LIMIT EXPERIENCE

Tag: Writing

  • LE Literary Journalism

    LE Literary Journalism

    The Common Thread: Alice Munro’s Family Secret

    by Deborah Blenkhorn

    My childhood best friend’s social media post about the recent death of her mother, a renowned artist, triggered a memory for me as the tributes and condolences poured in for the family who mourned the loss of a powerful matriarch, the rock of their particular clan. This woman’s middle daughter (my friend’s older sister), as well as, I believe, a young cousin, had been assaulted by an uncle and had sought abortions in the late 1970s.  These facts were common knowledge in our small Ontario community, but the general feeling seemed to be that “Uncle T” had issues because he and his wife had never been able to have children of their own, and they subsequently adopted… a preteen girl. 

    Those were the days! I wonder what happened to the girl who was adopted into that family clan.  She was my age, but never fit in with nor was accepted by our friend group, though my best friend would have been her adoptive cousin; we teased her as being a “Lezzie” and were unspeakably cruel in the way that only preteens can be. Of course all of that is water under the bridge of time.  It’s not time to remember that; it’s time to celebrate the life of the family matriarch, the artist: all her achievements and the lives she touched.  Who knows what she struggled with in the Uncle T years?  Was he her brother? Brother-in-law?  I don’t even know.

    Does every family have a dark secret that may or may not eventually come to light? It’s a bold claim that we all have an Alice Munro skeleton in the family closet, because Munro’s condoning of her husband’s abuse of her daughter seems unthinkably horrific, incomprehensible. Not every family holds that particular secret–though no doubt a fair number of them actually do–but the differences between that situation and those of other families may be simply ones of degree.  And of course we’re not simply talking about a secret within a family; rather, it is a question of a suppressed truth. So much sacrificed for the sake of decorum, in that case the preservation of a grande dame of the Canadian literary scene. In other cases, perhaps less extreme (or perhaps not), other sacrifices were made as transgressions were (the cliche is so apt I can’t help but use it) swept under the rug.

    Are we about to enter the Me Too Two era?  I almost hope so, though (again I can’t resist the cliche) the shit will totally hit the fan.  Without even stopping to think, I can list a litany of parallels.  My late mother condoned sexualized behaviour initiated by her partner (and others) towards me, on the commune where we both lived in the 1970s.  She died without my forgiveness.  Without revealing details that would compromise anyone, I can allude to the crimes I’m aware of in my friends’ lives, perpetrated by parents, siblings, roomers, priests, teachers, family friends.  I sometimes think that anyone who does not have such a story… simply hasn’t told it yet.  Is there a common thread? Yes. Power.  The corruption of it, the colonialism of it, the condoning of it.  

    And what can we do?  Fight it, yes.  But first, let’s at least acknowledge what has happened. Let’s own it, and let’s try not to be complicit in the great cover-up. One more cliche: Let the chips fall where they may.

    BIO:

    Bio:

    Deborah Blenkhorn is a writer and teacher living on Bowen Island in British Columbia. Her work fuses memoir and fiction, and has appeared in such venues as Blank Spaces, Dreamers Creative Writing, and DarkWinter Literary Magazine.

  • LE Author CONVERSATIONS

    LE Author CONVERSATIONS

    GINA MORIARTY

    Limit Experience Magazine Conversations speaks with Gina Moriarty, author of 100 words / 12 Hits / Gravity

    “The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows.” – GM

    In your essay,100 Words / 12 Hits / Gravity, you write from a transgressive space punctuated by the speed of an actual and metaphorical ride through the libidinal realm of union. It feels like the cerebrally exploited appendage of sex acts as a metaphysical portal to the ephemeral side of intimacy. The couple seems by the end of the ride to open to a paradoxical lack of connection. How did you identify and develop the mapping of the narrator’s drug induced confrontation with the masculine/feminine axis of desire amidst an edge of what leads unexpectedly to subtextual longing?

    GM While this essay reads as though it was written in a transient state, time was my true companion. Enrolled in a Travel Writing class during the pandemic provided an interesting obstacle – writing about travel without traveling. I chose to write of a trip I’d taken the previous summer with my boyfriend, and in doing so, gave myself the chance to play around in this Creative Nonfiction Travel Writing genre. Each week my professor, Marc Neison, assigned one word to use in the telling of a 100-word short story. Marc didn’t expect us to weave a narrative, but I appreciated the challenge. 

    By the end of the semester, I had 16 100-word segments prompted with words such as home, water, sunscreen, currency. These words became the landmarks to map “Gravity.” This piece wasn’t written in order, instead driven by these words set along emotional markers on the timeline of the trip. In my initial composition, the idea of balancing connection with disconnection was involuntary, but with each passing week, I noticed the theme and wrote with this harmonization of movement in mind.

