Travel – Nastasya Parker

Dreaming Spires

This Week’s Bite of String: Noise in an Oxford museum

While I was admiring Japanese cloisonné vases in the Ashmolean this half-term week, a family came along. They had a couple of primary school-aged girls shining cheap little laser torches everywhere. The slightly older of the two girls was quietly singing to herself, but the other was shouting and running around.

“Beatrice!” her parents kept saying in upper middle class tones, ever surprised at unconventional behaviour. “Beatrice, you’re getting silly… Beatrice, we’re in a museum. It can be quiet and peaceful…”

“It CAN be quiet and peaceful,” retorted Beatrice, without slowing down a bit.

Gotta love a girl no more than 6 who’s already dismantling arguments on semantic grounds.

The brief clamour enhanced my experience. I was on a solo overnight trip, and spending the afternoon in the massive Ashmolean with only myself to set the pace was a treat. I’d browse a couple of galleries, then sit and scribble about my finds, then repeat. Favourites were the ancient Assyrian and Babylonian exhibits, complementing the several Nimrud temple panels at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum in my home region of New Hampshire, and examples of Islamic and Indian geometric patterns and art.

There are exhibits predating those civilisations, and it inspires me to see how early humans, too, were compelled to preserve and create beauty. Feeding my brain on such exhibits felt rejuvenating, certainly unlike revising for standardised GCSE exams. But feasting on snippets of real life conversations thrills me, too.

Rest and Change

People like to say, “Change is as good as a rest.” It’s not strictly true; I think change enables us to push ourselves further without rest which we may need. Long-term, it’s possibly not of equal restorative value.

*A little bit of reading time, Worcester Shrub Hill station*

That said, it felt as if changing up my brain’s intake for a day or two rejuvenated me. In addition to visiting the museum, I read Mslexia magazine on the train rides, wandered along the canal in Worcester during a stopover, explored both the busy streets and the tranquil parks of Oxford totalling 43,000 steps in less than 36 hours, and enjoyed a theatre production of Little Women.

Seeing the literary classic on stage was the main purpose of my journey, which I learned about thanks to well-targeted Facebook ads. It was a terrific show, with energy and heart. They made use of birch trees as set pieces, and seeing those made me feel connected to New England from afar.

After the play, I went hunting for ice cream, as is my late-night, post-show wont, and I didn’t go to bed till midnight. But I didn’t leave my hotel for the next day’s explore until 10:30, and that is pretty luxurious for me.

Spending Time Well

So I took a bit of the morning to recuperate, and keep up with my daily scribbles. I have some novel-planning to work on, but I didn’t get to it; didn’t even read much. As usual when I travel, making the most of the experience involves a lot of walking and a fair bit of writing down what I want to remember.

Before visiting Oxford, I’d made an effort to put all my new novel work into a Plotting Table, with columns for each character and rows for each chapter. The Plotting Table is super helpful for seeing where stakes may need to be raised for some characters, and so forth. I wanted to print this out and pore over it on paper while out of the house, undistracted by chores.

But our printer is at least 10 years old and is suffering memory loss. It no longer recognises paper. I’ll be poking pages into it and it insists said pages do not exist. Or it will pick up a sheet of paper (or heck, two or three at once), load it an inch, then suffer a fresh bout of amnesia and say it’s out of paper anyway.

I had to give up on printing my Plotting Table. I had nearly 2 miles to walk to the train station, with my rucksack of overnight necessities, and I couldn’t risk missing the train. Turns out I was a bit busy, anyway.

Like Beatrice at the Museum, I would say vacations CAN be quiet and peaceful—but they certainly don’t have to be. Just this once, I think I struck a decent balance.

Have you given your mind any change lately?

Cracking the Code

This Week’s Bit of String: Letters on on ancient platform

As someone who reads everything around me practically without thinking, I instinctively attempted deciphering signs on our recent trip to Athens. My knowledge of this lettering comes from Russian more than anything else. In 2000, I visited Russia and wandered around staring at buildings and signs.

I identified the letter pi from a movie poster for The Patriot. While out for a meal, my Moscow friend said to me, “The waitress has a name like yours: Natasha.” And I could then spot the symbol for the “sh” sound.

One of my problems was confusing P, D, L, and G. They’re all sort of mountainous little shapes. In Greece, I spent time noting the differences. Other letters came clear through signs for pharmacies, using the phi and the mu. There were inscriptions, such as the mural behind the ionic pillars of the University building. Above marble steps strewn with empty cans and KFC rubbish, the mural portrays the academic subjects as robed women approaching a throned man. Physics, Mathematics, History, with Rhetoric and Poetics gossiping in the rear. Each figure had her subject name stencilled above, presenting me an opportunity to work on understanding the Greek letters.

