I wrote this story and committed it to memory for a show at Hubbard Hall in Cambridge NY, Whispering Bones, 2012. It is based on the true story of the death of my father’s infant sister and takes place in the now demolished house of my Uncle Harrison. Here I am telling it for the open access TV show, Story By Story, hosted by Kate Dudding and Joe DooLittle. A version of this story is also part of my Tina Davidson’s opera, BILLY AND ZELDA.
Author: laledavidson
My novel Blue Woman Burning was published by Emperor Books, an imprint of Red Penguin Books, in the fall of 2021: "In the cold descending breeze of the Altiplano between Chile and Bolivia, Fallon’s narcissistic mother bursts into flames before her family’s eyes. The inexplicable nature of their loss marks each family member in a different way."
Against the Grain, my latest novel, will be released on Earth Day 2022: “Against the Grain combines gorgeous poetry and romance with heart-stopping action, as the daughter of a rich CEO joins forces with a logger’s son to stop a huge lumber company from destroying an ancient redwood forest. The trees themselves become surprisingly powerful characters in this rich, multilayered novel. After reading Against the Grain, you’ll never look at a tree in the same way again,” says Matt Witten, bestselling author of The Necklace.
My book of short stories, Strange Appetites, won the Adirondack Center for Writing People's Choice Award.
I love all that is absurd, odd, and beautiful.
How Fantasy Was Born
In a hemlock grove atop a snowy mountain, silence blooms. Minutely needled branches quiver. Water drips from a crotch of snow between crossed logs into a black pool. More silence. Nothing is as beautiful as this. No poem, no words, no sculpture, no painting. Nothing human-made can approach this three dimensional physical plane, where the points of depth and dimension are plotted by each hemlock needle.
Don’t listen to the theorists who have traveled so far from the physical that their heads float like balloons above their bodies, attached only by a tiny string. They have tried to convince us that reality is perception, that we shape what we see with our language, and therefore can never truly see the world as it is.
We know better. If you stop, breathe and look, you will see.
They got it backwards. We are part of nature. The landscape shaped us, shaped the brains that made the language. Landscape shaped our stories. The fallen logs beside the still water tossed up the elves. The creek burbled fairy laughter, the snow-covered boulder created Hansel and Gretel’s frosted house impossibly far from the path of human treading. When you hear a woman screaming in the forest and follow the sound into the mouth of a mountain lion, a thousand myths are born. The seal’s soft round eyes created the selkies who shed their skins and became us. The change of seasons, the unceasing variety of bird call and flower petals commanded our tongues to shape new sounds. The order of the needles divided our sounds into segments, giving birth to language. And now, when we go back to the source, the land speaks us, and we call it magic.
A Writing Life: Lâle Davidson 