A Force, A Cosmic Certainty

Photo of Princess Leia

Trapped in quarantine purgatory, my partner and I, like two stereotypical GenXers, decided to escape to a galaxy far, far away. As we watched all three Star Wars trilogies, I was transported to the mellow days of the 70s in fog-drenched Monterey when my hair shone naturally golden and my sister and I frolicked in the ice-plant, climbing twisted scrub oaks in our front yard, part of the army base where my helicopter-flying father was stationed. I was five-years-old when George Lucas released his space odyssey Star Wars — that lightning in a bottle of space dust forever entwined in my consciousness. Though I was too young to remember viewing the first film, at some point, I developed my first girl-crush on an intergalactic princess with cinnamon buns for hair.

For Halloween in 1977, my mom sewed the only handmade costume I ever wore, winding my hair into two blonde swirls. We argued then about space-princess fashion. I could not recall Princess Leia having a hood, but later I realized mom was right. The hood shielded her identity as she skulked in space shuttle corridors, protecting top-secret rebel plans to destroy the evil Empire. This princess was righteous. With her chic 70s white gown and cocked blaster, was it any wonder that I was instantly smitten?              

In those early days, Star Wars meant playing in a backyard with a sensitive, tow-headed boy named Timmy. I liked Timmy’s house because he had just about every Star Wars action figure imaginable along with Han Solo’s notorious spaceship, the Millenium Falcon. He also owned Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine land speeder, my favorite space vehicle. Because I was a girl, I had to go to Timmy’s to indulge my fixation; Star Wars toys were meant for boys. But Timmy would often cry, growing weary and bored with this abundance long before I would. He would disappear inside the house, my imagination stretching solo in his backyard, lost and whizzing through the universe among dusty planets with Leia, my chosen avatar.

When I had my tonsils removed, my parents presented me with my very own Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia action figures, quickly followed by a 12-inch Leia doll that appeared under the Christmas tree. She was built like a tank with bright red lipsticked lips. It didn’t take long for her coiled hair to unravel in the violence of play.

Dim in memory’s fractured sense of time, my great-grandmother passed away and we departed on a long flight to New York for the funeral. Emerging from the mourning, what lingered from that trip was a brief outing to see the just released sequel, The Empire Strikes Back. We stood in a snaking line around the theater. Waiting, I stared up at the looming movie poster at Luke riding an Arctic alien creature and in the foreground, dashing Han Solo clutched – in a classic Hollywood romantic embrace – a relenting Leia in wending braids. I left the film dazzled, transformed in the wake of this tragic space spectacle.

After my parents split up briefly and I moved with my mom and sister to my grandmother’s in the South, someone gave me a tiny Yoda action figure for my birthday party at a roller rink. The little green guru came complete with a robe and plastic orange snake draped around his neck. Though I had new jeans wound with a stretchy gold belt, which made me feel older and cooler, I thrilled in secret at this nod to my Star Wars affinity, gone dormant. I found unlikely comfort in a reptilian talisman. It accompanied me to Germany soon afterward, where I existed as a military dependent, a child alien in a foreign land, reunited with my dad.

Returning to the states three years later, I re-entered my homeland in the early 80s an awkward tween complete with bad hair, braces, and spindly legs that had outgrown my body. Stuck in a sweltering summer in tidewater Virginia, my father’s last military assignment, I found temporary relief in a packed theater escape to the Redwood-forested planet of Endor. I was old enough then to realize the jokes were corny and those cuddly Ewok creatures were gratuitous. But there again was that princess, blasting away Imperial Storm Troopers on a speedy hot-rod before the enemy gave away the rebels’ daring plans to dismantle a deflector shield. And, how vile that this clever woman, who could pass as a bounty hunter and rescue Han Solo encased in carbonite, should wind up in a gold bikini enslaved to a slobbery alien slug. Again, after the credits rolled through a darkened theater, I blinked into the bright sun.

And then at some point, I lost the braces, headed to college and graduate studies, moved away, and settled into a career. In short, I grew up. The Star Wars trilogy had concluded and Princess Leia faded away with other childish things.           

Then I turned thirty. Once George Lucas released the highly anticipated three films of the Star Wars prequels, my resistance loosened, and I duly made my way back to the theater. Inferior films all, they failed to move me. Critics cited the overabundant CGI effects and clunky writing, but for me it came down to this:  the lack of a wise-cracking, blaster-packing princess.

But, as chance would have it, I also happened upon Postcards from the Edge, the early writing of Carrie Fisher, the actor forever chained to the iconic Princess Leia role. Her biting wit captivated me, so I followed its unrelenting circles over the years through her subsequent semi-autobiographical books. Vicious and wry in self-deprecation, her writing spared no ugly truth. She was simply brilliant. Surviving drug addiction and electric shock therapy, she endured the vicissitudes of bipolar disorder. Truly, the actor’s life proved as difficult as being outmanned and outgunned in an intergalactic war against a fascist regime.

But the past, especially when it’s a nostalgia-tinged cash cow, has a way of staying unburied. After getting married, we had just moved into our first apartment in a hippie neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. Standing on a stepladder to store shoes on the top shelf of a closet one day, I noticed a child-sized shoebox stuffed in the far dusty reaches, I assumed accidentally left by the former tenants. Opening the box, I expected to see Buster Brown’s. Instead, a treasure trove of Star Wars action figures from all three original films lay crammed together. The thrill of childhood coursed through me. They were all here:  R2D2, Lando Calrissian, C3P0, Chewbacca, Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Yoda, the Ewoks. And the best part? Not one, but three different versions of Princess Leia:  I could not believe my luck.

So, why exactly does a space princess still take up space in a grown woman’s mind? Sure, the heroine withstood torture and strangled her oppressor. She kept her sights on something bigger than herself:  a mission, a Force binding us all, even when she didn’t understand it. But she was so much less than this, too. She was not good. She had a temper; she refused to follow orders; she barked quips at the man who presumed to rescue her; she emasculated her brother, noting his short stature. She never armored her heart, allowing herself to fall for the n’er-do-well smuggler, believing in his goodness, all the while knowing it was unwise. And when a primitive race of teddy bear-creatures welcomed her into their tribe, she let down her hair and joined them. This cinematic messiness just feels truthful in all its weirdness.

Princess Leia — but really, Carrie Fisher, who breathed her to life on screen — showed us the contradictions within which women coexist in both their inner world and outer space. The outward show of it might suggest capitulation to expectations:  a virginal, sexy damsel in distress. But Carrie Fisher’s secret weapon remained, always, hard-bitten truth-telling. The gold bikini awakened all her feminine nightmares but, as she made clear in subsequent interviews, she didn’t like it. She enjoyed killing the mobster that enslaved her. As she herself said, then she went backstage and took off the bikini. And sometimes, when asked to shill for the franchise, she delivered unabashed profanity-laden resistance. She refused to stay within the archetypal lines on or off stage.

It was glorious to see Carrie Fisher in the recently released final Star Wars trilogy, back in the role that birthed her in our collective imagination. But it also unsettled me. It became her swan song. A silver-haired military general and grieving mother, she rolled her eyes and heaved sighs in the direction of impulsive fly-boys. Although she embodied an earth-mother knowingness, this too felt like a let-down, another type to entrap her. What do you do with a confounding woman who refuses to lay down her weapons? Perhaps pin her with the star of a general, but only if she remains unsexed and maternal.  

I’m sure women from other generations don’t see Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia with the same fervor and reverence I do. Maybe it’s the timing. A young, impressionable girl, I grew up in an era when women were either idolized as sex objects or glorified as mothers. In my life, I have felt pressured to embody both and came out neither. I can’t remember anything in between. We did not see women on the big screen then as heroes, particularly if they were going to crack wise and refuse to stay within the confines of feminine constructs. Nowadays, young girls see ample examples of the female warrior in comic book movies and no shortage of foul-mouthed, messy figures of pop female empowerment. Then again, there’s a whole industry dedicated to fame, broadcasting nothing more than materialism and heavily filtered sexiness. Maybe we have not come all that far from a galaxy far, far away.

Carrie Fisher’s untimely passing meant we never got to see the version of the final film’s chapter that would have placed Leia’s narrative front and center, the ultimate hero. Instead, she dies a martyr of the Resistance. This perplexed me. But as I had just rewatched this final installment of the saga, the world tilted on its axis in our parallel universe when resolute jurist Ruth Bader Ginsberg passed away. On the fateful day the news broke, a bereft stranger posted something on social media that stopped me cold. “We’ve lost our General Organa,” she wrote. Her cry echoed in chambers deep within me, too. Our rights as we know them hang a mystery between the scales. But mortality does not snuff the stuff of legend. It was Carrie Fisher, after all, who had quipped: “Take your broken heart, make it into art.”Justice remains a moving target, a constant revolution, even when evident only in celluloid science fiction planets, dimly lit and distant.                                                                                                                                                                                 

I read once that J.J. Abrams, director of two films from the most recently released final trilogy, named in an interview his favorite Star Wars image:  a melancholic vision of the boy hero, Luke, early in the first film. Drenched in the fading light of two setting Tatooine suns, he surveys the horizon, longing for an elusive future yet awaiting him.

When trapped sheltering in place, I revisited the films and chose my own favorite. At the end of The Empire Strikes Back, Han Solo has been captured, his fate uncertain; and Luke has lost his hand and his innocence, having reckoned with the evil in his father as also himself. But the figure that transfixes me here in this scene is Leia gazing out a window, not at the stars but — as I imagine — into darkness. Though standing next to Luke and their loyal droids, Leia looks small, alone, aggrieved.                                                                                                                                                           

As women, we navigate traps real and imagined, resurfacing, tempting, even manacling us if we’re not vigilant. Sometimes the attempt is downright comical or alternately unspeakable and grim.                                                                                                                                                              

But even enveloped in a bombastic space opera, this woman appears calm, elevated in her yearning. While she might seem lost, something else is at play here: a mature, hard-fought awareness — it, too, a force, a cosmic certainty all its own, surrounded though it may be by nothing but seeming endless emptiness.

 

Photo at the top of the page is of late actress Carrie Fisher in her role as Princess Leia. Photo from: https://i.imgur.com  

Ritual of Renewal

“Dear Girlfriends, it’s time for our annual new year’s celebration. Once again, please bring something written, by you or others, to share with the group. It will be so wonderful to hear the various voices and subjects you select.”

The email invitation calls us together to mark two occasions that occur when the calendar flips to the first day of January: a birthday for the world and for our friend, now 75. Each year, we come together a week or two after the big ball drops and the fireworks flash. At our age, we’ve mastered the art of delayed gratification. And so much more.

Each of us is the “birthday girl’s” friend or family member. Some have known each other a lifetime and see each other often. Others see each other just this once, or rarely outside of this yearly gathering. No matter. Each of us belongs there because we cherish the company, share the values, and savor the spirit of our hostess. We enjoy a place in her life and she in ours. We’re a collection of unique individuals who happen to be in the close circle of one special woman with a warm heart, eclectic interests, an inquiring mind, and an exuberant enjoyment of life. A woman entwined with her family, engaged in her community, dedicated to civic leadership.

An outsider looking in may see a random assortment of old ladies. We are not. We’re a special blend of women, like the makings of aged bourbon—maturing separately, mellowed and nutty with a hint of spice, and finishing expansively. Before we arrived at this stage of life, between periods of calm and contentment, we weathered dry spells, turbulence, and sudden storms. Some of us are native to this land, this region; others grew and ripened in distant terrain, in distinctly different climates.

Each of us has lived several lives. Some married; some didn’t. Some outlived or outgrew one or more mates; some bore children, raised other’s children, welcomed grandchildren. All understand that there is no one path. All have known joy and heartache in the relationships that defined our lives. We look back on decision points knowing that life is a mix of choice and chance, and what we thought were decisions arrived at freely were made while under the influence—of parents, spouses, propriety, or passing predilections.