What really struck me, though, was a votive from 400 BCE displayed under the Acropolis. It was dedicated to Hermes and Aphrodite, with their names carved into the stone in ancient lettering. EPMOY, said the stone. The day before, we’d walked up and down Ermou Street, and I hadn’t realised it was named for the Messenger God. It’s one thing for pillars to stand over a couple thousand years, and really something else for letters to do the same.

Countdown

Translating Greek letters bit by bit is like building a story from “pieces of string” gathered from daily life. It was nice to have a little extra time to contemplate the pieces, being on holiday. At work, we’re running out of time. My year 11s, regardless of special needs, will sit exams starting in just over a week.

For some, reading and processing the questions will be most difficult. I think of the times I’d look at a sign in Greece, work out what the letters meant–and still not know the word because it was too far removed from the English equivalent. Our students with severe dyslexia expend their energy decoding letters, but still have to understand the question, and write essay answers.

For other students, a main challenge is mining the deeper meaning of a text. It’s particularly difficult with poetry. One student on the autism spectrum was upset with a recent mark for poetry analysis. He had worked hard thinking what to write about the poem, and had interpreted it literally.

I told him poets often speak in code. They use symbols to represent bigger ideas. Blake’s “blood running down palace walls” in “London” represents cruel rulers, and Hughes’s terrified hare in “Bayonet Charge,” which I thought was metaphorical until just a month or so ago, a way of describing the hopping, chaotic sparks–this represents innocence harmed in war.

“We’ve got to crack the code,” I told my hardworking, frustrated student. “We have to tell the examiners what the writer might have really meant.”

Beneath the Surface

*Perhaps a bit less left to interpretation here, or perhaps not. Street art in Athens*

The word code comes from caudex, “tree trunk,” early books made of wooden tablets. These would be used to establish rules in writing. So books are essentially code, and whether wittingly or not, some translation will be involved. From the trunk of any volume we read, the meaning might branch out and strike different people in different ways.

Books are a code to the writer’s intent and context. At least, for the purposes of English exams they are. Heavens forbid anyone read or write anything for fun. Another student on the autism spectrum lamented having to revise Jacobean history for Macbeth, and Victorian for A Christmas Carol. It’s a lot to remember, none of which today’s students find clearly relevant.

“We have to know the circumstances around the writer in order to understand why they wrote and what they wanted to teach readers.” I explained, “It’s a good skill because everything we see people post online, they might have a purpose that isn’t obvious.”

“I never do that,” she said. “I just tell it like it is.”

I’m not sure any of us are so upfront all the time though. I’ve certainly seen her excuse herself from class claiming she needs the toilet, while sweeping away with phone in hand. Deciphering the code of an individual person is never fully possible, because our circumstances change and we constantly evolve.

It’s still worth trying, though. An open mind and willingness to take a little time puzzling out another human being is maybe the best reason to hone our interpretation skills. How do you keep yours sharp?

Mythology and Me

This Week’s Bit of String: Candles on a motorbike

At nearly 11 pm on Easter Saturday, the taxi driver from Athens airport told me about the seasonal traditions in Greece.

“From the execution Friday until midnight when it turns to Sunday, many people will not hammer, or cut, eat meat, or do anything with violence. It’s out of respect because of the crucifixion.”

*Inside the Byzantine Panagia Kapnikarea on Easter Sunday*

Then, at midnight, there are fireworks and prayers, before family feasts on Easter Sunday. Freshly arrived in Athens for a city break, my husband and I wandered out at midnight. Down a narrow street we saw the bobbing lights of a candlelit crowd, and we heard the prayers chanted in a nearby Greek Orthodox church. People poured from its marble steps carrying lit tapers—all manner of people: goths, senior citizens… One middle-aged woman came out with a bouquet of 5 lit candles, and climbed behind a man on a motorbike and they rode off.

Not everyone participates, I’m sure. As Iakovos said, “It depends what you desire.”

And of course there’s the other side of the coin, be it Euro or drachma. He told me how much he loves being a driver, especially for tours when he takes people to further ancient sites, such as Delphi or Mount Olympus.

He has particular praise for Mount Olympus. According to him, there’s a spot up there known as the Throne of Zeus, where no wind or snow or rain ever strike, as if it’s divinely protected.

“It makes you think they really knew something,” he says of the ancient Greeks.

Building a Religion

How we interpret such things and act upon them does, as he said earlier, depend on our desire. How often do we believe something we really don’t want to?

When we first learned about Greek myths in school, I was in 8th grade. That’s a lot older than British students learn about them, and maybe for that reason, I did not enjoy the subject. To me, the gods seemed selfish, not to mention cruel and misogynistic. My opinion hasn’t changed much on that, to be honest. I had to read lots of ancient Greek play in high school and college, and I like the genre of modern retellings, but the original stories don’t appeal much to me apart from being cultural references.

