Hedgehog‘55th
Birthday
Hedgehog ’s 55th Birthday is a long term narrative project that began with fiction and gradually expanded into painting and theatre. The novel is currently under revision and is set in a small American town in 1958, centering on Emma Rochford, a fifty five year old psychologist who has spent thirty years working with women unable to speak openly about their experiences to their families, husbands, or churches. Emma records their stories under the names of biblical women, protecting their identities while preserving the emotional traces they leave behind.
The paintings were created during the earliest stages of writing and imagining the novel. Rather than illustrating an already completed text, they became part of the process through which I began to understand and construct its fictional world. Through painting, I imagined Emma’s face, body, clothing, the spaces she might inhabit, and emotional states, memories, and scenes that had not yet fully taken shape in language.For this reason, writing and painting developed alongside one another. Some elements of the story first appeared as words, while others began as images or indistinct visual impressions before eventually returning to the writing. Painting became a way of thinking through the character and narrative, allowing the visual and literary aspects of the project to continually reshape one another.
As the project developed, I became increasingly interested in what happens to a woman who spends her life listening to and carrying the pain of others. Emma imagines herself as a “hedgehog,” hoping that its spines might create a safe boundary between herself and the suffering she encounters. Yet the better she becomes at recognizing and understanding the pain of others, the more accustomed she becomes to keeping her own feelings outside her professional life, until her work, loneliness, aging, and thirty years of accumulated emotional weight begin to enter her own life.
The project therefore gradually expands beyond Emma’s individual story into an exploration of women’s experiences, empathy, memory, and emotional inheritance. Emma’s journals contain the experiences of women from different generations, and as Joan reads them, she moves from being an observer to becoming a carrier of these memories, eventually recognizing both her mother and herself within other women’s stories. Here, inheritance does not mean that these women live identical lives, but that pain left unspoken and unresolved can reappear across generations under different names and in different forms.
Hedgehog ’s 55th Birthday remains an evolving project. While the novel continues to be revised, I am also adapting it into an experimental physical theatre work, allowing memories that first existed through writing and painting to enter the physical body. Through movement, breath, fabric, and repetition, the stage adaptation explores embodied memory, while layers of fabric placed on Emma’s body transform the accumulated weight of listening, empathy, and countertransference into something physically visible.