Numb fingers type faster

 

Today was one of those high, blue, fine-threaded days that brought a frost, and which means that my flat, a tenement from the thirties, is cold inside. We have heating, but it’s on a pretty poor gas system and we recently discovered that it was squeezing D’s lungs. A space heater will have to do us, when we feel lux enough to use it. The low today is only minus 2 celsius, so it’s not great trial. It just feels a little Dickensian to be wrapped in – okay – snuggies and blankets, with cold noses and fingers that bend a little unwillingly.

 

But I’m not here to complain. I’m here to express my gratitude to all of the people who have been visiting this blog recently and who have started following me on twitter. To the people who retweeted my story from yesterday, and who contacted me directly about it. Thank you! I think every writer craves an audience, and feels that when he or she has made a connection with a reader that that is something really uplifting.  I cannot explain this comfort, except that all writing is a form of communication, an attempt to lay out in textures and black marks something important to them. A story that burns through the finger tips. That wants, as Sundog Lit say, to burn the retinas. To light someone else up in the ways that they can and are able be. A less-than-perfect cross between song and chatter, physical sculpture and neon and flame.

 

 

It’s a dark time of the year, as I have said. Cold, blue, low lit. Writing is more important than ever, it feels. Reading, huddling round a book or bringing one clumsily, bittily, into being. I will have more time, now that my work, sadly, is cutting back my hours in the winter slump. The pictures above are from one of the distractions of the season: the Christmas Market on Princess Street. Outside of the picture are little huts strung with lights and tinsel, selling overpriced decorations and German snacks and hot mulled wine with schnapps. I’m thinking of setting up my own stand – selling a poem. Selling a photograph of this city. I won’t, because I’m truly not business minded, but the idea of doing it makes me smile. The possibility of physically handing my art over to someone as we both shiver and clap our hands at the chill.

 

There are ways to speak and ways to see on these cold days. If it’s warm where you are, perhaps summer, I am envious, but not. How are you managing though, wherever you are?

 

And thank you, as ever, for reading here.

August like a sharp intake of breath in a field of bright yellows and something like wheat

 

 

It is already August, it’s never August in Edinburgh until suddenly the streets are full of revelers for the festival, for the comedy, the book, the music, the children’s festivals and the populations swells and butts up against one another in the street, or else wanders drunkenly about, or else begs or juggles and we get a tiny break in the clouds, once or twice a day, that shows a scorching blue.

 

I have been having great fun reading the submissions for the Thresholds Project. Stories of imminence, of tension, of waiting at the doorway of life or simply a window, looking out. I really would love to read more. If you’d like to send me a poem or a flash piece, please do!

 

This, along with my Share Your Spaces project, are tentative attempts at something bigger. I might not be able to create a literary journal just yet, but I can wobbly step in the direction, here on the blog. I can look at the spaces within which you write, and be inspired. If you want to inspire me, and the readers of my blog further, and you have work that fits the criteria of ‘thresholds’ (a wide, and welcoming criteria of simply, a point of boundary, or a breaking of boundary, or traversing), please email me your work, or questions if you have them to: wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com

 

It all really began this year with the Endless Reads project, which lead to me reading some amazing, challenging works, to expansive and though-provoking connections with their authors via various social media, and to my becoming a reviewer on the online arm of a really fabulous magazine, which was something I had for a long time dreamed of doing.

 

The year is still young, even if the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Now at nine, it’s growing darker. Now the gloaming is thinning, and the nettles in my neighbour’s garden are dusty. New flowers grow all the time. Big-eyed daisies, bright orange things I cannot name. The reek of honeysuckle. I am hopeful.

Fur Luck

 

This is Lego, a leucitic reindeer living in the hill enclosure at the reindeer centre we visited. Leucitic is not albinism, not the absence of melanin but any pigment at all. There is a delicacy to Lego that is surface only – his pink antlers, his translucent hooves, though he is in robust health, friendly and hungry for the food we offered.

 

Why for luck (or ‘fur luck’ – in a dialectical form)? Because white deer are lucky, harbingers of good, rare things. Because Kilea is leucitic, something she shares with the character she is modelled after, Chariklea from The Aethiopika. It is a curse and a blessing to be  unique. It gives her a particular worth in the eyes of collectors, suitors, and a divorce from her people, her origins wiped from her skin, so she appears blank.

