Category: Chorus Blog

2/7/2019 0 Comments

Chorus blog: Love Letters

a rustling of love letters
by Alex Simand

I have a shoe box of knickknacks and love letters under my bed. turkey feathers. bandannas with maps printed on them. watercolors of song lyrics. little fossils of affection. they’re growing dust motes like mohawks spurting from their scalps and a bundle of spurned kitten fur and I wonder if I’m a neglectful father or if I should toss them into the trash next to last week’s lasagna. why do we keep these little trinkets of past loves? do we betray our futures by keeping truncated tokens of adoration within arms reach? I don’t know. I don’t know most things, but least of all of all this.

the last time I moved apartments, the box spilled out and I stood agape at the flood at my feet. arms spread with helplessness. I couldn’t scoop it up any more than I could hold a puddle in my palm. what do I do with every feeling I’ve ever had? what does it mean to have collected the sand from a beach for another person? there it was, spilling out of the topless jar that held, seeping into the hardwood, becoming hardwood, fading it, softening it, filling it with rot from the inside out. my skull is as squishy as a newborn’s head.

I have a rustling shoe box under my bed. from time to time, it slides out as if to say, hey. hey, remember that time you were tender? yes. remember when you were loved so hard they wanted to leave a mark of it? yes. I want the box to push its lid off like a boiling pot. I want to feel it ticking under my sleep. I want it to elect its next president, someone kind, like what a whisper looks like on a page. move over turkey feathers. there’s always room for one more.

que lastima, we cannot burn forever
unless our energy remembers
each other’s embers

Comfort Food
by Brennan DeFrisco

a cookbook is a love letter--

tastes of bread yeast when tossed, taffy when pulled
spun sugar brought up from Georgia

smells like love that never stops simmering
when we cook together
if we sizzle in the kitchen,

should we then burn the bed?
blue pilot light of our flammable bodies
spread across the stove top, constantly clicking

que lastima, we cannot burn forever
unless our energy remembers
each other’s embers

when the wind won’t lend itself to words
& the frost-covered burner remembers
& I become a kettle, screaming your name

pans as warm as your palms
cuffing the back of my neck
as we take turns stirring, you whisper,

B,
you’re the only recipe
I never want to share

[sticker by a Philadelphia sticker graffiti artist]

post-it notes
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

There are days when I’ve loved you like a mirror and I’m hypnotized; you’re my reflection’s self. The other night, laying on the couch opposite-ended like the grandparents in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you took a photo of me with your phone when I wasn’t looking and texted it to me. We were playing time machine, which is when minutes don’t tick by while under a blanket that resembles a Hershey bar. Sometimes boredom and comfort look very similar.

I looked old, and dry, and tired. I didn’t love you like the mirror of me having learned to thank my parts as I stared at the phone. Suffocating and sweating under the burden of the blankets, we became strangers.

I’ve been known to love you like we’re halved. Asymmetrical. Pieced together to make a whole. We’ve replaced letters with texts and the one on my phone with my face yellow in the lamp’s shade filled me with an unrecognizable feeling. The closest emotion to give it is loss. How can looking at me make me feel the loss of you? We aren’t under the blanket anymore. In the days following, sometimes I would look at the texted photo of the strange woman.

I have piles of post-it notes I’ve written to myself periodically throughout the years scattered all over my home in various rainbows of aging beige. Memories of my moments, and when I read them I can see how I actually look. Or at least how I think I look. In the mountains of fluttered sticky notes, sometimes I see a shadow of our asymmetrical features never quite touching. I need to take the time to read them in order to see this. I don’t do that often.

I hold a random bundle of post-it notes to my chest to staunch the river’s flow of loss, like the loss of years and the loss of youth and the loss of moments I forgot to commit to the notes to remember so then I’ve forgotten them. Footnotes to a life lived as a time machine.

Years ago I set-up a calendar alert for Valentine’s Day and made it seem like it was a love letter from a stranger. On the day I got it, I thought maybe you snuck on my phone and programmed the surprise. Then I remembered. In the years passing, I would send myself candy grams during office Valentine’s Days. And I never forgot who values me the most.

I delete the text you sent me.

Love Letters
by J. Sam Williams

Are my love letters filled with truth or lies?
Do they cause highs or cries?
I would surmise, that you agonize over words that jeopardize yet hypnotize.

