Since my last post, I have come up with a name for my project, which celebrates small achievements as good things in themselves, or as steps on the road to bigger things. The name is Little Big Steps – so far so good.
I had thought that this could become a book, or that I could start a new blog – something big. But the whole idea is to celebrate the small. So I am choosing not to follow one of the habits of highly effective people, as outlined by Steven Covey: ‘Begin with the end in mind’. (From The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Starting with something big in mind might mean that you never get started at all. It all becomes too daunting.
I have been thinking about how I get started on my writing, how I got started in the first place, nearly 20 years ago, when I was very ill and had severely limited energy. It started with a notebook, a gift from a friend. I wrote a little poetry in the notebook each day, typed it up the next day, edited it another day. Twenty minutes at a time was all I could manage. The writing was enough in itself, without thinking where it might lead to.
There are Boats on the Orchard, my latest publication, was not the result of starting with the end in mind. I was living in a house that backed onto a disused orchard, in a village that had been a major fruit-growing area; the orchards now disappearing or in decline. I had finished a story collection, which I had been writing for five years (also not started with a book in mind – a pair of stories sharing characters, which accidentally grew). I was not sure what to do with myself. I had a quote pinned above my desk, about when you finish a long writing project, it is as if you are falling from a tree, hitting off every branch as you come down.
It was a kind of bereavement, after living with those characters for so long. And after a bereavement, you have to carry on every day, putting one foot in front of the other. Putting new words on the page, even if they seem slight, even if it seems they won’t lead anywhere. So I wrote about what I could see from the window of my writing shed, and things I noticed as I walked the local orchards. Over time, those poems grew into something bigger – a commission for Wandering Words followed, and eventually a pamphlet, working with Sara Fletcher to produce images to illustrate the poems. It had long been an ambition of mine, to collaborate with an artist, and all this grew from seemingly slight scribblings in a notebook.
I guess the point of this is, you don’t have to begin with the end in mind. Just take a step and see where it leads you. For the time being, I have a name – Little Big Steps – and I have begun a new notebook, one that I have been saving for a while. I am jotting ideas, copying quotations from books and articles, and I have already asked a guest writer if she would like to share a poem of hers on this website, which fits the theme. More soon…
I have two conditions that force me into solitude – one is chronic illness, and the other is being a writer. I don’t want to push the tortured artist thing, or the tortured sick person thing, but I do spend a lot of time alone. I don’t have consumption and live in a garret – it’s a comfy 1960s semi, actually, and my husband is often upstairs in his study in the smallest bedroom, and would come to my aid if I needed company or help, often summoned by the magic of WhatsApp if I’m too tired to climb the stairs.
Oare Gunpowder Works: a bridge beneath which only Borrowers could pass
I have been brought out of solitude by working on collaborative projects. The first was being one of a group of artists chronicling a year in the life of Rainham Community Orchard. We mostly worked alone, making our visits to the orchard: sketching, taking photographs, writing down lines of poetry, but some of my visits were with Sara E. Fletcher, who was to work on ceramics, some of which ended up with the words from my poems on them, and those of Stephy Stanton. Sara and I also met away from the orchard, to spark ideas off one another, which changed my words and inspired her work. During our walks in the orchard – on a windy February day, and again in September on one of the pick-your-own-apples days – I noticed things that I would not have done so if walking alone, and Sara could always be relied upon to identify plants and wildlife. The weeds I called ‘tall yellow flowers’ were Oxford ragwort, and both definitions ended up in a poem.
Walking with someone you have not walked with before, even in a familiar place, brings new insights. I did so with Anna Bell, ‘Anna Outdoors’, when she asked me to write a poem for children about Oare Gunpowder Works, near Faversham. For eight years, I lived close to the woods in which the ruins of the gunpowder works stand. I walked there alone, I walked with my husband, I was an ‘Artist in the Woods’, at their annual event, for a couple of years. And yet, with Anna, new revelations came to light – a low bridge over a leat (a waterway built to transport goods around the site, on powder punts), which Anna said would only allow Borrowers to pass beneath; the scribblings of bark beetles on a moss-covered log; the two-tone moan of industry from the other side of the road that borders the woods.
Anna, like Sara, knows things about nature. Her experience added to my inspiration, her words became mine in the poem (poets are magpies, we steal shiny things and claim them as our own). Anna talked of the ‘chattering of bats’, and that phrase was too good to let go.
