Melanie Braverman
Melanie Braverman lives in Provincetown, MA, where she has worked most recently as studio assistant to a visual artist. Currently she is at work on a collection of short prose, Eye for the Small. Her work has appeared in Calyx and Paragraph, among other journals.
Working Notes, Melanie Braverman:
I was taking a series of homeopathic remedies. Homeopathy, from the Greek meaning similar suffering. The idea was for a time to write every day. I did, and by the end of the winter had the body of work now called Remedy, from which these pieces are excerpted. It begins with this epigraph: 'The pure and infallible oracle of the healing art is pure experience.' (Samuel Hahnemann, The Organon of the Rational System of Medicine. ) So this is what the manuscript embodies, contains. Later I thought to score the pieces differently, but in the end the affirmation of the period was the only symbol that would do, like the road sign which may mar the landscape but cannot be done without because now there are so many travellers. The work came quickly, what I know about the work is still catching up. 'The wheels of nature grind slow but exceedingly fine,' a sign on my homeopath's desk reads.
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