This week Lou Wilford, a fellow writer I know through reviewing and critiquing groups, has featured me on her blog as November’s Showcased Writer. Lou writes with wit and humour, so her own monthly blog posts are terrifically entertaining.
Dickens Museum, Doughty Street, London
Follow this link for my interview and a couple of stories. I enjoyed reflecting on Lou’s questions. We cover my influences and processes as a writer; what it means to be “cultured,” and the unfortunately valid question: “Are writers selfish?”
I selected my story “Centuries, in Burnt Sienna” as a sample to include in the showcase. I wrote it in 2020 and it was published in 2021, but I find myself going back to it when the world seems particularly tumultuous. Two sisters come of age in the 1980s and 1990s, and while they experience the terrorist attacks of September 2001 very differently, it ends their rivalry and brings them closer than ever before.
It’s a total classic, rich in taste and colour imagery. Also featuring pioneer Barbies at risk of dysentery, and a puppy named Periwinkle.
So anyway, that’s all I’m publishing for this fortnight. It’s handy timing. I worked hard on the interview questions and such during my flights at the end of October, and the work pays off a month later as I’m busy making Thanksgiving pies. I’m also fresh off a madcap romp through London, walking 13 miles in 8.5 hours to take in as many festive sights as possible. I expect I’ll be writing about that a bit in my Seven Wanders of 2025 coming up in another month!
Happy beginning of the holidays, everyone. Do let me know what you think of the interview. What makes a person cultured? And should we allow creative types a bit of selfishness?
Oh, we were in Birmingham a week ago, too. All over the place these days!
This Week’s Bit of String: A dark and stormy night
One rainy evening out of several rainy evenings this week, our cat Oberon got restless. He was hanging around the hallway, so I opened the front door in case he wanted to go out.
It’s all a bit much when you’re a small scaredy cat.
Named for the prince of the fairies, Obie does have a microchip-activated catflap in our double-glazed back door. It’s complete with fixed metal platforms in and outside the door for him to step up to the opening and then down, most daintily. Whenever possible, though, he naturally prefers a door to be opened for him.
When I opened the front door that night, exposing the wind and rain, Obie hissed immediately. That’s a no, then.
He lives in hope that the front door, actually at the driveway side of our semi-detached house, will reveal a different world from the one he sees out the back door into the garden, or the front windows onto the front garden and the cul-de-sac.
For us humans, opening our own front door rarely brings surprises. We expect most deliveries and don’t receive many guests. With Remembrance Day just passed, I consider the days when a knock at the door could bring devastating news. Now we have much tinier rectangles that do that for us.
Story Portals
Last Saturday, before the sun retired into indefinite hibernation, I spent the day wandering around Stroud for the Book Festival there. I went to Alice Jolly’s book launch for her new novel, The Matchbox Girl. It sounds excellent, a story told by an imagined adolescent neurodivergent girl who collects matchboxes and spends time in the Vienna Children’s Hospital, where she gets to know Dr. Asperger.
Jolly told us about the Children’s Hospital, and its workers who resisted categorising children, viewed each patient as gifted, and simply believed the deficiency lay in adults who hadn’t learned to understand a child’s differences yet.
Mock exams started this week for my poor SEN students, so let me tell you, that sounds pretty awesome.
Seasonal front door reflections, Woodstock, Vermont
Unfortunately, The Matchbox Girl is set in 1934 and the ensuing years. So, things didn’t go so well in the lovely Vienna Children’s Hospital after a while. Dr. Asperger was revealed in this century to have collaborated disastrously with the Nazis.
Jolly explained that she was researching Dr. Asperger and the hospital, but didn’t know how to write a novel about it all until she had the idea of the matchbox-collecting Adelheid.
She said, “When writing a novel, you must never go in through the front door. You must find a way in the back.”
This edict pierced me. I’m always seeking to improve my craft and when a talented writer, who teaches Creative Writing at Oxford no less, issues a proclamation about how stories work, I immediately inventory everything I ever wrote. I suspect I’m not the only one?
Anyway, I was thinking, “What is the front door to each of my individual projects, and which is the back? Have I been heavy-handed and just crashed through the front, is that my problem? Why don’t I immediately understand what my novel’s front door is, is that my problem?”
Head and Heart
I meant to submit my novel The Gospel of Eve to more publishers and agents this year. But I was wrapping up an edit and more dauntingly, a synopsis rewrite, when I became so busy with critiques and a new project and work and family, I sort of forgot. That’s a major goal for 2026.
But Eve in herself is like a pre-fabricated back door, isn’t she, relegated as such for millennia? In my new project, I suppose the front door is the whole relentless mess of trying to appear good, while the back door is the comparatively straightforward (but still quite messy) task of fixing up a New England resort and cabins. Each banging cottage door reveals not just the renovations needed inside, but further internal turmoil for the new owners resulting from past relationships.
