literary magazine 17
Angelina Jolie in DISTRESS – Inside: The Lone Ranger comes to the rescue!
Cover image: Diego Cupolo Artwork: Fossfor The Magazine on-line: http://viewfromheremagazine.com EDITOR: Mike French Managing Editors: Sydney Nash & Michael Kannengieser The Crew: Kathleen Maher, Paul Burman, Stella Carter Carter, Naomi Gill, Jen Persson, Jane Turley, Grace Read, Diego Cupolo, Kerrie Anne, Charlie Wykes, Lori Andrews, Carly Bald & Fossfor. Copyright: The View From Here magazine 2009 2009-11-06 Published by BLAM Productions based in the UK email: viewfromhere@primemail.com Painting of microphone used throughout: Fossfor Fiction articles in this magazine: All people, places and events depicted therein are fictional and not meant to resemble any actual people, places, or events unless otherwise specified.
Consistently interesting and entertaining with some of the best up-and-coming coming authors around. Scott Pack Publisher The Friday Project
Emili Rosales interview by Mike
Emili Rosales was born in Sant Carles de la RĂ pita in 1968. He works as a publisher and has been a regular contributor to the newspapers Avui and La Vanguardia. He has been described by critics as one of the most interesting voices of the new generation of Catalan writers. His fourth novel The Invisible City is an international bestseller and an English translation was published in October by Alma Books. Emili took a break from the Frankfurt Book Fair last month to talk to us.
The Invisible City won one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the Catalan language in 2004, The Sant Jordi Prize. How did that make you feel and what effect did it have on your writing?
When and how did you discover that you could write?
How important do you think awards are in general to a writer and the publishing industry?
Many teenagers feel the need of writing. I was one of them. I loved poetry, then I try to write as my favourite poets.
It was with my fourth novel, and I had taken before the decision of combining writing and editing. The prize didn´t change this situation. I think the reason of the higher attention paid to this novel is in the theme and the story. Perhaps one has a few good stories to tell. Perhaps this is my good one.
They are useful if they are able to put the focus on one book; if they shorten the way to the readers; but anyway readers are the stars of this play. With or without prizes. What was the motivation and creative force behind The Invisible City? A combination of a big historical event and personal interest. My
family arrived to my village in the Ebro delta 2 centuries ago when the building of a promising city started. But the city never existed, and I wanted to know why. The king behind this project was Charles III, the same that discovered dis Pompeia and then pushed the irruption of neoclassicism. So, my own familiar story, in a small town of fishers, in the center of a continental cultural focus. What were the reasons for giving the protagonist the same first name as yourself and placing plac him in Barcelona, where you live? I like to play with that, and I think readers enjoy this ambiguity. A novel is alive while the reader trust the narrator, and if it helps. There are lots of descriptions of architecture and the tone of the book quietly tly draws you into the two worlds in the novel. Do you think history and architecture can shape the present and how important to you was it that this came over in the novel?
Catalan writing is as diverse as other literatures, I mean, there are authors more close clo to other European authors than to other Catalan writers. I am trying to build my own world, my own references, and of course many of them are Catalan (note two big writers of XX century: Josep Pla and Baltasar Porcel) and many others are Italian, French,, Anglosaxons, Spanish ... Catalan literature, anyway have become a singular, special case among European literatures, and I am proud of being part of that. I understand you have worked as a translator. What kind of chemistry has to happen for a translator or to bring a faithful version of a book into a different language? Translating is an art! You must be a writer in the language of arrival! Are you happy with the translation of La Ciutat Invisible and how does it feel to see it translated into English? As far as I can appreciate it, I like it very much. I lived one year in England in 1998-99, 1998 and I am really happy seeing my novel translated to English. Art, architecture helps you to talk about the past, about history, but my interest is how they can show the peoples’ feelings, the peoples’ soul, the peoples’ dreams (this story is about a failed dream: the invisible city). Was it hard to juxtapose the eighteenth-century court with the contemporary art world? Did you write the two parts separately and combine them later or did you switch between the two as you wrote? It was really hard to combine both times. It took to me more time the building than the writing of the novel, but I enjoy very much as well as writing, the preview investigation: traveling to Naples, to Venice, to St Petersburg, and reading about Enlightenment, and neoclassical architects, etc. The writing of this
novel has been one of the more fascinating experiences in my whole life!
What has it been like working as the Spanish writer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón's editor?
Where do you write, what kind of view do you have?
Working with Carlos Carlo is wonderful. And a privilege. His literature has changed many things in Spain. I admire very much him because he was very confident from the first minute of all that was going to happen. He is a genius.
I prefer a window on Sant Carles harbour, but many times I write in hotels, flights, trains... What's been the reaction friends to your writing?
of
Enthusiastic. They are better than me. You've been described as an interesting new voice in the new generation of Catalan writers. Do you think The Invisible City is of a similar style to that body of literature or do you think it breaks new ground?
Did being a literature professor help you in your writing and did you enjoy that role? Being a literature professor is too much hard for me. I admire the work they do. What's next? Are you working on another novel? Yes. Perhaps Emili Rossell hasn´t died.
Letters From Home by Andrew Nicoll
It was snowing in one of the fifteen ways that Eskimos have a name for. Pirrelvag. "To snow in an extreme blizzard". Not that any Eskimo would ever have given a name to this snow. No Eskimo had seen this snow. The Eskimos were at the top
of the world, with the polar bears. This snow was at the bottom, with the penguins and the scientists. In the old days somebody would have given their station a name something suitably heroic, possibly with a link to Scandinavian royalty,
“King Haakon Base� or something like that. We called it Station 12. It was a hut in a valley with a lot of plastic insulation around it and two bunks inside. Sometimes the valley gave the place a bit of shelter from the winds that shrieked down off the
glaciers. Sometimes every last, gasping, frozen breeze came funneling down between the mountains and clawed at the windows and ripped at the roof and whistled through every tiny space in the joints. This was one of those times. It started right after the helicopter left. Fraser the pilot flew in with two weeks’ worth of supplies, had a cup of coffee with the guys, joked about how there was just another month to go and flew out again. Just another month. As soon as he took off, the first flakes started to fall, as if the beat of the helicopter rotors had stirred them up out of the rocks like fallen feathers. All snow smells different. This snow came on a wind
tolerable; coffee, canned fruit, chocolate, soft toilet paper and cheese footballs. Williams had a weakness for cheese footballs. They emptied the boxes and filled the cupboards. At the bottom of the last box there was an outsize envelope. It said: “Williams”. The envelope was stuffed full with smaller envelopes, so many that they poked out at the top in a jagged spray of multicolored stationery, some white, some blue, some manilla brown, one pink one that looked like a birthday card. “Is it your birthday?’’ Andresen asked. “Soon, yeah.’’ “Happy birthday. Looks like you got a card.”
the first flakes started to fall, as if the beat of the
helicopter rotors had stirred them up out of the rocks like fallen feathers. that smelled as gray and dry as cement powder. They watched the helicopter until it got right down to the end of the valley and then they watched a little more, looking down to the place in the sky where it used to be and listening to the sound of the rotors thumping off the sides of the mountains until imagination ran out. Then they looked at the snow and smelled the dry, cement smell. Andresen said: “We’d better get inside.’’
By the time they hung up their anoraks the blizzard was clawing at the hut, trying to get inside too. The wind sucked at the double doors but it couldn’t open one without forcing the other one shut so it howled round the windows in disappointment and blotted out the sun with a screaming blanket of snowflakes out of spite. They unpacked the supplies. None of it was really essential. There was enough frozen stuff in the store shed to let them sit out a blizzard for a month and fuel for the generator was too heavy to bring by helicopter. All the basics came in on a cat-trailer once a year but this was the kind of thing that made a hut under a glacier
“Yeah. Probably.’’ “You going to open it?’’ “I’ll get round to it.’’ “Who’s it from?’’ “I don’t know.’’ “You must have some idea who sent it.’’ “I have a wide circle of correspondents.’’ “Yes, so I see.’’ “Nothing for you?” “No, nothing for me,’’ said Andresen. “Again.’’ He made coffee, took out his pen and sat down with a long list of temperature observations. For the rest of the day, every time he looked up from his desk, Andresen’s eye fell on the packet of letters. It gaped like a python choked to death on mail bag. It was bloated. It was so overstuffed that it was almost round. It lay on the kitchen counter and rocked from side to side with every blast of wind that shook the hut and, when it rocked, it made a crinkling, cardboard, drumming sound. Those are the things that drive people crazy after a while. Like a dripping tap, like the way that the other man insists on unrolling the toilet roll from the side nearest the wall, when it should unroll from the
side away from the wall, like the way his desk drawer squeaks, like the way a little puff of air farts out from the stuffing of his chair every time he shifts in it and the way it whistles back in with an asthmatic wheeze every time he shifts again. It can drive you nuts. About eight o’clock, when the needle on the anemometer whirled round and nudged a hundred and seventy, the package of letters rocked again. It made the crinkling, cardboard drumming sound again. Andresen got up from his seat and turned it round. That was all he did. When it used to lie on the counter facing east-west, he turned it so it faced north-south. That was all. Williams said: “Don’t touch those!’’ and then, because he knew how unreasonable and shrill he sounded, he said: “Please’’ and “If you don’t mind.’’ Which only made it worse. Andresen just looked at him. He could have said something childish like: “I won’t hurt your precious letters,’’ but he had been down south for a while and he knew that wouldn’t help. Andresen believed in the soft answer that turneth away wrath. So he said “Sorry” as if he meant it. “The wind was making them rock about. They were getting on my nerves. Sorry.’’ “I’ll put them away,’’ said Williams. “You could read them first. Aren’t you going to read them?’’ “When I get round to it. My turn to make the coffee.’’ “Yes, ‘’ said Andresen. He put the lid on his pen and rubbed his eyes. “I’ve done enough for now, anyway.’’ And that was it. No row. There could easily have been a row, a stupid: “I know what you said but it’s what you meant by it,’’ kind of a row like married couples have but Andresen had stopped it. He closed up his desk for the day and went and sat down in his chair at the other end of the hut. It’s important to have separate places for working and sitting. Otherwise, if you’re stuck inside for a long time, it feels like you are always working or always sitting round relaxing. You need to be able to pack up at the office for the day and go home. So Station 12 had office chairs and desks at one end of the
hut and a couple of broken down easy chairs at the other end and a kind of a kitchen area in the middle with a table for eating at and the bunks off to one side. All the stations are like that. It’s important, for the same reasons that it’s important to put a little china castle in a goldfish bowl. It’s an enriched environment. Andresen sat down. There was a pile of magazines on the coffee table, National Geographics, mostly. He more or less knew them by heart. Williams brought the coffee. He passed the hot mug with his fingers on the rim - never even bothered with the handle - and he’d forgotten the sugar. Williams didn’t take sugar so it never occurred to him that anybody else might - exactly the sort of thing which could have started another argument but Andresen was an easy-going sort and he didn’t make anything out of it. They sat at the table. Neither of them mentioned the letters although Wlliams had not put them away as he said he would. They were still sitting there on the kitchen counter in their brown envelope. Andresen did not look at them. He stared into his coffee cup. He flicked through a National Geographic. “That’s turned into a helluva blizzard’’ Williams said. Andresen looked at the window. “Yes, it’s pretty bad.’’ “Hope Fraser made it.’’ “He was miles away before it reached here.’’ Andresen looked at a mark on the floor beside the door. He stood up. “You know what would go well with this coffee? Cheese footballs. I fancy a cheese football.’’ He walked across to the kitchen and started opening cupboard doors. “Here they are.’’ He poured some into a bowl, rolled the top on the bag and put it away carefully and came back to his chair. He never so much as glanced at the bundle of letters. Williams was watching him. He looked wounded. “Want some?’’ Andresen held out the bowl. “No. I’m fine. Not just now, thanks.’’ Andresen picked up a handful and wolfed them. Williams looked at him as if he’d been slapped. “What?’’
