Janet Robertson

Issue No. 70, Autumn 2022

Featured Story

My Father's House

By Kidd Wadsworth

There is a picture that hangs in my father's house on the wall by my parent's bed. It’s a 16 x 20, black-and-white photograph of a four-year-old little girl wearing a sleeveless polka dot dress. She has a pixie haircut, and her eyes are uplifted to heaven. According to my parents, she also has the cutest smile they’ve ever seen.

When I was younger and my life consisted of going barefoot and growing frogs in coffee cans, I must have known who the little girl was. But time steals the memories of idyllic days, choosing instead to preserve drama and conflict.

What did I care about a picture?

At eleven my life radically changed. I grew three inches, morphing from “athletic superstar” to “complete klutz.” At dinner, I’d reach out for the salt and knock over the shaker. Mom put a coffee table under the chandelier in the family room, because I kept whacking my forehead on it. When I walked down the hall, I routinely knocked the pictures off the wall.

That year I attended a church summer camp with group showers. One of the counselors asked me, “Were you pregnant?”

“Pregnant? No ma’am, I’ve never been pregnant.”

“Really? I’ve never seen stretch marks like those on anyone who wasn’t.”

I’d never been shamed before.

I kept the puffy red stretchmarks across my hips covered up.

Eleven also introduced me to the word pimple. It’s such a stupid word, puffing out the lips: pimple, pimple…like the word is a kernel of corn popping out of the mouth. I didn’t have pimples. Those were things cheerleaders got when they were nervous. Is Leland going to invite me to homecoming?

I didn’t have pimples, I had puss-oozing holes that defied hours of scrubbing with soap, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, benzoyl peroxide, etc., etc., etc. I had dime-sized boils, which burst open in the middle of the night, jarring me from sleep, dotting the sheets with blood stains.

Add endometriosis—undiagnosed—how could the medical establishment be that incompetent—complete with cramps so severe I routinely threw up from the pain on the first day of my period . . . and let’s not forget the mood swings. Perhaps to completely understand, you should know that this was before Motrin. I was put on codeine. Have you got it now? Mind-numbing pain, mood swings, opiates, can’t-catch-a-fly-ball-to-save-her-life and ugly, butt-ugly. The worse was, of course, the ugliness. I quit the softball team; no one mourned. I hid my period pain by hiding in my bedroom three days out of twenty-eight. I was smart enough to still make 100's in algebra, even with the missed class time, but I couldn't hide the remaining days. I had to face the world, with my repulsive, puss-oozing face.

The arguments began. My mom's reply to everything was, "This is just a phase."

That's when I began to hate the picture. You see—remember the 100's in algebra—I can count. There were exactly three pictures of my older sister in the house, three of my younger sister, but only two of me. We all had baby pictures. Mine is the one with my tongue sticking out. We were all in the family portrait. Mom globbed makeup on my face—think wax museum. My older sister and my younger sister both had one additional portrait, each HUGE. In her portrait, my older sister is about seven, my younger sister an amazingly cute two-year-old. Where was my picture? I worked it out. I knew what had happened. My picture had been so ugly that mom had substituted some distance relative for me. I figured that unknown little girl was one of Cousin Mel’s kids. The truth was that my own parents couldn't stand my picture. Instead, another little girl, the one they wished they had, hung in a silver frame beside their bed.

I decided to head out. Texas is the land of solitary things—lone rangers, lone stars, cowboys yodeling beside campfires to hide their loneliness. We lived in the western part of the state, where the land was flat, arid, almost barren, nothing but cattle ranches and oil wells silently pumping. I wanted to walk out into the dust and shout at God like Elijah, “Just kill me now.” I was done.

Mom and I had another fight.

What did I care? I’d made up my mind. I was leaving. I spoke it all out, all the hurt, all the pain. "And who is THAT!” I pointed at the heinous portrait. “You can't even hang up a picture of me! I'm your child.”

She stepped back, shocked, stunned into silence. I turned for the door. Now was as good a time as any to leave.

"But that is you."

