Episode 15: Gun Bubbles

Icelandic-American writer Margrét Ann Thors takes readers on a surprising ride from Reykjavík to Colorado through her imaginative translations. The essay, though beautiful and amusing, touches on such heavy subjects as abortion, mass shootings and serious medical conditions. Margrét deftly explores her feelings around perpetrators and zealots in relation to her pregnancy. In gorgeous language, this essay will have you wondering how the author managed to weave all these subjects into one piece. We will help you unpack Gun Bubbles in Episode 15 of The Personal Element. 

Transcript

Tavi Black  0:13  

 Hi, I'm Tavi Black. 
 
Christine Junge  0:15  
 And I'm Christine Junge.
 
Tavi Black  0:17  
 And this is The Personal Element
 
 Christine Junge  0:20  
Where we listen to an essay we love, and then discuss what makes it so good. 

Tavi Black  0:25  
This month we're talking about Margrét Ann Thors essay "Gun Bubbles", which was first published in Creative Nonfiction.

Margret Ann Thors  0:40  
Gun Bubbles

The Icelandic word for dinosaur is risaeðla, which means giant lizard. To say wedding, you use brúðkaup, which means to buy a bride. If I tell you I’m in love with a guy with gray-blue eyes and an accent, I’m really saying I am imprisoned by affection. 
 

Many summer nights, this guy—my husband—and I sit on a patch of damp grass in a suburb of Reykjavík, watching the midnight sun smolder and remembering each other’s language. Half-Icelandic and raised in the U.S., I have forgotten many of the words I knew as a child, and I laugh as if hearing them for the first time. Sometimes I get carried away, taking a little poetic license. A penguin is a blubber-goose. An idea is a picture in the mind. A cello, a knee-violin.
  Translated literally, abortion is fetus-deletion. Bullets are gun bubbles.
 

In Colorado Springs several years ago, on Black Friday, my dad pulled a rental car into a parking spot and left the engine running. “I’ll be quick,” I promised from the back seat. I was living in the U.S.on the east coast at the time, and my parents and I had come out west to visit my brother and his girlfriend for Thanksgiving. We were about to fly back to the East Coast on a red-eye. I’d asked to stop at a grocery store so I could buy a yogurt for the road.
 

The parking lot was laced in frost, tiny crystals that cracked when I walked. Hands shoved in my pockets for warmth, I hustled past some Christmas trees and approached the store entrance. Two cop cars idled there, but I didn’t pay much mind. Then I heard a pop.
  “Get on the ground!” someone shouted. A cop, that’s who was screaming at me. “There’s a shooter!”
  I darted back through the Christmas trees, pops sounding around me. Rounding a pillar, I saw the silver hood of my parents’ sedan and sprinted. Bullets kept popping, sounding fake, childlike—gun bubbles. I veered toward the car and lunged to get inside. But this wasn’t our rental, it was one just like it. My parents were a few spaces down. “Get on the fucking ground.” This time I listened. I splayed myself flat on the frozen asphalt, bubbles all around. 
  When I spotted the bent license plate on the front of my parents’ car, I bolted. 
 I tore into the back seat and slammed the door, shaking from head to foot. “There’s a shooter! There’s a shooter!” I screamed the words that had been shouted at me. 
 My dad made for the only exit yet to be blocked by SWAT vehicles. Cars on either side of us accelerated for the freeway. My heart galloped. I thought I might puke the whole wet mess of it out onto the seat beside me. 
 Two bananas slumped in a paper bag beside me. I devoured them, peeling the second before I’d finished the first. Their weight and mush and sweetness settled some of my shaking, if briefly. 
 Afterward, my parents focused on the look on my face when I ran to the car. My mom said she’d never seen such pure terror. Dad said it was the look animals used to get on the farms in Iceland, where he spent his childhood summers—the clutch-life fear when they glimpsed a gun. 
 For the rest of the ride to the airport, I kept quiet, trying to see my face through their eyes. 
 

