Whenever I begin to put a book together, I need to first make myself a loom. This is the right scaffolding for weaving together all of my disparate threads of writing.
You can’t weave a tapestry without a loom. And you need the right loom for your project. I made an inkle loom in grade school once, which I adored, and I could weave all manner of belts, ribbons, and skinny scarves upon it. Anything that was no more than six inches wide. But. I couldn’t make a tapestry. I couldn’t make fine cloth. The loom wasn’t big enough, complex enough.
When Clark and I wrote The Way of the Rose we had so many different things to say about the rosary, the Lady and prayer and so much writing we’d done over the years. Like an overflowing basket of jumbled yarn. But how to organize it? How to weave it all together into a coherent whole? Eventually I realized the rosary itself was our loom, with its pathway into the garden, it’s Our Fathers and Hail Mary’s. Every prayer of the rosary had a corresponding chapter in the final book and the book itself held the shape of the rosary and reflected its essential rhythms.
For The Body of My Mother I have always known that it would have nine chapters. Nine is the Mother’s sacred number—from the nine manifestations of Durga in Hinduism to the nine primordial mothers of the Kogi People of Columbia to the Nine Muses in Greece to the Nine Maidens of Icelandic folklore to the nine months a woman is pregnant.
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