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Reflected in Glass
Abstract
Reflected in Glass, a collection of seven short stories bracketed by two works of automythography, is largely an attempt to find focus in chaos, to give faces and names to at least some of the fragments that make up a life. The first and last pieces in this collection respond to Audre Lorde's question in the Introduction of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: "To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin's blister?" Though both pieces come close to autobiography, they are not strictly factual. By acknowledging them as "automythography" rather than "essay," the writer invites the reader to understand the personal truth rather than the fact. Most of the stories here focus on relationships between women. "Blue River" and "Diamond' examine the experience of losing friends to death, and the loneliness that comes not only from the loss of the friend, but also from lack of support our culture offers to women's friendships. "Barbara's Face Reflected in Glass," which was published in Laurus, is a love story, as are all the stories here, but in this story the love is shattered by an act of violence, one that the narrator survives, but the relationship does not. "Seams," "Ashes to Ashes" and "Crossings," involve characters in traditional family relationships. "Seams," which was published in The South Dakota Review, tells of a divorced mother learning to let her son grow up and away from her. "Ashes to Ashes" is the story of incest survivors learning to cope. For one of the survivors, coping means forgetting, for another it means learning to speak. In "Crossings," a mother and her cancer-stricken daughter come together to learn to say goodbye. Only "Orphans in The Skylight" is told from the point of view of a male character. But even in this story the focus is on a woman, the narrator's wife, and on the mystery of both her life and her death.
Subject Area
Modern literature|American literature|Rhetoric|Creative writing
Recommended Citation
Shoemaker, Karen Gettert, "Reflected in Glass" (1997). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9736952.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9736952