Tea for Two in Port Brokeferry

(Trying to remove the sour taste from my mouth, I retreat to Port Brokeferry. I wish all this plagiarism thing would just end. I really do. Maybe I should draw my line under this chapter. Maybe I will. So here's something sweet from Port Brokeferry.)

VISITORS TO PORT BROKEFERRY

It’s a bit blowy to be sitting outside, but it’s their holidays, so they sit at one of the tables on the pavement and they do it without complaining. They order a pot of tea for two and toasted sandwiches. He wants ham and cheese; she asks if she can have tomatoes with hers. Eileen scribbles a note onto her pad, something only she and Guthrie can make any sense of. She smiles at the visitors and asks if that will be all.

Guthrie is watching her through the window. Her hair is all blown from the tuck behind her ears. He frowns at that. He thinks there must be clips you can get for holding hair in place. He makes a note in his head to mention it to her sometime.

Eileen turns to go, almost. Thinks. Then brings to the visitors’ attention that there are tables inside the café if they would prefer. Eileen is cold and the fine blonde hairs on her bare arms are all stood up and her skin all goosebumps and shivers.

They laugh and tell Eileen they are on their holidays. As if Eileen did not know. They thank her and tell her they will be fine.

Eileen says she will be a few minutes and she retreats back into the warmth of 'The Bobbing Boat'.

Guthrie takes the slip of paper that Eileen has written on and sets about preparing the order of toasted sandwiches. Eileen lays a tray with two plates and two cups and saucers. She weights the two napkins down with two knives.

‘Shit, it’s cold out there,’ she hisses through her teeth to Guthrie, her voice so low only he can hear.

He doesn’t like it when she swears. He makes no reply. Her hair is still all loose across her cheeks. He wants to reach out and tuck it back where it belongs.

Eileen warms her hands on the sides of the urn, touching the hot metal, patting it so that she does not burn herself. Then she rubs the caught warmth over the backs of her hands.

Guthrie puts two teabags into a brown ceramic teapot. It has the words ‘Port Brokeferry’ raised on the belly of it. He has a shelf of them behind the counter. In different colours. They are for sale to the visitors. There are milk jugs to match. He points out that Eileen has forgotten the milk.

Outside the man sitting at the table holds the hand of the woman. He tells her this is nice. He means being with her. He means being together and no one else to see them. She nods. Tightens her grip on his fingers and leans in to kiss him.

FUN WITH NIK AND JANE

(sorry people, this is an essay… but it is, I think, worth reading)

Jane:

There’s a writer I know who gives advice to other writers. She has a blog that provides an insight into how the publishing industry really works. But her advice wanders beyond her sphere of expertise sometimes. Maybe we all do that. She says in one of her blog posts to do your research thoroughly and to double check your facts. I have done this here.

Last January, Jane set up a collaborative fiction site with herself as editor. She invented a place and invited writers to send flash fiction pieces to populate her town with characters and places and happenings. I played and very quickly had four pieces hung up on her site (and one rejection). Then something happened that made me question an editorial decision she had made which was against her own stated rules – I wasn’t the only one who thought this was the case. I don’t think Jane liked that I was so public in defence of my point of view. She sent me an e-mail that said she didn’t know whether to kiss me or slap me (kiss me for my beautiful words or slap me for publicly calling into question her editorial ability or arguing so strongly for a better decision). She said that she would have to cool off before deciding whether or not to use any of my other subbed pieces. She was very cross.

Then she helped make very public a charge of plagiarism against me.

Things crumbled a bit after that, with her collaborative fiction site stumbling forward for a month or so before finally coming to a halt. A while later she removed my pieces from her site and in their place made public the idea that I was a bad sort.

Jane also sent me an e-mail warning me against using the idea of an invented place like hers and populating it with my pieces and more. It was a long, calm and very threatening communication. She had sued the Daily Mail, she said, and won tens of thousands of pounds in damages. I should be careful, she said. She was serious. Even the pieces that she had not hung on the site, because they were originally written for her project, might not be mine to do with as I pleased. I thought the world had flipped and gone mad and that this was totally unfair.

