It is fascinating to read the posts so far about this piece, and the myriad of reactions from different perspectives. Pinard’s story struck me because she describes this mysterious alchemy, this not-fully-understood process of healing, and grieving for, her mother’s violent death, by embracing its aspect of flight. Clearly there was an element here wherein Pinard wanted to both connect with her dead mother and establish some sense of control over the random, sudden, and arbitrary character of the car accident, and the image of her mother catapulting through space.
What I first noticed when I downloaded the PDF file of Pinard’s story was that the author’s photo was unintelligible in a representational sense, nothing but a black hole of ink; I thought this was kind of interesting given the themes of memory, gaps, the “constructing” component of writing, particularly autobiographical/memoir writing. I think that the section from “Song”, the Robert Pinsky poem that Pinard chose as epigraph, is beautifully fragile, beginning and ending in air, just as Pinard’s piece does. It seemed all the more poignant to me to learn at the end that Pinsky’s “Song” was “written especially for inclusion in A Conversion of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry inspired by the work of Joseph Cornell.” Immediately I imagined one of Cornell’s fragile little assembled found object shadow box sculpture/collages, and for me this added depth and dimension to Pinard’s story.
As for the idea of flying, Pinard’s piece elicited in me memories of my own experiences plummeting through space, including sky diving (with what seemed like an endless free fall) and, most recently, canyon swing (bungee, basically) jumping in New Zealand, which was for various reasons by far the more frightening of the two jumps. Pinard’s story, and her urge to fly, made me revisit and reconsider both the meaning and motivation for my own adventures of flying/falling.
