Family – Nastasya Parker

Preserving

This Week’s Bit of String: Jam from the hedgerows

The acers behind the school were already blushing scarlet when our new term started on Monday the 2nd of September. It felt too early, as if I’d missed out on something. Shouldn’t we already have got to know our new students and settled them into routine by the time the leaves turn?

There’s no time like autumn to remind us of… time. School starts, orienting students (and those of us working with them) toward exams. The garden outdoes itself and nature accelerates toward harvest. There’s my little Bear’s birthday–they just turned 23 this week. I’ve definitely missed out.

There are new writing deadlines and many special needs care plans to learn. I must jumpstart my diet and catch up on reading while my energy’s still depleted from the summer. Then family crisis strikes, and I’m glad that while I was home I stayed up till midnight scribbling the memories and got up at 5… Preserving things takes a real time commitment.

And yet, or perhaps therefore, I blew off the writing and reading progress I’d scheduled after school and went foraging for berries instead. For one sunny afternoon, I berried for 2 hours, and the following day I collected for over an hour, ending up soaked in a rain shower. The stormwater pooled in the seed-dimples of the blackberries.

Conserving Strength

I’d done this already. In the brief interval between visiting my family and restarting school, I spent hours picking blackberries and elderberries, then making jam. This was all on my to-do list, a great big planned chunk of time: to gather berries, cook it all down, and brutally sieve it smooth. This gave me 4 medium-small jars.

For a fair bit of money, you can get an elderberry concoction at the chemist’s to combat sore throats and infections. I made blackberry-elderberry jam last year, and I swear my horrible, 19-century-consumptive coughs didn’t stick around very long. This could be sheer coincidence, but in case tasty jam can help curtail illness, I’m not taking my chances without it.

This week’s batch of jam came to only half a single big jar. Not very good, is it? After a fair bit of effort. It uncomfortably mirrors certain writing projects once I’ve read through critically and realise the piece isn’t getting anywhere.

But having spent afternoons outside, I felt better than I had since school started. Sometimes the act of choosing what to preserve is as useful as the result. Foraging, alone in a back lane or field, my mind streamlines to one purpose and the many other commitments feel lighter for a while.

And I enjoyed rustling through the hedgerows again. I have great respect for these ecosystems, towering above me at this point in the year. Bright red rosehips like beacons along the top, bindweed buds like kisses and the sun glowing through their flowers’ white petals, the jumbled jewels of blackberry bunches mixing black with still-scarlet. Elderberries are particularly beautiful in my opinion, the delicate network of stems connecting shining berries: black, silvery-red, or pink-flecked green.

Preserving Memories

I realised too why I feel particularly myself when I’m caught in the rain. It’s an unmistakable impression that I’m seizing the day, regardless of the weather. Maybe I’m conflating vitality with inner self, but it’s something worthwhile, either way.

When we’re confronted with the changing of seasons, it can feel as if time picks up tempo exponentially. Every ball we juggle is flying faster, and which one should we chase first? I’m going to work and keeping my house just about clean, and checking in with my family and cooking meals and entering writing competitions and sending out critiques for other writers.

But those hours outside might stick with me most. I scribble daily to recount how I’m building relationships with my students, and my dreams in broken-up nights. Spending quieter moments in the fresh air, focused on hedgerow microcosms or the fine vistas beyond, keeps me in a mindset that livens other descriptions, such as of my walking commute to work. Becoming more aware, I have more to preserve.

I’m probably not the only one who rushes at tasks, clamouring to tick a good variety of them off my list, assuming that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. But making jam this week, I realised this isn’t always the case, nor should we wish it to be. Sometimes the act of gathering is more important than the fruit.

This can be true of writing. Staying open to ideas may benefit us more than toiling to write every single one down. It’s definitely true of families–preserving memories is important, but making them will always be the most precious time. And maybe slowing down briefly can be the key to keeping on.

What do you like to preserve, and how do you find the best ways to do it?

Learning Abroad

This Week’s Bit of String: On the way to somewhere else

I’d never have got into this whole immigrant fix, splitting myself between two countries, if I hadn’t done a term abroad while in college. My major was English/ Education in New Hampshire, where contributing to class discussion was key.

In the UK, on the other hand, professors seemed flummoxed when people turned up. They didn’t even expect us to read the assigned literature: “If you didn’t do the reading for this week, I hope you do at some point in your life. It’s a great book…”

*Twin American spires: church steeple and rocket*

I had read each book, as it happened, and was unimpressed having it summarised in a murmur for 3 hours. Screw it, I decided. I’ll do the reading while on the train to somewhere more interesting.