As a child, I spent a lot of time on Epsom Common. I was a member of ‘The Red Pea Club’, named after the berries of the hawthorn tree in the alleyway near to our house. We had a club song, ‘Acorn’s the Word’, and a tree that we claimed as our own, The Dragon, which had branches that were wings and a tail, and a ‘cockpit’ from which to steer the dragon’s flight. I couldn’t tell you what sort of tree the dragon was, nor could I have named a hawthorn. I knew the ferns, the blackberries, and the wild golden rod that flourished on the Common, and the lilies of the valley that grew in our garden, but that was the limit of my knowledge of the names of plants and trees. Lost Words? I never knew them.
Back to the walk in the woods with Anna. She was keen for me to emphasise the sensory details in my poem, both of the Gunpowder Works as they are now, and as they were when the site was a factory, producing the black powder for the munitions industry. A friend told me that someone we both know has a licence to make gunpowder, so Anna and I visited Dave Lamberton at his Faversham home, where he fired a pistol in his garden, so I could experience the smell of gunpowder smoke. I stepped out from his kitchen to the garden, walked into the cloud of smoke – nothing at first, then in the nose, then down the back of the throat and onto the tongue, a bitter tang. The smell hung in my hair for the rest of the day. And all for one word in my poem, ‘The Gunpowder Spell’.
So, what have I learned? Writing is not just sitting alone with a notebook. It’s about walking and talking with others, with those whose experience is different from yours, and it’s about stealing – taking shiny words, storing them in your nest, then sharing them with others.
A few years ago, I heard Andrew McGuinness read a story at the University of Kent. It was a funny tale, and his delivery owed much to stand-up comedy. McGuinness taught creative writing at the university, and at Christchurch, the other university in Canterbury. I saw him at many events, reading his own work, interviewing writers and hosting panels. And then I didn’t.
Like Jack Mann (a stand-up comedian and the protagonist of Andrew McGuinness’s new novel, Anatomised), Andrew McGuinness was struck with a mysterious illness. I don’t like to assume that all of Jack Mann’s experiences reflect those of Andrew McGuinness. This is a work of fiction. However, my guess is that the research that has gone into Anatomised is borne of hard personal experience. The medical details, the intricacies of test results, and the psychological effects of having a life-changing illness that no-one can explain. Jack Mann is thrown from a comfortable life (albeit with family and bereavement issues in his background), having just relocated to the Kent coast, to a Kafkaesque nightmare of weird symptoms, hospital admissions and doctors who can’t see beyond their own specialties – stroke, MS – to alternative therapists who advocate positive thinking when the tinctures they give Mann don’t work.
I nearly stopped reading Anatomised, as Jack Mann’s experiences reflect some of my own as a person misdiagnosed, mistreated, disbelieved and ignored, both in the early days of my own chronic illness, and even several years on. The falling away of friends and relatives, the isolation, the unexplainedness of it all, the grief, the suicidal thoughts. Jack Mann, in a darkly comic scene, fails to throw himself on the right railway track, watching the train (which he has timed from hearing it pass at the end of his garden) speed past on the opposite track as he lays there, awaiting oblivion. My own (lack of) attempts were less dramatic. I walked by the river Medway several times a week, past some steps that descended into the water. I imagined stepping down and down to a watery grave. I never even took the first step down, but my dreams, when they came amidst years of barely sleeping, were of drowning, then a hand pulling me out at the last moment.
This isn’t a review. More of a reflection on lives that once were, altered forever – mine, Jack Mann’s, and Andrew McGuinness’s. And how writers can process their experience through fiction rather than memoir. McGuinness’s novel is not perfect – I felt the author’s anger at his mistreatment channelled through Jack Mann and his wife Alice. It was a little too noticeable at times. Would a reader who doesn’t know McGuinness’s story notice this as much as I did? Or a reader who hasn’t been through that kind of anger themselves, sometimes channelling it through poems and stories, which would have been better left until some of that anger had subsided? Perhaps a fictionalised account is the best one can do, given the closeness of the material, the pain. It gives the writer a distance from the awfulness of it all.