*Gorgeous weathering on these pillars from Hadrian’s Library*

I do think myths have huge value in what they might tell us about the people who believed, maybe even created them. What does it say about people that they would make sacrifices from their own, struggling lives to such seemingly callous deities?

What we found breathtaking in Athens were the monuments made by people. The stunning Propylaea, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, the Porch of the Maidens alongside the Erechtheion. How incredible that parts of the Pantheon still stand after almost 2500 years of invasions and natural disasters. And the beautiful little Byzantine church the Panagia Kapnikarea, nearly a millennium old. These are marvelous places, designed and built by humans with much toil and cooperation. Yet they make me wonder about a presence even more powerful.

I guess that’s what art can do, inspire you to believe in something greater, even if it’s just a previously unimagined hope for the future.

Likeability Vs Relatability

Looking down at the city of Athens through the Propylaea above, or through the Roman arches behind the Odeon, we had a stunning view over the chaotic crush of buildings, the worn, aged mountains, and the sea beyond. I imagined ancient people coming up here to sacrifice, worship, or be entertained, and wondered what their view was like. Maybe that was enough to keep them worshipping.

Raised in a Christian family myself, we were always deeply attuned to the suffering that Easter springs from, and I like the Greek orthodox idea of acting on that seriousness by refraining from aggressive activities for a couple of days. Maybe my upbringing contributed to my complete horror and aversion of anything execution-related. I am still mystified how Christians sit with the belief that an innocent deity suffered and died for their sins personally, and don’t constantly agonise over that.

*Getting the right balance… Porch of the Maidens, Erechtheion, Athens*

I once wrote a novel scene between American educators preparing for the 7th grade mythology unit. The Christian teacher describes the Greek gods as “petty and selfish—no better than people.”

On the other hand, he says, “Jesus actually became human, and that’s as accessible as it gets.”

But He never sinned, thinks the teaching assistant. Being human would be a cinch without guilt.

Could it be that ancient Greeks appreciated having dieties with lusts and impulses that reflected their own?

Conveying a religion must be like the constant political tussle over how to best message people. Meet people where they are, or urge them to strive for better? And as writers and creatives, we work to establish that same balance: creating characters who are likeable and also relatable, events that are dramatic and also recognisably everyday. It’s getting that juxtaposition between majestic ancient ruins and the settlements below; the prayers on loudspeaker and the candles on motorbikes. Our ability and taste for this will vary, one might say depending on our desire.

What do you think of the classical myths? Do you find the supernatural accessible?

Seven Wanders of 2024

Welcome to a new year, fellow adventurers and creatives. Here are my favourite, most inspiring walks from the last journey round the sun. Sometimes the timing of a walk matters almost as much as the place.

Hetty Pegler’s Tump and Bluebell Woods, Gloucestershire

We started a spring Saturday by traipsing through woods near Coaley viewpoint, where fiddleheads unfurled into ferns. Emerged opposite bright yellow rapeseed crops and traversed a clearing to a neolithic burial mound, Hetty Pegler’s Tump (below, centre). You can peek inside the narrow passage leading to chambers of ancient bones. On our way home after lunch in the Cotswold market town of Nailsworth, we lingered in more woodlands with carpets of bluebells in an electric shade of purple.

Oxford

We’ve never spent much time in Oxford—and this is despite me spending a uni term at Oxford Brookes. I remedied that with a sunny June day trip, motivated by an exhibit at the Ashmolean Museum. After viewing sketches by Flemish masters, and finding our way through the ancient statuary to the toilets, we left the enormous museum to explore outside a while.

We walked through the Christ Church College grounds to The Meadow, wandered streets and glimpsed a pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis liked to drink before coming back to the main avenues to view the Bodleian Library and then the Sheldonian Theatre, with rainbow Pride flags in its tower windows and the iconic Emperor Head statues guarding it. A few months later, when I read R.F. Kuang’s Babel, Oxford’s imagery remained fresh in my mind.

Warren, New Hampshire

The population of this small town near the White Mountains peaked in 1860, but we enjoyed our family visit. The Baker River runs behind the houses on one side of the main street, and the Ore Hill Brook behind the houses on the other. A recreational trail shoots through the town as well, directing snowmobilers and bikers and pedestrians straight to the Congregational Church and the massive ballistic missile rocket standing beside it. There’s also an excellent ice cream eatery, complete with friendly porch cat. I enjoyed my early morning walks and met a retired French teacher who comes out every dawn to pick up litter.

Cerne Abbas then Durdle Door, Dorset

We celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary near the Jurassic coast in the South of England, and on one of our day trips trekked around Trendle Hill to view the Rude Giant. The path led us below the chalked soles of the180-foot long figure, dug into the slope since the late 17th century at least. We walked up and over the hill, down into the lovely town of Cerne Abbas. Its streets are lined with little streams and footbridges take townsfolk from the roads to their pretty old homes and gardens.

