The Moirai

Stitching a Full Circle

Thirteen months ago I joined Substack because a writer I love claimed a throne here. Signing up from my hairdresser’s chair, I submitted my personal details and told him my dilemma: I’d removed everything extraneous from my writing life: the old decorating blog, time-sucking Facebook, the never used X that I’d only signed up for because someone tagged me in a thing I did on a stage in Boston nine years earlier.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have cut ties with the extraneous,” I said, smiling at the congratulatory signup email from Substack.

My hairdresser stopped snipping my dead ends, pointed the scissors at me through the mirror and said “Don’t go backward.”

But it was fate.

The Fates—in English—known as the Parcae from Roman myth and the Moirai (μοῖρα) from the Greek, were destiny made flesh and blood female. This trio of sister goddesses controlled when a person was born, when they died, and how much they suffered. They are also credited with creating the first five vowels of the Greek alphabet and the consonants B and T.

Thread gets its strength from twisting fibers. This twisting is done by spinning either on a spindle or on a wheel. The youngest of the Moirai was Clotho (Κλωθώ), tasked with spinning the thread of each human life. Lachesis (Λάχεσις), the middle sister, was the allotter, determining the length of each human life. The eldest was Atropos (Ἄτροπος) the “Inflexible One,” who decided the moment of death for each human life by cutting their thread with a pair of scissors.

Writing is a lonely enterprise. If you read or listen to Notes From the Underworld—all seventeen of you because I am an anti-influencer—you know what I mean, maybe all too well. Substack is a place for lonely writers to be lonely together.

The threads of Notes From the Underworld was born to share research I was compiling for Sewing the Ghost, a book project, which is expanding like the universe to include a sewn component, and possibly a performance component. But whatever the impetus, today’s post, coincidentally post number thirteen published on April 13th, will stitch the circle closed.

This June, a portion of Sewing the Ghost will appear in publisher April Gloaming’s literary magazine Waxing & Waning. Also this June, my first book FLOOD, a Memoir will be published. OVUM, a collection of free-verse and prose poems will be available from Finishing Line Press next January.

In the tiny room next to where I type this are seven boxes of materials from my career as a seamstress for the interior design industry. Among them are instructions for making all things known as “soft furnishings.” Diagrams depicting the proper measuring technique for drapery panels, the correct covering procedure for cornice boards, and how to thread rings on Roman shades sits atop ten years of alphabetized customer orders with snips of fabric attached. Beside it is yet another box, this one full of hand-made Victorian doll’s clothes I inherited from my maternal great-grandmother, who learned how to sew by stitching them.

I need to finish writing Sewing the Ghost.

But don’t count me out. I’ll still be among you, reading what you write, reading what you share.