 

And now Kilea is out wandering, not out in the world yet, but in among the trees, a haunting presence for me while I work on the next book, with a new girl needing to be realised.

 

Writing and dreaming. Looking for symbols of fortune when I should be looking to those of endurance. A mixture of these. More pictures and stories, at any rate, to follow.

Affinities

 

Today I am trying to shake off the peculiar airlessness suffered during days without writing. During the move there was no enough space to do any, between the boxes and the piles of clothes and the seemingly endless phone calls to utility companies and working out  how the stove works, the heating (it doesn’t)(neither will the internet for a while).

 

I’m going to throw myself back into writing as soon as I can, but right now, I’m in a Starbucks on the Royal Mile, cold with cold, awful tea to hand, pondering a disappointment – I had applied for the chance to read at the Edinburgh Literary Festival, and was not accepted. It’s quite a blow, in a year (more than a year) of knocks and tumbles and crests and crashes, both in my personal and writing life. In the midst of this, I feel the need to look for firm ground. More specifically, to sources that feel comforting, or challenging (to be challenged by some interesting work, while it may throw us up in the air, while we may feel unsteady and temporarily set off balance and even fearful of where we will land, is not the same as being hit by normal, mundane waves, is it?)

 

I’m thinking of other writers to whom I look for sustaining ideas. For a sense of kinship. For the thrill of reading works that are beyond difficult, inimitable. And most of these writers are North American, oddly enough. There seems a wider market for experimentation, honesty, rawness, discomforting prose over there rather than here.

 

I touched on this a little in my review of Jackie Kay over at PANK, with the idea of ‘the deep narrow sea-loch of Scottish literary scene’. There are amazing writers here, but not so much of the avant garde. Not that I count myself as trying to be avant garde – I doubt I could be a true boundary breaker, working in colour, rather than ideas. But there are people who work language with a tremendous, vivacious skill, and I would like to read them, in order to be electrified. Hopeful that some of the sparks will fire me in ways I could not manage on my own.

 

Of course, I need to read more writers from the UK to see if it’s true all over, to see if the most challenging texts are or are not to be found on these shores. Recommendations would be great – particularly for female writers. I’m looking for a Scottish or British (or Australian, or Kiwi) Vanessa Veselka, Kate Zambreno, (I’d say Bhanu Kapil, but she is (or was) English, and is now in America).

 

If you can think of anyone working the glittering, sharp angles, tell me. I would like to be swept away by a brilliance close to home, not by my own lack of grip.

 

Meanwhile, writing, gulps of air. And waiting for something, as ever, some shore beyond anxiety and the limits of my work.

Driving over the mountain

 

This shot taken by complete accident around eight o’ clock while A was driving us out of Ullapool, a village near to the bothy at Badrallach. And by near, I mean about 17 miles or so. This is mountain, field, moor and sea loch country. All that yellow you see is gorse bush, giving off its perfume of coconut to no one at all, and no bees right now. Perhaps little speck flies pollinate it, I don’t know.

 

I come back to the shot, and think of how it seems so much like my writing mind at times. A delicate blur of some grand scene. Right now, I’m working on a review of Reality, Reality, a collection of short stories by Jackie Kay, and thinking, because she is a Scot and mixed race, about race in Scotland, and trying not to make the review about that at all, because Jackie Kay is Jackie Kay, herself utterly, and a lovely writer.

 

So the review is blurry, because things need to be said to an international audience, that Scotland contains more than the image you can hold in your head of it.  Tartan and pipers and whisky and medieval men, pasty and freckly, in kilts. Or that film, Brave, which makes me put my head in my hands. That alluring, tourist-consumable image. Much more it is, and still becoming.

 

The landscape wooshes by, and now you are in the empty Highlands, but you might not know why exactly they are so empty – The Clearances, for one, as I like to mention here, and other socio-economic reasons I have not begun to contemplate. Woosh, and now you driving by a skiing town built up in the sixties and seventies and only less than hideously ugly when the snow is lying, as if it were designed that way. And then you are stuck in slow traffic on a bridge across a firth (an estuary), looking over at that icon of the railway, star of The Thirty-Nine Steps, and then the sun is shining and warm for once, so you go outside to a beer garden and listen to the crack of summer, a chick inside an egg beaking out and cheeping. Then you are in your house, tapping at the internet, sipping  more and more tea, trying to bring it all together.

