Kim Batchelor

Writer of magical realism and other imaginative fiction

Lost Girls

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I have often wished into being a peaceful place for those who experience difficult lives. Perhaps a clearing in woods, a waterfall replenishing a quiet pond, a soft breeze always blowing through it. I wish for the scent of grass damp from morning dew and the perfume of assorted flowers coloring the ground around it.

Listening to the pain of those individuals is a privileged role. It’s not often an easy one. Not often a comfortable one. And not always a satisfying one. Still a privileged one, when someone shares their burdens and challenges.

As an educator and counselor in a clinic serving women, most of whom were in their teens and early 20s, I spent hours as a listener. Several times a day, I found myself sitting across from someone stressed, angry, weeping, hopeless. Often, I could provide some small measure of useful information. Often, I could only listen.

A well-dressed high school student wore a blank look as she related how she no longer had a place to live. We connected her with resources to find one. I wanted to take her home with me.

A 16-year-old girl traced the lines of her initials that she carved into her skin. Her mother’s boyfriend had assaulted her. Her mother took his side and forced her out of their home. The case was reported, as required, and I connected her with resources. The girl went on her way leaving behind that image of her scar tattooed into my memory, along with anger at her mother’s selfish actions.

I listened to the despair of a young woman who suffered from the agony of the aftermath of pelvic infections that left scarring. She shifted from anger into resignation after I explained the source of her pain. Only surgery could fix the problem—I could not fix her, the nurse could not fix her, but when we both assured her that the pain wasn’t just in her head, she managed a smile.

One morning on the way to work I listened to Joan Osborne singing, “What if God was One of Us?” A stranger on the bus trying to make his way home. Or a young woman struggling with addiction, exclusion, eviction, rejection. In the parking lot, I stayed in the car crying for a few moments before leaving it to start the day.

Some moments reminded me it was worth it. The woman I barely remember, beaming, who made a point of coming to tell me that she’d left her abusive boyfriend and had turned her life around because of my help. The teenager who didn’t care if she got pregnant who later requested birth control from the nurse after I asked her to put herself in the place of any baby she might conceive. And then there was the day that Tiffany showed up at the clinic, clear-eyed, in recovery, and employed outside of the sex industry. Smiling. A new woman.

I wanted to draw their pain from them, send it hurling through space to dash against a passing asteroid. At times, their stories feed mine. When I wrote of a girl who had to grow up too soon, I created an entire island for her to be a child again. When I wrote of a girl with an expansive imagination and a mother suffering from a serious illness, I gave her a starry sky and a quiet children’s garden in the midst of the city and a group of mentors and supportive friends.

I can only wish with an oasis for all the women I had the privilege to know. A place for them to feel safe, a place for quiet among the tumult of their lives. And even though I can’t make it for them, I send that wish out into the universe of quiet places.

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Pablo Neruda and a Storm in Small Spaces

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When I am in the midst of a storm I often think of Pablo Neruda.

April is here, bringing promised showers and sometimes with them, tumultuous weather. A few nights ago, a thunderstorm passed us, tearing through the neighborhood, downing trees and severing the connection of thousands of my neighbors to electricity. I cursed my neglecting to charge my phone the night before and worried that we’d be without electricity for so long that my tablet and computer would also hibernate along with the power. While one February we’d suffered through four days without heat or hot water following a snowstorm that dumped several feet of snow on this city unaccustomed to much accumulation, this time the electricity returned after only a few hours.

I have often written of my appreciation of the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. Storms sometimes remind me of a story from his autobiography, Confeso que he vivido: Memorias, published as Memoirs in English, leaving out the “I Confess That I Have Lived” in the original Spanish title. I learned from the book that Neruda had been a diplomat and had spent a good deal of time in Asia.

On a flight from Colombo, Sri Lanka (what was then called Ceylon) to Rangoon, Burma (what is now known as Yangon, Myanmar), Neruda saw the plane crammed with “turbaned passengers, covered with colors and loaded with baskets.” A tropical storm along the way caused the plane to “shudder” and a darkness darker than true night time edged out the daytime sky. Lightning illuminate the sky accompanied by the booms of thunder, and the plane began to “stagger.”

Rain began to fall inside the plane.The water came in in heavy drops that reminded me of my house in Temuco (Chile) in winter. But ten thousand meters up, those leaks did not amuse me. The amazing thing, though, was a monk sitting behind us. He opened an umbrella and with Oriental serenity went on reading his texts of ancient wisdom.

