Year: 2024

‘How does the miracle occur?’

This is You, Dear Stranger, by Fife poet Paula Jennings, has arrived in the world, thanks to the remarkable Red Squirrel Press. The poet’s first book dates back to 2002, so there have been a mere twenty-two years (and two pamphlets) since then. And frankly, this beautiful publication is a miracle.

How and why? It’s been a strange story. The work was originally scheduled by Red Squirrel mastermind Sheila Wakefield for 2025. However, late in 2023, Paula was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She might not be around in 2025. She hastened to finalise the manuscript, with the support of her friend and fellow poet Anna Crowe. Meanwhile, Sheila offered to bring the publication date forward by more than a year.

By January of this year, the manuscript was with the publisher. At this point, Sheila asked me to help with the final edit. She herself was feeling awful. Having had had a heart attack two years previously, she feared her acute exhaustion might be heart failure. Basically, both poet and publisher were seriously ill, although Paula, supported by her niece Emma, managed a riveting reading at a ‘Platform’ event in Tayport on February 24. Those who were present are unlikely to forget it.

Meanwhile, with some come-and-go between me, Paula and Anna, minor changes to the manuscript were agreed, dedication and acknowledgements added, and Sheila sent the whole clamjamfrie to her typesetter, poet Gerry Cambridge.

By the time Gerry had designed and typeset the volume, and the proofs were ready to check, Paula’s illness had advanced. Her two sisters were taking it in turns to provide the increasing support required. Mary was travelling all the way up from Surrey regularly; Anne, from Sussex. Paula was less able to respond quickly on publication matters. Publisher Sheila’s health hadn’t improved either.

Everything necessarily slowed down. But gradually all the book elements came together. A photo for the jacket was sourced by Eddie Gibbons and two lovely endorsement quotes arrived from Vicki Feaver and Jane McKie, each of them straight from the heart.

In April, the book went to print. By this time, Sheila had been diagnosed – not with heart failure but anaemia. She was, nevertheless, soldiering on, accomplishing the numerous invisible aspects of book production: allocating the ISB number; negotiation print run and costs; paying the printer; registering the book; commissioning jacket image for the webshop; ordering and checking hard copy proofs; communicating with all concerned etc. And this was not the only publication Sheila was working on. If you thought a poetry publisher’s life was relaxed, think again!

Finally, in the very week that Sheila received the books, she had a crisis. She lost partial vision in one eye, which led to a night on a waiting-room seat in A&E. In the days that followed, this drama was repeated twice. There were mutterings about TIAs (one possible explanation) and retinal emboli (later discounted). Nobody was sure what was wrong but Sheila spent as much time in a hospital that week as she did at home (she must be on first-name terms with the ambulance service now). Meanwhile, the brain tumour was taking its implacable toll on Paula in Cellardyke. She was longing to have her book in her hands. Did it really exist, or had she imagined it?

Despite partial vision and medical summonses, Sheila (with the help of her own family) managed to get a box of books by courier to Fife, where Paula and sister Anne were waiting. Amazingly, four friends arrived at Paula’s house later that week and on May 3, there was an impromptu launch, reading favourite poems aloud, with coffee, cake, anecdotes and laughter. This is You, Dear Stranger had officially arrived in the world and the author, though terribly poorly, has some comfort in that thought. All prayers, warm thoughts or supportive vibes are welcome right now. It’s a horribly difficult time for her. It cannot be other.

This book is something to be proud of, something that will endure. It doesn’t address the experience of brain cancer. It was assembled before the poet had that diagnosis. But Paula has always been a magical person. Her poems are prescient in their evocation of the shadowy margin between the living and the dead, between this world and the next. At times that prescience is eerie.

Once a formal publication exists – a real book – there’s no holding it back. If you’d like to purchase a copy of This is You, Dear Stranger, please, please do. It’s somewhat special. I do believe you will enjoy it. Here’s the link: https://www.redsquirrelpress.com/product-page/this-is-you-dear-stranger-paula-jennings

I will never again take a shower without thinking of the title poem. Here it is.

The Way Water Shapes a Landscape

These are the first moments of the day:
one pillow under your head,
the other in your arms
and you are in this slash of light,
your slopes of skin buzzing with lost hormones.

Outside, the sun scratches furrows up the crags,
a blackbird anxiously practises two phrases

and inside you are about to invent a feasible day.
How does the miracle occur?

In the shower you are still no more
than a spinal column topped by
a roundish ball of memories.
The water taps and taps at you
like a patient sculptor
and then

there now
that’s you in the mirror, behind the steam;
this is you, dear stranger,
tying on your bones, your strung muscles.

WRITE THAT MEMOIR!

My dad always said he thought he had a book in him. He was a voluminous reader, but he died with that story unwritten.

Why, oh why did he never write it? Or even some notes about his early years? Who taught him to snare rabbits? Who made him expert with a shotgun and fishing rod? How did his own father die?

My mother did better. She finished a pamphlet of tales about her grandmother’s family, and after that, I was able to put some of her memories together in book form for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren when they’re ready.

Because they will treasure them one day. The older you get, the more these things matter. When Hamish Whyte did his memoir of Edwin Morgan, it was important. And not just for the greater good of literature.

As a result of all this, I enthused when a former work colleague, Morag Ridings, told me she wanted to write her life story. She had already done an illustrated booklet about her first husband’s life and death for his three grown-up children (and their children). The technology is there. It can be done.

But a full memoir is a big thing. She said she needed an editor. So I read the narrative chapter by chapter as she put it together, and all this started during lockdown, a good time for such things. She worked incredibly hard, but I am a tough critic. Anyway, the book grew, and as it grew, Morag’s natural aptitude blossomed. She wrote and revised, revised and wrote.

