Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Collage"

As the blonde painter built towards a caterwauling
climax of charismatic presence, her brain constructed
itself all over again. Everything in Mary’s past which
could be used to self-mythologize would be used—
that was taken for granted— but the tack taken was
about a jumble of dynamic elements, never needing to
coalesce into coherence, which would make her as larger
than life as she wanted to be. The unfathomable sense,
after this many years, of taking the raw materials Mary
employed & attempting to understand what was real, what
wasn’t, can be easily replaced by understanding that grist
for the mill was grist for the mill for Mary then, & anything
went. True dynamism meant that if half-stories became
full stories & vice versa, that was fine, as long as the whirling

dervish effect was achieved, birthing the Mary-as-hurricane
she wanted to be. Whether her father really was a drunken
lout in private, a philanderer, or even a lover of his daughters,
no one really needed to know. The serpent of that story
unleashed itself, and then self-consumed. Mary as someone
who, in drunken & drugged stupor, had been hit by a car
somewhere near Media, also disgorged itself in the melee, along
with the sense of enfranchisement around being hospitalized
for general insanity. Mary had been propositioned by street-kids
in Spain; had trod the boards in Massachusetts as a professional
hippie, on a New England commune; had random sexual
encounters in sleeping bags in airports; ran away from home
several times as a teenager; was a pioneer in the discovery of
oxycontin; was an out of control storm. The myth was a collage.

© Adam Fieled 2026