I have blogged aplenty on this site in defence of all my writing. Jane was wrong in the charges she made against me. So very wrong. My ‘offending’ stories are clearly visible now (through a blatant infringement of my copyright and accompanied by a stream of misrepresentation and lies). The stories are called ‘Waiting in The Scriptorium’ and ‘Mondays Smell of Burnt Toast’… you can read them if you search for them – please read them, for it is clear that my stories are not examples of plagiarism and Jane should think so too.

(Now to my research) On Jane’s publishing advice blog site one of her very first posts points out that: a) ‘there is no copyright on ideas’, and b) ‘specific arrangements of words can be protected’ but ‘the idea (storyline) will not be, as ideas are fair game’. All those words are hers, including what is in parenthesis.

Read my stories and it is clear that no specific arrangements of words have been stolen. I have admitted to having sometimes found inspiration elsewhere and used ideas from other sources and made them my own by what I have done with them. That’s what artists do, don’t you know. But I have never taken another's words and pretended that they were my mine.

Despite this, Jane still maintains that I have transgressed! This does not fit with her definition of what is allowed, her understanding of ideas as ‘fair game’ as expressed on her blog.

She now claims that with my Port Brokeferry project I am thief again, now stealing from her.

Jane got the idea for her January 2009 collaborative fiction project from other projects she had seen including a project called ‘Blue Rock’ where a writer had set up a very similar collaborative writing project, inventing his own fictional place and inviting poets to write poetry to populate his town with characters, places and happenings. Jane took this idea and, not wanting to merely replicate it, tweaked the idea, asking for 500 word long pieces of flash fiction instead of poetry. (Am I wrong or is flash fiction not sometimes seen as a sort of prose-poetry?).

I do not say that in doing this Jane was doing wrong. I agree with her that ‘there is no copyright on ideas’ and ‘ideas are fair game’. But why does she get so irate then when I set up my own fictional place (not collaborative, but just me) and populate it with characters I had invented initially for her now floundered project, and other characters I continue to invent?

Could it be because she has decided to slap me instead of kiss me? And slap me and slap me and slap me.

Jane has recently said she is too tired to be bothered with legal action against me over Port Brokeferry. Or maybe she realises that in this instance and by her own measure of what can and cannot be protected, she is WRONG. (see Malcolm Gladwell below and my other ‘essays’).

Nik:

And Nik: a knight to Lady Jane and all those other women who have attacked me. Nik posts my name on his blog last week and calls me vile and thief and hangs lies about me on his page.

I do not know why Nik reminds me of the Andrex puppy – blundering through reams and reams of toilet paper and making such a mess and everyone going ‘awww’ because the puppy is so cute.

Nik blogs about the pen he writes with, and the colour of ink he uses, and his handwriting; he blogs about taking off his beard and his lack of success in love. And now he blogs about me. That would be fine if he had anything real to say on the matter, but he tells lies about me. He did it before on another site. I thought those lies the blundering of an Andrex puppy, so I sent him a polite e-mail putting him right on the details he had got wrong. Now he reproduces precisely the same lies, and so I think him malicious, and a nuisance.

The Fun:

To be honest, there has been no fun for me in this. (sorry if the title of the post made you think there might be). I have been labelled as ‘criminal’ without trial. I have been called 'low' and ‘bloody low’, by people who have believed what Jane has said, or people who have gone on the say so of other shouty voices. For over six months I have had people think me bad, the worst that ever crawled the planet. Read my work and you will see that I am a writer who is worth reading (I hope) and not a writer who takes others’ words and makes them my own. Read my work and see sense, not the nonsense of others. Do your research and check your facts before making judgement.

