ELJ EDITION'S AWAKENINGS
Review by Meg Tuite
Diane Gottlieb has edited a collection of essays on the body & consciousness. The entire body in parts. Written by an incredible group of writers who don't shy away from the love, the shame, the panic, the diseases, the vulnerable parts of ourselves! This collection should be taught in schools and be a necessary addition to any book club! OPRAH, WHERE ARE YOU?
The collection is separated into eight sections:
First Section:
Our Bodies Know
Alison McGee writes “Throat you understood. Understood that words inside needed to be said but couldn’t and wouldn’t be said because danger, because don’t say a word, because survival.” And she writes to her ‘throat’ ‘feet’ ‘heart’ ‘mouth’ ‘cervix’ ‘hands’ asking the ’body’ to remember.
There is no way to count how many times I swallowed my words as a child, and through adulthood, because of terror, survival, unregurgitated trauma. And what we do to our bodies to punish ourselves for acts that many times saved our lives. Getting wasted and blacking out. And surely the predators who play into these scenes don’t take home the guilt, the horror, the shame that we carry with us into the world.
This section takes on those themes as well as our bones, our teeth, our hair in all its facets, our skin. The largest organ in the body. Jocelyn Jane Cox questions it all: “Don’t tell me skin’s just an organ when I know it’s just a bag, and liable to break, stretched, as it is, around real organs like the kidney, the liver, the spleen.” “..a rind you will puncture, a shirt you will sew, a canvas for unwelcome designs.”
And the breasts: reduction or stuffing what’s not there, or actual breast jobs: silicone hell!
And the bullying around it. I got called ‘flatsy’ for years and then breasts imploded on me with an overload that no one could call ‘a gift’! WTF!
Don’t forget: the butt, ganglion cysts, legs, feet, eyes, ears, lips, nose, cheeks, neck, hands, belly, back, vagina, calfs: what the hell won’t we magnify to obscene proportions?
Humans will find something that doesn’t quite hold up to whatever the ‘standard’ is for the ‘ultimate body’. And unless you’re a narcissist, let that body image GO!
Second Section:
Taking Up Space
Tania Richard writes, “When I swim, I don’t feel my body in the same way I do when I’m on the ground. I don’t feel the weight of it. The pain of it. The trauma. The history or the shame.”
Now there’s the goal. If only we could walk the earth as buoyant as we do under water. DEEP LOVE FOR THIS LINE. Because she says it all right there! To be able to LET GO of ALL the CRAP we CARRY and just LET OUR BODY BE OUR CONTAINER that we LOVE and ACCEPT AS IS!
Water, whirlpools, locker rooms, undressing, swimsuits, beaches, pools, showers, public display of our bodies. I’m sure we all have stories that encompass these places and memories of how we felt exposed.
The ghosting of the body: diets, scales, over-gyming, powders, steroids, gaining, losing, binging, purging, binging, purging, strapping in, spanxing, letting ourselves disappear with glee.
Whitney Vale writes: “The ghost of a starved girl haunts the refrigerator. Her transparent body glimpsed behind the expired tub of Greek plain yogurt.”
And Nina B. Lichtenstein writes of being harassed by her husband: “These love-handles aren’t exactly a turn on, you know,” he continued.” FUCK YOU, I say to the page. THESE ASSHOLES! But don’t worry, she takes her power back! LOVE!
Third Section:
When It Hurts
Jennifer Fliss writes of the hellish migraines: “They don’t understand migraines back then. I don’t either. But I intimately know the fluorescence of lights and the mallets beating in my head. I know the welling in my esophagus, the brine of the vomit, the queasy quaking sleep-won’t-come pain. The vomit stops them, these nurses who are just mothers of other campers.”
Suzanne Hicks and the movement of walking to wheelchair to the bliss of a hoyer lift into a pool: “I anxiously grabbed the pool noodle, you helping me saddle it between my legs so I could stay afloat. Because all the drugs infused into my veins, injected under my skin, in pills that I swallowed, along with the countless visits to physical therapy, handfuls of supplements and special diets couldn’t stop me from arriving at that moment.”
