Books – Nastasya Parker

Strange Journeys

This Week’s Bit of String: A pink overnight bus to Russia

When I was nineteen, I had a couple weeks after summer work and before my term abroad in the UK. Somewhat to my mother’s chagrin, I opted to visit Russia during that time while traveling among friends. From visiting Taru in Helsinki, I would go to Yulia in Moscow, then Zuzana in Bratislava.

After obtaining my “entry clearance” at Finland’s intimidating Russian Embassy, which reduced me to tears and impoverished me by $300 while charging the German guy in front of me only $60, I remained determined to visit Russia. I expected further bumps in the road.

*Some building I passed in my St. Petersburg daze. Almost the same pink as the bus.*

I did not expect the rickety overnight bus carrying me across the Finnish-Russian border to be pink. I boarded with dozens of sombre Russian passengers, and secured a window seat. The old woman next to me rested her head on my shoulder and went to sleep.

Throughout the night I peered into the darkness, passing vast swathes of evergreen trees and seemingly abandoned, massive industrial or nuclear plants. We disembarked to have our passports stamped out of Finland, then disembarked again for the Russian entry stamp.

“First time in Russia?” asked the Finnish border guard. At my assent, he slammed down his stamp. “Good luck.”

In a way, I did have good luck. But not in a conventional sense.

After the sleepless night with a stranger leaning on me, I left the bus as soon as it stopped. The sun was just rising, a distant golden glow that could equally have been a smouldering chemical inferno. Only one other person left the bus with me, a guy in his twenties.

As I watched the bus drive away, glad to be rid of it, I heard him say in accented English, “You know we are still outside St. Petersburg?”

I shrugged. “That’s fine.”

“Didn’t you have more luggage?”

I had my day bag over my shoulder, but he was right. My even-more stuffed rucksack, with three months’ worth of belongings, was still in the hold under the bus.

Getting in Trouble

I suppose it’s a classic tale: I caused my own problems. I was frustrated with myself for making such a stupid mistake, in so significant a matter, so early on.

The man on the street with me rolled his eyes as if equally annoyed at my folly. “Look,” he said, “Come home with me while I get ready for work. I’ll help you find your way into the city and perhaps locate your bag.”

Now, this will sound like more stupid decision-making. I was aware I shouldn’t go to an unknown man’s house in a foreign, semi-hostile nation. But if he had truly bad intent, I reasoned, then he would pretend to be more welcoming instead of exasperated. So I followed him.

I experienced my first Russian apartment. Toilet and shower in separated tiny chambers, a mug of bitter black tea. Dmitri, who’d been visiting his fiancee in Finland over the weekend and had returned just in time for work, gave me a St. Petersburg map with Finnish location names, wrote down the bus company’s phone number and address, and saw me off on the correct metro train.

I spent a few hours wandering the city. I only remember fragments, almost 25 years later. Deciphering a couple more Russian letters by noticing a cinema poster for the recent film, The Patriot. Glimpsing the Hermitage, the Tsar’s Summer Palace, from across a busy street, my view criss-crossed by tramlines. Ascertaining directions from an ice cream seller because we could both speak intermediate French. I was miraculously reunited with my rucksack at the coach company’s office, where no one had been the least bit interested in its contents.

Travel Stories

I’ve been thinking about this somewhat misadventurous episode since I’ve just finished a truly inspiring novel with a lot of travel in it: Sarah Winman’s Still Life.

This book has me longing to visit Florence, Italy, wander and look at art and eat amazing food. It’s also been a luxurious read because while the plot has war and flood mixed in, mostly it’s about people being super nice to each other. I might not be making it sound very exciting. But the characters’ love for each other, their tolerance for, even appreciation of, each other’s quirks is a balm as the real world seems to become more bitter and stressful.

In my travels as a student (who probably comes across as naive here), I gained independence but also learned it’s not the end of the world when that independence goes wrong. I don’t often put my travels into story form, although a couple times I’ve been inspired by places I’ve visited.

However, I notice in recounting this that travel puts us in a unique position to understand and utilise story structure. We embark on a journey with certain expectations, but what we want may differ from what we need. Being outside our familiar borders forces us to reflect on who we really are, as we notice we are stuck with ourselves here, there, and everywhere. And even when we bring problems upon ourselves, it can turn out okay.

Amazingly, once I reached Moscow the next day, I had a good time. My Russian friend was passionate about showing me around, and her stories about local history and how the city ran fascinated me. There’s another little twist in the tale for you.

Have you encountered surprising kindnesses while away? How does travel fuel your self-reflection and creativity?

Carried Along

This Week’s Bit of String: A wide range of accounts

Only one exam left. I’m happy for our students that they won’t have to sit through them anymore, but disappointed that it’s the only accepted measure for how they’ve done in secondary school.

My role in exams this year, in addition to reading and scribing for a 16-year-old with special needs, is also to act as language modifier for him. This is a rarely-granted access arrangement, for those with hearing and/ or processing disabilities, as well as reading difficulties.

It means I can assist with clarifying a question, but of course it’s quite restricted. I can’t define or ‘modify’ any subject-specific terminology, and it’s best to leave the engine of the question, command words, untouched (explain, analyse, evaluate, the whole Bloom’s Taxonomy lot). I can help with “carrier language,” the words that form the framework of the question.

Here’s an example. In the first History paper, one of the questions was: “Give an account of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

The student asked me what “account” meant. “Like Instagram or Facebook?”