(I am adding a footnote to this post. Today, Saturday 30th January, there have been developments. Someone spoke up to say that my stories do not represent plagiarism. This person even added a comment on Jane Smith's blog. Look up 'How Publishing Really Works' and look at her posts on the subject of plagiarism. Jane's answer was to say that this person speaking out in my defence was the same person as me. Jane had, she said, used fancy computer gadgets and her technological wizardry to establish that this person shared the same IP address as me. This is a lie. This supportive person has posted his whole profile up for people to check. He lives in England; I live in Scotland. He is young; I am not. How could Jane have established that we shared the same IP address? Fact: she couldn't have. Jane Smith Lies. This should be shouted loud. Jane Smith lies. If she lies about this, then how much more of what she has said is a lie? In a court of law this would be the point at which her entire testimony would be thrown out and the jury directed to totally disregard anything she has said.

There is still no fun for me in any of this.)

PORT BROKEFERRY - a development

(The village of Port Brokeferry has begun to take shape and some of the characters are becoming better known... then, into the mix comes Berlie's. This could shake things up a little bit in Port Brokeferry.)

THE ARRIVAL OF BERLIE’S

The trucks have begun arriving in Port Brokeferry, as they do at this time every year. And every year it is a surprise. Atholl Stuart is not surprised, though. Nor is Helen. At the police station the date is marked in the book, highlighted in yellow. Everything has been cleared and permission given at a higher level, their arrival expected. Atholl Stuart stands with his hat on and makes his presence felt on the street. He smiles amiably enough at the drivers of the trucks. He recognises some of the faces and they recognise him. Some even wave or call out his name, as though he is a friend they have missed.

The noise of the trucks brings Guthrie to the door of the café. Eileen too. They can’t help smiling. This will boost business. Things will get busy from here on in.

The drinkers at The Ship empty onto the street for a closer look, raising their glasses to the girls. The truck windows are wound down and the girls blowing kisses at the men from their cabs. Some of the men spilled from The Ship, made brave or silly with drink, Lachlan Davie amongst them, call after the girls or whistle or make rude suggestions and laugh too loud afterwards.

Evelyn and Morag at the hairdresser’s press their faces to the glass of the window. Evelyn is looking to see if a boy called Kelso is there. She has her reasons.

It’s the summer fair that is coming to Port Brokeferry. Here for two weeks. Then as quickly gone again and the grass of the green all torn and scarred behind them. The fair will bring the visitors in greater numbers. That is understood. It marks the start of the season proper. The hotel has extra bookings and the holiday lets at the sea front will soon begin to fill up.

Mad Martin leaves Edwin and his silver mermaid comb and runs up to the road. He calls to the drivers. He asks them if they have seen Col. They recognise him and remember his looking and looking for Col. They laugh and wave to him too, and sound their horns. Athol Stuart frowns then, takes one step forward and shakes his finger at them. They mouth apologies through the glass and laugh.

Ten trucks drive the length of Port Brokeferry before the afternoon is out. They form a circle on the green. Almost as soon as they are there, posters appear in the windows of the shops and in some of the houses. Bright blues and reds and yellows. Pictures of horses with feathered plumes and clowns with grinning smiles and acrobats flying across the paper and the name Berlie’s blazoned across the top. Bunting too is strung up between one side of the street and the other, a criss-cross web of yellow and red beards of cloth that brighten the place and take the eye upwards away from the grey of the streets.

At the end of the afternoon even Athol Stuart is smiling as he makes a note of the arrival of the fair in the station diary.

Grace is different, too. Even quieter than usual, Athol thinks, as she delivers a cup of strong sweet tea to his desk.

Give

Putting all differences aside, and all squabbles and all our personal hurts: writers get over to Vanessa Gebbie's Blog to see what you can do... a project to help raise money for the disaster in Haiti. Don't delay. There's a deadline for this project and it is Midnight tomorrow. Give generously to all other collections. It's what we are good at: giving.

CURSES IN PORT BROKEFERRY

(And another Port Brokeferry snapshot. This is Susan, mother to the schoolgirl Corinne, wife to Kyle. It is still Tuesday in Port Brokeferry.)

