October Review Challenge, #4 - Frequently used motif

October Review Challenge, #4 - "What motif shows up frequently in your work?"

Motifs in writing, as I tend to define them, refer to the images, concepts, things that recur in your work because you find them interesting, or compelling, or find them useful to express your ideas.

Like any author, there’s just some stuff I really like writing about. Locked rooms, knife fights, fancy clothes. Ballet and ballerinas, particularly broken-down ones. Small, angry women who are tough to deal with but damn excellent at the thing they do. Hot sensitive guys who know how to defer and aren’t afraid to cry (and who probably get compared to a horse at some point). But I probably have to go with the one that people most like to make fun of me for, because of how weird and pervasive it is— if it’s a Phoebe project, you can start taking bets about when there’s going to be a dead baby.

I am a person who has both an inclination for children and a frank fear of having them, and that does a lot to shape how I tend to depict them. Usually I am exploring the notion of hope versus obligation. A baby, you see, is a blessing and a terrifying responsibility. So a dead baby is a brutal loss but an absence of that responsibility. The tension is always a vital part of the child’s presence, the push between the joy and longing and the grief and fear.



After the stillbirth of Gabriel Hawking, Mrs. Hawking is at once relieved to be excused from motherhood, and guilty to have wished away his life— particularly since the Colonel was so crushed by the loss. While she had an inability to connect with the idea that the baby was any part of her, she could never shake the feeling that she had taken something from Reginald and destroyed it. Again, we have tension, relief versus guilt, the death of hope versus the freedom from obligation.

In my western larp The Stand, the sheriff character Malcolm Royce has suffered a recent stillborn child that took his wife’s life as well. Not only is he grieving the enormous loss, the baby never living represents another common meaning I use these dead children for— the crushing of a hope, in this case, that he can have purpose and identity other than a wartime leader. There is an in-game cemetery where both the wife Amelia and the child are buried, with a stone marked only as Baby Girl Royce. This was inspired by the stillborn girl my grandmother had who was similarly buried without a name, except my grandparents could not afford a headstone to mark it.

In a recent piece, our new supernatural mystery thriller pilot From Dust, we have a dead baby in the back story of the murder victim, a brilliant AI scientist David Heller who named his Siri-like digital assistant invention after his stillborn son Adam. One of the themes of that story is identity and self-determination, and in that particular case the child was born with holoanencephaly, or without a fully developed brain, and that body with no mind or soul stayed with Dr. Heller in his work. Again we see lost potential, and the pain of lost hope.

Those are just a few. My thesis play from grad school, Mrs. Loring, has the main character haunted by how her depression made her neglect her baby to the point where she almost died, so there's a near miss. Both my tabletop games set in the larger Breaking History universe, are driven by baby loss in one way or another, but I will not be specific in how so as not to spoil. And of course no discussion of this would be completely without mention of the progenitor, my very first larp Alice. That game was an attempt to be creative during a very dark and difficult period in my life, and I poured a lot of negativity into it. That larp contains one of the purest examples of a lost child representing at one freedom from obligation, the death of hope, and a guilty pain.

I like to joke that some day, when people are writing graduate analyses of my work, what the fuck is up with the dead baby thing will be a perfect topic for all the doctoral theses. God knows I've done it enough. And I'll be real, I'm sure I'll be going back to that particular well for many stories to come.