I rephrased it as “Tell the story of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

This gave him a clearer idea. While the concession of having a language modifier is rare, I wonder how many students unshakably associate the word account with social media, just as an example. For students who are neurodiverse, a word they’re unsure about can be very hard to see past.

Staying Flexible

Adults have this issue as well. There’s a new writer to the writing feedback group I’m in, and both times I’ve sent her my writing, she comments negatively because she’s made an assumption early on and then the story doesn’t comply with it. In a short story where the protagonist was looking after her grandmother, the reader decided that Nan was the name of one of the protagonist’s children, criticised me for mentioning a “grandmother” because that was adding too many characters, and continued to complain that the character didn’t interact with Nan in a manner suitable for a young child.

Revising our assumptions as we go along is a vital skill. Certainly, it’s more innate to some than others. I try to reserve judgment as I’m reading, and when something doesn’t make sense I go back and work out what I may have misinterpreted. I don’t often read book blurbs anymore because they sometimes distort the significance of plot aspects and lead you to expect something different.

This comes from when I read Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You. The back of the book talked about how the heroine “knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home,” and said “knowing what’s coming keeps her sane.” For perhaps my own personal reasons, I concluded the protagonist was neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum. I was baffled and a bit annoyed when she wasn’t.

My frustration was my own fault and based on my assumptions, so I decided not to read book blurbs anymore. I want to get swept up when I read, not anchored down by my potentially outmoded notions. When we read fiction or poetry, all language is carrier language. It’s all taking us somewhere.

Letting Characters Carry

During the last couple of weeks, I started writing my new novel. It feels as if, in a way, most of the language in the first draft is carrier language. That’s what I’m reminding myself anyway. It’s clunky because mainly, I’m seeing how the characters develop the plot. When I go back and edit, I can polish the voice and streamline the form. Many revisions from now it will travel, it will fly, rather than get shoved along.

*I love these roots at an old canal mill site, but for now I can’t get too attached.*

I’ve done a lot of planning and character research, and I feel I’ve honed my craft in terms of focusing the story structure and understanding the direction, kicking off with inciting incidents and such. But I won’t get super attached to anything just yet. I scribbled many notes on my characters’ backgrounds, considering their needs versus their wants, so I feel I know about them, but I can’t presume I know them deeply. I must remain open to what they do, because they could alter my planned plot.

A few pages in, I’m trying to stop thinking about how to rewrite with improved style. It doesn’t matter yet. My characters are more important. This absolves me for now from having to write beautifully or cleverly, which is great since I’m tired and not ready for that yet.

Stories carried by characters engage me more than stories dragged through certain plot points, and I think that’s true for many readers. However, we don’t want the plot to trudge as characters wield the burden of their thoughts too heavily. Later, I’ll correct the balance.

How do you stay flexible? What carries you when you start a project?

2024 Reading Round-Up

I had some ups and downs in my reading year. My first Didn’t-Finish in a few years (because there wasn’t enough STORY, dammit!) and a couple stretches of 2-4 weeks with no time whatsoever to read. But I always balance those out with a voracious spell after. It feels so good when reading time opens up again, like diving into a cool lake after overheating. Here are my favourites among all I read. I’d love to hear what you think!

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Direct and unobfuscating, McCullers introduces us to various misfits about town, starting with the iconic opening line about the “two mutes, [who were] always together.” The story represents the voiceless in many ways, and emphasises the need to be heard.

“The words which are surely the root of all human grief… ‘I have done those things which I ought not to have done, and left undone those things which I ought to have done. So this cannot truly be the end.’”

Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

*Wintry Moomins at Octavia’s Bookshop, Cirencester*

Working at a school, I’m somewhat bombarded with young people’s moods and stories, so I don’t go for too many books written in teen voice. I’m so glad I read this one, though. Lauren, the young narrator of this novel, is incredibly driven, and practical even while being compassionate. I wrote about her more in an earlier blog post because she became a favourite character of mine, and Butler’s take on empathy is an exciting one.

“Show me a more pervasive power than change.”

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

A glimpse into someone forgotten by history, this resonated with me partly because of my Eve novel. It delves deeply into the Duchess of Ferrara’s story, whom Browning alluded to in his poem ‘My Last Duchess.’ We see the plight of women in Renaissance Italy, and also explore a love of art that sets someone apart from the crowd.

“She is absorbed in her work; she is her work; it gives her more satisfaction than anything else she has ever known; it intuits the need, the vacancy within her, and fills it.”

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

I feel as if I’m the last to read this, but in case anyone else has yet to discover this novel: It’s excellent. There was tragedy in it and unfairness that I didn’t expect. I should have though, as the book is about an exceptionally intelligent woman trying to pursue a scientific career in the mid-20th century. Ultimately, the opposition she faces makes her later alliances and triumphs that much more thrilling.

“Their odd, tell-all friendship was the kind that only arises when a wronged person meets someone who’s been similarly wronged and discovers that while it may be the only thing they share, it is more than enough.”

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

It’s got an exciting scifi premise: the world is in danger, so a delegation must be sent to space in search of a fix. Once there, the lone surviving voyager meets someone from another planet, as different as can be. They develop communication with each other, and the results are breathtaking. I’m eager to see the film once it’s out.

“Sometimes, the stuff we all hate ends up being the only way to do things.”