After our stroll there, we drove further to the coast and joined hundreds of tourists, from all nations and races it seemed, to walk down the cliffs to see the magnificent stone arch of Durdle Door. The sight was also enjoyed by a big, blissed-out seal sunning himself on the beach.

Uley, Gloucestershire
This is one of my local walks, a long circuit that comes to about 7 miles. Hilly views, horse pastures, manor estates like gingerbread houses, and old Cotswold buildings in the village of Uley. The walk has been momentous in my writing life in the past, and I reclaimed it for that purpose somewhat this year.

At the end of the summer holidays I hiked to the Prema Gallery and Cafe to start a new short story there, now complete and submitted to competitions. In November I walked through beautiful autumn sunshine to the craft fair to buy a few cards and gifts, and just before Christmas I hiked to the village and sat scribbling new novel ideas in St. Giles church while a few local ladies set up an assembly line of oranges, dolly mixtures, and candles to prepare for the Christingle service.

London: National Theatre to Holborn and Lincoln’s Inn

I love London and its juxtapositions of old and new, native and diverse. Visiting in October half-term to see the excellent West End theatrical production of Dr. Strangelove, we spent the next afternoon on a HiddenCity James Bond-themed quest leading us around west central London.

We crossed Waterloo Bridge from the National Theatre, discovered an art park on a rooftop, and the little green houses, now dwarfed by skyscrapers, that used to be refuges for cabbies. Our clues guided us behind the Courts of Justice and around the London School of Economics campus and Lincoln’s Inn. It included stops at different pubs, welcoming even while stunningly ornate, such as The Princess Louise with its mosaic floors and intricately carved wooden booths, and the majestic Last Judgment, which makes an excellent amaretto sour and has bathroom stalls like confessionals.

The Pinnacle and Post Pond, Lyme, New Hampshire

A New England lake and/ or mountain inevitably makes my annual top wanders. But this one’s special because it’s the lake I grew up on, the summit I grew up under. For years I believed the sun couldn’t truly set unless it was between two hills and reflected over a pond, because that’s how I saw it every day of my childhood.

Post Pond is smallish, but deep enough to be considered a lake; deep enough to house snapping turtles with shells over a foot in diameter. We stayed in a cabin at Loch Lyme Lodge, the rustic resort where I used to work for the summers, and I watched the sunset from a picnic table up the hill while scribbling in my notebook. My husband and I climbed around on the Pinnacle, the hill behind our cabin, and found fairy castle tree stumps, and milkweed cradles, and fantastic views. I completed the day by swimming the whole length of the lake and back.

This year, I hope to work on a new novel set in a similar location, because really, there’s just no place like home.

Where did your wanders take you this year?

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?

Balancing the Dark

This Week’s Bit of String: Planet Buoy

On a rainy Saturday morning in St Ives, I’m shepherding 7 teens on a 2-mile walk with a seasoned photographer. We are nearing the end of our school Art residential; I’ve spent half my half-term supporting 3 very different students with autism.

The youngest one is only 14 and prefers to draw comic stories or animals in pencil, so through most activities, he’s put his headphones on and played games on his phone. That’s what he did through the photographer’s introductory talk.

The photographer has worked here in St Ives for 45 years. He says its popularity with artists comes from the “pure, North light.” Standing on a beach he tells me, “The sand in St Ives has a sheerness, and reflects that light.”

Just then, the youngest fellow patters over murmuring, “Miss, I took pictures of the beach.” With his iPhone, he’s captured the effect the photographer talked about. The reflections of the squished-together buildings across the bay appear over the sand in his photo. I compliment him heartily, and he’s off.

He creeps toward gulls, grinning, asking, “Scuse me, can I take your picture?” He aims his phone camera through holes in stone walls that no one else has noticed, sticks it into pier crevices to capture puddle reflections. One of my older students, herself a photographer with autism, is inspired by what he’s finding and so am I.

He finds a buoy, pulled up and stashed on top of lobster cages. I join him to capture its weathering with my iPhone. It’s like a planet, with rust crops and barnacle mountains. This young artist is showing what I’ve always found, that once we start looking around with a photographer’s eye, we pick up on so much more.

Balance

It’s like that with stories sometimes too. If we get into ideas mode, we find them everywhere. When I’m out and about, I take pictures partly to remind myself of strands of description for my journal later. Waves blooming around boulders, rust-fall streaming down the lighthouse, Planet Buoy.

*Pure light: View toward Chapel of St Nicholas*

The photographer we worked with, Chris Webber, makes me contemplate other similarities or counterpoints between the arts of photography and writing. He tells the students: “Your camera has a lot of dials and buttons, but at its heart, photography is about balancing the light. Don’t be intimidated by the camera. You control it. You decide what to shoot.”