And off I went, to friends in Glasgow, Bangor, Wolverhampton, and especially London. I read, and listened to new-to-me British music (Texas, Robbie Williams, Steps), survived on Kingsmill rolls and Edam cheese and Smirnoff Ice, and fell for three different guys in quick succession, the final one being my now-husband.

I also wrote a wacky but fantastic story about a girl whose heart, in the form of a cookie, is eaten for breakfast. I got an A for that class, after only attending 1.3 lessons. I did the reading!

What I Wrote This Summer

*New England idyll: Billings Farm Museum, Vermont*

It’s always interesting to see other writers post about their vacations in the summer. Some catch up on reading, and many are busy with their children during the holidays anyway. For me, I spend 4 weeks out of the 6-week break going to see my family in New England. There are definite vacation aspects to this—the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the ice cream.

It’s also very busy as I condense a year’s worth of interactions into 1/12 of the time. Half my family are too busy to keep in touch when I’m not there, so I run around trying to help people out and make memories. They are all I have, and they are precarious without me recording them. When not Doing Things, I’m scribbling about them.

This leaves little reading time. I have writing commitments—promised critiques, etc, and also students I check in with even in the summer, so I squeeze those in. What I do find, though, is that the travel, the hiking and driving and swimming and reflecting, open me up to learning a lot of random things. Without the more rigid structure of work and long-term writing projects, my brain relaxes just enough to sponge up new information.

What I Learned This Summer

There were my discoveries while hiking, which I researched later:
The rather formidable Argiope aurantia (ok, yellow garden spider) keeping watch from her web in the lake bridge. It’s also known as a zigzag spider because of that uniquely thick central line. The purpose of this unique pattern is still unknown to us.

The Warren Rocket: My family got together in Warren, NH, near the White Mountains. While other towns have Civil War cannons on their greens or in front of their schools, Warren (population peaked in 1860 at 1100-something) has a great big Redstone missile rocket. (Pictured at the top.) It was funded and transported by a local veteran hoping to encourage interest in space travel.

Signs around the rocket tell visitors about SS Officer Wernher von Braun, who supervised concentration camp workers to manufacture missiles that killed 1400 Londoners. After the war, Americans smuggled von Braun out of Germany to design even deadlier rockets over here, but also realise his childhood dream of sending rockets to space. I wonder what the childhood dreams of his captive labourers were, or those civilians killed in airstrikes.

*You can see why the Morse Museum caught my eye…*

The Morse Museum: Another early morning Warren hike discovery, a building with granite plaques advertising Curios of India and China, and African Game Trophies. Now-vacant, it was dedicated in 1928 to house the collections of Ira H Morse, a local shoe store mogul and game hunter. There’s a colourful bio online of IH and others, written by affectionate family members. They include his adventures but also quirks like how he would “ream out” uncooperative salt shakers, at home or in public.

Speaking of museums, there are a couple in the area which I like to visit.
Billings Farm, a late 19th century agricultural reenactment site. It’s great for learning about cows and dairy, edible plants and farm life (see above). When we visited this year, they were making pasta in the farmhouse kitchen. I hadn’t realised how long pasta has been a staple in the US (it’s much more recent in the UK), but in fact Thomas Jefferson sampled and loved it in Europe, and by the time of the Civil War macaroni was very popular.

The Hood Museum at Dartmouth College: I always stand in awe before the incredible, ancient Assyrian tablets before moving on to the current exhibits. This summer, a diverse selection of art including Musasama’s elaborate arrangement of textiles and natural objects across the floor, part of the Maple Tree Series, made me aware of the maple tree abolitionist movement. Did you know that in the 1790s, free people of colour, white settlers, and native Americans advocated substituting maple syrup for cane sugar, to starve the economy propping up enslavers?

My family creates a good learning environment, with our eclectic interests. Dinner discussions might be about what’s the oldest continuously-used language in the world (Hebrew, Tamil, Sanskrit… Lithuanian and Icelandic appear in the top 10, too). My dad found an 1884 encyclopaedia in our AirBnB and read passages out loud to us. There was no entry for childbirth, but lots of details on “Brawling in Church” and the various statutes against it.

Even though I didn’t do much writing work over the summer, the feeling of my mind loosening to hold more is not an unwriterly sensation. New stories could develop from here!

Do travel and family time inspire your writing?