*An artsy trip to the real Oxford, this past summer*

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Another book about art… This became a bit of a theme for me, and I really enjoyed it especially as I attended a couple of art exhibits at the time. Art unlocks emotion, and feeds creativity for our own art of writing. This book is a David Copperfield-style journey through a boy’s misfortunes, uncanny encounters, and striking characters, propelled all the while by a deep, tragedy-induced connection to a single painting.

“Immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved.”

Midlife Without a Map by Liz Champion

This book made me laugh the most this year. In addition to being funny, Liz (who also has a brilliant Substack) is incredibly relatable. I love how she doesn’t hold back disclosing her highs and lows. She’ll get swept up in something but be completely honest if it doesn’t work out, and that’s rare and refreshing both online and in literature.

“But now I’m halfway up the mountain, facing hairpin bends and vertical drops with a driver who missed his Formula One calling, I’m wondering if I was ever fit and fearless. Maybe a book by the pool would have been adventurous enough.”

How to Build a Girl by Caitlin Moran

A hilarious and heartfelt coming of age story, but also a great look at art and how we respond to it. The main character, Johanna, wants to save her family from poverty, so she becomes a music critic as a teen–a scathing one. Could passionate fandom make her as much money as trashing every band she sees?

“‘I feel like I can see the operating system of the world–and it is unrequited love. That is why everyone’s doing everything. Every book, opera house, moon shot and manifesto is here because someone, somewhere, lit up silently when someone else came into the room, and then quietly burned when they weren’t noticed.’”

Babel by R.F. Kuang

Language and revolution entwine in this speculative novel. In an alternative Oxford, colonial powers rule through silver. Once silver bars are engraved with pairs of translated words, magic imbues them, resulting from the disparity in meaning. The plot follows young trainees in this art of translation, and as readers we join them in their enchantment, and their horror as they recognise the injustice at the heart of the system.

“That’s just what translation is, I think. That’s all speaking is. Listening to the other and trying to see past your own biases to glimpse what they’re trying to say. Showing yourself to the world, and hoping someone else understands.”

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

This novel is about books, about books of lots of stories, and the stories are alive but they must be protected…It’s a stunning work to read, as all the little pieces fit together, reminding us that no story really stands alone. I found it incredibly lovely to sink into the universe of this book.

“We are all stardust and stories.”

Literary Mothers

This Week’s Bit of String: Villains in the woods

Growing up, we were always acting out stories. We played them with stuffed animals, listened to them on cassettes, and ran through the woods pretending we were heroes with baddies after us.

We lived beside a rustic, lakeside resort in New Hampshire, and its cottages were scattered above us in the forest, empty until summer. We’d patter along the footpaths, assigning different storybook villains to each cabin. Maleficent, the White Witch, the Big Bad Wolf, Snow White’s evil queen, and the Wicked Witch of the West all holed up in those cottages.

Mom accepted that we never wanted to play the bad guys ourselves, so she’d put on a crone voice and play the witch part, chasing us along while we shrieked excitedly. She always had to be the villain in our games and by doing so, she gave our games and stories extra potency.

As thrilling as Mom made our childhood, I could never write her into my fiction. I sometimes take people or moments that I irresistibly return to, and put versions into stories. But my mother wouldn’t work as a character. She’s too good.

Having devoted every second of her life to four brilliant (I mean, you should see my siblings) but very weird, needy children, plus helping earn a living primarily working with special needs students in elementary schools, plus volunteering at church and generally being a magnet for waifs and strays… She is the Most Patient Person in the World™ and my mother couldn’t be believed if she turned up in a book.

In modern literature, she’d be covering up for something. Her good deeds would be belied by exerting painful standards on her children. But Mom is almost unfailingly patient, and while she sets high standards for herself, she loves knowing who we really are and accepts our differences. And she’s by no means boring, with her wealth of experiences and her exceptionally tolerant good humour.

The Good Ones

I aimed to do a round-up of good literature mums, and it was somewhat challenging. Just as many fairy tale villains are female, a fair few mothers in contemporary books are abusive (Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine or Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects), manipulative and self-centred (Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk), or detrimentally submissive (The Glass Castle and Tara Westover’s Educated).

This might reflect people being more honest about how hard parenting is. Not everyone is cut out for the job. So many other mums in books are consumed with survival. This absolutely does not make them bad mothers, but it makes mothering secondary to the plot. It’s like when a sitcom couple has a baby and the baby is hardly ever in the show.

I’ve been writing about Eve, the “Mother of All the Living,” and motherhood looms large in my work-in-progress. But she isn’t a brilliant example because she had much baggage, and no one to emulate. I love reading and writing about mums that know their kids well, mums who, even for a brief scene, play whatever silly thing their kid likes and enjoy it, even while admitting that a parenting day can be long indeed. After all, my mom was like that, and as a mum myself, time spent with my Bear–doing anything, really–is my very favourite thing.

So I’m thinking of Elizabeth Zott in Lessons in Chemistry, who is honest with her daughter about how tough the world can be, but tries not to pass her sadness on. Supporting, defending moms like in Wonder or The Fault in Our Stars.

There are incredibly brave and devoted mothers like Mauma in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings, who is enslaved but gives Handful as much freedom as she can. The mother in Room by Emma Donaghue whose son is her whole life, quite literally, for 4 years.

Across the Pond

British mums have a different vibe. There’s a looser family dynamic generally, which seems fine, and a sense that kids ought to entertain themselves a lot sooner. Every culture has its own ways. I’ve always appreciated the British phrase “she fell pregnant” implying that motherhood is some sort of disease, because aspects of pregnancy really do suck.