Her words swirled my rage into a Gulf hurricane. I rounded on her. "I'm not an idiot! That's NOT me."

She tried to grab my arm; I broke away. She spoke fast, racing to get all the words out before I slammed the door. "I made that dress. I took all of you to Sears Portrait Studio. The pictures were so good that we paid extra and got the large ones."

I whirled away from her.

“I still have the dress.” She ran past me, down the hall, threw open the louvered closet doors and emerged with a polka dot dress on a hanger. Stilled, I stared. She brought the dress to me. Hesitantly, I touched the crisp, starched fabric. A tear fell from my eyes splashing onto my wrist.

“Sweetie, I have other pictures of you.” She dashed away as I stood holding the dress, caressing the polka dots. She was back in seconds, opening her wallet. Inside were pictures of all of us—at Surfside. Instantly, I recognized my sisters, and there was the little girl again, in a red, one-piece bathing suit, reaching down, putting handfuls of sand in a blue plastic bucket. The long-forgotten memory resurfaced: the tangy smell of the ocean, the taste of potato chips gritty with sand and hot dogs cooked over a driftwood fire. At the end of the day, we’d fallen asleep in the back of the station wagon on the way home, only to be roughly shaken awake, because Mom wouldn’t let us in the house until Dad hosed the sand off us in the back yard.

I turned to stare up at the picture, at the little girl in the sleeveless polka dot dress. She was more than beautiful, she was clean, her skin without a blemish, her eyes unscarred by hours of pain and vomit.

"That's not me," I whispered.

"Yes, sweetie, that's you. I swear . . . please . . . it is you."

She lifted the picture from the wall, and motioning with her chin to the vanity, said, “Go on, sit down.” As I looked in the mirror, she held up the picture beside me.

I tried, I really tried. “I don’t . . . it’s not me.”

She kissed the top of my head. “Yes, this is you.”

In the following weeks I spent hours sitting at my mom's vanity, holding the picture beside my face, trying to see the beautiful little girl in my ugly reflection.

Hope, unwanted hope, frightening hope, grew in me. But what if . . . what if it was all a lie? Still the hope grew. Surely, no one who started off that beautiful could end up this ugly. Maybe it was a phase.

That picture became a talisman I clung to when life continued to call me ugly. Twice at Texas A&M, I was accused of cheating. You’ve got to be kidding? Why would I cheat? My grades would have gone down. I guess the teaching assistants figured, no way a girl could understand electrical engineering better than a man. At least college brought me one miracle in the form of Accutane. I became pimple free. Of course, there are other ways, besides pimples, to make someone feel ugly.

I was fired from a teaching position I loved at a small college in Pennsylvania. Fired by a man, the head of the department, who was never my equal. Fired at three years with all the qualifications I needed for tenure at six.

I went home and lay in the hammock in my back yard and cried. For days, every day, when my husband came home from work, he found me there. “What did I do wrong?”

His words were the gentlest salve. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

Sometimes the birds outside my window wake me with their chirpings. This is my favorite time, with my husband snuggled warm against me. I look out the window and watch as the morning light comes, not in a burst, or with a sudden brightness, but slowly, until even the darkest shadows fade. I don’t know when the first neuron fired. My awakening crept upon my soul like the dawn.

There was another picture.

I caught a glimpse of it when I read one of the recommendations I received from a professor at Texas A&M. “She is a jewel.” Surely, I saw it when my roommate, when, to help me with my studies, did my laundry. My engineering buds would forcibly (yes, forcibly) drag me from my books to see a movie, or eat a pizza. (They paid for the pizza, too. I was perpetually broke.) I was shown the picture by my Ph.D. thesis advisor. How many wonderful days we sat in his office tossing ideas back and forth. Those were joyous hours spent creating and calculating, learning and laughing. He remains my dear friend. I saw the second picture’s glittering frame, I saw the beautiful smile on the young girl’s face, when, only days after I was fired from my teaching position, a friend reached out to me with an amazingly lucrative job offer. I was shown the second portrait in all its splendor by my parents who never gave up, who never stopped loving me, and by my husband’s soft kisses.