While you demonize, I attempt to moralize
While I revise, you militarize.
Is it you, or is it me that dramatize and oversize the problems that are pint-size?

I write letters that reprise and justify
But they only terrorize and galvanize
I write to apologize, you say I only finalize and eulogize, not humanize

I try to revitalize and romanticize
But you don’t empathize or recognize,
So, our relationship is an illegitimate enterprise, so I internalize and compartmentalize.

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11/26/2018 0 Comments

Rust Chorus Blog

When Your Life Oxidizes
Levi Rogers

Rust:
NOUN
mass noun
1A reddish- or yellowish-brown flaking coating of iron oxide that is formed on iron or steel by oxidation, especially in the presence of moisture.

He imagined a different life for himself. That was the truth. The truth that kept him at night. It was this truth that had made him a heavy drinker, made it impossible for him to quit smoking. He knew it now, finally, after all the years in therapy—and it was such a stupid and childish realization. One that everyone, eventually, comes to. The life he was living was not the one he had imagined. Yawn.
The funny thing was the specific way in which this supposed imaginary life differed from his real one. For all the main set pieces were still there—a caring spouse, great kids, a creative job, a funky house in the Alberta Arts district. But little things were different, ever so slightly. In his imaginary life his kids cried less, he’d quit his job to write books, and they owned their house rather than renting. He was less prone to rage or existential anxiety. His partner did the dishes and picked their socks up off the floor. His partner was thinner. He was thinner. For of course it wasn’t just his partner who’d lost track of their physical self (though he did like to blame him for such things) it was both of them.
In this different life he imagined for himself he never got a flat bike tire or ran out of food in the fridge. He never got angry and never once did he curse at his kids or punch a hole in their black Subaru above the gas tank when the latch didn’t work. He didn’t masturbate as much, he’d quit smoking, and cut his weekly whiskey intake from two bottles to one. Instead, he toured the country promoting a modestly selling book from a top publisher and donated half the proceeds to Black Lives Matter and We the Dreamers. In this imaginary life, everything sparkled and shone with a golden hue. Like a piece of sheet metal freshly manufactured, glinting in the sun. But his real life had been exposed to moisture and lay covered in rust.

These thoughts made him question his relationship with his husband. As if his dreams were already oxidizing. Their dreams. From silver to red to brown. The corrosion of minerals as a metaphor for emotional intimacy. His romantic expectations versus reality. Yet it was him and him alone who’d let the water seep in.

There’s a civilization of black mold on my windowpane that I can’t bring myself to bleach because at least it’s growing. At least it hasn’t reached the outer border of it’s possibility.

Bad Knees and How to Deal with Them
Alex Simand

I first noticed rust’s encroach when I was twelve and a beekeeper divined me with a pair of rods he mostly used for digging wells. Cross, they went at my knees, the metal like a sword unsheathed at my knobby prepubescent joints. What does it mean? I asked, but the beekeeper, a kind looking man with a massive white beard and mushroom dust under his fingernails, simply showed a sad smile and shook his head, jerking it in the direction of my father, who was rubbing ointment into his legs. I felt the inkling of a creak then, a future of bending for the sake of bending, forever at war with an arthritic atrophy I could never hope to keep at bay.

There are other forms of rust: a broken cuckoo clock on the wall of the dining room; days when the alarm clock sounds more like an apocalyptic siren; a job that seeps the blood from your face and leaves you gaunt and sunless. This, too, a battle of oils. Nobody wants to talk about how we’re all decomposing in plain sight but ignorance of nature is no excuse. Most days, my brain plays songs from my formative years on repeat, no matter how awful, no matter how Limp Bizkit, the last moment of absorption before we slammed closed the gates. Drinking a bottomless beer on a Wednesday because opiate is better than being buried alive like an infirm Edgar Allen.

Here are three coping strategies.

One. Move everyday with no sense of direction. Can’t build a cattle rut if you keep yourself to the brambles of routine. Climb a hill with no view. Eat a burrito under the bed.

Two. Make up words for feelings that will never be relevant in conversation. Trugology: the act of empathizing with the toxoplasmosis that inhabits your skull. Dervilbask: the task of carrying a pen tucked under your chin. Make friends with the random. Shakespeare was probably an alcoholic.