SUSAN PEGGING OUT HER CURSES

Susan hates him. Hates the smell of him. The sound of him. The thought of him. Today she does. She is hanging out the washing. Pegs in her mouth as she pins his shirts to the line. In her head she says she hates him. He’s a bastard. For what he did. That’s what she thinks. She wishes he was gone. Not sleeping in her bed again.

She hates the dark and everything quiet and his hands reaching for her. Like it was nothing what he did. Like it could all go back to what it was before. Like he has forgotten. She hates that too. All so easy for him. In her head there's screaming sometimes and he does not hear it.

It comes to the surface some days and her words all flung and stony hard. He recoils from her then. Trades with her, word for harsh word. Could be blows they hurt so much. He should just take it, she thinks. It is his fault, after all. He sleeps in the front room on those nights. But she still hears him. Through the wall. His breath slow and heavy. Hears him moaning as he curls and uncurls into sleep on the sofa.

She wishes him gone. The clap of her hands and he is not there. Like some sort of trick. Abracadabra; open the bedroom door and he is not there on the sofa. They can make whole elephants disappear. She’s seen it on the TV. A little bit of razzamatazz, the curtain raised and nothing there anymore. How much simpler, she thinks, for him to not be there.

Only, there's a part of her feels different. Some days it does. A part of her wants him there, too. For Corinne’s sake, she tells herself. He is Corinne’s father after all and he has a job to do with her. Some days it is not so bad. Some days she forgives him and seems to forget the wrong in him. Kyle holds her hand on those days and kisses her hair. She closes her eyes and imagines how it used to be. Makes believe she is back in the days before. Days she felt safe and sure and filled up with smiling.

He’s a bastard for what he did, she thinks. The last pegged out shirt releases her tongue and she says what she thinks then. Sets free the words. Small mouthed curses that she pins on the air, and the wind moving in off the sea blows them from her and carries them into the street of Port Brokeferry.

Maybe this is what Blair hears when he walks up the path to deliver the mail. He tries not to hear. Wishes he didn’t. For what he hears is something else that will keep him silent in The Bobbing Boat when Eileen serves him his bacon roll and a cup of coffee.

He’s a bastard, says Susan again.

A Finn Story

(Another postcard from Port Brokeferry. Remember that Mad Martin mistakes Edwin for Finn. Finn was an old sea-dog who owned the boat that Edwin now owns. Edwin, for his part, keeps alive the memory of Finn  through the stories he tells. He tells one here.)

A FINN STORY FOR MAD MARTIN

He was far from home, was Finn. Weeks away from the certainty of land. Out on a rough sea. Under a rolling grey sky. The wind was so hard and the sea so cruel that they were all bound to the ship with rope. Everything tied down.

‘Everything tied down,’ said Mad Martin, for he had heard the story many times before and recognised Edwin’s words.

You’ve seen the fairground rides on the green at the far end of the town. The ups and downs of them. Turning the stomachs of some so that they afterwards feel sick or dizzy or unsure of their own legs. Imagine days of this and all that was keeping you from being blown away was a thin rope reaching from your waist and tied to the rails of the ship you sailed on.

Bran was listening too. Pretending that he wasn’t. Coiling rope was what he seemed to be about. But he was listening, and for him the story was new.

Finn was the only man not sick. Though his thoughts were all tossed about, like the flecks of white in a snow-globe when it is shook over hard. A man can be called mad on the third day of weather such as that, for he does not think straight. Does not see straight neither. Fears for his life and his fears do play tricks on him. Finn said he was mad then.

Mad Martin was pretending to shake an imaginary snow globe in one hand.

Finn says he saw a mermaid.

Mad Martin gasped in surprise, even though this detail was expected.

