Once Upon a Time …

Kay Nielsen’s lovely art

… there was a girl who went to the Police Academy. Oh, no, wait. That’s Charlie’s Angels.

Once upon a time, I did a PhD. Now, a year down the track, I’ve actually been able to read the exegesis without breaking into a cold sweat, having that nerve jump in my eye and that vein start popping out of my forehead. I like to call this ‘personal growth’, but it’s probably just the result of cognitive dissonance.

Anyway. If you’re in the mood and have some time (and coffee and cake, that would be good), I’ve put the first part of the exegesis here – that’s the Introduction that was – which talks about why I write fairy tales, why I chose the form for Sourdough and Other Stories, the antecedents of reworked fairy tales, Freud – y’know, wanky academic stuff.

Never fear – I am a lightweight! So, it’s quite accessible.

‘Once upon a time …’

How to tell this story?

There is a girl, now young, now old. Magic is in her skin. In her youth there is loss, hope, passion, loss again, and she disappears for a long, long while. She resurfaces years later, a crone, with a wealth of experience, the art of survival embedded in her very pores and all the things she has done are etched in the lines on her face. Her beauty is gone, there is no trace of the great magic she once bore, but if you look closely, you can see where and who she has been, what she has done and some of the secrets she has tried to keep.

There is another girl: she elevates the work of a baker to an art form. She does beautiful and terrible things. She finds love, loses it, wins it again at great cost. We leave her kneeling beside a child’s grave, vowing that her memory will remain true. Time marches on and her own daughter appears and is confronted by the ghosts of her mother’s past actions – by the dangers created by the strength of that very memory.

Yet another girl, she also works with her hands, sculpting not dough, but living clay, a substance found in graveyards where the juices of the dead make the earth into something more, something that shifts and breathes and has the very essence of life in it. This girl, this lonely girl with her intense need to belong, chooses to sacrifice herself to save her friends. When we see her again she is so much less than she was, but she cannot know it – her knowledge, her very memory of herself, is gone.

A woman, orphaned at birth, abandoned by her guardian and left as a cuckoo in another’s nest is untethered. She belongs nowhere and to no one, her unconscious memories continue to operate and the traumas of childhood desertions, her lack of kin and community bonds, mean she has no boundaries – she is free to do awful things.

A child is rescued from a troll-wife by her mother. Much later, the same child, now grown, is searching for the same mother, who has fled. In learning the truth of the whole sorry mess the young woman finds her true home at last.

There are connections between these tales, these characters, fine as a spider’s web, often imperceptible until revealed in the light shed by another tale. The stories, when read at first, seem to stand alone – they have their own unique plotlines, narrative threads and characters – so reading them in ‘isolation’ from each other in no way lessens the pleasure for the reader because the story is ‘whole’. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. The story, when it stands alone, has its own meaning and themes, but the depth of meaning is obscured until further stories are read and then the undercurrents and layers of events become clear. Just as looking at an individual thread of a spider’s web will not give you an idea of the shape of the entire web, so too reading simply one Sourdough story will not give you an idea of the shape of the entire mosaic.

The Sourdough stories began with images and a voice in my head – each story, a different voice, a different narrator, all first person, all insistently presenting their stories. My original intention was for them to be a collection of stand-alone tales but as one was laid down and another appeared, sometimes there were connections – some more overt than others. One story might be obviously tied to its predecessor – such as with “The Story of Ink” to “Ash”, and with “Lost Things” to the two former. Sometimes a story would be entirely new and seemingly unlinked to any other tale until, several stories down the track, a connection would be made – as with “Gallowberries”, which is the second story in the book and “Sister, Sister”, which is the fourteenth, and “The Shadow Tree” (first story) and “The Bones Remember Everything” (twelfth). Sometimes the next tale would appear and it would connect in some way to the preceding one, but in no way to the subsequent. And so it went, until sixteen stories lay there, waiting to be put in place; waiting to make up a whole.

At first, I thought the effect like that of a tapestry, but the more I re-read them, edited them, reshuffled them and thought about how the tales sat beside each other, how they interacted and connected, I realised that Sourdough was not neat. The stories did not abut each other tidily; they did not flow smoothly one into the other, tying up all loose ends, making sure every mystery was solved, every question answered. A tapestry shows an entire picture, a fully exposed image. While Sourdough works together as a whole, it is not whole.

What Sourdough most resembled was a mosaic.