“Nothing.’’ “You don’t mind, do you?’’ “Why should I mind? They’re not my cheese footballs.’’ “No. They are very good too. The real thing. Proper sort of fondant filling. You could serve these at an embassy cocktail party - before the Ferrero Rocher, naturally.’’ “It’s just.’’ “What?’’ Andresen crunched his way through another mouthful. “Well, it’s just you’ve never eaten them before.’’ “No.’’ “I didn’t know you liked them, actually.’’ “You know what? Neither did I. But it turns out that I do so I will probably be eating a lot more of them.’’ “Tonight?’’ Williams’ voice went high and squeaky. “Possibly tonight. Certainly tomorrow night and the night after that and the night after that.’’ Andresen dropped the empty bowl on the coffee table with a clatter. “Those were really very good. I must learn to spin them out. Not snaffle the whole lot in a single sitting.’’ They didn’t say anything else until it was time for bed. Bedtime is important too; just as important as having a place to sit and a place to work. Without a set time for going to bed, the men in those stations might sit up all night. Without a set time for getting up, they might lie in bed all day. When it’s dark the clock round
seemed that he had only just managed to drop off when Andresen was up and about, opening cupboard doors. He sat up with an angry snort. “Sorry,” Andresen said. “Did I wake you? Sorry.’’ “What’s wrong?’’ “Nothing. Nothing. Sorry. Just go back to sleep. Sorry.’’ In the morning there was an empty cheese football packet left carelessly lying on the counter alongside the bundle of letters. It yawned. It gaped. It turned like a weather cock in every tiny draft but the bundle of letters lay there solid and matronly with only the occasional, disapproving wobble when the strongest blasts shook the hut. It was the first thing Williams saw when he woke. When he swung his feet to the floor the second thing he saw was a plastic bowl upside down at the side of the bed. He picked it up and a few tiny, orangeyellow crumbs fell out on to the linoleum. “Yours, I think.’’ He handed it to Andresen in the upper bunk. “Yes. Sorry. I must have let the fall in the night.’’ “You finished the cheese footballs.’’ Williams gave the bag a flick with his finger, caught it in midspin and scrunched it angrily into the bin. “Not all of them. Just that bag. There’s a whole box . Have some for breakfast if you like.’’ Andresen climbed out of his bunk and
there’s nothing to see outside the window but
a blizzard tearing at the glass and nothing to hear but the deep, muffled silence that comes after snow or always light, when there’s nothing to see outside the window but a blizzard tearing at the glass and nothing to hear but the deep, muffled silence that comes after snow, these things are important. That’s why Williams was so upset when Andresen started banging about in the kitchen at 3am. He had never perfected that sailors’ trick of letting the storm rock you to sleep, letting the wind be a lullaby and it
shambled off towards the shower. “They really are very good.’’ When he came back, drying his hair on a long, narrow towel, Williams was lifting the case of cheese footballs out of the cupboard. Andresen said nothing. Williams opened the flap of the box and shook it. “There are ten packets in a box,’’ he said. “Nine now. You’ve had one so that leaves four for you and five for me.’’
“Well I don’t think that’s very fair.’’ “It’s perfectly fair. It’s an exactly even split.’’ “And is that what we’re going to do with everything now, is it? Should we weigh out the coffee and the sugar? Should we write our initials on the toilet roll? Do we have to ration the soap?’’ “That’s not the same thing at all.’’ “No, because you don’t give a damn about soap, Williams. You only care about your bloody cheese footballs.’’ “We’re not going to run out of soap before the next helicopter gets in. There’s plenty of soap and plenty of coffee.’’ “And there’s plenty of cheese footballs too.’’ “Not at the rate you eat them. We’ll run out. If this blizzard keeps up there’s no saying how long it might be before the next chopper. We need to ration them. I’m not claiming them all for myself. This is a perfectly fair way.’’ “Why is it fair? I’ve never had any of them before. Weeks go by and you’re the only one who’s ever tasted a cheese football and now, all of a sudden, we have to share them out exactly evenly and ration the supply just in case the storm keeps up. Oh that’s very fair! So you ate the whole of the last box and now you’re going to be generous enough to split this box with me. I don’t think so. I’ll be eating cheese bloody footballs three times a day if I feel like it and there’s bugger all you can do about it.’’ “No!’’ Williams sounded more panicked than angry. “No?” “No. No, don’t. Please.’’ “What?” “Please don’t eat the cheese footballs. I’m really asking nicely.’’ “What?” “Please don’t.’’ Andresen said: “You’re off your head,’’ and got dressed. They didn’t say another word to each other all day. The blizzard raged and shook the station, they took measurements, they made calculations, they checked in with base at the usual times for two minutes of forced banter on the radio while snowflakes screamed outside, they made a mess, they tidied up.
From time to time during the day they went to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee. They always made their own coffee. Neither of them ever offered to make a cup for the other guy. At lunchtime they took turns to make a sandwich and reheat some packet soup, stepping carefully past one another, careful not to touch, careful not to block the way to the sink, careful not to make eye contact. It went on like that until seven o’clock. They were sitting around the little coffee table, at right angles so there was no chance of accidentally looking up and catching each others eye. Then Williams stood, went over
review of a paper I put forward for publication, my sister’s usually pretty good about writing so there’s bound to be one in here from her and that might very well have some pictures in it - her and her college mates always lots of good gossip. I’ve got a postal chess game going with a professor at Yale and his wife writes too - he doesn’t know that and I’m sure you’d find her letters very, very entertaining. You can take your pick. I’ll spread them out and you can choose.’’ “Don’t bother,’’ Andresen said. “I mean it.’’ “Don’t bother.’’ “Honestly. I mean it.”
Andresen shot out a hand. It dived into the bag
of mail like a seagull hitting the water and came out with an envelope. to the kitchen area and he came back with his swollen bundle of mail. “I’m very sorry,’’ he said. “I was wrong. I totally over reacted about nothing.’’ “That’s all right. I shouldn’t have said you were off your head.’’ “I am.’’ Williams said. “A bit. I got upset about cheese footballs.’’ “You like cheese footballs.’’ “I do. I know. Sorry. I know it’s mental but I’ve kind of fixated on cheese footballs. I’ve thought about it since yesterday and I can’t make any sense of it. I worry that we’re going to run out of cheese footballs and,’’ “Aww don’t start this again. Look, have your cheese footballs. I won’t eat another cheese football as long as I live. I’d rather be dead. If I had to put one in my mouth, I’d throw up. I’d rather eat your socks.’’ “No, listen. I’ll buy them off you. You’re right. They are as much yours as mine. I will buy four bags of cheese footballs - your four bags of cheese footballs. They are yours and I want them so I will buy them. I’ll sell you a letter.’’ Andresen just looked at him. “I mean it. I’ve got lots of letters, you’ve got none. You can have any letter you want. There’s all sorts in here. There’s something about peer
Andresen shot out a hand. It dived into the bag of mail like a seagull hitting the water and came out with an envelope. Quickly, he folded it to his chest and crushed it into his pocket. “Come on,’’ said Williams,’’ what did you get?’’ He was happy. He wanted to share in the fun, like opening presents on Christmas morning. “I have no idea.’’ “Look, then.’’ “I’ll look later.’’ “Look now. It’s not a secret.’’ “Actually, it is. It is a secret. This is my letter now, not yours. My mail is a private matter. I will read it when I feel like it and I do not intend to discuss it with you. Enjoy your cheese footballs.’’ Andresen left the coffee table and went to his bunk. Williams heard the envelope tearing. He turned round to look and looked away quickly again. He heard Andresen laughing. In the morning Williams was up first. He made a great show of setting up his chess board and trying out some moves. It was an elaborate pantomime but it made his point – the letter from Yale had made it through. Whatever it was that Andresen had snatched, it wasn’t
chess moves. He was making a statement. He was telling Andresen that the secret letter he had bought for cheese footballs was no secret at all. He would work it out. He would go through his letters and track down the missing one. Andresen swung his legs to the floor. He stood by the bunk, reading something, shielding it from Williams with his back and he sniggered. Just before lunch a bulb burst. The hut was not dark. There were plenty of other lamps still burning but there was a sudden dimness. The light grew less and they each, at opposite sides of the hut, realised at exactly the same moment how horrible it would be if the darkness of the blizzard overtook them. The double doors rattled again, as if the storm wanted to come in and make an inspection, size the place up for occupation. “I’ll get that,’’ Williams said. He went into the cupboard and came back with a new bulb, stood on a stool and screwed it in place. Andresen hunched by the window, looking at the storm. “It’s
echoed through the bones of his head like gravel. In the upper bunk Andresen read his letter again. The bed springs shook with his suppressed laughter. They began to keep secrets from one another. They became private. Williams ate his cheese footballs alone and in the dark, hiding them the way a junkie hides his stash, relishing them jealously. Andresen read his letter and laughed. He never spoke about it, never gave a hint about what was in it. When Williams asked, he refused angrily. “I don’t ask about your mail,’’ he said. Williams hit back the only way he could, making grand announcements about the contents of his letters as he answered them each evening. “My paper on glaciation has been accepted for publication,’’ he said. Or: “The Professor’s wife has an absolutely filthy mind.’’ And: “My sister has been at a party and it seems to have got a bit out of hand.’’ In the middle of the week, he said: “That birthday card was from my aunt.’’ Andresen said: “Many happy
They began to keep secrets from one another.
