Archive for category: Roots, Issue 1

Bird Swallowers 

After the men cut our voice boxes out, women began swallowing birds. We had to endure months of fighting down a choking sensation, but perhaps we managed because of the words we’d swallowed for years. The trick was to know that the bird has no agenda of its own. We remembered what it was like to nest something within our bodies. We made sure to eat worms, grubs, seeds regularly. We no longer ate poultry. Finally, when the birds nested within our bodies, we were able to warble and coo in a language the men couldn’t understand. 

Those of us who had found our new voices were banished, and we made a compound at the wild, forested edge of the town. It was a ramshackle hut, wings added as new members arrived. We held them in the crooks of our arms until their shock settled. We found birds for them, helped them with the swallowing. Rejoiced when they opened their sweet trilling for the first time. Our chorus grew in complexity and timbre.

Occasionally the men approached with fists and daggers and words of hate. We let our birds fly out and answer with their hooked beaks, their sharp talons. Sometimes the men returned to hiss and pace our perimeter, but that was no longer relevant to us. We had the earth to till, water to fetch, children to teach.

There was a large, warm, communal kitchen always with a pot bubbling on the stove smelling of earthy cumin and heady lemon, always something in a tin in the oven, rising like witchcraft. The children ran in unruly, laughing packs. They approached any one of us with their cuts and bruises and we tended them on our knees, with our cooing, with a loving peck.

Soon all the women had joined us. Soon we were complete in our togetherness. Soon we felt at home. All it took was time, space, food, affection. At night, we would huddle in groups, arms winged over each other, a shoulder for every head. We slept more soundly than we ever had.

Today, we wake with the sun, and ruffle the sleep from our eyes. We run outside to offer the day our salutation. Our birds are the yellow of the happiest day of a child’s life, and the blue of a sky that knows it stretches to infinity and the velvet dark of blameless sleep. We stand, us women with our children. We spread our wings and murmur into the sky, twisting and rising as one. We dance and laugh and play as if we are the wind itself.

Where do you look for inspiration?

Everywhere. 

But I especially like to begin with classic stories. 

Existing texts can be modified in many ways: by altering a key word, for example, by telling the original version backwards, or by attempting to prove a premise that is opposite the original’s.

To create this story (He Always Lied, I Always Told the Truth. And Then We Fell in Hate, published in Roots, Issue 1 of Temple in a City literary journal), I began with a famous logic puzzle. At an unlabelled crossroads, a traveller is permitted to ask only one question. One of the crossroads’ guardians—though the traveller doesn’t know which—always tells the truth. The other always lies. 

To complete the story, I retained the puzzle’s setting but changed its purpose. In my version, love conquers all, while the traveller’s question is no longer important.

These kinds of creative techniques are inexhaustible. Countless original stories/poems/songs/logical puzzles exist, and each may be productively modified through small or large changes: by reimagining the story from a new point of view, by altering the characters’ personalities, or by introducing elements from unrelated stories/poems/songs/logical puzzles.

Anything can be changed, and every change has the potential to result in original fiction.

Is there a kind of writing you’d like to see more of?

Stories with multiple authors. 

I belong to a music-inspired writing ensemble—a “creative writing quartet.” Our performances are divided into multiple “movements.” During early movements, we respond to paired prompts: a poem + a painting, for example, or a novel excerpt + a photograph. During later movements, we extend, transform, and hybridize the work that other performers composed during earlier movements. 

Over a year and half, we’ve generated more than 45,000 words together. Recently, we’ve changed our focus a little. Instead of purely composing new material, we’ve also begun to shape and polish existing material, with the aim of creating publishable fiction. And it’s working. Our first four-author publication will appear in a literary magazine this summer. 

Through these kinds of collaborations, writers can extend their capacity many-fold. They can write in many styles and in many voices. They can draw from more experiences—both in writing and in life. Together, they can compose work that is richer, deeper, and fundamentally more interesting than any one quartet member could create alone.