In a traditional mosaic, such as those found in ancient Byzantium or Pompeii, each tile is different: irregularly shaped, varied in colour and substance – perhaps glass, perhaps enamel, perhaps stone, perhaps a gem. Each one makes up part of a greater whole – like an impressionist painting, its full effect is felt when viewing all the pieces together in their proper place. In Sourdough, each story acts as a tile in the greater mosaic of the narrative. With this collection, however, the difference between a mosaic tile and a ‘story-tile’ is the detail in the latter – a mosaic tile is generally a blank, chosen precisely because of its characteristic of uniform facelessness, its consistency of colour or its appropriateness of shape. A story-tile is different – look closely and you will find each one to be highly individual. A story that can be enjoyed if read on its own, and also read as part of a much larger whole.

Sourdough then, is something different – neither fish nor fowl. Neither short story collection nor novel, but something both more and less than either of them. Something distinctive, that met the requirements of this writer. My urge – my need – to write springs from a desire to illuminate and explore ideas, concepts and thoughts that interest me ? the things that catch my eye and mind in the same way a shiny object attracts a bower bird. I also write to manage fears. To face these fears, to put them into words is to control them and take away their power. As a writer, I prod and I poke at that shiny thing, that fearful thing; I pull it apart and paw around its innards until I understand it, then I put it back together. But ? and here’s the rub ? I don’t put it back together in the same way. Were I to do this with, say, a watch or other mechanical device, then the magic would be broken. The device would cease to work as it was intended ? indeed, it would cease to work altogether. But writing?

With writing I can put pieces together in a new way and see how it continues to work – a new creature functioning in different way. I create a mosaic of words, of stories. Sourdough, then, is the result of this pulling apart and reconstructing.

As a writer, I am a practitioner in the fairy tale tradition ? I have read, written, researched and been published extensively in the area of revised and reloaded fairy tales. It is, therefore, no surprise that the stories in Sourdough are best described as ‘fairy tales’. In rewriting these kinds of stories, in pulling them apart and adapting them, I am engaging in what Carter has called ‘putting new wine in old bottles’ (1983, p. 69). Writing is a constantly morphing jigsaw puzzle that if you play with it enough, experiment enough, will fit together once again, and will work in different ways. Writing has an endless ability to adapt and change. Words are a kind of living clay.

Fairy tales share this endless ability to adapt and change.

One of the reasons for this is their communal nature. Regardless of culture, language, background, most people know some fairy tales. They are ubiquitous and timeless – versions of Cinderella have appeared since Strabo’s Rhodopis in the 1st Century BCE, including Finette Cendrillon (France), Aschenputtel (Germany), Ye Xian (China), and Cenerentola (Italy). The fairy tale has been morphing all its long life – not just across centuries, but millennia. Zipes has said of the folk tale (the precursor of the fairy tale):

Once there was a time when folk tales were part of communal property and told with original and fantastic insights by gifted storytellers who gave vent to the frustration of the common people and embodied their needs and wishes in the folk narrative. Not only did the tales serve to unite the people of a community and help bridge a gap in their understanding of social problems in a language and narrative mode familiar to the listeners’ experiences, but their aura illuminated the possible fulfilment of utopian longings and wishes which did not preclude social integration ([1979] 2002, p.6).

The shift from oral to written tales has not stunted the fairy tale’s ability to be adapted and adaptable. Its communal nature – and its place in collective memory – is another important reason behind the selection of this form and will be discussed in more detail in Part Two: Memory.

Where does the writer’s urge to adapt spring from? From doing exactly what the fairy tale warns us not to do: straying from the path. From wondering What if? What if the princess said, ‘No’? What if the prince wanted to marry another prince? What if the dragon won? What if the wicked stepmother was justified? What if the trauma of being abandoned by parents in the woods, being caged by a witch who considered a child a main course kept resurfacing, unbidden, in later life? What if there was no happily-ever-after?

Writer and critic Marina Warner says that the old storytellers – the grannies, the governesses, the travelling tale-spinners – used to finish their stories with: ‘This is my story, I’ve told it, and in your hands I leave it’ (2005, p.xxv). Emma Donoghue transforms this to: ‘This is the tale you asked for, I leave it in your mouth’ (1997, p.228). Perhaps, ultimately, the fairy tale’s ability to adapt is embedded in this idea. That a tale is given to us all, but the words will sit differently on our tongues, tasting novel to each person; that tale will be repeated, reproduced in manifold renderings each time it is told, each time it trips from diverse lips. Perhaps the possible adaptations of fairy tales are as many and varied as the number of people who might tell them, passing them on, changed and shifted, Chinese-whisper fashion, generation after generation.           