The only time I ever shot a gun was in the northwest of Iceland, when my Uncle Steini took me and a handful of my male relatives to a shooting range, really just a wooden hut manned by a sparse-toothed fisherman who owned a wall of shotguns. 
  Orange discs shot skyward, and the guys took turns blasting them down. Haukur, my closest cousin, whose name means hawk, gave me a nudge. “Come on, Magga. Your turn.” My brother rolled his eyes. “She can’t shoot!” 
  Hawk stood behind me and helped to steady the barrel. My dad and uncle watched from beside the wooden shed, with the old fisherman, who had snuff tobacco dripping from his nose, a black line from nostrils to lips. “Ready,” Hawk whispered. 
  The gun’s kickback knocked me to the ground. Soon my cousins were on the ground too, doubled over laughing. I unleashed myself from the gun’s strap and waited out the rest of the afternoon in the back of Uncle Steini’s Jeep, arms crossed, looking the opposite way. 
 

The shoot-out lasted five hours. As my parents and I walked through airport security for our flight home, customers in the grocery were just being released from lockdown. Details about the incident were still coming together. In the end, three people died, and nine were severely injured.
 It turned out that the store was very close to a Planned Parenthood clinic. The gunman said he was doing God’s work. He considered himself a martyr—which in Icelandic is píslarvottur, witness to torment. The word for killing, víg, sounds a lot like the verb vígja, to make holy. The word vígur, which describes one who is skilled in arms, is pronounced similarly to the English word vigor, meaning vitality, life force. These words skate across each other in my mind. I suspect if I follow them long enough, I’ll wind up in the Norse cosmology of the Viking era, where killing and consecrating could be one in the same. 
Every 90 days since November 2015, the gunman has been deemed unfit to sit for trial despite his raucous confessions of guilt.
 What if you had shot me and I had been pregnant, I want to ask him.


A few years before the shooting, on a blustery Christmas morning in New England, the left side of my body went slack, and I dropped to the kitchen floor of my childhood home. My dad carried me to the car. I spent a week on the cardiac ward. Stroke (heilaslag, “blow to the brain”) was the diagnosis—this despite my clean bill of health, low BMI, normal cholesterol. I didn’t smoke, hardly drank, ran half-marathons, ate lots of green stuff. And yet. A month after being discharged, I returned to the hospital to have a hole in my heart sutured shut. This hole, called a patent foramen ovale, or PFO, should have closed itself at birth but didn’t; the hole was the flaw in the design, the passageway through which a blood clot had shuttled from my heart to my head. 
 At the time of the stroke, I was on birth control pills, which can make blood sticky. Had I not been on the pill, the clot may not have formed, and the hole would not have mattered. Had there not been a hole in the first place, the clot may have dissolved in the lungs, as clots routinely do, and the contraceptives would not have mattered.  
But as it happened, both mattered. They mattered so much that, weeks after the surgery, at a gynecological checkup, a doctor looked half at me, half at her computer screen, and announced I wouldn’t be able to safely have children. “Too risky,” she said. “Given your history. It could happen again.” The stroke, she meant.  
 When did it become my history, I still wonder. This history I didn’t want, didn’t choose. 
 On the doctor’s desk was a framed photo of her with three little kids piled on her lap. I ran home, rushed through the back door and crumbled to the kitchen floor, same as that Christmas morning. Dry heaves. A silent, futile moan.  


In 2019, Iceland’s parliament passed new abortion legislation. Included in this bill about reproductive freedom was a motion to change fóstureyðing—fetus-deletion—to a softer word: þungunarrof, hiatus of pregnancy. Change what you call an abortion, lawmakers reasoned, and you’ll change how it feels. But still, in conversations among young women I sometimes overhear at the university where I teach, in one of the most gender-progressive countries on the planet, abortion remains what it has been for forty years: fetus-deletion. 
What we call things affects our understanding of those things, our relationship with them, our judgments about them. It is a different proposition for a woman to erase/delete/destroy her fetus than it is for her to put her pregnancy on hiatus. 
 Words matter. 
Too risky. Get on the fucking ground. Your history.
 Sometimes, when I’m trying to fall asleep, I picture the gunman’s mess of wiry hair and how wide his eyes were in the mug shot I found. How he interrupted court proceedings over a dozen times, shouting, “I am guilty. There’s no trial. I’m a warrior for the babies.”
 

A decade and change after the stroke, I fell pregnant. I had moved to Iceland and consulted doctors who weren’t so concerned as the gynecologist I had seen when I was twenty-three. The words too risky no longer echoed so loud in my mind. We tried and it worked. The ball of cells inside me grew and grew. Kicked sometimes. 
 I jabbed my thighs and love handles with blood thinners and made a constellation of needle pricks on my skin. My body baked a womb-cake. I looked down and couldn’t see my feet, but sometimes I could feel hers—the baby was a girl—wedged beside my ribs. I oiled my stomach. We waited.
 Now, I stare at her as she stares in wonder of her hands, her toes, and I try to understand how once she didn’t exist. Once, she was a honeycomb of cells. Inside my once broken body, she grew to be her. 
 