Everyone should be doing this.

Shaking a tail feather

I woke to birdsong. “Up with the lark,” you’d always said. I dressed in the lemon chiffon dress you hated and pulled on that hat. You remember, the scarlet one with the feather you said made me look like a chubby robin. You wouldn’t allow me to wear it. I looked in the mirror. Perfect. I hopped downstairs and headed for the kitchen.

Time for breakfast. My head was becoming too hot under the hat so I took it off and put it on the table, exactly where your plate used to sit. Toast or cereal? ‘Heads or Tails?’ You used to despair at my indecisiveness. You were always so certain in your opinions. I tossed a coin. ‘Tails’ – toast it was then. You’d have been furious at my childish delight in leaving crumbs in the butter, dropping sticky marmalade on the tablecloth.

“Shake a tail feather, Joannie,” you’d say whenever I slowed down, perhaps to listen to a whispering willow or smell the metallic tang of a funfair, or just actually breathe. You’d said it to me that night we met at the Palais Ballroom, “come on girl, stop gossiping, come and shake a tail feather with the best-looking man in the room.” 

You were a catch. All my friends said so. ‘He’s a proper man, that one.’ ‘Solid as a rock.’ ‘Knows his own mind’. ‘Don’t know what he sees in you!’ You never took to my friends though and they soon drifted off, as insubstantial as clouds once we got married and flew away.

You kept me fed and watered for twenty years and all I had to do in return was love, honour and obey. I managed the last one. I used to love your pigeons. I’d go up onto the roof while you were out and coo with them. You set them free each morning and each evening they returned. They were such stupid birds. We were birds of a feather. I let them all go yesterday and dismantled their cages. You’d have been incandescent with rage.

A knock on the front door jolted me out of my memories. I grabbed my hat, jammed it on my head at a jaunty angle and went to open the door.

“Mrs Joannie Brown?” asked the man in black, taking in my colourful outfit with a raised eyebrow.

“No,” I replied. “Joan’s my name – not Joannie, never again Joannie. Joan like in Joan Jet.”

The man smiled. “Your car’s here, Ms Jet.”

I travelled to the church in style and made a point of waving gaily to people as we crawled past. ‘Making a show of myself’. You’d have hated that. 

In the front pew of the almost empty church I listened to talk of celebrating your life. I wished it was shorter. I’d taken off my hat, not out of respect but because it was flattening my hair, and I cradled it in my lap. I drifted off and dreamt of soft feathers, funfairs, flying.

The knights of New Hampshire

Our grandfather taught us to identify trees by the shape of their leaves. If we hold out our cousin arms, we see patterns of elm, maple and oak on our skin. Maine and Massachusetts meet in the dim light. Who will conquer who this summer?

Worn paths lead to abandoned cabins in a ring like spikes on the head of a thistle. We divide into factions and use the dilapidated structures as bases. Water-stained calendars from the 1940s hang from nails in the walls and chipped ceramic bowls fill the cabinets. We sit cross-legged on plank floors planning our attacks, white stuffing exploding from mortal wounds in upholstered couches so laden with dust our eyes itch and water if we bounce on them. 

We fight like our parents with their menthols and plastic cups. Practicing for when slaughter comes at the hand of a sharp sentence, we slice at the air with sword branches and fling balls of mud with rocks rolled surreptitiously inside them. We know the true nature of family. We know how to play. We were taught by the parries and the starve-outs and the silences. The tricksters and the go-for-the-throats.

We hide in hollowed tree trunks and beneath crumbling porches with slugs and caterpillars and earthworms. We hold our breath. The oldest of us, in from the coast, steers us away from the refrigerator tossed down the hillside. When one of the twins get scared and starts to cry, we bury him in a pile of fallen leaves. We hide behind stacked towers of empty Michelob cans and jump from disemboweled mattresses, ignoring the far-off voices when surely it is not dinnertime yet. We strip twigs from a birch limb and peel off its bark. We kneel, circles of moisture growing on the knees of our jeans. We tap shoulders one at a time, bestowing power, demanding allegiance, promising fealty. We give each other new names.

