Showing posts with label short story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label short story. Show all posts

On the Beach at Culzean





This piece of writing is, if I had to define it, a prose poem. It was published under the title On the Beach at Culzean, in 2009, in the first edition of the Brownsbank Broadsheet. I don't know if there were any more editions, and soon after that, I stopped submitting small pieces of work unless I was directly asked for something, and concentrated on longer fiction and non-fiction instead. However, I came across this today while looking for something else, reread it and found that I liked it. More than that, it made me feel a little weepy. So I thought it would be nice to share it again on here. 


WINTER

The black dog rushes ahead. She is more than ten years dead, but here she is, sniffing along the shoreline, her curly cockade of a tail held high. My son, in red wellies and padded jacket, is walking along the beach, squatting to examine a handful of minute golden shells, prising them up with his starfish fingers, toddler’s treasure.

The shore is a string of pebbly and sandy curves. Arran comes and goes: a grey space, a smudge, a real place, etched against the skyline, Goat Fell cloaked in snow. The sea is audible on all but the stillest of days but in winter it is a muted roar. Closer, you can distinguish the inward rush and outward tug of pebbles beneath the waves. Agates have tumbled in, eggs that shatter against the rocks to reveal a smooth world within a world, a blue and white landscape, sea and sky preserved in stone.

The effect of the cliffs, the woods, is to shield the beaches from change, cutting them off from the land. Up there are narrow paths, leading mysteriously out of sight. Some of them thread through frosted plants and naked trees to the sea. Some of them end in nothing, nowhere, oblivion. Take care.

One winter, a canon blew down from the castle and landed on the beach. On Boxing Day, we took coffee and Christmas cake and climbed down to the empty bay, to sit on the elephantine rocks and gaze at the sea. Grey on grey. We found it half submerged in a pool of water, an intruder in this wholly wild world.


SPRING

My son has shed his wellies and hooded coat, casting his clouts before may is out. He slides and slithers, exclaiming over each find: fishing net, feathers, sea glass, his voice bouncing off rocks. What creature made these holes? What’s gribble worm? What? Why? How?

In the woods, snowdrops have given place to windflowers, then daffodils, ramsons, bluebells. On the fringes of the park, there are swathes of whin that smell of coconut and dazzle the eyes. During hard times farmers pulped this spiny crop and fed it to their cattle. The whin mill was an upended grindstone, trundled along a channel, hauled by a carthorse. You can see ghostly rings in the grass, to this day. And whin is still hard to handle. Stumble, put out a hand to save yourself and there will be tears.

Down here, the shore is edged by volcanic rocks, stretched and folded back on themselves, wrinkled, with seams of white quartz. There are caves too with ancient fortifications built across, as though the earlier castle had grown upwards, a living thing, rooted in the rocks beneath. Archaeologists have found human bones here. People were born in these caves, spent their lives, died and were buried among the giant spiders that also call this labyrinth home.

On the beach, the storms have left a litter of driftwood behind, sculptures on smooth sand. Out there the air is a mixture of salt and sweet. Ailsa Craig is a sugared cake.


SUMMER

Picnic time. From above, you can see reefs at low tide, with cormorants and shags perched on the teeth of them. They teem with life, these pavements of rock, and the pools between: anemones, barnacles, little fishes, translucent shrimps, sea slugs. Children are exploring the reefs, teasing the anemones, briefly imprisoning creatures in jars and boxes. Look and let go, look and let go, calls the teacher.

We trek down to the beach, staggering beneath our trappings. We make a boat out of sand. My son motors to Arran and back within the hour and the sand holds up pretty well. He and his father and his grandfather commence engineering operations. They dam the burn that trickles down from the hill, dig a new channel, build a castle, divert the channel so that it forms a moat. The whole edifice is decorated with shells and white quartz pebbles.

There are swallows diving above, oystercatchers patrolling the shoreline, wagtails darting here and there. I tuck my skirt into my knickers and wade through soft salt water feeling shells between my toes, then look back and see the men in my life, grown small against the rocks, utterly absorbed in the moment and each other.

The dog follows me, splashing and cavorting. She has found a length of mooring rope, thick and prickly, but it is pinned into the shallows by a stone, and she is pulling and tugging, snuffling and sneezing as the salt water goes up her nose. Up there, behind the theatrical arc of the beach, people are walking among the scenery, wearing unsuitable shoes. You can see the odd flash of colour from a jacket or dress. There are precarious girls in high heeled sandals, tight skirts pinning their knees together.

The air smells of roses.


AUTUMN

My son is growing fast. He wears a burgundy waterproof against the rain and a daft tweed hat that suits him, although he will only wear it here, where his friends won’t see. He has given up holding hands. But he still has apples in his cheeks, and a face like a flower, open and trusting. My heart aches for him, for all those leaps of faith which he must soon make. For the tripping and falling. For the spiny shrubs. For the picking himself up and walking on. For the narrowing of possibilities. For the disappointments and the friendships and the loves that are not me. How could it be otherwise?

Geese skein across the sky. The swallows have already gone.We stumble down the path to the sea past the boathouse with its tarry roof. The old dog with her white muzzle trots ahead of us. She comes and goes, a memory in both our heads.

Down here on Culzean beach, the familiarity of these stones, these shells, these grains of sand is comforting, our apprehensions soothed by the relentless thrust and pull of the sea. There is only now.

Behind the cliffs behind the woods there has been a change of scene. The heather is in bloom. The hill is a paisley shawl.

  




Please note that although you are very welcome to share this blog post, the piece itself should not be copied and shared online without my permission. 










Rewilding: the genesis of a slightly spooky tale.

One source of inspiration: Dun Beag on Skye

A question writers are often asked, whenever they stand up in public and talk about their work, is 'Where do you get your ideas from?' The fact is that most of us are never short of ideas. We have ideas coming out of our ears. We spend more than half our lives inside our heads, with characters of our own creating. What we're sometimes short of is the time to write them so we learn to be selective.

This is the reason why, if you ever approach a writer saying, 'I have this great idea for a novel/story/play' (meaning that you'd quite like us to write it for you) you'll generally find us backing away from you at speed, unless we're in the business of ghost writing, a worthy profession all of its own. We're not being mean. It's just that it may well be a great idea for you, but not for us.

Sometimes ideas arrive fully formed, sometimes as a small seed that nags away at you.

All of which is a roundabout way of exploring the genesis of my most recent slightly spooky tale that saw me through the dreich and dreary November days. I called it Rewilding. And it all began with a book festival.

Actually, it began long before that. Years ago, following my graduation from Edinburgh University with a degree in Mediaeval Studies, I did a postgraduate Masters at Leeds University in Folk Life Studies with Scots folklorist Stewart Sanderson. Both courses resulted in a lifelong interest in folk custom and belief.

Sometimes those interests coincide with my fiction.

Back to the Book Festival. At the very end of October, I'd been invited to speak at the Tarbert Book Festival - Tarbert Loch Fyne that is, and I can recommend it. I've spoken there twice now and hope they invite me back again. Anyway, my talk on my new book, A Proper Person to be Detained, was on Sunday lunchtime. That meant that we could listen to a presentation by one of my fellow Saraband authors, Alan Brown, with his wonderful Overlander book. (Buy it!) I was captivated by his account of 'bikepacking coast to coast across the Scottish Highlands'. But as I listened to him, my fiction writer's imagination was beginning to work overtime, the way fresh yeast starts to bubble and grow when you add a teaspoon of sugar.

I started to imagine a youngish  - but not too young - woman determined to prove her mettle in a small way, for various reasons that emerged as I visualised her. I saw her undertaking a small autumn backpacking expedition through a remote part of the western highlands, sleeping in bothies over some three or four nights, keeping a diary as she went.

The Cuillins
From Tarbert, meanwhile, we headed north to stay with friends on the Isle of Skye. We were fortunate to have chosen one of the finest weeks of the year. The sun shone day after day and although it was chilly, the frosts only served to enhance the scenery. We were seeing the Highlands and then Skye itself, in all their terrible beauty.

There is nowhere as beautiful as Scotland. Nor, sometimes, as daunting.

Among the places I visited, was a broch: Dun Beag. My husband has serious mobility problems, so he stayed in the car while I laboured up the hill to bag what is fondly referred to by my family as 'another of mum's heaps of old stones'. As I did so, I thought again about my fictional woman, and about myself at that age, mid thirties perhaps. I had done quite a bit of travelling and considered myself to be competent and unafraid. I started to project myself back into that situation, the solo hiker, in what is essentially a very safe part of the world. And then I started to think about fear, irrational fear maybe, but fear all the same, and why it might happen. Fear of the dark. Fear of strangers. Fear of silence. Because some places are scary and you have no idea why that might be.