Disabilities, inflammation, unnamed pain, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme’s Disease, painful sex, hearing loss, and how it feels when those closest to you don’t believe you! WOW!
Fourth Section:
How We Show Up In the World–And How the World Sees Us
Claude Olson writes an essay titled: “My Body Is A Language That I Cannot Speak”
The essay is structured in numbered sections. Here is one: “A young boy sits next to me on the Metro. He cannot be older than seven but no one seems to be watching him. The child is perplexed by me, by the fact that we are the same height yet I am clearly an adult. He glances down at my legs, noticing how they bow like a pair of crescent moons. What happened to you? he asks. I am not sure how to respond. I, too, am searching for the answer.”
How about being asked to explain yourself to a stranger? How does that feel? And again, to those family members, friends, acquaintances? What about when your diet is extremely limited because your body rejects it. But once again, others assume your ‘picky’ or ‘weird’. Questioned for your body and what it wants. Or doctors questioning your pain, your symptoms, what your body is telling you and the doctor feels she knows better than you! DAMN!
Fifth Section:
Illness As Metaphor
The Gallbladder Monologues by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris: “I’ve got gall. That’s what men have told me. You’ve got some gall.”
And more essays of how the world has us question our own existence and what we suffer from: Valley Fever, Gallstones! These women found their voices after battling emotional cruelty and abuse.
Sixth Section:
Separated From the Body
Dissociation: distancing from the trauma, PTSD, losing memory, time, days.
Miscarriages, post-partem depression
Here are some quotes:
“The voice told me to grab the rope. The rope was my breath. I climbed my breath out of this animal-like state, knot by knot, to the surface of myself.” –Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein
“I responded to a homicide report where I live. There was no blood, nor a body–only an empty house. I sat at the desk with the weight of my thoughts. Inviting them in, coaxing them close, holding them tight.” –James Montgomery
“I became a floating head after I was raped.”–Jane Palmer
“The truth was that she heard for so long from all corners of the world that her body was unattractive, undesirable, unfit to touch, unfit to love.”–Melissa Flores Anderson
Seventh Section:
Growing Older
Menstruation in the nation! UGGH! Pain creeps out of nowhere, menopause, hormone-rage, arthritis, wrinkles, hearing loss, graying hair, strange spots, hair loss, paunches, buckling knees, but as Sue Zueger writes it: … “her come-on-mutha-fucka-I-dare-you” is duly unleashed!
Eighth Section:
What We Do To Heal
Tachycardia, walking meditation, one foot in front of the other, learning to skip, foot drop, cavernous angioma, cancers and finding the way through to the other side!
Here are just a few more quotes from a collection that is vulnerable, fierce, powerful, and unparalleled:
"Anyone in an abusive relationship knows the job description is hefty. It includes mind reading."–Claudia Monpere
"It felt like he'd broken every bone in my body with his bare words as if he were cracking a Thanksgiving turkey wishbone."–Kim Steutermann Rogers
"In a drug-hazed stupor after my top surgery, I looked down at the fresh scars and yellow nipple covers and sang, "Hey, it's my birthday."–Ezekiel Cork
"My butt has become its own celebrity."–Kelli Short Borges
"Stark naked in the too brightly lit hallway, a body stood in front of the mirror, the head covered with a paper bag with peepholes cut out. I was looking at someone else’s body.”–Wendy L. Parman
"Shame creates secrets. My siblings and I were bound together by a particular shame."–Deirdre Fagan
"It came out of nowhere, my galloping heartbeat."–Elizabeth Fletcher
“Disability isn’t anything to be afraid of, and neither are the ways we navigate a world made to keep us in the dark corners where so much of it still believes we belong. These days, when my doctors use words that obscure, I illuminate them. I’m not afraid to drag us all squinting into the sun.” –Lizz Schumer
Every essay is phenomenal. How do we deal with aging in our bodies?
How do we deal with the pain; the dis-ease that changes us?
How do we create trust and intimacy again in a body that's been attacked, incested, trod upon?
How does love for who we are and the body we live in return us to us, or does it?
