I have written all my life since when, as a little girl, I hid under our long velvet tablecloth in the dining room to draw and tell myself stories. I have many notebooks filled with short stories, potential book plots, and poems. But I never pursued publication. I suppose I believed what my grandmother told me when I declared I wanted to be both an artist and a writer. She said: “You can’t hold two watermelons under the same arm.” So, I chose to become a visual artist and remained a frustrated writer. I even made many artist’s books and chapbooks to relieve me (at least partially) of my unwritten books’ weight.

Until one day, I woke up and started writing my book “The Amalgam.” The words poured out of me, and I stayed up for days, writing. Then, the days turned into several years when I wrote feverishly in my office at the university during class breaks, on little notes torn from whatever paper was around, in the middle of the night when a passage or phrase came to mind. I wrote without being able to stop. And, after a lot of trial and error, three helpful writers’ groups, and a slow process that, not to my surprise, parallels that of the visual creative process, my book “The Amalgam” is ready. Below is a short excerpt.

 
Fiction

“The Amalgam” is a literary fiction book of 82,00 words, as yet unpublished.

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THE AMALGAM

Athens, Greece

 Meta turns the framed embroidery face down and plants her foot on the back, forcing the stretchers apart. As glass shatters on the concrete, the worm-eaten wood cracks and sighs like old bones. She leans the freed handiwork against a column, running her fingers over the gauzy dress with the delicate flowers her grandmother had cross-stitched for her the Easter Meta turned five. In the musty storage room all this time, the fabric bears a collection of brown spots that remind her of dried blood.

“Where is home?” Meta wonders aloud. 

Amid the rest of her belongings piled up on the construction site, the embroidery looks back as if waiting for an answer. But the only response comes from the distant cannons.

Meta darts to a corner and bends over a row of early geraniums to settle her convulsing stomach. Spitting the foul taste from her mouth, she takes a deep breath. Then, chased by her unanswered question, she rushes down the stairs, unfazed that the rain has just turned into a downpour.