We use hub caps as shields and mix toxic teas of mud and clover, dandelion and sand in upturned, dog-chewed frisbees. We wriggle under foundations. We ride horses made from bent bicycle tires and plywood and strips of moldy tarp. We pry splinters from our fingers and lick blood like soft serve dripping down the sides of our hands. We drink from the stream and catch glimpses of our foes darting through shadows. We sling broken bricks at their chests and shoot arrows of greenstick and sharpened slate at their cheeks.

The voices reach us again and we swat them away like mosquitoes or biting flies but they return, landing in our eyelashes and buzzing our ears and we are pulled from the dappled and into the monochrome without a clear winner, with no trumpets to declare victory, and someone’s mother says let’s get all of you together for a picture and we stand in the cut grass squirming hip to hip with enemies whose hair we have yanked and faces we have slashed. We blink at the adults lined up next to the porch, sipping and smoking and shifting and chuckling. Alright kids, someone’s dad barks while holding a camera up to his eye and they all chant in unison-say cheese. 

If only

If only this didn’t happen every morning. If only your daughter didn’t scoop one Cheerio at a time into her spoon, study that lone circle of grain so intently, chew it quite so long. No. Eye. Contact. You know better. Her wild hair is knotted at the back and your hands itch to tidy it. “Plaits?”

Marissa face scrunches, chin tilts even further down.

If only you didn’t have to lose so many battles, hoping to win the war. If only your jaw didn’t ache from biting down your temper, from raging at Mike for just walking away, giving up.

You wipe milk from the counter, don’t look at the clock you’ve set twenty minutes early so you get to school on time. “Bag all set?”

Marissa hunches her shoulders, grinds another Cheerio to mush.

Shoes. If only shoes were not the hill you had to die on daily. If only you could just get out the door without your daughter wailing, “Too tight!” You shove two fingers between the strap of her Mary Janes and ankle socks but Marissa’s not having it. It’s almost like she enjoys this, mouth hinged open, full throttle. And why not? Wouldn’t you like to? You bet it feels glorious.

Shoes off. Sit and do not speak. Count time in your head. 

Marissa needs the loo. Then she’s thirsty. Then she’s going to be sick. Finally, the shoes are on. Finally, you reach the school grounds. 

If only you could whisk through the playground, unseen. You don’t want sympathy; you want an invisibility cloak. 

“Rushing this morning, were we?” Fake sympathy from Fake Tan Mum who looks pointedly at Marissa’s unbrushed hair. Her daughter? Sleek as an otter.

Marissa’s palm sneeks into yours and together you head toward the entrance, past Villa-in-Italy Mum and Council Estate Mum.

“Hi Laurie,” Villa-in-Italy Mum breezes. “Just collecting for-”

“Lauren,” you correct her.

“Yes,” she says, waving over another mum. “Collecting for Mrs Merickee? World Teachers’ Day is coming up and we thought-”

If only they knew how little cash you have to spare. You exchange a look with Council Estate Mum. 

Nancy!” Villa-in-Italy Mum is all bonhomie in her flowing maxi dress. “Care to contribute? Mrs Merickee? World Teachers’ Day?”

As Designer Bag Mum reaches into her gorgeous green leather handbag, you and Council Estate Mum edge away. “I need to get Marissa into class first.”

“Oh, she can go in with Clemmie, can’t you hon?” Villa-in-Italy Mum pushes her sour-faced daughter toward the entrance and reaches towards Marissa as if to do the same.

Marissa’s face tightens and you jump between them. No need for a meltdown. “That’s ok, I need to talk to Mrs Merickee anyway.” 

If only they knew how much easier it is to lie than to explain. You step into the corridor. Voices clank off polished floors and hard walls; children laugh and give each other fist bumps. It’s so loud even though no one is shouting. Marissa gulps air, mouth puckering like a fish. If only they knew how much their noise felt like an attack. 