 

This is the job of a writer in small countries and large. Bringing the moment together, or the whole nation, or some crumbly part of it, holding up to critique or make shimmering. And my eyes are blurry, and I need more time. And right now my mind is elsewhere, stitching at the world of grief and love in New Mexican mountains. Or it will be soon, when my head stops swinging.

Red Rowan

Late at night, editing to strange music choices – poppy hip hop from The Hairpin, a playlist of the music of Modest Mussorgsky, he of Night on Bald Mountain.

 

The text takes on strange shapes with the changing light, my eyelids growing heavy. But my fingers work almost independently, like little tailors, sewing up the gaps and ripping out the bad loops and snarls. I have to pull back before some witching hour comes. I set myself a placeholder, I embed a white rock in the ground, to know I can come back this way again, as many times as I need. Everything, I feel, should be form-and-function. Sometimes I’d like to write from ideas, to speak bolder, but the truth is, the text comes out this way, everything a fairytale and everything sharp and weighty as a hunk of flint. Perhaps the right material to spark, but not an overt flame, as the writers I look up to can manage.

 

Perhaps I have read too much of Virginia Woolf’s criticism to think out these sorts of things on my own terms.

 

Lastly, before bed, the Rowan of the title. A tiny one, but on its way. Rowans planted to keep out the fairy folk from houses, if not texts, to put a red bloom at the doorway. To mark and defy this liminal space.

 

 

Sunday Poem

D hand feeding a wild deer, Bald Mountain, NY

 

A white doe on the green grass appeared to me, with two golden

horns, between two rivers, in the shade of a laurel, when the sun

was rising in the unripe season.

 

Her look was so sweet and proud that to follow her I left every task,

like the miser who as he seeks treasure sweetens his trouble with

delight.

 

“Let no one touch me,” she bore written with diamonds and topazes

around her lovely neck. “It has pleased my Caesar to make me free.”

 

And the sun had already turned at midday; my eyes were tired by

looking but not sated, when I fell into the water, and she

disappeared.

 

– Rima 190, by Petrarch (b.1304- d.1374)

 

One for the writers. Sometimes the sentence or the success is as fleet as deer, and always out of reach. Sometimes even deer are happy to be in our company, for a while.

Lucky Number 13

This is cross-posted from my Tumblr. I wrote it on Wednesday, hovering between wild hope and worry.

 

Now it is Friday the 13th, and seems all the more apt to repeat:

 

I’ve been reading Hobart 13 – the theme of which is luck. Stories and essays on being unlucky or lucky, or simply dismissing luck altogether.

 

Do I believe in luck? In theory, no. But in practice, principles of rationality get a little blurry. The idea of luck is, as Jac Jemc mentions in this issue, something of a matter of faith and/or trust: if you have faith in a higher power, or in other people, then it’s hard to shake the feeling that when things go well, that it’s not entirely your doing.

 

So, this is a brooch that I bought for my wedding. A wedding being, as anyone who has watched Doctor Who knows, a time of liminality, a time when one is betwixt and between states. Strange things can happen.

 

I wore this brooch on my silver wedding dress (actually an old cocktail dress of mine). On the way over to the wedding, one of my guests told me afterwards, she had seen a dragonfly skimming about – this is not entirely common in the north west of Scotland at that time of year (September) when dragonflies might have expected to have died off.

 

I think of the brooch as lucky because I wore it on the wedding day. I think of it as lucky because I haven’t lost it yet, as I lose most things.

 

I’m going to wear it today, and see if it has any effect. If nothing else, it’s terribly pretty, is it not? And that might be enough to buoy my spirits through the tough times that may come.

….

 

So I took that little brooch along on Wednesday when I met my agent to discuss my first book and how it is fairing the seas of submission. But there was no news there; she was seeing someone the following day. Ah, I said. We had a lovely evening eating far too much Vietnamese food and discussing bookish things and me talking about the city and its gruesome history (oh so much gruesomeness) and then I took the brooch home.