It’s a mixed blessing to remember that amid the vast structures of a story, with so many interplaying elements we’re meant to orchestrate—we are the ones who control the pen (or keyboard). It is, ultimately, up to us.

I also wonder if a story, at its heart, might be as simple as balancing certain elements. Except that a story is balancing the dark. As storytellers we wield light and seek to not obliterate dark (because then a story might be dull or saccharine), but to balance it.

Letting in the Light

I read more about story structure and trajectory before my latest novel edits. John Yorke in Into the Woods frames this as a trajectory of knowledge (which suits my creation story retelling, since Eve allegedly plunged us all into sin by gaining knowledge). A protagonist is awakened to something, they experience doubt, they reluctantly accept, they experiment, it backfires, until ultimately there is a reconciliation of the new knowledge: a reawakening and a total mastery.

*Weaving: lobster nets on Smeatons Pier*

None of this happens without light, and the light would be ineffective if dark didn’t precede it. Presumably, God would never have said, “Let there be light,” if They’d already had all the light They wanted. As creators, we first shine light into a character’s situation so they have to recognise the dark they’re living in. They may react by being overwhelmed; they’re not used to this illumination. Ultimately, we mould the light into hope.

*Wishing you a torrent of creativity this week.*

Depending on the story, we’ll allow a pinpoint or a whole widening arc of light/ hope. Also, depending on the type of writing, we’ll show the whole landscape or do a macro shot. Chris Webber does dawn photo shoots and landscapes but also food shoots, for catering outlets. He showed my students a picture he took of a sorbet scoop: “Sometimes you don’t want your viewer to paddle, you want them to dive in.”

I’ll definitely keep that in mind while editing. Which bits are especially important for readers to plunge into? How do we direct the light while also bringing out the exciting details?

Making Links

This Week’s Bit of String: Snakes and the sublime

“I held a snake!”

A Year 11 student greeted me with this after Christmas, while his classmates discussed gifts and excursions. This student’s family didn’t have money for those. But he found out how snakeskin feels: smooth, cool, strong.

I was supporting the student in his English class, and as an introduction to Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” the teacher sought examples of the sublime.

“What’s the most awe-inspiring place you’ve visited?” she asked the class.

With his classmates describing Alpine ski trips, island volcano walks, or seaside visits, my student felt sidelined. He told me again, “I held a snake!”

*A formidable power: Vermont floodline summer 2023. See how the water swept through halfway up the trees?*

After every contribution of wondrous landscapes from the other students, the teacher asked, “Did it scare you?” She established the connection between excitement and fear, the sublime power of nature.

I asked my student if he felt a bit scared holding the snake, and I said his mixed feelings reminded me of the class discussion. The boy’s face lit up and we decided he ought to share his story with the teacher. A snake is part of nature, right?

He held his hand up for several minutes while other students were called on. Reluctantly, the teacher let him speak just as she was closing the topic.

“I held a snake!” he said.

The whole class laughed. “That’s not what we’re talking about right now,” snapped the teacher.

My student was devastated. He kept asking me, “Why did you say I should tell her?”

Finally I murmured, “Because I would have responded differently.” I don’t like disagreeing with a colleague around a student, but taking the kiddo’s side in this somewhat subtle way calmed him down.

Essential Bonds

And I was angry, actually. This student can be quite challenging but his Educational Health Care Plan outlines the traumas he’s been through, the difficulties he has with learning, and strategies to help him access the curriculum. Even if a hardworking teacher doesn’t have time to check the documents again and again, surely making children feel included is just common sense.

*Haven’t got any snake photos, but the pattern on these fritilleries is awesome too*

It takes barely a second to say, “Interesting. Thanks for sharing.”

After all, the English curriculum assesses students on their ability to make connections. Follow literary clues from an extract to deduce the writer’s motivations. Compare how poems show similar themes in different ways. How hard is it to connect the snake, a potentially deadly predator, with formidable but impressive landscapes?

Some connections will be firmer than others. We all make far-fetched ones sometimes, in our natural human tendency to see grand designs behind the events of our lives, hoping to place ourselves in the centre. But the ability to draw these links sets us apart as a species.

When It All Comes Together

One thing I love about writing is teasing out the connections. My first published story took place in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. In my research I learned the Creole word for earthquake shared its root with the mudpies eaten by the most impoverished people: Tè, like terre, for earth.

This term linked vast struggles of poverty and disaster with resourcefulness and survival too, and chained them up into a more manageable bundle. But it wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t looked into the native language, and if I hadn’t already felt a connection to the country, following stories about mudpies and Cite Soleil and the Creole language long before.