Incorporating Wildness

This Week’s Bit of String: S-curves under Main Street

Like many former mill towns, my parents’ town in New Hampshire is built on a river. To be more precise, it is built between a series of riverbends. The Mascoma River threads beneath Main Street twice, and beneath another principal artery around the corner of an intersection.

We moved to this town when I was a somewhat irascible 8-year-old and its charms were lost on me for a decade or two. The town wasn’t really feeling itself for a while there, either. When I visit now, and walk early in the morning to avoid the worst heat, I know to look over both sides of each bridge for heron, deer, and bald eagles. And I’ve started wondering at the river itself.

The town buildings of Main Street, mainly originating in the late 1800s or early 1900s, are built right next to the river but a fair way up in elevation. The banks are unbreached walls of leaves. Boulders stand in the water as if swept there by glaciers, just a car park away from the former laundromat (future microbrewery). There’s a heavily wooded peninsula in the middle of the river section near the Lutheran church. I’ve never seen a person down there but have seen a pair of deer drinking.

I’ve started wondering about all this. What was the river like before the town was built? Was it a great deal wilder in its natural state? Did boats travel down it when the mill was functioning, somehow steering around the boulders?

Inner Wilds

While contemplating how closely we can live with wildness in nature, I began drawing parallels to inner life. We grow up civilising ourselves, so to speak: building various blocks we deem useful or desirable within our minds. As we develop our mental landscape and moderate our personalities, what torrents gush, untameable, between these blocks?

*This is actually right in the middle of town.*

An interesting analogy as I traipse through the grey-gold dawn in my childhood town, and reflect on different incarnations of myself. I wonder at which point I was the most wild, the most untamed. It’s the moments when I feel most unique that I feel most myself, like when I used to run outside alone into thunderstorms. But there are so many shared characteristics among us all, equating identity with individuality may just be another societal pressure.

As an oldest child of four, and in a religious family, I’m not sure how wild I’ve ever been, really. Who knows what my natural state would be, and whether my eagerness to conform affects my writing. Most likely, my writing is where I break free from it a little.

Defying Expectations

After all, the problem with trying to conform is that there are so many standards to meet from others, and often they are contradictory. It’s cool to be non-conformist, at such times when society expects it from us. It’s equally challenging with writing: be clear but don’t over-reveal. Ensure your characters are unique, but recognisable and likeable.

*Even the built-up bits won’t last forever. The mill upriver from town.*

Writing a happy ending is practically an act of rebellion these days. Allowing a villain to be truly villainous breaks the writing mould (and I don’t think I have it in me to do that, although I’m happy to read it). Similarly, opting for quiet, non-busy moments in real life may be the ultimate subversion. Am I at my wildest when I’m out hiking or when I’m curled up reading a book?

By linking the word wild to its root of natural (with connections to wold; woodlands), then it’s easier to accept these contradictions. After all, nature can be both calm and then fierce. Sometimes at the same time—tonight I tried to connect with my wild self by going out in rolling thunder and glimmers of lightning, but it barely even rained. Well, I was there even if the storm wasn’t quite.

What wildness have you built your life around, and how do you reconnect with it every now and then?

Making It Up

This Week’s Bit of String: Near-misses and resistant materials

“Miss, did you ever almost cause the death of a small child?” a year 10 boy asks casually as we sit on the high stools around a Design Technology table. Three boys with various tools and MDF fragments, me with my laptop and notebooks.

This is Resistant Materials. I know very little about CAD, woodwork or metalwork, but I’m supporting a student doing the GCSE. When I told my husband I’d be helping with Resistant Materials, he quipped, “Is that the course, or the students?”

Fair question. But I’ve clearly won some trust. The boy who’s asked this surprising question explains to me that he was once on a ferris wheel with a friend, and her shoe fell off and almost hit a toddler on the ground. Hence, he feels he was beside someone who almost accidentally caused the death of a small child.

Story ideas pivot on crucial moments like the one he mentioned. A slight change in breeze, an incremental rise or fall in the Big Wheel, and the shoe might have hit. I noted the exchange with the Year 10 boy and preliminary thoughts about the alternate scenarios in my daily scribbles, ready for half-term when I have a few free hours to sit, and wrestle out my first new story of the year. I’ll have my latest novel edits all typed up by then.

Exploring Options

Around the time the Resistant Materials boy mentioned his anecdote, I was reading through a literary magazine called Story. It’s based in the US, and I discovered it because I was looking for submission possibilities and Googled “short story magazine.” Sometimes we forget to keep things simple; we look through comprehensive listings of publications and deadlines and fret over word counts… This was more a case of “ask and you shall receive.”

