I’m late with this roundup, on account of doing proper authorly things such as slicing 80,000 words out of a novel. As I transition to inventing new short stories, though, I’m looking back on various places I was privileged to visit, the street art found and historical moments memorialised. So much fuel for the imagination, gathered in just a year.
7: Vaxjo, Sweden
I know–what the where? Pronounced something like “veck-ya,” this is a small, eco-friendly lakeside city in southern Sweden. My son participated in a gaming event there, while my husband and I visited museums, a very old church, and sculpture trails. And rediscovered chokladbollar. There’s a special pride in discovering someplace unknown to most people.
Vaxjo lake with cathedral view
“Ancient Runes, now THERE’S a fascinating subject.”
Window at the Swedish Glass Museum, Vaxjo
6: Bristol
It makes the list every year, because I find more. This isn’t just due to the city’s size incorporating former towns around it, it’s also because of the constantly blooming arts scene, on street and off. This year I explored more in the Southville and Eastville areas (shoutout to the Writers HQ retreat located at the latter), and revisited Clifton.
Public allotment boxes and a mermaid in the city centre
Clifton Suspension Bridge over the Avon
Astronaut mural, Southville
5: Matara Centre, Cotswolds
We attended an Open Gardens day before many plantings came up, but this was still a fascinating walk. Different patches foster tranquility while saluting traditions from different parts of the world. It was like visiting lots of places at once.
Japanese pond
Field sculpture
Matara courtyard
4: Cascade Trail, White Mountains, New Hampshire
Bonus points for thunderstorming on us while we hiked. We ascended the waterfall trail and had a good splash, loving the views without realising we hadn’t even hit the biggest cascades yet. I say, DO go chasing waterfalls—especially in your first drafts! (Then dry off a bit during edits.)
Kinsman Falls
White Mountain views
Embracing roots
3:Sorrento, Italy
Sorrento is a small but busy city an hour south of Naples, along the gorgeous, rugged coast. It’s got mountain views (including Vesuvius), olive groves up the slopes and citrus trees along the streets, lovely old stradones and domos, and of course, fantastic food. Just don’t overwork yourself beforehand then visit with slightly watered down flu.
Sorrento mountain views
Ruins at Herculaneum, under Vesuvius
Sorrento centre at Christmas time
2: Jurassic Coast, Dorset, UK
Fossils and waves. There had been recent landslides from the massive coastal cliffs, so I could scurry to the rockfall and grab a promising sample without chiseling. Even a fist-sized chunk of this coast is packed with fossilised sea creatures, and you can imagine the waves carrying in more surprises.
The Golden Cap
Coastal cottage
Windswept on the landslide’s front lines
1: Glasgow, Scotland
With bagpipes ringing in our ears, we took in landmark buildings such as the cathedral and the Lighthouse (actually an architecture museum). There’s also a tenement house museum I’d love to see, to reflect on how so many people lived, and I could spend a whole day at the Necropolis and come up with probably half a dozen different stories.
Lighthouse view: hundreds of windows and stories
Everything is painted
Bridge of Sighs to the Necropolis
What inspiring adventures have you had in the last year?
So…2018. How was it for you? My year got a little ploddy. A little spend-all-the-free-time-dragging-through-housework-while-sleep-deprived-from-illness-and-injury-ish. A little every-outing-or-escapade-requires-double-chores-on-surrounding-days-and-heaps-of-TLC-to-convince-family-members-to-go-along-with-it-y.
That demolished my writing and reading routines for the last couple of months, and honestly, I kind of allowed it to. But while I haven’t got a finished draft of my current novel, or a publisher for my other one, and I was mostly long listed in 2018 with just a couple of shortlistings—those hard-plotted outings and escapades I cajoled my family into? They were awesome.
When I look back, it’s not the stresses my mind turns to; it’s the adventures shared. It was tricky to narrow down the top explores of 2018, but here they are, the ones that most charged up the imagination and, well, made life grand.