An evening in Stroud
While at Stroud Book Festival, I also attended an interview with Elif Shafak regarding her latest novel, There are Rivers in the Sky. I’m excited to read this book as well. It spans history through a single drop of rain and incorporates the epic Gilgamesh poem.
Elif Shafak is passionate and graceful, and she spoke about the difference between information, which we have in overabundance; knowledge, which requires sustained commitment; and wisdom, which engages the heart.
I don’t want to worry so much about front doors and back doors and such, so that the heart of my project goes the way of the sun recently, obscured by my deluge of thoughts. It’s been such a long time since I actually started writing a novel from scratch—my Eve novel started as a short story—that I’m constantly questioning myself. Were my previous drafts this rough?
But after receiving very positive feedback about the first 3000 words, I started to feel better. It takes time to find a story’s heart, front door, and back door. Now that I know someone wants to read more, that gives me strength to keep discovering.
Have you been to any literature festivals this year? What great books have you discovered, and what insights did you gain into your own creative work?
Back in school for the Christmas term, I spent 40 minutes working with a student on algebraic practice expanding brackets. Guiding him to multiply each bracketed term by each term in the other brackets, explaining why we’re multiplying here.
He was making progress, starting to remember a couple more steps as we moved on to the third problem of his online homework—and then he was sick of it. He insisted on guessing, repeatedly and incorrectly, stabbing the keyboard, for the fourth problem.
I sputtered reminders that he could work out the right answer if he tried.
Autumn leaves at Mascoma Lake, New Hampshire
He stabbed another wrong guess. “Miss, I just saw, like, three stages of grief pass over your face in one second.”
He may well have seen anger and bargaining and depression, but his comment then immediately made me laugh. It’s fitting, I suppose. It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.
Across the Ocean and Back
Just a week ago, as the half-term break ended, I arrived back from the USA. I published my previous blog post from Heathrow Departures on my way out, and spent the entire flight westward on writing tasks. Caught up on the latest Mslexia issue, scribbled about the journey, and wrote answers to interview questions for a Writers Showcase I’ll be participating in at the end of the month.
I made the trip for three reasons: to be with my family as we cope with bereavement, to start finding some private closure for myself, and to help out in any way possible. My parents are now in charge of my aunt’s house as well as their own, and my autistic cousin is now a wonderful part of our family. There’s a lot going on.
For example, on my first full day there I woke up at 4:15 a.m. and started scribbling about the previous evening’s reunion with my family. At the vaguest sign of daylight, around 6:45, I embarked on a 5-mile hike. I started in awe of the New England autumn colours which I haven’t seen much in 22 years and eventually made my way to the cemetery where I had a good cry at 8 a.m. over the family graves. I thanked our lost loves for giving us such good examples of how to look after each other.
A view to my grandparents’ old house
After helping my mom with weeding, organising the pantry, and then hoovering up cobwebs from the basement ceiling, we left my aunt’s house for my parents’ and met up with my brother and his kids, plus my kiddo and their fiancé, for raucous family times. This included, among other random moments, me bouncing my niece on my lap while singing a sped-up version of a Sunday school song about Daniel in the lion’s den, in honour of my cousin’s middle name Daniel. Junie demanded it twice more.
And that was just one day! It was a wonderful week, I managed to squeeze a fair bit in, although it feels surreally separate from my back-to-term life. Despite the lack of sleep on the overnight flight home plus hints of jet lag, I made it through this past week at school while also cleaning my own house this time, running the BlueSky channel for Women Writers Network, critiquing 3 different pieces for other writers, editing the opening section of my new novel to submit that for feedback, starting my Thanksgiving cooking, and writing this masterful piece.
Ups and Downs
My day job itself is a microcosmic whirlwind of emotion. I’ll spend an excruciating hour with a student who refuses to go to classes so it’s down to TAs to educate her 1:1. An hour despairing of my career choice while she refuses to do anything while she glowers at her phone under a fur-lines parka hood. Try to make conversation and half the time I’m met with a sneering, “You WHAT?” The next hour, I might be fortunate enough to attend a Photography class, prompting and scribing a student’s self-evaluation of his work while a couple other boys in the class exchange corny jokes.
“Miss, what do you think of this one: What did the first hat say to the second hat? —You stay here, I’ll go on a head.”
Woodstock, Vermont
I told my husband’s favourite joke which involves an elephant impersonation so I could never do it justice here. This surprised the boys so much, they cracked up. Meanwhile, my student tried his best to bite his smile back and I could claim my revenge:
“Pretty sure I just saw all five stages of grief pass over your face when I told that joke,” I quipped.