The fairy tale is fluid, shaping to the teller’s needs; its communal nature means it is constantly shared and in that sharing it is invariably, however infinitesimally, changed for we all have tales in our mouths.

When the fairy tale is told again and again, when it changes, it fragments. It becomes a new story-tile in a greater mosaic of the fairy tale tradition. What I have done with Sourdough is recreate this on a smaller scale – Sourdough is a kind of model for how stories are retold and changed, and how they fit into a larger framework, calling on and re-shaping the community’s collective memories. The reader’s memories of old fairy tale forms and traditions allow them to interact with, relate to and comprehend the newer forms.

I have endeavoured to put Novalis’ idea of a higher form of fairy tale – one produced when meaning and comprehension are embedded in the tale – in to action (2007). I have tried to take my stories beyond the traditional ‘flat’ fairy tales with no character development, only a moral and a pat happily-ever-after, while still allowing the reader to know they are in a fairy tale and thereby to access all the cultural capital – or contextual encyclopaedia (Chambers, 1987) – that is attached to the form. I have tried to take my characters and plots beyond the ordinary, the expected, in order to create Novalis’ ideal. The selection of the fairy tale, then, for the Sourdough tales is not coincidental, but rather deliberate. The fairy tale, with its wealth of accreted meaning, provides the most appropriate configuration for the performance and display of the ideas about memory utilised in the structure and content of Sourdough (to be examined further later) – a happy meeting of form and content.

I shall discuss further the differences between short stories and novels later in this exegesis (in Part Three: Mosaic) but one of the important points to note here feeds directly into my choice of the fairy tale form. A short story (like a fairy tale) is meant to be comparatively brief; it is a slice of life, a slice of time. Unlike a novel it does not have the luxury of many divergences, many characters, or many plot twists. Where one is constrained by length, an economy of words is at its strongest when a writer can utilise terms and phrases that are already imbued with meaning: tropes and motifs.

Fairy tales use these as shorthand codes for readers. These can be traced back to customs and practices and habits that held sway when the tales first originated. Although these may no longer be current, a reader will recognise stock characters such as kings, queens, helpers, wicked stepmothers. Figures such as trolls, sprites, elves, giants, werewolves, ghost and spirits were all figures of belief to older, more credulous societies. We may not believe in these figures, but if we encounter them in a fairy tale, we know what they mean, what they stand for – indeed, we expect them to appear. Standard plot devices and themes such as stolen brides, royal succession, sibling rivalry, child abandonment, transformation (willing or otherwise), talking animals and supernatural figures are recognisable as recurring tropes (Zipes, 2006). As an author, I know I can write of a wolf in the woods and tap into all the ideas that adhere to that image: fear of wild beasts, fear of the untamed, the dangers of leaving the path.

One of the traditional motifs of fairy stories is the child who has been lost, stolen, abandoned or otherwise separated from family and community – “Hansel and Gretel”, “Molly Whuppie”, “The Pied Piper”, “The Kintalen Changeling”, and “The Kantele Player”, are but a few examples. This breaking of bonds either familial or communal does not seem to have much deep psychological effect on the characters ? this is because a traditional fairy tale is not about character development. It is about lessons and morality and entertainment. Traditional fairy tales tend to work to a formula that minimises reflection and memory – characters do not ruminate on their abandonment issues and often when recalcitrant parents are reintroduced at the end of the story, they are forgiven (“Donkeyskin”, “Hansel and Gretel”); fairy tale children seem to be ceaselessly kind and compassionate. Fairy stories begin with once-upon-a-times and an adventure happens, with life occurring very much ‘in the moment’. The lost child, whether denigrated younger son, abused stepdaughter, disinherited lad, ugly but clever girl, eventually comes to the end of the tale and earns a (not always) happily-ever-after. The effect is somewhat flat. There is no delving into the psychic trauma that surely must accompany being sundered from family or community environment.

As I wrote Sourdough and Other Stories I realised that I was attempting to address this very lack – what memories did fairy tale children carry with them, conscious or otherwise? Surely these memories are painful, fragmented, fractured? Surely they resurface? If my work not only incorporated but reflected this kind of fragmented or fractured memory – a tale made up of other tales – the effect would be richer, more textured. A single text, made of parts that told not simply one story, but many. A multifaceted fairy tale where memory ? fractured and refracted ? could play a central part.

