Stories a-go-go

This is Bowling Harbour with old boats rotting away, an outmoded form of transport which in its day was vital. I'm including it because today I made a long-overdue trip to the Transport Museum, otherwise known as the Riverside Museum on the side of Glasgow’s river. Foregoing any form of transport, I made my way there on foot along the walkway come cyclepath and then a rather inglorious and puddly track. It was a beautiful sunny, windy autumn day so this was in itself a joy. The car park was crammed to overflowing anyway and so was the museum.

Here is Aberdeen Harbour in May this year as seen from the top of the Orkney boat. A little different from Bowling, but fundamentally serving the same purpose. I loved the grandeur of these ships and their many colours, arriving from and going to who-knows-where and carrying-who-knows-what.

I’m old enough to remember the transport museum when it was in the ‘Tramway’ in Pollokshields, now an arts centre. I remember getting the 59 bus there with my dad and little brother. I’m sorry to say I found it dull back then, just a lot of dusty old buses and what was so interesting about cars anyway? As a result I don’t think I ever visited it when it was in the Kelvin Hall.

And let me wander a bit here: I do remember the Kelvin Hall when it housed the Circus and the shows at Christmas, though my English dad would have called it the Fun Fair. I’ll never forget the smell of elephants or being turned upside down in certain brightly painted machines with rows of coloured light bulbs whizzing past me.

Anyway, I’m here to recommend the Riverside Museum to everyone. I have a long list of favourite people I’d like to invite along on my next trip there. For those of you concerned about the loss of ‘the street’, never fear: it’s still there. And for enthusiasts of bike, boat, train, car and hearse, everything is included and all magnificently displayed in one of the most extraordinary buildings I’ve ever been in. It was only this morning, when I saw a photograph of it from above, that I realised just how extraordinary it is. And the inside doesn’t disappoint. It is a peculiar and rather refreshing shade of pale green and is made up of a series of strange angles and curves, a surprise round every bend.

The content of this building is complex and interesting too, although I did wonder why there were displays of dresses. Clothing is not transport and few of these dresses looked very practical for a ride on a bike or an open-topped car. Maybe in the midst of all that mechanics, there has to be something for the ladies. I’d like to claim ladyhood here and refute the need for dresses to keep my attention. I’d also like to add in my favourite quote. I’ll give it a separate line of its own because I deem it very important indeed:

‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms.’ Thank you, Muriel Rukeyser, for this.

I may have mentioned this quote before. This afternoon I was engulfed in stories and it was very exciting indeed. I think Rukeyser really meant that there were stories behind everything and everyone, everywhere we go, if only we choose to look. That’s a little of how I interpret it anyway. Museums are full of stories that could surprise you, I think, and this museum had me wondering about a myriad of objects all signifying different circumstances from my own and reminding me of distant times and places. A black shiny car with runner-boards for gangsters with guns, a padded leather seat in the back for the lovers and a large loose steering wheel for the getaway driver. Trams with wooden seats with little patterns of holes cut in them. How uncomfortable they must have been, but still pretty. Singer sewing machines: I saw two. Now, I know they involve wheels, but they’re not really transport either, are they? Not strictly speaking. But I confess I get lost when I see one, lost in love and one day soon I’m going to have one of my own. (I do actually own one but I found it on the dump and it is missing several of its parts, but then, according to its serial number it was made in 1897 so it deserves to rest on its laurels, or at least on my piano.)

And boats, lots of them, or models of them, all sailing past on a conveyor belt type arrangement. Fabulous. The romance of the sea with its secrets and dangers.

There was only one serious problem. Too many humans, as witnessed by the over-flowing car park. So it has been decided that this is a Tuesday morning event by which I mean I need to return there when no-one else is standing in front of the glass cases or jostling me off the subway, so that I can linger and linger and linger and listen to all the stories whispering in my ear.

But the most exciting part is that several storylines for Lenny Gillespie, of Mavis’s Shoe fame, came hurtling through the ether at me which I will now have to explore and research. Of course, this takes me back to the museum, and others like it, as soon as I possibly can. Yippee!

'Nobody says my yoghurt is sour!'

A certain publisher has shown an interest in my work with Kusay Hussain. This is exciting news, although it’s only an interest, not a publishing deal, but it reminds me I was going to write here about what we’ve been doing all this time. Kusay is an Iraqi writer and a civil engineer who came here a few years ago because of the security situation in his country. He lives with his wife and children and, boy, does he have a few stories to tell.

Before leaving Iraq, there were attempts to kidnap one of his little sons. Kidnapping was, perhaps still is, a common tactic there for extorting money. Kusay was himself captured for a period. He also lived through several wars, lastly the invasion by US/UK troops, and endured the various privations visited upon his country as a result.

I am learning a lot. For instance, the quickest way to bring a country to its knees, especially a hot one, is to switch off the electricity. Turning it on provokes great gratitude. Our beloved sun can be a weapon. Different armies have different styles and some armies resemble prison camps. Mostly I’m learning about human endurance of one kind or another. (See my earlier post on Ingrid Betancourt for more on this.)

Kusay contacted the Scottish Book Trust who contacted Scottish PEN about help putting his stories into English. Scottish PEN contacted me. Kusay and I met for the first time in the Glasshouse in Queen’s Park, Glasgow, in March 2009 and continued to meet there for several months surrounded by cactus’s and close to a display of poisonous snakes and spiders, and a pond full of outsize goldfish. This place is well worth a visit especially if you have kids, and became a neutral haven for us to begin our work and build our trust in each other. We were invited to read our first story at the Scottish Parliament the following June.

Since then a great deal has evolved: our understanding of each other, our writing process, and the content of the stories he dares to write, because some of these stories re-awaken past events he might like to forget, and because the rest of Kusay’s family are still in Iraq and subject to the pressures and threats he and his wife and kids have been lucky enough to escape.

I know not one word of Arabic, and seem completely unable to retain even the little phrases that Kusay tries to teach me. But it doesn’t matter. He writes in his best English, which is, thank God or more likely Allah, improving, and I smarten it up. This involves correcting the language but also smoothing it out to make it more accessible to the English-speaking ear. There are all sorts of dilemmas in this, the most obvious difficulty being to know when it’s appropriate to retain Arabic phraseology or imagery and when it’s better to ‘translate’ it into something more common in English. Every phrase requires its own decision. It’s fun, trying to understand one another, especially that moment when we break through our confusion.

He writes in English because that is the language of the country in which he now lives and because he wants his stories brought to the West.
The best part is our meetings. Coming together are two cultures which we’re told are at odds with each other, but in fact are more similar than different. Coming together are two people who on the surface are vastly different, but who are in fact more similar that different. I have a new and very wonderful friend.

Of course having a friend brings obligations. Kusay keeps himself up at night preparing work for our meetings, and I worry about keeping up with his mass of ideas. Our meetings are fun, but the work itself can be time-consuming and there is all my own work to do too.

Our ventures have included many short stories but also poetry. This is particularly headachey for me because Kusay likes to use little short lines with rhymes that twine: this way is not mine, but it’s fine, some of the time. Occasionally they make no sense at all until we sit together and unlock them, which often means agreeing, with some difficulty, on compromises. Something has to be lost for something else to be gained. We have also worked on a plan for a book of common sayings from Iraq and also from Scotland. We gave up on the Scottish side of it as having been done, but the Iraqi ones were fabulous and included the origins of these sayings. Fundamentally it’s a book of fantastically quirky short stories and an insight into daily life in Iraq. My favourite saying so far is ‘Nobody says my yoghurt is sour.’ I like ‘Colder than the water porter’s ass’ too.

Kusay is also working on a couple of novellas and the big one: a co-written novel about an Iraqi exiled in Scotland and a Scottish soldier in Iraq. This last has proved very difficult indeed. After several weeks of planning it became clear that as writers our methods diverged radically. Kusay writes everything in his head, then puts it all on paper. I plan character, background, texture, beginning and end and perhaps a stepping stone or two in the middle, then I start writing and modify and modify and modify the plan as I go along. There were many misunderstandings until we saw this difference. He described it as having two people trying to drive the same car. So we stopped the car, got out and had a little picnic of short stories by the side of the road. What we now have is Kusay as driver but Sue as … well there is no driving equivalent; as creative editor or ghost-writer.

I used to call our process transmogrification, because I changed his writing only a little and added just a touch of English language writerly sparkle, not much, more of a sheen really. But this feels like something different. The creative aspect feels more mutual, like a proper collaboration, and not just taking turns with distinct tasks. Fabulous.

Here is a short video made by Al Jazeera English News about our work.

Lenny's Recipe

I’m receiving blogs from exotic places, most recently from the Scottish PEN conference in Belgrade. Of course a place is only exotic before it has attained the contempt that comes with familiarity. And then familiar places, once unvisited for a certain period of time, offer us the comfort of the same familiarity when we return to them, and perhaps if we’re lucky a renewed spark of exoticism.

This comes to you from Glenuig in Moidart. Moidart seems exotic to me again, perhaps because of the mist, and comforting because I am visiting an old friend for her BIG BIRTHDAY (mentioning no numbers) in a place I haven’t visited for some time. So for a short period I can enjoy both feelings at once. My eyes are instantly rested, no longer gazing at the horizontals and verticals of Glasgow City but at the rocks and mountains and all the trees, greenery and early autumn singhed-ness of open, late-September northern countryside. The only straight line is the horizon and, due to the weather, even that’s a bit fuzzy.

Directly in front of me the sea is silver, pewter to my left and on the right a vibrant blue. The wind is blowing and the rain clouds moving fast, pursued by openings onto the great blue yonder. Patches of yellow sunlight appear momentarily on the tops of islands, or glow in the curve of sandy bays. Unfortunately I’ve parked my little van/office in the lea of a rocky outcrop and it’s cold and those sunny highlights are yet to hit me. A lone seagull appeared from nowhere when I threw my crust onto the beach and there are only a couple of gannets circling and plunging off in the distance, their white backs luminous in the intrepid sun.

Today, in contrast to all this, I’d like to write about Lenny, the girl from Mavis’s Shoe, because I want to write a sequel for her and have no less than three possible plots and can’t decide which one to go for. I’m here, in addition to celebrating my friend’s spectacular age, specifically to make that decision which for some reason can’t be made in the hubbub of normal life. I’m also here precisely because what I need to think about is so completely different from my surroundings. Sometimes such contrasts can help, but often have unforeseen consequences.

Once upon a time, while baking on a balcony in the French sun, I wrote a chapter about tattie-howking in a heavy Scottish mist. When I read it later, back in Blighty, I couldn’t gauge its authenticity because despite everything being drippy and cold on the page, I still re-experienced the heat of the Mediterranean. Lucky me. I’ll dig it out once winter sets in and the heating’s on the blink again.

But I digress. Or prevaricate. Or maybe I’m just cold.

Sometimes the ingredients of novels are a little strange. Occasionally people ask how I went about writing Mavis’s Shoe and I usually talk about the research, who I interviewed, how I tracked down records and so on, but never mention the long drives to exotic/familiar places in poisonously fumy vans, the healthy diet I often impose on myself while sitting there trying to find focus, or the arguments I have in my head to give up and find the nearest sweetshop or heater.

And still I digress because really I want someone else to make this decision about the sequel, or at least to help. I can’t tell you what the three plots are, of course, because that would break the spell. That’s another ingredient in the cake mix of novel-writing, arguably, and one which I also usually fail to mention because I don’t want anyone to think I’m whacky when actually, as anyone who’s read Mavis’s Shoe will know, I’m keen of portraying the realities of any situation.

So, any ideas on what Lenny does next? Or later?

Completion

The first draft of the stage version of Mavis’s Shoe has now been finished. I know there is a lot more work to be done, but it feels good to have reached THE END, at least for the first time. Perhaps drafts should be called laps, as in those on a running track, or would the idea of running in circles be too painfully close to the truth?

If you don’t have a complete first draft, you don’t have enough ingredients for your cake, aka play/novel/short story/screenplay etc. My ingredients are in the bowl and I am celebrating with some fizzy, by which I mean Lidl’s oversweet pear cider that some kind (unsuspecting) person has left in my fridge, and by lighting the wood-burning stove and leaving the curtains slightly open despite the darkness outside, so that I can still see the trees waving frantically against the pink city sky in the gale. I can hear my daughter and her friend giggling in the next room, not at me I hasten to add, though I wouldn’t care. Copies of this first lap have been sent to two parties for inspection, and the anxiety, not to mention dread, that sometimes accompanies the wait for feedback has not yet made its presence felt.

I am also celebrating the arrival of two copies of West Coast Line, a Canadian journal who have kindly published one of my short stories, The Love Bus, which you can also read on the International Literary Quarterly website. In addition to this, West Coast Line have published two stories that I worked on with Iraqi writer Kusay Hussain. We got paid for these stories too which is increasingly rare these days. The current journal’s theme is ‘Transnational Publics, Asylum and the Arts in Glasgow’ and its guest editor is Kirsten E McAllister, a Japanese-Scottish Canadian. I’m delighted to see the names of several people I know on the contents page.

But the other thing I am celebrating, Sue-no-friends in my room all alone, is my participation in the Vault art event over the last weekend. I know, visual arts: what was I doing there? I did ask myself that question a few times. I was doing an ‘art booth’. The booth was actually a table, itself a work of art with a variety of strange marks of glittery red and pastel green amongst others. There were three jars of sweeties on it (when I started) and a plateful of custard creams. Beside me at the table were a couple of visual artists offering instant art for a small fee. I was offering instant poetry, also for a small fee, based on OuLiPo techniques. I dreamt this up in a moment of optimism. Actually it was a moment of optimism about optimism. In other words I was feeling rather despondent and was missing feeling optimistic, so I faked it and hey presto! there I was making promises to the organisers that on reflection seemed a little difficult to fulfil. (I was under the auspices of Ironbbratz studios, who I love. If you are a creator of art of any description, Ironbbratz studios is a fabulous place to be.)

For an art venue, the Briggait in Glasgow has a lot of drips falling from it’s beautiful holey ceiling. Some of it landed on the booth-table. But spirits were not dampened and indeed I am celebrating the fact that the instant OuLiPo poetry exercise worked and was even, apparently, therapeutic for the customers who revelled in being able to talk for a few minutes completely uninterrupted on their chosen subject while I concocted poetry from their words. It was a heart-warming occasion for all, and one which I’d happily repeat.

So, yes, I think smug is the word I’d use for myself right now. Not proud of it but it doesn’t happen often.

Strange Truth

Yesterday was the last day of the Auld Reekie’s International Book Festival and also the first day that I made it over there. Illness and other distractions kept me in Weegieland. But my trip was so worth it.

I went with a friend, bumped into my very own brother and then another friend, and together we hid the last remaining copies of Mavis’s Shoe from any prospective buyer. Not on purpose of course and not once we’d realised what our little huddle was doing. Then, after a brief short story in the Spiegeltent, I abandoned the crew and went to hear Ingrid Betancourt.

Has anyone else had the experience of feeling as if everything that is being said is suddenly massively important? It’s a feeling that makes the colours in the room more vibrant and, of course, you could have heard a pin drop. In that little hour I had that experience. Ingrid Betancourt was abducted by guerrillas while campaigning for the presidency of her native Colombia and spent six and a half years imprisoned in the jungle. I didn’t actually learn the nuts and bolts of what happened to her in captivity, only that it was unimaginably brutal, that her captives were increasingly savage towards her and that, despite this, still she hoped to find absolute forgiveness in herself for them. She is small and slight, speaks slowly and with deliberation, though I suspect sometimes this was true because the questions she was asked required her to dwell on memories that continue to cause considerable pain.

Before taking my writing seriously I worked as a counsellor and specialised for some time in trauma. The kind of counselling I offered often took my counsellee to the very centre of their existence. Does this make any sense to you? It’s the kind of place where the big questions of life roam, where people make decisions that change their lives completely, though their outward circumstances may seem the same, and where people decide the most central question of them all: whether to live or die. Hearing Betancourt talk took me into that strange and most important space where life and death decisions are taken. Most of the audience questions were about what had happened since her release, how she had dealt with it, what happened to her family relationships, how she felt about her captors and their organisation now, and so on. These are important questions because, unless you've lived through something like that, it’s hard imagine how you’d sustain yourself during your ordeal or how life might feel on your release. It’s that central question of so many stories, if not all, ‘What would I do?’ Perhaps we want to be reassured that we’d have the same resilience and compassion as Betancourt, that’d we’d survive with our integrity intact, that we’d survive. That we wouldn’t end up either mad or bad. But the truth is that there is no such reassurance. We just have to hope we never have to face those questions and if we do, that we behave in ways we can live with afterwards.

But for me, being reminded of those existential questions made me feel all the more alive. Something vital was being spoken about and that in itself is refreshing, so I bought the book and took it home. Late last night I read the first few pages and had to wonder whether I was as brave as I’d thought. It was the story of one of Betancourt’s many escape attempts and I had to leave her at the point of re-capture as she is surrounded by several brutal men charged with teaching her a lesson. This is not something to read last thing at night so I stopped. But perhaps the other reason I am drawn to this woman’s story is because I want to see the bottom of the barrel of human behaviour. I’m wondering if there’s a safety in knowing just how bad it can get and that people do rise from the ashes as Betancourt appears to have done.

Reading this also raises questions about fiction, truth being stranger and in this case more powerful. Mavis’s Shoe is about a horrendous real-life bombing episode in which thousands of people were killed, although the real figure is not known. Since writing that novel I continued my research into other war zones and then turned my attention to what happens next. All of this research involved reading personal accounts, many of which were gripping, fascinating stories in themselves. So why fictionalise? Why not just tell the stories? But that’s for another post.

Snakes Alive!

Until recently half the human population of this household was vegetarian, the other half only limited meat-eaters. Our reasons are as manifold as our habits. Of the carnivores, it seems, in the cold light of day, that the bigger the beast, the less likely you are to be eaten in this house; no cows or pigs, very occasionally sheep, chickens often, and fish oftener. Some of us claim a strong interest in Buddhism, famous for, amongst other things, its equal valuing of all sentient beings and therefore its vegetarianism. Mendicant monks, including the Dalai Lama himself, are allowed exception on the grounds that they can eat whatever they are given. If I applied that to myself I’d live on chocolate, booze and thin fresh air.

Following the Buddhist thread, I remember hearing of a large Buddhist monastery in America (I forget the name) who were invaded by cockroaches in big numbers. After many weeks of uncomfortable living cheek by mandible with the only probable survivors of a nuclear attack, and over many increasingly frequent discussion on the subject, the good monks decided mass-murder was their best option. This can’t have been easy. Especially for the roaches.

But it seems these decisions have to be made and everyone draws a line somewhere in the quagmire of moral living.

While in the local pet shop recently, I heard a sound that made me smile. It was the singing of some crickets, or cicadas to give them their prettier name, who were incarcerated in little plastic boxes on a high shelf near the window. I was transported to warm nights in foreign climes, or cinematic moments of intimacy as heroine and hero leave the company of others and step onto the balcony alone together and get to know each other a little better, swooning in the heat. Returning to earth I thought crickets strange creatures to keep as pets. You can’t take them for walks or cuddle up with them on the sofa or let them out in the garden for a run around. You can sing with them, I suppose, compose music around their backing vocals even, but wouldn’t you need a few other notes?

‘Snakes,’ said the shop assistant, when asked. ‘For people who keep reptiles as pets.’

The full horror was upon me. The realities of the fast food chain of life. The foolishness of my reveries. It was chastening to be standing there with flea foggers in my hand preparing for my own mass murder.

But, again, these decisions have to be made and everyone draws a line.

Life, surely, is to be cherished. Does that include bacteria? Is it ok to eat yoghurt? Or to bake yeast into bread? I’m saying yes to both, even though in baking bread I’m killing infinitesimal numbers of infinitesimally small creatures in doing so. And what about all those cleaning fluids that make life difficult for all manner of beasties including spiders, who after all eat flies (yuck!) that otherwise might infect us with those germs? And what about the fact that our body system grows stronger if it is exposed to low levels of bacteria? Bacteria are good for us. That yoghurt is only playing life’s game of one organism battling against another, the yoghurt gobbling up other bacteria in the war-zone of our stomachs.

The genesis of each human life itself is a battle: the ovum secretes vile chemicals in the face of approaching sperm, chemical war-fare of the womb, the survival of the fittest.

And now I begin to scare myself, but to find a shadow of that line I was looking for too. Survival of the fittest seems to me one of the most repugnant popular notions of these post-modern days. It's the lazy alternative and we can do better. Going forth with care and consideration, even cherishing, for other beings as much as humanly possible, seems much more satisfying and carries less risk of hubris. Buddhists try to leave as little trace of their existence as they can, to limit the damage they cause to other life. As a writer of historical fiction this is tricky. As a human being, it's still tricky, but also rather obvious.

To quote one of Muriel Spark's favourite words (apparently) 'Nevertheless' ... where's that flea fogger?

(These and other dilemmas of the tiny world of beasties are a feature of a novel I am working on. You can read the opening few paragraphs on my website.)

Labour of Love not Lost

What a delight! Shortly before Mavis’s Shoe was accepted for publication by Waverley Books last October and I was immediately caught in a whirlwind of fast track re-editing and cover blurb, I was cooking up the latest draft of another novel. This work-in-progress was variously filed as ‘Hopping the Twig’, ‘Strange Fish’, ‘Essentials’, ‘Elementals’, ‘Stranger Fish’ (a later version) and ‘This Book Smells’, (its first title - a warning seemed in order). It was simmering on the back burner while I ignored it and tried to get some distance. The exact distance I took was from Glasgow to the south of France via the airwaves plus the 400 kilometres on my beloved old bike along the Canals de Garonne and du Midi. This took me from the Garonne in Bordeaux to Port La Nouvelle on the Mediterranean, effectively linking the Atlantic and Mediterranean seas. Being flat, it wasn’t difficult and took less time than you’d expect, despite a couple of days of head winds and one of heavy rain; nine days in all plus a couple spent with family and then the journey home. I have to admit to some smugness about this at the time, although it’s greatly tempered now by limited exercise since those heady days.

Anyway, in total only two weeks had passed, not enough for any mental distance to have worked its magic. Due to the furore over Mavis’s Shoe it is only recently that I have returned properly to this multiply-named novel. Today I reached the end of my read-through with a tear in my eye. The obvious reason for weepiness is that this book is partly about death and what counsellors (which I used to be one of) call ‘complicated grief’. The tear was eyestrain too, but the main cause was writer’s terror. It is always worrying going back to a piece of work that has been left. There is the fear that you were deluded when you wrote it and that it’s actually not worth the computer chip it was written on and you’ve wasted a year of your life, or more if you’re Garbriel Garcia Marquez or Donna Leon to name but a couple who allegedly take a decade. The tear is for fear unfounded, a sigh of relief, that despite the still considerable editing task ahead, all is not lost and the thing was worth doing whether it is ever published or not. Unfounded fear is a great delight, a variation on ‘Better to have loved and lost’ etc. Only a seriously worried person can experience that kind of relief.

I saw a documentary recently about Peter Howson, the Glasgow artist famous for being brave enough to go to Bosnia as a war artist and being so seriously disturbed by what he saw there that his life fell to tatters on his return. Whatever you think of the whole strange idea of a ‘war artist’ or of Howson’s dark portrayals of disturbing events, he is astonishingly prolific. Apart from a certain commission which seemed to stop him in his tracks for a quite a period, I wonder if any of his paintings ever took a year, and doubt it. And although paintings can take some artists even longer to complete, I doubt there are any novelists who finish a book in a couple of weeks or a day, and if they do, whether it is their best work.

I’m not as brave as Howson and have never been in a war zone, apart from once wandering with a friend through Armagh (I think) in the dead of night and suddenly being surrounded by soldiers with big guns and being asked what the hell we thought we were doing. ‘Hitching,’ I said, wide-eyed and very young, and they escorted us to the edge of town where we erected a tent beside the border post.

But Howson and I share a common subject in war and its effects on ordinary people. Howson, as an artist, takes snapshots which don’t tell stories but suggests them, in the way a poet might provoke an image in a reader’s mind. The beauty of novels is their very length. There may be ugly brutal scenes but a good book will throw them into contrast with hope or generosity or humour then throw you back into despair and on further to disgust or love. You stay with it for hours at a time being moved through all the different experiences a human can have. Quite a bargain really for as little as £7.99 a pop.