The Light Streamed Beneath It
A Memoir of Grief and Celebration
- Publisher
- ECW Press
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2021
- Subjects
- LGBT, Personal Memoirs, Death, Grief, Bereavement, Inspiration & Personal Growth
- Categories
- Author lives in Ontario
Print-equivalent page numbering
EPUB Accessibility Specification 1.0 AA
Single logical reading order
Table of contents navigation
Short alternative textual descriptions
Language tagging provided
Accessibility summary:
This EPUB meets the requirements of the EPUB Accessibility specification with conformance to WCAG 2.0 Level AA. The publication is screen reader friendly. It includes alternative text, linked contents, print pagination and language encoding.
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eBook
- ISBN
- 9781773057880
- Publish Date
- Oct 2021
- List Price
- $16.99
Library Ordering Options
Description
A Publishers Weekly Notable Book
49th Shelf Recommended Read
A modern gay memoir exploring love, death, pain, and community that will resonate long after the last page.
“This is an embodied story of love, loss, and recovery — raw, candid, and filled with a sense of awe at human resilience.” — Shelf Awareness
“A timely story so human, so beautiful, so bravely told with heart and humour.” — Rosie O’Donnell
A lifetime of finding punchlines in his heartache comes to a shuddering stop when comedian and writer Shawn Hitchins loses two great loves, five months apart, to sudden death. In this deeply poignant memoir that combines sober self-portrait with tender elegy, Hitchins explores the messiness of being alive: the longing and desire, scorching-earth anger, raw grief — and the pathway of healing he discovers when he lets his heart remain open.
Never without an edge of self-awareness, The Light Streamed Beneath It invites the reader into Hitchins’s world as he reckons with his past and stays painfully in the present. As he builds an embodied future, he confronts the stories that have shaped him, sets aside his ambition, and seeks connection in what he used to deflect with laughter — therapy, community and chosen family, movement, spirituality, and an awareness of death’s ever-presence.
A heartrending and hope-filled story of resilience in the wake of death, The Light Streamed Beneath It joyfully affirms that life is essentially good, as Hitchins weaves his tale full of tenacious spirit, humor, kindness, and grit through life’s most unforgiving challenges.
About the author
Contributor Notes
Shawn Hitchins is the author of A Brief History of Oversharing (ECW, 2017). His one-man show Ginger Nation toured extensively before being filmed in concert. Hitchins is an award-winning entertainer, writer, personality, and creator of live performance. Based in Toronto, Ontario, he splits himself between Eastern and Pacific time zones.
Excerpt: The Light Streamed Beneath It: A Memoir of Grief and Celebration (by (author) Shawn Hitchins)
The swings of my childhood were bone-breaking tetanus-laden tests of fate. Warped planks tethered to decommissioned hydro poles with rusted chains; discs of plywood threaded with a knot only slightly bigger than the centre hole; spindly branches of a willow tree gathered, clutched in a fist, and held onto for dear life. There were no safety stops or rubber crash pads.
The objective was to gain enough momentum to launch yourself into the air, to defy gravity for a split second, to hover weightlessly. Then fall, ever so slightly, and feel the jerk of a taut rope catch your body weight and hoist your stomach into your throat. Of course, there were the daredevils; the hearty farm kids who jumped mid-air and flew like Superman and broke their arms like Clark Kent.
I was a fan of Batman. Batman drank Diet Coke.
All summer long we encouraged each other to “go higher, higher” knowing the rotted seat could crack in two and send us plummeting to the hard earth below. “Don’t stop!” Our flapping t-shirts and the skin on our faces measured velocity, our feet dug trenches in the sand grain by grain. “Higher! Higher!” Knowing the closest adult was fields away drinking Seagrams coolers and Labatt Blue.
It was early morning when my cousin Heather and I sneaked outside to practice our circus flips off the A-frame of her blue swing set. We were beginner trapeze artists who had graduated from seated swings to swinging while standing, from balancing on one foot to hanging by both arms off the top bar.
The morning dew had not evaporated before my first attempt on the top bar. My hand slipped as my chest cleared the rung. As I fell, my torso caught the rusted ridges of an eye bolt and tore my skin from my navel to chin. I landed with a thud. My aunt and uncle woke up to the sounds of me sobbing and bleeding as Heather led me into their bedroom. My uncle calmly reached for a tin of ointment in his bedside table. He began slathering a thick wave of goo over the torn flesh, using his fingernails to graft parts of my skin back in place. I can’t picture my uncle’s face then, but I remember his enormous calloused hands sealing my wound. The sensation back and forth of a thick index finger cauterizing the bleeding under grease. His touch coagulated my tears.
What practice I had as a child moving from extreme to extreme. To sit in the seat of emotions, in conversation with my body; with gravity, friction, tension; with the physical world. To then glide, back and forth through time, between the past and the present. From sheer terror to happiness, up and down, unconsciously asking, “Who will catch me if I fall?” Unwittingly I prepared for the disorienting moments ahead. For that day when the branch breaks, the rope snaps, the seat cracks, and it all comes crashing down to the earth.
Editorial Reviews
“This is an embodied story of love, loss and recovery — raw, candid and filled with a sense of awe at human resilience.” — Shelf Awareness
“Deeply moving and beautifully told, The Light Streamed Beneath It manages the remarkable: to share an impossibly sad story with vulnerability and tenderness while also carrying us through the pain with care and grace — and even weaving in joy, desire, and utter aliveness along the way. Shawn Hitchins’s path of rebuilding trust in life after absolute heartbreak will stay with me always.” — Christa Couture, author of How to Lose Everything
“Shawn Hitchins’s writing is generous, beautiful, and fearless in its authenticity; it so warmly embraces love and all that it means to experience it. Each page of The Light Streamed Beneath It is a celebration of life and the complexity of humanity, assuring every reader that we’re not alone in our darkness or loss. Frankly, it is one of the most important books that I’ve read.” — Anne T. Donahue, author of Nobody Cares
“In his moving and eloquent memoir, Shawn Hitchins beautifully explores the messiness of our human lives, and reminds us not to mourn what we lose but to celebrate what we gain. While grief is inevitable in every life, The Light Streamed Beneath It serves as a radiant testament that our strongest armour is an open and unafraid heart.” — Brian Francis, author of Fruit and Missed Connections
“A timely story so human, so beautiful, so bravely told with heart and humour.” — Rosie O’Donnell