MOMAYA - Some Success!

At the start of the year I set myself some goals. One of these goals was to get published by Momaya. This year I entered two stories into their annual competition and ‘Annie And Father Cuthbert’s Kisses’ has been commended and picked to be published later in the year.

The story is part of a novel I have planned out in my head. Annie is a character who is socially isolated, at first by the circumstances of her birth, then by the poverty she lives under and later by geography and poor education. In this story we see Annie as a child at school sometimes. She has no friends to start with. Then she does - one girl takes Annie under her wing. They go to church together on Sundays, both falling in love with the young Father Cuthbert and fantasising about what his kisses would taste like. Then Annie sees Father Cuthbert with her friend’s mother. They are lovers. And Annie is seen by the woman. Annie loses her friend and cannot tell what she knows. She ends this ‘chapter’ isolated again and unwilling to be at school any more.

I wrote this as a couple of flashes at first, just setting my fingers free on the keyboard of my computer and seeing where that took Annie. Looking back I wonder now where the ideas came from. They are by no means original, of that I feel sure. I am certain there must be stories or films where a child sees a priest with a woman doing what a priest should not. I cannot think of a specific example, but it feels like familiar territory. Isn’t there a song about Father Christmas kissing mummy? Was that somewhere in my head when I was writing this? Who can say?

Ideas are rarely completely original, are often just new configurations of old ideas given a new voice. We are all products of the culture we inhabit, bombarded by it from the moment we enter the world until the moment we leave it. That culture informs our thinking, our conscious and unconscious thoughts. When I am in the act of writing it sometimes feels like lying on my back floating in the sea and the current of my creative thinking takes me this way and that way without my control. I think this further makes difficult the whole issue of ownership of ideas and makes it a complex matter to come up with hard and fast rules about creative borrowings.

But the debate continues… as it should.