They became private. Williams ate his cheese footballs alone bound to blow out soon,’’ he said. But he didn’t believe it. That night in bed, Williams lay with a bowl of cheese footballs. He ate each one individually, not wolfing them in handfuls like Andresen had done. He held each one on his tongue, letting the cheesiness of it flood his mouth, then flicked it to the side to crunch it between his teeth, slowly, slowly, waiting for it to give and crack and release its fondant filling. He ate them apologetically and in secret, careful not to let them crunch and rustle in the bowl, taking each one out carefully in tweezer fingers. He didn’t want a fuss. Williams knew he had got the best of the bargain. There was no point rubbing anybody’s nose in it. He took the last cheese football between his fingers, placed the bowl silently on the linoleum and pushed it out of sight under the bed. The crunch
returns,’’ turned his back, read the letter and giggled. The storm did not blow out. It’s like that sometimes. Fraser the pilot did not come back with a new batch of supplies. Williams tried to make things last but, towards the end of the third week, he went to bed with his final half-bowl of cheese footballs. Lying there in the darkness, his mattress trembling in every blast of the storm, each mouthful became a metaphor for life. Every bite took him closer to the grave, every crunch carried away a year of his life. There was just one left. It rolled round the bowl, dodging his grip with a lonely, papery whisper. He caught it. He lifted it to his lips. He held it on his tongue. He did not chew. He did not crunch. He lay back on the pillow and blotted out the endless scream of the blizzard. He imagined himself in a distant
opium den, drifting, dreaming, as the cheese football melted away, softened, dissolved, until it was gone, until there was nothing left of it but an imagined recollection. “That’s what will happen to me,’’ he thought. “One day I will simply dissolve away. There will be nothing left.’’ There was a salt taste in his mouth that might have been the last trace of a cheese football, or it might have been his own tears. “All done?’’ said Andresen. His face loomed down from the top bunk. “All gone? None left?’’ He disappeared again and said: “But I’ve still got my letter,’’ and the bed shook with his laughing. In every remembered childhood, there’s a moment when we wake and believe that it was all a dream. The vase did not shatter, the puppy did not die. That was how Williams woke. It was as sweet for him as for any child and the moment after was just as bitter. The storm still blew, the cheese footballs were all gone, there would be no helicopter and Andresen had the letter. He thought of calling some sort of a truce. After all, in an emergency it was always understood that they would pull together. If Andresen had been starving, he wouldn’t have stood by, hoarding all the cheese footballs. He could just make some light-hearted comment: “Okay, you win, what’s in the letter?’’ and they would laugh and talk about it. No they wouldn’t. He knew that. Andresen hung his legs over the side of the bunk, jumped to the floor and walked off to the shower. His shirt was hanging over the end of the bunk where he’d left it the night before, his trousers were on the chair. Williams got out of bed and rifled the pockets. Nothing. He pushed his hands under the pillow of Andresen’s bed. Not there either. It could be anywhere. It could be in his locker. It could be hidden among his socks. It could be with him now in the bathroom, tucked in the pocket of his dressing gown. It could be in the roof space, behind the tiles above the bunk. It could be anywhere. They ate cornflakes with madeup condensed milk. Williams said: “So what did the letter say?’’ He tried to make it sound as casual as he could.
“What letter?’’ “The letter you took from me.’’ “I didn’t take your letter.’’ “You did. I saw you. I was there.’’ “I didn’t take it. You sold it to me. I bought it.’’ “Yes. Yes, I did.’’ They crunched through some more cornflakes. Williams was trying to do that trick they do on TV, where an interviewer says nothing for a few seconds, says nothing and just looks, hoping that his victim will be forced to fill the silence. Nothing happened. “So what did the letter say?’’ He almost screamed it. “You are very rude,’’ Andresen said. “What did it say?’’ “I don’t ask you about your mail.’’ “For God’s sake!” Williams banged his bowl down on the table. “This is stupid. I’m not even going to argue about it. It’s my bloody letter what did it say?’’ Andresen got up and went to the sink. “What did it say? What’s the big laugh? Always reading it and tittering, that’s you. Hee-hee-hee. Ha-ha-ha. Come on then, share the joke!’’ Andresen said: “I’m going out. I want to check the weather station and it will give you time to cool down.’’ Williams said: “Fine.’’ Andresen got dressed. It took quite a time. Layers are important. By the time he was done he was so thickly cocooned that he walked awkwardly, like a knight ready to be winched on to a charger. His legs were too thick to use and he waddled towards the door. “Lock up after me,’’ he said. “And listen out for the postman.’’ Williams followed him out. As soon as the door opened there was a screaming blast of cold, like looking into an ice-furnace. They had to struggle, Andresen pushing from
outside, Williams pulling from inside, before the door would close again. The wind dropped for a second and the door banged shut. Williams hooked the inner door to the outer door, just as it should be. It was perfectly safe. And Andresen was perfectly safe. He walked along a tethered rope, the hut at one end and the weather station at the other. It was hard going. Weeks of blizzard had left snow in deep, carved heaps over the gravel and he couldn’t see a thing. It didn’t matter. He could walk safely along the rope, do his work and come back, like an astronaut in airless space or a diver down under tons of crushing, freezing water. He was safe. Andresen went and came back. He crawled over the pile of snow humped up in the mouth of the tunnel that sheltered the door and he found the door shut. It would not open. He banged on it. He kicked it. He tried to out-yell the blizzard. He crawled back out into the snow and stumbled round the hut, tripping on the safety ropes as he went, one hand always on the hut wall, until he saw the dim yellow of the window glowing in the storm. He banged on the window with the flat of his gloved hand. It made a faint thud against the triple glazing - no more of a sound than a moth beating against a light bulb - and the blizzard snatched even that away. But Williams heard. He looked up from where he was on the other side of the hut. They looked at each other through the window, Andresen outside in the blizzard, Williams inside with clothes scattered across the room, books torn open, cupboards empty . They looked at each other and Andresen knew he would die in the snow. He stood there for a while, his hand on the window making kitten-pawing movements at the glass, so faint he could barely notice them through his gloves. He stood there until Williams
broke off from ransacking the hut to make a cup of coffee. All the time that it took for the kettle to boil, Williams stood there at the window looking right at Andresen. He measured out the coffee. He poured the boiling water. He stirred in the milk and he went back to the search. When he looked at the window again, there was nobody there. Andresen went and lay down in the tunnel. He made himself comfortable on a pillow of snow and froze to death. In the morning, when the snow had stopped, Williams found him and dragged him inside. He used kettles of hot water to unbend his limbs and peel the frozen clothes off his body to search them. That was how things were when Fraser the pilot arrived. Williams was sitting at his desk, getting on with his work with Andresen, half frozen, half scalded on the floor in a heap of wet clothes Fraser gave him a bag of cheese footballs and he ate them quietly in the helicopter all the way back to the base. There was no sign of the letter anywhere. When they got the place tidied up and the relief crew flew in, they found it in the sugar jar a day or so later. It was a bank statement.
about the author Andrew Nicoll is a newspaper reporter living in Scotland. His award-winning debut novel 'The Good Mayor' has sold to 17 countries and was published by Bantam Dell in New York in August 2009. Photo Credit: D Sharon Pruitt
Writers’ Block by Kate Thompson
‘Anything about books or publishing,’ was the suggestion for this piece. ‘Write about something you’re passionate about.’ It shouldn’t have given me any problems. I’m one of those people who is always passionate about something. One passion after another has hijacked my attention and steered my life in completely unexpected directions. When I was a teenager it was horses, and I worked with them for several years after leaving school. Then came a sudden, overwhelming, (but shortlived) desire to become a radical lawyer, which led me to London, from where I went travelling, discovered India and fell in love with it. I returned a second time, and might have gone again had it not been for the arrival of my first daughter (arising, as do most children, from another kind of passion!). I began writing when she and her sister started school. There was a writers’ group in the local library, and I went along as a way of getting out of the house. To begin with it was all quite tentative – a poem here, a short story there - but within a year or two I was in the grip of a new and ferocious passion. The ideas were piling in upon each other, and I was driven to write, and write, and write. Managing it was the difficulty. Time had to be found to do it, and attention had to be dragged away from it and given to the other central things in my life – my family and the small farm I was running. The internal pressure to write was sometimes so intense that I would have to go away for a while and get a draft down on paper, because I was unfit for any other purpose until the pressure was released.