Possibly one of the reasons for the lack of ‘memory’ in traditional fairy tales is the fact that there are no secrets that remain hidden for very long. False brides are revealed (“White Bride, Black Bride”, “The Goose Girl”, “Maid Maleen”), as are false heroes (“The Golden Bird”, “The Two Brothers”) ? the fairy tale is aimed at an ending, directed to a limited temporal horizon. A fairy tale is a straight corridor; there are no corners where things might hide.

The more I wrote and the more I thought about memory, the more I realised that I was not simply working with ideas of everyday memories – personal histories and the things we know we know – but something more. The stories I was creating were to be portals for the reader ? they were to function, not as voluntary memories (the details we are easily able to call up on demand) but as involuntary memories. Or, more precisely, the stories were not only analogues for involuntary memories but also doorways into them. The involuntary memory disrupts the flow of the durée and the story-tile was intended to do the same: act as a fictional analogue of the involuntary memory, pulling the reader through time to a place that was both past and present, and into spaces where other memory relationships were examined.

Esther Salaman wrote about involuntary memories ? the ones that come upon us unbidden and bring with them the sensations we felt at the time we first experienced the events that caused the memory ? in A Collection of Moments: ‘There is another kind of memory of experiences, which comes unexpectedly, suddenly, and brings back a past moment accompanied by strong emotions, so that a “then” becomes a “now”’ (1970, p.11). These can be tripped by a smell, a sound, a location – their very nature is that they are unexpected and intense. Salaman also describes these involuntary memories thus: ‘My memories of childhood are like scenes lit up by sheets of summer lightning as one speeds in a train through the night’ (1970, p.8)  In using the short story form, I was creating this real-life experience, an intense tale that brought with it quick, acute sensations. My short stories, fairy tale forms they may be, are intended to capture that same unexpectedness as the strike of an involuntary memory for the characters in the texts and also for the readers who will experience, in the reading of these tales, that same sense of sudden connection. And in that sense of connection, they will also recognise a ‘portal moment’, when they are pulled into the tale.

I am telling fairy tales but I still want my reader to suspend their disbelief and follow me as I stray from the path. Working in the genre of speculative fiction – which, as Wilkins observes, deals ‘openly with that which is fantastic and unfamiliar. Speculative fiction, as its name suggest, speculates in a fictional way on things that are not true’ (2011) – I am writing ‘make-believe’. I still want a reader’s belief because it is that belief which keeps said reader engaged in the tale I am telling. I am very aware that even though I am writing fairy tales I am not writing stories for children. The fact that a traditional fairy story does not examine the psychological effects of trauma on a stolen child is one of the things that flags such tales as ‘for children’. In writing a fairy tale for adults, I must add something more: I must make the fairy tale credible in some way. To do this, I am examining the effect of psychological trauma – of what William James referred to as ‘thorns in the spirit’ (1898, p.199). I am attempting to ensure that my stories have an emotional realism that is convincing. For example, in “Sister, Sister”, the effects of Faideau’s traumatic childhood are on display in the man he has become; in “The Bones Remember Everything”, Ingrid’s loose grasp on her will to live is the result of her previous experiences. I want to achieve what Freud refers to when he says ‘the story-teller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’ (1997, p.228.).

Realistically, a child stolen away and separated from the natal memories, the memories of childhood and the family group, is going to be traumatised. Even though the memory may be forgotten or repressed it still remains in the subconscious and continues to work within, whether it is remembered or not. From the point of view of a writer who explores the depths of a character’s psyche, I know that being abandoned or lost or stolen away is going to have a deeply scarring effect on a character, be they abandoned child or outcast adult. Not all the Sourdough tales are about lost children: some use adult protagonists who are lost or exiled from their families or communities to examine the effects on grown-ups of the loss of a sense of belonging. Being able to show this in my stories adds emotional realism to my work – if a reader can empathise with a character’s situation (even if that character occurs within a fantasy or fairy tale setting), then the reader is more likely to be engaged and to believe. I wanted my characters to be believable and to activate the reader’s empathy. If I want to take my story beyond a mere conte de fées where everything can be made better by magic, then I need to show how being lost, abandoned or stolen affects my characters. This makes my characters real and rounded and credible – be they witch, princess, mother, murderess or troll-wife – and lifts them beyond the kind of wallpaper characters which inhabit traditional fairy tales. When a reader reads Theodora’s flight through the city to save her child, when they flee along the unlit passageway in the catacombs, I want them to feel her fear, her hope, her determination. If this convinces them, even for a moment that there really is a troll-wife hot on their heels then I have succeeded.

