Affirmative Action: the AA for life's travels

A healthy bank account, lots of woollies, a resurgence of my youth’s social anxiety, and not much writing: the end result of my lockdown. 

 I knitted a lot. And worked loads – as a counsellor specialising in trauma. I lived alone, my house paired with someone 75 miles away (though this turned out to be a godsend). To be fair, I finished writing an almost-finished novel then wrote a short sequel/extension, but it was like pushing a car through a swamp, mostly. A huge part of me resisted any kind of expansive thought or creative activity. 

This is not unhealthy. We were in emergency mode, so physiologically we were primed for fight, flight or freeze. When our bodies talk survival and fill up with adrenalin, we don’t have the wherewithal for the subtleties of ‘The Zone’ or ‘Flow’, a state partly defined by being so engrossed in something you are unaware of your surroundings. So the 2 year hiatus in this blog seems natural and right. 

As soon as regulations allowed, I saw counselling clients face-to-face in a designated room in my home. After lockdown, there were other reasons for not finding a new workspace, so my isolation continued and, in a sense, my lockdown, and my social anxiety. 

Anxiety is bad for creativity and acts as an inner censor. Likewise, encountering your singular writing voice, your essence in its most naked experience and expression, is the perfect anxiety prevention strategy. Similar to coming home, there is a sense of safety in submersion in something uniquely yourself but simultaneously universal. It’s like tapping into the common all pervasive life force, yours and the rest of the world’s, and in so doing losing awareness of immediate danger. We allow ourselves more easily into deep sleep when another person sleeps with us and instinctively we are each other’s guardians. Journeys inwards, forgetful of the world outside our bodies, requires security. 

So until recently, much of my anxiety was channelled into the meditative safety of knitting. This is essentially acting out someone else’s creative moment. It also satisfies the human need to sort, another healthy response to the chaos that is covid, Brexit and climate catastrophe. Knitting is fine, especially if you like watching variable colour yarns make interesting tone combinations in your fingers, as I do. Plus you get something squishy to wear or give. 

But when the world is in a dangerous uproar and people find themselves writing tortured poems like THIS ONE, or are being actually tortured by other humans, surviving flash fires or floods, or with bombs raining down, art feels a little more pressing than simple craft. Yes, people in war zones (and those suffering most under the current vicious UK regime) need blankets and jumpers, not to mention actual safety and homes. Political art is vital, difficult, inspiring and necessary, but so is the art that moves us every day in large and small ways: colours that dance in our gaze, shapes that send our eyes round eddies on the canvas, audible textures that appeal in ways we can’t quite grasp or form words to express, words which make pictures in our heads and sensations in our bodies. These bring various kinds of pleasure in themselves. As well as also moving us to action in all sorts of subtle ways we may not even be aware of and thereby segueing towards art as therapy and eventually potentially merging with political art, art is deeply reassuringly human.

So in a grand act of throwing the table over, I have sold my house and moved to a little cabin in a remote spot near 2 small conurbations. I remake a kind of vow here, though I’m not sure exactly what mien it will take, to re-find, feel, sense, touch and foster the connection to the unspeakable wonders between words, the visceral response to colour, light and sound, and to the vital common relatedness of all life. 

Big talk. In practical terms, so far this means getting up early so I can listen to the burn at the back of the cabin, watch the thrush family pick breakfast bugs out of the grass, and glimpse the feral cats’ kittens play in the undergrowth. And going to bed early so I don’t waste my eyes with electric light and can see the blue night sky through my window. Recent research* tells us three days of no electric light returns us to our natural circadian rhythm. It feels like washing out my brain ready to notice what else is in there, or ‘out there’ and what’s happening in the world around me, and gets those beautiful cognitive cogs whirring again. 

 

 *University of Colorado Boulder

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms."

The title of this post is a quote from a poem by Muriel Rukeyser, the American Beat poet. I often start workshops or events with it and then a couple of years ago finally enshrined it in the poem below.

FOOD

An evening walk
To shake off work and home,
I strode unpeopled streets
a moon huge above
the hill our house sits on.
It spread its silver coins for those
who chose to lift them.
I filled my pockets
and brought home dinner.

They think I’m there all day for them
and want to chat.
This gets no writing on the page and only
feeds me greens and wine
when what I need is word protein
spicy flights of fancy
the sugar of phrases falling
in surprising ways and
book borscht with feta metaphor
that turns what I produce a vibrant red
and frightens me
then makes me laugh and
feeds the world.

With this nutrition I could forgive
those proper Charlies who want a piece of me.

Verily I say unto you:
the world is made of stories
not atoms.
Words are the food of life
and nothing else matters.

Lovely Layby Life

Yesterday was a belter of a day for me. After the lengthy but enlivening snow cover, we’ve had a lot of dull, overcast, wet and cold days. And thanks to the BBC weather department I knew in advance that the sun was likely to appear and the temperature rise, but for one day only.

So I set off in the campervan for the hills. Local ones, mind. An overnight still feels out of the question. Having set off, I could see my destination was in fact white with snow, whereas the countryside I was driving through was a rather pale, sleepy green, and mud brown, not forgetting the black arms of trees against the sky seeming to implore the weather god for something better, and soon. I did consider rerouting to greener pastures, but I know and love my chosen layby. Routine saves wasting time on unnecessary decisions, and therefore keeps the focus on writing.

My road into nowhere was only passable because forestry lorries, such a feature of Scottish country life just now, had been up and down all morning. But my layby was full of snow, and another car (shock! horror!) was parked at one side. No matter. I had important things to be getting on with.

So I got in the back and made tea (obviously) and considered my options. The sun was doing its best and where it was breaking through the clouds, the hillside was dazzling. So I decided to chance it and opened the back door, the better to afford a clear view of the hillside opposite, which I think you’ll agree is rather lovely with the snow picking out drainage features, rock structures, fields and enclosures. There was heat in that sun. It seemed wise, if not unavoidable, after my tea, to gather my strength by laying back and having a little snooze. I kid you not. I slept in the sun yesterday.

By the end of the day much of the layby’s snow had thawed to chilly puddles. Also by the end of the day I had written loads of words and more importantly, made numerous decisions about my story, sorted out some inconsistencies and moved it on by a couple of plot points.

As well as all this, and this is one of the real pleasures of layby life, I had three layby encounters, and no, not that kind. The kind where real things are said and no-one has anything to gain by faking it or showing off. First was a woman out walking with (perhaps) her husband. While he wandered on, she stopped to say hello and ask what I was up to. I waved Writing On The Road at her and I gave her a short tour of the van (it’s very small). It turns out she’s a poet. Naturally I offered her all the encouragement to escape and write in laybys as I could muster.

The next was the sheep farmer who works the land around my chosen layby. I’ve been going there for years and only ever seen him fly past on his buggy with his dog in a box (open) on the back. What a pleasure it was to meet him and get to ask about stuff that’s had me wondering for ages. There was also a walker with rather limited manners, but of course, he might appear in the next book. Nothing in layby life is ever wasted.

I'll be on Radio Scotland's Out for the Weekend program later on today (about 3pm) if you want to hear me talk about the joys of solo campervanning, what made me write the book and some of the things that have gone both wrong and right.

Writing on the Road: Campervan Love and the Joy of Solitude

While writing two novels, ghosting two memoirs for other people and working on various other bits and pieces, I needed to escape my hectic household and create some space to do it. As a mother of two and sometime step-mum of four, I realised my only option was to get into a campervan and have it function as a mobile office. It wasn’t long before this had become a habit.

Whether I’m by a beach with buzzards, golden eagles, deer, seals, surfers, other campervanners and dead fish for company, or in the hills around Glasgow, or France, my aim is to switch off the phone, get out the laptop and write.

Writing on the Road is not just funny (or sad) stories of campervan trips in Scotland; it is not just ‘Zen and the art of campervan maintenance’ (with stories of sweetness and light that will entertain or make you cry); and it is not just nature writing (with observations of wildlife in Kintyre, Assynt and other places on the western seaboard of Scotland). But if you enjoy reading about how books are written and about recovery stories from relationship breakdown, or about women travelling alone and all the things that can go wrong (and right), about strategies for facing fear, dealing with creepy crawlies and noises in the night, and about surviving all that life throws at you, then you will probably enjoy this book.

As well as chapters on writing, procrastination, meditation and creativity, there’s information on how (not) to buy a campervan, how to maintain it and what to do if you lock yourself out in the middle of nowhere just before bedtime.

I hope this book will inspire and encourage any would-be campervanners to get out there, get creative and enjoy the campervan life.

I'll be appearing at the Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow in March. Meanwhile watch out for my little van around town.

Planning for chaos

On my wall today there are thirteen sheets of paper with the names of the thirteen projects I am currently either considering or already working on. This is a blissful state to be in, at the end of one project and with the possibility of another twelve. But it’s a diabolical situation too. There is too much choice and if I examine the contents of my various notebooks I’ll find more projects to add. I know that what I need to do is explore these projects in turn to some depth, enough to be able to make informed decisions on each of them. But in the meantime deadlines for paid work loom. So I scribble my thoughts and ideas in mind-map style onto the sheets, muse on one of them for half an hour, scribble some more, then get back to the grindstone. They are undulating in the updraft from the radiator below as if they are jostling for my attention and shouting: Pick me!

But perhaps I have the wrong set of sheets. Maybe what I need are a new set of sheets about genres, styles of writing or readerships, or weighing up the possibilities of being wildly experimental or aiming for a bestseller, or finding an amalgam of all of these and more. Perhaps I should be examining the options of a return to visual art or music instead, or abandoning it all and returning to care work so I don’t have to sell my house to survive.

I need some dedicated time to explore all of this and what better place to do that than in a small campervan with spectacular views. Physical space is as valuable as time, as if living in a metaphorically grand landscape enables the enlargement of my ideas. This is what I long for. But sadly the weather is bl**dy freezing making day trips are the only possibility. So I am doing overdue domestic chores while mulling over these projects, returning every so often to the wall to scribble in a thought or phrase or feeling. I’m using ballpoint pens in a variety of pretty colours to make it more interesting. The music is a bit loud and it’s hard to write when you’re dancing. My head is over-full with random thoughts and ideas from which I’m hoping to knit something interesting.

So I have a question for all the writers who are reading this, or indeed anyone involved in creative ventures: How do you go about deciding which project to do next and to what extent, and how, do you plan?