There were some great stories in this issue. My favourite was about a group of boys and their scout leader who got trapped in a cave for several days. The dynamic among the boys before, during, and after was fascinatingly written. It made me realise–and again this sounds SO obvious but it’s another thing that I lose sight of now and then–we get to make stuff up.

I’m pretty sure the writer hadn’t been stuck in a cave or been close to someone who was. But they did a great job making up the scenario and tracking its impacts. I’m going to do that too, I thought. Make something up.

I tend to be a bit timid with my ideas, whether it’s from actual fear or more likely, lack of mental energy. Starting from scratch is EFFORT, to borrow the ultimate disparaging statement from my students. That’s why it can be useful to begin with a memory, with a favourite setting or even person, or with a retelling, a twist on something old.

What About the Future?

Lately, I’ve indulged in inventing future scenarios. If my imagination is slightly inhibited regarding stories, I severely limit it when considering how real life could turn out. I’ve done this from a young age, to avoid disappointment. I specifically remember preparing for my 8th birthday, to be celebrated at Chuck E Cheese’s, something I’d wanted for years. Rides! Games! Pizza! I’d wanted it, but wouldn’t allow myself to picture it, because that would risk building expectations.

If we’re tuned into the world, and we have an ounce of empathy, it can’t escape our notice that we’re clinging to some privilege. Whatever tough times we’ve had, billions in the world are substantially worse off. My husband and I remark to each other sometimes about the Event, an imaginary but tacitly half-expected reversal of world fortunes.

“This would be a strategic location in the Event,” he says when we take in hilltop views on a hike.

“For the Event,” I say when I add to the ranks of canned goods in the cupboard.

But it’s also possible that amazing things will happen in the future. You know, on occasion. Struggling to sleep with exam stress on behalf of my students recently, I started imagining what, for example, our 30th or 40th anniversary might look like, having just celebrated our 20th.

Maybe we will be surrounded by family next time, instead of on our own. There could be a new generation of children on the scene, and though another decade could see further health complications for my parents, I imagined my own kiddo helping to ensure they’re looked after, and this brought comfort.

We can’t get attached to any single projection of the future. But envisioning positives—perhaps especially in the form of small, everyday details—is a new bravery for me. Part of appreciating what I have means letting go of my expectation of disappointment. And if events look to go in a different direction, then I’ll just make up new hopes.

How do you keep sight of the freedom to make things up?

Writing to Remember

This Week’s Bit of String: Memory manager

My mother always said you can tell a storm’s coming when the leaves blow upside down. It doesn’t sound logical, but she’s right. Once you’ve seen enough storms, you recognise a particular silvery toss.

When I was a kid, we lived across from a lake and spent whole summer days there, sometimes cut short by thunderstorms. As black clouds massed over the water, the maple tree beside the landlord’s boathouse would thrash and moan.

And we’d run for it, holding hands across the road, towels streaming behind us. Once indoors, we watched lightning jitter over the lake’s teased-up waves, and sometimes the power went out.

One such evening, we played on the scratchy carpet illuminated only by my dad’s battery-powered reading lamp. Perched on the edge of the sofa in his shorts, Dad flipped through a computer magazine and sang about the glossy adverts inside. I still recall the words:

“Super T-R-S control. Memory manager! Memory manager! Free inside this bo-oook!” As with many of his ditties, the first line copies the opening of “Good King Wenceslas.” Then he finished with a high-pitched flourish.

At the time, we were probably bored with being inside in the dark, hot in the humidity, and hungry for a dinner my mom wouldn’t have been able to prepare without electricity, but all I remember is Dad’s goofy crooning, and it makes me smile.

35 years later, I have no clue what a super TRS control memory manager does in a computer, or if it is in fact something a computer still relies upon. I do know that at every stage of my writing life, memory has been an essential motivator.

A Justification for Stealing

As writers we are somewhat notorious for snatching versions of people from our lives and wriggling them into stories. Sometimes a whole person might get caught up with the bits of string we collect.

Preserving one-time theatre buddies, exchange students, or other lost friends in my writing helped get me through high school and college. I could huddle in my work when metaphorical storms came.

*A local wall. Layers and fragments and wear and tear… it’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?*

Remembering is more than piecing together fragments. It is a profession of faith: You’re not here, but I believe in you, and the closeness we shared.

