How I write

For my students and in memory of Stephen Boyd.

First, there is the inevitable mysterious swim through the unconscious. I think of it is as the first long dip into those images that follow you about; that sit in the centre of you somewhere around your midriff and belly button as though that part of your body had become an x-ray or xerox machine repeatedly copying those primary images; images which swim up to the surface from your watery body so that when you look down you can see them sticking as seaweed used to cling to my young, untrained swimmer’s legs. I look again now and see those images sitting in the centre of me --- they have moved up, closer to the centre of me --- and when I feel them sitting around my navel and belly area I know then a new book is emerging.

I suppose those images are also stored away within my brain but somehow, they have shifted to the centre of me: to my solar plexus where the sun shines; where all the light is, where the central heat of my generative energy burns. Images ripe for conversion into something living, a shape or form with purpose and momentum.

And the images I store and make there in the centre of me (I am thinking now of Jonah inside the belly of the whale) is a process of copying and replicating a set of

essential shapes and colours, light and shadows, of dark, then clear and bold, moving outlines. At the moment my leading image is the following.

The passageway between one man’s house and another; a narrow spit of land; an alleyway, a twitten, a pebbly, gravelly, sandy no man’s land between one set of owned bricks and another. A piece of land so unremarkable as to be barely accounted for except in some quarrelsome mind. This, I soon realised, was the essential territory, unit or container, I needed to hold my story. In my last book it was the Green Lady Lane which was the essential repository for my story telling and also a real location; a byway, a passage between one space and place, one order of time, one mode of being, oneself and another, one era and several others because in that book I cross time and space quite often. Most importantly, it was also a place I could look up on a map and find it marked as ‘Green Lady Lane’, and this was usefully real and satisfying. Grounding.

This time round I found myself immediately within the realm of fable. I was making up my spaces. And so the space I am now marking out as my story-space is also a space of dispute or debate (I haven’t yet decided how much emotional heat to grant this territory) between one character and another. Between my character Pond Man who first emerged in the book I have just completed, Pond Life, (Autumn 2025), and his neighbour Laurence

Gallows, a character arising from the genre of fable to which I seem to be committed. Fable it must be, I think, because it allows me to plunge straight into the ludicrous, the silly and bizarre.

GALLOWS (silly and bizarre) may well be a holding name for now, but it arose from the fact I had been playing hangman with an eight-year-old every Wednesday afternoon after school and found myself hanged every time and thinking how short life is when you transfer it to the realm of the ludic. Games, like life, can have vicious rules. And Gallows is Gallows because I wanted to be reminded of how this character of mine was constantly hanging himself by his own ridiculous schemes which is what many human beings seem to do. What we called when I was growing up ‘a potty idea.’ Laurence Gallows is full of such ideas.

At the same time I was reading the opening episodes of Michel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote and reminding myself of just how ludicrous and pantomimic were the schemes of that knight-errant and his steward, Sancho Panza; and just how wonderful were the drawings in my particular edition; and how much I had loved donkeys, a favourite animal of mine growing up by the seaside when donkey rides were still just about fashionable in the very dated Victorian turning Edwardian childhood that was mine. And now I see, looking again, that Sancho Panza’s donkey is called ‘Dapple’ in English which is a

translation of the Spanish ‘Rucio’ which means grey-beige or taupe; but you cannot possibly call a donkey (or is it a mule: to be confirmed) ‘taupe.’ At the moment, at least one of the donkeys (there are a few) is called Lucy named after a faithful household servant, an old Nurse.

And so my book, Pond Man, as it was called earlier this year, began with the re-reading of a ludicrous epic and the replaying of a ludicrous game. (I was also thinking of the game Pin the Tail on the Donkey). But it also rested upon the fact I had created a before life or back story to the character of Pond Man; it rested upon the fact he already exists within my ludicrous literary history or genealogy and now I wished to x-ray or scan him a little more deeply – to grant him more depth and texture – and so carry him over from that earlier story of romance (there are women in Pond Life and one in particular: Pond Man exists as a site/sight for her grief-stricken fantasies).

This business of carrying over is important. It is at the crux of my method, and, upon reflection, I realise a way of recalling how we first learned to do arithmetic at school --- our sums of addition, subtraction and multiplication --- by carrying over numbers from one column of numbers and attaching them to another. So then what, I wondered, might have been lost or altered in transit as I carried out this crude choreography with my sums?

Well, Pond Man has been carried over to another genre, another space-time continuum. In this new story he still has a garden, but it is not set within the grounds of the manor house but out along the sea front --- in the public realm --- where ordinary folk can sit and consider the time of day. These are known to the locals as ‘the sunken gardens’ and you have to climb down a few steps to reach them; these gardens have a very particular layout, faintly mathematical, certainly geometric, which seems important to those who come and sit there. It tidies their mind; helps sort out their past.

And perhaps these initial scene settings, this laying out of shape and space between one place and another – the twitten between Laurence’s house and Pond Man’s and the space between the promenade and the pier and the sunken gardens – are the essential means of world-building I must do early on in my unconscious planning. I say unconscious because it is only after six months of writing I know that these shapes and spaces and forms are important to how I will negotiate the world I am in and to the characters that belong here. I know these are the locations of their disputes and the lived spaces of their emotions filled with resentment, regret, loss and disappointment, and then the more expansive territory of grief.

