By Bacopa Literary Review 2022 & 2024 Contributor Marisca Pichette
I’ll be the first to admit that my writing doesn’t like to behave. Often, when I begin working on a piece, I’ve got no clear sense of what it will be. Is it a poem or an essay? A short story or a novel? Is it literary or dwelling in the shadowy in-between? Creativity is a wild thing, and I am merely a collector of curiosities.
While my publication record is as varied as the sun-dappled forest floor, my two Bacopa Literary Review essays are kin. 2022’s “The Taste of Hundred-Leaved Grass” touches on memory and nostalgia, planted in the bedrock of a constantly shifting landscape of birth and heritage. At the heart of the essay is a meditation on whether land can ever be truly understood: And because it doesn’t belong so much, it has always belonged. It is there to be the thing that doesn’t fit, the reminder of how this landscape has been altered, tinkered with, held.
These themes continue in 2024’s “Bones Within and Without: An Ode to the Wild Dead.” But where the first essay tracks the living, the second catalogues the dead. Beginning in childhood, it recounts the story of a strange little girl obsessed with remains. Again, the question of understanding–and connection across realms of being–is raised: A skeleton is a memory. It doesn’t belong to me; its owner has fled with the flesh. All I can offer is a home, and care for every piece.
These two essays attempt to catch that elusive feeling that insinuates itself into all my writing regardless of genre: Where is my place? Is it the hills and forests that raised me, growing for ages before I was born on the cusp of their diminishment? Is it my passion–writing the wilderness, seeking to capture the magic of nature in words? Or have I already failed before I’ve begun, and there is no place that can wholly hold a person?
Humans have tried over millennia to mold the landscape to suit our needs. Now it is withdrawing from our grasp. Ice caps and topsoil trickle through fickle fingers, retreating until the horizon is bare. I write with both reverence and fear. And I wonder–does that not also apply to looking inward? Seeking to understand the external is often easier than examining the cluttered dimensions of self.
So if there is a place of belonging, let it be this: uncertainty and desire interlaced. Here writing and wondering are one. My place is me–wherever I find myself today. My voice is whatever it wishes to be when I look out the kitchen window and catch a glimpse of some ancient, wild thing, silhouetted between naked trees. And in my work and my life, let this be both a promise and a spell:
Their thoughts are not available to me. I watch them as I watch the stars—at a distance I can little comprehend, and know I’ll never narrow.