Three. Dress up for bed. Tuxedo jacket and hound’s-tooth stockings tucked under a wool blanket. Listen to music that makes your ears screech in protest. Preferably something old and scratchy as the wool blanket. Try sleeping outside. It seems to have worked for the Soviet children, though they don’t usually live long enough to truly test the bounds of theory.

There’s a civilization of black mold on my windowpane that I can’t bring myself to bleach because at least it’s growing. At least it hasn’t reached the outer border of it’s possibility. I want to see how far it goes, even as my life atrophies like a duffel bag stuffed into the back of a closet. In the duffel bag lives: soccer socks with logos of cats on them; a pair of broken rainbow candles I got from the Middle East, back when travel was still possible; a slick coat of lubricant from either axel grease or Astroglide, can’t decide. Maybe that’s all there is as we come to rest, a collection of totems we watch from our periphery while the world turns to dusk.

Rust Queen
Marie Marandola

“It’s called a patina,” the mirror sneered
as she frowned at her tarnished reflection.
“And it’s very dignified.” She absently scratched
at the aged silver-glass, pursed and unpursed her lips, but the skin
around her mouth preferred the pursing.
Like snowmelt—how strange, when in her mind, she remained
as smooth and icy as she’d ever been. A wish, a—
Well. Perhaps it was for the best, the not seeing.
The mirror made her sad enough
with his murky new blossoming where once
he’d known to only show her proof of youth. And what good
would vengeance do? Even the daggers in the knife block
had grown rusty, and no amount of scrubbing
(she’d tried—oh, how she’d tried) would shine
them back to what they were. Whose heart
would they pierce now,
save her own?

The mirror made her sad enough
with his murky new blossoming where once he’d known to only show her proof of youth. And what good
would vengeance do?

Untitled
Liz Bergland

Louisa hated these trips to the surface. The masks smelled like feet, and the canned oxygen tasted like plastic. The recycled air and close quarters on the station weren’t much better, but at least they weren’t pressed against your face. At first, going down to the planet had been worthwhile. They searched for survivors, even found a few people who had managed to seal themselves in with enough plants to keep the carbon cycle going. Now, though, they just looked for salvage —electronics, fuel, medical supplies, rare plastics—and food. Anything refrigerated had rotted long ago, and even the canned goods were inedible by now, but thanks to the station’s reconstituter all they needed was organic material. Without aerobic bacteria the bodies hardly decayed at all; they’d have all the flavorless protein goop they could eat for at least a few decades. “Look!” She looked up sharply at the urgency that broke through the tinny tone of her headset. Tetsuo was walking quickly towards the skeleton of a high-rise. They must’ve just started building it when the photosynthetic plague hit; it was little more than steel beams jutting into the sky. Like metal saplings, thought Louisa, trying to feel the sun. She caught up with him, breathing heavily as her space-atrophied muscles strained against the weight of gravity. “What?” He ran his gloved finger along one of the beams and held it up. The tip was a reddish-orange. “Rust,” he half-whispered. Louisa looked at the smear, uncomprehending. “Yeah, so?” Tetsuo’s full expression was hidden by the mask, but his eyes shone and the skin around them crinkled. “Rust means oxygen.” His voice creaked. “Oxygen.” She felt light-headed for a moment, then remembered to breathe again.

kola diviya
by Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

The rusty-spotted cat is tiny and streaky and rare; and I’m told that despite my interest, I won’t be able to adopt one. They live in Sri Lanka and India, and they make their homes in the rapidly diminishing deciduous forests. Obtaining one would be impossible, or so it’s explained to me by the animal shelter on Morris Street. But, I mean, I can make a forest of my apartment if necessary. Fill it with trees and we can live underneath one at the end of the growing season. I’m told the tiny wild cats are protected, but I can protect them here, too.

My current cats are big as hell and none of them are spotted with circles of iron oxide - none of them would want to venture into a tree or cave to escape a predator or, more importantly, a responsibility. My cats are average-sized wards of my wood-paneled home, they ask a lot of questions about my plans for the future in raspy sounding mews whenever I call out sick from work. But just like the rusty-spotted cat, there is so little I know about myself - so the fact that almost nothing is known about rusty-spotted cats works for me just as well. We could live together in anonymity comfortable in not knowing. Spend the days in the vegetation of my deciduous home experiencing the shelter of a solitary life. We’d only emerge at night to hunt out the snacks in the fridge and talk to one another about dreams, make meaning out of the stars blistering in through my ceiling. And the joined unity would be enough - they can keep their secrets and I can keep mine, and the little pack of mini cats and I could sleep in a circle in cavernous regions of our home.