In the last three months another character has arrived. She belongs to history, but her biography ran

out after the famous man she was attached to died. Her name is Katherine Parnell, and she had been married for a brief amount of time to Charles Stewart Parnell, the famous leader of the Irish Home Rule movement. Before that, for about ten years, she was his mistress. Parnell died in 1891, and Katherine outlived Parnell for thirty long and lonely years wandering from seaside town to seaside town renting rooms in various forms of shabby accommodation. She died in 1921 and was buried in the cemetery of the town where I was born; the town which has becomes the teaming mythic space of my last four books, and which, in this the fifth book in a sequence, has turned into something more than myth: a place of fairytale and fable; of alternative histories and biographies; of bizarre genealogies; of strange alternative lives.

And here emerges another unconscious or partly conscious strand of seaweed. Parnell was a literary and historical ghost for James Joyce who I read intensely as a twenty-year-old in another seaside town on the East Coast of Scotland; a town where I came of age as a shoddy student but a devout reader. (Being a student I realised meant completing a dull set of tricks: you didn’t have to be imaginative or even very well read, you just needed to know the tricks). Parnell haunts Ulysses and Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as he must have haunted Joyce’s childhood, his father being a committed and passionate Parnellite. The name of

Parnell came up frequently in my undergraduate tutorial discussions; at least enough for me to be bothered by the fact I did not understand the significance of this historical character and his tragic myth.

I was studying Joyce with an intense and brilliant scholar who died tragically and young – he hanged himself -- and his odd, kindly, awkward ghost still haunts me. This tutor, brilliant and deadly in tutorials, but painfully shy on the narrow streets of my university town, sent me a note about my literary potential or my abilities as a reader (certainly it can’t have been anything to do with my essay writing skills). I was embarrassed by this note and I couldn’t quite grasp it, but I did recognise it as a sincere form of affectionate support.

My tutor whose name was Stephen, spelt like Joyce’s young artist, used the phrase ‘elan vital’ which felt silly and pretentious, but only because the recipient was perhaps both those things. I wasn’t then mature enough to understand what it might have meant to have been seen. I was still in hiding as, perhaps, was he, within the mythical labyrinth of Joyce’s Ulysses with its endlessly self-referencing world of high and low allusions and citations. I didn’t quite know what anything was swirling around inside such clever, slippery language, other than this text was a different sort of epic --- a literary experiment -- and it was based upon the Greek epics but especially Homer’s The Odyssey which I had read

(poorly); and that it was stuffed with contemporary and ancient Irish history and the living sights and sounds of the streets of Dublin.

So perhaps what I am doing now in this new book is scanning and copying tiny parts, poorly made facsimiles in felt filaments of that mysterious text I didn’t then understand, and I still don’t fully understand, (how could I? It is a beautiful, ludicrous and mysterious mythic crossword emerging from an extraordinary unconscious; and I have never been talented at crosswords, so I rely, as I usually do, upon the poetry; the rhythm and the sound of words propelling me generously and kinaesthetically along). And undoubtedly, I am carrying over old emotions from years gone by when I was first learning how to see and read the world in a town that was not my home but nonetheless was still by the sea, this time in Scotland.

,And perhaps I am also trying to understand by means of other people’s stories --- Pond Man’s, Laurence Gallow’s, Katherine Parnell’s and then the characters I am still creating who will attend to these central figures --- the character of Wilhemina Halifax for example who has emerged in the last two months ---- what it was that was going on all those years ago as I grappled with mysterious and experimental literature and with myself as a reader and young girl coming of age (in many ways I was young for my age and I would say the

same now. But it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to come of age belatedly, whatever we mean by ‘age’; but it can’t just mean number of years lived upon this earth).

But I have dropped Mrs. Halifax, my boarding house Madame, a figure who must have been ubiquitous in any seaside town in the Victorian and Edwardian era. Mrs. H., or the Heave-Ho as she is known by her lodgers, had a husband called Harold who is dead and gone leaving her as the sole warden of this down-at-heel boarding house where, for the sake of frugality, she tries to enforce strict rules. Undoubtedly her most taxing resident is Mrs. Parnell with her high- born and condescending manners. Mrs. Parnell, once known as Miss Katherine Wood, was the daughter of Lady Emma Caroline Wood; Lady Emma being the wife of Rev. John Wood, one time chaplain to the Royal family at Windsor. And so there you have the beginning of another dispute, this time between two women: one ranked socially more lowly but with property; and the other, once ranked more highly, now fallen low with almost nothing to her name except a borrowed dog cart pulled by a local donkey, another borrowed creature.

So a basic kind of symmetry is emerging, a simple sort of maths. Now there are the two men, Pond Man and Laurence Gallows, and the two women, Katherine Parnell and Mrs. Halifax. At the moment, Pond Man will move back and forth between the realm of fable,

where Laurence more obviously resides; and the realm of something other, which I am pretending is historical biography (more serious stuff I tell myself) but in truth history is at least as ludicrous as the world of the fable.

And so, as these two circles of history and fable overlap, the characters will spill forth from these nestling shapes; will wander out of their petty provinces, their feudal kingdoms, because the desire to foist forms of power upon one another will become too great. At heart, we are all conquistadors enforcing our feudal class codes and whether this is a conscious or unconscious habit ( I tend to think more conscious than not) it produces a set of psychological dynamics or games that at some point we all play at as we try to wrest control over our ever-diminishing dominions.