Thank you Shelley Karpaty, Robin Payes, Di Kersey, and many others for tuning into my live video with Susan Kacvinsky! Join me for my next live video in the app.
“Meeting Death” is about a girl in the ancient world waiting to be handed to the king of Argos, and Susan tells you what it is in the first paragraph. Like the goats, I was livestock, moving from my father’s house to another man’s.
Then she makes the plot prove it. The girl adopts a runt kid, she falls in love (of course), and then her mother slaughters the goat.
What got me is how gentle it is. The mother sings to the goat while she opens his throat. There’s a good boy. There, there. Nobody raises their voice. If you have ever been managed by someone who loves you, you know that technique. It’s not an accident that the woman using it is the one who has to hand her daughter over next.
Susan told us that she wrote that scene walking barefoot on a beach with a notebook, which she calls writing from the body. Then she rewrote it more times than she could count, and read every line aloud before it went anywhere. So the tenderness inside that difficult scene isn’t instinct. She chose it, over and over.
I asked her how a story about a fifteen-year-old might speak to women our age, and she pointed out that the mother isn’t the only threshold guardian. There is also Death. You can’t go through any gate unchanged, so every crossing you have ever made required a sacrifice. The teenager dies so the adult can exist. The adult dies to become the midlife woman. The midlife woman dies after the menopause, after the children, after the marriage, quite often.
I’ve written about this in the essay you can’t have a resurrection without dying a little.
Susan told us that said in most of our earlier thresholds, we crossed unconsciously. Like in our first coming-of-age. You rebelled at fifteen because that’s what fifteen does. Nobody explained it, you just went. Midlife is the first one you cross with all the wisdom of our life experiences within us. We are our own wise women.
Susan thinks the awareness is the gift.
Please come to the Salon tomorrow and tell me what you think. Is this wisdom a gift or a tax when faced with the Threshold Guardian! Think about the last threshold you crossed: did knowing what it would cost make it easier to walk through, or is the knowing exactly what keeps women standing at the gate for years?
Susan Kacvinsky writes Modern Mythology. “Meeting Death” is a chapter from a novel set at the turn between the old gods and the new. When it’s finished I will share with you exactly how to get your hands on it.
The story itself is in The Story Room Magazine, Issue One, which is the only place any of these pieces appears in full, alongside ten others on the Threshold Guardian.
TOMORROW: Sunday, 5pm UK and noon Eastern, we do the other half of The Story Room. The Author’s Table is where we talk about how a piece was made. The Heroine’s Salon is where we discuss this quarter’s theme The Threshold Guardian. Who is standing at your gate, and what she wants from you before she lets you past. Susan will be there. So will four other writers from the issue, and hopefully you can join us!
It’s free if you’re a member of The Heroine Society. Membership is $9.95 a month, which is less than a single ticket to the Salon, and it also gets you the Magazine, the quarterly Salon, and the chance to be published and paid.
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