Read this incredible and necessary collection! It takes us on many journeys that steer us back to our own homes. It helps us reconnect with parts of ourselves we have neglected, ostracized, let others judge. No more! Time to get on with the love our bodies deserve from us! Truly a road 'less traveled' and the most important 'road' to navigate!
HUGE LOVE TO Diane Gottlieb, Gayle Brandeis, and the sublime authors who give it ALL! LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY!
Essay Contributors: Camille U. Adams, Maureen Aitken, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, Melissa Flores Anderson, Andrew Baise, Eleonora Balsano, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Marion Dane Bauer, G Lev Baumel, DeAnna Beachley, Kelli Short Borges, Barb Mayes Boustead, Amy Champeau, Ezekiel Cork, Jocelyn Jane Cox, Aria Dominguez, Jacqueline Doyle, Deirdre Fagan, Jennifer Fischer, Elizabeth Fletcher, Jennifer Fliss, Melody Greenfield, Suzanne Hicks, Ann Kathryn Kelly, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, Nina B. Lichtenstein, Tracy Rothschild Lynch, Alison McGhee, Claudia Monpere, James Montgomery, Ellen Birkett Morris, Sandell Morse, Monica Nathan, Claude Olson, Terry Opalek, Melissa Ostrom, Maggie Pahos, Jane Palmer, Wendy L. Parman, Tania Richard, Kim Steutermann Rogers, Kim Ruehl, Lizz Schumer, Sarita Sidhu, Whitney Vale, Karen J. Weyant, Cynthia Wold, Sue Zueger
Review by Meg Tuite
Diane Gottlieb has edited a collection of essays on the body & consciousness. The entire body in parts. Written by an incredible group of writers who don't shy away from the love, the shame, the panic, the diseases, the vulnerable parts of ourselves! This collection should be taught in schools and be a necessary addition to any book club! OPRAH, WHERE ARE YOU?
The collection is separated into eight sections:
First Section:
Our Bodies Know
Alison McGee writes “Throat you understood. Understood that words inside needed to be said but couldn’t and wouldn’t be said because danger, because don’t say a word, because survival.” And she writes to her ‘throat’ ‘feet’ ‘heart’ ‘mouth’ ‘cervix’ ‘hands’ asking the ’body’ to remember.
There is no way to count how many times I swallowed my words as a child, and through adulthood, because of terror, survival, unregurgitated trauma. And what we do to our bodies to punish ourselves for acts that many times saved our lives. Getting wasted and blacking out. And surely the predators who play into these scenes don’t take home the guilt, the horror, the shame that we carry with us into the world.
This section takes on those themes as well as our bones, our teeth, our hair in all its facets, our skin. The largest organ in the body. Jocelyn Jane Cox questions it all: “Don’t tell me skin’s just an organ when I know it’s just a bag, and liable to break, stretched, as it is, around real organs like the kidney, the liver, the spleen.” “..a rind you will puncture, a shirt you will sew, a canvas for unwelcome designs.”
And the breasts: reduction or stuffing what’s not there, or actual breast jobs: silicone hell!
And the bullying around it. I got called ‘flatsy’ for years and then breasts imploded on me with an overload that no one could call ‘a gift’! WTF!
Don’t forget: the butt, ganglion cysts, legs, feet, eyes, ears, lips, nose, cheeks, neck, hands, belly, back, vagina, calfs: what the hell won’t we magnify to obscene proportions?
Humans will find something that doesn’t quite hold up to whatever the ‘standard’ is for the ‘ultimate body’. And unless you’re a narcissist, let that body image GO!
Second Section:
Taking Up Space
Tania Richard writes, “When I swim, I don’t feel my body in the same way I do when I’m on the ground. I don’t feel the weight of it. The pain of it. The trauma. The history or the shame.”
Now there’s the goal. If only we could walk the earth as buoyant as we do under water. DEEP LOVE FOR THIS LINE. Because she says it all right there! To be able to LET GO of ALL the CRAP we CARRY and just LET OUR BODY BE OUR CONTAINER that we LOVE and ACCEPT AS IS!
