I have been accepted again as a member of the Heartland Society of Women Writers, presumably because my heart is in the right place. They have published my short story “Papier-Mâché” in their [w]hole Anthology, which came out in August. (Previously, online, they published “A Lilac Year.”)
“Papier-Mâché” is part of my “suite” of mask pieces, started in 2020, of which four have previously been published: “The Persian Warrior,” “L’inconnue de la Seine,” “Kachinas,” and “Day of the Dead.” There are two remaining, and I hope to see them all together some day, as a single work. If only I had the letterpress I once dreamed of!
My particular papier-mâché is (typically) complicated: “There were strips of newspapers—of crossword puzzles, book reviews, World Series pitchers, stories about rescued dogs, and comics including Calvin and Hobbes. And for upper layers, colored strips from National Geographics of sea anemones and cheetahs, El Tajín in Veracruz (which the aide, Martina, knew from family visits and told them was named after a thunder god). Saturn and sharks, pandas and sunken ships, mountain gorillas and strange, creepy insects. Funny roly-poly armadillos. Eskimo and Maya children, children from Poland, from the Sudan.
Silly probably to make a big deal about the paper, but Ruth Sims felt there was an indefinable magic in choosing words and images that spoke from everyday and far away as the foundation of the masks, even though they'd be painted over or covered with origami paper, tissue-thin gold leaf, feathers and raffia and beads. What was inside counted every bit as much, Ruth told Martina.”
What was inside is the thrust of this exploration.
image: ApplesPC, Pixabay
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