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livvywritesworld · 1 year

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A Fist in the Mouth | Overview & Analysis

For those who don’t know, I am a creative writing student in my first year of university. In my introduction to creative writing class this semester, I wrote a short story called ‘A Fist in the Mouth’ for our fiction unit. After a couple rounds of editing, I submitted this piece to my university’s literary magazine and was later accepted for publication.

This is my first ever publication acceptance so of course this story holds such a special place in my heart now, and I thought I might make a post about it just kind of sharing a couple of snippets and some of the inspiration and thought I put behind the story as a whole.

(please let it be known that I retain all rights to my original work and no plagiarism will be tolerated)

excerpts and analysis under the cut

‘A Fist in the Mouth’ began as a way for me to kind of reintroduce myself to short fiction after a period of not having written anything at all due to some health issues. I had all of these ideas for the short fiction piece that I needed to write for class and none of them were working out how I wanted them to while still fitting within the word limit. So, I decided to discovery write something while listening to one of my many Spotify playlists just to kind of get in the groove of writing once more and really just see what would happen.

As I was writing, the song “Modern Girl” by Sleater-Kinney came on shuffle and for those of you who have never heard the song, there’s a repeating lyric, “hunger makes me a modern girl.” This really sparked some inspiration in me and all of a sudden I was writing about a teenage runaway come riot grrrl serial concert goer experiencing the horrors of girlhood and ambition.

‘A Fist in the Mouth’ begins like this:

There’s a difference between running from and running to. When I left home, I thought I was running towards. I didn’t think of it as me leaving my parents’ oppressive religious household, though that was a fact that I readily acknowledged as a girl. I only ever thought of it as me, freshly eighteen, running full speed at a future I thought I deserved. A future I knew never would have found me if I’d stayed in that town, in that house, with those people, spending my days on my knees praying to a god that didn’t see me as deserving of anything more than I’d already been given.

Now, I think all I was doing was running away from every facet of my life. I didn’t feel the same way about God as the rest of my family, was scared to death of them looking at me one day and suddenly seeing all of me. Back then, I felt like I didn’t have any other choice. And I probably didn’t.

The narrator is kind of inspired by the character Maxine in the film ‘X,’ which I had watched a couple of weeks before writing the story, as well as Ethel Cain’s discography. I really wanted to write from the perspective of a teenage girl fleeing a very religious household (religious trauma for the win) because she wants more out of life than what her parents have laid out for her.

As we move through the story and see how the narrator interacts with the 90s Seattle grunge & punk scene, we are introduced to the narrator’s insatiable hunger (her ambition, queerness, and dedicated yearning). I use a lot of motifs throughout the beginning and middle of the text to try and recreate this feeling for the reader.

I was nineteen and my presence felt both excessive and non-existent. I wasn’t eating as much as I should’ve been, couldn’t really afford three meals a day. Most of my money went towards rent and bills, any real food I got would be leftovers from the diner. The cook was a bit sweet on me, so he’d make me a sandwich every day, free of charge, whatever kind I wanted.

The thing was though, even if I did get enough to eat, I still never felt full. I’d look in the mirror and my mouth would be this gaping cavern, something that didn’t fit on my face. It didn’t matter how old I was, how much life I did or didn’t experience— in the mirror smiling back at me was a gape-toothed girl looking to swallow the whole world if given the chance.

Then, we meet the character of Magdalene Williams, who is the only character in the story that I’ve named. The inspiration for Magdalene was definitely Mary Magdalene— I kind of wanted this holy-like figure to come into the narrator’s life and really give her a taste of the life that she craves for herself.

Magdalene invites the narrator to an all non-men punk show on the edge of Seattle and the narrator feels her hunger clawing up out of her stomach and demanding to go. She is inherently drawn to Magdalene and has no idea why. So she accepts the invitation.

The story kind of unravels from there, and we end with Magdalene coming onstage with her band and giving The Performance of a Lifetime and generally really disturbing the narrator. The narrator knows that something Is Not Right here, she’s been very active in the scene for the last year and has never heard of Magdalene yet the entire crowd is going wild over her, and once Magdalene starts singing she immediately knows that something is wrong. And yet. She just can’t look away.

In Magdalene, the narrator sees everything that she wants, everything that she is so hungry for, and it terrifies her. She’s also a little jealous, and a little horny but very much in a prophet/faithhealer x devotee kind of way.

I wrote the entire story in past tense because I really wanted it to have a sort of confessional vibe, to really keep in tone with the religious themes and imagery. My professor suggested after workshop that I might try it in present tense but it just was not working. During our class workshop however, everyone said that they liked the choice of past tense because it was almost like the narrator was telling us, the reader, that she experienced such an intense period of wanting in her life and still made it out in the end.