Water, whirlpools, locker rooms, undressing, swimsuits, beaches, pools, showers, public display of our bodies. I’m sure we all have stories that encompass these places and memories of how we felt exposed.
The ghosting of the body: diets, scales, over-gyming, powders, steroids, gaining, losing, binging, purging, binging, purging, strapping in, spanxing, letting ourselves disappear with glee.
Whitney Vale writes: “The ghost of a starved girl haunts the refrigerator. Her transparent body glimpsed behind the expired tub of Greek plain yogurt.”
And Nina B. Lichtenstein writes of being harassed by her husband: “These love-handles aren’t exactly a turn on, you know,” he continued.” FUCK YOU, I say to the page. THESE ASSHOLES! But don’t worry, she takes her power back! LOVE!
Third Section:
When It Hurts
Jennifer Fliss writes of the hellish migraines: “They don’t understand migraines back then. I don’t either. But I intimately know the fluorescence of lights and the mallets beating in my head. I know the welling in my esophagus, the brine of the vomit, the queasy quaking sleep-won’t-come pain. The vomit stops them, these nurses who are just mothers of other campers.”
Suzanne Hicks and the movement of walking to wheelchair to the bliss of a hoyer lift into a pool: “I anxiously grabbed the pool noodle, you helping me saddle it between my legs so I could stay afloat. Because all the drugs infused into my veins, injected under my skin, in pills that I swallowed, along with the countless visits to physical therapy, handfuls of supplements and special diets couldn’t stop me from arriving at that moment.”
Disabilities, inflammation, unnamed pain, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Lyme’s Disease, painful sex, hearing loss, and how it feels when those closest to you don’t believe you! WOW!
Fourth Section:
How We Show Up In the World–And How the World Sees Us
Claude Olson writes an essay titled: “My Body Is A Language That I Cannot Speak”
The essay is structured in numbered sections. Here is one: “A young boy sits next to me on the Metro. He cannot be older than seven but no one seems to be watching him. The child is perplexed by me, by the fact that we are the same height yet I am clearly an adult. He glances down at my legs, noticing how they bow like a pair of crescent moons. What happened to you? he asks. I am not sure how to respond. I, too, am searching for the answer.”
How about being asked to explain yourself to a stranger? How does that feel? And again, to those family members, friends, acquaintances? What about when your diet is extremely limited because your body rejects it. But once again, others assume your ‘picky’ or ‘weird’. Questioned for your body and what it wants. Or doctors questioning your pain, your symptoms, what your body is telling you and the doctor feels she knows better than you! DAMN!
Fifth Section:
Illness As Metaphor
The Gallbladder Monologues by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris: “I’ve got gall. That’s what men have told me. You’ve got some gall.”
And more essays of how the world has us question our own existence and what we suffer from: Valley Fever, Gallstones! These women found their voices after battling emotional cruelty and abuse.
Sixth Section:
Separated From the Body
Dissociation: distancing from the trauma, PTSD, losing memory, time, days.
Miscarriages, post-partem depression
Here are some quotes:
“The voice told me to grab the rope. The rope was my breath. I climbed my breath out of this animal-like state, knot by knot, to the surface of myself.” –Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein
“I responded to a homicide report where I live. There was no blood, nor a body–only an empty house. I sat at the desk with the weight of my thoughts. Inviting them in, coaxing them close, holding them tight.” –James Montgomery
“I became a floating head after I was raped.”–Jane Palmer
“The truth was that she heard for so long from all corners of the world that her body was unattractive, undesirable, unfit to touch, unfit to love.”–Melissa Flores Anderson
Seventh Section:
Growing Older
Menstruation in the nation! UGGH! Pain creeps out of nowhere, menopause, hormone-rage, arthritis, wrinkles, hearing loss, graying hair, strange spots, hair loss, paunches, buckling knees, but as Sue Zueger writes it: … “her come-on-mutha-fucka-I-dare-you” is duly unleashed!
Eighth Section:
What We Do To Heal
Tachycardia, walking meditation, one foot in front of the other, learning to skip, foot drop, cavernous angioma, cancers and finding the way through to the other side!