Looking around in the understated elegance of our friend’s home, it’s clear that our company is accustomed to material comfort, although many among us came through and remember leaner times. Today, we dress tastefully, each as it suits us. Unlike our mothers and theirs, we wear pants—even jeans—and enhance our outfits with artful ceramic, gold, or silver jewelry selected more to please ourselves than to impress others. Some add flair to ordinary wear: jeans tucked into wine-red, flat-heeled boots topped with a plaid shirt. One, eyes framed by bold designer glasses, adds a stunning handcrafted pendant to a bulky bright green sweater. Our hair? Tinted or grey but blow and go, suiting the spontaneity and freedom of our fluid, light-to-heavily scheduled lives.

We’re new, revised editions of who we used to be, growing and changing as we go. Credits and credentials from past pursuits—initials after our names, plaques on our walls—say little about us today. Now, we’re free and eager to learn, not some canned curriculum but whatever we want, wherever we go, and whoa—we’re humble. There is so much to learn about this life! 

After breaking bread over homemade tomato soup, tasty cheese and crackers, luscious berries, and more in the open living-dining room—ten at the long rectangular dining table, several more in the bay-windowed front room—we turned our attention to our hostess, standing at the corner of the L-shaped space. “Let’s share our readings now,” she said. “I’ll go first.”

“I wrote this a long time ago. It’s called, ‘My Mother’s Hands.’”

“Oh I remember it,” I said, “I’ve thought about it often.”

“You read it at your 70th,” someone said and others echoed.  

It struck me then how remarkable it was—that in our fast-moving and mobile society, despite changes in my life and around me, I’d been present in this same company at that 70th birthday celebration and every year since. For me, that day five years ago was the first time I’d been included. For others, it was a long-loved ritual. Now, I saw so many of the same faces turned toward our friend again. Were they reflecting, as I was, that friendship, like life, becomes richer, more nuanced, and much more rewarding over time? Were they noticing the absence of some faces? And were they appreciating, as I was, being present once again?

What else had changed? Our hostess’s grandson, a newborn sensation last year, toddled through our midst in constant motion, reminding us of our own children and grandchildren at that age—a joyful time of empowerment and discovery much like this late stage of life in which we find ourselves. Our hostess’s daughter-in-law, the toddler’s mother, read an affirmation she’d composed for the occasion. In simple, sincere prose, she captured our friend’s special qualities, honored their relationship, and revealed her own depth of character. And more had changed. This year, a new thread ran through our reflections. “I am better off healed than I ever was unbroken.” The reader noted how that thought, attributed to author Beth Moore, resonated for her personally and for our country. A covey of concurring comments fluttered up. Yes, we could relate. Although tormented by political turmoil, we took heart from and recommitted to the resistance, determined to shape a culture that would finally, fully liberate our daughters and granddaughters.

The readings we shared revealed the threads that weave us into a friendship quilt. As one after another world-wise woman rose to speak, whose voices did we hear? Our own, as well as inspirational messages from mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zin, from Leading from Within: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Lead, selected by leaders striving to do good and effective work in the world; and from poet Mary Oliver, a personal favorite, offering these instructions for living a life: “Pay Attention. Be Astonished. Tell About It.”

I just did.

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ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB | What She Was Saying by Marjorie Maddox

In these powerful stories, What She Was Saying softens the already thin line between hope and hopelessness, between perseverance and despair, between what can and cannot be said. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter and Eludia book awards as well as a semifinalist for Black Lawrence Press Hudson, Eastern Washington University Spokane, and Leapfrog Press book prizes What She Was Saying gives voice to the lives we all need to hear.