While acknowledging, and celebrating really, that our lives are made up of such emotional tempests, and that progress is often two steps forward and one (or two or three) back, I don’t necessarily like that portrayed too realistically in a book. I like a story to have a fairly orderly trajectory.
Yes, the protagonist, having been made suddenly aware of a problem during the inciting incident, will over-compensate and mess it all up. Yes, all will seem lost at the midpoint and they’ll have to rally again. But it irks me when a writer reconciles characters just to fall out over something else, for example, or gives them a crucial self-realisation only to forget it in the next chapter and have to learn it again. This seems common in stories of middle-class angst.
Maybe my intolerance makes me a selfish reader, but I don’t need fiction to resemble real life that much. I can read about real, sometimes harrowing issues, but give me some kind of actual trajectory through it. The ups and downs of real life are tiring enough.
Does that bother you in a book? How firmly do you like stories plotted, or are you happy enough to spend each moment with a character?
This Week’s Bit of String: The attention-seeking habits of adolescent male humans
Most Year 11s in our bottom-set class aren’t interested in the problems of the past. They’ve been taught about the workhouses and Thomas Malthus’s Poor Law of 1834, but our Trio of Fortitude just smirks over their A Christmas Carol essays when I prompt, “So why did Dickens write about Scrooge in that way? Why did he write this book?”
“Fame. Money,” they say.
And what surer way to earn those than write a book? I hear my fellow creatives laughing wryly at that.
Centre of attention, or chance for reflection? Mirror spiral in London
There’s probably an element of projection here, assuming every adult from every time period will share the adolescents’ lust for money and fame. These are, after all, the same boys who’ve ridiculed me assuming my job is low-paid.
“You’ll never own a Lamborghini, Miss, so what is the point?”
As for fame, I don’t think these students crave it, but they do like a certain quantity of attention. The Year 10 boys have taken attention-seeking to new depths. They like to watch each other accuse staff of misconduct.
We squeeze through the crowded corridors to hear a boy shout, “Miss, did you just assault a minor?” One of our longest-serving, high-level TAs walked into a classroom to have a boy ask, grinning, “Didn’t I just see you chuck a pen at a student?” It happens with such frequency, we wondered if it was a TikTok trend. This particular group of boys get such a kick out of joining in to make bizarre claims.
Fame and Money
Attention-seeking is no fault, to my thinking. We all need attention, and I aim to give it to those I love without them needing to seek it. Ideally, we would know the students in our classes, even the ones not technically on the special needs register, well enough to cater to their personal interests and goals. But in a low-set Science class of thirty, many of the students with high need and low focus, while we’re trying to teach the entire GCSE curriculum, we’re mostly running around shushing and confiscating hazards.
Attention-seeking tactics, performances for peers, sometimes choke out opportunities to gain deeper, more constructive attention.
Obviously, when I write I do hope that certain pieces will gain favourable attention. Sometimes, in conversation, I prize making a witty riposte above empathy. Then I regret it after, even if I won a few gratifying laughs. Attention is great, but it’s not my raison d’etre.
I also put up the harvesty decorations. Here’s Obie looking perfectly autumnal.
My writing jobs in the last fortnight have consisted of preparations to feature as a Showcased Writer on another writer’s blog, and maintaining writing group correspondences and completing critiques, while also adding more to the new novel I’ve been working on. There’s a mix of promoting myself, others, and creating for the fun of it (which will hopefully one day appeal to others too).
Our Women Writers Network on Bluesky also hosted one of our Skychats, inviting other creatives to join in on the hashtag #WomenWritersNet. This month’s topic was the Writing Mindset and it was inspiring to listen to people’s thoughts about what this entails, and hammer out my own idea of it.
For me, a writing mindset is open to ideas, no matter how mundane the source, and is flexible in switching from gathering mode to the hard work of expanding an idea. My writing mindset is fed by such discussions with other creatives, and by taking in art of all forms–reading, listening to music, walking city streets–and yes, by affirmation.
Time Well Spent
By far, the most writing I do is in my daily scribbles. For 5.5 years, I’ve written on and about every single day, chronicling interactions and noting ideas. I sometimes worry about the amount of time this takes me, usually at least an hour each day.
Is the time I spend trying to preserve memories and thoughts distracting from the now? Or do my reflections enhance my present?
A bit of notebook-ogling while waiting at the airport
This week, as I prepare to visit my family in the US the instant half-term break begins, I’ve looked back through my notebooks. There are dozens of them now. I found the ones from each summer visit, and flipped through specifically to find each time we saw my Aunt Laurel, who passed away just weeks ago.
Since I’ll be helping my family in the wake of her loss, it fortified me tremendously to read family stories she told me that I’d recorded in my journal, and little bits of conversation, the ways we made each other laugh, how she’d reach up at least a foot over her head to hug my husband and call him “Sweetie.”