I’ve always loved Lionel Shriver’s line from We Need to Talk About Kevin, about a good-bye kiss the protagonist clings to: “I have relived that moment so many times now that the memory cells must be pale and broken down, like the denim of much-loved jeans.”

I’d done the same thing. Curled into a college half-desk in my Contemporary Poetry class, hunkered against a tempest of morning sickness, I would zone out from discussing TS Eliot’s “The Wasteland” and recall saying goodbye to my now-husband in Victoria Station. He’d cried and said, “You’re not the sort of person one forgets.”

I’d worried for the integrity of my memories, whether they’d buckle under the strain of my reliance. Is a remembered instant like a favourite song, and if you rewind too many times the cassette ribbon gets tangled and won’t play?

Nostalgia vs Declinism

Our memories aren’t saved into hard drives. They can get corrupted retroactively, or embellished. This is why I do my daily scribbles. My memory has a back-up. I’ve conserved in my pencil scrawl what ordinary felt like when my kiddo still lived here with us in the UK. I’ve described countless morning walks, in case the trees all get chopped down or my legs stop working. I’ve put down the frustrations and small wins and many laughs and a few tears over two years of getting to know SEN students who are now about to take exams and leave.

Studies show that the older we get, the more we prefer to reexamine the past than imagine the future. This is the tricky boundary between nostalgia and declinism, believing the best is all behind us and nothing good lies ahead.

Crossing that border is dangerous not just to ourselves, causing anxiety and pessimism, but potentially to society. The nagging feeling that things must have been better before, surely the nation was greater once—it can lead to people making some selfish political decisions.

I get the anxiety, of course. When the future flashes into my mind, it’s often like the maple tree by the boathouse at our childhood lake. A menacing, pale toss. The present could so easily blow away; storms of some kind are inevitable.

So we run for it, into our memories, and I’m thankful for how writing has reinforced mine. If the alternative is oblivion, I am unrepentant about my pilfering. Besides, memory needs imagination to keep going.

While a remembered person or location can inspire me to start a story, it’s the moment when they alchemise with other elements of fiction, when they become something truly new, that motivates me to keep going. That’s when I know I’m on to something.

Understanding that helps keep me from getting lost in the past. The power of synthesising the old into something fresh and creative means we can make something from the future, whatever it brings. It’s like my dad making new songs from a Christmas carol and a computer ad, and I’m still singing it decades later.

How do you preserve your favourite memories?

New Pleasures Prove

This Week’s Bit of String: Tale of two benches

Last Saturday night we went on a date. We got dinner from the chippy and sat in the rare clear evening on a bench above the car park.

“Like two yoofs,” my husband said as we popped open our cans of Rio tropical drink. “But without the cheeky ciggy.”

After our chips, we did a cultural about-face at the town cinema watching a broadcast of the National Theatre’s excellent The Motive and the Cue. Based on diaries from when John Gielgud directed Richard Burton in Hamlet, it made us want to see the actual 1964 production. It was my kind of nerdiness and luckily, my husband was all for it.

I remembered when we first moved to the town, new to the area (in my case, new to the whole nation) and unsure how to entertain our 3-year-old. We wandered up to a school playground on a typical cloudy afternoon. A plain, plasticky bench had a slightly rusting plaque: “In memory…” and a person’s name.

“Not the most flattering tribute,” said my husband.

“Well, it doesn’t say ‘In loving memory’ or anything,” I pointed out.

That made him laugh, and I felt smart and seen for a minute. That didn’t often happen in the first months as an immigrant and wife.

This week is our 20th anniversary. We’d used a John Donne quote from “The Bait” on our wedding invitations.

“Come live with me, and be my love, And we will some new pleasures prove…”

I didn’t really have an idea what those pleasures would look like (does anybody?), and it took us a while to find the confidence and freedom–and economic stability–to come up with the successful melding of tastes like we had last week.

If That’s All We Have

It took time. Two decades ago, our wedding song was Louis Armstrong’s “We Have All the Time in the World,” from the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. That is my husband’s type of nerdiness: gadgetry and fast cars and also outer space.

When we met and I was nearly 20, I was keen to lose myself. The movies we watched were ones he thought I should see, and I was thrilled to be trusted with them. We had 20 days together—weird how this number keeps popping up today—between meeting and my return from Old England to New. At some point in that mad rush, he played “We Have All the Time in the World” for me, and I was moved to the point of no return.

I’ve written about time before, though. It can be more romantic when you don’t have much of it, in the same way we sometimes use it better when we know it’s scarce.

