Nature: A Powerful Conduit to Memory

by 2020 Creative Nonfiction First Prize winner Virginia Boudreau

T.S. Eliot once referred to April as "the cruelest month." As a resident of Nova Scotia, I'd concur with that observation. Springtime in this part of the world rarely plays fair. It tends to drag its feet and arrive kicking and screaming at the back door. Unfortunately, 2020 was no exception. For that reason, grass was on my mind. I was longing for the rich color and softness of it in the way I sometimes yearn for stars to brighten a too-dark sky.

                                                               Grass

. . . I marvel at the serendipity of seeing a bunny over by the stone wall, this day of all days. It's a treat, particularly at a time when the Covid-19 virus holds the world captive, and nothing seems certain anymore.
     I stand on the lawn, not quite green. It's mostly a spread of dull sienna grass, littered with twigs and pine needles, worn thin in places and stitched with smatterings of sheep sorrel and hawkweed. The rabbit sits still as can be but for his twitchy ears, shell pink and gleaming translucent in the wan lights . . .
     I try hard not to hear the sound of your breathing. It makes me think of you, stretching and grabbing for air like apple pickers teetering to reach the ripest fruit on the highest branches. How many times have I held the sweetness of a small perfect world in my hands and taken it for granted?
     As the rabbit fades into the thicket, I picture us sprawled in the long grass. Daisies were everywhere, mingling like leggy girls in fluttering white skirts, dancing like there was no tomorrow. We wove chains for our hair, plucked petals for hours, saying "He loves me, he loves me not" . . . and we wouldn't stop until we ended up with the answer we wanted . . .

My friend Pam and I shared the love of nature. Even after she was frail and struggling for breath, she'd suggest getting outside. Nature is such a powerful conduit to memory.The sight of the rabbit took me back in time to another Easter weekend on a local forest trail The patchy grass on my lawn deposited me further back to the contrast of that idyllic day on the bluff where dandelion seeds in the meadow opened a portal directly into our shared childhood. 

The inspiration for the "Grass" piece made me think about all the ways we are intertwined, how everything connects, and everything belongs. I was startled into considering not only life's astounding beauty, but also its impermanence. Like the translucence of long furred ears or filaments riding the wind, how fragile it all is, and ultimately, how hopeful. I'm going to try to hold onto that.

*    *    *

Virginia Boudreau is a retired teacher living on the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. A poem about her friend Pam, "Resurrection," appeared in Qwerty Magazine in 2018. Her other poetry and prose have appeared in a wide variety of international publications, including Claw and Blossom, Grain, Palette Poetry, Sunlight Press, The New York Times, and Westerly (Australia). New work will be appearing in Cricket Magazine.

Read Virginia Boudreaj's prize-winning "Grass" on pp. 16-17,
as well as other thoughtful works of Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry,
Short-Short, and Humor in Bacopa Literary Review 2020

Finding Meaning in a Time of Mourning

by 2020 Poetry First Prize Winner Caitlin Cacciatore

The writing of "Sacrament" was an exercise in mourning, and a labor of love besides. I felt moved to write an elegy for my late grandfather, who had passed of COVID-related breathing difficulties in the middle of March. There was so much I needed to say. I wanted to wrangle everything I felt onto the page--not only the grief and the aching loss and the niggling sense of regret at not calling one last time, but also the pride I felt at having known such a towering figure of a man, and the small comfort that he'd had nearly a century's worth of time on this planet to love and to live and to fight the good fight. 

I can't say I realized when I was writing that I was no longer speaking to my grandfather alone. I was also addressing a world that was entering a period of mourning that lingers to this day. It didn't occur to me until well after I'd finished my first draft of the poem that I had written something powerful enough to speak to others who had similarly lost loved ones. 

Mourning has a tendency to render us powerless and angry. I couldn't allow it to render me speechless as well. I needed to do what all writers do in times of crisis--I needed to offer the world some great and lasting truth, something that would pay tribute to someone I'd loved dearly and lost unexpectedly, something that would have made my grandfather proud and in doing so, honor his memory in the only way I knew how.

At the time "Sacrament" was written, I was just beginning to feel a strong sense of moral obligation as a poet and writer. It's ultimately up to us to chronicle what I like to call the human cost of history. The mind doesn't deal well with large numbers. One day, the pandemic will end and historians will write down horrific numbers and compare the death toll of COVID-19 with that of other pandemics throughout history. 

In a hundred years, I'll be gone and so will most of everyone I knew or loved, but my words might live on, and maybe someone will read them and understand that COVID-19 was not just a number in a textbook or a date on a ledger. It had a real, visceral, human cost that cannot be measured or quantified. That is the power of words--they live on.

*   *   *

Caitlin Cacciatore is a queer writer and poet who lives on the outskirts of New York City. She believes poetry has the power to create change and brighten lives, and wishes for her work to be an agent of forward motion. Caitlin prefers writing in the hours just after dawn.

Read Caitlin Cacciatore's Poetry First Prize Winning "Sacrament" (page 5)
and other fine works of Poetry, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Short-Short, and Humor
in Bacopa Literary Review 2020 (print and digital)

Our Journal of the Plague Year

by Mary Bast

Being observations or memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a Citizen who continued all the while in London. Never made public before. (Daniel Defoe, "A Journal of the Plague Year")

Daniel Defoe is best known for his novel Robinson Crusoe. But he was a prolific writer of more than 300 works on politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He wrote about everything that drew his interest, so--of course--when the plague began to threaten Londoners, he decided to remain in the city and chronicle its progress.