My journal also reminded me of her words: “It takes a lot of disasters to make a grown-up, or even to feel fully human.” That puts all the attention-seeking antics of young people in perspective, doesn’t it?
So, my favourite reason to write is to preserve love. To lay down a thread guiding me back to the best kind of attention, from the people dearest to me. It often works out that those people are the ones who give me strength and inspiration to keep creating.
Do you have people like that to fortify your writing mindset? How do you balance preserving relationships with gaining attention?
This Week’s Bit of String: Pencils, coughs, and cake
Thirty-three years ago Wednesday, I started properly writing my first book. I was eleven years old, in seventh grade. I hid behind my hair and refused to wear my ugly glasses. When I was forced to speak in front of the class, a classmate hooted, “Turn up your hearing aids, everybody.”
And then I finally started writing it. It had taken time to realise I could do more than play-act it in miniature, I could write it. Preserve it. Do the grown-up thing.
On the very evening after I’d begun my writing, I received encouragement at the junior high school’s annual Open Evening. My new English teacher praised my classwork extensively to my parents. She was the first to focus on my writing. It felt like an endorsement on behalf of the universe, the timing of her conviction that I could go far. I remember being giddily pleased, while of course trying not to show it.
In the next two months, with pencils, stacks of double-sided lined paper, and my tiny printing (I’ve no idea why they say that’s a symptom of a control freak), I wrote 386 pages. Whilst maintaining my good grades, too. I have never been able to replicate that accomplishment in terms of volume produced.
Reaching Limits
That draft should have been more than 386 pages. I hadn’t reached the end, even though I knew exactly what should come next. I had thought about it, played reels of it in my mind often enough. I contracted bronchitis and was sick for 3 weeks, then got it again the following month and was sick for longer.
Not only had I entered my Author Era, I was pioneering what would become my Victorian street urchin-inspired cough. To this day, I’m susceptible to it, and it serves as a homing signal for my family to find me.
Obie, my writing accomplice
I was barely able to do schoolwork, and I stopped writing my story. Throughout the following decade, I simply restarted the same story, standing in new sidekicks as I met new friends, and I never got past 100 pages. The first novel I would ever complete, Artefacts, was a very different story although it had a similar protagonist modeled somewhat inadvertently on myself. But my self-perception had evolved over the years requiring a different plot, because my dream ending shifted from being rescued to self-acceptance.
I finished my first novel in 2015, almost 23 years after my original Writingversary. My first published story, in The Bristol Prize Anthology 2010, came 17.5 years after the Writingversary. 10.5 years after my Writingversary, I completed a degree in Writing and Literature while a single mother working full-time. I’ve had quite a few short stories published now. Not so with my novels yet, but I wonder if my 7th grade teacher, and the many supportive teachers and college instructors that followed, might still be impressed.
Marking Success
It’s a bit staggering to consider that I’ve been putting pencil to paper to write planned projects for more than three decades. Naturally, I wish I had more to show for it. Winning the 2017 Gloucestershire Prose Prize and reading at Cheltenham Literature Festival was a highlight, and my story “Pie a la Mode” won £250 in Amazon vouchers from the Funny Pearls humour website. Enough to fund equipment for a pet cat, and even a new hoover to clean up after our dark feline prince Oberon.
This year’s Writingversarydestination
Writing has opened up social opportunities as I’ve made wonderful friends through writing groups, and it’s an integral part of my mental well-being. I don’t feel right if I don’t do it. By building my writing habit over the years, I’ve built resilience as well. I may not have a lucrative career, but I am constantly creating or fine-tuning pieces.
I still sometimes wonder if my bouts of poorliness tend to follow a particularly busy writing stretch. But now, because writing is part of my daily life, I tend to keep working on projects even when a cough strikes, or even flu.
Maybe that’s my best success. Thirty-three years provide many chances to give up, and I didn’t. For this year’s Writingversary, I walked up to the local Garden Centre after work and had a drink in the cafe and a slice of pumpkin cake with maple chai frosting. I scribbled in the golden autumn light. The timing of my Writingversary draws me to this season, and I’m so glad I found a bit of time to celebrate.
Do you remember when you first started writing? How do you celebrate this milestone?
This Week’s Bit of String: Notre Dame towers and a dog called Unity
Last weekend, we were in Paris. It was a wild idea, the trip planned in less than a fortnight. From 3:00 Saturday morning, when we woke up to shower and catch a flight from Bristol to Paris CDG, until 10:15 Sunday night when we fell into bed back in our own home, we walked 54,000 steps. We stayed Saturday night in a tiny hotel room in the 14th Arondissement, but the bed was comfortable, we had climate control, and there was a full Parisian breakfast included.