When we said our wedding vows and I eventually sorted the paperwork for our kiddo and me to emigrate, the dream of being together became a promise. One of those takes more work than the other!

*Poses like these! New Orleans, New Years 2024*

The effort has been amply rewarded. My husband is a musician, so in addition to being immersed in James Bond and Star Trek, I get to be a jazz band groupie. I would never have imagined that my cautious British physicist would turn out to be a star poser for photos, or that he’d come along to Shakespeare performances.

Sticking with it for the amount of time that change requires is a small miracle. Other times, we swoop to each other’s rescue in an instant. That’s another miracle: when one vulnerable person reveals their desperation and their partner responds with care, no matter how lost and alone they too may feel.

Suddenly You Flare in My Sight

If a story equals character plus event plus time, there are infinite combinations. I come up with fiction ideas by asking “What if…?” sometimes about real-life situations, but not usually about my personal ones. Lately, though, I imagine alternative realities which would have unspooled had I made different choices.

We often liked to tell people, if they asked how we met, that we never would have if he’d been a moment later heading back to his uni, and had missed the train. But what if we’d met seven years ago, or ten, instead of twenty-three? If we met the same way, as students with no assets swiftly adding a child to the mix—we’d never have been able to live together as a family. The immigration laws are so tight now, they keep increasing the amount a British citizen must have in the bank to earn the right to bring an international spouse home. I ache for the people kept apart because of this, because of meeting each other a decade too late.

This helps me appreciate what we have, and I track our moments of delight in my daily scribbles. As favours we gave all our wedding guests copies of Wendell Berry’s poem “The Wild Rose.” He compares his longtime partner to a wild rose blooming… “where yesterday there was only shade, and once more I am blessed, choosing again what I chose before.”

There are so many twists in life which we can’t control, and always a fair few choices to regret. It’s nice to remember the ones we’re more than satisfied with, even—dare I say it—proud of. What surprising choices would you make all over again?

Trouble of Our Own Making

This Week’s Bit of String: Saturday morning movies

One of our family traditions was letting Mom stay in bed on Saturday mornings, and we’d watch a movie. This sounds simple, but we had to choose from our videotapes, mostly random stuff recorded from basic cable, plus Disney feature cartoons. I’m the oldest of four kids, with five years between myself and my youngest sister. Certain parties objected to anything in black and white, and it couldn’t be too “mushy,” and one gets creeped out by films with talking animals.

Whenever I vetoed a movie, my siblings would roll their eyes and admit annoyed defeat. “Oh sure, because they get in trouble.”

*This movie’s still a nope from me. But the local vet’s window display was very cute!*

It’s true, I was super sensitive about misunderstood characters in kids’ films, from Anne of Green Gables to Pete’s Dragon. Lady and the Tramp—I couldn’t bear that one (plus, it had talking animals so it was out anyway). It was the same with books: Curious George, for example.

I was petrified of getting in trouble for something I didn’t do, or even worse for something I did. I was the oldest child in a religious family, sensitive by nature, also traumatised by abuse. My dread of getting in trouble was so severe I couldn’t read or watch things where that occurred.

Causation vs Correlation

Lucky for me, in quite a few children’s films, things just happen. We ended up watching Peter Pan a lot (not the cartoon, but a slightly fuzzy tape of Mary Martin performing the lead in the Broadway musical). Plenty happens in that without the characters necessarily causing it.

It’s different as you get older. Characters must be autonomous, reflecting our quest for independence. This means everything that happens stems from protagonists’ decisions, overreaches, and failures.

Every crime-busting film from Miss Congeniality to Hannibal starts with the heroic detective disgracing themselves, and they must salvage their reputation. Every superhero film first establishes them as fallible; their powers are their only shot at redemption.

*We love wonky, flawed characters. But do we have to make them responsible for everything?*

Recently while I finished retyping my entire novel with new edits, I streamed Paddington and Paddington 2 to get through the copying. When I mentioned it to my youngest sister, she was like, “Wait, how do you watch those? Paddington gets in trouble all the time!”

Yeah, I kind of got over that. I had to, or else I’d never read or watch anything. Nor would I be working on my current novel, about possibly the most famous Character Who Gets in Trouble of all time: Eve, the original sinner.

As I edit the book, I’ve been reading about story structure. John Yorke in Into the Woods presents the prototypical story structure as a process of awakening. Initially, the protagonist does not deal well with revelations and things continue going wrong. I just finished Nikesh Shukla’s Your Story Matters, in which he emphasises the importance of causality: the plot springs from a main character’s action or deliberate inaction when faced with new knowledge.