Hay-on-Wye: It’s got tonnes of books, and a river. Pretty much my two favourite things! Oh, and plenty of nice places to eat. Or just buy a Welsh cake. This year was my first at the late May literary festival there, and I took in such a fantastic range of lectures and interviews. I also enjoyed wandering the streets and soaking in the literary vibe, chasing waterfalls, and watching the sun set over the river.
One of the many enticing specialist bookshops in Hay.
At the River Wye, always trying to get closer to the water.
That happy festival vibe, fun for all ages.
Portishead/ Window Wanderland: Portishead is one of our nearer coastal towns, but we hadn’t explored it yet. Turns out it has a lighthouse, and a lido! Throw in some grand beach houses, a beach crissed and crossed with driftwood, and a brand new lifeboat station, all making this an exciting discovery.
Sunset at Battery Point Lighthouse
Street art on the side of the lido
It was the Window Wanderland event that brought us there in February. I’ve written previously about Window Wanderland, when neighbourhoods decorate their windows for all to come and see. In addition to the Portishead one, we also returned to the Bishopston area of Bristol to take in their window displays, because they truly are stellar.
A tree grows in Portishead
Bishopston’s unique displays included this Super Mario one.
Bristol: This has made my top seven before. But it holds such a wealth of routes and sights, I had to include it again. Plus, I’ve now had a piece performed there so I can feel I belong (maybe one day I can say the same about Hay). Just some of the ways Bristol reminds us life is good: street art to marvel at on every corner, diverse museum exhibits from Wildlife Photographer of the Year to African fabrics to Japanese woodblock prints, milkshakes at Rocatillos and pie or pizza at The Stable and roasted white hot chocolate at Mrs. Potts’ Chocolate Shop, and over 800 games to choose from at the board game cafe Chance & Counters on the lovely Christmas Steps.
A cormorant enjoys the Bristol Harbour view.
A street of murals, by the historic St. John’s Gate into the old city.
Festive homage to the famous Bristol Balloon Fiesta.
Canals, and More Canals: I know, this is a repeat, too. But my weekly hike along the Stroudwater canal continues to be a highlight, the resident waterfowl and the changing angles of sunlight affording new views in the same places every week. Plus we explored further on the Gloucester and Sharpness canal this year, climbing around the beached hulks at Purton’s ship graveyard and the marinas at Saul Junction and Sharpness. Finally, there’s the last remaining stretches of towpath on the Thames and Severn, from Stroud to Chalford, the beautiful little town carved into a hill, and then from Chalford to Sapperton, the longest canal tunnel.
The Ebley Swan family in the snow, Stroudwater Canal
Rainbow over Nutshell Bridge and gatehouse, Stroudwater Canal
Turbine at Sharpness, Gloucester and Sharpness Canal
One of the hulks in Purton’s ‘ship graveyard,’ Gloucester and Sharpness Canal. Old, disused ships were intentionally beached along the strip between the canal and the Severn river to stop erosion.
Mount Osceola: Following 2017’s excursions, I vowed to climb a higher mountain in 2018. And I did, conquering my first 4,000+ footer, in the White Mountains of my home state, New Hampshire. Climbing Mount Osceola was a bit like 2018: hard work scrambling over substantial scattered stones and patches of steep-ish rock face but in the end we had some incredible memories. And felt a tad awesome.
The view from the top.
Smaller snapshots of beauty along the trail.
Minneapolis: One might not think of this Minnesota city in a top list of US destinations. However, we ended up there while taking our son to a gaming event, and loved it. Starting with the Walker Art Gallery’s wondrous sculpture garden, next crossing through Loring Park and Greenway seeing all the fountains and plant boxes and tiny free libraries and black squirrels (still can’t quite get over those…), we then traversed the city using the Skyway. The Skyway is a network of elevated passages between and through buildings in the city centre, allowing people to get about traffic-free and safe from the elements (in our case, it provided some relief from 100 Fahrenheit/ 38-degree Celsius temperatures). Using these passages, we found our way across the city to my first ever look at the great Mississippi River. Here, the river is flanked by old flour mills with an interesting history of rivalries, all chronicled in the Mill Ruins Park and Museum. I love a place that honours its ruins while progressing in an environment- and walker-friendly way!