We had a bittersweet reason for this enjoyable adventure. When my aunt Laurel died a couple weeks ago, one of my cousins already had a trip booked to Paris. Laurel and my cousin were great Francophiles, so the family was inspired to send some of her ashes over and scatter them in the Seine. I couldn’t be at the full funeral in Vermont–busy though the weekend in Paris was, it didn’t shatter me the way a whirlwind cross-Atlantic trip with a minimum of 16 hours travel each way would have done–I could be part of this goodbye without missing work.
My cousin chose a spot across from Notre Dame’s dome, where we could walk down a cobbled ramp to the river. We found as we approached that as well as a cathedral view, we would be leaving my aunt alongside a weathered wooden statue of a turtle bracketed onto the stone wall, quite fitting as she’d had a beloved pet turtle for decades.
She loved dogs too, and soon after we’d poured her ashes into the river, a dog came bounding in, bucking jubilantly, snapping at her own splashes. Her French owner told us the dog’s name was Unity, and we did feel a strange synthesis at the resting place.
I was happy with this sendoff for Laurel, but my heart aches that all the life erupting around her in this location will never know her or her story. I wonder what other remnants of lives we step over all the time, and what unimaginable events will unfold later.
Interlocking Stories
Paris is particularly suited to such wonderings, with its many plaques honouring students and others who were killed in the Resistance against Nazi occupiers, and other signs memorialising Jewish families that were deported. Behind Notre Dame, there’s the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, which I researched for part of a story I wrote in January. The main character spent time in Paris and met his fiance, changing his life.
I certainly didn’t imagine I’d be visiting Paris later, and scattering my aunt’s ashes across the Seine from the same Memorial. Once again, there’s a strange unity of past and present, fiction and nonfiction. As Julia Ormond says in the 1990s remake of Sabrina, one of my aunt’s “Chicken Soup Movies” which she believed had restorative powers: “Paris is always a good idea.”
Back to the writing work, here’s a picture of the incredible Our Lady of the Workers church in the 14th Arondissement
I’d actually forgotten about the story I wrote in January, with its Paris turning point, until my cousin told me where we’d take our aunt’s ashes. The story needs a lot of work. I wrote it during my January short story binge, when I slapped whatever idea I had onto paper: new ones, old and previously rejected ones, half-dreamed ones.
Since then, I’ve had a couple short stories I’ve worked hard at polishing, and I’ve started a new novel while still working on the final edits to my book about Eve and Creation. These projects are still keeping me pretty busy alongside my day job and everything else, so the fictional Paris encounter will probably wait a long while.
Ideas to Remember
It’s not possible to remember every idea or story, good or bad. So just because one thing has to wait doesn’t mean it will never get its time. When it comes to assessing our creative choices–and our life choices, really–there are so many possibilities that it seems unfair to judge one as entirely bad or good.
While I’m making up a new novel, I haven’t decided yet whose voice to lead with out of my new characters, and I keep switching. Would 5 points-of-view be too many? Yes, I know. But I decided while making myself write just four days after Laurel’s death, my work-in-progress wasn’t fun enough. So I pried its bars loose, and went back to page 2 to introduce an entirely new character, outside the pages of development I’d explored and planned in the pre-drafting stages.
Have you ever felt the need to do such a thing? Did it work?
My middle-class protagonists who take themselves somewhat seriously needed a foil, or maybe that was just me. Either way, I’ll see what comes of having someone else in the mix. A story undergoes so much evolution and so many rewrites, most ideas turn out to contribute something worthwhile.
I wouldn’t usually slide in an extra character, but it’s earlyish still, and who’s to stop me? In real life, there are people who appear out of nowhere and brighten everything.
I wouldn’t usually spend a middle-of-the-term weekend gallivanting around Paris, either. I don’t know if Paris, is, in fact, always a good idea, but it worked for us this time. And there’s a lot more we’d like to see. Strange to think I now have a bit of my aunt on this side of the ocean, over the Channel. Wondrous to imagine the places and people we have yet to be part of.
This Week’s Bit of String: Jewelled hedgerows and painted roundabouts
The mini roundabout by Tesco has received fresh stripes. St. George’s red cross is now painted over the white, courtesy of an undoubtedly patriotic local citizen. I don’t think it makes much difference to how anyone drives or feels. Do some British citizens in this fairly homogenous town feel safer because someone spraypainted the emblem of a Roman soldier of Greek descent whose worship started in Palestine? Whatever works for them, I guess.
What surprised me was the title given to this campaign of painting and flying loads of extra English flags. “Raise the colours.” Before I remembered the military and scouting origins of the phrase, I thought it odd. The English flag isn’t spectacularly colourful.
As an immigrant (21 years living in Britain this past week!), I have my own perspective on the UK and its colours. They are sometimes dull grey skies and the stifling black or navy blue of school uniforms that I see at work. But they started for me with red double decker buses and purple cross-country trains, the pulsing bright lights of Student Union discos and the green of grass that grows through the winter.
