Wild Thing: breathing like lions + monster archival hunt!
For this month's Howl, we practice moving and breathing like a lion in the spirit of my conversation with Myth Monsters Podcast + a dig through my fiction archive to uncover an old lion story š¦.
This is where I was when my friends went off to college.
While itās funny to me I now make my living as a professor, I actually didnāt want to go to college myself. The idea that some institution was going to āshapeā me was not appealing. I already knew the places I learned the most about myself: the wild.
And I also knew how I would feel the most challengedānot through advanced academic classes, but hiking over 100 miles in less than a month and living out of what I could carry on my back.
My family reasoned with me that finding a group to go with would be a good compromise, and I secretly agreed. So, thatās what I did.
On one of our solo nights, I woke to mountain lion prints (mother and baby) by my open-air campsite. I was both in awe and terror. Theyād spared me, but theyād seen me.
Years later, living now in Philadelphia, single for the first time in my 20s, I imagined myself back into the moment. The desert, lions scouting strayed humans. This time, I invented a woman whoād left her partner and apartment and modern life behind out of a self-inflicted exile. In the story, she wrestles with her own violent impulses and struggles to understand that sometimes resistance, physical resistance, is necessary. That sometimes that shame comes from those afraid for you to recognize, and wield, your power.
The story is a confrontation with the forces that seek to silence and take away oneās ability to defend and speak for themselves.
I was lucky to have a friend a few months after I finished the piece to call me to say they were putting together a new issue of their magazine, Pink Monkey Magazine, on monsters and were curious if I had anything for the theme. Hm, I thought. I just might.
What followed was a few rounds of edits with the super talented Sam Schieren and Max Cea, and personalized illustrations and collage work by Emma Caster-Dudzick.
Dug up from the lion cave, here is your monthly peek into the archiveā¦
THE HUNT
originally published in Pink Monkey Magazine Issue 4, 2018
Some fears are meant to be stalked quietlyāfrom afar, ignored as you pass through them like the signs and symptoms you donāt want to see. To be big and strong when facing danger only invites more in. Like how if you honk at the buck caught in your headlights on a country road, past midnight, heāll come bounding for the dashboard. Animals think simply in response to a challenge. Rarely do they back down as guidebooks suggest.
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