Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    White Birds: Dreams for Dancers: The Widening Gyre, #0
    White Birds: Dreams for Dancers: The Widening Gyre, #0
    White Birds: Dreams for Dancers: The Widening Gyre, #0
    Ebook49 pages31 minutes

    White Birds: Dreams for Dancers: The Widening Gyre, #0

    By Kaimana Wolff

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    "In times of great trouble, great dreams come."

    Jane has spent years trying to forget such dreams. Her dreams are not pleasant; yet beautiful in their way. When such dreams keep coming, she decides it is time to pay attention to the dance she in which she finds herself.

    Each dream is heralded by the image of a white bird, symbolic of the dissociative state resorted to by many victims of abuse.

    These brief stories are poetic interpretations of some of life's worst moments, tracing a heroic journey while revealing the arts of the warrior.

    Note: this book contains MATURE CONTENT incluidng realistic depictions of abuse. It is intended for adults only.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStars Above, Stars Below Press
    Release dateMay 16, 2018
    ISBN9781386325505
    White Birds: Dreams for Dancers: The Widening Gyre, #0
    Author

    Kaimana Wolff

    Kaimana Wolff, novelist, poet and playwright, survives in a small community on the coast of British Columbia with her friend, a beautiful soul housed in a wolfish body. Often Lord Tyee and Wolff can be heard devising new howls, songs and dances on the lawns, in the parks, and in glens of the great forests still permitted to stand.

    Read more from Kaimana Wolff

    Related to White Birds

    Titles in the series (3)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Magical Realism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Gold Shells Tumbling

      Jan 2, 2022

      Gold Shells Tumbling
      4 min read

    • Article

      Cul-de-Sac

      Dec 1, 2021

      That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog

      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      May 1, 2023

      It has to be one of the gloomiest human characteristicsto wish for something from the pastto return again: So when my girl callsand says she wants her first room back,the one that gurgled and swayed, suspending herin that gravity-free chamber of my b

      2 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Eternal Adventure

      Jun 29, 2021

      The Eternal Adventure
      4 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jul 1, 2022

      The embers of a Thousand YearsUncovered by the HandThat fondled them when they were FireWill stir and understand——from Emily Dickinson’s “1383” Remember when we hurriedourselves into the evening’s sacral blaze: Our coal-covered bridal gownsdrenched i

      6 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Way Back Home

      Apr 30, 2022

      Morning light in Sydney has a quality of powdered gold, spilt celestial talcum. It gets up the nose. The streets seem to have nothing to think about other than parking and shopping, violence a concept from another hemisphere. The calm seems deliberat

      6 min read

    • Article

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Jack of Knives

      Jun 3, 2021

      WINNER £100 Jennifer is the author of four middle grade children’s novels published by Maverick (writing as Jenny Moore). Her latest book, The Misadventures of Nicholas Nabb, is set during the same period as her winning story and also includes a scen

      6 min read

    • Article

      When The Refuge Goes Awry

      Sep 1, 2023

      Books Vexations by Annelyse Gelman University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets, 2023 paperback, 56 pages, $18.00 Maybe the world should end as it began, in verse recited by a poet. Homer in a folding chair staring blindly at the sea, Troy’s towers bur

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Weaker Sister: When we have to evacuate Earth, only the strong will survive.

      Oct 13, 2016

      What on earth was mine? Our underground domicile’s concrete walls mapped with veins of mold and ice, the drip-drip-drip of dirty melt from the ceiling into four rusty pots, the gray shapes the water made when we flung it out against the frozen drifts

      25 min read

    • Article

      100-WORD-STORY COMPETITION Winners

      Aug 16, 2022

      We’ve been delighted by the huge response to our 100-word-story competition. The entries have flooded in thick and fast during the past few months, but while we’ve enjoyed reading every story, only a few can come out on top! You, our readers, voted t

      5 min read

    • Article

      Forever Wild

      Oct 1, 2018

      When I think of the Scarborough house, I remember the wind whipping through my salt-hardened curls and my little-girl feet bare and crusted with sand as I run through its heavy wooden doors. I was four and wild as the landscape itself. My grandparent

