Susan Dixon

Construction vehicles make the road to campus a slalom run. The enormous crane sitting on what used to be an athletic field reaches into the low-hanging clouds like Jack’s beanstalk. After yesterday’s thunderstorms, the heatwave has broken.

A gorgeous, washed, clear morning, cool breezes through the window. I heard the thunder yesterday and the rain drumming the roof but I was lying in a darkened room on my acupuncturist’s table so I missed the tornado warning and the sirens.

It was 1972. I was newly married, living in the north but traveling south for Christmas, which was a major festival in my family. Through a series of happy accidents, my husband had escaped any danger of being sent to Vietnam so my spirits were high. Vietnam as a specter over my personal life was behind me. I was everything civilians are accused of being: involved only when personally affected. The war was not behind the Vietnamese, but in a selfish betrayal of passions I had only recently held, I was no longer paying much attention.

In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Narnia is under an enchantment that makes it “always winter and never Christmas,” meaning “always dark and never light,” “always cold and never warm,” “always dormant and never growing,” “always fearful and never hopeful,” “always paralyzed and never creative.”

Most people I urge to write during this time dismiss the idea, or don’t register it as having any relevance to themselves. They aren’t “good enough,” they would say, or they aren’t “writers,”or their story isn’t interesting, or important, etc., etc. No matter how often I would urge, they could not see how whatever small contribution they might make would matter to anyone.

So I decided to make my point using the poem that introduced me to the Irish poet Eavan Boland who writes herself, as a woman, into the tangled historical and mythological history of Ireland.