In today's HuffPo: writing toward fear, as I wrote toward One Thing Stolen

 

I have made reference to the challenges that beset me (self-afflicted, surely) as I set out to write One Thing Stolen. Today, in Huffington Post, I'm write of the fears I was writing toward during the process.

The piece begins like this, below, and carries forward here.

There is a girl who only just recently knew who she was, what she wanted, the dimensions of now. A girl who has a retro-minded best friend and a reputation for ingenious ideas about night snow, urban gardens, and the songs that rise up from Philadelphia streets. She has a mother and a brother, both loved. She has a father obsessed with the Florentine flood of November 1966--that unforeseen spill of the Arno River, that mud that clawed through homes and stores and across the face of Cimabue's "Crucifix," among so many other treasures. This girl has moved with her family to Florence. This girl is losing herself.

It's hard to say, precisely, when she began to peel away. When an obsession with nests and nest building became her terrible secret. When thieving erupted as a necessary part of her existence. When words began to clot and clog and answers became elusive.

It's hard to say when all this started. It's impossible to know how it will end.

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Fire

You think that because I make fear I don’t fear, but you’re mistaken. I am afraid of rain showers, spigots, pitchers, sea mists, and snowfalls. Of bricks that won’t burn, of macadam, of blankets. Or pearl ash and compressed air, of gunpowder. Of anything that snuffs or dampens, of pine combs and seeds that burst to life when I am in the mood for killing. I am afraid of being hemmed in and broken, of thinning out to only smoke and only vapor, of tracking high, toward the sky, and disappearing, fading.

Of being made extinct.

Of being forgotten.

Fear impels me. Fear is where I draw my courage from.

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