My brain works in references, whether it's everyday conversations, watching television, or even when writing. Everything winds up connected one way or another, like a web of tangled string, and when it comes to writing it is not always intentional, either. Here are some intentional and unintentional references in my novel, An Impossible Dream.
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It’s one thing to be called a liar, it’s another thing to be called a liar about your lived experience. Sare from my novel, An Impossible Dream, knows this all too well. She notes the “righteous fire” that comes from the injustice of it. For her, the experience she lived is one multiple characters continually seem to struggle to wrap their brain around because it is not a story many would have heard before. It is shocking to them, uncomfortable, and maybe even challenges their views of the world as they think they know it. Her frustration goes a step further, in someone digging into her past without permission. That, on top of not being believed, she does not even have a say on who she chooses to share said experience with. As is stated in the novel, “Never mind not even her own history belonging to her.” This idea of the preciousness of our personal stories is an ongoing theme in this series, as well as the violation of that sacredness from others. In book 1 of the same series, Be, Ari deals with this, too. In her case, along with the dismissing or discounting, she also deals with her eldest brother, Nick, using her lived experience to his advantage, making it about him, and trying to dictate how he feels she should respond to it. In that moment, she reflects: “It’s my story, she wanted to tell him now. It’s mine. It happened to me. And it’s mine to do with as I wish.” This becomes a central theme in book three, Where the Heart Is, with the Queen and the realization of the erasure of her overall story over the course of the first three books, and the eventual reclaiming of her narrative in book four.
It felt like a sort of rebellion against the patriarchy. That she was going to speak regardless of his response or his purposely deaf ears. It felt inevitable that speaking to “her father” would mean never being heard the way “her father” assumes he would and, even, should be heard. As Dr. Karen Ward says in the preface of the Girl God Anthology, Re-Membering with Goddess, “Speaking about trauma is political.” It is as “liberating” and “revolutionary” as she says “understanding trauma is” and “healing trauma is.” When it comes to CPTSD, one of the common struggles people face is the re-traumatization that occurs when they try to share their stories. The dismissing, the discounting, and even the excuses people make for why the abuse or trauma occurred. I know this from firsthand experience and have seen others sharing across social media of similar experiences. It’s not just mental health, either. What immediately comes to mind is my mother’s experience as someone who lives with chronic illness. One of her many, many experiences that she shares in her book, The Unchained Spirit, involved an intrathecal pump that was meant to aid the “intense, unrelenting pain over [her] entire body” that caused further problems and torture. She came close to losing her feet and “finally, the pump was removed at [her] insistence.” She was back to dealing with the horrific pain, but as she notes about advocacy and pushing to be heard, “What was important was that I spoke up and followed my instincts. I knew what was causing the problem and, despite all those who said otherwise, I insisted the pump be removed and the meds stopped. And, I was right.” It’s worth noting, my mother and I are straight, cis, and white. We’re conscious of all we do not have to face because of the privilege that comes with that. We are conscious of the devastating consequences that come with not being heard, not being believed, with someone else trying to take over the story or erase it, with not being allowed to decide who gets to hear our stories or when. We’re also conscious that we are not the authority on someone else’s lived experience and that no one owes us their story. That someone else’s experience is not about us.
When someone tells us their story, we shut up, we listen, and we believe them. Main Character of An Impossible Dream, from four different perspectives, from four different books6/29/2023 The main character in An Impossible Dream (11/20/23), Sare, is a reoccuring character in my Be Series. Here are some of the different perspectives of Sare from Madam Hayworth in Be (book 1), the Queen in Where the Heart Is (book 3), Ari from When Morning Comes (book 4), and Elsbie in the upcoming An Impossible Dream (book 2), which is Sare's story!