*Keeping the sides connected: Houston’s famous Be Someone bridge*

Sometimes my threads linking a character’s motivation to their actions aren’t strong enough. Or maybe they’re too coarse and unsophisticatedly blatant. Honing those connections is vital, and enhanced by cultivating connections in our everyday lives–by taking those moments to invite other people to share. Even if they just tell us they got to hold a snake that one time.

My latest story is on the wonderful Funny Pearls website. It takes the perspective of a girl with autism as she considers what connections to make, and how to do so. From building a bridge with Knex to practising facial expressions in the mirror and developing a felicity with the subtle burn, read how Sylvie makes links in “The Late, Great Jimmy Stewart’s Video Guide to Emotions.”

As with any force of nature (or predatory reptile), connecting with others and recognising our many links to the world can be quite frightening. It may mess with our pre-established plans to consider someone else’s challenges and let them in, but the consequences can be pretty awe-inspiring all around, too.

How do you build connections in your work and in your life? And does it sometimes scare you?

Seven Wanders of 2023

Hiking around and seeing new places inspire me as much as reading other writers’ work. I don’t necessarily end up writing new stories about the places I see, but glimpses of the spectacular keep some spark alive inside me when the rest of life seems a great stack of to-do lists.

Feeling like an adventurer in the real world can’t hurt our creative life, right? Here are some of my favourite explorations, why they ignited my imagination, and a smattering of my photos.

See also previous years’ top wanders: 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Festive Cirencester, Cotswolds UK

We gave ourselves a couple hours’ break between getting COVID in December and finishing work and sorting out Christmas and travel preparations. Cirencester is fairly local and its alleys and Cotswolds stone lend themselves well to the festive season.

A wander, the purchase of a jungly fern from a back alley shop overflowing with plants, and cups of hot chocolate at a specialty chocolatier renewed the season’s sparkle.

*Black Jack Mews, back alley plant shop, wreath of pine cone kernels and moss*

Widworthy Barton, South Devon UK

While staying near the Jurassic Coast in Southern England, I went out for exercise and discovered a fascinating little story as well. Uphill from the thatched farmhouse we’d rented, I came across an even smaller hamlet and a square-towered stone church with its graveyard.

A lustrous black gravestone memorialised the village’s matriarch and her husband. He was a holocaust survivor and popularised the Rubik’s cube, and she bought the local manor house and revitalised the community, abseiling down the church tower in her 70s to raise money for roof repairs.

*The Widworthy Barton church, the Kremer graves, and the fields and hills of South Devon*

Dovedale Stepping Stones, Peak District UK

In late September we had a rather cold, frequently wet camping trip and finally explored a Peak District destination I’d wanted to see for some time. We were lucky to have a sunny morning at the Stepping Stones, casting a sharp, bright contrast between peaks.

The stones are set firm and flat in the river like molars, and after crossing, we followed the path under trees and past sparkling reflections. There was a good climb up smooth-worn stone steps laid by Italian prisoners of war during WWII, and then a further walk along the river with pale bluffs on our other side, rising up like mighty ship hulls with dark bird barnacles. We later did a longer, more rugged walk to reach the Chee Dale Stepping Stones–those are quite scenic, too.

*Dovedale Stepping Stones, fossils in one of the stones close up, Thorpe Cloud*

Newfound Lake, New Hampshire USA

For me, summer is most blissful at a New England lake. This summer we had a few days with the entire family at Newfound Lake. It’s the third biggest lake in the state and the deepest, reaching 183 feet deep. It’s thought to be one of the cleanest in the world, and the sunsets over low-slung mountains off in a corner were spectacular, the reflections pristine.

We had the trilling cry of the loons at night and that cool lake smell in the mornings. Woods of oak and pine separated the holiday houses, but we got a glimpse when we were out on our kayaks. One house even had its own massive inflatable waterslide tower out in the water, with “No trespassing” painted all over its base.

*Sunset over Newfound, mushrooms in the woods, little free library: Slow down, enjoy life*

Portobello Road and Notting Hill, London

I don’t know if it’s hard for places like this to keep living up to their reputation. Do the streets made famous in Disney songs and late 90s films want a break sometimes, want to drop the facade? Well, we took a good walk along here and enjoyed the mix of shabby and cheesy and pushing the boundaries.

We perused stalls and shops selling everything from wool berets to sequined jackets, to prints made from photos of your iris, to last minute pumpkins for Halloween the next day, and we had lunch at a place called Egg Slut–absolutely delicious. Then we did a further loop through the posh neighbourhoods of Notting Hill, with big, pastel townhouses dripping with gauze webs and jack o’lanterns for the holiday. Imagine trick or treating here!

*Portobello Road street market, painted door, decorated Notting Hill Halloween*

Brecon Beacons Four Waterfalls Walk, Wales UK

Another hike I’d been sizing up for a few years, this too proved well worth it. It was cloudy, but the falls are still quite spectacular. I guess we can thank the rather wet year for that.

