“One has to travel far in order to find a burial ground.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés- Women who Run with the Wolves

Most writing feels like digging up secrets from the earth’s belly, pain emerging along the way. Yet writing can also be a way to explore the aftermath of rage: once released, it needs to find a proper burial ground for its excess to be transformed into something useful again.

Re-reading Pinkola Estés’ classic on how to connect to “the power of the wild woman” is proving extremely nourishing and nurturing for my new novel, as it mainly revolves around negotiating with pain, rage and all the damage they leave behind. Burial grounds are those areas, both metaphorical and literal ones, where the damage can be worked until understanding, and hopefully rebirth, can occur and the characters can find their truest goal.

Perhaps, all novels are a way of negotiating with the darkest side of humanity to give it a new purpose, to send its spark off on a new flight. A novel is a journey through poison to discover compassion shining on its flipping undertow. Each novel we create is a different route of the same journey, a different path leading to unexpected truths, an initiation of sorts.

At least, that’s what it feels like to me, and that’s probably the reason why I chose to write in the first place: to find the most glorious burial ground for what is supposed to be unspeakable but is not, something solid that needs tending and soothing, until its toxic drive is finally loosened, diluted into dreams and songs we can see and deal with, all writing thus becoming both excavating and burying what was lost, both the spade and the soil.