Anatomised has stayed with me, and given me a great deal of cause for thought. I read a lot, but needed a week before beginning another book, to process Jack Mann’s story, Andrew McGuinness’s personal story, and my own. I thought of it as I walked with my husband Bob on a recent holiday. Bob has only known me with my illness, as we met when I was some seven years into it. On this holiday, as I do in my daily life, I could only manage a couple of hours out everyday, then I slept and rested for the remainder of the day. ‘I’d understand if you wanted a wife who could walk further,’ I said, as I took Bob’s arm, struggling to walk back to the house where we were staying. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘Think of all the bother of divorcing you.’ We laughed, but I thought of how holidays used to be, before all these years of illness; a third of my life lived like this.
I’m glad I didn’t take that walk down the steps into the river, because life is good, in spite of my limitations. I’m glad that Andrew McGuinness was able to recover enough, to fight enough, to give us Anatomised. It is lyrical and thought-provoking. I would particularly recommend the last few chapters, where … but I don’t want to give the game away.
Anatomised by A.F. McGuinness is published by Red Sail Press and costs £12.99. A proportion of income from sales of the book will go to Lyme Disease charities.
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.
William Trevor and I have connections, via a small town in Ireland, and two men. One of them was my father, another is now a friend, and was a catalyst for uncovering my past and a wealth of material that was to feed my writing for many years.
In 2007, a William Trevor story appeared in The Guardian, and in the biog it said that he was born in Mitchelstown, Co. Cork in 1928. In the same town and the in same year of birth as my father. It was a town I had never visited, and as my father had been dead for seven years by then, I had no cause to visit. We had few connections with that side of the family: Dad rarely mentioned his childhood, and his silence spoke of sadness.
I had not seen or spoken to my father for several years before his death, for reasons that I won’t go into here; stories that are not mine to tell. The truth is, you can never cut off entirely from your past, and my curiosity about my father’s past grew. I held on to The Guardian short story supplement for some months, spoke to a friend about writing to William Trevor, and the impossibility of doing so. I’m not sure what was holding me back from sending a letter, from writing the letter, but my friend said, ‘What do you have to lose?’
I found out that there was a short story competition to be judged by William Trevor, part of the William Trevor Literary Festival to be held in Mitchelstown. So I wrote a letter to William Trevor, care of the administrator of the competition, Liam Cusack. I left the letter to Trevor unsealed, placed it in another envelope, and enclosed a note to the administrator, asking him to forward it, and saying that he was welcome to read the letter before sending it on. I didn’t keep a copy, but from what I remember I asked if he might have known my father. Perhaps they had gone to school together. My dad knew William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ by heart, and perhaps they had learned the poem together. I expected no reply.
Liam Cusack, Jim Parker and Maria in O’Callaghan’s, Mitchelstown
A few days later, I had a telephone call from Ireland. Liam Cusack had read my letter. He said that Trevor had previously received ‘crank letters’, so he had opened mine. There was no point forwarding it, though, as Trevor had left Mitchelstown when he was five years old, and would not have gone to school with my dad. He would, however, do a bit of research for me, about my dad, as he thought there was a man who would have known my dad.
This led to a visit to Mitchelstown in 2007, and twice more, the last being in 2014 when I read a story from my collection As Long as it Takes at a Culture Night event, in the company of both Liam Cusack and Jim Parker, the man who knew my father, and with whom I exchange long, handwritten letters once or twice a year.
In 2008, I spent two days at the Small Wonder Short Story Festival in the beautiful setting of Charleston. William Trevor was making a rare appearance, a reading and a book signing. It was sold out, but I hung around the desk in the hope of ticket returns. Five minutes before the event, a few tickets were released, which had been reserved by people in the USA, and had not been collected. I took my place, and listened to a story set in a small town in Ireland, not unlike Mitchelstown, read in the same accent that I had heard throughout my childhood.
I queued to have my book signed, and had a few moments with the man. He looked frail, and the organisers were protective of him becoming too tired, and aware of the long queue of people waiting. I told him that my father was born in Mitchelstown, too, and in the same year, and that Trevor and I had a mutual friend, Liam Cusack, in Mitchelstown. ‘Oh, how is he? I’ve heard he’s not been well,’ he said, but I was moved along before I could say more.
William Trevor only lived in Mitchelstown for five years. His father was a bank manager in the town, and bank managers were moved from town to town. Then Trevor left Ireland, as my father did, as a young man, to go to England to find work, and never returned to live there. He was an outsider, a Protestant in a Catholic country, an Irishman in Devon, and this gave him a different perspective on the world he lived in. Liam Cusack told me that Trevor came back to Mitchelstown often, and was to be found sitting on a bench in the square, looking towards the Galty mountains, or watching people, making up stories in his head about small town people.