I want to bring my baby to America. I want to want to bring her. But the illogic of the U.S. gives me pause. Gunning down women “for the babies.” Shooting up elementary schools for the—the what? Movie theaters, nightclubs, houses of worship. Grocery stores, birthday parties, post offices, private homes. In some years, recent ones especially, there are more mass shootings than there are days.
 

“I wouldn’t say gun bubbles,” my husband says. “Byssa is gun—that part’s right. But kúla is more like sphere or ball, not bubble.”
  I take this in. “Gun balls,” I say, deflated. “Where did I get ‘bubble’?” I do this sometimes, let the words slip. 
 “Well, you’re close. Bubble is loftkúla.”
 Loft means air, kúla, ball. Air ball. 
 I repeat the word kúla to myself. Kúla. KOO-la. KOOOO-la. 
  Where have I heard that before?
 Later that night, my mind chews on a memory of my midwife: her fingers feeling for my sternum, her measuring tape snaking the hump of my stomach. 
 Baby bump, I realize. That, too, is kúla. 
 

Why are you arguing with a murderer, I ask myself. You think it’s personal. It’s not personal. He  doesn’t know you. He doesn’t google you. To him you’re nothing, no one. 
 I can’t drop it, though. When I was pregnant, I learned new facts about bodies and babies. My daughter, I read, was born with all the eggs she will ever have, upwards of four million. So in a sense, my daughter was inside me when I was inside my mother. My daughter was inside me in that parking lot in Colorado, long before I fell pregnant, long before I was ready to rewrite the story a doctor told me about myself. The possibility of my grandchildren is inside my daughter. I want the gunman to know this. I want every pained individual whose sweaty hand holds a weapon to know that every person is in fact many people, past, present, future. 
 But I also want the gunman to be proud of me. See, I want to say, it’s good I wasn’t shot. Look at what good I’ve done. Look at my daughter. 
 I think I need to feel important to him, special, singled out. Because otherwise my death would have been meaningless. The death of my future, of my future family, would have been meaningless, too. 
 

and listeners if you hear Christine laughing It's not about the essay. It's because I'm holding up some pantyhose in front of my microphone.

Christine Junge  13:56  
Yeah, the things we do as a as a small podcast to make it work. 

Tavi Black  14:01  
Well I want to say Christine that I am just so in love with this essay Gun Bubbles. I feel like it's one of the finest essays that we have talked about and we have talked about a lot of excellent essays. 

Christine Junge  14:16  
Yeah, you know, it's funny I I was also going to say that this is my favorite and then I was like well maybe maybe everyone is my favorite as I'm picking it apart to discuss but I do think that this one is particularly good.

Tavi Black  14:29  
 It's just we read a lot of essays and and with this one it just there was no labor involved at all for me to read this. It was such pleasure the whole time and it's just there's so many reasons why I like this one. I mean just the opening is so excellent when she's talking about these words, which I'm not going to try to pronounce these Icelandic words. Just I'm "imprisoned by affection" you know "to buy a bride", it's just really an excellent opening.

Christine Junge  15:04  
 Yeah, it really is. It's just so interesting. Like, I felt like this essay, like you said, was so effortless to read. But it was also so jam packed with like things that I was learning and interesting kind of juxtapositions of ideas. So it was both like very deep, but also very easy. 

Tavi Black  15:23  
And she does she packs so much in here that is, you think this essay at the beginning is about, maybe it's about language, and it is about language, but that's not really what this essay is about. And, she as she brings up each subject, I think, Oh, this is what the essay is about. It's about a shooter. And I'm so glad we're talking about this. Because if we're talking about subject matter, when we're choosing our essay, sometimes we don't like to do too many essays that are around the same subject. So sometimes if you sent one in listener, and we've said no to doing it's mainly sometimes just because we've already done essays on the same subject, and I almost didn't want to do this one because it was about a shooting as I started reading, and I thought, Well, we've already done Meghan Doney's really amazing essay about a school shooting The Wolf and the Dog. But then it turns out this essay really isn't about a shooting.

Christine Junge  16:28  
Yeah, and, and like you said, in that first section of the essay, she introduces "translated literally, abortion is fetus deletion, bullets are gun bubbles." And that's like your first inkling of like, oh, so this is going to be about both abortion and guns.