A teaching assistant you haven’t seen before stops and asks if you’re lost. “Parents aren’t allowed back here.”

If only they put Marissa first instead of their stupid rules. If only you weren’t on your knees, just five weeks into the ter. “We’ll just be a minute,” you say, gesturing to Marissa’s headphones. Best investment you ever made. Her face goes slack with relief. 

If only you could make the world more Marissa-friendly. You walk the rest of the way to class, her Mary Janes and your Crocs squeaking down the corridor. If only everyone were like Mrs Merickee, whose gentle “Morning Marissa” greets your daughter. She’s in. Lightheaded, you lean against the stuccoed wall. Now it’s time for your face to go slack. 

Outside again you see Artsy Mum in her dungarees and Marathon Mum, hair in a pony, abs on show in a cut-off top above neon leggings.  “All good?”

You’re so happy you forget to censor yourself. “Third day this week!”

“Third day for what?”

Blue-Stocking Mum wanders over. Great. A crowd. “Oh I’ve been having a bit of trouble, getting her to come to school.” You stare at the school gate, trying to summon yourself there.

Artsy Mum frowns. “She doesn’t like school?”

If only conversations on the playground weren’t so competitive. If only you had one day when you didn’t feel like a slug and you’d bathed and you had an actual friend. Maybe Artsy Mum, with her gentle confidence and wicked laugh, maybe even Blue-Stocking Mum, who sounds like Oxford but never acts like she’s all that.

“Just tell her she needs to be in school,” says Marathon Mum. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do.”

If only they knew how many things Marissa endures that feel like torture. Seams in her clothes like razors. Speaking in public like being whipped. 

If only people could just stop with the snap judgements. Five minutes past nine and you long for your duvet. Your stomach churns until you remember Marissa’s face with her headphones in place. You remember her drawing a pineapple last night, the intricate detail of each segment. If only they knew how amazing your daughter was.

“Hold up ladies,” says Blue Stocking Mum. “I heard something about this on Radio Four.” 

“Honestly, whose kids aren’t struggling with school since Covid?” says Artsy Mum.

Their words wash over you like soft rain. Your jaw eases. 

Artsy Mum says, “Hey, anyone have time for a cuppa? We could go to mine.” She catches your eye and holds it. 

Oh, you think. Oh. 

Maybe you could. 

You’ve written a poem here, rather than your more typical flash writing. How different did you find that process and are you experimenting with different forms of writing? What are you excited to try?

I find that I get bored easily, and one way to keep the interest going is to try new forms. I am also easily influenced, and am immersed in a lot of poetry at the moment. I’ve been writing less straight fiction, and more CNF or hybrid, and there is something about poetry that lends itself to being in that interstitial space. Previously I felt embarrassed or inadequate with writing poetry, but supportive friends have encouraged me to try, and I am grateful for their guidance.

Describe your writing process. Are you a planner or a pantser, do you prefer to write in quiet or amid noise, do you write most effectively when you are working through a pain or sorrow or when calm and happy? Do you start with wisps or fragments or have a general sense of whole structure before going in?

My process looks a little like going about my day, then being struck by lightning, but being unable to do anything about it for a few hours! I make many incomprehensible notes on my phone, and when I have time, I return to them and see what coalesces. As I write, I very rarely have a sense of the whole thing. If I do, it’s because I have been composing it in my mind for some time. I don’t edit very much, but will take a pass to check for repetition/clunky words, to make sure the structure is sound, the character and plot progression is okay. I also always take a pass for sensory detail. I almost never send work out without a second pair of eyes on it, and am blessed with an amazing community of writer friends who are so generous with their critique.  I always, always write in silence as I have hyperacusis and cannot focus if there is extraneous noise. 

Is there a kind of writing you’d like to see more of?