When Bear and I immigrated to join their dad, Bear was just turning 3 years old. Soon after, my mother-in-law complained to my husband that I was spoiling our not-yet-preschooler by playing with them too much.

My response was simply: “When, precisely, did this spoiling start? When Bear was a baby and toddler, when I was a single mum working full-time and finishing a degree?” My mothering, too, has been pretty survival-focused at times.

Still, I have plenty of British friends who clearly had children for reasons other than to complete housework.

British books have great mums, too: Agnes in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, for example. She seems to know her children on an almost supernatural level. “There is nothing more exquisite than her child.” Nazneen, fellow immigrant to Britain in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, feels similar wonder for her baby. She can’t protect her children from everything but she loves them desperately.

Finally, Bernardine Evaristo’s Amma in Girl, Woman, Other. I think of her quote as I miss my own kid, now on the other side of the ocean with my mother and all the rest of my family.

“the house breathes differently when Yazz isn’t there
waiting for her to return and create some more noise and chaos
she hopes she comes home after university
most of them do these days, don’t they?
they can’t afford otherwise
Yazz can stay forever
really”

That sums things up for me. Who are your favourite literary mothers?

2023 Reading Round-Up

I read 32 books in 2024. I’d love it if I’d had more reading time, but often when I set a high reading goal for the year, it makes reading feel stressful. I’m rushing to finish a book when really, I should be enjoying it. So, no regrets!

Here are my top reads from the year, and of course, my very favourite quote from each. Because I have tried over the years to savour books better, I always pause after finishing one and write down my favourite quotes.

As to how I mark the pages of my favourite quotes while I’m reading… I exercise my right of protection against self-incrimination on that.

Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris
A master intrigue-builder, Harris sneaks suspense in through everyday details and seemingly idyllic settings. The setting here is a boys’ grammar school, secretly crumbling. Since I work in a school, semi-snarky descriptions of teachers and students amuse me.

“Although listening to boys is bad enough, listening to their parents is fatal.”

Cuckoo in the Nest by Fran Hill
I love Fran’s writing, particularly her hearty humour which is specific without being sharp. Her debut novel gives voice to a wonderfully insightful adolescent character entering foster care. This book is a real gift with its empathy to all characters involved.

“I could have done with help defending myself against the way Bridget would experience the emotions she thought I should be having.”

Not Quite an Ocean by Elizabeth M Castillo
Castillo deftly balances beauty and decay, peace and turmoil. Her latest volume explores womanhood through the metaphor of the ocean, inspiring us to reflect on our journey with awe and compassion. Women, the sea, what’s not to love?

From “Who Will Hold the Ocean?”
“Who will teach her that the darkest parts of her body are where creatures are the most boneless, and bright?
Who will dismantle the great, iron skeletons of conquest that lie rotting, eating away at her throat, and back teeth?”

Braver by Deborah Jenkins
I adore a story with a diverse cast. In some respects, this novel is as simple as a little group of people banding together to help each other out. But of course the tug of each individual’s needs pulls events into a tangle.

“There’s the smell of grass and that scented summer air that drifts into your very soul and makes you believe in the safe familiarity of things.”

The Binding by Bridget Collins
Set in a world where books can only be made when a person is “bound,” surrendering their memory to the page. This results in all sorts of secrets and shocking twists. It’s also an incredibly moving love story.

“It makes one wonder who would write them. People who enjoy imagining misery, I suppose… People who can spend days writing a long sad lie without going insane.”

Salt Lick by Lulu Allison
This haunting epic takes place in a climate-wrought [near?] future dystopia, observed by a Shakespearean-style chorus…comprised of rewilded cows. Between flooded coasts and strict urban areas, various communities help each other and revive hope.

“We see you, boy
We see your gentle heart
Keep it carefully
It has work to do”

Game Changer by Neal Shusterman
A high school football player finds himself in an altered version of his universe every time he gets concussed. Each shift highlights issues of race, class, gender and sexuality, and raises questions. What makes us who we are–and how easily could it change?

“If life exists four hundred times smaller than we can see, it must exist four hundred times larger than we can see.”

March by Geraldine Brooks
The imaginary father of Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters in Little Women is the protagonist here. We see his part in slavery, Civil War battles, and early attempts at Reconstruction. Through him, Brooks unforgettably lays bare the national shame.

“And yet I do not think it heroic to march into fields of fire, whipped on one’s way only by fear of being called craven. Sometimes, true courage requires inaction; that one sit at home while war rages, if by doing so one satisfies the quiet voice of honourable conscience.”

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
Written during World War II, this novel alchemically combines some of my favourite elements: a precocious narrator passionate about writing, an eccentric family among castle ruins, class struggle, explorations of love and art.

“‘Anyway, your father had a very distinguished forerunner. God made the universe an enigma.’
“I said, ‘And very confusing it’s been for everybody. I don’t see why Father had to copy Him.’”

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
A brilliant homage to David Copperfield transplanting Dickens’s expansive cast to coal country, western Virginia in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. It exposes the disadvantages and downright exploitation in rural areas, while also inspiring us with the resilience and compassion of many who live there.

“… Wanting to see the rest of us hurt because she was hurting–You have to wonder how much of the whole world’s turning is fueled by that very fire.”

Are any of these your favourites too, or do you have recommendations to add?

Celebrating Books

This Week’s Bit of String: An air of incredulity

“Miss, how are there people who like to read?”