Viewing the city’s skyline from Walker Sculpture Garden, across the iconic Spoonbridge and Cherry by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.
Loring Park fountain
Old mills and the Mississippi River
Seville: Talk about incorporating history. This southern Spanish city has Roman aqueducts still standing in the middle of busy roads. Its signature spire, Giralda Tower, was built in the 12th century as a minaret under Islamic rule. The cathedral’s incredible craftsmanship must surely have been financed through genocide and slave labour during the Age of the Explorers, when Columbus, Magellan, and their cohorts sailed triumphantly up and down the River Guadalquivir, welcomed by the Torre del Oro. The current Royal Alcazar Palace was largely built using moorish designs under a 14th-century Christian king known as Pedro the Cruel or Pedro the Just, depending who tells the story. It is still used as a royal residence 650 years later. We loved wending our way through the tight little warren of streets to these attractions, shaded by orange trees and palms and ancient gleaming facades affording us the occasional glimpse into ornate courtyards filled with greenery. Also, there was tapas. And sangria.
Part of the Roman aqueduct
The Torre del Oro, or Tower of Gold, at sunset
Close-up in the Real (Royal) Alcazar. I could spend hours looking at these patterns.
Seville’s roofscape at sunrise, Giralda minaret at the centre background
A year with this much excitement and wonder must have been pretty good. I’m looking forward to revisiting some of these locations in the coming year, discovering new destinations, and definitely putting it all to use in various tales.
Have you had experiences in any of the above places? What other spots have you explored in the last year, and where will the next one take you?
This Week’s Bit of String: A beloved chicken farmer
In a small New Hampshire town during the 80s, graffiti appeared on a slab of roadside rock: ‘CHICKEN FARMER, I LOVE YOU.’ Legend has it, the message was directed at a girl living on the small chicken farm across the street, from a shy boy perhaps in her class.
About twenty years later, a revised message, similarly handpainted, appeared: ‘CHICKEN FARMER, I STILL LOVE YOU.’
Awww, you know? Awww. The story appears here in Atlas Obscura, and the entry describes the message as ‘a less personal but more public way of reaching out…’
The paradox of personal and public is an intriguing aspect of graffiti and street art. And that paradox affects us as writers too, essentially in reverse. Street artists preserve their anonymity but bring their work right in front of everyone; as authors we (assuming we don’t use a pen name) give up our anonymity but depend on readers’ choice as to whether our work gets seen or not.
So what can writers learn from street art and graffiti?
Resourcefulness
Some of my favourite examples of street art select a feature of the urban landscape and create a whole work around it. A couple pieces from Bristol:
Simple, but fun…
This street artist saw an alarm box on a wall and apparently thought it would make a great pearl earring in a big, monochromatic version of the famous Vermeer.
It’s sort of an artist’s form of gathering bits of string, you might say, and I’m a big fan.
What a Difference a Letter Makes
In high school in the late 90s, I was tickled by a revised carving on a classroom desk. Someone had cut ‘MANSON FOREVER’ onto the surface, but someone else had mocked it by transforming it with a simple scratch into ‘HANSON FOREVER.’ Doesn’t sound quite so badass does it?
As a TA, I found some similarly misguided graffiti scratched on a table in a Science classroom: ‘Praise Satin.’
Typical of the devil’s insidiousness that his name would be easily conflated with a luxurious fabric.
Now, these entries aren’t art, according to any definitions discussed in earlier blog posts. But I do find them entertaining, and as writers we appreciate the importance of words—these silly ones remind us how essential each letter actually is.
Community Engagement
More street art from Bristol. If these figures could talk…
In Detroit, as in more and more cities around the world, there’s an annual Street Art Festival during which many different artists are given their own wall, each, to work on. Some use it to commemorate important figures of the area, to express the pain of the Black Lives Matter movement, or to remind citizens of vanished neighbourhoods. In this Huffington Post piece, Festival director Roula David describes their aims: to be ‘significant for the community as opposed to just putting pretty things on pretty buildings.’
