Reviews/Memoir
28 September 2008
Small Wonder Short Story Festival
‘Can you hear me above the noise?’ William Trevor pauses from his reading of ‘Teresa’s Wedding’ as the sound of a milking machine thrums through the barn. For Claire Keegan it was geese honking that interrupted ‘A Long and Painful Death’, and another reading halted altogether as a herd of cows moo-ed their way past the barn to be milked. Blankets are advised, indeed provided, for barn events. No-one complains about paying to freeze in this venue where daylight can be seen in the gaps in the roof.
This is the Small Wonder Short Story Festival, set in the grounds of the glorious and appropriate Charleston House, home of the Bloomsbury group. It offers an idyllic pond adorned with statues on its banks, and the folly garden with loud and blowsy flowers and apples on the trees so red they could be plucked by the heroes of a fairytale.
Claire Keegan, whose collection Walk the Blue Fields was my favourite read of 2007, reads in a subdued and intimate tone, long red hair tossed over her shoulder. She breaks her reading with giggles that are both girlish and seductive, as she stops to apologise for the accent of the German character in her story. Hers is a writers’ story, one of procrastination when the main character is offered the isolation she craves: a week to write in Heinrich Boll’s cottage on Achill Island. She starts her day’s ‘work’ by driving to the shop for milk and coffee, watching at some length a hen crossing the road (beautifully described), then going for a swim, and later baking a cake. Her peace is interrupted by a telephone call from a German visitor, keen to look around the house. She entertains some vague romantic thoughts about her imminent visitor, and tries unsuccessfully to elicit a compliment from him during his visit later that evening. After outstaying his welcome, he berates her for wasting her time, so tainting the sanctity of Boll’s house. It seems he has been spying on her all day. The woman writer, incensed, goes to her desk late at night and writes until morning, creating a long and painful death for him: the writer’s revenge.
After her reading, I catch a word with Claire Keegan about how Irish writers seem drawn towards the short story; she agrees, and tells me about a book by Frank Connor in which he sets a challenge for writers to describe a hen crossing the road. ‘Well, you’ve cracked it,’ I say. She giggles, asks if I write, and gives me some words of encouragement about completing my short story collection. I feel like giving up, I tell her. I could never be as good as her. ‘Oh, never give up,’ she says.
Anne Enright also provides encouragement in the Q & A session after her reading from Taking Pictures, her short story collection published a few months after her Booker prize-winning novel The Gathering. It seems that one reviewer accused her publisher of rushing the collection out in the wake of her Booker success. No, the stories were ten years in the making, ready for publication before the novel. The publishers chose to put the novel out first: novels sell, short stories are not commercial.
I have accused myself of taking too long over my collection (two and a half years for ten stories so far), and for failing to concentrate on one project. Anne Enright has three projects on her desk: novel, short stories and various columns. ‘I have no time for writer’s block,’ she says.
She accuses herself of writing the same story again and again, each based on Orpheus and the Underworld. For those who look back, the object of their desire is lost. She favours first person narrators, woman characters, and there is a theme, as a member of the audience points out, of men taking liberties and women letting them get away with it. Enright says that she is political in her personal life, but ‘it’s not up to a writer to comment on their characters.’
She likes movement in her stories, and this can be on a small scale, describing intense encounters. Her story ‘Can I touch?’ is of a pregnant woman trapped in a lift with a man who is overly interested in her bump. There is an ‘emotional ratcheting’ in the story, reflecting the mechanism of the lift. She has also written a story set on an escalator. She likes the sense of weight and balance, of being inside things.
Enright says that she has problems with omniscience in a narrator. Those of us that have been taught creative writing know that the use of an omniscient narrator is a sin for a writer. William Trevor uses it liberally. The master storyteller he is, he can do as he likes. He tells as well as shows his characters’ thoughts and motives. Do we need to be told that the pregnant bride, Teresa, has married a man she doesn’t love? We already know that the marriage is one of necessity. Somehow, it adds to the poignancy when her new groom asks at the wedding reception, ‘Did you go to the fields with Screw Doyle?’, and we are told that Teresa is not angry with him, the man who has been told to marry her by the parish priest. ‘I did,’ she says. ‘But that was years ago. The baby is yours.’
William Trevor follows his story with a memoir of his childhood in provincial Ireland, and the experiences that inform his work. This is particularly moving for me, as Trevor was born in the same town and in the same year as my late father. I had, in fact, gone in search of my father’s story by visiting this town, Mitchelstown in County Cork, after first writing to William Trevor to find out if he knew my dad. My letter was intercepted by Liam Cusack, a friend of William Trevor’s and now my friend too. I catch a quick word with Trevor as he signs my copy of A Bit on the Side. ‘We have a mutual friend,’ I say, and explain the connection between my father and himself, how Liam facilitated my trip to Mitchelstown last year. The frail writer, now 80, is most concerned to know if Liam is well, have I seen him recently, before I am ushered along to make room for the next in the long line of fans.