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Path Through the Woods

      May 30, 2023

      A Path Through the Woods
      3 min read

    • Article

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work

      Dec 15, 2018

      HERNAN BAS New and Recent Work
      6 min read

    • Article

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson

      Jun 25, 2018

      My Dinner with Denis Johnson
      13 min read

    • Article

      The Wisdom of Women Shines in Najla Jraissaty Khoury’s ‘Pearls on a Branch: Oral Tales’

      Oct 22, 2018

      Long, long ago These things happened or maybe no. Let’s start with the image on the cover. Three women sit in a courtyard. One holds a long-handled pan over a coal brazier; the other two, one of whom has her back to us, hold small cups. They wear ide

      7 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      When making an axe handlethe pattern is not far off. —Gary Snyder My mother was either horizontal on the couch,or vertical, a plumb line from her spineto the top of her head to the ceiling that spinswhen she drinks, alcohol and an air bubbletrapped,

      4 min read

    • Article

      Foxes

      Jun 15, 2019

      What’s worth happening happens in deep woods. Or so my daughter tells me. Her plotlines: In the deep woods someone is chasing, someone else is getting hacked. Hatchets are lifted, brought downdowndown. Men stutter blood onto snow. A cast of animals—s

      17 min read

    • Article

      Nothing To Fear

      Jan 26, 2021

      Nothing To Fear
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Girl Who Lived

      Dec 28, 2018

      The Girl Who Lived
      4 min read

    • Article

      Holiday For One

      Mar 24, 2023

      Holiday For One
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Garden In The Desert

      Sep 20, 2021

      A Garden In The Desert
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for White Birds

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      White Birds - Kaimana Wolff

      Acknowledgments

      D ream, Betrayal appeared in the June, 1996 issue of Canadian Lawyer , the first-prize national fiction winner.

      Dream, Tropical won the Otherwords ’97 competition to the British Columbia Festival of the Arts in Powell River, BC, May, 1997 and appeared in the Spring, 2006 edition of the Litchfield Review, CN.

      Dream, Magical appeared in the Summer, 2004 edition of the Litchfield Review, CN.

      Author’s Note

      I n times of great trouble , great dreams come, decides logical, lawyerly Jane, a woman who has spent much of forty-something years trying to forget such dreams. These are not pleasant; yet they are beautiful in their way. When the dreams keep coming, it is time to pay attention to the dance you are in.

      Each dream is heralded by the image of a white bird, symbolic of the dissociative state, the defense resorted to by so many victims of abuse.

      First, the snowy owl wings into Jane’s childhood, rescuing her in Dream, Magical into a heaven of imagined warmth amid the emotional blizzard of a prairie childhood.

      Next, in Dream, Historical, the egret comes to lift her from her pre-history, the overshadowing fascism of the Second World War, carried on by its very victims.

      In her marriage, depicted by the paradisical Dream, Tropical, Jane sees that her children and her aspirations have also adopted the skill of dissociation, fluttering out of reach like doves. Ultimately, this means living a death in life, in constant mourning for what can never be.

      Dream, Feral terrifies Jane. She must face the fact that abuse kills. Transforming herself repeatedly into what she hopes makes her unrecognizable, each time she finds herself facing the same death. She must become a warrior, fierce as a falcon; must end her familiar self.

      In Dream, Betrayal, with her battle skills polished to a high gloss, she must choose between truth-telling and the best defense of an abusive client. Her skilful confrontation transforms her into a garuda, the compassionate fighting bird of Buddhist mythology. 

      Thus Jane learns how to avoid sliding into sickness, poverty and powerlessness—the all too common state of the abused. Her dreams have taught her what fate awaits her if she cannot summon the courage to be a warrior bent on triumph over terror.

      These stark visitations step-danced through my nights, stylized, as dreams often are, with a sense of beauty and meaning in combat with the ugly subject of domestic violence. Dear birds, pale harbingers of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1