Here are just a few more quotes from a collection that is vulnerable, fierce, powerful, and unparalleled:
"Anyone in an abusive relationship knows the job description is hefty. It includes mind reading."–Claudia Monpere
"It felt like he'd broken every bone in my body with his bare words as if he were cracking a Thanksgiving turkey wishbone."–Kim Steutermann Rogers
"In a drug-hazed stupor after my top surgery, I looked down at the fresh scars and yellow nipple covers and sang, "Hey, it's my birthday."–Ezekiel Cork
"My butt has become its own celebrity."–Kelli Short Borges
"Stark naked in the too brightly lit hallway, a body stood in front of the mirror, the head covered with a paper bag with peepholes cut out. I was looking at someone else’s body.”–Wendy L. Parman
"Shame creates secrets. My siblings and I were bound together by a particular shame."–Deirdre Fagan
"It came out of nowhere, my galloping heartbeat."–Elizabeth Fletcher
“Disability isn’t anything to be afraid of, and neither are the ways we navigate a world made to keep us in the dark corners where so much of it still believes we belong. These days, when my doctors use words that obscure, I illuminate them. I’m not afraid to drag us all squinting into the sun.” –Lizz Schumer
Every essay is phenomenal. How do we deal with aging in our bodies?
How do we deal with the pain; the dis-ease that changes us?
How do we create trust and intimacy again in a body that's been attacked, incested, trod upon?
How does love for who we are and the body we live in return us to us, or does it?
Read this incredible and necessary collection! It takes us on many journeys that steer us back to our own homes. It helps us reconnect with parts of ourselves we have neglected, ostracized, let others judge. No more! Time to get on with the love our bodies deserve from us! Truly a road 'less traveled' and the most important 'road' to navigate!
HUGE LOVE TO Diane Gottlieb, Gayle Brandeis, and the sublime authors who give it ALL! LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY!
Essay Contributors: Camille U. Adams, Maureen Aitken, Kathryn Aldridge-Morris, Melissa Flores Anderson, Andrew Baise, Eleonora Balsano, Melissa Llanes Brownlee, Marion Dane Bauer, G Lev Baumel, DeAnna Beachley, Kelli Short Borges, Barb Mayes Boustead, Amy Champeau, Ezekiel Cork, Jocelyn Jane Cox, Aria Dominguez, Jacqueline Doyle, Deirdre Fagan, Jennifer Fischer, Elizabeth Fletcher, Jennifer Fliss, Melody Greenfield, Suzanne Hicks, Ann Kathryn Kelly, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein, Nina B. Lichtenstein, Tracy Rothschild Lynch, Alison McGhee, Claudia Monpere, James Montgomery, Ellen Birkett Morris, Sandell Morse, Monica Nathan, Claude Olson, Terry Opalek, Melissa Ostrom, Maggie Pahos, Jane Palmer, Wendy L. Parman, Tania Richard, Kim Steutermann Rogers, Kim Ruehl, Lizz Schumer, Sarita Sidhu, Whitney Vale, Karen J. Weyant, Cynthia Wold, Sue Zueger
Diane Gottlieb is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness (ELJ Editions). Her writing appears in 2023 Best Microfiction, River Teeth, HuffPost, SmokeLong Quarterly, The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Bending Genres, Identity Theory, and Hippocampus, among many other lovely places. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in the nonfiction category, on the longlist at 2023’s Wigleaf Top 50, a finalist for the 2023 Florida Review’s Editors Prize for Creative Nonfiction and the Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal. You can find her at https://dianegottlieb.com and on social media @DianeGotAuthor.
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Meg Tuite is author of a collection of three of her books (Domestic Apparitions, Bound By Blue, and Her Skin is a Costume) Three By Tuite (Cowboy Jamboree) 2023, White Van (Unlikely Books) 2022, Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing) 2018, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) 2013, won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging 2013, Grace Notes (Unknown Press) 2014, a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press) 2011, and an upcoming collection, Planked By The Abyss (Whiskey Tit) 2024, as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 20 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021, and Wigleaf’s Top 50 stories of 2022, 2023. Her blog: http://megtuite.com
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