Tavi Black  16:46  
Yeah, and we don't know that at first. But you do by the end, and you think, Oh, look at what she did in that first little section. She's able, and that's what she does over and over in this essay, which is one of the things that makes me love it so much is she weaves her subjects and, just what she is thinking about into every part of this essay. I also like if we're talking just about the beginning, I like how she brings it in the first couple of paragraphs. We're in Iceland. That's where we think we are. And then boom, we're in Colorado Springs. And so I'm thinking, Oh, wow, okay, so we're in Iceland, we're in Colorado, she brings us back and forth so seamlessly. I really love that. I mean, she says, I'm half Icelandic, I'm half American. And you really feel that in in this essay, how she has these two different cultures that she's really living with and in.

Christine Junge  17:46  
Yeah, and even in the way that she picks apart the Icelandic words. Like, I wonder if somebody who is fully raised in Iceland, you know, that you wouldn't be thinking of the words in English, or like how they translated. That's something that probably only somebody who's bilingual would do.

Tavi Black  18:02  
 Right. Yes. And she, this is another subject, but I'm just looking at this first part of it. And there's something about her sentences which make it so easy to read and to listen to this essay. In probably the fourth paragraph she she talks about, "the parking lot was laced in frost tiny crystals that cracked when I walked." It's such a beautiful way to describe just walking into a grocery store. 

Christine Junge  18:37  
Like as you just read that aloud, there's so much poetry in there. "lot was laced with frost, it crackled when I walked" like there's, you know, sort of like that internal rhyming. I don't know if if that's something that she kind of added in as she edited or if she just naturally thinks in such a poetic way.

Tavi Black  18:54  
Yeah, I feel like she is a very poetic writer that her descriptions and her verbs throughout the essay, I kept underlining her verbs. I'm going to come back to that because later on in the essay, there's some great verbs she uses in one sentence. 

Christine Junge  19:10  
Tavi when you're saying that reminds me so much of in our MFA program, there was one of the teachers AJ Verdelle, who was obsessed with verbs. And she had you go through all your writing and pull out and underline the verb so that you can make sure that you're using them well. 

Tavi Black  19:27  
Yeah, she and she's right. Use your verbs. I often quote A.J., you'll probably hear me do that a lot. 

Christine Junge  19:36  
Yeah, I know you've worked very closely with her, both in school and and on your novel. Another thing about her sentences. They're really a lot of them are really short. And I think that lends itself to making it easy to read. Like in the section of the shooting. She says "my parents were a few paces down, get on the fucking ground. This time I listened."

Tavi Black  19:59  
 I think it's absolutely right that if you're in in a tense situation, those short choppy sentences, I mean, she's really lending her writing to the action. And right after that is actually the section I was going to talk about the verbs where "cars on either side of us accelerated you her heart galloped. I thought I might puke. Two bananas slumped in a paper bag," you know. So she's just in just a couple of sentences. She uses these really great verbs.

Christine Junge  20:31  
 Yeah, no, that's, that's really, really true. 

Tavi Black  20:33  
And then on top of all of that, that she's got going on. What I love is she's she's in Colorado. And then in that last little bit before she brings us back to Iceland, she says, "Dad said it was the look animals used to get on the farms in Iceland." So she references Iceland. I mean, all of this. Of course, we've talked about this before, it looks effortless. But I think it's very intentional that she's saying, hey, wait a minute, we're gonna go back to Iceland. And in the next section, she's talking about the where she's shooting. And one of my favorite things in this section is she talks about the "sparse tooth fishermen who owned a wall have shot guns." And again, action, they've got "the orange disc shot skyward, the guys took turns blasting them down." But then she describes that fellow, with "snuff of tobacco dripping from his nose, a black line from nostril to lips."Just such great description. 

Christine Junge  21:36  
Yeah, it really does put you put your right there with her. And just jumping back for a minute to the part that you spoke about. When the data is describing the look the animals used to get. I felt like that was so descriptive. And it really, really brought me there. And that her mom says that she's never seen such pure terror in somebody's eyes. And then the dad is describing the "clutch life fear when the animals glimpsed a gun," and I felt like oh my god, like I so see that panic on her face through that paragraph. 

Tavi Black  22:09  
Yeah, so really good economy, just describing she could have gone on and on about what fear she felt. But we just got it immediately when her dad said that.