I come away inspired, refreshed and ready to work on my next story. My head is spinning with tips and quotes. Claire Keegan’s comment about the short story framing the essential longing of the main character; Anne Enright’s presence as a real, down-to-earth woman telling stories of real women and situations; William Trevor’s continuing source of inspiration from his childhood. I dream of being up on stage at a future festival. Dream over, I get back to my desk and on with the work.
2 September 2008
On characters and family
The characters I create are rarely just imagined. Rather like a vulture picking titbits from corpses, I gather details from real life and piece them together. Actually, more like Dr Frankenstein, stitching together parts of different bodies. Life and real-life characters are gifts for writers, like the people who come round to collect items I’ve advertised on Freecycle: the woman with the child-like face and the four inch scar laddering her neck; the cub scout leader whose email name, busterjohn, matched his Buster Bloodvessel physique; the Irish woman, collecting a book called The Pope’s Children, who entertained me with an account of attending the Papal Mass in Dublin in 1980 – ‘when the Pope’s helicopter circled the park, my mother and I just screamed.’
I recently went on a writers’ holiday in rural France. Cut off from TV, the internet, and miles from the nearest town; surrounded by nature and spectacular thunderstorms; in the company of other writers and a great tutor; I found myself frozen, unable to work on anything other than editing the writing I had brought with me. There were no cafes where I could people-watch, no bus passengers to smell and observe the pattern of the dandruff on their coats. No, imagination alone doesn’t work for me.
Characters take a while to ferment, and childhood memories predominate. I was an eavesdropper as a child, one who could blend into the background, perched on a stool by the red Formica table, legs toasting by the coke boiler in the kitchen as I listened in to adult conversations, storing them for poems and stories forty years later. My poem, Visits from my Aunts, shows this, and my story, A Tea Party, is woven from a child’s eye view of adult goings-on, the unnamed narrator not unlike my nosey, child self.
Of course, readers believe that these stories are my own, my family’s. There is more than a grain of truth in this, but never the whole truth. Yes, I did have a tea set as a birthday present from an Irish uncle, but, my father, unlike the father in A Tea Party, didn’t have an affair.
I do agonise before I fictionalise family stories. My father’s cousin, Nellie, told me about coming to England from Ireland in the 1950s, and being badly treated by the family where she was a mother’s help. I pushed this further in ‘Biddy’, my most recent story, with her character being raped by the father of the family, then suffering a miscarriage in a hospital where they believe they are dealing with the aftermath of a back street abortion. The rape never happened in real life; the miscarriage is my mother’s story. There is a risk in writing both: that the unreal will be taken for real life; that the true story, one of many we were never to divulge outside the family, will now be known by everyone.
I left this story for several months, scared to proceed with the fiction, scared to write about real life. I justified returning to it by reassuring myself that neither woman will read the story, and that writers should not be bound by taboo, or what others might think. Two quotes came to mind (I’m not sure who first said them): write as if you were already dead; become a writer, lose a family.
Estranged from my mother, her opinion no longer concerns me, but I do suffer a quiver of anxiety before sharing family-based work with my brothers and sisters. For my sister Eileen, who is also a writer, she was consumed with fear about sharing a dramatic monologue based on our mother’s stories. What if her siblings didn’t share her version of the truth? What terrible fate would befall her if she spoke of those things that we were forbidden to tell outside the four walls of our childhood home? We both have to learn that we are no longer children, that we are safe from the threats of our parents and the retribution of the Catholic Church.
I have recently been on the receiving end of a writer’s use of real life in their fiction. In Scarlett Thomas’s ‘The End of Mr Y’, I recognised a classroom scene as one where I was one of the students. My class was not portrayed in a flattering light, and it was clear that the character (Scarlett herself?) was unimpressed with her class’s reaction to her session on defamiliarisation. I was not sure whether to be flattered or insulted! How exciting to appear, even if disguised, in a best-selling novel. On the other hand, wasn’t there something unethical about this, using her MA students as material? But what do we have if we don’t have our own lives to use as material? My classmates and I, as writers, must be the first to understand and forgive our unflattering portrayal.
A good exercise, taught to me by Patricia Debney at the University of Kent, is to write in response to these three statements:
I would like to write about…
But I am afraid to because…
Nevertheless I will…
We have a rich seam of stories and characters to mine from our childhood; the pain of unearthing these needs to be worked through for ourselves, and so that others may know stories, which would otherwise be lost. Andrew O’Hagan wrote, ‘The child you were will never desert you.’ As a writer, I say, Thank God.
Climate Camp at Kingsnorth - riot police and bananas
I am a local to the Climate Camp near Kingsnorth on the Hoo peninsula, the site of the proposed coal-fired power station. I visited the camp today, 4 August. I was really impressed by the peaceful atmosphere and the willingness to listen to other people. I waited for the bus to the camp at Strood station with Dave, a retired miner, who was due to speak alongside Arthur Scargill (in favour of coal-fired stations). There was a respectful exchange of views with climate campers who were also waiting for the shuttle bus. The poor man was carrying the most enormous bag packed with leaflets. I saw him later on the Channel 4 news, still carrying his heavy load, while A.S. spoke to camera.