I don’t know if it’s too much to share on here like word count-wise, but the last few paragraphs of the story are my absolute favorites and I’m so proud of them. They’ve remained mostly unchanged in my various rounds of edits and I’m so impressed with myself for being able to write like this after having literally not written anything substantial in around six months.

Before I left home, my whole life was like a sepia photograph of a sunny day. Over-exposed, parents with smiling faces and sons with square jaws, daughters with ribbons in their hair. Wooden crosses on the walls, simple and unornate because God doesn’t need to be loved in gold foil. Grass stains on white tights, Sunday kitten heels scuffed from being worn so often, deodorant powder refusing to wash off the baby pink dress Mama thought looked so nice with my brown eyes.

There’s a difference between running from and running to. At eighteen, I was running towards something. I’msure of that. I don’t think I ever had an idea of what that something was, or what I even wanted it to be, but I did know that I didn’t want to be some televangelist’s golden daughter proffered up to God like Icarus was to the sun.

I noticed things about myself the way my family noticed things about God and religion and theology. Studied myself in mirrors, in the dark, in the depths of my own mind. I noticed everything and remembered nothing. Blood never started to fill my mouth until I surrounded myself with idolatry of a different kind, the screams sounded too much like mine.

At nineteen, I was running from. That night, hunger attacked every fiber of my being, ate away at my organs, left behind teeth marks and blood. I saw that hunger reflected in Magdalene, her mouth an open wound as she screamed out her lyrics. I wasn’t scared, though. There’s nothing scary about hunger, what’s scary is the response hunger elicits from other people.

This, I noticed. All in real time. Learned it of myself.

I watched the crowd feed Magdalene, and consequently devour her whole. Sanctify her living and alive, right before my eyes. And I never wanted anything more than I did then. I craved it, would’ve let hordes of women and girls crucify me where I stood just to be in Magdalene’s position. She never could’ve been full, not with the way she sang, but at least she was well fed. Oh how I wanted to be kept in excess.

Have learned to become my own number one fan lol

#really am my own biggest fan lolll who else is gonna do it #writeblr #writerblr #my writing #mywriting #viaspeaks #love how I use a nickname on here that I hate but have already committed to #literally no one has ever called me via #and I do not like it #but all of my posts already have via tags #via speaks #queer teenage girls with religious trauma are terrifying #unnamed narrator you will always be famous #kinda sorta working on a magdalene prequel short fiction piece #because she's an absolute icon #and I'm obsessed with her #I literally love talking about my own writing #so if you made it through this I love you

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chocolate-brownies · 6 years

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Want more from Nadia? Learn from her in person at Wellspring in Downtown Palm Springs this October, and learn what it means to #ExperienceWell. Tickets available now!

Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber says that she had her ass saved in a church basement, not a church sanctuary. Nadia grew up going to a traditional church in a conservative Christian denomination three times a week. As a teenager, she was troubled by what she felt were contradictory teachings and ended up leaving the church for a life of heavy drinking and drug use. Ten years later, she realized she needed to get clean, and started attending 12-step meetings. It was these meetings in church basements that Nadia credits for helping her to redefine and reestablish her relationship with God.

During these years, when Nadia’s nascent faith was beginning to reemerge as a driving force in her life, one of her good friends—also a recovering alcoholic and fellow stand-up comedian—lost his struggle with bipolar disorder and committed suicide. In the wake of his death, Nadia’s community turned to her (one of the only ones among them with a faith practice) to perform the funeral. As she looked out across the mourners, a motley crew of academics and queers and recovering alcoholics and comics, she became aware that this gathered crowd of misfits had no real home in which to hear this traditional message. They had no pastor. “Oh shit,” she realized. “I think that’s me.” She entered seminary shortly thereafter and was ordained in 2008.

Nadia’s upcoming book—Shameless: A Sexual Reformation—comes out early next year. For it, she’s asking women in her community to mail her their purity rings if they have them, which she says she’ll melt down and sculpt into a vagina and mail to Gloria Steinem upon completion. We sat down with Nadia to hear her take on Christianity, religion, sex, and shame. Watch to hear her take, and then read on below for more.

Wanderlust (WL): Let’s start right off the bat talking about this idea of sin. Is sin real?

Nadia Bolz-Weber (NW): I think a lot of people are very turned off by the term “sin” because of the way it’s been used against people, because it’s like somebody implying that you’re bad and immoral. If you really strive in your life to be a good person, the last thing you want is someone being like, “You’re horrible and you should feel bad about it.” But, there’s an author named Francis Spufford and in his book Unapologetic, he redefines, instead of using the word “sin,” he uses this term “the human propensity to fuck things up.” And then you’re like, “Oh, I definitely have that.” Right? Like, there’s something in me that no matter what, I’m gonna end up hurting people, or I’m gonna end up having selfish motives about something that I pawn off as being virtuous motives for something.