Christine Junge  22:22  
Yeah, that's something that she does throughout the essay, have really liked the show, don't tell rule. She really follows that. And you'll see why it's something that you'll always hear in writing classes. 

Tavi Black  22:33  
Definitely. And I feel like she, when I talked earlier, too, about how she brought in Iceland in the next paragraph, ,how she keeps referencing back to her subjects, to her setting. Really, she does it again at the end of this section, where she says "the guns kicked back knocked me to the ground. Soon my cousins were on the ground too, doubled over laughing." But to me that reference when she's in the shooting of crawling on the ground, they're saying "Get the fuck down." You know, this, this getting low again, like she's bringing it back here in a different section. 

Christine Junge  23:12  
Yeah, and you're right. She does that throughout the essay, even with the the two main topics, the abortion and, shootings. You know, obviously, when she talks about the shooting and how the shooter was doing it out of a misguided attempt to stop Planned Parenthood from doing their work. Yeah, so then, you know, she brings that connection. 

Tavi Black  23:33  
And I think that's really true. She just is so able to weave in her thoughts. I mean, we've keeps we keep saying the same thing. But it's true. It's kind of remarkable how she brings up in one sentence, you know, the first section about the fetus and you know, honestly, for me, I didn't even think anything that it would be about a fetus. I just thought she was telling us words, Icelandic words. And here comes the surprise in a couple more paragraphs. 

Christine Junge  24:08  
Another way that she kind of brings the two subjects together, is when she says I don't know how to pronounce it in Icelandic, but the word vigor, which describes one who is skilled in arms is pronounced similar to the word vigor in English, meaning vitality, lifeforce. And yeah, the idea that, like these two words that sound similar and are spelled similarly, I mean, opposite things. And then yeah, and then she brings up the idea of the Norse cosmology, where killing and consecrating could be one in the same and again, she's like, joining those two opposing ideas about guns and bearing a child. 

Tavi Black  24:50  
Yeah, I mean, I, I wrote so brilliant that she put that in, I mean, bringing it to the Norse cosmology and Viking era. I'm like, wow, she's just really digging deep into her subject. And I just have to mention that I love the sentence that "these words skate across each other in my mind". I mean, she could have just said, Yeah, I was thinking about those words. But she didn't she put it poetically, which we've noted that a lot of her essay is very poetic. And for me, I feel like the pivotal moments in this essay is right past that, where she said, "What if you had shot me and I had been pregnant? I want to ask him," because that is her bringing all of her subjects and thoughts together.

Christine Junge  25:40  
It also, you know, she echoes it down later, when she's talking about how she's having these conversations with a shooter. And, you know, I've never been involved in something this traumatic, but I know, in my own life, like there are times when I'm like having these internal conversations with people. And I'm giving a lot of headspace to this person who, you know, might have like, done something rude to me in the grocery store, or whatever it is. And you know, that I know that they're not thinking of me, and she kind of has that same thought of like, the gunman doesn't know me at all and doesn't isn't thinking about me, and I'm spending all this time, like having these conversations with him. 

Tavi Black  26:19  
Yeah, I, it's interesting to me that she doesn't really come to that until the end, where you realize, oh, she's really, really thinking about this guy. I didn't catch that, you know, until towards the end. So that's why I think this moment is pivotal to me, because this is where I realized, Oh, she's talking to this guy. She's still thinking about it. And then we come to the next section, which is, so unexpected. What a surprise. Suddenly we learn she's had this stroke. 

Christine Junge  26:51  
Yeah. And I think this essay is one that really bears rereading are we listening to so listeners, I really hope that you'll go back and listen to it again after the conversation, because I did feel like as you're reading it, you're not 100% sure how these things come together. But then at the end, you can look back at it and be like, Oh, my God, these, like she wove these very disparate subjects together so beautifully.

Tavi Black  27:16  
Exactly. I was so surprised to read about the stroke, I just think this is going to be about a shooting, which is a huge event, which is about, you know, babies and fetuses and abortions. And, you know, all of that seemed like such big subjects. And now, oh, my gosh, she just had a stroke, another big subject, and in a relatively short essay, and I and I do want to say that, I do recommend that listeners go and read this essay, because we actually asked her to edit this down for our podcast. There's a fuller version on the Creative Nonfiction website that I really recommend reading. It's worth it. 

