Graphite Glory

"You smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you are wearing a dirty old paper bag. Come back when you are dressed like a real princess." From The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch .

It was a hard fight. I worked through the night, which became morning, which became afternoon, and the next evening, and then the next night, and the next morning. I worked through the rattling of recycling bins from my neighbour’s house, their exploding fireworks and music; through countless cups of coffee so strong I had to take anti-acids; through two pasta meals, ten cups of hot water, a peanut butter-honey-banana sandwich, and a grand total of 8 hours sleep in three days – and as I slept I dreamt of a whale biting me in half. My head and chest swam to the shore but never reached it, because I swam back to get my legs, which sank. At that point someone called me Jonah (not Ishmael) and I could see lights emerge on continents surrounding the sea – in this dream the continents surround the sea instead of sea surrounding them. I woke up and went back to the computer, made more coffee, started a new chapter, lamented the cheesiness of my fiction but made peace with the fact that I...

"In Paula , you write that you were a solitary child who made up for her loneliness with imagination. That question takes us back to the one you asked before, the one about the labyrinth and the facing mirrors. From the time I was very young, as long as I can remember, I have felt that the world is magic, that there are two realities: one that's palpable, visible, quotidian, solar, and the other one, the night reality of secrets, shadows, uncontrollable passions - a lunar reality. And I also sense those two planes in my body. There is the person everyone sees, the one reflected in mirrors, but inside that body, organs are pulsing, hormones floating, dreams and children gestating; memory lies there, mysterious emotional and chemical processes hidden to the human eye. Inside me is the fish I was when I was gestating, the infant I was at birth, the seven-year-old girl, the mother of twenty, the mature woman I am today, the corpse I will be. Sometimes, as if in a fresco, I ca...