    Writing about drugs – psychedelics specifically – creates portals for nonfiction writing which allow space for fantastical elements, but more-so, make room for garishness, for those carnal moments to transpire. This drug-induced state erases any filter, and that can only transfer to the writing, allowing the narrator a sort of jester-like persona. With LSD the true nature of the partaker is unabashedly revealed. The connection between all who indulge together is forged by the efforts of the drug, by the shifts of frequency, and in such a way a different friendship forms as the user’s consciousness expands to a greater understanding of the persona they’re tripping alongside. The interconnectedness on such a deep level prompts new levels of intimacy, a compulsory truthfulness occurs, and the user can’t help but show their true nature.

    The reason some swear against acid is because the come down requires self-work. The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows. The thing about LSD is it’s a truth serum some just aren’t ready to taste. Those, like me, who have used the drug with the objective of mine expansion instead of simply getting super trippy, tap into the superpowers we all possess – the superpower of intuition. Expressing how these characters opened themselves to the vulnerability of each other, I was able to set their motorcycle along this paradoxical axis of drug addiction that parallels their relationship, displaying how cocaine shuts out the universe while psychedelics open one’s mind to it.

    It’s a perilous balancing act – not the motorcycle – but drug use in a union, because the moment one person tunes themselves to a different level – a different frequency – the whole relationship disassembles, and while both remain on an unbalanced precipice of addiction, the universe’s pressure will increase on the couple until their only chance is to split or to conform fully around each other and their chosen substances. 

  • LE Author CONVERSATIONS

    LE Author CONVERSATIONS

    SUZANNE LEA

     

    “In the most literal way, Like Oxygen, was born at the end of a love affair.” SL

    (photo credit: Suzanne Lea)

    LEMagazine asked author Suzanne Lea to explore her creative process as a poet. She’s been previously published in the earlier iteration on this platform, the literary journal, LEJ. You can read her essay, The Specificity of Desire here. 

    Surprisingly her second submission, a couple years later as we were transitioning from the literary platform of the journal to the more expansive nature of the magazine format, was poetry and not essay. We wanted to ask her about the differences she experiences as an essay writer and as a poet. 

    LE Your poetry collection, Like Oxygen, reaches outside the theoretical container of Limit-Experience and pulls to it the libidinal space in a very visceral way? How did you arrive at this space and how did the process differ from your encounter with your essay, Specificity?

    SL When you think about it, writing is a strange thing. We pluck words from our lexicon and place them in such a way that the reader understands both the meaning and the intention. Creative writing is even more interesting – creating a path using words in the wild,  words strung together for the first time, creating something altogether new. I write because I have a love affair with language. I write because I love finding new ways to tell universal stories. 

    I love the taste of new words meeting for the first time. Words just introduced, taking their first steps off the tongue and in the world. I love big, fat, juicy words. Little, tine, bony words. Dirty word. Holy words Dark threatening, stormy words. I love long, complicated, ego-stroking words and fanciful words that exist only to serve the needs of children and lovers. My favorite, though, is the discovery of a word whose materiality is so organic that a gentle nudge can send it floating like a dandelion on the current of a conversation. These words, when placed together properly, are so sweet as to be missed the instant they are spoken. 

    In the most literal way, Like Oxygen, was born at the end of a love affair. I find that to be true of much of my writing. Most of my poetry is written after-the-fact. Although every ending is not tragic, often grief allows for a very specific kind of hindsight. A perspective not found in the midst of an experience.  While we are pushing and pulling, touching and pressing, we only feel our own skin. We only know whether we’ve been kissed or kicked. Afterwards, we often find a sort of aerial view. We become the topographers of our own country.

    Writing poetry is the place where I have the most fun with words who were once strangers. Tucked away inside my poem, Like Oxygen, there is something more. Inside what appears to be a song about the libidinal desires, I have secreted away a prayer. Please kiss me properly. Kiss me like oxygen. Kiss me as if you were certain. Kiss me as though you have abandoned yourself to the experience. I ask for these things because I know the tepid tongue of endings – when the lights come up and everyone leaves.  

    In my experience, non-fiction storytelling is different. There is a linear quality to creative non-fiction. There is usually a beginning, a middle, and an end. Non-fiction storytelling is experienced as fact. (Or as factual as we are able as fallible humans.) The Specificity of Desire is my attempt at telling the story of my Limit Experience. There is no pleading for more. There is no longing for less. My Limit Experience is measured by a before and after. My experience created a moment when I jumped from who I thought I was and what I was capable of, to the very edge of propriety and then a step further. 

    My Limit Experience was life altering. I am not the same person that I was before the events of Specificity. I barely remember the girl who lived in this body without that experience. That can also be said for Like Oxygen. Although the details are drastically different, the same ‘before and after’ exist. Similarly, the act of storytelling closely resembles this dynamic. I pull from my love of language to tell a story. I try to set the stage for what comes after. Both experiences create a longing for something more. Both experiences beg me to step outside the safety of storytelling and run my fingers along the rough edges and smooth surfaces of life.