MAREE ALDRIDGE - artist/poet/author/speaker/therapeUtic coach
Visual Novellas
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Therapeutic Coaching - offering spacious reflection in the midst of metamorphic change
AVAILABLE NOW (in soft-cover print)
The Return of the Girl Behind the Door
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'.
The Return Novella - sequal to Letters to a Missing Woman
The "HER-STORY" of this Return
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?”
AVAILABLE NOW!!
The "Letters to a Missing Woman" e-book and soft cover
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.
Creating the Letters to a Missing Woman visual novella
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
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.
Continued...
Click the link below to read the rest of the introduction of how the novella and art project.