Because it’s quite a popular destination, we couldn’t always get close to the cascades, or behind them. Still, I love seeing how torrents slice through rock, and all the greenery that scales the damp cliff face around and behind the water. One waterfall had dozens if not hundreds of little rock cairns built in the stream below.

To save backtracking the long, muddy, crowded access path at the last fall, we found a vague trail up the bank and did some rugged scaling. This earned us extra waterfall views from the top and made us feel quite intrepid.

*Falls and cairns. Note fallen tree in first photo and tent on the left in the third photo for scale*

City Park, New Orleans Museum of Art Sculpture Garden, Esplanade Avenue, and St Louis Cemetery #3–Louisiana, USA

Did something completely different over the Christmas holidays and visited America’s deep South . We met up with our kiddo in Houston, then my husband and I roadtripped along the Gulf of Mexico and the bayou, and spent New Year’s in New Orleans.

Staying in the French Quarter, we had the experience you might hope for: strolling out for morning beignets under wrought-iron balconies trailing ferns, pausing to hear jazz bands in the street. Later, we stopped at City Park, a massive public space half again as big as NYC’s Central Park.

*City Park ibises, The Ptolemecist sculpture and live oak, St Louis Cemetery*

We were greeted by long-beaked ibises when we got out of the hired car, and we ambled through the Besthoff Sculpture Garden beneath live oaks dangling Spanish moss and resurrection ferns (ferns that go grey and curl, allowing themselves to survive losing over 70% of their moisture in dry spells). The statues combined cultural elements of the city’s past: a Rodin, a ghostly dress with a solar system model for a head, a conquistador helmet turned to a snail with a little boy riding its back, a glorious African woman, her garment a series of impeccably formed coils.

From there we walked down Esplanade Avenue, with pretty pillared houses and more live oaks, the trees so mighty they were busting up sidewalks and weighing down overhead electric cables. We came back through one of New Orleans’s famous cemeteries, with aboveground vaults since you can’t dig graves below sea level. Some vaults have lots of cupboards in them for family remains, and one had a small ornate frame fixed to it with a photo of the occupants behind a convex lens, like a locket, so you could see the faces of the African-American couple who passed away in the 1980s. It seemed a privilege to actually see what they looked like, and I wish that idea might catch on.

*Esplanade Avenue house, decorated post, and bougainvillea*

What were your favourite visits and meanders this year? How did you keep your spark alight?

Stuff of Legends

This Week’s Bit of String: A new political slogan?

I work with some amazing students and love my job, but the start of the school year is hard. Somehow there are always vast new tasks to train ourselves in, you know, during our spare time. Plodding to work in the mornings, a mental run-through of the day’s requirements almost overwhelms me.

Then I remember something that makes me smile: “Lying dog-faced pony soldier.”

I know this is ridiculous. It’s not an ideal phrase for the President of the United States to be spouting, even if it’s a movie quote. President Biden including it in a rambling answer about climate change in Hanoi recently probably didn’t advance the cause. (I’m linking to the entire press conference transcript because most of it was on-topic and coherent. I mean, you should hear the other guy.)

But it gets stuck in my head! Is that a writer thing, that words not even sung can repeat relentlessly in our minds?

*Siblings are such an influence–here’s all of us recreating a childhood photo*

And it’s so random, it makes me laugh. Biden says his brother liked to say “lying dog-faced pony soldier” when quoting a John Wayne film, that it was an insult a Native American character hurled at a cowboy or something. Seems like this alleged movie line gets stuck in the President’s head, too.

It’s weirdly inspiring that a random detail can live on, lodged in the minds of people who never saw the original source. It’s a little different from how the written word lingers in our minds. There’s something special about the oral tradition. I don’t know if we can capture it in our writing, but it’s worth celebrating in its own right.

Family Lore

This is extra strong in families. Maybe it’s because of our deep fondness for each other, and our affinity to one another’s voices, plus shared source material. When someone we grew up with, for example a sibling, tells a story, we can picture especially vividly its setting and characters.

While creating resources on persuasive techniques this week, I learned that the word anecdote basically comes from the Greek roots “not for publication.” (See more on the word’s origins here.) These are little stories that are either too biting, or would lose too much of their aural charm were they printed.

A lot of our favourite family references and legends become so because of how they sound when spoken. We didn’t even have to be there when it happened, we just love hearing about it. Humour’s always a hit, as well as special oral characteristics.

Rhythm: When my sister worked at the town recreational summer camp, she later recounted one boy’s plans for the rest of the day. Imitating his weary exasperation, she recited: “All I want to do/ Is go home/ and eat my sandwich/ and go outside/ and look for salamanders. But I never FIND any salamanders!” Punctuated with sighs, it’s almost like a poem. Sometimes I find myself planning my day to a similar rhythm.