Christine Junge  27:57  
Yeah, we'll link to it on our on our website. Yeah, one other area where I really liked the sentences when, in this stroke section, when she's talking about "had I not been on the pill, the clot would not have formed in the hole would not have mattered. Had there not been a hole in the first place, the clot may have dissolved in the lungs as class routinely do. And the contraceptives would not have mattered." There again, it's just like that repetition and and meet her that she uses so well.

Tavi Black  28:24  
 Hmm. Definitely. And again, I almost I thought when she says, "When did it become my history? I still wonder." To me, that's where I see her just really start to contemplate life, death, birth. She brings those topics together here in that sentence.

Christine Junge  28:46  
 Yeah. And that sentence also, it really brought home for me. What surprised the stroke was for her? Yes. Even though she says it. Like, you know, I was healthy. I was young. These things don't happen to people in those situations. But the idea that, like, when did this become my history? Yeah, it just really drove home the point of like, how did this happen? Exactly. 

Tavi Black  29:09  
And that she uses the word history, because that's what the doctor says to her, given your history, you know, a word that they use casually. And she's like, history is not a casual word. That's what I feel like she's saying with that. 

Christine Junge  29:22  
Yeah, she's really saying like, this has become part of my story, part of my life story. And that that's much heavier than like, Oh, this is just part of your medical history. 

Tavi Black  29:33  
Yeah, exactly. And then she brings in and then the next section about Iceland's Parliament passing a new abortion legislation. So here she is, in the next little section, talking about history. Kind of brilliant. 

Christine Junge  29:52  
Yeah, and I have to say this is my favorite part of the whole essay when she talks about that Iceland is thinking of changing the word for abortion from fetus deletion to hiatus of pregnancy, and like how thoughtful the legislators being about like something that I'm sure a lot of people in America at least would be rolling their eyes, like, who cares what we call it, but it is really important. And it reminded me of this great article I read, and I will try to link to it if I could find it. But it was about this doctor who was caring for a patient, a pregnant woman. And she goes into labor at like, something like 30 weeks. And that's obviously very early. And as before, it's like right on the cusp of when they consider a pregnancy viable, like, a fetus viable. And so basically, it's up to the mom, whether to when, when the baby comes out, because it's coming, there's nothing they could do to stop it. It's up to the mom to decide whether they're going to try to save the baby, even though it'll have like, lots and lots of medical complications, and it might not live or if she's going to treat it like a stillbirth. And so they're, so they're in the hospital room discussing these options. And the doctors are like, some of the doctors are using the word using the word fetus, and some of them are using the word baby. And in the doctor who's writing about it is like, Well, is it a fetus? Or is it a baby? Like, it all depends on how the mom wants us to proceed. And just says, yeah, just that feeling of like, Oh, my God, the line is just not very clear. But the words do matter. Because, you know, that they were hoping that if, if the mom decided not to pursue life support for the baby, or excuse me, for the fetus, they were hope, they were thinking to use the word fetus, because then then the mom might not be quite as heartbroken, even though obviously, she would be, obviously.

Tavi Black  31:51  
I find it interesting that they, they use hiatus as a word. Wow, you wouldn't expect, especially a government agent to to use that word. It's like you said it's very thoughtful.

Christine Junge  32:07  
And you know, and then she kind of goes on to say more explicitly, like, what we call things affects her understanding. It's different for women to erase, delete, destroy her fetus than it is to put her pregnancy on a hiatus. And again, she's just kind of like drilling the point home there that we're as she says, Words matter. 

Tavi Black  32:24  
And then she says, words matter too risky. Get on the fucking ground your history. Again, for the reader, she's giving us a little gift of reminding her about the words that have really shaped her life at this point. 

Christine Junge  32:39  
Yeah, and it reminds me of at the beginning of the essay, which we already talked about, when she says "translated literally, abortion is fetus deletion bullets or gun bubbles". So they are to she's using her words very carefully to kind of lay out a groundwork for what the essay is about. And then here again, she's using those three phrases "to risky, get on the fucking ground, your history" to again, like give us like kind of signposts about what what the essay is really covering? 