In other words, the main character is SUPPOSED to make it all happen. It’s all their fault. They have to fall a long way in order to teach us how to get back up. Every protagonist, in a sense, is the author’s sacrifice.

Agency vs… Real Life?

Now that I recognise how it works, it’s stressing me out and reviving my aversion to characters getting in trouble. I put a film on and wait for the character to completely blow it. I’m anxious while reading because I know the protagonist is destined to screw things up.

*There are a lot of things bigger than our characters and us.*

I do like a domino plot, though, where each detail causes another; the way John Irving or Margaret Atwood spin massive tales of intricate characters and everything’s interconnected by the end.

As I go through my Eve book yet again, I’m wondering how to cohere the trajectory, Eve’s actions (or inactions) and their consequences. This is a myth retelling, so not everything is strictly in Eve’s control. She has God, Lucifer, and most chaotically, other humans to deal with. Plus, part of my reason for writing this is to repudiate millennia of condemnation. Maybe bucking the traditional structure is acceptable, or am I a bad writer if Eve doesn’t trigger every consequence herself?

I noticed that in Dune 2, the protagonist never fails at any new trick he tries. The developments in the plot are not of his own making—different from a Marvel film. Indeed, Nikesh Shukla notes that the character-triggered consequence story structure is a Western tradition. It makes sense, I guess, that main characters from other, more faith-based cultures have less agency to affect the plot.

We Westerners are obsessed with individuality—the downside being we can be persuaded that any trouble is our fault. In real life, it’s not. Not every time. How tightly do you like your plots linked to your character’s actions? Does it ever cause you anxiety, knowing a character is destined to get in trouble?

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?

Antici…PAtion!

This Week’s Bit of String: Silent night

One of my earliest memories takes place at Christmas. My small New England town put on a Christmas pageant at the church, one of those crowned white ones on a pristine green.

Candles glow in frosty windows as Mary and Joseph journey to the manger and kneel respectfully. Junior high angels dance down the aisles, bare feet thumping over cast iron grates, and the kings stride in their colourful robes.

At the end, the choir sings “Silent Night” as everyone files off the darkened stage. Kings, shepherds, angels and kindergarten cherubs. Joseph, penultimately, exits down the centre aisle and finally Mary, sombre and alone, disappears into a side door. The lights come up and everyone bursts into “Joy to the World.”

*Some of my favourite ornaments, carrying lots of memories*

Can you spot what they forgot? My just-turned-three-year-old self was keenly aware that everyone left the infant Messiah behind. The wooden box-manger only held a doll, but I was inconsolable; to me dolls were as real as anything. I was outraged at the abandonment, sobbing amongst the heavily coated crowd.

My parents found the girl who played Mary, but I wanted nothing to do with that traitorous mother. Then I was introduced to the person who owned the Baby Jesus doll, and that alone calmed me down.

I still wonder at the order of that pageant, unchanged in decades. Through the ensuing years, I loved the pageant, thought it beautiful–but also tenderly sad. That’s Christmas for you, I guess; moments of quiet, of loss, of sudden delight. I was taught that when setting up a collection of short stories, you showcase the best ones first. Maybe it’s our instinct to start strong, but this can result in an anticlimax.

Maintaining Order

Four decades and an ocean now separate me from that distraught doll-defending girl at her first nativity play. I’ve been around long enough to know my ideal festive sequence of events, even if I can’t always control it.

The key is to avoid letdown. You have to hit your checklist in the right moments, before the season over-ripens to wistfulness. Most Christmas films have an element of nostalgia and wish fulfillment that’s too sad the day after Christmas. The build-up is the best part of Christmas, really. Putting ornaments on the tree is a lot more special than taking them down.

*There can be a lot of stress at Christmas, but Obie the Bosscat is keeping on top of things.*

The word anticipate shares a root with capture. It means to grasp something beforehand. That’s quite exciting, isn’t it? Not like the tedium of just waiting, because at least we know that December 25th will, in fact, arrive (unlike a lucrative writing contract, for example).

I get Christmas tunes playing in my earbuds during hikes around mid-November, and the lights and decorations go up at the very start of December, so I can enjoy them for longer. Everything must be in place for the cosy moments between all the running around. At some point, I will be reminded that it matters more to me than to others, and each sparkle will disappear from centre stage.

Heightened Sensations

Christmas forms strong memories because it engages all our senses. We associate smells, tastes, sights, sounds, and feelings with the holiday. When a moment incorporates all senses, I think our memories cohere around it more firmly.