In Belfast, murals honour many of the victims killed there during the Troubles. I learned about this thanks to a great post on Sandy Bennett-Haber’s blog. She refers to street art as a conversation between artist and environment, and also ‘a broad conglomeration of stories about and on the streets.’ Of course, I like this reminder that there are stories behind each work and its artist.
Even the kid carving ‘Praise Satin’ into a table has a story, possibly a rather interesting or disturbing one.
Breaking the Rules
Street art and graffiti give people who might otherwise feel ignored—young people, sometimes minorities, possibly lower socioeconomic status—a voice in their community. Using that voice is often an act of rebellion, of courage, and as writers we can emulate that.
Even while there are more and more street art festivals, many artists feel the best, most striking work is done unsupervised and perhaps illegally. Perhaps that’s because the most important things are worth fighting for. Especially these days, when the spectre of censorship looms, we writers should take heart at that.
For more stories about the role graffiti and street art play around the world, check out this feature on The Nature of Cities. Are there any special works of unconventional art near you? What’s the story behind them?
This Week’s Bits of String: An unknown 14-year-old’s thoughts on street art
Having established that both art and the empathy it enables can be excruciating processes, the next question is: What do we get out of it? This question reminds me of Dulcinea begging Don Quixote to explain himself in The Man of La Mancha. And the analogy makes sense. Writers and artists tilt at windmills when we try to draw beauty and order from the sticky marrow of reality. It’s a difficult job. Why do we insist on dreaming this impossible dream?
A Noble Reason: Resounding Into the Chaos
Transforming blank space in Stratford Park, Stroud: this stump of a lamppost becomes a giant crayon.
Julia Bell, in a piece for The Guardian about the ability of books to change the world, quotes Salmon Rushdie: “If literature is not an argument with the world then it is nothing.”
Arguments aren’t pretty things. But sometimes, making art or writing literature doesn’t mean inserting beauty onto a blank page or canvas. Instead, it can mean creating depth, and to accomplish this, we must guide readers through dark places, and alert them to some ugly monsters.
Working as a teaching assistant, I once found a scrap of paper in an Art classroom. It was a copy of a questionnaire assignment Year 9s devised on the ethics of street art. One of the questions was: ‘Do you think Banksy is doing the right thing?’ and the anonymous respondent had scrawled, ‘Absolutely not! But neither is anyone else!’
These kids are on to us.
In other words, even with the edgiest art forms, we aim to project intent into a seemingly cruel, random world. Sometimes the intent, as with post-modern authors like Kafka, is to expose the chaos by reflecting it. Other writers, from Charles Dickens to Alice Walker, reminded society to uplift those being trampled in the disorder. The current ‘Own Voices’ books campaign continues this quest today, as more people seek out stories from LGBTQ authors, ethnic and racial minorities, and people with disabilities. Support this exciting movement by checking out this list on Goodreads and choosing a few books for your Christmas list.
A Possibly Less Noble Reason: Grabbing Attention
We write because we are like leaves cast too soon from the tree, left with no choice but to brighten puddles instead.
We also do it because we want to be heard, even those of us with the privilege not to be in a minority or disenfranchised group. Stories may be fictionalised, often wildly, but the emotions they draw on are real, and perhaps, in our humble opinions, heretofore neglected. I love Esther’s thought in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar: “Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.”
We tell ourselves that our acts of creation will at least avenge, at most remedy, the ways in which the world tries to destroy our spirit.
One of my favourite motivations for writing is to resuscitate memories of people and places I no longer get to see. Putting versions of them in stories allows me to keep hold of what time snatches away. As the protagonist, Helen, exhorts her students in my novel Artefacts:
‘Let’s write, and mine the glimmers inside that might turn out to be gems. Whether it’s people we love, or the feeling of playing a sport really well, or a place we visit that makes us feel free, let’s use those to defend ourselves.’