I’d been scribing answers to questions about Lord of the Flies while the severely dyslexic GCSE student dictated. He was then curious about why there are “neeks” (the word “geek” has evolved) like me who actually enjoy books.

“Well,” I told him, “I got to like reading because I was taught so many different books at school, I knew there were loads of great options.”

The openness of the question surprised me and I should perhaps have been more emotive, told him how reading takes me out of my own life and into different worlds. Or that it’s easily as entertaining as TV. I wish I’d had more time to tell him that with books, there really is something for everyone. As long as they can access it–which unfortunately, he physically cannot.

I wonder if this young man gets the sense of luxuriousness from playing videogames which we find with books. Books free us from having to compete. They offer immersive surrender, and that’s what I crave sometimes. It’s liberation from being in life’s driver’s seat.

*Hay Castle: “Love detonates this distance between us to ash holds your flooded heart in the fire of night”*

Again, this only works if you can access it. We all go through stages when there simply isn’t time to read much. Sometimes I find myself reading with a grim desperation to tick books off my reading list.

I remind myself that this is love. As with any relationship, we sometimes get caught up in our duties of care; keeping everyone fed and happy. But the love is there. When it comes to reading, I ensure I take the time to write down my favourite quotes, to reflect in my daily scribbles, before starting something else. It’s not a chore.

Burrowing and Borrowing

I spent last weekend at Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival. If you ever need to rekindle your love for reading, it’s a great place to do so. Sunny but chilled, colourful yet somewhat calming. I guess that’s because even though I’m among crowds, they feel like my people.

Not that Hay’s festival-goers are in any way homogenous. As with writers, there are all sorts of readers. Young and old, Welsh or English or from further abroad, people in motorised wheelchairs or with support dogs. At an evening talk I also noticed another woman on her own, like me, pencilling tiny notes.

In both the first talks I went to, though they were on very different topics, the writers talked about being magpie-like in storing and selecting detail. Marina Hyde, the Guardian columnist on current events, peppers her pieces with pop culture references. Peter Frankopan, a passionate historian who’s recently written about natural disasters throughout history, drew on so many different sources he ended up with 4000 footnotes in his latest book.

Later I enjoyed wonderful readings from the poet laureate Simon Armitage. He opened with “Thank You for Waiting” (have a listen here!) and he talked about how hard it was during lockdown to be inspired without everyday interactions and excursions. He calls those the “cement” which sticks our writing together. Trying to create in his upstairs office, he found himself writing poems about Velux windows.

The reason there are enough books in the world to interest any reader is because writers are so diverse. And maybe when we love our art enough, we can find ways to write about anything.

Safety in the Pages

Beyond offering inclusion, books throughout history have bestowed security. We listened to Irene Vallejo talk about her volume Papyrus, which uncovers the history of the written word. She shared stories of the library of Alexandria, and told us how things changed with the development of the Latin codex.

*Bookish street art in Hay. Is it secret? Is it safe?*

The codex, with similar etymological roots to the word book, means block of wood, or tree trunk. Instead of being a long, flattened scroll you’d have to roll back up for storage, the codex used sheets bound together like modern books.

This change wasn’t just culturally significant. It also made reading a safer hobby. In times of religious persecution, for example, Christians could read in codex form. Should someone come along, they could close the codex and stow it away as a humble block, thus keeping secret the substance of their reading.

I loved learning this bit of history. Even now, in our privileged times, there’s something reassuring about wandering around an event where lots of people have books under their arms or noses. Just a bunch of bookworms sharing a common love if not common tastes, and although there are plenty of magpies about, they’re the curious rather than vicious kind.

What makes you fall in love with reading?

Over the Rainbow

This Week’s Bit of String: A few hundred definite articles

When I was young and had energy–aged three, to be exact–I started eschewing naps. My mother would put me down for a “Quiet Time” instead, with a stack of books to look through. I knew their stories well, but I wanted to properly read them. Logically I started at the beginning, and as my mother settled me down, I asked what the first word of the top book’s title was.

It was “The,” as in The Wizard of Oz. Now able to read my first word, I went through every book I had and counted how many times “the” appeared in my books. I kept counting wherever I went, well up into the hundreds, until I noticed the word “there,” and counted those. I was in the midst of counting “thens” when all the other words started making sense and I lost count, too busy reading. Sucked into new realms.

Our copy of The Wizard of Oz was a big, almost A3-sized book with illustrations based on the film version. Since it became my first reading experience, I have a soft spot for the story–but clearly I was already drawn to it, since it inspired me to try and read in the first place.

Real Life or Dreams

One thing that bothered me about the movie was how it framed Dorothy’s whole adventure as a dream. I preferred the Chronicles of Narnia, in which all that happened was incontrovertibly real, just occurring in a different dimension (which I tried to reach through many a wardrobe). I felt it diminished Dorothy’s experiences to portray them as just a dream.

Even now, I get a bit ruffled when creators use the “But was it all a dream?” cliche. Hopefully this doesn’t make me too simplistic or uncultured, but I like reality clearly delineated. If an unreliable narrator misleads us for their own ends, or for their own survival, or if they’ve been misled, I’m all in and I have colossal respect for the storytelling (Elinor Oliphant is Completely Fine, Fingersmith, Life of Pi). But if, for example, a TV show or film implies the entire premise has only happened in a character’s mind, as one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tried to do, I’m offended. How dare the whole plot be minimised in this way?