I love flash because of the sheer variety in the form. There is this idea that there are only a few basic story types, and the challenge for the flash writer is to put some personal slant on it – structure, voice, angle etc. Mostly, in the current publishing landscape, a narrative is still required – some sense of movement. I would love to see more writing that straddles genres between vignette/story, poem/prose. I think there are lit mags that celebrate that, and I love them, but many lit mags will reject stories that don’t have that sense of movement. Sarah Fawn Montgomery said in a recent craft talk via The Writers’ Centre that these kinds of stories often exclude differently abled writers because their CNF stories often don’t have movement or resolution. I agree, as someone living with fibromyalgia and the chronic and complex effects of developmental trauma. I also agree as a person of the Global Ethnic Majority that our stories often do not take a Western shape, and there needs to be more space for that. Those spaces exist, and I am grateful for the editors and litmags who champion that, but it isn’t widespread as yet. Please keep writing your non-majority culture stories and sending them out! They are important and the world needs to read them.

You’re very generous as a writer. You boost other writers, you collaborate with writers on stories, you help others write safely through trauma. Was there an experience you had when someone was generous to you? What inspires you to celebrate and work with others so effectively?

I’m just giving back, Eirene. There isn’t just one experience of my receiving generosity – there’s hundreds. This community is truly the most supportive and uplifting. Some of my best friends are people I know from the online writing community. It feels completely effortless to be around other writers – sharing, collaborating, boosting; and is so different to my experiences growing up where I struggled to connect in any authentic way. I get so much joy from being a part of this community, and am happy to give back in any way I can.

Your professional experience is in both writing and trauma. Is there anything you’d like to say about safely writing through traumatic experiences?

There is quite a lot I have to say! I say some of it here. And people can sign up for my Writing Trauma workshop mailing list here – I’m running Part 2 in July. If you aren’t aware, I am a psychiatrist and trauma therapist. I’m also a trauma survivor and have had conventional treatments which have been really helpful, but the most transformative experience has been writing about my trauma (particularly my collaboration with Amy Marques). Writing traumatic experiences is such an important thing to do, but how do we do it while also staying safe and grounded? Sometimes there is a feeling that there is no way but through, and it will be painful – yes, but – it is possible to learn some gentle somatic techniques to be able to get through without losing your cognitive connections, and therefore any chance of processing the traumatic experience. If you can do that, stay in your body while writing about your trauma, it then moves from something without chronology or words that jumpscares you, to a story about a thing that happened in the past. 

A Haunting

It was a small house in a relatively new neighbourhood that had only been a stretch of sparsely-inhabited countryside for centuries beforehand. The house had six rooms, four up top consisting of three rooms made into bedrooms and a bathroom, and two down below, a sitting room and kitchen. The house at that time, home to three young children and their parents, was naturally full of sounds, and you can tell when some of those sounds don’t quite fit. I don’t think I can give many specifics, but the first things I distinctly remember were footsteps. And not a slow few footfalls, but an almost continuous coming and going outside the rooms I would sit in. I remember I would listen to it, and wonder what it was my mother was looking for, but for some reason I didn’t want to help.

It was when I began to see things in the next few years did older events take on a new light. It was never constant, it came in waves. For a few days it might be particularly bad, then for a span of weeks there’d be nothing more than the creak of a floorboard. When it happened, I’d see a shape maybe in an upstairs window as I walked home, or I’d be in our small back garden and see something through the open back door, moving upstairs. Sometimes I’d be in the house, and would see a shape turning a corner. A child’s imagination is unruly, and my siblings and I all had our fair share of monsters under the bed. But this was different. I began to become nervous in the house, especially alone, or even just when I was the only one upstairs or downstairs. On days off early from school, from which I could walk home myself, I can’t begin to tell you how wrong it felt to dread coming up to the front door of my own home because I’d have to be in there, alone.