Every late August, when I return to Gloucestershire from my summer visit to my family in New England, the colours of old England are deep purple berry-black and deceptively soft stinging nettle-green. I forage in the hedgerows and make blackberry-elderberry syrups and jam.
This year, the hedgerows are particularly festooned with colour. Dark blue sloes and so many little red hawthorn berries, you can barely see the leaves. Apparently, drought can stress trees into making extra fruit in a more desperate bid to pass on their genetic material. Hopefully they don’t feel too downhearted that some of their DNA is going into a crumble. It’s doing all kinds of good!
Full Spectrum
Ask my five and a half year old niece her favourite colour and she will tell you it’s rainbow. I didn’t know that was an option when I was a kid.
I hope no one nitpicks her and tells her rainbow isn’t one colour, it’s all of them. Of course it is, that’s why people are so enchanted by rainbows. Shining colours melded together more closely than a hedgerow, with far more beautiful range than a red cross on a white background. We all have an innate love of mixture and brightness.
A baby bear and their great aunt Laurel, 23 years ago
In my dining room, next to the spiderplant grown from a student’s gift and a felted leaf garland crafted by another student, a prism hangs. It is no tear-shaped slip of a thing, it’s a weighty diamond capable of pitching a whole swathe of rainbows.
My aunt Laurel gave it to me when I was struggling as an adolescent. “Sometimes you just need more rainbows in your life,” she told me, her voice catching on her compassion.
Three days ago, Laurel died suddenly of a heart attack in her Vermont home. On that side of the ocean, my family rallies to honour her and to support my cousin. On this side of the ocean, a friend gives me yellow gladioli at work and another drops an orange-papered Tony’s Chocolonely bar through my letterbox. British colours at work again.
Making Rainbows
More vibrant fruit yields can come from jeopardy, and rainbows don’t happen without storms. My aunt Laurel had her share of storms, but she absolutely sparkled for us.
She loved the lupins that grew in the median strip of Highway 91, she loved candied almonds and jewelry. She gave me my first CD of Les Miserables, and instigated the nerf gun battle that ended in my husband proposing. She invented her own evil twin to blame pranks on, and encouraged all of us to do the same. She was the source of many a thoughtful gift, and constantly opened her home to us, no matter what annoying phase we were going through.
When my baby was born (I mean, they were a baby then…) she was the one with me in the delivery room. Despite the tragedy and horror of the terrorist attacks that day, Laurel always reminded me how she couldn’t stop smiling after the birth. She strove to see the world through the most hopeful prism, and sometimes that’s awfully hard.
Even better than a prism, she’s left us with her wonderful son, my cousin, who will now be even more part of my immediate family. It’s excruciating to know she won’t be there the next time I get back to see my family. But she’s left us so much to be grateful for, especially an undying impression that no person or place is as dull as just two colours.
Wishing you rainbows this week, friends, and hopefully not too many storms.
Last week my entire family stayed together in a lakeside house in Maine. This included my 5-year-old niece, who moved expertly from one of us to the next, with wide-eyed invitations for our attention and imaginative assignations for us.
“Want to pretend you’re my mommy and I’m a toddler?” she asked me one morning. I was hardly about to turn that down.
Our view as Lily Pad and the Moment Fairy
Later on, she had my brother-in-law at her command in the role of big brother, while her own big brother (actual age 6) was her little brother. She’d gone from being a toddler to being 13 and a half, and her name was Lily Pad. My kiddo’s fiancee was now her mommy, and I was briefly a co-worker. My niece’s job was testing beds, which after various hikes and kayak-paddles and swims, I was more than willing to help with.
In the evening, we all gathered in lawn chairs to watch the sun set over the lake. Then my niece invited me to sit on the dock with her, dangling our feet in “Waterworld.”
She told me, “Sometimes if I need a moment, and I tell my mom I want to go to Waterworld, then I come here and you’re the fairy who meets me. You’re the fairy for people who need to take a moment, so they can talk to you and not be lonely, and you won’t tell anyone.”
I couldn’t have been prouder than when she led me back to the rest of our family, now doggedly roasting marshmallows around a campfire despite the 30 C/ 90 F heat, and she introduced me as The Moment Fairy.
Ongoing Stories
When I was in second grade, our teacher read us the 1953 chapter book Little Witch by Anna Elizabeth Bennett, about a witch’s daughter who would prefer to be a fairy. This book had me convinced I, too, was a secret fairy, and I eagerly assigned the role of captor witch to whichever family member incurred my unspoken wrath.
Fairy house at my hometown’s lakeside park
It might be my mother for making me drink my orange juice even though I said it tasted sour, or my little brother for faking naps and then being allowed to stay up later than me. If you think these reasons are far-fetched, wait till you hear my solution.
I was certain that if I woke up at the right time, and went into my closet with the correct numbers on my little calculator, then the fairies would rescue me. I tried it once and it didn’t work, but I figured I needed a different moment of the night.
Nothing really dissuaded me from that story. It dissolved into new fantasies I nursed in my imagination. Similarly, in my niece’s game, she was constantly accommodating new roles for us. While most were outside making s’mores, she led my husband by the hand through the holiday house.
“He’s the Show-You-Something Fairy,” she explained when I went in for extra ingredients.
Sure enough, she was picking up various objects and explaining them to her engineer uncle as if he’d just materialised from a fantastical dimension (it probably seems as if we do, appearing once a year from the UK). The Something she was Showing him as I went back outside was a flyswatter.
Moments to Remember
I was inspired by my niece’s imaginative efforts, and moved by her confidence that at any given time, at least one of us would want to duck into her world. As she gets older, she will desperately need a variety of people she can slip away and have a moment with. She’ll have so many things to show and explain to us.
A magical moment from home.
Sometimes, as I wrote a couple weeks ago, I worry about my stories getting stuck in my head and progressing no further. But while I value being a writer and long for success, my roles as mother, wife, daughter, sister, aunt are more important. It’s nice to remember that I serve some purpose there, and it’s truly a privilege to do so.
For now, the fairies have flown. Back in the UK, I’m the Moment Fairy for myself. I have to keep going, finding ways to be present from afar for my family while remaining present in the life I sought elsewhere. It means choosing which of the dozens of times I think of them each day are the most valuable to pass on. That’s the challenge, when we’re not rubbing up against each other regularly and experiencing life together.
Sometimes, separation hurts too much. Maybe it’s a pleasant evening with no extra family to share it with, when I have no one to bake for but my husband and me, when it’s warm but there’s no place to swim. I miss the feel of a little hand in mine so much. It’s tempting to dig myself into chores or into writing assignments, but maybe I should surrender to those moments, too, to keep my caring fully kindled.
Which moments matter most to you? How do you make the best of them?
Once on a Girl Scout visit to the local Shaker Museum, we learned about a murder which hastened the decline of this hard-working populace. The story stayed with me for decades, and only recently on a visit home did I confirm it.
Shakers, officially the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming, fused work and worship to delight in tasks rather than view them as punishments. This resulted in some excellent craftsmanship for which they’re known. They’re also distinct for practising celibacy. Their numbers relied on recruits.
One of the original Shaker tables, where the Wier girls may have eaten their meals
Families struggling to provide for their children might sign a couple over to the Shakers, agreeing not to interfere with Shaker education. When the American Civil War started, a man named Thomas Wier entered two daughters into such an agreement. He was enlisting, and his wife was ill. It seemed the best way to look after them.
In 1863, Wier returned. He made various attempts to take his daughters back, valuing unification above the contract. His wife and older daughter tried to snatch them away during a visit, but the girls fought them. On another evening, Wier tried to visit them but the community trustee, Caleb Dyer, refused because it was so late in the day. Wier shot him.
Caleb Dyer died from his wounds three days later. As trustee, he’d been in charge of the finances pooled by the fellowship. They had invested in mills, bridges, and railways around town. However, his records of these transactions had mainly been mental and unwritten. Without him, creditors swarmed and a local mill even, apparently, fabricated debts and demanded them of the Shakers. The community lost a lot of money.
Hearing that story the first time, it fascinated me that a whole group’s fate hinged on a desperate man’s impulsive act against a seemingly, perhaps excessively, introspective one. I always wondered what happened to the children Wier was pursuing. Did they feel responsible? Where did they truly feel at home?
My recent visit did not illuminate anything on that front, so I’m still imagining the possibilities.
Life of the Mind
The tale had populated my mind for so long anyhow. In my last post, I considered how random objects can lodge in our memories, and this is even more true of stories. Their crest and ebb etch channels into our minds. For us creative types, it’s as if we’re standing on the shore wondering how to harness these tides.
How far will our creations make it?
Once we’ve diverted our gathered stories into new forms, an even bigger question is: What’s good enough to share? Which are better off eddying in our minds and which can we release?
Last week, one of my stories dried up in the wild, you might say. It was my third story to flow all the way to a major competition’s longlist, but not make it past the dam. Longlisting is good for sure, but I want better for my stories. Now I have to work out how to give it an extra shove, when I thought it was great already.
It’s panic-inducing, the realisation that most of our work will advance no further than the borders of our minds. Our desires to reap tangible benefits from all our efforts, to gain recognition and to be remembered for it after we’re gone, are all real and human. If my novels and more of my stories never get published, will all my time be wasted?
