I’ve published my first book! It has 25 poems and 25 short stories. I’m very excited. It’s called Bone Listener, named after the capstone story in the collection. Oh, I do hope you’ll buy a copy of the paperback or the ebook.
Here on Pagan Song, you know me as a songwriter. I’ve been writing songs for the pagan choir Crow Women since the late 90s. I also have a whole other set of songs that I’ve developed as a solo artist. But did you know I’m also a writer? I have many short stories and poems scattered hither and yon. This past winter I decided to drive all those ponies into one corral and let the world have a look at them.
I hired a mentor to help me figure out how to turn my 100 or so written pieces into a book. She insisted that the material is really two books. I sure resisted that at first. But Amanda convinced me. So I have created the first of the duology, Bone Listener. Next year I’ll publish the companion volume. Its working title is Thresholds.
I’m eager to talk to you about the stories in Bone Listener. This blog is about music, so I’m going to feature five of the fifty pieces in the book–some of the ones that have music in them.
The Storm Crone
I’ve been going through the shift from Mother to Crone for a few years now, and the crone experience pops up in a lot of my writing. The Storm Crone is partway between prose and poetry. I’ve read it a couple of times at Spoken Word events or Bardic Circles, and it’s fun to perform. It’s dramatic, and I like being dramatic. Here’s an excerpt:
…The old woman sways in time with the trees, a little faster now, letting the gusts caress her just as they caress the branches. She and the trees are as one, both dancing with their lover, the wind.
And now the first fat raindrops fall, a wing of rain sweeping in, spattering the branches above. She begins to sing a rain song, wild with the secret powers of water, the sounds moaning out of her throat; ah, ah, ah, the vibration of song energizing her magic.
She can smell the ozone and the scents of the trees and the dampening earth. She fills her lungs with the storm and sings more and more loudly, in a passionate duet with the thunder. Her song is not beautiful, but deep and dark and very, very old, much older than she is, a song she has drawn like a bucket of water from the deep well of crone wisdom…
I’m a musician, and my croning journey has had a lot of music in it. So, of course the main character in The Storm Crone expresses herself in song. Just like me.
Sometimes my thoughts about croning emerge as music. I wrote The Croning Song for the croning ceremony of one of the other Crow Women, and just recently used it for my own croning ceremony. It was deeply magical and ever so fun.
Summer Solstice Dawning
In my local community in New Mexico, a group of us spend the whole longest day together in ceremony. We call it Long Dance, and it is. We begin at summer solstice sunrise at 4:30 in the morning and end with the sunset at 7:30 at night. I wrote this poem years ago, when I was still working as a college professor in Colorado. I’d drive to Albuquerque the day before and camp out on the land so I’d be ready to get up to greet the summer solstice dawning. Hence the title.
During Long Dance, we keep the drums going the entire time, all 15 hours of daylight. So, it’s not surprising that this piece features percussion as a theme. It runs almost 4 pages, but here’s how it begins:
On solstice day
we rise before the dawn
and walk through the meadow
one behind the other.
Our sleepy feet make a dark trail in the tall grass.At the front of the line, a woman bangs a drum.
At the back, a man rattles a tambourine.
One can’t hear the other
so their beats are misaligned.
From my place in the middle, I hear them both.
I smile at the earnest discord.We are walking between the worlds
of past and future
the drum of the waxing months
the tambourine of the waning months.
On summer solstice we walk together
one after another
across the fulcrum of the year…
As the poem goes on, the point of view character (me!) begins to sing. Which is exactly what I do as the sun rises at Long Dance. I have a song about that, which is wrote about in the blog post Celebrate Summer! here on Pagan Song.
To The Stars
I made a spreadsheet of the 50 pieces in my book. (If you know me, that won’t surprise you. I think in spreadsheets a lot.) I counted and thirty of the fifty stories and poems have explicly pagan content. The other twenty don’t. And that’s fair. Being a pagan priestess-songwriter is a big part of my creative life, but it isn’t everything I am.
I happen to love reading science fiction. So I wrote a short story about a young musician who gets chosen to go on a starship that’s heading into the void to colonize a new planet. The ship has all the usual types of crew. But our character is chosen to be part of the arts and entertainment unit. The story begins with the main character’s audition to get onto the starship crew:
The first time I performed “To the Stars” was at my audition for being on the crew of the starship…My number was 17, blessedly close to the beginning, before the judges wearied. I was wearing a simple dress selected by my grandmother. “It’s your song that matters. Let them listen, not get distracted by your looks,” she had told me. In front of me, number 16’s mentor clearly had a different approach. Her dress had red sequins, the neckline plunging, her sleek silver guitar evoking a stylized spaceship. Her face was calm, but her hands were shaking. “Good luck,” I whispered when they called her in, but she was already gone.