So, I’ll keep hoping that one day I can adopt one, and we can protect one another.

Untitled image
Cassandra Panek

third image is William Cheselden's Osteographia
fourth and fifth image are Illustrations of Madness: James Tilly Matthews and the Air Loom

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8/13/2018 0 Comments

Stone the Crow Chorus Blog

J. Sam Williams

Let us buck the old traditions and bring in the new. Crows, so long associated with the evil one—or one evil—with death, bad luck, and the afterlife should be seen as birds of intelligence, of remembrance, and of consequences.

I read an autobiographical story about a woman who once mistreated a murder of crows and they never forgot it. To the best of my ability, this is how I remember the story:
The murder antagonized her with flybys and much cawing. But this woman tried to make amends. She started to feed the murder. The crows became quiet and still and eventually she would be outside in her backyard and they would fly overhead dropping shiny objects near and around her.

These shiny objects represent the crows acceptance and warmth towards this woman. Does that sound like a death omen? Does that sound like the harbinger of evil? No. We should all love the murders flying about more.

Cassandra Panek - High Dive

As a fledgling, I would leap from the twisted boughs of trees
Wings tucked tight to the bulge of my hollow breast
And force my black eyes open as the earth rushed up to embrace me.

I’m older now, canny enough to soar.
I throw myself off mountains
plummeting, screaming the thin air into my lungs.

One day I won’t unfold my wings.

Marie Marandola - BAGGU for Irving Farm Coffee Roasters

I bought the bag with the crows on it at the station coffee kiosk, back when I was still learning to ride trains by myself.

“Do you know the difference between a raven and a crow?” the cashier asked.

I shook my head.

“Crows are the ones that travel in groups,” he said. “They menace and caw. Whereas ravens are bigger, with hooked beaks. You only ever see one or two ravens in one place. And the sound they make is more of a low croak, or a growl.”

My coffee was free that day. The bag’s been with me since.

A friend mentioned recently that, although he doesn’t mind the single life, he misses having someone to make breakfast for.

I don’t. These days, I like waking up by myself in undiluted darkness. When all I can hear is the murmur of Law and Order reruns circling my neighbor’s TV while she sleeps—and only if I strain to hear it.

If I strain to hear it, I can remember a time when my skin ached from lack of touch. When I cackled and flapped about with need. When my own breath wasn’t enough to circulate love through me. A lonely girl with a cache to fill, wandering hazy through an echoing commuter hub like a half-remembered dream.

Now, awake, I brew strong tea and test my voice to the sound of no one snoring. I paint my eyelashes into black, long-feathered wings.

Outside, dawn breaks.

I skip breakfast altogether. I want to live on air.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella - Rock Gardens

Crows will kill and eat a newborn lamb if given the opportunity, and despite their silky feathers and sharp intelligence, I can’t forgive them for that.

However, I don’t recommend tossing rocks at them either to shoo away from gentle livestock. Leave stones for land barriers in gardens, or collect them for a singular and then communal collection of wannabe flowers for a rock garden – like the one I had in my backyard growing up. Salty mini-boulders collected from the lip of the ocean, a shore filled with primordial pillars, the littlest of who now live in the back of a home almost forgotten somewhere on Long Island.

Save your stones.

I wonder if there is a bible passage, or a portion of another religious text, that mentions bird and beast cohabitating in harmony. Crows nesting in the curls of a sheep’s back, golden threads of sunshine turning the coal-feathers into oil slicks of blue. A heavenly place of accord – an illustration in a Little Golden Book.

There are no farms, or sheep, no crows where I live - in the middle of a city – I’m removed from pastures; and I am neither friend nor foe to beaked predators (I don’t see them often. But when/if I do are they an omen of murder? Not like how a group of them is called a murder, but on the rare occasion I see a crow I wonder if they are carrying death on their glossy backbones).

