by Maria McCarthy | 9 Oct, 2019 | Chronic illness, Irish women, Irish writers and writing, Little Big Steps, Medway Towns, Mental health, Poetry, Writing and wellbeing
I invited SM Jenkin to share her poem ‘Invicted’, as it lends itself to the theme of Little Big Steps. I know SM as Sarah – we were sister Medway Mermaids, part of a women’s writing group, and also share the experiences of being second-generation Irish women and living in the Medway Towns.
‘Invicted’ appears in her debut poetry collection Fire in the Head, published last year by Wordsmithery. It was also published in the anthology Please Hear What I’m Not Saying, edited by Isabelle Kenyon, a fundraiser for the UK mental health charity Mind, and runner up for Best Anthology at the Saboteur Awards, 2018.
Invicted
Victory
is getting out of bed, even though
it is past noon and everyone walking past
has seen that your curtains are
still closed
Victory
is having curtains in the first place,
and a net behind them, and
space to put them up and
keeping them there
Victory
is those sharp clean teeth and that cereal
that you swallow down and keep down
and the milk that is still OK to drink,
today
Victory
is remembering that above those sharp
teeth are lips that kiss, that shape
soft words:
you are allowed
Victory
is those clothes that keep you warm,
and those matching yellow socks
that remind you of
summer beaches
Victory
is making it beyond the chipped
front door today, and staying put
when they walk past, and see
right through you
Victory
is not telling them to go
fuck themselves, because really.
Who knows what their victory looks like;
is it anything like yours?
Victory
is going to bed and staying there,
not knowing if tomorrow is going to
be a victory day and
doing it anyway
____________
Over to Sarah, to tell us how she came to write ‘Invicted’:
‘Invicted’ was written as I reached one of the lowest points of my life, a culmination of what felt like a relentless conga-line of hurt and humiliations, large and small, and a couple of major health scares. It became difficult to get out of bed, to have any kind of energy at all; I didn’t want to do anything or go anywhere. It became hard to find anything to celebrate when it seemed like everyone else was surging ahead in their lives, and posting such happy pictures online. I was isolated and not meeting anyone. My life seemed small and grey in comparison. So, to compensate, I wrote myself a checklist for myself of the things I was able to do and why this was important. It started off more as a way of reassuring myself that I was managing to do something, to remind myself that I was doing something. That, yes, getting out of bed was an achievement. Yes, staying in the outside world once you managed to get there was an achievement. Yes, now that you’ve seen this you can celebrate and recognise that this is, after all, a common and shared life experience. That we do not know what other people’s victories look like.
I wrote that poem because shaping the words helped me to shape my understanding, and how important it is to recognise those small steps of achievement. Writing that poem became an achievement for me, and sometimes, when the bad days return, I can say to myself, Victory is getting out of bed. There’s still a hangover that any talk about weakness is not the done thing. I’m a poet. I’m not always going to stick to the done thing, especially now.
It was important to me to make a reference to HMS Victory, the ship built at Chatham dockyard, where my dad worked.
It feels to me that there is still a macho hangover in some parts of Medway. An idea that a victory is something that has a very narrow definition, only applying to “wins” such as a conflict (large or small), a business win, a football match. I wanted to explore and expand that definition for myself. That winning mindset is hard to shake off.
SM Jenkin is a second-generation Irish writer, a lover of science fiction and an editorial advisor for Confluence magazine. A former chair of the Medway Mermaids writing group, chair and founder member of the Medway St Patrick’s day committee, SM Jenkin is a regular performer on the Kent Live Lit scene. She has performed internationally, and has been published in numerous literary anthologies and magazines. Her debut poetry collection Fire in the Head was published by Wordsmithery in 2018.
Social media: @sajenks42 https://www.facebook.com/SMJenkinWriter
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Maria McCarthy | 27 May, 2017 | Medway Towns, Writing, Writing and wellbeing
The past twelve months have been full of change, disruption and uncertainty. Writing has not come easily, and there have been times when words have deserted me. Writing is the one thing that keeps me sane, and deprived of that outlet, things have been hard.
What has been different from other bad spells, when I carried on writing through the worst of times, and about the worst of times, is the shifting of the very walls and ground that hold me, like a slow earthquake, with cracks developing beneath my feet, and dust from the tremors falling all around. Of late, these cracks, this dust, moved from metaphor to reality, as we moved to a new house, and channels were gouged into the walls to run wiring to replace that which had been in the house since it was first built, in the early 1960s. Phenomenal dust rose, settled, was wiped away, then more settling and wiping in a cycle that seemed to last forever. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock, so my damp cloth worked each day, only to see more thick grey deposits the next morning.