It seemed like only a moment had passed when they called my number. I walked out onto the stage in my plain gray dress and smiled at the blobs of faces in the dim auditorium. I chose one of the blobs and replaced it with grandmother’s face, and sang my piece to her, lovingly, yet plaintively, for my song was about what is left behind as we go, away from childhood, away from home, away to the stars.
When we heard I was selected, my grandmother wept…
After that, the story skips to a scene while they’re traveling across interstellar space, and ends with a scene once they have crash-landed on a new planet. During the accident, the arts section of the starship is separated from everyone else. I thought it would be fun to explore how a bunch of poets and artists and musicians would do in founding a colony without the rest of the crew.
I might write the whole novel. I want to know what happens next, too. Do you?
She Calls
In this collection, there are five pieces that are the lyrics of songs I’ve written. Some lyrics translate directly into poetry. Some really don’t work, especially if the rhyme scheme is particularly ‘hard’ or if the structure really depends on a verse/chorus structure. That doesn’t migrate into poetry easily. I looked at the hundred or so songs that I’ve written and just a few seemed to me to stand on their own as poems. This is one of the ones I chose:
In the blue of the evening, She calls
Pause a while and hear…
In the glowing horizon She shines
The first star tells me…As the last of the setting sunshine
bathes my upraised hands
I am filled with a knowing
as the darkness gathers the land.In the dusk of my lifetime She calls
More and more, I hear…
As the darkness deepens to black
Blessed Death whispers…
Those are the lyrics to my song She Calls. All of them–it’s not a long track. I wrote a blog post about it called Befriending the Dark Goddess. She Calls was one of my songs that arrived first as a poem, that I later set to music. In this collection, it returns to its origin as a poem. I meant for it to pose questions and let the reader fill in the answers. The first star tells me… Tells you what? Perhaps you’ll go out at dusk and look at the first star and let it tell you a secret that’s just for you.
Bone Listener
As a musician, I sometimes use the title of one of the songs on an album as the ‘title track’. For example, the first album my pagan choir the Crow Women put out is called Crow Goddess, taken from the song Crow Goddess that’s on the album. (You can hear it here on our Bandcamp page.) So when I was fishing around for a title for this book, I considered all fifty poem and story titles. I thought Bone Listener was a good one for a title track. Not only is it the title of the longest story in the book, it’s also a thread that runs through everything. In my writing, I listen for the bones, the inner meaning, the story that’s True.
The short story Bone Listener began its life as the beginning of a novel. Like To The Stars, I might buckle down and write the rest of the tale. But for now, it’s a nice self-contained ‘coming of age’ story that includes mystical connections with the dead, rites of passage and a touch of murder mystery. Here’s one of the parts with music:
My mother led me to the center of the cave and left me standing there. As in the other tests, nineteen skulls were arranged in a circle, and behind them stood all the adults. Over their shoulders I could see the shelves lining the walls of the Cave, all crowded with the bones of our dead.
The people began to hum, softly at first, and then with growing intensity. I stood in my initiation robe, vibrating with the sound of voices. The humming opened into a full-throated keening that echoed in the Cave, driving away any possibility of thought. I gave myself up to the reverberations, merging with the sound. I began to vocalize too, my voice ringing in the ecstasy of the wordless song of life and love and parting.
Abruptly, the sound halted. The ensuing silence was as loud as a shout.
Writing and Songwriting
Those are just five of the fifty stories and poems in this first collection of my literary work. I hope you check out the whole thing. And if you do, please write a review on Amazon. Most first books languish with few sales. Reviews make a huge difference in how much their algorithm pushes a particular book. Besides, I’d love to share all of these ponies with you, now that they’re together in this spiffy corral.
I learned a ton while creating this book. It was a lot of work, but recording an album of music is much more time-consuming. Now that I’ve finished this first book, I want to put together several more. I’ll do the second collection, Threshold, for sure. Maybe I’ll do a full-length novel. Maybe I’ll finally publish the book I wrote about pagan music. I’m also inclined to get back to my solo album Out of the Nest. So many good choices. Dear reader, which would you most like me to do next? If you have an opinion, leave a message in the comments.
Whether it’s music or poetry, the creative process is one of the delights of my life. Thanks for listening.
The cover art for the book Bone Listener is by Alane’s bandmate Carole McWilliams. The painting is called Rock Spirits. You can find Carole’s blog posts about her art and music on Carole’s author page.
You can buy Alane’s book Bone Listener on Amazon, as a paperback or an ebook. Please give it a review!
For more information about Alane Brown (as a solo artist), including her collected articles here on Pagan Song, her bio, and links to sites on the web, check out Alane’s author page here on Pagan Song.
Visit our homepage to see the full list of the musicians who write for the Pagan Song blog.
Please support the Pagan Song project. We’re on Substack, where we post each week’s blog post, and also other goodies, like posts curated from our archives and extra messages from the writers. It’s $5 a month. All funds go to paying the authors of our posts. They thank you for your support!