 

Today, Friday the 13th, I met up with her again to hear what had happened – taking with me the brooch and a copy of Hobart 13 (since I knew I was probably going to be early, and wanted to read it. Something to steady the nerves. I enjoyed so much of it, perhaps because the notion of luck is and was still very much on my mind).

 

So is it good luck or bad luck that there is still no definite news on Kilea?

 

There is the London Book Fair, beginning on Monday, and hopefully more news a little after then. Or perhaps in a little while more. Right now, I don’t know.

 

What does feel lucky is how strongly my agent cares about the book. How determined she is to put it in the right hands.

 

I am lucky to know her. I am lucky, too, to have D. supporting me in the edits of the next book. To have my parents and in-laws helping us out in this terrible economy. To be home in Scotland, where I feel much freer to write and to try to participate in the literary culture here – and online.

 

I am lucky to have so many people here coming to read or to look at pictures of the city, of the landscape. People who are kind enough to comment (even though, in the past few days, I haven’t been in a sound place to respond properly. I will be better!). You’ve kept me going for months, really. You’ve helped me reach out to others, to the readers and the writers, to feel like I have a right to speak about my writing, about the books I love, about the everyday beauty my camera captures, because that’s just what you do.

 

I’m lucky to have books to read, and people all over to talk about them with. I am lucky because I can keep writing. I am lucky because I love words, and you do too.

 

Are you lucky? Do you believe in fate, destiny, kismet?

 

Is luck something you keep, or keeps you?

 

This Reader’s Manifesto

Today my first book review for PANK is up.  Please go and have a peek, if you like, and if you have opinions, let me know what you think.

 

In a moment of furious over-reaching I have decided to come up with a manifesto of what I want to achieve as a reviewer. Yes, I know this is only the first review, and I am getting a little ahead of myself. I want to come at this from a good angle. I want to sort of dive in and be a bit brave. There will be bullet points to make this official. So before I start apologising in advance, here we go.

————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

There are many ways to be a reader. As a reader I have always read with my eyes half-closed, listening and running my finger along the words, stopping, letting the air rush in and out. Because I am not as much an intellectual, systematic reader as one who seeks out the textures of the book, the images, the scents of grass and sickness, the cobblestone and cold high room. How this is achieved in chains of sentences one after the other until the end.

 

I read not just in sympathy with the character but seeing how they are fitted and made distinct from their world. How they shape and want and touch and shake. With an eye to the layering of time like paint and philosophy and weather and landscape and hurt and thresholds and liminal states and other constructions of instability and evolution.

 

My aims and wishes as a reviewer:

 

• I wish, then, to read well, critically, but must do so with an awareness of what my constraints are in seeing, and therefore with acknowledgement that the tackling of the text is necessarily subjective, perhaps overly colourful. Purple even. I will try not to go overboard with metaphor. Oops, isn’t ‘going overboard’ a metaphor too? Can’t win.

 

• And now that I am going to review seriously – not much more seriously, since I am terribly earnest about words – it is important (for me) to set out what, exactly, I’m going to review. In also the hope that I might receive books to read to feed into my churning readerly writerly brain.

 

• I will try to read new and newly translated books that are essential, exciting, fierce (my favourite word for books), haunting, nihilistic, loving, cunning, humane, clear-eyed.

TELL ME THAT I MAY READ THEM.

 

• I will try to read well and write my understanding out. I want to make clear this hazy appreciation of the text, so that others will be intrigued. I want to be kind in the manner of a surgeon. Maybe a little sloppier.

 

• I want to read the fine boned literary works. Dense tissue books. Books ribbed in scars. The slim sucker punches, the weird hybrid prose-poem-memoir novels combing their hair with their fingers, the hissing mess, the elegant bombs. I am aware of another Reader’s Manifesto, that struck out against the literary, the ‘plotless’. Well, I love the unabashedly literary. Something that is trying so hard to play to test to cut up to expand and blow apart cannot be elitist. The elite run the tory party, and giant corporations and banks with casual disdain.  Literary writing is effort made to look effortless (sometimes) and made for the people.