It is hard to think, to write, to give space to creative thoughts when living with dust, noise and builders; with your precious things still packed in boxes; when the walls around you and the roof above you are not those you have lived with; when the view from your window is not the one you have woken to for the previous eight years. And when the certainties of your life for the same number of years have been shaken: a dear cat companion declining and dying; a husband rushed to a cardiac unit in an ambulance, sirens blaring; financial difficulties forcing a move of house.
Writing and publishing is a long game, however, and there have been cheering moments when poems and stories have been published several months after submission, and an even longer time after they were written. Reminders that you can write words that others want to read, that the one thing that keeps you well is still below the surface.
This summer will see the publication of an illustrated pamphlet of my poems, There are Boats on the Orchard. These were some seven years in the writing, and for the past six months I have seen the orchards and poems recast in wonderful drawings by Sara Fletcher. It’s a bittersweet project, since I no longer write in a shed overlooking an orchard. In fact I had no permanent place to write for a couple of months, when one house was sold and another had not yet been secured. Then the struggle to find a space amongst dust, builders, and too-much-stuff that fitted in the old house but not in the new. But now I have a desk and a space in the house to write.
Instead of an orchard, I now have a view of the River Medway from my bedroom window, plus a view over the dips and rises of hilly Gillingham. There is a road, houses, and a factory that makes Jubilee clips. In the middle of the river there is a strip of land, Hoo Marshes, and on the other bank I can see the spire of the church at Hoo St Werburgh. It’s a moving landscape, as the tide comes in and goes out on the estuary, and small boats pass – sometimes larger shipping. The lights of the factory come on at 6.00, and people arrive by bicycle, in cars and vans, and on foot. The traffic climbs and descends Danes Hill all day. The landscape moves, and I remain still, as the floors and walls beneath me settle and stay.
Beneath the floorboards, raised by Dan the Sparks and John the kitchen fitter, there were packages and a yellow cash tin, hidden by the previous owner of the house, who lived here for 46 years. Amongst the documents and mementoes was a compass in a brass case. I opened the case and oriented myself in the house: the river to the north; the front of the house facing east; the back facing west.
Returning to the house after a week away, I first went to the bedroom to look at the river, my constant north. When my three-year-old granddaughter visits, it’s where she heads, too, calling to everyone, ‘Do you want to see a river?’ She dashes to the other rooms, to see if there is ‘another river’, but there is only one.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Maria McCarthy | 17 Feb, 2016 | Chronic illness, Medway Towns, Nature writing, Poetry, Walking, Wandering Words, Writing
On a cold Valentine’s evening, in a room above a pub where the old sash windows didn’t quite close, I heard Katherine Pierpoint and John Gallas read poetry. The week before, I went to the University of Kent to hear Katharine Norbury read from The Fish Ladder, her superb memoir, which was one of my favourite reads of 2015. What links all three, and got me thinking, is that travelling inspires their writing.
Katherine Pierpoint talked about winning a Somerset Maugham Award, which had to be spent on travelling, then read some poems, and recounted some tales, from her trips to India and Egypt. John Gallas – well, he just keeps moving, and the poems he read ranged from New Zealand to The Alphabet of Ugly Animals, which he wrote after seeing an exhibition at the Turner Contemporary, Margate. He has also worked on a book of translated poems from around the world, The Song Atlas, and read one from Tanzania.
Katharine Norbury walked and walked from the sea to the source of water. Will Self, he’s another one: walking, walking; writing, writing. And I wondered if there was something missing from my experiences, from my writing, because I haven’t been very far at all.
My writing came from enforced inactivity. It started a year into my illness, at a time where I hardly left the house. Journeys were short, and the I was only able to be away from the house for an hour or two. This is still the case, sixteen years on. I haven’t spent a night away from home in a year. I nearly did – to go away to a wedding – but I crashed the day before, and knew I couldn’t make the journey.
Yesterday, I went on a short trip alone. A ten minute walk to the station, a train ride of less than half an hour, and a wander round Rochester, where I used to live. It’s familiar, yet changing. The shops change ownership, a cafe where I used to write every Sunday morning has changed names twice since I moved away, and has knocked through to the next shop. Even the railway station has moved a few hundred yards from the old one, which stands strangely empty as we roll towards the new one, the waiting rooms and shelters levelled, just a sign saying ‘Do Not Alight Here’.