The other means of embedding an idea of realism in my fiction – in order to convince a reader to suspend their disbelief – is to do what Wilkins in her chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing (2011) describes as immersing the reader in the everyday ? in the recognisable ordinary before introducing the extraordinary/fantastic elements. An example of this is below, from Kelly Link’s The Faery Handbag:

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and t-shirts and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

            Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds worth of prom dresses – a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring – for eight dollars. I go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

            The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

            Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true (2005, p.2).

The very ordinariness of the first two paragraphs makes the reader comfortable. The third paragraph introduces the idea that this may not be an ordinary handbag and the fourth lets us know unequivocally that we are no longer in the everyday. A close reading of this quote also shows that Link has very subtly evoked old fairy tale traditions with the line ‘a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring’ – in one version of “Donkeyskin” the princess asks for a dress so fine it can pass through a ring, in another, so fine it can be carried around in a walnut shell.  Before we can get to the jumping off point for the introduction of the fantastic elements, however, we must be firmly lodged in the comfort of the everyday.

In writing a fairy tale I have some leeway – the ‘everyday’ for this genre is quite set. Forests, mountains, castles, towers, caves and within these settings the reader knows they will find something different: witches, trolls, wolves that speak, fairies, princesses and the like. The willing suspension of disbelief is already hardwired into the reader of the fairy tale; these locations and tropes and motifs are familiar. Freud in his essay on “The Uncanny” considers the myriad meanings of the word unheimlich (‘uncanny’) and it is interesting to note that he states quite categorically that ‘In fairy stories feelings of fear – including therefore uncanny feelings – are ruled out altogether’ (1997, p.229). It is possible that this is because the fairy tale is so familiar to us that it has lost any sense of unheimlich – as Freud says ‘We adapt our judgment to the imaginary reality imposed on us by the writer, and regard souls, spirits and ghosts as though their existence had the same validity as our own has in material reality.’ In short, we do not regard the fairy tale as, in Schelling’s words ‘everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’ (quoted by Freud, 1997, p.199).

A further observation: heimlich is described variously in Freud’s essay as homely, familiar, tame – but one of the quotes he considers is this one by Gutzkow: ‘Oh, we call it “unheimlich”; you call it “Heimlich”. Well, what makes you think that there is something secret and untrustworthy about this family?’ (1997, p.198). This implies that sometimes there is a fine line between the familiar and the uncanny. What Gutzkow taps into is the notion that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive – that which is heimlich, familiar, can become unfamiliar, unsafe and dangerous. I find this idea particularly apposite to the territory of the Sourdough stories, where the home and the family are not heimlich – in fact in this universe, the home and the family are frequently the most dangerous, and therefore unheimlich, places in terms of risks to the characters. Sourdough brings to the fore one of the very things glossed over in traditional fairy tales. My creative work seeks to go some way towards rehabilitating the sense of the uncanny in fairy tales.

In contrast, the old form of the oral folk tale would not be thus (heimlich) – such tales were dynamic and fluid, changing with the needs of the teller, being recounted to an audience more credulous than today’s readers, and therefore perhaps out of Freud’s ‘realm of fiction [where] many things that are not uncanny … would be so if they happened in real life’ (1997, p.227). So in times past, the oral tales would seem to be recounting real life possibilities and fears – and might have had this very quality of unheimlich, which is missing from the written fairy tale. Therefore it is in the area of emotional realism that I endeavour  to make my mark with a reader by examining the thorns in the spirits of my fairy tale heroines, and through this inviting the reader into the emotional space of the narrative and to participate in the uncanny space of involuntary memories.

Each story is told from a first person, present tense point of view – this makes the story more immediate and personal, and it enables the reader to move into and experience it. Use of the first person narrator will be discussed in more detail later in this document, but suffice to say that reading the ‘I’ puts a reader into the shoes of the protagonist and enmeshes them into her feelings, memories, actions and events as she sees and lives them – it also parallels the journey the writer undertakes while writing to ‘get into the skin of the creature’ as Henry James would have it (2011, p.37). In Sourdough a character’s story is not simply told in one tale – they may appear as the protagonist in one story, only to later reappear either as a minor character in another tale, or as a character about whom yet another character tells an anecdote. While a full life story is never unfolded, the effect of layering details produces a richer, more textured tale – each story is a tile piece in a mosaic, with the whole being made up of a series of parts. Like life itself, the entire work is made up of brief moments.