What People Are Saying about What She Was Saying

From the ingenious title to the last story, What She Was Saying is a study of the gap between the covert and the overt. Alienation, isolation, desperation are here writ both small and large; their echo is a humanistic plea for inclusiveness, community, friendship, and simple love and kindness, one to another. Wonderfully crafted, honest, and bold, Marjorie Maddox’s work always brings her readers to new levels of perceptiveness about the big picture as well as minute moments. –Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab’s Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court, or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman

This collection reveals a beguiling new voice in contemporary fiction. . . . Maddox s stories open up unexpected, little noticed corners of our world. . . . Some read like fables; some surprise with bold humor. All celebrate the mystery of the familiar, the strangeness of the ordinary, and the humanity of marginal lives. –Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek

These are luscious stories, packed with unflinching honesty and the earthshaking kind of beauty that makes us brave. –Fiona Cheong, author of Scent of the Gods and Shadow Theatre

Publisher’s Information

 

  • PUBLISHER: F
  • ISBN: 978-1942515685
  • DIMENSIONS: 6 x 9
  • PAGES: 180]
  • PRICE: $15.00
  • RELEASE DATE: 03/01/2017
  • PURCHASE HERE

 

Recommended Works by Marjorie Maddox

Favorite Eckleburg Work: https://files.acrobat.com/a/preview/3af44d25-aecd-46d6-8241-2dfbb20b6f6b?tx=5YT26731HF185425B&st=Completed&amt=3.00&cc=USD&cm=&item_number=fiction-guess-watson

Windthrow by K. A. Hays

Windthrow: a forestry term for the uprooting or breaking of trees by wind. The voices of K. A. Hays’ third volume of poetry speak out of nature’s violent transformations. At turns self-effacing and empathic, fearful and accepting, these are poems of heat: the heat of new motherhood, of uncertainty, and of grief. Here, the things of a teeming world—” the truck stacked with cut trees,” “the military jet, droning over,” and “the beachgrass, blown / with dusty miller sprout”—are bound for renewal and ruin. In poems spare and strange, Hays looks outward to lay bare the complexities of our emotional lives. READ MORE

The Grass Labyrinth by Charlotte Holmes

Fiction. These linked stories the pain of an artist’s life and of those who share it. A married children’s book illustrator falls in love with a photorealist refugee. Their daughter, a blocked poet, becomes infatuated with a young painter with whom she shares a palpable bond. And this young painter, dumped by his girlfriend and tired of the hustle, envisions settling down with his widowed stepmother in the house where he grew up. Whether in a college town, a Brooklyn loft, or a Carolina coastal cottage, these stories explore, over a 30-year span, how the choices the characters make shape those they love in ways they never anticipate, down through the generations in a surprising portrait of one family’s intimate struggle to find the paths that will carry them to the work they must do, the lives they must lead, and the people they can’t help but love. READ MORE

Discussion Questions for What She Was Saying

1. 1. In what ways does the title, WHAT SHE WAS SAYING, apply to each story in the collection? How is this a book about women’s voices? About silences?

2. 2. Reviewer Kristen Hanna has said of these stories, “Maddox’s exploration of depression, longing, grief, relationships, woundedness, and regret…do what good stories do, they promote empathy and understanding.” Sena Jeter Naslund has added, “…their echo is a humanistic plea for inclusiveness, community, friendship, and simple love and kindness, one to another.” Do you agree or disagree? Why? Is this a book also about hope? About writing?

3. 3. WHAT SHE WAS SAYING is a collection of short shorts, short stories, and creative nonfiction. Discuss why and how the author mixes fiction and creative nonfiction. What is the thin line between these genres? How does blurring these boundaries add to the overall themes of the book? Why do you think the author ordered the pieces the way that she did?

About Marjorie Maddox

Sage Graduate Fellow of Cornell University (MFA) and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University, Marjorie Maddox has published eleven collections of poetry—including True, False, None of the Above; Local News from Someplace Else; Wives’ Tales; Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation; and Perpendicular As I —the short story collection What She Was Saying (March 2017 Fomite Press), and over 500 stories, essays, and poems in journals and anthologies. Co-editor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, she also has published four children’s books. For more information, please see www.marjoriemaddox.com

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In these powerful stories, What She Was Saying softens the already thin line between hope and hopelessness, between perseverance and despair, between what can and cannot be said. A finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter and Eludia book awards as well as a semifinalist for Black Lawrence Press Hudson, Eastern Washington University Spokane, and Leapfrog Press book prizes What She Was Saying gives voice to the lives we all need to hear.

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