WRITING PROMPTS inspired by 'When I Sing, Mountains Dance' | Irene Solá
Understanding our internal landscapes through literature, deepening the connection between personhood and place | Book review with subsequent writing prompts and a text to film soundtrack suggestion.
Creative prompt: When you have finished your current read, create a collage (tangible or digital) reminiscent of the visual imagery the text provokes for you.
Book Review
This disjointed but uncannily interconnected narrative web is geographically centred around the Pyrenean summits. Solá kickstarts the curation with a catastrophe that one might label a natural disaster, but which exposes itself to be more than unfortunate coincidence as the stories unfold. We learn, over convalescing timeframes and through differing voices, that the lightning has about as much to do with the atmospheric conditions of community, as it does with the temperate pressures in the natural atmosphere, that cause clouds to strike sound and vision.
We learn that a storm is only a storm because a person gave it that name. That a storm is only disastrous, romantic, or theatrical, because we perceive it as such. We perceive it as such because its receptive meaning has evolved over time and across generations. But if we were to discover or witness the first storm, for the first time, the word or its name and its emotive connotations might be different.
We talk about the weather all the time- in the safety of our homes, under rooves, or out in a naked landscape, accompanying its temper tantrum, shouting about it whilst right in front of it, with no eaves for shelter. Where the rain beats down and we grow furious about our choice of clothes, and instead of cursing our choices or our foolishness to underestimate these natural processes, we curse the sky. Weighing on the weather with our words. Hoping it will hear us, without believing that it might.
“We poured water out in colossal drops like coins onto the earth and the grass and the stones, and the mighty thunderclap resounded inside the chest cavity of every beast. And that was when the man said damn and blast. He said it aloud, because when a man is alone there’s no need to think in silence.”
A treacherous rover walks into the eye of the storm while his family merely talks about it, around the table, revelling in their smugness about their interior warmth. He has stormed off in the hopes of appeasing his own internal storm, only to walk straight into one crafted by the atmosphere. Whether the raging thunderstorm massages his resentment or stiffens it, nobody knows what his internal landscape looks like, apart from the sky impersonating it. The rover remains oblivious to this part he plays in the orchestra. He does not think to wonder if the sky might merely be holding up a mirror.
Through a diverse multitude of narrative voices, including those of non-human agency, Solá teaches us about the differing perceptions of place. The driving force of these voices run like the wind’s everchanging direction, still echoing a commonality of consideration across each tale… to whom do these mountains belong?
Whether from the perspective of mushrooms, widows, ghosts, canine companions, giants, villagers, or the clouds themselves, these narrative voices work like cogwheels, turning at their own unique rates of motion, in their own time, unaware of their interdependence on the rest. It is authorially alluded to in When I Sing, Mountains Dance, that this is what makes a place a landscape, a home, a community, or a destination.
The mythological origins of a place’s name can give rise to cynicism and become the topic of disagreement between inhabitants. At the same time, what lies beneath the lore and discourse around the origin of nouns, reflexively invites a deeper consideration about that very mysticism at the heart of such legends - where did they begin - who told them first, and which one is concrete?
“The spores of one are the spores of us all. The story of one is the story of us all. Because the woods belong to those who cannot die. Who don’t want to die. Who won’t die, because they know it all. Because they convey it all. Everything that needs knowing. Everything that is conveying. Everything that is. Shared seed. Eternity, a thing worn lightly. A small thing, an everyday thing.”
We might get stuck in the cycle of research or the seemingly unresolvable, circular conflict with neighbours, about how a place came to be, or what belongs to whom. Through intricate, magnified means of storytelling, Solá offers insight to the collective components surrounding a place- the interdependent aspects working together, unknowingly to them, to form an undiscovered alliance, and thus, a reliance on one another. She educates us without telling us. She says it all without saying the explicit. This one-person collective is a profound example of authorial reliance on the engagement and imagination of the text’s readership. Solá is perhaps asking readers whether it is this very cogwheel- the place and the creatures residing on it, working together unconsciously, as if there wasn’t conscious magic at play. The narrative origins of place names like Les Pyrenees, are suggestive of landscapes being influenced by inhabitants, and vice versa. All of these convalescing perceptions of events are given breathing space in this book, and from varying angles. Voicing their gigantic feelings and marking their impactful footprints, the internal landscapes of each narrator echo across the pages like pealing reminders that even the most remote of places are anything but idle. What still resounds in my own mind, after parting with this book, sounds something like..
if the mountains are my home, what do they call me?
What constitutes atmosphere?
How does disaster effect us differently?
Writing Prompts inspired by When I Sing, Mountains Dance
“The last time I came up here, last spring, a local told me these peaks are cursed and that every ten years somebody gets struck by lightning.”
Think of a particular place you have considered cursed. Under the same framework of the above quote, start to construct a narrative - i.e. this ‘place’ is cursed and, every ten years….
or
Free-write a stream of consciousness for ten minutes with this quote in mind, or under the topic of intermittently occurring natural disasters - anything that comes to the forefront of your thoughts.
“little tiny frogs did rain down, and Joana sayeth unto them that if she so desired she could bring on the hail, or bring down a rain of frogs, or make all their livestock die, and then they did take me also and Joana said nothing more ever again. But I was fine, for I learned to laugh.”
Imagine something other than water raining.
“The crying starts like a small animal. Like a single cloud, like a thin fog in my chest.”
Describe the process of crying, in detail. Try this also for laughter.
“I don’t suffer much, from sadness or melancholy, but melancholy, like beauty, is important for poetry. I learned that all on my own. The importance of melancholy to give the poem weight. And the colours of words and verses.”
Distinguish the difference between sadness and melancholy - this could be written poetically, symbolically, abstractly, journalistically, or even in conjunction with scientific research/knowledge.
A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN
“There are two pools in the river that are mine.”
Write about a natural space or part of a landscape you connect with so deeply that you consider it yours or at least an integral part of your identity
or
Write about a place you have visited or want to visit that inspires your own integrity
The narrator of this chapter describes this place as if it gives her magical powers to teach herself something no one else has taught her. There is an overruling sense of assertiveness and integrity intertwined with this narrator’s personhood across this entire page. The landscape she describes offers her freedom and eradicates any shame, a place where she can bathe naked and teach herself to swim, an environment where she becomes.. to quote Ada Limon…more animal me than much else.
FEAR PERSONIFED
“I am your fear awakening once a year.”
Think about (one of) your own fears and give them/it character. In other words, Personify Fear - write an I AM prose poem from the narrative voice of this fear. Consider… if it had a voice, what would it say? Is there a possibility that it fears you more than you fear it?
THE NARRATIVE OF NOUNS
“And with the fire’s warmth, the snow baby thawed and took on the colour of a person and then moved its eyes and then its arms and legs and turned into a boy, and they named him Jaume.”
Write about how your name came to be yours.
or
Write about how a place got its name, as if in a folk tale - this could be real or imagined/fictional
INTEGRITY GOES THROUGH PUBERTY
“I said yes to everything. And then my mother started to say I shouldn’t go into the forest with the lads because they were only thirteen years old, and I was now a woman. I wasn’t interested in being a woman. With all the cruelty of womanhood and the few things left to you once you become a woman.”
Do you get more or less stubborn with age?
> And lastly… if this book became a movie, this might be the soundtrack <
