Chapter Seven
From Owen's writng prompt. I don't usually post these, but since I will probably be entirely stuck doing non-fiction freelance stuff for a week, y'all are gonna have to take what you can get. Anyway:
Chapter Seven.
About there the book stuttered to a halt.
The protagonist was in the forest and showed every intention of staying. Of building a little hut out of whatever one builds a hut from, branches and heavy strips of bark, maybe skins, maybe a sod hut like the writer's pioneer forbearers built. The writer is tempted to spend some time researching huts and wigwams and ways of building that could be managed by a smallish person alone. And the protagonist would like to settle in the hut and arrange it neatly and trap rabbits and gather mushrooms and berries. The protagonist would like to make stew and gather ferns for a bed.
The writer wants to let her. The writer liked the Boxcar Children as a child, before realizing they were allegories on the value of housework -- there is something about setting up a small home and putting it in order. Something about keeping the milk cool in the waterfall and damming a small pool for swimming. Oh, yes, the writer likes this. Half her life is playing house like this. Half her writing seems to make small beds of ferns in which she can sleep.
But of course the forest was meant to make the protagonist's life hard. She is not supposed to settle in and make a tidy safe place for her heart. She is supposed to hack and run and work her way through it. She is supposed to demonstrate her vulnerability, and also her strength and pluck. She is supposed to gain wisdom, possibly by meeting an old witch of the forest, though now that the writer puts it that way, it seems a little silly. And though the writer says she doesn't believe that hacking and working and suffering lead to wisdom, deep down that's exactly what she thinks.
And there's always the question of why the writer has chosen the protagonist, this clever orphan girl, one of several such she's chosen. And why she wants always for these girls to make wigwams out of bark and live vigorous, well-tended lives like cottage gardens, deep in the woods. There is always the question of what part of her own littlegirl heart the writer has tucked away, somewhere in the forest, on the way to the king's city.
1 Comments
oooh, i like this!