The secondary school where I work just finished an energetic, 6-performance run of The Wizard of Oz. My husband played in the band and I helped a bit with front of house and quick changes. When a production ends, it’s like waking up from a dream. There’s that sudden cessation of energy and the unwinding of a massive, intricate knot as everyone goes their separate ways.

It struck me, watching it again after a long while, that actually the way the story unfolds is just the way a child might imagine it. As a conquering hero, but innocent, with devoted friends and all sorts of magic. It’s not a diminishment of childhood experience, it’s an ode to their imagination, and I was quite moved by it.

Haunted Forests

It also serves as a reminder that even in our heads, even as children, we’re not completely safe. I don’t know any child capable of constructing a fantasy where nothing bad happens. Otherwise, how would we prove our heroism, and our comparative innocence? Dorothy tries to invent a place where there isn’t any trouble, but trouble gets in anyway.

It’s all those anxieties about the future and those fearful spectres from our past creeping up. “Just try to stay out of my way,” they cackle. “Just TRY.”

One of the reasons I’m quite sensitive about stories being dismissed as “all in your head” derives from my experience in a psychiatric ward when I was 12. I was withdrawn and always thinking about stories. The staff wrote in my records that I seemed to be “responding to internal stimuli” and I was put on anti-hallucination medication.

“Are you hearing voices?” the psychiatrist, a toneless woman with an unfortunate resemblance to Jabba the Hutt, asked.

“No.”

“Are the voices telling you to say that?”

“No.”

But the doctors had become too entrenched in their own reality to decipher mine.

Fortunately, the pills didn’t affect my imaginings in the slightest; I could still escape. It shocks me that it never occurred to those medical professionals that a young patient would wish to imagine things outside the immediate reality of strip searches, iron-meshed windows and straitjacketed children screaming for help.

In my opinion, it should have been as obvious as Dorothy dreaming her way from black and white into colour. I suppose it proves how powerful our inner lives are; they can transport us so fully that people watching us have no idea where we’ve gone. I probably looked as if I was responding to internal stimuli when I was three years old counting “thes” and “thens,” and I go round mouthing dialogue to myself sometimes even now. I know what I’ve made up though, and what I haven’t. You can see why I’d find it irksome if someone tried to tell me otherwise.

What takes you over the rainbow? Has it ever gotten you into trouble?

Learning Something New

This Week’s Bit of String: What poems, jellyfish, and King Tut have in common

I am starting 2023 building a new habit. I feel like that sounds more promising than a resolution, what do you think? Anyway, this habit is to learn something new every day.

I think we all learn stuff most days. Part of the reason I relish daily scribbles is because it teases out new information I glean without necessarily noticing. It’s also why I stop after each book I’ve read and write down my favourite quotes, instead of charging on to the next one. Just a little bit of reflection time. Because my mind’s always leaping to the next thing I absolutely MUST get done; the next book to tick off the To-Be-Read list; the next job to cross off from my planner. I’m very susceptible to the look-at-all-the-things-I’ve-done narrative on social media and I have to force myself to stop and reflect. I had to make it a part of my routine, a habit.

My dad used to ask us at the dinner table, “What did you learn at school today?”

We hated it. On principle, we often insisted we’d not learned a thing. And that may have been true some days. We expected that anything learned would be unmistakably gifted to us, not always understanding that we might need to flip through the resources and find what needed to be learned.

So with this learning habit I’m working to develop, the rule is that the Something I learn for the day can’t be part of my normal reading. It has to be something extra, something I take time to look up and find out about. It IS allowed to be a poem or short story outside of my pre-planned reading list, for example delving into an online literary magazine, as long as it’s not just because I’m prepping my own submission for it.

The idea is to take in information or art for its own sake, free of agenda. To shake myself from the constant bridle of Getting Things Done, and just stretch my brain.

It’s also to repurpose scrolling time. As I mentioned earlier this year, I want to waste less time on social media. I haven’t been terrible about scrolling and spending time online, but I could do better. Instead of scanning Facebook and Twitter, brain on autopilot, just waiting for something salient to jump out at me, I will go and seek salience myself.

So far, my new habit has entailed:

Finding out about early British underground buildings like fogous and souterrains, because for her novel my student has created a Secret Hunting Society which lives in a village hidden underground.

Cooking dinners ahead for the week while listening to these fantastic Intelligence Squared videos featuring William Sieghart’s The Poetry Pharmacy

And this Intelligence Squared Dickens vs. Tolstoy debate, Simon Schama arguing on the latter’s behalf and sharing this Tolstoy quote: “The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably, but to make people love life in all its manifestations.” (Makes it sound a bit simpler and more feasible, do you reckon?)

Research on jellyfish because I made a little ShrinkyDink jellyfish while crafting with my sisters over Christmas and I added it to my keychain

Reading some lovely poems from Plume Magazine— I particularly loved “The Classics” by Christina Lee and “Cathedral” by Kwame Dawes

Finding out about aphantasia, since another student believes she has it. People with aphantasia don’t see imagery in their minds, which makes it harder for her to connect with material she reads.

Researching Tutankhamun because the latest Royal Mail stamps for sending letters abroad have his possessions on them, and I was wondering… Do those really belong to this country?

Looking more deeply into a January 6, 1853 train accident that claimed the life of President Franklin Pierce’s only child just two months before Pierce’s inauguration, because it was alluded to in A Worse Place Than Hell, the book I’m reading. Pierce was the only president to ever hail from my home state, and it surprised me I’d never heard of this tragedy, when it must have heavily influenced his actions during a pivotal period.