I rarely fear the turbulence of a flight, unless it is particularly fierce. I occasionally fear the possibility of tornadoes in a storm, a fear I carry with me from my childhood. I have never found myself on a flight or in a storm as frightening as the one Neruda described. If I ever do, I hope I will find enough peace to simply open an umbrella and continue on with my reading.

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Dreamscape at the Bottom of the World

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The boat moves slowly through the milky haze floating above the waters of the Ultima Esperanza sound. Passengers brave the damp cold on deck for as long as they can, taking in the views of the mystical landscape–the dreamscape of waterfalls cascading over cliffs that rise on either side. When the bitter cold is too intolerable, they slip back inside to warm themselves.

Occasionally a guide will point out the places where animals in warmer times congregate. But not now. Now, only condors watch over us, soaring across those occasional patches of gray sky where the haze clears.

At dawn that Easter morning, I waited at the dock a few blocks from my hotel in Puerto Natales, a town a few hundred miles from the southern tip of Chile. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the trip that day. At first, I lamented the bleak day, the chill that seeped to the bones. I soon realized that something that seemed almost spiritual slipped in with the white wisps of clouds come to earth.

Two nights before, I’d flown into Punta Arenas, the southernmost town in Chile. The flight from Santiago  was the most anxiety producing of my life.  The plane flew over a region largely claimed by nature. Much of the last hours, I saw nothing on the ground—no lights from towns or cities. Only completely blackness.

Suddenly, a force brusquely nudged the plane and the currents of air tossed it about. Through the window, I could see flakes visible as they descended from the inky darkness and through the plane’s exterior light. Snow.

The plane finally dropped lower as it started its descent, but I couldn’t see where it would land. Only one patch of amber luminescence which in time showed itself to be the tiny Punta Arenas airport.

The edge of the that town of just over 100,000 people is battered by the waters of the Strait of Magellan, nicknamed the “dragon’s tail” by early explorers.

The southern region is most of all a place of wind. Brutal wind. On the Ruta del Fin del Mundo (the “Route of the End of the World”) that runs the 152 miles from Punta Arenas to Puerto Natales, a monument dedicated to the wind stands at the halfway point.

We took that route to reach Puerto Natales, surrounded by patches of the snow that had fallen the night before. For many people Puerto Natales is the jumping off point into the natural wonders just north of Punta Arenas. An hour or so away from Puerto Natales is a national park which is home to the Torres del Paine (‘paine’ means blue in the indigenous language of the Tehuelche—also known as the Aonikenk—people), a cluster of mountains so stunning that someone once used them in an advertisement for the Canadian Rockies. The snow of the night before dusted the ground around us as we traveled.

The boat continues its journey up the sound, winding through the waters that skirt the national park. Three hours into the trip up the sound, we leave the boat and walked a path through the trees to one glacier. Afterwards, I hike with the other passengers to a lake where the remnants of another glacier float along its surface like irregular ice cubes in a giant punch bowl. We all return to the boat to retrace our journey, sipping whiskey to mark the occasion.

A few years later, this time during the Chilean summer, I will return to Puerto Natales. As before, the boat will sail just after dawn, but on that trip bright sunshine will light the way and the sea lions I had not seen on the previous trip will make an appearance. In only a short while, I will realize, though, I have traveled to a new and different land.

The future is another country to be visited at a later point in the itinerary. I savor these moments now moving toward our destination in Puerto Natales. I don’t realize it now, but I prefer the bitter cold, the frigid moisture. Most of all, I favor the ghostly mist surrounding us without knowing all that it conceals.

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Poetry in Shadows: Puppets of the Wayang Kulit

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Ethereal music from bronze instruments plays a tune somewhat discordant to your ears. An oil lamp or single bulb sends out a light projecting images of kings and princesses, clowns and demons onto a white cloth. A dalang is the shadow puppet master of the Wayang Kulit, who, behind the cloth, calls up the spirit of ancestors, following a tradition of more than a thousand years.

The puppets act out scenes from the Ramayana, an epic poem brought to the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali by Indian traders and sailors. Or the Mahabharata, one of the world’s longest poems that also contains the Bhagavad-Gita.

The play will last three to four hours. Careful if you find yourself drifting off. You may find strangers from the play enter your dreams—Semar who is both a clown servant and a god. He serves Prince Rana, reincarnated from the Hindu god Vishnu. The beautiful Sita, Rana’s wife, also appears, as does the magical bird, Jatayu, who dies when it attempts to rescue Sita. Or perhaps members of the Pandawa and the greedy Korawa families play out their rivalry in an epic conflict from the Mahabharata.

