I'm pleased to have another story out, to start the year—my third published by the excellent Wild Roof Journal, which over the past several years has, it says, "built a community of emerging & established writers, visual artists, teachers, grad students, mental health professionals, travelers, hermits, vagabonds, ragamuffins, etc. etc.," (that sounds like me!); whose name comes from a line in William Blake's The Book of Urizen.
My story, "Or Die of Namelessness," can be found in Gallery 1, Knocking on wood: on glass.
Its name comes from another poet, Wendell Berry, and these lines of his—
“we must call all things by name out of the silence
again to be with us, or die of namelessness”
The names are of particular interest, for it is the names the forlorn hero of the story is losing, to nominal aphasia, to the lonely, silent void. Along with all the rest, the names of the fossil shells he had made his career, and the shared language between him and his true love—"Cephalopods, ammonites, opalised pippi shells, spotted Babylon snails, cowries, dolphin gastropods, miters, moon shells, turbans and vases and urchins, whelks; Venus comb murex, hundred-eyed cowrie, rainbow abalone, sheep’s ear abalone, pontifical mitre, orange-mouth olive and lettered olive, colorful coquina clams, chambered nautilus, tusk."
A cousin of mine died from aphasia last year, and by coincidence we saw a fine play in the fall about a woman suffering and finally perishing from word loss too—Nick Payne's Constellations.
images: generated in WordItOut
