MAREE ALDRIDGE - artist/poet/author/speaker/therapeUtic coach
Visual Novellas
Poetry & Blogs
Therapeutic Coaching - offering spacious reflection in the midst of metamorphic change
![](http://img1.wsimg.com/isteam/ip/819c8ba5-9384-4ea7-af3f-f2786cada7c4/Logo%20for%20website%205.png/:/rs=h:500,cg:true,m)
Visual Novellas
Poetry & Blogs
Therapeutic Coaching - offering spacious reflection in the midst of metamorphic change
A new "her-story."
"Because of one girl."
History may be denied or buried yet it is still very much alive; it has a story to tell and a voice to be heard. Denied history, in the form of an unwanted silent girl that the Woman with Renewed Wings would rather have forgotten, arrives at the crucial and unavoidable juncture of 'The Return'.
A cast of characters all bound towards one end because of one girl - what pre-readers are saying.
Between 2016-2018 I wrote "The Return" as part of my Doctor of Ministry thesis.
This story begins with some history, as all return stories do. There is a prior context, a location, a human drama that is a layered and complex weaving.
History or in this case “Her-story” is documented in “Letters to a Missing Woman.” What is discovered by the end of that fable is that transformation is a great soul pilgrimage, a profound homecoming where the woman who left her derelict house with tattered wings renews them and encounters a truth that she is her own odyssey. Thomas Moore defines an authentic odyssey as not a collection of tantalizing experiences, but “a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” When the reader leaves the woman with now renewed wings, she is pictured walking a shoreline and the story closes with her words, "I had done this. No one had done it for me. I have taken an odyssey and now I am One."
“Letters to a Missing Woman” felt incomplete to me. The paradox is that no transformation or homecoming is ever complete, and this is partly what this returning story explores.
My own curiosity was stirred by women who had read the story and attended workshops and then queried what happens after the ending. The Woman with Renewed Wings was yet to enter into her own return where she might pass on the lessons she has learned. Coincidentally, events took place in my own life that pushed me onward to face my own personal struggle to return. It did not feel right to leave the Woman With Renewed Wings wistfully wandering shorelines in retreat away from the world. Though it would have been idyllic to have left her in hiding, what about those other women from whom she had come who were “once beautiful and youthful crumbling in on themselves like their houses, not living and not thriving as they could have”? I wondered would happen should the woman who departed with tattered wings return to those women with her wings renewed? When she returned to her “capricious house” and the mercurial nature of that neighbourhood would she be subsumed back into the “patterns that were not on plates or hand stitched onto linen, but embedded?”
After 6 years of writing, image-making, an installation, workshops, refining the layout design, and spawning more stories, "Letters to a Missing Woman" became available as an e-book December 2019. NOW (May 2020) it is also available as a large soft cover print.
NZ buyers - contact me for other options.
If I were to write the backstory of “Letters to a Missing Woman” I doubt I would know where to begin and where to end. I was awakened by a shocking recognition in 2012 that I had gone missing somewhere in my life. It happened when I re-read a letter that I had written some twenty years earlier. The writer was so hopeful, so emotionally generous and so lovingly vulnerable. I wondered as I sat there, letter in my hand, so numb stumbling through those lines, where had that ‘me’ gone? When, why and at what point did she disappear? That same year a close friend of mine had regular dreams about calling my name, searching high and low for me, yet I was not to be found. ‘Missing’ was a word that expressed what I needed to face about my present existence in 2012. My “where have you gone?” question became a quest.
Having had my consciousness cracked open, I embarked on a search for my ‘missing woman’, which was a distinct shift from all my efforts to change myself over the years. I gave up ‘change’ and began looking for who had gone missing. That same year I created an art installation called “Thresholds of Alteration”. As part of my exhibition I had constructed a shoreline using natural materials, sand, driftwood, shells and a hut to vigil in. I littered that area with treasures and candles. In reflecting I wrote, “I am waiting for someone here at the shoreline – I am waiting for myself.” I invited this me to come home, while also feeling compelled to walk into the unknown to meet her on the road.
Two months later I walked onto a beach to find the gift of a beautifully made sand mermaid, tail adorned with shells. Without thinking I said to my companions, “there is my missing woman”. That happenstance ensured she became the symbolic character who would make her way into my writing.
As I quested it became more difficult to find where this all really began. At every point I backtracked towards I could see the thread stretch on even further into the past. The origins of this narrative are buried deep in my psyche, threaded thematically through my history and that of my family over many generations. My mother had suffered a lost childhood in exchange for a traumatic one. My grandmother had died leaving her young children to the mercy of a cruel orphanage experience. When my mother began to gain access to her family history in her early fifties, we were both struck by the tragic story of an ancestor, a woman in our lineage who died and was buried at sea on her voyage to New Zealand from Denmark. She never saw the new land that promised new beginnings. ‘Going missing’ stretched back at least to 1871, yet I have no doubt even this would not be the beginning.
Click the link below to read the rest of the introduction of how the novella and art project.
Artist, author, poet, workshop facilitator, therapist, Doctor of Ministry/Adelaide College of Divinity
Maree worked as a community artist from 2004 till 2016. Her public installations and exhibitions invited conversation, reflection, healing acceptance and conscientiousness-raising regarding what she calls “the subtext of social injustice” (disconnection, marginalisation and objectification), in a quest for remedies and liberation. Through the mediums of visual arts, story, poetry, sound, and environments of co-creative co-learning, Maree presents the yearning for wholeness personally and asks searchingly for the inclusion of difference/strangeness and meeting the difficulty of the human experience with empathy.
BIRTHPLACE OF LETTERS TO A MISSING WOMAN
Maree was the Artist in Residence from 2011 to 2015 at the social service agency, Anglican Action, in Hamilton. She was inspired out of a sense of justice for the plight of women who found themselves in broken places to write Letters to a Missing Woman in 2014 as an empathic response. From the story, an art installation was created and resided at Anglican Action in 2015, then for six months at the College of St John’s the Evangelist in Auckland in 2016. Maree has facilitated many Letters to a Missing Woman workshops of various kinds and for women, men and people helpers since 2014. Her Doctor of Ministry thesis (2018) focused on writing a sequel which she has named The Return. This is being published as The Return of the Girl Behind the Door which extends and deepens the tale that began in 2014, bringing it full circle as Poet T.S Elliot describes, “the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.”
FROM WRITING TO WORKSHOPS AND CO-LEARNING
Letters to a Missing Woman, "The Return" and "Winter Fire" were offered as workshops and retreats between the years of 2014-2019, offering space to work with the themes of missing-ness and reconnecting to one's self as interactive, creative and reflective processes. Participants wove in and out of the fictional stories and their own story as an inner pilgrimage of homecoming. The co-journey was made up of many women and men who were willing to be curious about what newness might emerge by going "to the places that scare you." (Alice Walker).
Maree was awarded her doctorate (Doctor of Ministry) through the Adelaide College of Divinity November 2018. Currently Maree works at an alcohol and drug recovery center and continues to keep creating. She has two other stories that are linked to Letters to a Missing Woman and The Return of the Girl Behind the Door at different stages of completion.
If you would like to inquire I promise not to email bomb you. I write a blog about once a month/every 6 weeks and post regularly on the "Letters to a Missing Woman" Instagram and Facebook pages. If you'd like to know more about workshops, know when there's a new blog or receive updates about the stories LETTERS TO A MISSING WOMAN, THE RETURN and my current projects or new poems you're welcome to join that email list by making contact.
Copyright © 2023 Letters to a Missing Woman - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy