Quarry

“…clean, white wings opened and closed silently, like an owl’s.”

The idea for Quarry came from a writing class taught by Susan Hankla. She led our class across the street from the Studio School to the museum where visual art would inspire our next attempt at fiction.

You can find Landscape with Wing by Anslem Kiefer in the Modern and Contemporary Collection in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The museum’s website describes Kiefer’s art as “immense and desolate landscapes.” This enormous mixed-media piece is almost eleven feet tall and eighteen feet wide and constructed of oil, straw and the wing is made of lead. The website explains that the wing “refers to the Icelandic myth of Wayland, a crippled and imprisoned metalsmith who escaped on wings he made himself.”

I know nothing about Icelandic mythology and I don’t have an education in psychology, but I tried to evoke the overwhelming, haunting feeling of Landscape with Wing in words.

On a rainy day at school, a teenage boy experiences a vivid and violent hallucination of a crow.  He sees himself as monstrous, towering over his fellow students, his defeated mother, and the nurses who care for him at school and in the psychiatric hospital. Later, in his high school hall, students morph into hawks and he’s returned to inpatient care. Once released, he walks through a thunderstorm to a nearby quarry.

I imagined his quarry to look like the one in the 2004 movie, Garden State. From a darkened sky, torrential rain pummels the characters before the camera zooms out showing the terrifying enormity and depth of the quarry. Here’s a clip of that scene: Scream into the Abyss from Garden State

But here, our protagonist finds comfort in the dark enormity of the quarry. Here, he finds a tragic way to escape on wings he made himself.

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I’ve begun sending query letters for my novel, Degrees of Forgiving, to literary agents. Finding agents who are open to new work like mine and following their specific requirements for submission (the first five, ten, or twenty-five pages, the first three chapters, a synopsis or query only, etc.) is slow-going. What I’ve learned is that for every 100 queries I send (yes, 100), I may receive one to five requests for the full manuscript. Very few of these requests result in an offer of representation. I haven’t yet dug into those odds, but probably should to manage my expectations.

Richmond’s suffocating July humidity keeps me inside at my desk. Besides the agent query process, I’m working on another novel. My 30-year-old narrator recounts the high school shooting that jolted her life off-course. Her close connection to the shooter resulted in debilitating guilt for not preventing him from killing many, including her best friend.

Gifted writers and readers from my Tuesday critique group and my Thursday critique class help me make every chapter of this novel better. I’m humbled by and grateful for their wisdom. I couldn’t do it alone.

Thanks for coming along.

Heather