I would not dare to put my own writing in the same class as William Trevor, but we do have a connection. We cannot quite escape our past, even a past that is ours only tentatively, or is it in the blood, in the psyche? What do I know, really, of Ireland, having grown up in England, having visited, for only weeks at a time, the Ireland my parents were born in? Yet Richard Skinner wrote this of my stories, when he reviewed As Long as it Takes on Writers’ Hub:
McCarthy shares with William Trevor a profound melancholy and her tales, like the Irish landscape eternally showered with soft yet invasive rain, are similarly saturated in shame, sacrifice, and secret sorrow.
When I was seventeen, my German penfriend, Elke, sent me a page a day diary. It had a green leatherette cover, and she later sent me a pretty notebook, with a Chinese design on the cover, And so began the habit of keeping a journal. My recollection is of not writing in it for several days, then filling pages when I felt a bit down. I remembering recording watching the Fonz on Happy Days (appointment television in the days of three channels), or that I had seen the boy I fancied looking out of the window of his office, several floors up, as I walked to college. He had blonde, short hair, and I only ever saw him from a distance as I passed the telephone exchange opposite his building. Yet I built up a private fantasy about him, shared only with my journal. Now I think of it, he was always standing at that window when I passed. Perhaps he wrote about me in his journal.
Research or a notebook obsession?
My mother was not one for respecting privacy, so I kept my diary with me at all times, and slept with it under my pillow. No one read it but me.
My diary habit stopped when I left home, a week after my 19th birthday. I can’t remember why. Perhaps there was too much going on, little time outside of studying and socialising in my first year at Thames Poly. I didn’t start again until I was 40, a gap of over 20 years. Illness had forced me stop work, and I was adrift; I felt like I had lost my identity.
I was out with a friend when I saw a notebook I liked. It was A5 spiral bound with a picture of a parrot on the cover. ‘Let me get that for you,’ she said, and out of nowhere, I started writing poetry in that book, and keeping a diary.
It became a thing that I only wrote in notebooks that other people had given me. As I took on a new love, a new identity as a writer, the notebooks filled and accumulated. By this summer, with only one notebook cull since I began writing (again) in 2000, I had two large boxes full of notebooks, plus a pile on my desk awaiting a second read.
Faced with moving house, and the prospect of someone having to deal with my journals when I die (yes, I do think about such things), I decided to destroy them. I don’t think anyone else has read them. When my daughters were living with me, they didn’t seem interested. Current journals were left on coffee tables and never picked up by them. When I met the man who is now my husband, I said that he was not to read them, and he has respected that.
Over the years, I have read each one again, a while after completing them, to see if there was any material to develop into poems, stories or blog pieces. They have then been stored away. I saw no reason to read them again before destroying them, and I drew in the support of a friend to help me. ‘Are you sure; are you really sure?’ she said before and during the ripping, cutting and shredding. Writer friends on Facebook asked the same question. It seemed drastic, they said. But I was and am sure, and the hours we spent in my writing shed, going through the repetitive actions of notebook destruction, left me lighter. It also made me realise what a huge task this would have been for someone after my death. I have it written into my will that I want my notebooks destroyed without being read.
The paper filled a builder’s bucket and two black sacks, which have gone to be recycled. I picked out some shreds, read some words and phrases from the remains of the journals. My eyes fell on sentences as I tore pages out, which threw me back to certain people, certain times. But I was not drawn into reading further.
I don’t know where I shall write or where we shall be when we move. I’ve had the good fortune to have my own room, in a converted shed, for the past six years, and it’s doubtful that I’ll have that luxury again. I may have space for a desk, or it may be that the kitchen table becomes my space. I may become a cafe writer, as I used to be, or someone who writes on trains and buses.
There will be new journals, new gifts of notebooks at birthdays and Christmas. These will fill and be kept again, until the next cull. All that shredded paper, that’s the past. The future is ahead of me, with new notebooks to fill.
my latest publication, was not the result of starting with the end in mind. I was living in a house that backed onto a disused orchard, in a village that had been a major fruit-growing area; the orchards now disappearing or in decline. I had finished a story collection, which I had been writing for five years (also not started with a book in mind – a pair of stories sharing characters, which accidentally grew). I was not sure what to do with myself. I had a quote pinned above my desk, about when you finish a long writing project, it is as if you are falling from a tree, hitting off every branch as you come down.