The second picture hangs in my heavenly Father’s house. It is there by his throne. It is a picture of the child I was created to be—of the child I am becoming. My life might have dissolved into bitterness and anger, but those who loved me saw, not the boils on my face, but the light in my soul. They chose to overlook the ugly person I was—and at times still am—and instead see the beauty beneath. They have shown me, myself.

When life tells me I'm ugly, when I am in pain, when I have been kicked down, when I lie beaten and bruised in the dirt, I go to my Father's house and gaze again at the picture of hope that is me. And then I get up—and live. I am beautiful.

Issue No. 70, Autumn 2022

Literary Learnings

Harry Potter's Two Worlds and World War II

By Kidd Wadsworth

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in the Harry Potter series, begins:

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

With this first sentence, Rowling informs her readers that although the Dursleys are normal, something, or someone, is not. Two paragraphs later we learn that the Dursleys have a secret. By the end of the second page, Mr. Dursley sees a cat reading a map. By the end of the first chapter a giant of a man, carrying a baby, arrives on a flying motorcycle. Yup, something’s definitely not perfectly normal here.

So, we are introduced to two worlds, the world of the Dursleys, and the wizarding world of Harry Potter, Dumbledore and Hogwarts. But here’s the catch, and it’s a big one: It is the Dursleys’ world that is false, that is a caricature of our world here on planet Earth. In the Dursleys’ world Harry is forced to sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. The Dursleys’ son is given a stick with which to whack other students at the exclusive private school he will attend. None of that is in anyway perfectly normal. In contrast, the Weasleys, especially Mrs. Weasley, are warm and welcoming. Ronald, their son, who will become Harry’s best friend, is self-conscious, a little bumbling, and in every way totally likable. Thus, from the beginning of the novel the reader gets it, there are two worlds, the one everyone sees—our world, the false world of dull houses and mean people on Privet Drive—and the wizarding world, the world of magic and dreams; and Harry belongs in the wizarding world.

But did you get it? When you read the Harry Potter books (or saw the movies), did you understand why the story of Harry Potter resonated with the British people? Like the wizarding world is our real world, the story of Harry Potter is the story of the British people’s entrance into WWII.

Let’s review. Before WWI Europe had been at war with itself for hundreds of years. England fought France, France fought Spain, etc. The Protestant revolution brought with it more war and more death. But it was not until WWI that Europe fought its first modern war: chlorine gas, hand grenades, death in a muddy trench in the ground, and men returning home shell-shocked, crippled in mind and body. Nothing in Europe’s history prepared the English people for the hell that was WWI. The Great War, they called it, or even more telling, The War to End All Wars.

Then the beaten, economically impoverished people of Germany embraced Adolf Hitler as chancellor. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated the Munich Agreement with Hitler, declaring it, “Peace for our time.” A year later Hitler invaded Poland. France also buried its head in the sand, putting its faith in the Maginot Line. Hitler’s armies simply went around it.

In the Harry Potter books, the people of the wizarding world have fought and won a blistering war with Voldemort. (Think: WWI.) But if the wizarding world was victorious, why will no one say the name Voldemort? The reader knows, as Harry soon finds out, that no one will say Voldemort’s name because everyone is afraid the dark lord is not dead. After WWI, the British people were collectively suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. They, like Chamberlain, the prime minister they elected, did not want another war. So, they pretended they could make peace with a monster. Voldemort is both Rowling’s personification of war and her Hitler. Dumbledore is Rowling’s Winston Churchill. Harry Potter and the students of Hogwarts are the next generation of English unbattered by the first war; they unerringly know that Voldemort must be actively opposed. Even as the Minister of Magic, like Chamberlain, refuses to acknowledge the threat, they prepare for war. One of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the Harry Potter series is the burning of the Weasleys' home. Voldemort is back; war has returned, and the full horror of everything they have lived through and now their children must endure is written on Mr. Weasley’s face as he clutches his weeping wife and watches his home burn. Before the war is over, he will lose countless friends and one son.