I met many local people who were camping there, all of whom I had not met before. It was good to be with like-minded people, and to exchange details so we could meet again after the camp. There were two elderly women, one from Hoo and the other from Strood, who had come to find out about the camp and the issues. I thought it was great that they had got past the scaremongering to come and see for themselves.
I left when the cry was going up that riot police were on site. I am not a fit person (I have ME) and knew I wouldn't cope with getting caught up in the aggressive actions of the police. As I left I asked one of the police if I could have a lift to the bus stop, explaining that I am disabled and unable to walk too far. They had closed off the road to the camp, and wouldn't let the shuttle bus get closer than about a mile from the camp. I got a lift in a 'meat wagon' and was offered food. I was very grateful, and accepted a banana! As we drove down the lane we passed a row of police with riot shields. It was a chilling moment; they looked very tense and they gave me a steely stare, probably assuming I had been arrested.
I have since seen all the news reports and am shocked at the police's actions as I feel that it's a peaceful camp. I have to admit to being in tears as I saw the protestors being hit with riot shields and batons. The protestors weren't resisting, they were just holding their arms in the arm and chanting 'This is not a riot.' And it was so at odds with the individual officers I spoke to, particularly the ones' at the gates who were friendly and courteous.
I just wanted to share what I saw today. Good luck to all at the camp. And local people, please don't be afraid to visit. There are workshops and lovely vegan food and people from all over the world who have come to support the protest. You might just learn something.
Maria
And I'm growing old - Neil Young, Incy Wincy and the internet
Age has not withered me, and after 9 years away from the big one-dayers, I was drawn out of festival retirement to see Neil Young at the Hop Farm Festival on 6 July 2008.
Time was when I would cheerfully remain in wet jeans and T-shirt all day. Middle age has stopped that cheeriness. But no grumpy old woman, me! Armed with (allegedly) waterproof jackets, umbrella and fold-up chairs, me and the folkbloke sallied forth from car park to arena. Four hours of rain later, the sun got the biggest cheer of the day so far when it emerged from where it had been hiding as Rufus Wainwright sang Hallelujah. Praise be, Rufus! Like that brave little spider, Incy Wincy, we had triumphed over rain and adversity.
There was much talk, entre moi and folkbloke, of the shortcomings of our so-called waterproofs and umbrella, which had a steady trickle running down the silver thing in the middle and onto the handle, and how much better other festival goers' rain gear was compared to ours. I spent several hours sitting in a blue plastic recycling bag, which we'd found in the boot of the car - ah, memories of those black bin liners at Reading '77!
Highlights of the early part of the day were the fabulously talented (and so young!) Laura Marling (Mercury prize nominee), and My Morning Jacket. However, the music was marred by the sound which blew away with the breeze creating a kind of Norman Collier effect. For those too young to remember, he was a comedian whose act consisted almost entirely of faking a speech with the mic cutting out, with hilarious results. Supergrass are good old festival stompers, who were clearly enjoying themselves as much as the crowd was. Disappointment of the day was Primal Scream, who sounded like any old rock band, and failed to excite.
The rain returned as the evening drew in, but did we care? After several wet-bottomed hours, Folkbloke fetched my spare dry trousers from the car, the blue plastic recycling bag having failed the waterproof test. Having neglected to bring dry knickers, I went commando for Neil Young.
Neil Young now has the place of Best Live Act ever for me, taking over from Led Zeppelin, Knebworth '79. In a mix of old and new, he totally rocked the place, possibly the loudest and heaviest sextagenarian on the scene. It was the emotion of the performance that did it; 'And I'm growing old', in Heart of Gold; 'Old man look at my life, I'm a lot like you were' - a song by the 24 year-old Young, written with such prescience. How different is he from those days? His voice is richer, and imbued with life experience and experiments in music conducted to please himself rather than the trends of the music industry. I love his whingey-whiny voice, and this was used with good effect in Mother Nature, sung to the simple accompaniment of the pump organ. I imagined it as a prayer, a hymn sung at school assemblies around the world.
After a 25 minute rendition of No Hidden Path, the piece de resistance was Young's encore, a heavy metal version of the Beatles' Day in the Life. Absolutely stunning. The crowd yelled for more, but there was no way he could have topped it. We were left to file out of the arena as high as Incy Wincy was when he reached to top of that water spout. Even the rain and the 2 hour wait to get out of the car park couldn't dampen us.
In the old days, when you came back from a festival you would tell your friends just how brilliant it was, but they never got it. As for your mum and dad, they were only interested in how to get the mud out your jeans, and 'Did you really come back on the train in those filthy clothes?' It felt like you'd been to a secret place, a kind of Heaven after the purgatory of rain, toilets and sleep deprivation. No one could understand unless they'd reached the same nirvana. Now there is the internet. Within hours you can share experiences with other festival-goers. Was the vegan noodle bar the best festival food? Just how shit were Primal Scream? Was it just a bunch of old hippies singing along to The Needle and the Damage Done?
I'm booking my ticket for next year - as long as they have Neil Young every year - and I'm off to find a really waterproof calf-length coat, waterproof trousers and wellies. I believe you can find such things on the internet...