Also, trying to find out about women runners in the 19th century because this nonfiction work mentions Louisa May Alcott going running in the early mornings before her long shifts at a Civil War hospital. I’m very curious about what women would have worn for morning runs in the 1860s, and I’ve found some interesting facts about the history of women runners but nothing that illuminates this passage, so if you know anything about it, do let me know.

The different types of attention that may be compromised by social media use, as outlined by Johann Hari on Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast. It rather motivated me to keep going with this little habit of mine!

Do have any suggestions of things I should learn about? What sorts of things have you sought to learn?

2022 Reading Round-Up

My top ten books from the year again feature quite heavily from independent publishers and writers I know… mostly writers I met on Twitter. So that medium has something good going for it, although in the year to come, I will attempt to convert some of my scrolling time to reading time. Might get through a few more books that way, don’t you reckon?

Cajoncito by Elizabeth M. Castillo

Multilingual poet Castillo gifts us this volume of English and Spanish poems. When she writes about love and loss, it’s as if she’s peeled back layers to say things I didn’t know how to. Many of her thoughts use metaphors of ink and pages, which were beautiful and also motivating to me as a writer. Particularly the first piece, “Can I Send You My Poems?” is perfection.

“…Can I cleave
my way, breathless, across the seas? Can I scale
the mountains erected defiantly between us? Fight, bare-knuckled, the beasts that live at altitude?”

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

I love Anne Tyler’s family sagas. Her characters are always so real, so nuanced and quirky, and the dynamics between them so plausibly fraught, I am amazed at where she finds the inspiration to keep developing such individual ones. I like her straightforward, often humorous style, as well.

“But still, you know how it is when you’re missing a loved one. You try to turn every stranger into the person you were hoping for. You hear a certain piece of music and right away you tell yourself that he could have changed his clothing style, could have gained a ton of weight, could have acquired a car and then parked that car in front of another family’s house. ‘It’s him!’ you say. ‘He came! We knew he would; we always…’ But then you hear how pathetic you sound, and your words trail off into silence, and your heart breaks.”

A Snow Garden and Other Stories by Rachel Joyce

These short stories are somewhat festively themed, and they reflect the heartache and joy of the holidays. There’s a fun modern-day nativity story, the title piece is haunting, and the final story quite lovely—but my favourite was the first, “A Faraway Smell of Lemon,” which seemed sort of an homage to Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” with its great, moving simplicity.

“Binny’s words echo in the silence. The young woman nods. And because she does not reply, because she does not fight Binny’s words, because she does not soften or dilute them with a sentence of her own, they fall for the first time. They land. Binny feels their weight, their loss, but the world does not stop or shudder. Yes, she is still standing. She is still breathing.”

*The opportunities we discover thanks to books! Braunton Burrows, Devon, UK*

The Shadows We Cast by Sarah Tinsley

This is a real page-turner and a true feat of dramatic irony. As readers we know the twist from the start, and we’re desperate to know how the characters will work it out. It’s also an unflinching look at the aftermath of sexual assault, assigning the event its rightful significance while also developing the protagonist fully so she’s not at all defined by it. There’s so much to unpack in this book, I’ve reflected on it further here.

“Coming here should have made it better, a distraction from the dreams that left her blunt and smudged. She feels like an echo.”

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

A travel memoir about dealing with tragedy by hiking the South West Coast Path, I may have particularly enjoyed it because I love that region anyway. I saved the book for when we were clifftop camping in North Devon, and thanks to Winn’s narrative, I found out about Braunton Burrows and we had a marvelous trek over the sand dunes. The book is candid and searching, but often also fun and irreverent.

“We hide ourselves so well, exposing our skin in youth when it has nothing to say, but the other skin, with the record of time and event, the truth of life, we rarely show.”

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The perfect read for cold January, this surreal, slightly gothic sort of mystery. I was tempted to start naming months in the way the protagonist takes to doing: The Month of Steadfastly Accumulating Tiredness, perhaps. But I don’t have the knack Clarke does. It’s an intriguing concept and so cleverly told.

“Perhaps even people you like and admire immensely can make you see the World in ways you would rather not.”

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

You know I love a book about a book. Possession, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and this novel by Krauss, are examples of a literary investigation which unfolds into a great personal journey. Here, there’s a book to be translated, and it brings together a girl grieving her father, and a holocaust survivor.

“Strange what the mind can do when the heart is giving directions.”

*I **might** be needing a bit more bookshelf space in 2023…*

Miss, What Does Incomprehensible Mean? by Fran Hill

Fran Hill is a terrifically warm and funny writer, and here’s one volume of her diary-style memoir about teaching secondary school English. This is quite an accomplishment given that a teacher comes into contact with many, many characters. She’s artfully chosen which ones to follow, and tracks relationships efficiently. It’s such an enjoyable read, especially if you work in education.

(Of a Sixth Form English class preparing to read The Handmaid’s Tale) “Rebekah certainly knows her Bible stories. The others hadn’t a clue. Conor thought a Testament was a body part.”

Mrs. Narwhal’s Diary by S.J. Norbury

Another enriching, uplifting volume from indie publisher Louise Walters. This one’s in a diary style too, but much more novelesque, with in-depth looks into the protagonist and her family. The point-of-view is bemused and warm, often funny, and all the characters and the setting are so unique. I particularly liked the insights on parenting, and on trying to free a loved one from the clutches of repressed British genealogy.