There was something about when Sare was anxious or excited or too tired to care, when the carefully-crafted façade began to crack. Elsbie could hear it in the less-than-perfect words, the accent and cadence of kitchens at night and laundries and alleys and brothels. The choppy sentences and incomplete, blended together words. Of dirt and dust and moonlight and never-enough-time and shadows. The impolite and improper and imperfect that naturally rolled off the tongue. It was a rough stone rubbed shiny. As I explore in my Acorn Tops Blog, The Universal Toy, dolls, within a historical context, were a source of companionship. They were discovered in graves across countries, a sign that they were thought of as precious. They can be seen as an aspect of innocence and childhood, as they were dedicated to goddesses when outgrown. Dolls were used to display clothes, such as the Bartholomew Babies in England. They were used to promote and prepare for socially acceptable roles and expectations. There’s a lot of meaning one could derive from just the historical context of this toy. What I find in writing, though, is it is not just the research of the outside world that contributes to play of symbols in stories. It is our personal connection and experience. Dolls remain an ever-popular toy of choice today. Plenty of children have had or played with dolls growing up, from brands such as Barbie to American Girl to Cabbage Patch. My favorite doll growing up was a hard plastic Molly doll from the children’s show, The Comfy Couch, and she’s been so well loved that my mother had to use nail polish to fix the red of her nose and sharpie to fix the black of her shoes. Another hugely influential doll in my own life is named Edna. She is one of the few possessions my great grandfather was allowed to keep of his mother, for who I am named, after she passed away. She’s been this incredible touch stone of connection and family history that has survived house fires and multiple moves, including one across the country. Perhaps then, given these personal ties, it is no surprise that dolls and character’s relationships to the toy become an ongoing symbol throughout my Be book series. This was something, I, as the author, did not fully realize until @DailywriterQ on twitter asked about symbolism in author’s stories. It starts in Be with Ari and Peter’s niece, Rosy, and a cloth doll with yarn hair named Emily… He forced himself to smile, fist curling tight. “I still believe in fairy tales, even after everything.” He hesitantly whispered, but a breath of hope left within him. “I know you don’t. I know you think it’s foolish.” Childhood is often denied to children where Ari, Peter, and Rosy are from. It was something denied to Ari, who makes it a point to ensure others receive what she never had. For Rosy when she receives Emily, it is hope and wishes coming true. It would be her equivalent of Santa Claus. As my mother always said, it was something to believe in that was bigger than ourselves. It is something magical in a world that does not offer children like Rosy much magic. For Peter, who was doing everything he could to try to get Rosy a doll, it is connection and community. Which carries over to when Rosy lends Emily back to Ari in a moment where Ari is feeling very isolated and alone. It then transforms for Ari into a type of companionship, comfort, and touch stone of that same hope she gave to Rosy. I would not say there is a larger cast of characters in An Impossible Dream than in Be, but where Ari feels very isolated as a young woman surrounded by men, as I explore in my interview with Jenn Romano in The AjennDa Blog, Sare in An Impossible Dream is surrounded by other young women, allowing for more of a comparing and contrasting of circumstance and symbolic meaning. “Every lil’ girl needs a dolly.” Gilly said like it was a simple matter of fact. For Sare, who has been a servant her whole life, the very notion of a doll confounds her. She associates it with pretend work, rather than play. As her conversation with, one of “the ladies,” Gilly progresses and she tries to riddle out this popular toy, dolls become a look into the divide of haves vs. have-nots, as she “would argue only certain little girls ever had a doll,” and even then, what those dolls come to mean within those varied circumstance.
Sare does not know if her friend, Gracelynn, had a doll growing up, but imagines, knowing what she knows of her home life, that it would have been treated the way Gracelynn was treated: “to sit on a shelf out of… reach, as a means to have something else to brag about.” In that same vein, both Be and An Impossible Dream, discuss the row of unblemished porcelain perfection sitting in the princess, Rochelle’s, windowsill. In Be, Henry compares it to his mother’s books which he calls “well loved” and looked it. In comparison to the cloth doll like Emily or Elsbie’s unnamed rag doll, Rochelle’s dolls, too would have been expensive and rarely played with. She is another girl who is seen as little more than an object by those in her life, a comparison Sally, another of “the ladies,” later makes about how Elsbie was treated by one who should have loved her most. Even as Sare comes to recognize a more positive benefit of the doll, beginning to see what her friend, Elsbie, saw in her doll specifically, companionship, it acts as another layer of a metaphor for Elsbie and a bit of foreshadowing when thinking about why Elsbie never took such a precious thing back with her when given the chance: “It was safer where it was.” Ultimately, for Sare, the doll comes to represent the ever foreign and elusive “before” she alone among her peers does not have, the love, family, and memories of a time before she donned an apron and scrubbed chamber pots, as this unnamed rag doll was made specifically for Elsbie by Sally and Gilly keeps it and the rest of Elsbie’s childhood treasure safe. What do dolls symbolize for you? Did you have a favorite doll growing up? If you are a storyteller, do dolls make an appearance in your story? rIn my Be Series, there's some overlap when and where the books take place, due to the shape of the series versus the timeline. The second book, An Impossible Dream, is a prequel and takes place over the course of six years, overlapping in terms of the timeline for the very last year with the first book, Be. The places the characters visit, also have some overlap, such as with the town surrounding the castle. Here are two excerpts side by side, to compare, of the town surrounding the castle from seventeen-year-old Ari's perspective in Be and sixteen-year- old Sare's perspective five years earlier in An Impossible Dream.
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Ellie Lieberman |