***

But a squirrel did fall out of a tree last night, a dead branch collapsing right behind me – small-limbed furry buddy body splayed on the pavement, and quaking like an earthquake was moving through its body.

My boyfriend, a hand at the small of my back pushing me forward, said, “that’s it for that squirrel.” But when we got to the front door, I stalled looking for cigarettes. Heard the posse of people who were paces behind us scream, “SQUIRREL!” at what I assumed was its poor lifeless body.

When my boyfriend went inside, I went hunting for its body.

As a child, in the same neighborhood with the backyard rock garden, I once found the body of a dead bird in the gutter. For days I would leave the bird leaves from a Linden tree, dried lily of the valley, and the mustard yellow chalky filament that would fall from the tree canopies as gifts. Like the bird and I were ancient Egyptians, I recognized its humanity in death.

I wanted to do the same for the squirrel.

But despite my search, the squirrel was gone. I looked under cars and in shrubs, climbed over a parking fence to see if some beast or burden dragged its corpse. No remains, no indication that a hurt ever happened with the exception of a cracked bough still on the sidewalk.

The squirrel – skirting death. Refuting postmortem gifts. So, I’m saving my rocks – that when lumped together would make a cairn – since no crow warned of a death on a thirsty Thursday night. For this moment, the squirrel is safe while the crow is absent – making plans to befriend lambs in their nurseries.

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5/10/2018 0 Comments

Wrecked Chorus Blog

[wrecked]
Marie Marandola

A man burned his house down
trying to kill a spider. The smudge
on my bathroom ceiling
is a shoeprint, left over from
the cockroach I couldn’t reach.
That was before I saw
the other, perched quietly
on my loofah’s soft pink folds.

It’s hard to be alone, but sometimes
harder not to be.

You light a cigarette,
say you want to quit--
and drinking. You want to cook
for yourself, believe in love,
feel something again. But I’ve watched you
listening to poetry
with your eyes closed.

You take the first drag, and the end of me
goes to ash.

Untitled
Caitlin Spies

Through mist, behemoths rise,
Skeletons strange and rough.
How could you be Sleepless here?

Moisture adheres to every scrap,
To everyone.

This moss grows, drink it in.
Touch a hand to the bark,
Come away cold, but wanting more.

Water turns to Thunder in this hidden cove.
Silken against skin.

The temptation is too much, I am too close.
Eyes closed, breathe the forest in.
Breathe in your air.

Droplets in my hair.

I open my eyes.
I am standing on a bridge.
Two lines, two lives.

The path divulged, and I, coward,
Choose nothing.
And go back the way I came.

Relationship Haiku
Levi Rogers

A self body bag
I wrapped for you, trekked with ropes
From the sea, perfect: wrecked.

[wrecked]
J. Sam Williams

Never been drunk. Never been wrecked. Never smoked weed or a cigarette. Emotional trauma wrecks me enough. Gluttony wrecks me enough. Lust wrecks me the most. Sin is my wrecker and death my destructor. Try and purge all from my mind. I don’t have time to focus on the rest.

Soak
Cassandra Panek

I float like pots and pans
Left overnight
In the dark I salt the water
But nothing will cleanse your greasy touch.

My body made of pith
Jane-Rebecca Cannarella

I am drunk on my mistakes and my love is a leather helmet. My body is made of pith and at every beginning and end, I supplicate my plant’s interior at the altar of my errors. Loneliness is a clay that has shaped me—fragile and brittle with a hollow inside. I plug my body with the frames of silt silhouettes that I melt into the void of my insides—I can almost see them for who they are. Mesmerized by their outlines, I devour them. Bodies that beg to live within me, I try to hold them to my figure forever.

Ceramics are breakable and every baked part of me is a splinter that once retained the bits of boys that lived in the gulch of my cavities. I am earthenware shards splayed across the kitchen floor. I am vials holding wet, salty, sand made-up of texts that go unanswered. Grind down the remaining parts of my body until it is gritty soil. Till me until I’m loam. And let the loneliness turn into a field where flowers are farmed.

living wreckless
Alex Simand

It’s funny how once you are whiplashed, it lives in your neck forever: that unshakeable kink, that muscle memory of scraping glass and crunching metal and torn jeans running along the concrete. I see it when I close my eyes, how close I was to departing, how close still, as the blood dripped down my leg and I picked pebbles from an exposed kneecap, hopped right back to a motorcycle that leaked oil, hopped up on adrenaline and the thrill of still being, and rode off. I should have been smarter, but there is no such thing as retrospect, which is an abstract concept best left for men with elbow patches.

