Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness

October 27, 2023 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness—What happens when 49 authors sit down to craft their experiences of living in a body? Magic! Curated by Diane Gottlieb, with a foreword by Gayle Brandeis, Awakenings: Stories of Bodies & Consciousness is truly a magical anthology of short essays, filled with trauma and triumph; pleasures and pain; challenges, resilience, and growth. A host of seasoned writers, including Alison McGhee, Jesse Lee Kercheval, and Jacqueline Doyle, alongside emerging artists, such as Camille U. Adams, Terry Opalek, and Sarita Sidhu, share their hearts, their limbs, their breasts—even their teeth!—on the page in this singularly stunning array of diverse voices, journeys, and literary forms.

No matter where you turn in this tribute to the miracles, mishaps, and mysteries of the body, you will be moved. Awakenings will sometimes make you laugh, often make you cry, and will always spur a deep appreciation for the flesh and bones that carry us all through life.

We are delighted to feature the foreword from AWAKENINGS by Gayle Brandeis!

Foreword

I recently climbed into a sensory deprivation tank for the first time in nearly forty years. When I was a teenager, I loved floating because it helped me disassociate from my body. I’d close the hatch of the tank, lean back into the highly saturated salt water that turned me weightless, and let my physical self melt into the darkness. I became what I most longed to be at the time—a being of pure thought, no messy body to drag around. I had been ill for a year as a teenager, in and out of the hospital, and once I went into remission, I pretended to be ill for another year because I didn’t know how to be anyone but “the sick girl.” I also kept my period hidden from everyone during that year because I wanted to remain a child, didn’t want anyone to know I was growing up. My body was a source of confusion and shame and pain— escaping it inside that dark humid tank felt like relief.

All these years later, floating offered the opposite experience. I felt no sense of “deprivation” when I eased into the water and the lights gently dimmed, then turned off completely—just the beautiful opportunity to sink more deeply into my skin. I could feel the tender presence of my body even after the salt swallowed its weight; I could feel each heartbeat, each breath, for the gift it truly was. When I was a teenager, if my arm or foot bumped into the side of the tank, I would curse the rude reminder of my embodiment; this time, if I drifted into the edge, I welcomed the sensation. There’s my arm, I thought—how wonderful that it can feel the world around it! There’s my foot, zinging with touch! There’s my body, my body that’s experienced so much over the years—illness and surgery and birth and grief and injury and exhilaration and discomfort and bliss and bliss and pain and bliss—there’s my mortal body, which won’t always exist. There it is, blessedly alive and awake.

As its title suggests, this breathtaking anthology is full of such awakening, such somatic reunion. “Body, bring her back to herself,” invokes Alison McGhee in “The Body Knows,” the opening piece of the collection, and indeed, in essay after essay, we find writers coming back to their bodies, and finding new senses of safety, of gratitude, of forgiveness within their own flesh, sometimes after years of illness or disability or trauma. “Return to your body,” a voice within Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein tells her in “Holy Hour.” “It’s OK now to return.”

The voice of the body, and the urgent need to listen to that voice, thrums throughout this collection. “I have learned to trust my gut,” writes DeAnna Beachley in “My body :: in parts,” a process that is not always easy in a world that teaches us to experience our bodies from the outside in, to focus on how we look instead of how we feel—a world that tells us our minds and bodies are separate; a world that actively separates us from our bodies. “I couldn’t bully away my pain any more than the bullies around me could,” writes Barb Mayes Boustead in “Pain’s Imposter Syndrome”; “now, I choose to let it speak … We’re still learning to trust each other—me, to trust that my pain is telling the truth, and my body, to trust that I will take the information it gives me to seek relief and assistance and comfort.”

The voice of self that issues forth from the body also thrums through these pages. “(M)y mouth is power, magic, bitch, and balm,” writes Melody Greenfield in “Lip Service,” and the voices in this book are all these things— powerful, magical, healing, bitchy (in the most celebratory and empowering use of the word). “These days, when my doctors use words that obscure,” writes Lizz Schumer in “Don’t Lie to Me,” “I illuminate them. I’m not afraid to drag us all squinting into the sun.” The voice that rises from the body, from our embodied truth, the voice that drags us into the sun, can provoke both personal and social change. “Speaking out is a revolutionary act,” Sarita Sidhu reminds us in her essay “Shattering the Dark Silence.” “This is the path to liberation. This is how hope blooms.”

Hope and liberation bloom throughout this anthology, often culminating in hard-won self-love. “(A)s I grow old,” writes Marion Dane Bauer in “What I Knew,” “as senses and limbs and viscera fail, I love this flesh I was born into in a way I never knew could be possible.” In “Men and Their Hands,” Claudia Monpere extols, “I want to write love poems to me, to my body. I want to cherish it in spite of a hearing loss and graying hair and arthritis, grateful for all it can do as it ferries me through the years. I used to take comfort in the fact I would be dead someday. Now I take comfort in the fact that I have this dazzling day.”

When my hour of floating was up, I stepped out of the dark sensory deprivation tank into the dazzle of light. Gravity anchored my body once again, and I could feel the sweet grounding of my full weight upon this earth. Still, a sense of buoyancy stayed with me for hours; I continued to feel deeply alive, deeply awake and grateful inside my own skin. I felt the same way when I finished reading this book—freshly awake, freshly grateful for my own body and our shared journeys of embodiment. I felt, and feel, so grateful for all these wonderful writers, and for Diane Gottlieb, who so artfully brought them together. May these powerful voices wake you up, in turn—may they buoy and ground you and guide you back to your own tender body and all the stories it holds.

Gayle Brandeis, author of Drawing Breath: Essays on Writing, the Body, and Loss

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Diane Gottlieb

Diane Gottlieb, MSW, MEd, MFA is the editor of Awakenings: Stories of Body & Consciousness. Her writing appears in 2023 Best Microfiction, River Teeth, HuffPost, SmokeLong Quarterly, Hippocampus Magazine, The Rumpus, Chicago Review of Books, About Place Journal, and 100 Word Stories among many other journals and anthologies. She is the winner of Tiferet Journal’s 2021 Writing Contest in the nonfiction category and on the 2023 Wigleaf Top 50 longlist. Diane is the Prose/CNF Editor of Emerge Literary Journal and the founder and author of WomanPause, a newsletter dedicated to lifting the voices of women over 50.