heavy in my mind like a ripe pear

“As for my next book, I won’t write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.” - Virginia Woolf

My PhD novel has been growing heavy in my mind for nearly 20 years.

Its shape has shifted, then shifted again. Then again. And then again once more.

I think it’s ready, asking, to be cut now. But if instead it falls from the branch it has clung to for all these years, I hope it lands in a pile of soft dry grass, where it will be safe from the hungry parrots who have been feasting on fruit still on the trees. Where it isn’t left too long to be picked up, still fine to eat, with perhaps only a tiny bruise or two from the fall to be cut away.

Worse case scenario, maybe it will be scooped up with all the other windfalls and be made into a lovely crumble.

I lit my first fire in the house last week. Picked figs, rhubarb, runner beans, iron-rich greens so dark they are almost ink-black. Made yoghurt. Failed at making yoghurt. Wrote and wrote, deleted, despaired, then wrote again.

The pear will be cut, or it will fall.