As time went on I managed to regularise things a bit. I found a place to work and developed a routine, and was able to divide my attention more reasonably. But the drive remained, and as soon as I had finished one book, the pressure for the next one would begin to build. There was always some new interest to be explored, some social problem to be wrestled with, some fascination that needed to be moulded into the form of a story and written down. Every book has had a life of its own and has been driven by some underlying interest or concern. Over the years I have written about genetic engineering and extraterrestrial life, the origins and the demise of the human race, social problems and terrorism, time, alchemy, and (driven by another unexpected and all-consuming passion) Irish traditional music. In 2007 I was offered a residency in Bristol, backed by the RSA and the Gulbenkian Foundation, to study some aspect of ecology and produce a creative work based upon my research. I chose climate change, became passionately interested in it, and wrote my latest book, The White Horse Trick. Which brings us, more or less, to the present day. And I find, to my surprise, that I am not currently passionate about anything. The White Horse Trick is my nineteenth book in twelve years, and I am suddenly empty. Burned out. I am all out of fascination, all out of righteous indignation about political and social problems, all out of drive and fixations. I am, for once in my life, devoid of passion. I’m not writing and I don’t know what or when I will write next. Does that mean I’m suffering from writers’ block? The thing is, I
don’t believe in writers’ block. I’m not even entirely sure that I believe in concept of ‘being a writer’. A writer is someone who writes. A poet is someone who composes poems. Are these people therefore writers or poets forever, even when their inspiration has dried up? It would be repugnant to me to sit at a desk and produce a new book to some kind of formula, because I was expected to, or expected myself to. I have always written because I had something I wanted to explore or impart, and at the moment I don’t. I’m not blocked. I have nothing to say, so I am saying nothing. And I’m certainly not suffering. I am using the time to sort out the long-neglected corners of my life. I’m decluttering the house and getting some long-overdue repairs done. I’m tackling the jungly bits of my garden and building some new vegetable beds. I’m playing badminton in the village hall and trying my hand at a bit of painting. I don’t know how long the savings will hold out, but I’m refusing to get anxious about it. I need this time to wind down, to take a look around, to de-focus my mind and let my soul rest. Perhaps some new passion will come along and push me into writing again. If not, I’ll have to see if there’s anything else I can do. But in the meantime it is wonderful, just wonderful, to be not driven for a while. If this is writers’ block, I’m taking it as an opportunity and not a crisis. I am making full use of it and enjoying every passion-free minute!
Kate Thompson has won the Children’s Books Ireland Bisto Book of the Year award four times – in 2002 for The Beguilers, in 2003 for The Alchemist’s Apprentice, in 2004 for Annan Water and in 2006 for The New Policeman. The New Policeman also won the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize 2005, the Whitbread
Book Award Children’s category 2005 and the in augural Irish BA Award for Children's Books in 2006 and has been longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. Kate also won the CBI Bisto Book of the Year 2006 with The New Policeman for the fourth time. She is the only author in history of the awards to do so.
Kate's new novel, The White Horse Trick, was released on the 1st October. www.katethompson.info Lake image credit: Photography
Sam
Llic
The Marketplace by Paul
Many years ago - some time before the Sinclair ZX80 1kb computer and long before the internet - my brother bought me a copy of A&C Black's Writers' & Artists' Yearbook Yearbook. It was a treasure trove of information with its listings of publishers, agents and majorr awards, and its chapters on submitting manuscripts, copyright and marking up galley-proofs. proofs. While this and similar other 'marketplace' books remain available (in print and online), the internet has made this information so much more accessible. Googling 'literary agents' today brings up 2,880,000 entries, while 'publishers' scores a whopping 110,000,000 listings. If, on the other hand, you're not looking for a publisher or an agent, but for a competition, then a search for 'short story contest 2009' crea creates 29,800,000 hits. If anything, the choice can be
overwhelming, although with more and more publishers, agents and literary competitions accepting email submissions, the process is somewhat cheaper and quicker than snail-mail mail ... if not more competitive. Filters based on geographical location and genre can narrow the field to a more manageable quota. This can prove a major benefit of subscribing to at least one regional writers' society and for subscribing to specific literary magazines, where independent publishers in particular are more likely to place a call for submissions. With all this is mind, I'll happily mention a short story competition that was run by a regular visitor to The View From Here and one of this magazine's interviewees. Gary Davison, author of Fat Tuesday and Streakers. He announced a 250 word short story competition on his website and, what's more, our very own Mike French (editor of The View From Here)) will be taking a seat as one of the judges. The winner will appear here in print in i The View From Here. Now, there's one competition you don't need to Google. Background photo credit:: Helga Weber
Celebs in Writing Distress:
Angelina Jolie Dear Lone Ranger I love your magazine, The View From Here, and it has really motivated me to start my first novel. I don't want to trade on my fame however and want to send it to a publisher under an assumed name. Have you any suggestions as to how best approach them? Help me Lone Ranger! love Angelina
Dear Angelina Thanks for including the signed photo of you with your letter Angelina, I've pasted it up at the local tavern after negotiating a fair price with the proprietor. So to your problem. You've come to the right Ranger my girl. My advice would be to change your name to Jolie Angelina, research the publishers to find one that you believe will fall in love with your work - plus write a good covering letter and I'm sure you'll get picked up if your writing and story are strong enough after about 5 to 50 years of submitting. Good luck! yours The Lone Ranger
Book Reviews
The Shadow of a Smile by Kachi A. Ozumba Publisher: Alma Books Review: Grace Upon first inspection The Shadow of a Smile has everything. It has deception; it has love and family loyalty; it has imprisonment, isolation and loss of innocence; it has illness and sacrifice. The underpinning foundation of the narrative is the unavoidable presence of bribery, corruption
and betrayal that has infiltrated and taken residence in Nigeria. The narrative's overriding message is one of unfailing hope amidst a crooked society. The novel starts with a great pace. It has short sharp sections where the narration flits back and forwards in time. The first few chapters are full of action, throwing us straight into a grim prison cell, and then taking us back in time through road accidents, violent fights and even more violent grief. Zuba, our boy-to-man protagonist, grows up before our eyes and faces unrelenting challenges (bereavement, false imprisonment, seriously ill father and the task of stepping into his shoes). Zuba's responses to these challenges (sincere anger, utter shock, endless hope and selflessness) show us that he is a kind, honest and fair young man who acts with care and integrity, even in the most dire situations. It is the power of his noble responses to adversity that allows Zuba to take control of his helpless circumstances. Zuba is described as having 'a lightness to his walk', and as being 'not wily enough for this world'. He is a peacemaker. He is 'a handsome young man, full of promise'. He is tentative and assertive. He is a troubled hero; 'Zuba paced back and forth on the veranda, barechested'. In spite of his heroic actions, Zuba is not a superhero. He is a very real, very likeable young man who has a flawless character, but who has a pertinent physical flaw in the shape of a keloid (swollen scar) on his forehead (the presence of which he is always aware). This may be a good moment to mention my one (rather large) criticism of this novel; the novel's one keloid, if you like. The presence of Zuba's keloid is referred to many times by Ozumba, in phrases such as, 'he began to stroke his keloid', 'began to rub his keloid', 'rubbed his keloid'...these phrases became tired and repetitive by the end of the novel. I think Ozumba was attempting to draw attention to how people are acutely aware of their own imperfections, and how a shared imperfection creates an instant bond between two people. However, Ozumba's observation of human behaviour isn't portrayed with any insight or depth. I think what is missing is a flair for language and description. I couldn't help but be reminded of the type of fiction produced by school pupils when asked to write a descriptive passage. This extract will illustrate my point: 'Tiny, revolting, mean-looking, orange-black glassybodied lice were lodged along the seams'.
The description in the novel focussed almost solely on 3 areas: 1.
2.
3.
Colour: 'The clouds shed their sullenness and now sparkled a cheery silvery blue'; 'Apart from the church and the green-painted offices to their left, the other blocks framing the yard looked greyed.' Facial expressions: 'A smile played on the lips of the leader of the group'; 'The smugness vanished from Mr Egbetuyi's face...[his] mouth hung open in mid-sentence...Zuba was too dazed to give them more than a vague glance'. Smells: 'The mattress smelt of rancid sweat and drool'; 'The air filled with the scent of burning flesh'.
While these descriptions are good and powerful, I found myself wanting more; more depth and more variety. I wanted more factors to be considered. For example, a pattern emerged where males responded to bad news by vomiting and females responded by unstoppable crying. I became bored with the repetition of these descriptions. I understand the over-description of facial expressions because Ozumba is drawing attention to the importance of the subtleties in people's faces and how a glint in someone's eye can be laden with meaning. While Ozumba described some brilliant facial expressions (for example 'Chairman flashed huge teeth at Zuba', 'His face split by the widest grin', 'her eyes were full of hate') I felt there were too many mundane references to smiling ('he attempted a smile', 'she smiled sadly') which laboured a delicate point. The Shadow of a Smile seems to be an in depth study into displays of human emotion through facial expressions, but I fear it falls short due to an inability to explore and describe more diverse methods of communication, and a blindness to the depth and variety of emotion. The extract from Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, situated before the first chapter of the first section, hints that something as small as a shadow of a smile can change a person's entire face. Whether this is enough of a premise to sustain 300+ pages of fiction is debatable. If it is, Ozumba hasn't done justice to the profundities of the expression of emotion because he repeats the same phrases much too often. The Shadow of a Smile has some beautiful moments, some hilarious moments ('A fart trumpeted from his elephantine buttocks'), some moving moments ('It was not the attention-seeking crying of children. It was silent like the bleeding of wounds'), and some joyous moments. The novel was spiked with these gems, but these moments weren't linked together with ease and they seemed too fleeting. The beginning and end were held together superbly with fast paced action, suspense and frequent plot
developments, but the middle lingered and trudged around the same worn-out descriptions. I would recommend The Shadow of a Smile for its big themes, likeable characters and moments of beauty, but I would warn a potential reader to be patient through the slow parts and the repetitious descriptions of expressions, colour and smell.