This week’s bit of string: Thoughts and images from artists who’ve passed this way already
We’re approaching that time of year when Bill Nighy’s ‘Christ-MAS is all around us’ from Love Actually gets stuck in our heads. Come now, it isn’t just me. But I won’t bother you about Christmas yet, nor even, indeed, about love. Let’s talk about art instead. Art is all around us!
Bristol’s old city wall, brightened with hundreds of colourful twisty ties.
As someone who left the ability to drive when I emigrated twelve years ago, I do a lot of walking, and I don’t mind it. Even when I’m walking the same route to and from work every day, I enjoy taking pictures from my journey and reflecting on it later, scribbling details in one of my handy-dandy notebooks.
I’ve been motivated in this by a hashtag project my sister Nicole St. James started two years ago. #Everythingyoucanwalkto encourages us to get outside and take pictures. We use our phone lenses to frame what we see, and make it into art. Have a look, here.
What qualifies these photos as art? They just feature things found in nature, or random bits of graffiti like a sticker on a lamppost. How do we identify what art is?
Art Derives from Nature
On her Brainpickings website, Maria Popova posted a nice compilation of quotes defining art. She references Frank Lloyd Wright, who observed that art develops the ‘elementary principles of nature into beautiful forms’ for people to use.
A rose is a rose, but it’s art too.
I agree that the relationship between nature and art is key. Being out in the fresh air, in the colour and grandeur of the landscape, opens our minds more to appreciate art and beauty. So when I’m walking along, provided I’m not stressing too much about something stupid, I am more liable to look around and interpret what I see as beautiful, and capable of use in art.
Art Creates the Unexpected
The other thing that opens my mind to art as I’m out walking is finding something unexpected. A painting on the side of a building, or a baby’s shoe hung in a tree. These give me pause, make me think, question: what’s the story here?
In remarks detailed by a New York Public Library article in the Huffington Post, Leon Botstein called art necessary to ‘discover the imagination.’ He also noted its ‘powerful protection against boredom.’ In order to do so, of course art has to surprise you a little. As for defining it, he said: ‘If it seems to evoke, even inadvertently… it can be a piece of art.’
Yes, those weird pieces of street art, even the most obscure or minimalistic modern art—if they cause emotion, even frustration or confusion, they are art! After all, it’s a frustrating and confusing world. We have to expect art to reflect that, at least occasionally. Look at Kafka, or Beckett, or Joyce. The bizarre, somewhat disjointed narratives they created qualify as literature partly because they awaken us to the same qualities in the real world.
The Unbearable Inconvenience of Feeling
My personal definition of art, plain and simple: It makes you think, and it makes you feel. That includes literature. As writers, we definitely have the power to do those things, if people let us.
Encountered this ‘Love me’ sticker in Paris. Ceci une pipe? Or a poignant plea from a wayward artist?
Admittedly, thinking and feeling aren’t everyone’s cup of tea. In a passage from my novel Artefacts, a teacher confronts the rather challenging seventh grader, Luke, after Luke covers the toilet conveniences in paper mache and uses the excuse that he’s made art.
‘You can’t use art just to inconvenience people,’ Mr. Tamworth said. ‘Or even solely to shock people, I would argue.’
‘They say it’s supposed to make people feel,’ Luke snapped. ‘That’s pretty damn inconvenient.’
And it is, it is inconvenient, sometimes excruciating, especially when art or literature places another human being’s pain-stricken soul in front of us. Art is all around us, bursting before our eyes, blooming in our minds, and the beauty of it can ache. But we use it to create our own work.
So we cry at movies (including Love Actually. You know it isn’t just me!) as we are forced to contemplate what we might do in a similar situation. We feel as if we can fly when listening to music like Ralph Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ and new imagery and ideas seep through our veins. We look at an art installation in the street and start thinking about who put it there, and why. And eventually, these feelings and thoughts, these what ifs and bits of string, help us formulate new stories, and put new art into the world.
