How did you come up with the title? It came to me as I thought of the parallels between birth and sexual intercourse, between being a mother and a lover, of what happens when a person becomes a parent and those identities shift and split (or merge).
What can you tell us about the inception of this piece? The week I wrote this in a flash prose class with Jenny Wortman, I had read April Bradley's "Like Water Flowing." I kept coming back to the way she described both her intimate moments with her husband and also the mundane, day-to-day life they shared. That week in our class we were focusing on movement in flash prose, and after my third reading of Bradley's piece this just came out of me. I usually try not to write about motherhood, but I felt like this piece wasn't just about being a parent, and it wasn't just about sex, and it wasn't just about identity. It was all these different things I wanted to talk about but wasn't sure how.
If we could lift up the log of this piece, what would we see there? That the path to being a mother and a sexual being isn't linear. It's filled with ups and downs, it's hard to find your footing at times. You'd find a lot of messiness between paragraphs, between phases. But, to me, it was so important to get that part of my identity back to feel whole. Motherhood is wonderful, but it can be all-consuming. I never wanted to lose the other parts of myself to being a mother.
If this piece were a small forest creature, what kind of small forest creature would it be? I'd have to say some kind of bird. Something small and unassuming, but isn't limited to the forest. In the end I hope this piece feels like a release, lifting off, a flying away. An escape to higher ground.
Read "A Splitting Open" here: https://gastropodalitmag.wixsite.com/main/post/a-splitting-open-by-alaina-scarano
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Lifting Up the Log is an ongoing series designed to indulge our love for the story behind the story, as well as to give our beloved contributors an additional way to showcase the writing they have shared here.