Happy Women’s History month! I never used to think much of March, just the last cold month of winter before spring truly arrives. But since being a part of Dandelion Revolution Press, this month has a special place in my heart. Our first two anthologies were published on International Women’s Day in 2020 and 2021. You can read my blog post from last year about my story with the press. This year, I really wanted to explore my story telling process and share how I wrote “Chant de la Mer,” my featured story in Every Breath Alight.
This third anthology, our post-Covid project, took longer to finalize with each of us able to be out in the world again—we got new jobs, traveled, and celebrated life. Despite the extended timeline, I am so proud of this book. The variety of stories are splendid and our talented authors truly outdid themselves. Like the title invokes, the theme of Every Breath Alight is about finding your voice, speaking up, and rebelling.
Inspiration
When I started thinking about story ideas for this collection, I knew immediately what I wanted to write—a little mermaid retelling from the perspective of Ursula. It all started from a lyric to the song “fairytales” by Gabby Sophia that has a line that goes, “The voice was taken from the mermaid but what if it was taken in the first place and they believed her because of her pretty face.” That line. Every. Single. Time.
I asked myself what if Ariel was the villain of the story? And they believe her because of her beauty? What if they didn’t believe Ursula because of her otherness?
Then I started brainstorming the arc of the story. I knew I wanted it to be a metaphor for colonialism where an island is invaded by humans. What was once a sanctuary for merfolk on land, becomes colonized and destroyed by industrialization.
Inspired by the movie version of The Little Mermaid, the mermaids wear shells as a necklace and it translates their ocean voice to one that can be understood on land. The idea of language and voice and colonialism was something else I wanted to weave into the narrative. So many native languages have been overtaken, forgotten, because of colonialism. In this story, I used French as a secondary language. So many people consider it a beautiful language. Yet in this case, it is inherently wrong because it has been forced upon the merfolk and forced them to forget their native language.
Around this time, I read the book Empire of the Vampire which is written as a frame story. The main character is telling his life story to his jailer. The entire book is written, even the narrative parts, in quotes as the main character immerses us in the tale. Sometimes the narratives breaks away and we are inside of the jail cell and his present day perspective.
I have never encountered a story before that used quotation marks to indicate the inside frame. The entire book was written in this way which is quite a feat (and quite the headache for the copyeditor). It can be confusing to read at times, but I knew I wanted to employ this technique. And maybe I wouldn’t write an entire book this way, but why not write a short story this way?
Short stories are made for experimenting. It’s beautiful how much you can get across in a brief span of words. They are an incredible way to test your limits, try new things, and find your voice.
The Shell of the Story
I knew that I wanted to write my short story about voice as a frame story—a grandmother telling her granddaughter about losing her voice. The inner frame of the story is about fighting for voice and what’s right. While the outer frame is about telling stories of the ones that came before us, raising their voices, and sharing their stories.
I love frame stories. They add such nuance and another layer of story. Many famous literary works are written as frame stories—The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, One Thousand and One Nights, and Frankenstein. All of these stories have a reason for the frame itself. To entertain on a journey or distract a king and survive another night. And what better way to convey the theme of speaking up in my story than using a frame?
With all of these questions and ideas swirling around in my head, I started to draft. As I wrote, I tried to draw on some of the darker elements of the original Grimm fairytale like the main character feeling like she’s walking on knives. I had a concept, but I had to create a plot, build a world, and craft characters.
The trap I ran into using the quotes (instead of using italics or section breaks) was that the story had a lot of telling rather than showing. As an author, I really had to defend my decision to use quotes in this way and work to fix all the telling I had written. For me, the quotes are a signal, every single line break, that this is being told by a character. That she is using her voice to speak about her past and breathe life into her own story.
Another concern I received in my feedback was that the granddaughter wasn’t enough of a character (I didn’t even give her a name!). Despite the power of the grandmother’s story, what was the granddaughter’s story? What was she grappling with? In essence, who was she? With feedback and more questions to answer, I wrote another draft.
Using My Voice
I’m very excited to see what this year has in store. I am very, very close to finishing my first draft of my new adult historical fantasy novel. Even though I haven’t worked on it consistently since the summer, I know I will find my voice for it and write the ending better than I conceived of it.
All three of my stories featured in DRP anthologies have strong motifs of water. Water is cleansing and powerful. It is life and death. My novel has strong motifs of water too. My writing always seems to return to these themes and maybe that is a part of my authorial voice. I am drawn to the natural world and all the meaning it brings.
As I’ve tried to define my writing process this year, writing the story behind the story for “Chant de la Mer” was a nice way to remind myself that I need to spend a lot of timing thinking before I even put words on paper. Things take their own time, and as I approach three years of writing my third novel, I have to remind myself of that.
More than ever, I think it is important for us to speak up against hate and uplift marginalized voices. It is our responsibly to use our right to free speech responsibly and make sure our actions match our words. I hope my story has a little bit of that message. And the entire anthology itself is a diverse tapestry of stories that help us realize who were are.
It feels odd that I haven’t talked about the latest anthology until now even though it has been out in the world for a couple of months. To be honest, I have felt far from my author voice. There have been a lot of changes, but I think I am finally settling into my new life and it felt nice to write a blog post again. When I have doubt, I read over my own work and remind myself that I am a talented storyteller with things to say.
For years, it was hard for me to call myself what I am. I think it’s hard for artists to call themselves what they are when they feel like they need to prove something first. But you don’t need to prove anything to call yourself what you are. Use your voice to speak up for yourself and who you really are. Just like a mermaid named Ursule whose voice was stolen by a petty human named Auriel.