Rowling adds to this "history made real in fiction" a second masterly stroke. She creates in Harry Potter a new Beowulf. Think back to this tale you were forced to learn in high school. A great warrior named Beowulf is called to fight a monster, Grendel. Since this story has been retold a thousand times in a thousand ways there are now two versions of the story. One in which Beowulf fights Grendel, Grendel dies and Beowulf lives; and one in which Beowulf fights Grendel, Grendel dies and Beowulf dies. Thus, the tension in the Harry Potter series mounts. The battle is coming. Harry and Voldemort will fight. We are confident that Voldemort will die. After all, Rowling wants to make money from these books. But will Harry die? That’s the question that keeps us turning the pages.

What I wonder as I read great authors, like Rowling, is: Did they know as they wrote their books that the stories they told were their own stories, the stories of their people?

Spring 2021

Sifting for Word Jewels

By Janet Robertson

Redaction: the censoring or obscuring of part of a text for legal or security purposes.

The evening news and Congressional hearings have familiarized us with the standard definition of redaction. But I often employ redaction in my never-ending search for juicy words. Consider Yeats’ poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” You can find it here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43281/the-lake-isle-of-innisfree

Print out the poem, and using a black Sharpie, redact every word that does not immediately speak to you. Below is my example:

arise

wattles

honey-bee,

glade.

dropping slow,

glimmer

lapping

heart’s core.

Yes, it’s hard to look at Yeats’ work with all those black marks but consider the gems that have been revealed. In the past six months I have written 30,000 words for my new novel. Yet, not a single word, unredacted above, is in my book. Yeats and redaction have provided me with new words; words Yeats has given meaning and cadence. Consider the phrase dropping slow. I might alter it to be dawdling slow or summer slow, but the idea of putting an adjective before slow is Yeats’ gift to me. Lapping brings to mind not only the sound of water rhythmically hitting the shore, but also the mental image of a thirsty dog greedily lapping up the water in its doggy bowl, spilling it out onto the kitchen floor. Since my novel is about a dragon—a crazed, schizophrenic dragon—I’ve decided to use this word to give the dragon a rabid-dog-like quality. Keeping in mind Yeats’ usage, I added the word slapping, to let the reader hear the scene.

With its forked serpent’s tongue, the dragon eagerly lapped up the bits of magic, slapping its wet tongue against the stones, desperate to consume even the smallest twinkling morsel that had fallen from Alyse.

Consider Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “We Real Cool.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/28112/we-real-cool

I chose to redact all but a single word, lurk. What a great verb! But again, a word search of my new novel shows I haven’t used it. Why not? Certainly, many of my characters lurked.

First lines and first chapters of novels, because they must immediately capture and hold the reader’s attention, are excellent places to look for interesting words. Consider this sentence from the opening of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone:

Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.

I would redact this sentence leaving only amount of neck and craning. The idea of giving my characters different amounts of neck never occurred to me. I cannot remember ever using the word craning.

Consider these two sentences from the first chapter of The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

I would redact everything but dark beyond darkness, cold glaucoma and dimming. Not only are each of these incredible by themselves, but they build on one another. McCarthy repeats himself. He describes the world’s bleakness not once but three times. It is dark, it is cold and diseased, it is dimming. The reader knows that the man is losing his sight, not his physical sight, but his spiritual sight. He can’t see any hope. What McCarthy taught me here was to use many words, to be unafraid of repetition.

The phrase cold glaucoma repeats the thought of darkness by adding the sense of touch, cold, as in a land which is dark, without the sun’s warmth and light. Both cold and glaucoma add the idea of approaching death—the ultimate darkness. The bodies of dead people are cold. Glaucoma is a disease of the old, of those who are weary and about to die. There is so much for me to learn here.

Redaction is a quick literary exercise that always blesses me twice. First in the word jewels I find, and second in the experience of reading again authors and poets who continue to touch my life. It’s time for a new definition of redaction.

Redaction: the obscuring of part of a literary work, leaving only those words and phrases which speak to the writer, for the purpose of discovering new words and new writing techniques.