No matter the play or poem, you will spend time deep in a forest thick with greenery, filled with creatures hiding where the sun doesn’t linger. The forest is the scene of banishment or refuge.

“All is clouded by desire, Arjuna,” Kresna tells the prince of the Pandawa family. “As a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.”

With one movement of a prince’s hand, giants are defeated.

See my post, Water from the Moon, to find out how I was introduced to the Wayang Kulit.

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Water from the Moon

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“You do whatever you can about the misery that’s in front of you. Add your light to the sum of light.” Billy Kwan, The Year of Living Dangerously

The flickering illumination of a nearby fire filters through a white cloth. Children’s voices accompany the Gamelan, traditional percussive music from bronze instruments. There, on the island of Java, shadow puppets of the Wayang Kulit act out a scene from Hindu mythology.

Click here to watch.

This is the opening of my favorite movie, The Year of Living Dangerously. The shadow puppets come to represent the characters in the movie that stars Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver.

Look at Prince Ajuna. He’s a hero. But he can also be fickle and selfish. Krishna says to him, “All is clouded by desire, Ajuna, as a fire by smoke, as a mirror by dust. Through these, it blinds the soul.

The movie contains many stunning and sometimes powerful images. The camera hovers over a mountainous landscape of rich greens as a vehicle moves through it. A grieving mother pours water over her lifeless young son, nestled in white lilies.

In the movie, photojournalist Billy Kwan—a male played by the female actor Linda Hunt who won a best supporting actress Oscar for the role—moves between two worlds in 1965 Indonesia. One world is that of his profession capturing images of a beautiful land on the verge of tragedy. He spends brief moments in the other world trying to improve the lives of one family living in extreme poverty.

Most of us become children again when we enter the slums of Asia. And last night I watched you walk back into childhood. With all its opposite intensities: laughter and misery, the crazy and the grim, toy town and a city of fear.

For a time, Billy navigates both worlds successfully. He occasionally joins in the camaraderie of his journalistic peers while also providing monetary support to a mother and her very young son. When the child dies in spite of Billy’s efforts, and he can no longer ignore the callous exploitation he sees in his colleagues, Billy is thrown into a conflict he can’t resolve, except with one last, desperate act.

Between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians were massacred during what was known as “The 1965 Tragedy.” “Water from the moon,” one of the Indonesians in the movie says before he goes into hiding. “Something you can never have.”

I took that phrase, “Water from the Moon,” as the title of my first novel, a story of “what if.” What if we lost our precious democratic institutions? What if the United States ever found itself under dictatorship? The story was inspired by what happened when the longstanding democracy of Chile in 1973 was replaced with dictatorship. The main character of the novel, Adrienne Dylan, struggles with choosing the best way to respond to the increasingly oppressive situation of her home country. She can live an isolated life or put herself at risk working with those who want to change the situation. She can choose to react violently or nonviolently.

Always in the back of Adrienne’s mind is her late father’s possible role in the overthrow of democracy, and in the increasing evidence that he was responsible for the death of her birth mother when Adrienne was a child.

On a recent trip to Guatemala, as a van carried me from Lake Atitlan to the colonial town of Antigua, I wanted to immerse myself in music to drown out the incessant droning of a fellow passenger. I chose to listen to the soundtrack I created for Water from the Moon. Each song evoked a scene, and I soon found myself drawn into the emotional story I had created years ago. I sometimes looked around at the mountains surrounding the Pan American Highway and found it hard to believe that not that long ago, Guatemala found itself in the midst of a civil war that had lasted decades. Recently, it has arrived at a place where shoots of stronger institutions that are crucial for democracy have started to grow.

Here in the United States, we live now in turbulent times, and the upheaval has many of us wondering and worrying about the future. We have limited ability to know what will come. We seek the answer as to the best road to take. It feels sometimes we are looking for a few drops on our parched tongues from some lunar spring thousands of miles away.

Friends are reading 1984 by George Orwell. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. The Iron Heel, by Jack London. And It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis and The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. I often consider removing Water from the Moon from the metaphorical bottom drawer and rewriting it for our time. That consideration has never been stronger than in the last few months. Storytelling has great power–to both take us to those dark places and give us the opportunity to ponder what we can do to pull ourselves back into the light.

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Welcome.

I write for children. I write for adults. I write fiction short and long, real and fantastical, foreign and domestic.

Here you'll find my stories and links to my novels.

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Copyright Kim Batchelor