Serena by Ron Rash Publisher: Cannongate Review: Charlie
“When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.”
So opens Ron Rash’s Serena, a novel set in the Appalachian Mountains that follows the fortunes of the eponymous central character and her husband as they create a timber barony in 1930’s America. From the cover art on my paperback edition, you might be forgiven for thinking that what follows Rash’s wonderful opening lines will be a novel of romance and tribulation. How delighted was I to find something far more engrossing; both in content and style. What Rash has created here is grand theatre, in the best possible sense. He quotes Marlowe on the cover page and I was struck by just how this novel follows the form of Elizabethan drama. It soon becomes apparent that Serena is no heroine as she ruthlessly pursues her ambition. Nor is Pemberton, her equally ambitious husband, heroic. Whilst he has faint qualms about some of Serena’s methods he is not one to let concern for his workers or his business partners stand in their way. In keeping with Marlowe and Shakespeare a cast of supporting characters are introduced; some major, some minor, some serving to shed light on the characters of the Pembertons and others to provide commentary on their actions. Some are comic, others menacing and yet others heroic in ways the Pembertons will never be. Apart from Rachel, the young girl who has borne Pemberton a child, we are seldom privy to their thoughts, just as we know little of what the Pembertons may be thinking. This is not a novel that presents its characters from within; rather we know them through their deeds and judge them accordingly. And when their deeds are as remarkable as Serena’s a novel less assured than this might rightly be met with some head shaking. Rash however is a very accomplished writer indeed. His work as a poet and his detailed knowledge of Appalachian history, which he teaches as Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina, allow him to write with power and grace and so detail a time and place where such things seem not only possible but entirely right. He clearly has a deep love for the land and the history of the peoples who have tried to shape it and it is perhaps not going too far to say that in some sense, that Rash has characterised the land itself as locked in struggle with Serena; who embodies the destructive nature of human progress. As she cuts down both trees and people to turn a profit, so the mountains and trees cut down people in their turn. In contrast Rachel is accessible to us, we learn of her thoughts and fears for herself, her son and her way of life. She in a sense is the positive aspect of humanity that is diametrically opposite to Serena.
As for the workers and businessmen, some of the supporting cast I mentioned before, they are in turn awed and cowed by Serena and what she represents. Some strive to do her bidding, some seem to venerate her and some rightly fear her. None it seems can fathom where she came from or what drives her on. In this she is like the great eagle she trains to hunt snakes; beautiful and terrible and utterly unafraid. In writing the above I am conscious that I have yet to discuss plot. Again, rather like the Elizabethan drama, Rash uses plot as a canvas upon which to paint his scenes and to comment upon the actions of mankind. That said, the story is entirely satisfying and centred upon Rachel who can bear a child and so sustain a future and her struggle with Serena who is barren and can leave no legacy save through destructive force of will. In parallel with this, the book details some of the events surrounding the establishment of the National Park in the region and the impact this had upon business and livelihood. This second narrative is also concerned with sustainability versus profit, industry versus nature and is as relevant today as it was then. It is not however the reason you should read this book. Instead read it for its remarkable sense of time and place and Rash’s wonderfully vivid recounting of people and events set in a hostile yet magnificent landscape. By all means reflect upon how man and nature may come together and for what purpose but at the same time simply enjoy what I found to be one of the most engrossing and substantive books I have read for a long long time.
Stories From The War by Nathaniel Tower
He didn’t know how to tell his story. It wasn’t an easy story to tell. There certainly was a clear beginning, but it didn’t make much sense to start at the beginning. There was no way to end the story either; the ending seemed to last forever. For the last sixty years he had been living the American Dream, a dream that existed only when awake. It was a dream that consisted of a happy marriage, a beautiful home, and wonderful kids and then grandkids. At night though, the dream always disappeared as the nightmare took over. Nightly it changed. While the dream was always the same, the nightmare varied every night. There was just too much to fit all into one. “You had another nightmare last night,” his wife told him over grapefruit juice and bran cereal. “Did I?” he asked in that detached voice that he always associated with her observations. In reality, he wasn’t detached at all; that was just how he wanted to appear, and so he barely looked up as he slurped a spoonful of bran flakes and fat free milk into his mouth. “Yes, honey, you did. You woke up screaming. That’s eight nights in a row now.” “Is it?” “Yes, honey, it is. Do you want to talk about them?” “I don’t remember them,” he lied through another slurp. The nightmares had been with him for sixty years. Of course he
remembered them. He didn’t need the nightmares to remember the stories. The nightmares were not vivid enough to do the stories justice. They simply were reminders, reminders that he didn’t need, but reminders that terrified him nonetheless. No one could ever forget what he had seen. But that was the nature of war. “Why don’t you ever want to talk about them?” she pressed on. Living with these unknown nightmares for sixty years had not been easy on her either, but she had tried to be a patient and understanding wife through it all. The man had taken such great care of her and their children. For awhile, she had even been able
there had been any hope for healing, he gladly would have shared his stories with her years ago. Again he woke up sweating that night, his upper body jolting straight up past military sit-up position, a fierce scream accompanying the sudden jolt. Tonight had been flak storms and shrapnel showers. Last night had been alligator-filled swamps. The night before had been the faceless body of his best friend blown to pieces by a land mine. Before that, he saw mutilated bodies, raped women and children, and countless other tragedies that weren’t even worth mentioning. They were so far back in time that it didn’t matter anymore; there was nothing that could be done to rectify any of them, yet they haunted him constantly. There never had been
They forgot all about the church wedding. She mentioned it once a couple months after the return, but he was too jaded for that. to sleep through his kicks and sweats and cries in the night. Their life together had been satisfying enough that his years of secrets had been okay. But with the cancer getting worse each day, she wanted to know what the man had been struggling with all his life. She wanted to know before she died. “There’s nothing to talk about,” he replied, rising from the table and pouring half of his milkmoistened bran flakes into the sink. “If you ever want to talk, I’m here for you.” As she said these words, she rose from her chair and gently touched the shoulder that was busy scrubbing the wet particles of bran out of the ceramic bowl. “I know you’re here. I just don’t have anything I need to talk about.” He slowed his scrubbing and let her gently caress his shoulder in a consistent circular pattern similar to that of waxing a car. He knew she was trying to heal him of his scars, but he also knew the scars were far too deep to ever heal. If he had thought
anything that he could have done. He had just been planted in the middle, an innocent bystander that had joined because everyone else had joined. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Looking back, it had been the right thing to do at the time. But the moment he had been dropped off in that jungle, he had ceased to have any innocence. They had gotten married right before he had left even though she had only been seventeen and they had only known each other for six months. Again, it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. They would have a big church ceremony when he returned. After one year and nine months, she didn’t think he would return, but she remained innocent, thousands and thousands of miles away from any of the tragedies. She was detached. No matter how many stories she read or heard, it would never have the same impact on her. You had to be there to know. When he returned after two years and one month, they forgot all about the church wedding. She mentioned it once a couple months after the return, but he was too jaded for that. He didn’t see much point in having a big fancy
celebration after the things he had seen. The moment his torso lurched forward in the bed, she placed her hand soothingly on his back. “Shhhh,” she whispered comfortingly in an angelic voice capable of bringing withered tulips back to life. The hand repeated the waxing motions from earlier in the day. “It’s okay honey. It’s okay.” She didn’t believe the words she said. Neither did he. He couldn’t explain why these nightmares grew more and more intense as he grew further away from the experiences. They should have vanished long ago just like all those lives had. “Please tell me about it,” she said, trying not to grit her teeth as the aches in her head pounded violently against her temples. The headaches were getting worse now. She knew she only had a few weeks, maybe a few months if she was lucky, although she wasn’t entirely sure she would consider that luck at this point. “There’s nothing to tell,” he panted. “Just a dream. Go back to sleep. You need your rest.” Even through his painful demons he protected and cared for her. “Harold,” she said to him the next day while they read the morning paper, he the business section, she the lifestyle. “Yes, ma’m?” he muttered without looking up, his reading glasses secured tightly on the bridge of his nose. “Did you know that another American company was sold to the damn foreigners today? Pretty soon we’ll have nothing left. Is this what I fought for?” Seldom did he make references to the days of the war, but when he did they always were politically charged. “Harold,” she said tersely. “I want to talk to you.” “We’re talking, honey. We’re talking just fine. We always talk fine.” He turned the page, pretending to continue the story from the front. “Harold.” This time it was a nononsense shout. It had been many years since she had used this tone. It might have been the first time since their three girls had grown and left to have children of their own. This was the only thing left that could really faze him. He was all ears now.
“Lucy has only a few hours to live,” the doctor told him. “She is conscious and can hear you, but she can’t really speak much.” “You’ve got my attention, dear. Now what do you want to talk about?” “I want you to tell me what you dreamt about last night.” She had put the paper down and was demanding that he make eye contact. He did. “I don’t remember.” He looked away momentarily as he spoke, not willing to lie while looking in his wife’s eyes. “Yes you do. Now tell me.” “There’s no need for you to be haunted, too.” “But I am haunted, Harold. Any time that something haunts you, it haunts me too. I’ve been haunted for sixty years just like you. Ever since you came home you’ve been different. I haven’t loved you any less for it, but I have been haunted every moment right along with you. That’s what happens when you give your heart and soul away to someone. You experience everything they experience. You share everything. The joys they feel as well as the pain and horrors. I don’t always want to, but I can’t make the ghosts go away either. As long as we’re both alive, I’ll be haunted if you are.” “Then there’s no need to talk about it.” “I’d like to know what’s been haunting us for the past sixty years. I want you to tell me before I die.” “You’re not dying anytime soon,” he lied. Both had tears welling in their eyes behind their reading glasses, but neither was willing to be the first to let one spill. Their eyes were dams fighting against the swelling waters. “I think I know when I’m dying. And I know I’m dying soon, whether you want to believe it or not.” Harold was the first to relinquish a tear. She leaned in a bony finger and wiped it away. He thought the finger was beautiful and gently took hold of her hand before she could pull it away. He tasted the tear. It tasted like two years of hell. It tasted like sixty years of swelling pain. It tasted like his wife
was dying. He longed to taste her tears, too. “Tell me before I die. It’s the last thing I want to hear.” A tear was beginning to escape her eye, but she was too strong to let it fall. With a quick blink of the eyelid, the tear remained stationary in the swelling ocean. “Why do you want that to be the last thing you hear?” “Because nothing could show me that you love me more than your deepest secrets and fears. And because that will make the pain of death feel like the joys of eighty-five Christmases.” “You haven’t experienced eightyfive Christmases.” “I know. That’s why I want to.” He creased the paper, still holding her hand with a loving firmness. “I’ll tell you before you die.” “Thank you.” A tear finally rolled down her cheek. He quickly scooped it up with his dried hand. Instantly he felt refreshed, as if that tear contained a thousand years of peaceful life. For the next three weeks, the nightmares continued, growing in intensity each night. Sometimes they came more than once in a night. He still could not bring himself to disclose the information to his wife, but she wasn’t dying yet. Then the expected happened. She was rushed to the hospital after fainting and hitting her head on the dresser. The patch of congealed blood brought back horrifying images, and for the first time in a long time he saw the nightmares during his waking hours. “Lucy has only a few hours to live,” the doctor told him. “She is conscious and can hear you, but she can’t really speak much.” Again the tears swelled in his eyes, but he fought stronger than before to hold them back. He would not allow her to see these tears escape. He would not allow her to know that this was worse than every moment of
those two years of hell, those two years of constant fear, those two years of torture and death and destruction and all of the unsightly images that accompanied them. He gladly would have fought for sixty more years in conditions ten times worse if he could prolong her life until the end of his. But he couldn’t. The only thing left that he could fight was the tears that tried desperately to escape his eyes. He held them firmly inside, nearly swallowing them to the point of invisibility as he entered the room to see his wife of over sixty years for the last time. She wouldn’t have been able to see the tears, but surely she would have known they were there. When he entered, she spoke but two sentences. “I love you. Now tell me.” That was it, her last six words, none more than a syllable. And somehow he knew that she wouldn’t utter even another sound before all life vanished from her body. So he sat beside her, and with great strength, he told her what he believed she needed to hear. “Vand surrounded in the field of the most beautiful flowers, we saved the young boy’s life.” It didn’t matter that he changed the two most important details of the story. What mattered was the beautiful smile that swept across the adorable face that he had fallen in love with back in 1941. It was the same smile. It was the same face. She didn’t need to see the horrors he experienced during those years. She just needed him to tell her a story as her life finally came to an end after a long and painful struggle. When he went to bed that night, he didn’t see anything except her beautiful smiling face.
about the author Nathaniel Tower writes fiction and teaches English. His short stories have appeared in a variety of magazines. He also is the founder and editor of the literary magazine Bartleby Snopes.
Photo Credit: Nevada Tumbleweed on Flickr
Johannes Speyer and the Active Reader by Georgy Riecke
This article was going to be all about Lucio Ganzini (whose pointless memoir, Where the Power Lies: Pricks, Prats and Publishing Houses, hit the shelves last week) but circumstances, like a stiff summer wind, have blown me from one field to another, leaving me free to pursue alternative thoughts. It just so happens that I have recently found myself myself, on several occasions, laying down the law on my late teacher, Johannes Speyer (1913-1984) 1984) – a man whose influential doctrines any reader of mine will have come across, in various forms, throughout my writing. Some say I have lived my critical life in Speyer’s yer’s shadow. They are probably wrong - but in case they aren’t, let me say this: I’d rather sit in Speyer’s shadow than melt like a
soporific snowman under the smouldering sun of chronic ignorance. The truth is that I have, for some time, considered writing ng a book about him (Wolfgang Heizler’s 2004 critical biography, Surfing on Words, Words though good in parts, failed to get a sense of the man as he really was). Conversations with Speyer was the first title that came to mind. At last a chance to utilize those patient transcriptions I made of all our early conversations! Looking back on these, however, I realised that for every wise thing Speyer said, I would offer something quite inane in reply. Perhaps it would be better, in the long run, to go for Speyer Stories,, a compendium of my favourite Speyer anecdotes: the time he almost drowned off the Adriatic Coast trying to read Moll Flanders for the
thirteenth time on a makeshift raft; the time he asked a skywriter to reproduce the opening line of Paavo Laami’s The Phoenicians across the sky and refused to pay up on account of a missing comma; the time he threw a glass of vanilla milk at Maria von Küppelberg’s five year old daughter; maybe even the time he killed a facetious magpie with a large German lexicon. So m many great stories. Perhaps too many. What about a collection of quotations instead? Speyer was eminently quotable, after all. ‘Read, re re-read and re-read read again’ was his most famous phrase – one which bears repeating, re-repeating repeating and re re-repeating again. Oh,, but to reduce a man to a mere parade of aphorisms: it’s a cruel sport. No - what the world really needs, I thought, is a book that puts Speyer’s life and work into perspective; a book that outlines the relevance of his theories for contemporary readers. Speyer and the Twenty-First Century - something like that. Should you doubt the immense necessity of such a study, allow me to spend the rest of this short article explaining, for those who don’t already know, just why modern readers ought to know more ab about Johannes Speyer. He had his faults, I’ve never denied that. He could be wilfully obscure at times, or just plain silly. Take his infamous surfing metaphors, for example. Whatever provoked a man of his intelligence (nevermind a landlocked Austrian) to pepper epper his prose with quite so many references to surfing? We shall never know suffice it to say that beneath the weird frothy waves of his language swam fish of remarkably good sense. Indeed, the foundations of Speyer’s thought were, to some extent, frighteningly hteningly simple. He fought, in short, for better understanding; for a greater effort made on the part of the reader to fully comprehend the glorious creations of the writer (curiously he never questioned whether the writer was worth understanding: he took this for granted). He was, you could say, a critic of criticism, constantly haranguing his colleagues for their failure to make an effort worthy of their roles. Lazy readers annoyed him like nothing else. The perfect reader, for him, was one that squeezed every last drop of potential out of a book; that made every page of every book sweat for its very life. To his mind, reading was far from a relaxing activity: it was a fierce struggle, a violent tussle, maybe even an erotic rumble between reader and write writer. Anything but a calm afternoon on a cosy armchair. God forbid. How does this translate into actual practice? As I hinted, Speyer’s methods were somewhat extreme. What’s more, he spent so much time attacking critical methods, he rarely gave himself the op opportunity to apply his own. It is up to us, therefore, to try and pick up where he left off; to smooth down the rough edges of his philosophy into a workable form, whilst retaining the core of his provocative thoughts. I have attempted to do this, in the m main, by pushing forward the idea of ‘Active Reading’. Speyer believed not only in re-reading, reading, but in pursuing a range of reading styles. This is something we can all integrate into our own reading practice. Have you ever considered, for example, reading underwater? derwater? Maybe it sounds a little
mad – but it can do wonders for one’s understanding of resonant themes in early twentieth century Hungarian poetry. I cannot even begin to describe the pleasingly different perspectives one gets from reading Virginia Woolff once on a boat, and then again in a field full of manure. Oh, the nuances, the nuances! They simply seep from a book in the hands of a truly Active Reader. Trust me. Once you’ve read Boris Yashmilye up a tree, in a cave and then again in sub zero temperatures, tempera you’ll never look at literature the same way again. ‘Stop skirting along the surface of things,’ as Speyer once said to me, ‘take a dive, for art’s sake,, take a dive’.
Georgy Riecke has been dipping his wrinkled toes into the strange lake of obscure European literature since the 1980s. After studying in Germany, he co-founded co a literary magazine, ‘Groping for Allusions’, in London. In the mid 90s he founded another journal, ‘Underneath the Bunker’, which has been online since 2004 (www.underneaththebunker.com). Since 2008 he has been regularly blogging at http://georgyriecke.wordpress.com. Photo Credit: Jude Giles with thanks to Grace Read
Gary William Murning interview nterview by Mike
Hi Gary, thanks for agreeing to chat about your novel If I Never.
deal with Legend Press and how did that make you feel?
You're very welcome, Mike. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.
I actually approached Legend a few years ago with an earlier project -- a quite experimental (for me, at least!) "literary" ghost story called The
How did you get your publishing
Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. That particular novel didn't quite fit their list but further work was requested so I sent along If I Never. And, as is sometimes the way with publishing, the person I was dealing with at the time moved on to pastures new and I pretty much assumed that that was that. I knew from past experience with other publishers that when a sympathetic etic editor leaves the opportunity usually goes out the door with them -- so I pretty much forgot all about it. I got on with other projects and didn't even try submitting If I Never elsewhere (something I can't really explain... I usually submit pretty widely.) wi Then, out of the blue, about eighteen months later I heard from Tom Chalmers -- Mr Legend himself -letting me know that he'd like to discuss If I Never with me. Naturally I replied pretty promptly! How did it made me feel? Initially, extremely excited. ited. The conversation I had with Tom went exactly how I would have wished. He made it very clear that everyone who had read If I Never had really enjoyed it and that they wanted to publish it. More to the point, he seemed to "get" what I was trying to do with my fiction. He saw that whilst I wanted to write work that would be extremely entertaining, and also wanted my work to have a little depth -- layers of meaning that the reader could explore if he or she wished. It really was a wonderful feeling... butt then came the short wait for the contract be signed and so on and so forth. That was hell -- not because of any contractual problems or difficulties with Legend, I hasten to add. That all went splendidly. No, the problem was that I managed to convince myself self that everything was going to go pear-shaped! pear There was one week in particular when I was a
first day -- and I've been able to enjoy it much more since then. It's like I was saying to a friend recently, though; you simply can't maintain that level of excitement -not without keeling over! The chances are with a small indie publisher, that the book will not make a large number of sales or make the bestsellers list - does that frustrate you or are you just glad to see it in print?
complete pain to live with! All worth it, though! Would you have considering selfpublishing? I briefly considered this option with Hungry Ghosts, but that was never really something I wanted to do... I suppose I wanted my work to be published because someone else wanted it to be published rather than just myself. How does it feel now the book is published - is there a high then a come down? I'm a writer so I should be able to do a little better than cliches but... the old reliable rollercoaster analogy actually fits very nicely. The week before publication was very weird. Friends were asking me how excited I was and, most of the time, I simply wasn't. The excitement came with acceptance and publication itself -or the run-up to it, at least -- was actually quite scary! It didn't help that I'd opted for an online launch -- a week long "event" with a competition and various other bits and pieces. The closer I got to it, the more I realised that I could end up with egg on my face if no one took part. Thankfully, though, it was a huge success -- the book selling out on Amazon.co.uk within hours on the
Not make the bestseller list? Pish and tosh! I won't be happy until I've taken the world by storm, Mike. World domination one reader at a time!... Seriously, though, I do think, with time, a good independent like Legend can position itself to, to some degree at least, beat the big boys at their own game. It can't happen overnight, of course, and if If I Never manages to sell 3000 or 4000 (pretty optimistic) in its first year, I'll be extremely happy... but I do believe that with a lot of time and effort on the part of the author, novels from independent publishers can break through and achieve decent sales figures. For example, If I Never is currently stocked in about 140 Waterstone's stores alone around the country. I know of writers with big publishers who haven't got that kind of in-store presence -- and that was only achieved with my publisher's efforts and also my own (with help from my parents), approaching individual stores, sending out flyers, that kind of thing. I think it's important to accentuate the positive, as the song says. Yes, the odds are stacked against If I Never being a bestseller, but that doesn't mean that it can't achieve a degree of success. Independent publishers, generally speaking, do something different. Difference, as I see it, is a huge selling point and can be used advantageously. A lot of first novels are semiautobiographical - how much is this true for If I Never? None of If I Never is semiautobiographical... thankfully! Yes, my characters no doubt have bits of me in them, but it's purely fictional (that's my story and I'm sticking to it!)
In your blurb it says that you are passionate about on-line on publicity, how important is it i for an author of an independent publisher to market their book and have you noticed a difference in attitude between on-line line and more traditional routes of advertising? I think it's important for any author to do as much marketing/promoting as possible. e. Independent publishers especially have a lot of work to deal with and are usually manned by a fairly small team. Legend Press, for example, is extremely proactive. They work for their authors, and they work hard. But they just can't to everything. That's That' why, when If I Never was accepted, I made a very conscious decision to do as much as I could myself. I have a fairly severe physical disability so certain avenues just weren't open to me -- but I figured that if I worked on really establishing an online presence this could only work in my favour. To be honest, I haven't all that much experience of the more traditional route. I've found the local press to be fairly receptive but bigger publications, naturally, seem to be taking a little more persuading. I am finding that it is vital to followfollow up, though. Pester and nag them into submission. That's the approach I am currently using. I'll let you know how it goes! Some of the violence in the book is treated with comical undertones - was that because you wanted want to soften the tone of the book with humor? I'm not sure why that happened that way, actually. It just developed naturally, and I certainly never made a conscious decision to soften the violence. I think it just fit with the general tone of the
novel... there's a mildly comic undertone to most aspects of it so I guess it just bled through (no pun intended) into the more violent scenes. Often in novels it takes a while for the boy to get the girl - in If I Never they get together in an interesting but very quick way, although the novel does spend a lot of time reflecting on the nature of their relationship - how key was all this to the story you wanted to tell? I hate preamble. It's something I was quite prone to in my earlier work and these days I like to cut to the chase, so to speak. The relationship between Price and Tara is fundamental to the novel -- the one thing that interested me most of all -so I suppose the quickness of their developing relationship stems from my own selfish need to get to what interested me most. I didn't want it to be a novel about falling in and out of love. I wanted, I suppose, it to be a novel about being in love whilst having to contend with some quite extreme external (and internal) pressures. So, yes, it was quite important to get right into the thick of who they were together. People often react out of their belief systems and perceptions and this seemed key in the book with the George controlling the behavior of Price and Tara; is this something that interests you? Absolutely. With this novel in particular, I was fascinated by the idea that long-established behaviour patterns and, yes, beliefs, to a degree, dictate the choices we make. I liked the notion that some of my characters' instincts, at the beginning of the novel, at least, were to maintain the status quo -- however painful that might be. Change was being forced upon them and they could either go with the flow or resist... the novel, I suppose, is in part about how they learn which is
the best choice to make under their very unique circumstances. There are characters in the book like Richard and Claudia who are cut off from society by their disabilities - was it important to you to show those specific characters. Not especially... this is something I've been thinking about quite a lot just recently, actually. As you know, I have a disability myself -- but I've never really considered myself a "disabled writer". It's not usually at the forefront of my mind when I work on a project, and, in fact, many of my novels don't feature characters with disabilities at all, and when they do, they are just characters like any other character... what I mean is, I don't approach writing them any differently. Both Claudia and Richard had an important part to play and a point to make, but it wasn't really about their disabilities. Not within the context of this particular novel. Even when I do write about issues that arise, quite specifically, from an individual's relationship with his or her own disability I tend to feel that disability itself is not the issue. To a degree, the old idea that societal reactions are the disabling factor rather than the disability holds some water in this context. By that I mean that disability comes from the outside rather than the inside -massive generalisation but, basically, what I'm saying is that all my stories, whether disability-centric not, are intrinsically human stories. I'm sure we can all relate to feelings of difference, of exclusion, of isolation -- of having to work hard to fit in and earn a place for yourself in life. Yes, the circumstances where someone with a disability is concerned can be quite extreme and unique, but these are stories and characters that should speak to and of something in all of us. You mention you like music, what kind of things do you like and do you listen to them whilst you're
writing or do you work in silence? Oddly, I don't seem to listen to music half as much as I once did -- but my taste is pretty varied. I enjoy everything from Glenn Gle Gould playing Bach's Goldberg Variations to 1980s electro-pop, pop, Soft Cell etc. Anything that's good or different, basically. I never listen to music while I'm writing, however. It just doesn't work for me -- it pulls me out of the world of the novel. I don't on't always get it, but silence is always appreciated when I'm working. Can you tell us something about the next book you're working on? Yes, I am currently working on what should hopefully be my third Legend Press novel, As Morning Shows the Day. At heart, it's a novel about secrets and lies -- about how the things we are told in childhood ultimately shape the people we become. Set largely in the 1970s, in the north-east east of England, it builds on certain themes that I touch upon in what will be my second nd Legend Press novel, Children of the Resolution. It isn't a sequel -- as far as characters and plot are concerned the two novels completely unrelated -- but the two novels are, in many respects, thematically paired. I think they'll sit well together -- and by the time As Morning Shows the Day is finished I think I'll have said just about all I want to say about what it is to grow from a boy into a man. I hope! After that, it's another very different novel -- currently in early development stages -called Out Of Season. But I'll tell you about that another time.
Visit Gary's site at www.garymurning.wordpress.com
now open for
poetry submissions see on-line for details
photo credit: Tschaff
The (Random) Name Game by Stella
Well I’ve been away from the View for a while. My day job was threatening to swallow me whole and I had to put up a good fight. Anyway, it’s good to be back! *stretch* Yes. What was I saying? I love the internet. It’s full of so many things – useful, useless, and just plain mind-boggling. boggling. It’s a particularly fabulous resource for writing – fact checking, finding tips, stumbling over interesting articles, and getting inspired, especially when creative energy is present but the subject is lacking. One resource I’m especially fond of is all the websites and databases for baby names – etymology, popularity, etc – not only for when I’m trying to find a name for a specific character in a project, but when I need to do a random exercise to get in the right frame of mind. I choose a name and then invent a whole biography – parents, ents, childhood, job, hobbies, achievements, whatever. Not a very long piece; a nice little sketch. The only disadvantage is that it can become unbelievably time-consuming consuming to pick a first name and then a surname. Really, it’s usually only meant as a brief exercise, but I end up digressing for a good half hour (or moreV) trying to find the right combination with the right meaning. That’s why today I said no getting bogged down. Pick something random. Except my brain cells couldn’t cope with all that spontaneity ity at once and so I turned to Google. Ah, GoogleV *sigh sigh* All I had to do was type in “name generator.” Sure enough, “random name generator” came up as a search possibility. One click and everything was before me. Aside from the fact that there are actual programs you can download to your computer to randomly generate names, there are three websites which are very handy. First up is Behind the Name’s random name generator. I'm already familiar with their first name and surname databases, which provide thor thorough etymological breakdowns, I just never noticed the (shiny!) random name generator. Not only does it give you a choice of creating a first name with up to three optional middle names of defined or ambiguous gender in languages ranging alphabetically fro from African to
Welsh, it also gives you the option to select other criteria such as mythological (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Norse), ancient (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Germanic), biblical, historical, literary, and theological connotations. But that’s not all! It also o has special categories such as witch, fairy, goth, rapper, wrestler, hillbilly, kreatyve (spelling(spelling wise), and transformer (for all that transformer fanfic you should be writing). Next is the Random Name Generator, Generator which isn’t as intricate as Behind the Name, ame, but it lets you set the obscurity factor in your search through U.S. census statistics; 1 = common, 50 = not so common, 99 = totally obscure. Trust me, setting the thing to 99 yields weird and wonderful results – different cultural backgrounds collide headlong. Finally, there’s the Fake Name Generator, which somewhat freaks me out since it generates an entire fake identity, complete with address, phone number, birthday, credit card number, mother’s maiden name, occupation, and UPS tracking number. I never n would have thought of tracking a fake person via UPS. I’ll have to remember that. Until a fake person actually vanishes, I'll try to figure out whether “Evandrus Silvius” is a successful or failed rapper.