I’m not easily impressed but—blimey—the style she was developing was astonishing. She was accessible, compelling, interesting—a joy to read.

After two years and several drafts, there was a book. Two hundred and thirty-six pages of A Girl from Glasgow. I designed and typeset the volume, and did the jacket. She paid for the printing. I put it on Amazon. Friends and family bought it. She cheerfully lost money on nearly every copy sold. It’s costly to create something like this, and frankly, you have to self-publish it, because unless you’re a celebrity or have done something of historical significance, no commercial publisher would take it on.

Her Amazon reviews were wonderful. This is my favourite:

Wow—I am lost for words. From the moment I picked up this wondrous book I could not put it down. Personal favourite chapter of mine was “Living with a Teenage Boy”. This was disconcerting, awe-inspiring and amazeballs.

We printed 150 copies, and then another fifty, and then another fifty. We have a few left.

If you know anyone who grew up in or around the West End of Glasgow in the forties or fifties, or anyone who worked in further education (the Scottish colleges, or ‘techs’) in the eighties and nineties, I particularly recommend Morag’s book for them. (If they email nell [@] happenstancepress.com, I’ll invoice at cost without an Amazon fee.) The book is fascinating. On a human basis too, it’s deeply affecting—both sad and funny.

Humorous, pragmatic, resourceful, Morag wrote the book my father never got around to. It’s an inspirational example for anyone thinking they might do the same.

But thinking is no use. Here’s what you need to do.

Get a piece of paper or a computer, or whatever you use to write with. Write a heading: CHAPTER ONE.

Then keep going.

SOME THINGS ARE HARD TO TALK ABOUT

I first met writer and poet Clare Best in 2009. That’s when I published her poetry pamphlet Treasure Ground, which grew out of a residency at Woodlands Organic Farm on the Lincolnshire Fens. In the poems, a Romanesco cauliflower has the allure of a Grecian urn; and a corn dryer opens a world of silence. Clare wrote about Lincoln Red cattle too, and how to read them; and about sheep, and how they read us. First, her poems were distributed in the produce boxes distributed to 2,000 Woodlands customers. Later, Treasure Ground was sold at farmers’ markets. We had to reprint!

Although their author was much invested in them, the Treasure Ground poems weren’t personal. So when Clare went on in Excisions, her first full collection, to write about about her double mastectomy, in naked detail and with unparalleled openness, I was astonished. Astonished and humbled. But she can do that. She has that skill. Each time you think you know her, she peels off another layer. She’s unafraid to talk about those things we keep most private. Or perhaps she is afraid but — after many years of preparation — uses her fear to fuel the creative act.

That’s certainly what she does in The Missing List, a prose memoir about an abuser, her own father. And then just last year in her most recent poetry book, Beyond the Gate, the central focus is another deep grief. This time the ache at the heart of things is the act of choosing to end a pregnancy. What a difficult thing to speak about! Could anything be harder?

Many women (and men too) go through their lives with shadow children, lost family members who died before being born. Privately, the unborn are remembered. Publicly, they don’t exist. How do the mothers who couldn’t mother them manage their loss? What can be done with this reserve of secret pain?

Clare Best addresses such questions in Beyond the Gate, and her consideration is personal. By no means every poem deals with the issue head-on, but quite a few touch on it. Others ‘have their roots in the soil of that experience’, as Clare puts it. And because the experience is so difficult to talk about, we decided we would tackle it. We would read some of the relevant poems together, we would talk naturally about the thoughts that arose, and we would record the discussion and make it public. We would open the gate.

The resulting audio session was planned but not rehearsed (we didn’t know in advance exactly what we were going to say). It lasts about forty minutes. Several poems are visible on screen as we speak or read, though not the longest — the one that deals most directly with the pregnancy and its ending. We don’t discuss ethics. We consider only the poems, and the way they approach what it is to live with the irrevocable and unchangeable consequences of a grievous decision.

The link below will take you to the YouTube recording if you would like to listen.

HAPPY WET YEAR!

Happy New Year to wildness and wet! Because there’s plenty of that stuff round here. It brings to mind ‘Inversnaid’ and I know I won’t be the only one muttering “Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!”, although maybe I don’t absolutely mean it. Not after the last few weeks.

I’ve never been to Inversnaid village, which is on the shores of Loch Lomond, seventy odd miles to our west. But right now it’s soggy underfoot in Fife too. My new-ish trainers, I noticed this afternoon, are letting water in. Perhaps they didn’t expect quite so much of it.

It hasn’t been raining continuously, I guess, but all the same, it’s profoundly, deeply wet, with the winter woods bare and shining. Drifts of dank leaves are sludging all the pathways. Ditches are waterlogged. Drains are clogged. Burns are swollen with brown, muscly water. Brand new ponds have invaded fields and woods as if they intend to stay. Mud and muddles, dubs and puddles. Boots on, and headgear, gloves and scarves.

It’s not cold though. More faintly misty, grey round the edges. Mysterious. You see the tails of squirrels frisking just above your eye-line. Anything could happen in weather like this. The ground under our feet could sink and we could go with it. We’re walking in clouds.

Only one poem will do, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote it in the 1880s. It’s the antidote to gloom, even if the “beadbonny ash” (the rowan with its glorious red berries) had all its jewels eaten by the birds before Christmas. No matter! It’s beaded with raindrops now.

[Illustrations courtesy of poet Eddie Gibbons, who called in a little AI and worked magic]

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wilderness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.