WL: Is organized religion a symbol system that causes people this kind of pain or trauma that they then need to reconcile?

NW: I think religion, especially when it comes to messages around our sexuality, causes a really particular type of harm in us. Now, the culture, the broader culture, also has some very damaging messages. There’s the commodification of sex. You can “know” how worthy you are of desire according to how close you are to a body ideal. Once you’re too old, or too fat, or too plain, you’re no longer worthy of sexual desire and so there are these damaging messages that society gives us around the commodification of sex.

I sort of hesitate to indulge in the sin of false equivalency though because messages from religion, those go down to our created place, our source code. Those seep into us in a very deep level and the difference is that the society has … our society has never said that the creator of the universe is disgusted by my cellulite. Do you know what I mean? So, the religious messages are saying, “This is God. God feels this way about you as a sexual being.” And that can be pernicious in a very particular way.

WL: Let’s talk about your experience with sex then growing up. When was the first time that you were talked to about sex? When was the first time that you were able to sort of explore that with yourself?

NW: My mother, bless her, who is an amazing woman, who I have a great deal of respect for, you know, handed me a Christian sex-ed book and was like, “Let me know if you have questions.” The basic message is that, men are supposed to be the leaders and they’re supposed to have this competency in the world and what the real focus for girls is trying to be as pretty as possible and quiet as possible so that you can attract them so that they can take care of you and you can have babies.

WL: How did we get there? I mean, in the Bible, especially the New Testament, Jesus is hanging out with prostitutes. How did we get to this point where all of a sudden, women were the quiet demure and men were superior? What happened in the church? How did sex and femininity become marginalized?

NW: I think a lot of the sort of really misogynistic interpretations of scripture, and also the fear of sex stuff that came into Christianity came in with a lot of the church fathers, a lot of the original interpreters of these texts and theologians in the Christian tradition. They were doing what really any of us can do, which is going, “We have some concerns with ourselves and the world, and we’re going to go to this sacred text and see what kind of direction we can get.” Well, Augustine interpreted the Garden of Eden story in a really particular way that we are so influenced by that we don’t even know the difference between the text and his interpretation.

For instance, the word sin isn’t in there, the word temptation isn’t in there, the word temptation’s not in there, the devil is not in there, “original sin” is not in there, fall from grace is not in there. All of that is stuff that Augustine interpreted into the Garden of Eden story. So then it’s like, “Okay, well who was Augustine?” Well, brilliant guy, however had some sexual hangups like all of us do. His original shame, his story, his original shame came from an incident in the bathhouse with his father when he was going through puberty and he had an erection and his father commented on it.

In the same way, the Song of Solomon is this beautiful erotic poem in the Bible, and it’s most likely the only book in the Bible that was possibly written by a woman, and it is mostly an erotic poem about a very shameless woman who has a lover and she loves her body and she loves their body and she loves sex and eroticism, and she has no shame about this. So what happens? Origin, another sort of church father comes along, and he goes, “No, that’s not about sex. That’s about Jesus’ love for the church. It’s just an allegory.” And okay, well who was Origin? Origin was this guy who was so terrified of sexual temptation, no kidding, he castrated himself. He cut his balls off. Is that the guy we want to go to for direction?

WL: Where did the idea of shame come from, and why do we feel it? How does it sort of creep in to our everyday lives?

NW: I see shame as being this hidden thing that drives us sometimes, because it’s this dark thing that I need to make sure nobody sees. I need to put all this energy into pretending something about myself is not true or something about myself is the whole truth. Or I need to make up for it, or I need to keep proving myself, or whatever because of this suspicion I have that something’s bad about me. I think if we could bottle shame as an energy source, it could easily replace fossil fuels, because it can really be this driving thing in our lives. But what it will never lead us to is freedom. Never does shame lead us to freedom.

Learn more from Nadia at Wellspring!

—

Lisette Cheresson is a writer, storyteller, yoga teacher, and adventuress who is an avid vagabond, homechef, dirt-collector, and dreamer. When she’s not playing with words, it’s a safe bet that she’s either hopping a plane, dancing, cooking, or hiking. She received her Level II Reiki Attunement and attended a 4-day intensive discourse with the Dalai Lama in India, and received her RYT200 in Brooklyn. She is currently the Director of Content at Wanderlust Festival. You can find her on Instagram @lisetteileen.

The post Sex, Shame, and Scripture: Debunking the Doctrine of Desire appeared first on Wanderlust.

#sleep sounds #sleep music #white noise app #nature sounds #relaxing sounds #rain sounds for sleeping

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