Sometimes, yes, there is writing that creates a clique and does little else, but these are not what I read nor wish to here. I also believe there are more than a handful of literary styles out there, and that it is important to seek out both the well made traditionally written works and the experimental.

 

• I want to read books mostly written by women. Sorry, though I know white, middle class men of certain milleux receive hardly any attention these days in the press. I know! Terrible shame. But I’d like to be a little biased. I spent a lot of time at university, undergraduate anyway, thinking that women just didn’t seem to have written anything. I have years of the sin of omission to make up for. I will make exceptions for the exceptional. Two exceptions I can think of right now: Patrick Somerville and Steve Himmer.

 

• I wish for dazzling fiction, of a type that does not always scream at you from the shelves. I want to read the strange and lyrical and yes a thousand other terms of superlatives from not just British and American authors but Australian, New Zealander, South African, Trinidadian, Irish, Indian, works in translation – a commonwealth of letters.

 

• I ask, also, where are the low-lying Scottish female writers of literary fiction of the up-coming generation? Are you hiding in the shadow of all that crime-procedural stuff? Down a close somewhere, picking over the usual murder weapons, shaking your head at the voyeurism, the usualness of it all? Has Alexander McCall Smith cornered you, kindly, for tea and biscuits in 44 Scotland St? Or are you further North, typing away in the village coffee shop while you should be sending out CVs?

I know of prolific Kirsty Logan, who has written some grand fiction, and hope to pick up a collection of hers for review. I just went to a reading given by Catriona Child. But more! I need guidance. Step forward, young lady writers! I’m a reader and I’d like to read you!

Just in case you think me limited, young is also ’emerging’ is also ‘new’ so age is not the key thing here.

 

• Books and authors I have loved of late: Green Girl, The Summer Book, The Hour of the Star, most of what I have read of Virginia Woolf, of Jean Rhys, of Toni Morrison, of Anne Carson, The Way Through Doors, Season of Migration to the North, The Sound and the Fury, Nabokov of Pale Fire, Pnin, Lolita of course, lots of the 19th-20th century Russians (inc. Bulgakov, excluding Dostoevsky), the Odyssey, the Aethiopika (An Ethiopian Tale), The Golden Ass.

 

• Authors for consideration so far: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Catherynne M. Valente, Zoë Wicomb, Lauren Beukes, and Herta Müller and Elizabeth Ellen (with thanks to StuckInABucket and Nouvellist).

 

• In my reading pile, to be reviewed if they haven’t been on PANK already: Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) by Eileen Myles, Zazen by Vanessa Veselka.

 

I would love your suggestions. Please add to this list with titles you think might fit, and I will try to acquire them (not sure how, at this point) and try to do them justice in review.

Writing is Waiting

I’ve been working on my first review for PANK and finding it unusually stressful. I just really want it to be good enough, but the language of critique is hard for me. Always I cannot see with a clinical eye, but have to touch everything instead, working out the shapes and textures. Right now, I’m waiting for D to have time to proofread what I’ve done so far, to point out any weaknesses or confusion so that I can smooth them away. Added to this, I’m also waiting for the weekend, when D will be able to sit down and read the manuscript of the current with me, to play spot-the-no. No, this doesn’t make sense, no, this is not clear enough, no, this does not sing.

That means, for now, I have set the manuscript aside, cannot fiddle with it even a bit. I have nothing for my hands to do: I keep hearing dud notes through the wall, and it irks. But a bit of distance is necessary. Writing is waiting, not just typing. Not even thinking – sometimes the silence is needed, to let the subconscious seethe and click, like a nest of something, a swarm of something, knitting away in the dark.

I have, after much of humming and hawing, finally decided that the title is not what I want for it, that it should be Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts, so that’s what it shall be from now on. The last words found written on a piece of paper, inside a wallet, on the body of Stephen Foster, writer of ‘Oh! Susanna’,  ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. It carries more within it than a generational descriptor. It hints, it hums sweetly, but not too sweetly.

Anyway, to keep my mind from rattling too much, I’m posting these pictures of Spring. Soothing, and only pleasant, of the blossoms on the ornamental cherries which seem to be everywhere in this city. You turn a corner and there they are, heavy with puffs of white or pink. These were taken behind the National Museum, beside the Potterrow Port: