The title arrives
As the early morning sun warms the window blinds, I slowly become conscious of my breath. I gather awareness around three words moving inside me with the rising and falling of my chest. The words are a title for a short story. A story, which has found me in this very moment of time between slumber and getting out of bed. Three words resting in my body. I hear them almost in a backward listening kind of way. They are coming from deep within.
It is with a gentle knowing and a touch of excitement I acknowledge the title has arrived. Like many times before, dialogue follows shortly after. I hear them talking and move my ear a little closer to the pillow like an eavesdropper leaning into the cracks in the wood of the door trying to hear a conversation on the other side. I smile. The tenderness of their words touch my heart as their talking shapes them. It begins with an outline and then everything is quickly filled with the colour and details of their gestures. It is not so much a visual but a feeling. I feel how their words land. How they touch. When they touch. I know the emotion behind their eyes. I feel what they have lived before as well as their journey to come. It is not just their words but the pauses between that hold me.
I keep breathing as the story takes shape. I know not to rush it. Sometimes I swing my legs out of bed and know there is nothing to do but open my computer and write. The story has decided it is time. Other days I give in to the need to carry the words with me as I go about my day. Allowing the story to take shape in the steam of the shower, the vibration of the car engine as I drive somewhere, or in the back of me as the front of me natters with the world. The story gestates inside until it is ready for this world. Short or long, whatever it needs before the words pour out of me and settle in their place on the page. Some land where they ought to be forever. Others land to hold purpose temporarily and are moved around, deleted or replaced. They don't mind.
In January of this year, a title with a story percolating in my body, switched and suddenly created a new one. The title abandoned its former story for something more urgent to be told. I have not had this experience before but I did not resist. The presence of those in the story became very strong and so I wrapped my dressing gown around me with urgency that day and went straight to writing.
Whisper me awake had arrived and there was no going back. A three-word title holding the soma of a story needing to be told. Whisper me awake is my chapter contribution to the third edition of Anthologia, a beautiful gathering of writing by women, of which I am once again honoured to be a contributing author.
As well as being the title, Whisper me awake is the first line of dialogue. The first spoken words of the story. Words from a mother to her son. It is also the palm of a hand holding the reader with great care, carrying them through the story. It is the collective ache and the poignant desire of everyone involved, on and off the page. Whisper me awake is also the marrow of a poem which closes.
I do not remember much of the writing. But I know, when it was done, I was out of breath.