We’ve got Christmas songs, both jolly or deeply moving, we’ve got sparkly lights and shiny ornaments and the contrasts of crimson berries against sharp green holly. We’ve got smells of cinnamon and pine, and tastes of citrus and chocolate. We’ve got the sensations of warm hearths and fuzzy jumpers and the bracing chill from anaemic skies.

Great storytelling engages all the senses as well, which is why Christmas stories and films and songs can be particularly moving. Listening, viewing, reading them, and even creating our own helps us to seize those moments because otherwise, we might forget the bits that turned out how we wanted, when some events inevitably proceed less smoothly.

I wonder if our relentless preparations are partly an attempt to find exactly the right combination of sensory stimuli that make us feel young, make us feel loved and valued as we believe we once did. We are desperate to capture something, maybe that outpouring that George Bailey finds at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, or the kindness and mutual appreciation of a goose dinner at the Cratchit family table.

What are your favourite moments to capture in the holidays? How do you manage to seize them, and do they fall before December 25th or after?

Fever

This Week’s Bit of String: Overheated eyeballs

I have this bad habit of getting coughs. These aren’t misguidedly romantic chest coughs that might have made it into an epic nineteenth century novel or opera, just ugly, scraping hacks. My throat spasms into wretched fits. It carries on for weeks, my ribs get bruised, it’s exhausting.

Often, I’ll briefly get a high temperature with it. The kind of fever that crawls up behind your eyeballs and tenderises your skull. It’s not great for productivity, but does inspire vivid descriptions, if I do say so myself.

It may be a sign that I’ve been doing too much. I feel I should be able to Do All The Things. After all, I eat plenty of fruits and veggies, and get up early for exercise and fresh air. However, I seem to get sick when I’ve been completing a big writing project while also, as always, working full-time and taking care of my family. It’s as if that extra creative endeavour pushes me over the edge.

*Hiking during our camping weekend–totally worth it.*

At the moment, I’ve just missed a couple days of work for flu-like symptoms, probably a back-to-school virus, so now I’m trying my best to be quiet and not start coughing. This followed a weekend camping trip to the Peaks and copious reading about story structure, plus overtime planning resources for small group interventions at work, doing critiques for other writers, trying to finish a short story and while I haven’t quite begun the next rewrite of my novel, I’m thinking REALLY hard about it, ok?

Health Warning

Can writing affect our health? Is it one thing too much? I definitely am less grouchy when I’ve been able to write, preferably in a quiet setting, unlikely though that last bit is. I think it helps my mental health—but maybe it’s just that I place high standards on myself and I feel better for Getting Things Done, whatever the things may be.

Writing is a passion—and the root of that word is bound up with suffering. It is ‘that which must be endured.’ Hard, necessary work. It is absolutely fun and exciting, too! But it takes a lot of effort and relentless, toiling THOUGHT to make it good. So yes, it probably does impact our health.

I always felt guilty missing work if I picked up a bug while traveling, or if I’d run myself down finishing a novel. Was it wrong of me to let my personal interests impede my contracted employment? I worried I was behaving as selfishly as I perceived people who always called in sick on Mondays because they were still hungover. I’m still not convinced I’m being completely fair to co-workers or to my family in how I expend my energies.

But there are other fevers that make our brains itch. Characters that pummel our skulls from within and ideas that sputter up from deep inside us. We’ve got to write.

Incandescence

Sometimes, I do great work when I’m sick. I wrote a play during an extended bout of flu. It was about a team monitoring a whole city’s worth of subconsciouses, spying on people’s dreams to solve crimes.

*I call this one: Still life of a working writer mid-term*

Weird, I know. But kinda cool? Anyway, it did get through a competition and we performed it. Someday I might develop it further than a single act, and make a series of it or something.

In the same way that extreme weather or stress sears certain things into our memories and forms indelible creative impressions, health events can crystallise ideas.

From the tuberculosis that ravaged the Bronte family to Stephen King’s childhood ear infections which he writes about in his memoir On Writing, it does seem as if cycles of illness and health sharpen our imaginations. Have you ever found this?

While I was sick this week, my brain came to a screeching halt over work things like differentiating Science vocabulary on independent or dependent variables. But it did present me with a striking novel-related sequence, like a dream Eve or Cain might have. It unfolded before me as I trudged to work (and didn’t stay long). My elevated temperature practically distilled my story’s essence better than my healthy brain could.

What links do you see between your health and your creativity?