As deaths began to be reported, Londoners of 1665 reacted much as we in the U.S. reacted to early reports of  "a corona virus" from other parts of the world--initial concern, then forgetting about it, reading more specific information about "COVID-19," but raising our hopes again and back to life as usual. Until it was upon us. And while self-isolating to help flatten the curve (two phrases most of us had never uttered before this spring), things have been, perhaps, a little too quiet. In fact, we had three times as many submissions to Creative Nonfiction this year as in 2019.

Long before rumors emerged of the scary year to come, we decided to expand our Creative Nonfiction genre to include literary essays as well as personal memoir. Those we accepted provided balance in these otherwise off-balance times, including "Singultus," in which Ann Kathryn Kelly describes the unfolding diagnosis of her persistent hiccups; "The Garden in Eclipse," a late September elegy by gardener, birder, and naturalist Paul Grindrod ("On any day you might still see hummingbirds squabbling over feeding rights at the tubular pastel flowers of a sunset hyssop . . .");  and Cynthia Close's "Just Looking: A reflection on John Updike and what it means to write about art"--so intriguing to me as artist, writer, and Updike fan that I bought her key reference, Just Looking: Essays on Art by John Updike

In this 2020 Year of the Plague we also reviewed a number of  submissions specific to living with the novel coronavirus, including two accepted in Creative Nonfiction, Una Lomax-Emrick's "Chores" (When I washed my hands, I began to balance my phone on the edge of the bathroom mirror and play sitcoms into the basin to time the rinsing.) and "The Mouth on the Mountain" by Virginia Watts, who recalls her childhood trips through tunnels on the Pennsylvania turnpike (Even though this is not a place you are used to, you must take this journey . . .)

Our new Humor genre also brought plague year work. The elected representative of the Canine Association for Normal Exercise and Moderation expresses the concerns of its over-walked membership in Stuart Stromin's "An Open Letter to the Secretary General." In "Coronabrain," Ashley Chang amuses us with family quarantine scenes:

From my room, I can hear Mom and my brother Taylor getting popsicles from the fridge.
Taylor: I miss being able to go out to eat and having options.
Mom: I miss you having friends.

Finally, one of the rejection letter editors in Cadence Mandybura's Humor contribution, "Notes From the Editors on Orange is the Darkest Color" writes, "I personally loved this novel: a surreal black comedy with the stakes of truth vs. fiction winding higher and higher. Throwing in a worldwide pandemic is a daring, hyperbolic choice . . . This idea also has the potential for an episodic series, if you're interested in shifting the format to television."

*   *   *

Our 2020 issue, featuring these authors and many more

will be available mid-September in print and digital format.

Meanwhile, you can find Bacopa Literary Review at Amazon.com

Questioning Your Own Reality

 By Mary Bast

Gaslighting is a pattern of manipulation tactics used by abusers, narcissists, dictators, and cult leaders to gain control over a person or people. The goal is to make the victim or victims question their own reality and depend on the gaslighter. "Are Gaslighters Aware of What They Do?" by Stephanie A. Sarkis, PhD, Psychology Today, January 30, 2017.

Much is being said these days about political gaslighting, conversations about "fake" news, twisting of details meant to make us question our understanding of reality. And now--in the wake of COVID-19--a dawning awareness that the world as we knew it has dramatically changed, yet still thinking to some degree "This can't be happening." Even when we admit the awful truth, denial defends us as we engage in escapist strategies to help us cope.

Perhaps now is the time to better understand the nature of gaslighting in childhood, experiencing--beyond the words of 2019 Creative Nonfiction contributor River Kozhar--the horror of a tortured existence where everyone outside the family wants to believe "This can't be happening." 

 "When My Cat Died"

River Kozhar

When my mother gaslit me as a child, telling me over and over that what I was experiencing wasn't bad enough to be traumatic, I began to feel that what I was saying didn't actually reflect the horror of my childhood . . .      

     They were serial killers, but no one seemed to have the slightest idea that was the case. Guests would come and tell me how wonderful they were. They couldn't see the burn marks . . . the scars . . . never heard the words . . . whispered into the quiet corners of my life like poisonous wraiths until I forgot where they originated . . .  

     Children's Aid came once, when my parents were not so careful, but they left me there . . . dismissing it as a one-time thing. It was, however, shortly thereafter that I received a gift from my parents--two kittens . . .

     That nightmare was a dungeon in some abyss of the world, a hall of narrow cells always damp with blood or tears . . . and it did not take my life for two reasons: I had a vague recollection of love from my early years and had glimpsed goodness in people from the outside world, both of which gave me impossible hope; and I had two neighbours in the cells next to mine . . .
     They became my kin as well as my cellmates, but they were not human. Like some Tarzan of the feline world, I was raised by cats . . . slowly learned their language and their culture . . . learned to track scents on the wind, to walk in a circle before I curled up to sleep . .  how to snarl like a jaguar, how to wake to the particular meow that that meant someone had brought back a kill, how to purr, how to say I love you . . . 

*     *     *

River Kozhar has published prose and poetry in 15+ literary magazines and is seeking an agent for her second novel, a diverse NA/YA fantasy romance. Her nonfiction (under this nom-de-plume) has also appeared in the Deaf Poets Society. She lives in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

(Read the rest of River Kozhar's "When My Cat Died" (pp. 96-100), plus
more Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, Mixed Genre, Fiction, and Haiku

in Bacopa Literary Review 2019, Print Edition or Digital Format)