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Oh my, I have to say, what an intense process this is — doing what is nearing the final edit-proofs of my mother’s writings!  I have worked for ten hours today on the second volume and have only made it through 130 of the over 300 pages it contains!

I know this about myself, that I have an almost ‘strange’ ability to focus on work I am doing at times.  I suspect strongly that this ability is tied to my dissociation (as odd as that might seem).  The level of focus it is taking me to work my way through this edit-proofing process is astounding even me!  I am ‘up for air’ right now.  Or rather, I am nearly off to sleep at this hour (1:00 in the morning my time now).

I believe this effort will literally ‘pay off’ — and hopefully soon.  I received my first compliment from my sister today, who followed the link to Volume One I sent her today, and reported that she couldn’t leave ‘the story’ until she finished it.  It took her four hours — and she is an extremely fast reader.

Part of what is tricky about this process I am engaged in — said if I leave completely out of the picture WHO my mother was and WHAT she did to me — is that my mother wrote in a literary format that is becoming obsolete in today’s world.  My mother ‘speaks’ over and over and over again in the body of this text of her words that she ‘wants to write’ — while at the same time being completely engrossed in her act of writing!

Yet I sense that her form of letter writing lies as some sort of ‘mongrel cross’ between the actual ‘literary tradition’ and the ‘oral nonliteray tradition’.  Yet because her writing is being carefully crafted to fit a published book format — at the same time that I am attempting to preserve THE literary voice she uses to transmit information (most often to her mother) — I have to pay close attention not ONLY to the words she writes, but also to the pauses, the spaces, her nearly flamboyant and chronic use of dashes, her omission of punctuation — so that in the end readers will be able to follow the story Mildred is telling without falling through the ‘gaps’ that are as much a part of her writing style as are the words themselves.

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This process I am engaged in is, to put it mildly, quite BIZARRE!  I am polishing, if not honing my mother’s ability to present a complete facade of herself as being a ‘one kind of woman’ at the exclusion of the ‘other kind of woman’ that my mother was essentially extremely capable of being.  Right now I cannot think about ‘any of that’ because this job I am currently doing would be an impossible task for me to complete.

Maybe I have to ‘go to’ some dissociated and disconnected ‘place’ while I do this job that has more in common with the ‘dissociated and disconnected place’ my mother was able to ‘go to’ while she WROTE these words!  That could be an eerie and unsettling awareness if I let it breach my quasi-professional ‘role’ I have myself in right now.

Partly what concerns me, and I mean this as in ‘involves me’, is that a STORY (according to some very professional International Storytellers I was honored to converse with once upon a time) exists in its OWN RIGHT separate from its teller.

I have written about this before on my blog, how I see the history of our species’ story contained in our DNA itself, how I see genetic memory as being the living of a living story that is so ancient, and so much larger than any single separate entity that calls herself-himself human.

I am — most essentially — pursuing a course of action that I have chosen.  I am being the Fair Witness to this STORY that my mother is telling.  It is HER VERSION of this STORY that is in her words.  Yet Mildred’s husband and all of her children, along with fellow homesteaders, acquaintances (Mildred could not form friendships), and random strangers all had some part in this story.

Storytellers in the oral nonliterate tradition will speak about the requisite involvement of ‘audience’ with ‘story’.  Both the living audience and the living story combine to FORM a living work of art — in time — in space.  I am actively involved with the telling of this story so that it can become a story an audience can participate with.

Horror of Horrors, how can this be?  I certainly know my mother was vilely violent, a child abusing maniac, a dangerous, MEAN and awful mother.  I certainly also know she is not presenting THIS part of herself in this story!  No real surprise there to me any longer — though it greatly amazed and puzzled me for a long time during ‘my process’ with Mildred’s written words.

But because I have chosen my Fair Witness role, and because I have chosen to create the narrative chronicle of the shards and fragments of my mother’s writings as her completely disorganized papers came to me originally after her death, and because I am choosing not to analyze or interpret ANYTHING she says (there will be probably close to 800,000 words here in these four volumes – my guess), all I need to do is FOCUS and DO THIS WORK.

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The image that just came to me as I wrote these last words was of taking a piece of paper and some crayon or pencil — something — and finding a pattern, laying the paper on top of it, and rubbing, rubbing, rubbing — until the image becomes clear on the paper.  No, the evil genie is not going to appear through this rubbing process.  Just an image.  Just a story.  Just a version of a story, seen through my mother’s particular keyhole.  It is her perspective, and my job I have assigned myself is to rub this story, polish it, bring it forth as crystal-clearly as possible — so that THIS story, this strangely-NOT-the-mother-I-knew-wrote-this-story – story — will appear.

The next image that comes to me is of a clean room, like the ones they use at Intel, where nobody can go in THOSE rooms.  If they do, they wear suits, or they work with strange gizmos in their hands through glass.  Because I know that my mother’s story IS CONTAMINATED.  It has to be deadly toxic – somewhere — because she was.

But I leave all that alone right now.  I work with her words as if I never met this person before in my entire lifetime.  And on some strange, twisted, yet very real level, I probably never did meet THIS woman, who wrote THESE words in this story I plan to just plain publish!

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*HOPE FOR A MOUNTAIN: MILDRED’S ALASKAN HOMESTEADING TALE – VOLUME ONE – BEGINNING A DREAM

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