Tag Archives: bodyofwork

Talking to Yourself: MFK Fisher

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , ,

I have an abridged version of MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. The original version was written as a cookbook to stave the wolf of starvation from the door during World War II. It included such ideas as cooking a quiche with sawdust to stretch the recipe.


When she revisited the book sometime later, she included editorial comments in brackets suchly []. So that when I read How to Cook a Wolf, it included that recipe for stretching a recipe with sawdust to feed four and in brackets she included the line “if three are not your friends”.


The line struck me in the haven of my own mind. It was wryly funny, and darkly realistic, and yet. Her re-visitation of the work was something few artists are able to do, we believe, and yet the avenue is open to us all. Think of the painter who reuses a canvas to paint a portrait of a sunrise where once he had painted yet another portrait of his grieving wife. Letters were once written vertically and then horizontally to conserve paper.


A commentary to our past selves is a conversation with a now stranger. Be kind. Don’t light that draft on fire. It says something important, even if you are not the person now that it was speaking to when you wrote it.

Talking to Yourself: Mo Haydr

100 Day Project, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , , , ,

I first stumbled on Mo Haydr’s works when I was a poor, broke grad student haunting the local library in Leeds. My favorite sections were horror and crime, and Haydr’s work settled comfortably in both. One of the first books I read was Pig Island which made me, as a reader, pretty mad. I could respect what she was saying with the plot, but I could also respect that I had checked out a library book and could just shove it back in the return bin without remorse.


Years later, I read Wolf. It took the underlying young woman protagonist arc that was first mapped in Pig Island and said, well, yes, but what if the other characters did something a little differently? It was a good book on its own, but a fantastic counterpart to Pig Island. Even if I weren’t already a fan, as a writer I could really get behind the conversation taking place between the two works.


How freeing! To be able to have both timelines, the present and of course, the darkest timeline. Or perhaps, in creating a response timeline you may find you were already in the darkest timeline. In writing complete worlds, we aren’t bound to characters talking to each other. The entire structure of our universes unfold in new and different ways with a single, “But what if I did it a little differently this time.” Perhaps you learn that you have grown optimistic in aging or perhaps the person you become takes the patina of age as whatever the opposite of rose-colored glasses might be.


You can’t respond to yourself unless you’ve said something in the first place.