Liam Brennan as Robert Kirk
When we came back, I started to write. Somewhere along the way, I recollected my own play, produced at Glasgow's Oran Mor venue a few years ago. The Secret Commonwealth, directed by Jen Hainey, with Liam Brennan as Robert Kirk, was a play about the 17th century Gaelic speaking minister of Aberfoyle who wrote a treatise of that name, all about the dangerous supernatural world, the 'commonwealth of the fairies'. Kirk was presumed to have been carried away by them as a retaliation for revealing their secrets. When that play was produced, the talented Celine Donoghue did the music. She had studied the songs and melodies that were associated with the sidhe of the Celts, fairies for sure, but nothing like the small, twee creatures of Victorian imagination - and dangerous when crossed. Creatures neither of heaven nor of earth, but of somewhere in between.

Along the way, I refreshed my memory about the belief in the water horse, the each uisge. Not the reasonably friendly kelpie, but a much more challenging creature altogether.

Finally, I came upon a song, collected and sung by the incomparable Julie Fowlis, a heart rending song that - unusually - gives voice to the each uisge, the dangerous water horse himself.

I wrote throughout the month of November, while I listened to the song obsessively. The story took its course, as such things will. I wrote to find out. I always write to find out. If I know the whole story before I begin, I tend to get bored and give up.

By the end of that time, I had a short novella or a long short story, some 17,000 words, which I called Rewilding. My good friend read it and at first remarked that it was a love story. Which it is. No doubt about that.

Then, she messaged me the following day to say that she had woken up in the night, disturbed by it, wondering what was really happening, worried by it.

That too was just the kind of response I wanted. It's not a story that I can place anywhere traditional with any certainty or speed, and I just wanted to get it 'out there' in time for Christmas. So, it's on Kindle. I may turn it into a small paperback as well, for those who don't much like eBooks, but I've reread it a few times on my Kindle in the dark, and I think it works. Especially in the dark, now that I come to think of it. Each time, it both frightens me and entices me.

I wonder if it will do the same thing to you. The question you have to ask yourself at the end is, what would you have done, in her shoes? Because I know what I'd have done. Do you?

Oh and by the way - if this song doesn't send shivers down your spine, I don't know what will.




















Orange Blossom Love and other stories ...

Another lovely cover image from Michael Doig
I've been so busy with all kinds of writing over the past few weeks that I've hardly had a spare moment to update this blog. Here in the West of Scotland, we're in that time between seasons when the trees are beautiful - especially the rowans - but the days are shortening all the time. Soon our clocks will be going back an hour and then the nights will seem very long - and very dark.

BUT I've been cheering myself up with working on the first in a series of unashamedly romantic novels, set largely in the beautiful Canary Isles. And really wishing I was sitting on the deck of a catamaran in the sunshine. But if I can't do that, then the next best thing is to write about the islands, and dream about them. And share some of those dreams with readers.


This all began many years ago as a short story called Sardine Burial which - coincidentally enough - has just been republished in eBook form by the excellent Hearst Magazine Company: one of four short stories in a new mini collection of my stories, available on all ebook platforms - but you can find it here on Amazon in the UK and here on Amazon in the US. I love the way Hearst are embracing short stories in this form - mainly because I'm a big fan of the short story myself, not just as a writer, but as a reader.

I experimented with Sardine Burial as a radio play - it was actually produced on BBC R4 years ago - but I really wanted to write it as a novel. Its first incarnation was published and pretty much sank without trace. I'm quite glad, because it wasn't ever the way I really wanted it to be. It's a romantic story, no doubt about it. And why not? But what I really wanted to write was a novel about two people from quite different backgrounds, who fall in love and marry in haste. What happens next? Do they repent at leisure, as the old adage would have us believe? So I went back to the beginning and began all over again. Especially with my hero - lovely Luis - who plays the guitar and sings - and cooks, too. OK, OK, he's a man in a million. But he has his faults. As you'll find out if you read the book.

That's what I've been writing about in Orange Blossom Love.  (Try THIS LINK  instead, if you're in the US!)  This is one of the more sensuous and unashamedly romantic pieces of writing I've ever done. It's a very grown up love story. And I'm afraid it does end on a bit of a cliff-hanger. There was no way round it. You'll see what I mean when you get there! But I'm hoping to be able to get Part 2, Bitter Oranges, out on Kindle in time for Christmas. Or very soon after.

My only worry is that there is an important - and quite different - project which might just possibly get in the way. I'll tell you a bit more about that later because it's very exciting too and it will have to take priority for a while.. But if I manage my time properly, I should be able to do both. And maybe winter in Scotland will be a very good time to visit the gorgeous, sunny Canary Isles, even if it's only in my imagination! On the other hand, Bitter Oranges is set partly in Glasgow. So I might just have to make do with Luis, who brings his own brand of sunshine with him! Always has. Always will.