It all began to pile up. For me, and for everyone else. But no one talked about it. I know my siblings heard things from the way they seemed preoccupied. I never caught my parents talking about it or sharing looks. Sometimes I’d find someone in a mood, but no one said anything, and it began to gnaw at me. So one day, when I was about twelve years old, I confided in my brother, with whom I had grown a little distant as he entered his mid-teens and I was still a child, that I thought our house was haunted. It was the shock of my life when he said he thought so too. We spent some minutes asking each other questions. Fact is, it had been going on for roughly as long as we both thought. My brother told me he couldn’t bear to walk around a corner in the house any more. He was convinced he was going to walk right into it.

One particular thing comes to mind: we often found doors closed. This was especially horrible for my brother and I, who had taken to leaving doors as wide open as we could throughout the house. There was always the notion that something had closed it, and was waiting on the other side. There were times, I’m not proud to admit, we slept elsewhere than our own bedroom because the door was closed when we got to it.

Over time, the atmosphere in the house became oppressive. My brother spent much time out, I spent many weekends staying over at friends’ houses, my parents, who only shared a handful of particularly bad experiences, rarely left each other’s sides. I think we had all come to an understanding, and though we never talked of it together, things were passed between individuals. We were always waiting for something to happen so it would be over for the moment.

It was near my fifteenth birthday, during a period when it wasn’t especially bad. It was the end of summer holidays and a late weekday morning. The bathroom was quite small, and we had a walk in shower, slightly raised off the ground. The shower itself was in the corner, with doubled over, opaque curtain of thin plastic on a rail overhead. I was in the shower when it happened. Out of nowhere, like an invasive thought, I got that awful feeling a person gets when they’re being watched. A gut response, they say, to being hunted. I didn’t quite know what to do, I just tried to finish washing off. In the rush, I didn’t notice that something had pressed itself up against the curtain. I think I stumbled backwards into the wall, watching fingertips pressing and curling, the dome of a head pushing into the plastic. The way the curtain clung to it as it twisted itself up violently in it disgusted me in a way I can’t begin to describe. Light from the frosted window barely silhouetted it, but I could tell it was horribly thin. Then, as it moved towards me, the curtain was pulled taut on its rings like vacuum sealing over its face, and I began to scream.

I remember crying into my mother’s arms, and no one asked why. I spent some nights with an uncle. I couldn’t tell you what he was told, or what I was like. I do remember serious talk between my parents for days after. Not a month later, we moved out. I remember that face, and it still comes to me in a nightmare. I never followed up on the house in all the time after, to see if it couldn’t keep tenants, or if it remained empty. Or, I should say, mostly empty.

Was there an incident or story behind either of these poems?

Post-vespers was written after a conversation with a friend of mine. He was observing that some of us who’ve come out of formal faith communities have a residual compulsion to pray…the question of “what is prayer now” resonated with me deeply. 

Describe your writing process. Are you a planner or a pantser, do you prefer to write in quiet or amid noise, do you write most effectively when you are working through a pain or sorrow or when calm and happy? Do you start with wisps or fragments or have a general sense of whole structure before going in?

The poem Prompt is a good description of my process. I’ll have an idea or prompt or fragment of a poem simmering away all day & I’ll check on it as many times as I can. Sometimes I’m waiting for the next line to “drop in”, sometimes I’m fidgeting obsessively. But there’s a sense that the poem is a thing/being waiting to be discovered or interacted with, rather than “written”. 

It probably comes from both places but do you believe you write more from the head or heart?

It’s a weaving together. The secret third thing for me is the body. For me writing is a very somatic experience. I mostly write while walking and often have a sense of where and how the poem is affecting my body, whether it’s calming me or exciting me or where there might be resistance to saying a thing. 

Is there a type of writing you’d like to do more of? Is there a kind of writing you’d like to see more of?

Collaborative writing. Whether that’s writing groups or sharing prompts online or two or more writers contributing to the same piece. I love the ways ideas spark and move when shared between us. I love the way writing in a safe community can give us the courage to write things we otherwise might not write. And I love the friendships that develop between writers. There’s often a special sort of intimacy, I think, like when you’ve shared the same water bottle.