Shifting Currents
When the Shaker community started to die down and sell off their buildings, a Catholic community bought up much of the premises. They built their own shrine and chapel, and fixed up the Shaker buildings with a view to running a boys’ school.
From left: Shaker broom shop, Catholic chapel, Shaker Great Stone Dwelling
For decades the shrine kept going partly by putting up a dazzling display of Christmas lights in the snow, and receiving donations. But the funds seem to have dried up, and as of a few years ago, they couldn’t maintain the site. By this time, the Shaker Museum was established enough to buy the site back.
So, anything can happen. A draft of a story in my head could evolve into something else entirely, or get swallowed into another project. Maybe that will have more of a chance outside my imagination’s borders. Who knows.
Like the Shakers, we can’t view our work as a punishment, or even exclusively as a means to an end. Engaging with creative pursuits is challenging, but it helps us make sense of and appreciate our surroundings and the people therein. It gives us an outlet in stressful times, whether someone else ever sees it or not.
Even if our creations don’t make it far out of our heads, is that really such a bad place to be?
This Week’s Bit of String: A library visit and hometown changes
On the first day of my summer visit from old England to New, I went to the library with my mother. It’s recently been refurbished in my hometown. The children’s area boasts a full play kitchen, and a teen reading room features a whiteboard table for doodling. On top of the bookshelves in the grown-up section, a community craft exhibit includes three-dimensional scrapbooked cards, patchwork quilts, carvings of birds, embroidered landscapes, and a whole felted ark full of animals.
What a lovely place. I did wonder, though, as Mom and I left, “What happened to that mysterious cabinet of dolls that used to be at the back of the library when I was a kid?”
Library children’s nook
She responded, “I keep wondering what happened to the collection of international creches at the Catholic shrine after it was bought out.”
Another good question. The lakeside Catholic retreat in town ran out of funds and was bought out by the Shaker Museum across the street, an ironic reversal of fortunes which I may revisit in a later post because there’s an intriguing story at the heart of it.
For our purposes this week, suffice to say that the Catholic site had a Christmas specialty. They ranged an immense collection of lights along their hillside. Coming home on a December night, we’d see them reflected in the lake from a couple miles away. They also took donations of nativity sets from all around the world, many of them beautifully crafted.
It’s funny how objects that may not have tangibly impacted us can anchor in our minds and resurface later. As writers, we’re often character-driven and particularly fascinated with people. But lately, I’ve noticed inanimate objects asserting importance in my short stories. What does it mean?
Living in a Material World
For me, writing a short story has generally included a central image, which may well be a natural or material object. Mudpies, a book of mazes, lipstick. Usually these are sort of thematic, whereas lately they’re practically plot points.
In the past year, I wrote a story about a fairground tragedy involving a ferris wheel, and the wheel additionally functions as a wider symbol. Another story currently on submission is about a family, each child represented by a colour from the gumballs in a vintage candy machine. Two decades of mid-twentieth century history are magnified through the machine’s glass sphere.
Big wheel keeps on turnin’…
In real life, I’ve tended to wax sentimental over objects. After moving house when I was 8, I carried a little box of favourite things with me everywhere. A stone from the lake where we used to live, a broken necklace charm from a long-distance relative, I can’t even remember what else. When called upon to correct a sentence on the blackboard, I didn’t leave my seat without my box. I dropped it once and scrambled on the floor in front of my new classmates to gather my treasured crumbs.
Objects stand in for people in my mind. One of the many details I plan regarding my summer trip is coordinating my contact lenses. I wear monthly ones, and I always time the changing of them so that I put new ones in on the last day with my family. That way, I can linger for longer back in the UK with lenses that have “seen” my loved ones. It’s silly, but I’ve not been able to shake that symbolism.
Object Permanence
Please look after this bear thank you.
Maybe I am holding back a bit from attaching deeply to characters in a short story, placing a central object between us for distance. Will that impede the reader’s experience? We’ll have to see. It’s a new angle from which to look at characters—how they handle objects in their lives can tell us a lot.
It’s not as if this is wholly without literary precedent. Objects are important in children’s literature. A glass slipper, a golden ticket…A wardrobe becomes a new world, a boxcar becomes a home, dolls come to life. I remember a book in our church library about a penny. Each chapter focused on a new owner of that penny, from a child abducted by native Americans to an enslaved boy running toward freedom.
What could objects say about us, if they could speak? We did an assignment like that in our Journal As Literature college class. A friend wrote from the point of view of the socks she always wore to bed. I wrote about the teddy bear I’d bought my baby from London, to connect them to their then-estranged father. If I’m remembering correctly, I think the bear assessed me as guilty of some misplaced sentimentality, but he felt compassion for me too. Of course he was compassionate; he’s a teddy bear.
What would you write about? If your main character had to flee with a handful of possessions, what would they take?
