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 A NOTE ON THE MOLE STORIES:
There’s no reproducing in type that small comic voice, with all its varied inflections & unsteady swoops—even the recorder lies a little about it, makes it too constricted, hard-edged and mechanical.  Amy’s voice is her own medium.  She has some trouble reading (“borderline dyslexia,” if such a thing exists), & she hasn’t been over-exposed to movies & tv.  Her stories come out of her own world.  The stories lay themselves out on the page as unselfconsciously as a bird emits an egg.  They are “primitive” stories, granted, with the marks of an uncluttered storyteller’s mind—like the chants & potions & prayers mixed up with other matter-of-fact narrative in Jerome Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred.  Amy is enchanted with the sound of her voice—literally with its sounds, its ability to produce mimetic & original sound effects as well as plain old practical words.  She’s fascinated with the sounds of words, with word order, with repetition (and especially pleasant device—the magical & hypnotic multiplication of things & ideas), with names (to name a thing or a person is to possess it/him/her. To seize her/his/its soul), with the mystery of numbers.  Further, Amy has a magpie delight in random bits of narrative; she shuffles fragments of story around as recklessly as Donald Barthelme or Robert Coover, and the results are as dissonant.

            The Mole stories are an old stew tradition in my wife’s family.  Amy’s grandmother invented the saga of Mr. Mole & the Little Old Lady as an inducement to her children to eat their stew.  The series, as originally recited, always centered on a giant, delicious stew full of turnips, carrots, potatoes, etc., which the Old Lady perpetually cooked.  Mr. Mole was an Autolycus (to mix moles & wolves) in pursuit of this stew.  Inevitably he attempted to hijack the stew & inevitably the Old Lady caught him & thrashed him with her sturdy broom.  The epic was functional in design:  descriptions of hot, delicious stew + roguish adventures = listening children who would willingly eat their own hot stew as the tale unfolded.  We have continued the Mole Saga in our branch of the family, & Amy has grown up on the simple & repetitious stories.

            Her own variations occur away from the dinner table, so Amy has (logically) removed the traditional central interest, the eternal stew.  She sees the Mole family & the Little Old Lady as autonomous characters free of their original mythic functions.  The stories deal with methods of retribution and punishment (“Mr. Mole”) and of child-rearing (“Mr. Mole & His Little Child Timmy”). Things happen rapidly & without much sense of continuity or transition, with scenes shifting & characters hopping around as wildly as in the incomparable Krazy Kat cartoons.  Everything for en effect, everything in the interest of the action—that’s Amy’s method, and God help Aristotle!  She is quite consistent in the way she sees her characters, even if they are inconsistent & violent themselves.  I guess that’s the way it is when you are seven.

Once upon a time there was this little cabin & across from the cabin was a meadow of crops—you know what crops are, don’t you? And right in the middle of the crop field there was a hole.  And there was a mole who lived in that hole & his name was Mr. Mole.

He had a wife-mole, 2 boys & 1 girl.   Susan, Tom & Joe were the children.  Susan was the girl, Tom & Joe was the two boys.  Mr. Mole’s name was Tommy Mole, but they called him Mr. Mole.  The mother was Tina Mole. The Old Lady—well, she had a husband & they played.  The children played all day.

One day Joe decided he would be with Father, helping him beat up the Old Lady & her poodle that she had.  Well the poodle one day came along when Tom was pulling up crops.  He threw 2 or 3 crops at him.  The dog bringed a bag of potatoes to throw at him, but he dropped them by accident.  Then Tom & Joe caught him & said, “Now you’re in for it!” & threw them at him.

He came home & the Old Lady was furious.  She was furious &—whooo! she really was mad!  She shouted, “Oh, you little old pinko! Ah!”  And she went upstairs & got a little tub for him & was ready to wash him, you know, like most people wash their dogs.  Well, she had tomato soap to wash tomatoes, but she used it on him to wash off the tomatoes.  And she put flea soap on him.  Well, the dog Arf   Arf   Arf with the tomato soap on him—arfarfarf—then it stinged because it got in his eyes.  He went . . . he blinked & he blinked:  2 times, 3. 4, 50, 60, 70, 80.  Well, that was all.  He just sat down in the tub & slept & slept & slept & slept & slept & slept.

He woke up & he was under his cover with his little coat on in his little house with his little hat. And he went outside to take a walk with her.

They took a walk & Mrs. Mole had a new little baby & they named him Timmy Timmy Timmy.  Timmy Little Mole.  Timmy was 5 weeks old now.  He played around outside.  He would play with the turnips, he would play with the crops.  He would play with all that he could get his hands on.

“He had to learn about nature,” one day said Mother.  So he did.  He learned.  He learned how to hunt.  He learned how to get the Old Lady.

By one chance, that’s what he did one day: hit her with a turnip.  Mama was glad & proud of Timmy.  And she liked it.

Timmy said, “Goody goody goody goody” & threw one at Mama.

She said, “bad boy.”

He said, “You bad girl.”

She said, “Bad bad.”

“Bad bad Mama.”

“Go to bed.”

“Go to bed, Mama.”

Four years later, Amy is still at work on dictated stories.  Now they are much more sophisticated & “literary.”  She likes to tell mystery stories, something on the order of Agatha Christie’s tales of genteel lives and tragic conflicts.  They are full of foreshadowings, climaxes, reversals, denouements & all that other Aristotelian stuff.  She is more self-conscious than she used to be, but her stories are still very original.  Our family has kept up a tradition of reading aloud—everything from J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Conan Doyle, Daniel Defoe, to Herman Melville and Dean Swift.  So Amy has a sense of literature as an oral (& aural) art, & the voice comes for her before the pen.  This has been a salvation for a girl seemingly doomed not to read.

She has embarked on undertakings more ambitious & complex than these Mole stories, but I think her first efforts are as fresh & imaginative as anything she is likely to do.  The mythic qualities here, the weaving of a family collective folktale by an individual imagination are part of Amy’s artistic growth.  She may go on to be a poet as we know the trade, but she will never be any closer to the sources of art.

Amelia did not become a poet or a professional writer. She did keep a detailed journal for years and years, piling up a ziggurat of blank books she loved buying and filling.  She told her journal stories about her adventurous life—traveling with a friend to Britain at age 16, sleeping in ditches (or once on straw in the stables of a posh prep school in Northumberland), going later to Britain to be an apprentice hatmaker and a nanny, then on to Italy and Spain, in a small motorcycle accident on Corfu, staying in a luxury apartment on the Champs d’Elysees then deciding to go to university and working through four years for a degree in anthropology.  Then a humanities degree from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, followed by work all over the southwest as a field archaeologist, including a stint supervising the major burn assessment at Mesa Verde, after the huge fire that swept the site.  Now she is a happy mum with two small boys, living in an idyllic village in the Forest of Dean in western England.  She is all grown up but still tells stories to her children, maybe even some of the Mr. Mole tales.  Like Wendy, she has grown into Mama, and she has her own boys who will not grow up—at least for awhile.