The wild orchards near Newington
I am not alone often when I go out, but felt the need to undertake this bold expedition by myself. I notice things more when I am not in company. The wild orchards that border the track between Newington and Rainham; the passenger waiting on the platform in a thick puffa jacket, glasses tinted black on a bitterly cold day; a little girl in the next toilet stall with her mum, telling on Leah, who had ‘pulled all the tissue out and just thrown it on the floor, and that was a waste of tissue, wasn’t in Nanna?’ Nanna was in the next stall along from her. The small child in the Oxfam shop, who declared she was going to ‘inspect stuff’: ‘Hmm, this a very comfy chair’. How different the Cathedral looks from the platform of the new station, the perspex and metal shelters on the opposite platform obscuring the view. How cold the fingers of my right hand, texting my husband to ask him to pick me up at the station on the way home.
At the weekend, I’d heard Guy Garvey on the radio, at the BBC 6 Music festival, talking about living in New York for a year, and how being away had fed his songwriting. Again, the importance of travel to an artist. I listened to Guy Garvey’s solo album on my iPod on the way back from Rochester. I’d heard it a few times at home, whilst on my computer, my phone, reading, talking to my husband. I hadn’t really heard it at all. On the train, it was just me and Guy and the music, and staring out of the train window.
Perhaps it’s being alone that creates the experience, and travelling doesn’t need to be that far. My orchard poems, on Wandering Words, and new ones being written, started when I felt bereft after finishing my story collection. I wrote about what I could see from the window of my writing shed, as a filler-in thing, till the next writing project found me. They became that project. Like the shops and cafes of Rochester, the orchards are changing, disappearing. Here is a new poem – or perhaps two, about the boats that are docked on the orchard that backs on to our garden.
Dry Dock
A catamaran
upturned on trestles
a milk jug draining
ii
And now there are three
hour minute second hands
stilled round the dead tree
Photo by Stephen Palmer
On a car ride from Faversham to home, I was shocked to see that most of an old cherry orchard had been chopped down; the second such orchard that has disappeared in the last two years. Last summer, we bought cherries from a stall in that orchard. A young woman was selling them, her toddler in a playpen under a tree, and a babe in arms, just ten days old. We asked what kind of cherries we bought each time – Napoleon Biggereau, Sunburst, Merton Glory. We bought some on the very last day the stall was open, on my way to an event where I read my poem ‘Know your cherries’. I used them as a prop, then shared them with my granddaughter. She accepted them silently, seriously, while the other poets read. The juice dripped down her chin.
Like this:
Like Loading...
by Maria McCarthy | 31 Oct, 2015 | Horror, Medway Towns, Short stories
When I was a child, we celebrated Halloween at home. We didn’t dress up, but we did bob for apples in a washing-up bowl, or attempt to take a bite out of apples strung from the beam in the living room, hands clasped behind our backs.
Trick or treat didn’t arrive in England until the ’90s, by my recollection, when I had children of my own. We’d carve a pumpkin, and stand it in the window to attract passing ghouls. I once got cross with a boy who knocked twice at our front door, begging ‘Trick or treat.’ ‘You’ve had your sweets,’ I said. ‘That was my twin brother,’ he replied. ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘heard that one before.’ I was just about to shut the door when a child identical to him arrived at the bottom of the steps leading to my house. Shamefaced, I offered the second twin a dip in the treats bag.
Maria reads The Man in Black at Horrorshow
Seven years ago this month, we moved to a village. Expecting the usual trail of spookily-dressed children, we bought some sweets and lit the tealight candle in our pumpkin. Knocks came there none. Year 2, the same. Year 3 and beyond, we no longer buy sweets for Halloween. We are at the end of the village, just before a stretch of the A2 with few houses, only orchards shedding their autumn colours and fields of sheep. At our end of the village, there are few children. There are mostly older people who have lived in their houses for upwards of 30 years. A ‘young’ neighbour, 50-something, like me, describes it as ‘Death Row.’
In spite of the lack of trick or treaters, we’ve carved a pumpkin every year – a new experience for my husband, Bob, who I have known for a little less than 9 years. But this year, the weeks have passed without thinking pumpkin, without (as I often do too early) choosing a candidate for our Jack o’ Lantern. We are having a pumpkinless Halloween. In any case, Bob will be out gigging with his band on mischief night, while I stay home with the cat. Who isn’t even black.
To make up for this, I am sharing a story, ‘The Man in Black’. I wrote the first version of this 15 years ago and revisited it for an event called Horrorshow, held at The Barge, Gillingham, a couple of years ago. My Medway readers will recognise the setting, in and around Rochester. Versions of this story have won and been shortlisted for prizes; this is the first time it has appeared in print.
Happy Halloween, one and all. May your pumpkins glow brightly in the dark of the night.
Read The Man in Black. Beware, those with a nervous disposition…
Like this:
Like Loading...