If the collection forms a narrative ‘building’, then the effect in my mind is that the telling of each story is something akin to a light going on to highlight the rooms of that building, one at a time. Similar, perhaps, to the effect of how author Georges Perec moves his reader around the building of La Vie: Mode d’Emploi (1978) ? each chapter takes place in a different apartment reached by the knight’s move in chess. Or, indeed similarly and perhaps more appropriately, to Salaman’s ‘scenes lit up by sheets of summer lightning’. With Sourdough, I had in mind the effect of memories occurring in a scattered fashion, with the sudden illumination that happens when an involuntary memory strikes. The subsequent roll-out of other stories is akin to one memory triggering another in turn, each intense, unexpected and imperfect. The design aims at working on the reader’s intelligibility and emotions as much as the characters in the stories.

The writing of the Sourdough mosaic was a practice-led project. As I wrote, the same sensations experienced by the characters in the stories also occurred to me as each story spark flared into being. This intensified, and as connections between story-tiles became, if not clear, then at least less obscure, the sensation felt similar to the process of experiencing an involuntary memory. I wondered, further, if I could recreate this sensation for the reader, and so the research question, ‘Can a writer use the structural possibilities of the mosaic text to create a fictional work that is an analogue of an involuntary memory?’ emerged out of the creative work. The creative work itself is a form of ‘making strange’ as Woods would have it – taking and remaking what is already there, in the same manner as a visual mosaic might be created from already existing elements or artefacts. In writing Sourdough I am interacting with and interrogating a very old form, that of the fairy tale, but I am also attempting to remake it, to give it a new life by adding the dimension of memory to it, one which resonates as much with the reader of the tales as with the characters in it. In this reworking, this making anew, I am engaging in Woods’ ‘potentially disturbing, unnerving performance culminating in something refashioned, remade, or newly made, or perhaps differently made’ (2007).

My research question is a by-product of the act of creation. I am not a writer who thinks ‘I wish to write a story about blah.’ I am a writer who is struck by an image or a first line, a character or a voice ? the spark is random and unexpected and triggered by any number of things ? rather like an involuntary memory. “The Navigator” sprang from having looked up too quickly and seen the blue, blue sky and suffering a somewhat vertiginous sense of flying and falling. “Sourdough” began as I contemplated the art of making bread. “Ash” came as a result of seeing a photograph of the Traitor’s Gate in the Tower of London. “A Good Husband” has its origins in walking past a Gothic clothing shop in Fortitude Valley while on the way to a friend’s wedding, and seeing the beautiful ball dresses in the window. “Lavender and Lychgates” is embedded in the involuntary memory (sparked by a photo of a church) of looking up into the shadowy roof of a lychgate in the UK a few years ago.

The exegesis acts as a companion piece to Sourdough and Other Stories, and is a critical essay which considers the theoretical, critical and contextual foundations of the creative work, the significance of collective and involuntary memories and their use in the fairy tale form, and the writerly tekne used in the writing of the mosaic novel. Once the creative work was done, the next matter for consideration was establishing the best means to explore the research question. Like Malinowitz ‘I discovered that my interest in literature was catholic rather than specialized, a writer’s interest, not a scholar’s’ (2003, p.307), so I looked to the essay to be ‘a haven for the private, idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble’ (Sanders, 1988, p.33). The essay offered me the chance to reflect on what had come out of the creative work, to mediate on the challenges I had faced in my writing and what I had been trying to achieve – a place where I felt my writer’s voice would be best heard.

Hopefully, this essay shows Bolt’s ‘movement in thought itself.’ (2004, n.p.). The cumulative effect of the creative and exegetical works should be that of a dialogue between the two components – or as Bakhtin puts it  a ‘plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices’ (1984, p.6) – each text informing the other and providing alternate but complementary lenses with which to interrogate the research question. This idea of a dialogue between the two ‘voices’ of the creative and critical works is reflected in the mosaic nature of Sourdough, with each story-tile in dialogue with the others, forming perhaps such a multi-voiced work that it may create a kind of choir of voices, each singing to the other.

 

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