Welcome to another installment of If My Book, the Monkeybicycle feature in which authors compare their recently released books to weird things. This week Claire Polders writes about Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion, her debut story collection forthcoming from Vine Leaves Press.
If Woman of the Hour were a garden, it would be full of uninvited weeds thriving against the odds.
Some people claim I was in charge of the garden’s cultivation, but that is a lie.
Everything started growing when I began listening to seeds. I first heard the angriest seeds because they were the loudest, and I watered their stories into Venus flytraps.
Some people say that Venus flytraps aren’t weeds, but I think of weeds as plants that we didn’t intend to grow and that sprouted from the earth as though by magic.
Imagine them seething underground, the seeds, screaming for light.
I recently learned that plants can hear, so I’m making only a small leap when I’m telling you they can scream.
After the angriest seeds germinated and poked out their heads, I listened for other types of seeds. Some only hummed, hiding their eagerness for the sky beneath their tough covering.
Did you know that a third of all orchids rely on deceit? These flowers can smell or look like a food source or a safe place to copulate while in reality they don’t offer any rewards and only get the insects trapped in a maze of passages, chambers, and chutes.
Some people insist that the plants I paid attention to were not uninvited and therefore not weeds, and they have a point. By listening I invited the weeds into being.
Plants have a kind of agency, however. If a caterpillar nibbles on a leaf, the owner of that leaf may produce a bitter substance to deter the caterpillar or may produce a sweet nectar to attract a caterpillar-eating wasp.
What I’m saying is: I did not plan for the wildness of my weeds. I’m not even a guerrilla gardener like one of my midnight characters. I neither planted wolf’s bane nor corpse flowers. There were simply fifty seeds that rebelled against their own image and longed to tell their tale in their own weird words. They waited like desert blooms, until I came along with my watering can.
Nobody is promising you a rose garden.
Claire Polders is the author of 6 books and 100+ essays, stories, and book reviews. She was born in the Netherlands, lived in Paris, married an American in Italy, and now slow-travels the world. Find out more at www.clairepolders.com or sign up for her free Substack newsletter Wander, Wonder, Write to follow her on her journeys. Monkeybicycle published “Bleeding Girls Initiation Ritual,” a flash fiction included in her debut collection, Woman of the Hour: Fifty Tales of Longing and Rebellion.
Order Woman of the Hour here.