Word by Word

Practical insights for writers from Jessica P Morrell

Happiness is Reading

Written By: Jessica Morrell - Jan• 20•25

Happiness is in the quiet, ordinary things.

A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages.

And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent. ~ Virginia Woolf

I’ve never used a letter opener as a bookmark, but I’m sure we agree that a delicious story transporting us far from the ordinary world belongs on our happiness list. With the horrors of the L.A. fires and a rising oligarchy overtaking our republic,  transporting is what I desperately need.

Girl with Needle-work by Pietro Rotari - Artvee

Girl with Needle-work, Pietro Rotari

A few days ago I read a short story that has haunted me. It’s from a contest held in conjunction with  Roxanne Gaye’s  Substack column The Audacity. The tagline is ‘writing that boldly disregards normal constraints.’ I highly recommend it for it’s mission, news roundup, and the twice monthly essay contest for up-and-coming writers.  In the January 15 column Megan Pillow describes how her book group had read Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and talked about how society treats people on the margins. And how these truths are more terrifying than the monsters under our bed. {For the record, I had monsters in the closet and tigers under the bed.}  Cuckoo is about  kids sent to a conversion camp in the 1990s and it sounds chilling. But then it’s a horror story and meant to be chilling.

This, in turn,  begat a horror short story competition. The winner is “The Needleworkers” by Dyana Herron and it’s a fairytale meets a Shirley Jackson-type tale. Here is the link  again and first paragraphs. And I cannot stop thinking about it.

The aunts keep the needles locked upstairs in a room of the common house. They knew otherwise the temptation might be too great for us nieces to sneak between meals and chores to handle them –measure their weight in our palms, test the sharpness of their points, rehearse a threadless a stitch or two.  

And how could we resist? The needles are beautiful. Most are true silver, polished to a perpetual shine from use. Some are wooden whittled thin. A few, the oldest, are carved from bone. They are all bright and smooth, unlike the dusky tin spoons we use at mealtimes and the rough, disfiguring mirrors in the hall. They are lovelier than anything that belongs to the community, and much more valuable, because they are what we use to stay safe from harm. 

Keep writing, keep dreaming, have heart

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