I’ve lived so many alternate realities in which the white truck behind me did not stop, but instead ran over my body—thump thump—like a skunk’s slumping carcass on wine country’s winding one-lane highways. In which I was crushed by my own machinery. In which my arms were torn from their sockets, leaving me a chewed-up sock puppet waiting to be tossed in the trash. In which my ribs shattered into a million pieces like a plastic bag full of glass.

I should have expired, I think, that day. Carton of milk. Missing persons. A slumped slab of flesh in an ambulance. A wailing faraway relative. Instead, I have this mark where my knee used to be. I can feel through my scar tissue the part of my ivory I left in the asphalt. I pass the spot where it happened everyday on the way to work, unmaking myself, building a memorial for a moment that only finished partway.

photos supplied by Cassandra Panek with the exception of the last two

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2/2/2018 0 Comments

Shadow Work Chorus Blog

“Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten.” Neil Gaiman

Welcome to Shadow Work
Levi Rogers

When I hear the term “Shadows” I often think of The Nazgul, the Ringwraiths of Minus Morgul in Lord of the Rings who live in the shadowlands. Their black shadow cloaks and the fog they summon. Or of J.K. Rowling’s Dementors, based on her experience of depression. Or of Plato’s cave in which the shadows projected across the cave wall from the fire are an illusion of the real. I think of what Bane says to Batman in the The Dark Knight Rises: “I was born in the darkness, you merely adopted it.” Or of this marvelous essay by Gayle Brandeis on her shadow son: here.

I also think of the Enneagram, it’s notion of shadow work, and the exploration of my own shadow side. The Enneagram is a collection of nine, inter-related personality types that describe one’s psyche, modes of behavior, strengths and weaknesses in order to (hopefully) set you on the path to your true self. Each person has a specific type or number with a set of “wings.” When one is living within their numbers and wings, they are living in a healthy balance. However, each personality type also has a darker side, literally called a shadow side, which they must also learn to deal with. If one works through the Enneagram you soon learn that this shadow work becomes a necessary part of the process on the path to discovering your true self. Just because they’re called shadows doesn’t mean they’re bad or evil, like the aforementioned Ringwraiths; in fact, the Enneagram teaches that one must embrace their shadow side. We must embrace this shadow work. In our writing, in ourselves, in others even. This is Shadow Work. Let’s begin.

This is Shadow Work. Let’s begin.

My Shadow Self
Alex Simand

My shadow self is a gibbon with a sash strapped around her neck. When you ask about her ribbon she says she'll never tell about the gushing gash or the river that came before. Instagram means our wounds are medals, brown packages tied up with strings, bondage as beauty. My gibbon bares her teeth because, in the world of demented apes, molars are a mark of the bipolar, because, in the world of shadows, it's better to share your marrow than it is to trudge along with a club slung over your shoulder.

After dinner, my shadow gibbon drips onto the throw rug so we must put it out for the night, grip a rolled-up newsprint flat in the hand, though she whinnies and flees for the nearest tree. You can’t see her, but you know she’s there. You know she’s watching. That’s the thing about the shadow self: she’s precisely an Elf on the Shelf, except your mother cannot reach her, except your father will always blame you when she lands on parquet and it will be you who turns to smithereens.

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1/19/2018 0 Comments

How we spot the shadows: shadows in our favorite narratives

featuring cover from the illustrator FD Bedford
Marie: Peter Pan

I don’t think I’m allowed to let this theme pass us by without admitting that I’m obsessed with Peter Pan.

What started as a relatively normal childhood game of pretend, a play enacted and re-enacted with my mom’s best friend’s son and our collective team of younger brothers, has in my adult years turned into something much larger and deeper. No longer does my love of the story hinge on the possibility of flight, or my desire for eternal youth, or the availability of rad merchandise at Hot Topic; now, I’ve become steeped in its shadows as well.

