A little gift of fiction

Theotokos: a story from my archive

Somewhere along the way I became a person who reads non-fiction. This is as surprising to me as anyone who knew me when my shelves were filled with novels and short stories.

During that transformation I became a writer who writes non-fiction.

A lot of that might have come about because so much of my life is stranger than fiction. Confronted with the weirdness that happens all the time at my farm I’m always saying, “If we presented this to an editor they’d tell us make some changes because the plot is too unbelievable.”

As a writer I’ve always found a deep alchemy in crafting an entire world from scratch. The story I’m dredging from my archive today is the first chapter of a novel I wrote fifteen years ago. As the story made its way to me I lived and ate the characters and the scenes like nourishment. I traveled to Istanbul frequently and was privileged with guides who led me to basements of forgotten chapels.

My art history background is immersed in iconographic study — growing up in a tight, evangelical environment I wasn’t allowed to contemplate images. When a rule makes no sense, I become a detective. As a young college student, I was driven by the question of why were images demonized through the Protestant Reformation?

This chapter was read aloud by a dear friend and voice actor, Sara Parlier, at a local experimental theater production. As we prepared for her reading the words were tightened and the chapter edited to a polish that I haven’t given the rest of the story. As I bring it out of the archive for you as a stand-alone piece, I’m feeling the urge to give the same attention to the following chapters.

They might appear here too.

But for now, I leave you with — Theotokos.

Photo by Ruth Gledhill on Unsplash