me

were so dear, long, long

ago, long, long ago. Sing me the songs

I delighted to hear, long, long ago, long ago. Now you are come,

all my grief is removed. Let me forget

for how long you have roved. Let

me believe that

you love...

When you say, close that that damn piano, I understand. It is out of tune, the day proves too hot.

Our days were singing, dancing, and solving problems, while limiting emotional displays.

In the fernery, the overhead sprinkler system hissed and sprayed us periodically. We viewed native plants and introduced species, the word, invasive, too heavy for flowers and fronds and children.

Water droplets ambushed us as we passed tree ferns, lilies, orchids, and fell in untidy showers, intermittent and cooling, from hanging ferns.

The grandfather clock chimed each quarter hour throughout the humid days.

We longed to see you again, until we could no longer see you again.

II.

Like the first time you disbelieved you would ever be free of loneliness, the clarinet sang Ravel's Pavane. Something became uprooted in me then. They had wanted a piper, but Lee was willing, so they settled on clarinet. She was clever enough to piece an arrangement together.

Clods and red rose petals dropped into the rusty wounded hill. No dead infant or princess. No fairytale life. No movie-version ending. No. This was my father we laid to rest. The sunshine at 11:00 am drove us blind and maddened the grief-stricken visitors. My mother gave out small wails. And I, I had nothing to say.

At the wake, they called him Nature's Gentleman. I thought that fitting. He knew every plaintive note Ravel described, but in a keen dusty Australian way. He had always wanted to be a signwriter, but instead, he became a civil engineer. He described bridges against the skyline and over the waterways, and raised dams to fortify the townsfolk.

He was a strong leader. His subordinates knew not to abuse his trust. He kept his own counsel.

He leadeth me beside the still waters.

Here the commentary refers to “repose of the soul, when salvation flows as in a gently running stream; when there is no apprehension of want; when the heart is at peace with God.”

He restoreth my soul.

III.

Lake Moondarra

We hug the dam wall, a solid practice

for there are crocodiles in these waters--

but that is years later when they have drifted

south. For now, there is adolescence:

shame and slights and burning humiliations.

These warm waters shift gravity sufficient

for joy to intercede: She will not impede

the sun-bleached swimmers, the lilies. The robust

fish were introduced afterwards, after

we had grown and left. Laughing with friends,

floating in the northwest desert, we sway

like holidaymakers in a daze among

the fractured pillars of childhood,

like reeds above the drowned city.

“plenty of rain also thunder”

we hurry down to the riverbed afraid to be spotted by busybodies and other dangerous individuals we stop to sit on boulders the only dangers to appear snakes and failing courage we have all day the school is away down the river the dry river has plenty to say that the school will never swallow a few friends that's all it takes to make it through this day I have seen the flood waters in the rainy season the surge halts my breathing sorrow for the dead the lost the swept away I don't know how this story progresses whether I will be okay I need friends there wherever the river takes me the flood waters rise the banks overtaken the storm in the mountain reflected as the waters charge down the throat of the slopes plenty of rain and thunder in this youth