For the story of Peter Pan is full of shadows, both literal (the boy’s shadow lost and regained at the beginning, the children’s silhouettes against the moon, the depths of the Neverland’s forests and jungles) and metaphorical. Wendy must stay home and darn socks by hearthlight while Peter and the boys whisk away on various adventures, and although she is arguably the story’s true protagonist, it is not for her that the book is named. As a woman, she exists only in the shadows of a world that favors men. In theatrical and movie versions of the tale, Mr. Darling and Captain Hook are traditionally played by the same actor, a casting choice that throws a pretty heavy Daddy-Issues shadow of its own.

But, what I find most interesting, is knowing that when J.M. Barrie was first creating this world and its characters, it wasn’t Peter with whom he most identified. Barrie wrote Captain Hook to be an embodiment of the darker parts of his own character: his insecurities, his temper, his fear of whom he might too easily become. The author and the villain even share the same first name: James.

And I, who was once a girl that dreamed of flying, feel that so hard.

As time wears on us, it’s so rare that we can see ourselves as light.

Instead, we shrivel in the shadows that we cast.

"Barrie wrote Captain Hook to be an embodiment of the darker parts of his own character: his insecurities, his temper, his fear of whom he might too easily become. The author and the villain even share the same first name: James. "

featuring the covers of the Ballantine editions
Sam: Lord of the Rings

My favorite use of shadow in a narrative has to be in Lord of the Rings. Both in the books and in the movies, the "Shadow of Mordor" is a vital piece to the narrative puzzle. Think, in LotR there is never a concrete villain. Sauron is just a magical eye (or cat butt) depending on who you ask. There are what amounts to faceless Orcs and some video-game-like bosses in Saruman and the Witch-king. All of these villains together make up the one true villain, the force that Frodo and Co. are fighting against—the power and influence of Mordor.

Tolkien's villain is nothing more than the idea of what is to come, the shadow of a future that will curse and kill everything Frodo loves. This is what makes the use of Shadow in LotR so effective. It's a looming presence that feels insurmountable. How do you kill an idea? You go to the source of the idea and refute it. The idea is of ultimate power, an evil-godlike dictator. The ring of power suggest to those who wear it that they can be that person, that they can use the power for good. But, as we learn, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And Frodo fails to refute this idea.

"It's a looming presence that feels insurmountable. How do you kill an idea? You go to the source of the idea and refute it. The idea is of ultimate power, an evil-godlike dictator."

‘Course—I'm not even going to bother saying “spoilers” ‘cause the books have been out for over 50 years and the movies for 15 years. The clumsy Gollum takes care of it by showing how that absolute power is self-destructive. The shadow of the future Mordor reign is vanquished. It's a wonderful metaphor for power and a great example of how the use of shadow in narratives can be riveting.

featuring covers from the Little, Brown and Company issue and the William Morrow & Company
Janie: Black is the Colour of My True Love’s Heart

When thinking of a work that utilizes shadows, this title is the first thing that came to mind, Black is the Color of My True Love’s Heart. It’s a mystery novel that I read when I was twelve while on vacation. Maybe it was the title, which would sorta indicate a utilization of color theory. And color theory makes me think of contrast and contrast makes me think about manipulating shadows and highlights in Photoshop.

I looked up the book and its plot, since the only things that have maintained since I first read it is the enthusiasm I had while devouring the whole book in one day and that it was a mystery. Everything else was relegated to the dense cloud of memory. As it turns out, I remember nothing of it. I was genuinely surprised when I read the plot—I had to re-read the plot twice to be, like, “there were folk musicians involved? I thought this was set in Victorian England? Is this actually the same book?” (It was).

And maybe that’s how shadow work unintentionally functions in this narrative. The plot of this mystery is now a mystery to me in my old(er) age. The only thing that has struggled through the shadows is the memory of enthusiasm and enjoyment while losing myself in the reading of this book. What creeps through the dust of one’s mind is reduced to a fragment, a feeling, a snapshot of a time that was lived and now not-lived.

This plot has been lost in the shadows of my mind for twenty-one years—maybe it’s time for me to bring it into the sunlight of remembrance again.

"The plot of this mystery is now a mystery to me in my old(er) age. The only thing that has struggled through the shadows is the memory of enthusiasm and enjoyment while losing myself in the reading of this book. What creeps through the dust of one’s mind is reduced to a fragment, a feeling, a snapshot of a time that was lived and now not-lived."

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How we spot the shadows: shadows in our favorite narratives

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