Tavi Black  33:13  
Agreed, yeah. And so again, cleverly, she doesn't just say, oh, abortion, shooting, you know, that that would have been an easy way to say it, but she doesn't, you know, and then that next paragraph about when she's trying to fall asleep, she pictures "the gunman's mass of wiry hair." And that again reminded me of the Wilson the dog, Meghan Doney's essay, how much being involved in a shooting affects your life. And later, she talks about, you know, this crazy country and how many shootings there are. I mean, what can you say but I agree with her. It's insane. So this, this next section where she's talking about being pregnant, and her baby, and this as it is, as we've presented, it is my least favorite part of the essay. Not that I don't like it, but I again encourage people to read the full version because it's such a an uplifting, you know, she loves her baby. She's excited. She got pregnant, she couldn't believe she got pregnant. It feels a little truncated. And that's because we made her cut it.

Christine Junge  34:32  
Yeah, but even in the shortened version, she has such seven beautiful phrases like "my body baked a womb cake." 

Tavi Black  34:39  
Yeah, and before that "the constellation of needle pricks on my skin". You can see it. 

Christine Junge  34:44  
And I really like when she says, "I looked down and couldn't see my feet, but sometimes I could feel hers." And you know that that really, again, paints a picture of what it's like to be pregnant feel almost like this other being has taken over your body.

Tavi Black  35:00  
Yeah, I mean, it's really beautiful writing, I guess what I was finding, as I was rereading it, it was that I was almost kicking myself that we made her or asked her, we didn't make her, we asked her to edit it down just for our podcast length. But for listeners, if it sounds a little bit unfinished, that's our fault, not hers.

Christine Junge  35:23  
Another part of the essay that I found myself thinking so much about after I read it was the part that goes, "I learned new facts about bodies and babies." And then how she read that their daughter was born with all the aches she will ever have. "So in a sense, my daughter was inside me when I was inside my mother." Like, whoa, like, mind blowing? 

Tavi Black  35:44  
Profound. Yeah, I never thought of that before. 

Christine Junge  35:48  
Me neither. And I thought I had yeah, I've thought about that so much how like, my baby has been inside me since I was born, which means that my baby was inside my mother, when she was gesting me, like how? Yeah, yeah, something I've been thinking about a lot is just like, connections and how we're so much more intertwined than than we think we are. And yeah, and this, this was like, a really mind blowing way of thinking about that. 

Tavi Black  36:17  
Yeah, she's just, she does pack so much in here. And then she brings it back to, "I want to bring my baby to America." And again, we just mentioned that, but she says "there are more mass shootings than there are days, in some years in America." And then and then after that, she brings it back to the language and the title gun bubbles, which is so excellent. And funny, but she's sort of got it wrong. Yeah, it's really, oh, gun balls, balls. Yeah. Gun bubbles is so much better. And I find it interesting at the end, where she says, "I want the gunman to be proud of me." 

Christine Junge  36:59  
Oh, I know. 

Tavi Black  37:00  
I mean, it's such a strange way to say that, right. But I know that this writer is doing everything intentionally. So I know, she meant to say it that way.

Christine Junge  37:11  
But for me, it made me, it really hit home, the idea of how big a presents this man is in her life, even though she never has met him or, you know, and like she said, he knows nothing about her. But he's taken on this giant status in her head that like she even worries about what he thinks of her. 

Tavi Black  37:31  
Right? There are these presences in our lives, that maybe we don't even know it at the time. Maybe it's not as big as being in a in a shooting. But we are influenced by people, by situations, sometimes in ways that we could never guess.

Christine Junge  37:50  
It was also an interesting idea that she's saying, "See, it's good, I wasn't shot, look at what good I've done. Look at my daughter," as if like she needs to prove her worth to a gunman like to say like, I'm worth being alive. You know, it's not, like everybody's worth being alive. So it doesn't matter if he's proud of you, or what you've done in your life. 

Tavi Black  38:10  
Yeah. And so we just get at the end of this essay, we get such honesty, you know, and vulnerability, which I don't feel at the beginning of this essay, you know, from her, but you really get it at the at the end. It's just such a beautifully well crafted, well written essay. And I just want to say thank you so much for letting us talk about your essay and for working with us. What a pleasure. 

Christine Junge  38:40  
Then like we said, please go back and read it on the Creative Nonfiction website because it's, it's worth it's worth a second or third read. Yeah, and I would say you know, Creative Nonfiction. We read a lot of essays on that and highly recommended sites. 

Okay, well, thanks, everybody, and we'll see you next time. 

Tavi Black  38:58  
Next time.

To learn more about this podcast, visit us online at personal element podcast.com. There you'll find links to the essays we discussed information on how to follow us on social media, and more. 

Christine Junge  39:15  
And so you'll never miss an episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, whatever podcast app you use. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai