The Shells of Ourselves Left Behind

Plus July writing challenge, Dawn Chorus, Book Club News

This is a time of writing. I wonder how I will look back on this time of early mornings at my desk, moving through the book at pace, pouring myself into it as if I was trying to fill a well with myself. This is how it was with my last poetry collection too: an unstoppering of myself, a release of all the animal thoughts in my head that have been sitting caged for years, waiting for their freedom. It is both exhilarating and exhausting. So much of memoir writing, and this is a memoir of sorts, is about excavation of self, and I find myself in the strange position of actively grieving my dad whilst capturing that grief on the page and linking it in and in and in to a sense of belonging, or a lack of a sense of belonging. I once visited Wharram Percy, an abandoned medieval village near Malton. The place had a magical feel about it, and by that I don’t mean Disney magic, I mean something earthy and unseen, as if the lives of the people who had lived there flickered under the ground, a turf fire never quite going out. It was beautiful: the little lake with ducks bobbing, the roofless church, the little graveyard and the footprints of houses, the paths you could walk where the last inhabitants had walked. Seen from above, on google earth, it’s easy to see the village laid out. But up close it is raised mounds, fields with those typical medieval plough lines still embedded in the ground, trees, water. It doesn’t really look like a village. You have to bring it back with your imagination, you have to rise above the ground to see the impressions. This is what it feels like to write this book. This is how it feels right now to walk through the chapters, placing a house here, a field here, a lake here, a bog, a fen, a marsh here. I place wolves at on end and the sea at the other. If the landscape is an archive of ourselves and itself, then these are the scars we leave on it and in it.

Back home, at the mesolithic site of Star Carr they found a place that was scattered with flint flakes, a semi circle of flint flakes and a space in the middle where the knapper had sat. When I leave my desk I leave a similar semi circle of papers and books and notes and pens and post it notes. When I visited my mum’s house this week I went into the garage, which is really a barn, and found my dad’s tools, his boxes of tins and cogs and screws and nails, our old kitchen clock on the wall, stopped at ten to eleven, the side board from my childhood repurposed as a tool box. a semi circle of scrap wood and metal and plans scribbled on notebooks around his workbench. Everything in the garage has a layer of grimy dust on it now. It’s been ten months since he died. It feels longer. But here he is, or the shell he left behind, waiting to be tidied away. We’re not quite ready to do that yet.

After months of nose to the grindstone writing, running the magazine, running courses and managing life, I feel so ready for a holiday that time off is like mirage. I think, tentatively, about taking a couple of weeks off mid summer. Time to read my book in the garden, time to actually do something with the garden, maybe some beach days and sea swimming. It feels like a pipe dream right now. There is always the weekend. This weekend I head out with my metal detector to a new permission. i look forward to unearthing a different set of stories.

I wonder how I will look back at this time when I was putting the work in; writing, writing, writing in the early hours as the swifts flickered and swooped past my windows, where some days I didn’t manage to get dressed until the afternoon because I was working, working, working. It feels good to push the writing, push myself, to see what can be achieved. I think I will think this a happy time, a good time, a fulfilling time in which I was able to be free in the moment of creation.

July Writing Challenge Now Open For Bookings

Come and write with me in July. We’ll be exploring fairytales.

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The Dawn Chorus returns in June

Come join me for some gentle accountability, put your writing first in this facilitated writing space. Click this button to find out more.

Book Club News

Tanya Shadrick is jioning us at the end of the month to chat with me about The Cure for Sleep. Come and join us, it’s a pay what you can event. Click this button for more details:

Until next time

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