Intonation: On a trip to Naples once, my brother went to the opera. There was a poorly older woman sitting nearby who kept unwrapping cough sweets during the show. This provoked the wrath of a German man in the audience. My brother quoted the man as he complained to the frail woman during the interval. ‘When you go to open up your BONBON… it is AWFUL!”

Transferring the Magic

Just within the last month, I found myself telling someone the bonbon anecdote—in my dreams. It’s that integrated in my subconscious, and I was never even there. I wonder if it sticks with any of the friends I might have mentioned it to in real life.

Sometimes, a little story weaves itself so inextricably into our fibre, we think it is ours. A secretary at my old job back in the U.S. told me one of the company’s engineers once submitted a receipt from a vegetarian meal with his travel expense report. He’d had a delicious mushroom—but the receipt was truncated so instead of asking to be reimbursed for shiitake, he was passing on a charge for “one large shit.”

My husband got such a kick out of this story, he came to believe it was a secretary at his company, across the ocean, who told him the story about one of their engineers. There my husband was, animatedly sharing it at some gathering, and I couldn’t help capping it off, somewhat mystified: “But that’s my story.”

That was only shock talking, though. The tale did not originate with me, and obviously I never intended it to end there either. I think it’s clear that stories, particularly when they’re passed on orally, get absorbed and possessed by all listeners. Isn’t that quite magical?

Are there special anecdotes you’ve heard that become living legends?

Pest Control

This Week’s Bit of String: A pestilence of Shoulds

Do you ever imagine your abstract stresses as actual creatures? I find it makes them more grapple-able.

Lately, the word should is plaguing me. If it came to life, I think it would be a multi-legged trudger, low to the ground with clinging claws. It would blast out barks: Should! Should! and be a right pest.

My mind gets infested by Shoulds, particularly in the summer. During term-time, there’s little question about what I have to do. There’s work, there’s squeezing in chores and writing deadlines and exercise and family commitments around that. But if I get time to myself, I’m overrun with quarrelling Shoulds. The guilt of leaving things undone becomes weightier, because what excuse do I have?

*I’m no artist but… I’m thinking stout caterpillar body, claws of a sloth, and stubborn pug face.*

You should be writing, a voice in my head says quite frequently. Editing my novel, inventing a whole new book, polishing and submitting short stories, putting effort into a Twitter presence—I should be working on all those things.

But there’s also the cluttered house, and my garden in a riotous bid for attention, and the thought that there’s no time like the present to get extra exercise and stretches in, should I be attempting some sort of social life, and actually, what if I caught up on sleep and reading; shouldn’t that benefit me in the school year?

If I created a word cloud based on my thoughts, the biggest word in it might be should—apart from family member’s names maybe, and definitely the cat and probably, embarrassingly, peanut butter (the latter accompanied by the phrase “should absolutely not eat anymore of it today…”)

‘Tis the Season

For most of my summer, I go to my family overseas. There are wonderful little vacations encased in this, but home time has a serious intensity to it so that I bristle if it’s called a holiday.

*Up at sunrise during the summer to seize every moment*

As an immigrant, my herd of Shoulds has extra directions to pull me in. And the limits of time give their claws an extra sharpness. It’s super important to me that I help out my parents and siblings and child while I can see them, but that we also make fun memories, and keep my husband entertained since it is, in fact, his vacation, and that I get moments to feast my senses on the mountains and lakes and rivers of home—all while keeping up with writing and exercise. So the Shoulds run rampant.

Without my teaching assistant job playing the alpha role among the Should herd, it’s hard to figure out which Should is in charge. Each seems quite as demanding as the others. Yes, I should dig into writing, but think how bad the weeds will be if I leave the garden any longer. And have I really recovered my strength enough for a new term—maybe I should spend an afternoon lying around reading.

The Long Game

The word should is rooted in debt and guilt. Any argument I come up with against one therefore sounds like an excuse to shirk. Which Shoulds can we allow ourselves to ignore?

I’ve tentatively decided one thing. I’m not ready for another deep edit of my Eve novel yet. I’m too frustrated now. I’d have her jumping up and down by the third paragraph shouting “Read me, fools!” like she’s Maleficent or something. I need time to think before the next edit and submission rounds. Maybe I’ll have mulled it enough by next weekend, maybe I’ll leave it for half-term or even next summer.

You know what I ended up spending lots of time on for the end of my break? Foraging. I turned myself into a scrappy little squirrel to combat my scruffy little Should flock. I walked the lanes for hours picking blackberries and elderberries, and cooked them together into jam. With its murky elder depths, I’m hoping it will ward off winter colds. Nothing leaves you helpless at the stubby, plodding feet of a Should herd the way illness does! So maybe I’ve played my priorities right. We’ll see.

What do you do when pestered by Shoulds?