“Why can’t we change other people? Why isn’t there some sort of antidote to their toxic beliefs that we can slip surreptitiously into their tea?”

Transcendent Kingdom by Yea Gyasi

This book has so much in it. It’s about families, neuroscience, race, religion, addiction, immigration… The characters were so relatable in their struggle for redemption and belonging, while the story illuminates wider issues of racial justice.

“I, too, have spent years creating my little moat of good deeds in an attempt to protect the castle of myself.”

Have you shared a love for any of these books? If you haven’t yet, there’s never a bad time to treat yourself. Enjoy!

Never One Thing at a Time

This Week’s Bit of String: The ultimate tear-jerker

Our GCSE students (aged 16) had their last exam this week and took their leave. For the ones we’d worked closely with, we threw a little party with balloons and refreshments. A couple of us got cards and prosecco in return.

“No one got me anything,” joked one of my fellow teaching assistants. “I’m going to cry. I will!” But she couldn’t muster the promised waterworks with us watching.

A last lingering Year 11 girl, the most reluctant to leave, offered this: “I know what will make you cry. It always works: when someone asks, ‘Are you okay?’”

This student is one of the most perceptive people I’ve ever met, let alone one of the most perceptive teens. She was spot on. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, when we’re muddling on in a lonely blur and then someone stops and asks how we are, with genuine interest.

And there go the floodgates.

The key to these gates will vary, depending on the magnitude and current of what’s behind them. This is not just a female thing, either; guys are equally likely to get triggered by something seemingly small.

When I first immigrated, I was so alone and the British townspeople were so preoccupied and indifferent, a rare Hello from a stranger had me fighting tears. Since then, I got somewhat inured to being away, able to bumble along preoccupied myself. But when my son moved to America a few weeks ago, leaving me separated from both my best little buddy and my whole family, that changed things.

Colleagues know better than to ask if I’m ok. They ask how he’s getting on instead, and the news is generally good. They say, you must miss him so much, which saves me from having to say it. Much of the time, therefore, I maintain equilibrium. There’s a constant ache, a horrifically deep emptiness, dulled by almost-daily messages he and I exchange and by my relentless counting down until I can go see him (5 weeks and 2 days). In some moments it has been piercing, like when I put clean sheets on his bed and wondered if I should keep the pillows how he likes them or stack them tall. Or when I went to send a care package and the post office got grouchy over the extra barcode on the customs sticker.

Triggers are necessary because they give us a choice: Hey, you know that deluge you’re hiding behind the dam? Can we try channeling it, please, before it starts to leak? Sometimes we feel we have to keep refusing, and other times maybe we can’t put it off any longer.

Literary Triggers

At a Retreat West workshop a couple weeks ago, we learned about the importance of having your book’s “inciting incident” right at the beginning, to hook readers in. This is different from the climactic showdown or the big reveal. Often, it’s one small thing that kicks everything else out of inaction.

Rather than the writer throwing a wrench into the protagonist’s works, usually the writer is nudging the protagonist into the uncomfortable realisation that their way of life isn’t really working.

Great examples of this are Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine, or Piranesi. Eleanor would have kept on refusing any company apart from the Glen’s vodka from Tesco if she hadn’t been sent to that charity concert and developed an ill-advised crush on a singer. Piranesi would have kept wandering the statued halls of The House, recording tide times, if signs of visitors hadn’t begun to appear.

Even when a story begins with a main character choosing to make a change, they often don’t fathom how badly that change is needed or where it will take them. This has been true of literature for as long as storytelling has existed: Chaucer’s pilgrims wouldn’t have realised how much they’d learn on their journey; Romeo had no idea how far he’d go for love when he went to the party to see Rosaline.

When we write stories, we’re not attacking our characters with suffering for the fun of it. Our imaginations have found someone who needs liberation, and we’re plotting a way to spring them free.

For Our Own Protection

In real life, incidents don’t spiral in an orderly manner. It’s not a series of clues and incremental escalation, sometimes it’s everything at once and sometimes it’s like, “Ooh maybe things are about to settle down,” and then bam, another thing hits you. Meet a friend for a catch-up, and as you recount the last couple of months you’ll be thinking, This sequence of events would not fly in fiction. Readers would be too confused.

*18 years ago.* *You never know how things will end up.*

Honestly, I’m kind of glad it’s that way. Imagine if our lives progressed more rhythmically. If we were characters in a book and something went wrong, we’d have to ask ourselves, is this trying to teach me a lesson? Is this merely foreshadowing a massive climactic battle later on?

As it is, I can pour myself into work, helping students cope with their own stress and trauma, and I can write my grief into my novel instead of feeling it as my own. I need to edit this story of Eve so she more quickly learns to use her voice; learns that it is her own even if one of her ribs is not. For that to happen, stuff’s got to go wrong, to force her to wonder how she put up with everything, years after being exiled from Eden and then losing her first two sons.

While I work, and work on writing, I can ride it out, 5 weeks and 2 days. It’s already 7 weeks of separation, and there have been plenty of mini-crises to interrupt the trajectory of contemplating my new life: exams and Supreme Court decisions, viruses and injuries, something scurrying in the roofspace when we try to go to sleep. Who knows what else will come up, whether they will keep distracting me from loneliness or force me to confront it. I suspect the former; I’m grateful not to have to slow down.

What about you? Are YOU okay?