Behind the Name: http://www.behindthename.com/random/ m/random/
Random Name Generator: Generator http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm
Fake Name Generator: http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/gen-random-ushttp://www.fakenamegenerator.com/gen hu.php
Background image: John Goodridge
Terry Gilliam's latest film is out at the moment with the mouth twisting title of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. It stars Heath Ledger who died during filming. I chickened out at the ticket office and just asked for a ticket for Imaginarium - before ordering my bucket of popcorn. It turns out that the Imaginarium is a travelling show that leads people selected from the audience through a mirror into another world. Constructed from their wildest dreams and desires, this alternative reality is sustained by the mind of Dr Parnassus who used to sustain our world by the telling of stories. "Are you telling me that if you stop telling a story ... This story ... something you made up, a fiction ... that the universe ceases to exist?" Mr Nick. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus I loved this film and the Imaginarium itself is the closest thing I've seen that equates to a great book. A world is created behind the mirror by Dr Parnassus (the author) and yet it is a landscape emotionally fashioned by the inner mind of the person within it. (the reader) And that's what a good book does. A book that sticks with you and changes you is one that creates a believable world and gives you space within it to interact and when it resonates with your experiences or what's bumping around inside your mind, then it has a power to truly connect with you in a profound way. "The people's need for stories grew. Stories that would feed a great hunger. A hunger for more than just understanding." The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
We need stories, everything doesn't break down into information, data, the 9 to 5. We need writers who give space for the reader. We need writers who know their craft who can show us the wonder within their minds in a way we can connect with. We need writers who understand their fellow humans, who can weave a story for us to walk into. Cinema, music, TV - they are all great - but it is that most unlikely object sitting on the bookshelf, the book, that asks the most of you and provides such a wondrous return. That's why we need to encourage new writing, new voices. To nurture new talent. If we let market forces dictate what we read - then we will read the same thing over and over. Another Dan Brown anyone? Out there are writers who can show you things you never knew to ask for - things that will make you laugh, cry, make you remember you are unique, special. Or they will do given the chance to develop, to mature, to work within the publishing industry but not be conformed and shaped by it. Terry Gilliam is known for making astounding, different, non-commercial films that have people like Johnny Depp wanting to be involved. Sometimes he gets it a bit wrong - mostly he breaks new ground with films like Brazil. We need writers like that who don't write for the market, but dare to be true to themselves. Here's hoping that peoples' thirst for stories will grow and endure and the fixation on celebrity and the lowest common denominator will eventually shrivel up for the want of an Imaginarium. A life changing experience. A story well told. Mike
Picture credit: h. koppdelaney
A Practice by Cynthia Newberry Martin
For six years, I was a lawyer. I went to law school; I passed the bar exam; I was sworn in, and I paid my licensing dues. Et voila. It fits, doesn’t it? Far more difficult to know if you’re a writer. There’s the obvious, “You’re a writer if you write.” But that’s like saying you’re a cook if you cook. When I was in law school, I heard over and over again, “You have to learn to think like a lawyer.” But that doesn’t work here either. What defines a writer is not “thinking.” All my life I’ve been a reader. While I was taking time off from work, I began to imagine what it
would be like to have the kind of life where you created magic on a page. In March of 1995, driving from Columbus to Atlanta, I pulled over to the side of the road and began to write. I wrote two more times that year, seven times in 1996. Then in January of 1997, I sat down to write and I’ve been writing ever since. Ten stories, two novels, three book reviews and countless blog posts. I’ve had some of those stories published. I’ve had writers I respect and admire say my novels are good. At some point in there, I became a writer. In his blog, “How Not to Write,” Jamie Grove wrote “For many, the
making of the writer is a bloody affair.” So true. It’s not easy, especially if you’re a thinker. So how did it happen? First, there was enjoyment. Writing felt good, and I wanted to keep doing it. Stephen Elliot wrote in The Rumpus that more than anything, writing is what he wants to do with his time. It’s also what I want to do with mine. Second, there was recognition. Henri Matisse came to painting late, also after trying his hand at lawyering. He wrote, “From the moment I held the box of colours in my hand, I knew this was my life.” Sometimes we can only discover the Photo credit leap: Nikki Tysoe
shape of our lives as we live them. It’s like that glass slipper, though. When it fits, it fits. Third, there was compulsion. To paraphrase Jerry Maguire, it completes me. And in a world of errands and TV, it feels real, as if I’ve done something solid that goes deep rather than just across. Fourth, there was awareness. Dorothy Allison said, “Be a watcher.” I would have said I was, but I wasn’t. I might have noticed things, but I was not constantly present in the possibilities of the moment. It’s taking practice. When I read, there are the writer’s words on the page. There are also the unwritten sentences I hear, the connections I make, the creeks I jump, the rivers I forge— these are the reader’s contribution. The reader’s voice. If you come to writing from the perspective of a reader, as I did, you come to writing with a reader’s voice. This seems obvious, and yet I didn’t realize it until a few months ago. When I write, I’ve been putting both voices—the reader’s and the writer’s—on the page, which then left the reader nothing to do. My writing group, led by Pam Houston, has helped me to weed that reader’s voice out. Pam is always telling me to “trust the reader.” I do, I say. Really. It turns out my problem was not that I didn’t trust the reader but that I couldn’t separate my reader self from my writer self. Now that I understand what’s been happening, I can do the weeding. As a writer I want the reader to jump and forge. In January I discovered the Gyrotonic Expansion System, a type of exercise similar to Pilates. I love doing it. Every twist. Every turn. It’s all about getting in touch with your body. Most of the movements are circular and three-dimensional—like life. As founder Juliu Horvath said, “You willVfind the unexplored parts of the body.” Naturally it’s not for everyone, but I clicked with it. In late April, I discovered that the “wave” was a larger movement than I had understood. I was really supposed to roll far more and involve more of my body. “Oh,” I said, “I’ve been doing it wrong all this time.”
“No,” Kayley said, “you’ve been doing it right. This is just a different level of right.” Writing is a practice. I must do it. I enjoy doing it. And it feels right. It’s in the way I go about my days. It’s an openness to impressions, a desire to acknowledge the inner life, to make connections and find meaning. It’s a desire to seek out the unexplored parts of life. To take what I see in the world, run it through my insides, and see what falls onto the page. I’m not a writer because I write. I’m not a writer because of something I do or don’t do or something I have or have not done. A writer is something I am.
Cynthia Newberry Martin lives in Columbus, Georgia, the home of Carson McCullers. Her blog, Catching Days, is one of Powell’s Books “Lit Blogs We Love,” and on the first of each month, a guest writer contributes to the series, “How We Spend Our Days.” Her fiction has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Clapboard House, Six Sentences, Sentences Contrary, and Storyglossia. Her first novel, The Painting Story, Story was a finalist in the 2008 Emory University Novel Contest. She is currently cur working on a new novel, Between Here & Gone. catchingdays.cynthianewberrymartin.com
Sabrina Who Always Believed by Kathleen
The ever-changing light, time, and temperature enthralled Sabrina. She marveled at the vibrancy of everything alive. And wondered at the imperceptible emanations of everything inert. It astonished her how the atmosphere was layered with sights and sounds. Sabrina delighted in the way things occurred—constantly. Sometimes, just as the world’s magnificence overwhelmed her, its rampant pain and deprivation sickened her. But she was profoundly resilient and her intrinsic joy and gratitude returned soon enough. Was she ambitious? Not so much. She packaged cleaning products gracefully, operated the cash register correctly, and bestowed customers with a bedazzled smile. When she fell in love with Jon, she sent announcements to friends and family. For six weeks she took photographs of them outside the Chinese restaurant, inside the movieplex, even boarding public transportation. At home she pasted into heart-shaped cutouts pictures of her and Jon kissing, and emailed romantic updates to all contacts. Until Jon said he couldn’t do it anymore. He wasn’t the man Sabrina thought he was. She didn’t understand. “Sabrina, it’s simple.” Jon was hooked on pornography and off-track betting. He disliked pets and stole tips from unguarded tables. When he left, Sabrina’s resiliency lay dormant. She wept until finally her mother slapped her. “Get on with it, Sabrina.” Of course. It was wrong to lose faith. And within a
year, Sam beckoned. She enjoyed him even more than Jon but this time kept quieter. Until her ebulliency wore him out. Same story six times over. So with Jason, Sabrina hid her intensity to the utmost—which left her floating between heaven and earth. He, however, boosted his mood with drugs so that it seemed they existed within similar strata. In fact, they lived ecstatic together until the drugs grew unreliable or Jason’s chemistry changed or both. On Sabrina’s thirtieth birthday Jason said he was bored. Again she lay stricken. Watched TV and stayed indoors. This time her mother wasn’t in striking distance but said on the phone, “Wise up, Sabrina, or you’ll lose your mind.” That jarred her awake. Sabrina had always feared for her sanity. Enough so that she immediately tidied up, turned off her electronics, and found a job assisting corporate retreats. She scheduled events at grand hotels and stood behind a field of name tags. “Please wear them; don’t take them off,” she said, smiling like a child who has tasted ice cream for the first time. After day-long exercises in trust, a CEO invited Sabrina to dinner. During which she expressed awe at his kindness. The light, the colors, the clever salads, the encrusted entrée—Sabrina was enthralled. She hung on his every word. Later they danced on the roof and played hide-andseek in his suite. Come Sunday evening, the CEO promised to call her. And Sabrina believed him.
next month
Interview: Kate Thompson
Interview: Snowbooks
Next month’s issue out: 4th December
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