On the third day he saw her. Swears he did. Swore till the end of all his days. Adrift in the churning water, she was. Laughing like it was all a lively game and nothing more. Screaming with the thrill of it, like the girls on our fairground rides. Her hair was all spun out from her, like a golden veil laid over the water. The pretty breasts of a girl and the tail of a fish. Finn said it was silver and blue and black, her tail, marked like the mackerel. And she saw Finn, fixed him with her eyes, and raised a finger to him, beckoned him to her. And Finn would have gone too. Would have leaped from the boat under her spell, only his own fingers were as cold as cold and he could not unpick the knots in the wet rope that tied him to the rail of the ship. His knife he had left below deck and when he went to retrieve it the madness and the magic was broken and the impatient mermaid was gone.

‘Tell what you found,’ said Mad Martin. ‘Tell about when the storm was over what you found.’

When the storm was gone and the sea lay flat and the air held its breath again, Finn found a silver comb lying on the deck of the ship. It was a gift from that mermaid. Don’t ask how he knew. He just did.

Edwin carefully withdrew something from his pocket. It was wrapped in tissue paper that crinkled as he slowly peeled it open to reveal a small silver comb. It was Mad Martin who saw the gold hairs caught in its teeth, and so he believed in mermaids. Bran smiled and went back to his business.

Writers Should Understand the Creative Process

'THE ROAD TO XANADU' by John Livingston Lowes

I recall when I started this creative writing business, I happened to be reading this book by John Livingston Lowes. It is hundreds of pages long and had been a safe doorstop in my house for years before I picked it up to read. It provides a detailed analysis of the working of the imagination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It is a fascinating documentation of the theory of the Creative Subconscious, something the great Coleridge believed in himself. Coleridge kept very detailed records of the books he read and here in ‘The Road to Xanadu’ we find a thorough examination of those texts and a feat of superior literary detection by Mr Lowes when looking at Coleridge’s master work, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Lowes convincingly demonstrates how much the poem owes to what Coleridge had read and to the workings of his creative subconscious as it digested what he’d read.

Images, details of navigational and astrological observation, words, phrases, ideas – Coleridge’s imagination was fed by everything he read and he read everything. (It was almost possible then to read everything there was – now it would take you a lifetime to read a year’s worth of the Times Newspaper!) ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ has the feel of a faraway place in its depiction of the becalming of the ship on the Sargasso Sea. The land of ice and snow too feels just as real. The poem's minute and accurate depiction of how it would have been to be on the other side of the world is testament to the documented experiences of others who had been there – Coleridge had never ventured beyond Europe. The poem and so much in the poem could not have been written without the breadth of Coleridge’s reading. But he did not read to plunder the works of others. He read and the reading fed his imagination. Just as all experience does. It’s a natural process in the creative act. This is how the imagination operates when you understand the workings of the creative subconscious - as much as the ways of the subconscious can be understood.  Although we may not be aware of the creative subconscious at work when it is at work, the fact that it is at work is undisputed fact.

When I argue that as artists we do not create in a vacuum, this is what I mean. Read this weighty tome and see just how thoroughly the reading of Coleridge shaped his poem. It is a truly fascinating read, too.

So, when someone trusts you to read something they have written, and asks you to think hard about their piece, to provide a detailed and thorough critique of what they have written, do not be surprised that something of what you read filters into your own work - a thought, a word, an idea, an image. Coleridge understood that for the creative subconscious to be fed the reader has to give all his attention to what he is reading and then by some miraculous process the creative subconscious will borrow what it will from what has been studied and will use the borrowings in the shaping of an imaginative piece of work of its own. It is not a calculated 'theft' of ideas and words and images; it is a process that Coleridge was not in control of (except that he did read with the intensity of one who studies rather than one who just reads) but it is a process that Coleridge recognised at work in his completed poems and a process that he understood and submitted to. As for Coleridge, so for anyone who creates at whatever level they create.

Writers and artists don't need to know this. But knowing it helps you understand something of the creative process and in periods of block knowing how to feed the creative subconscious can be every useful.

A Woman I Love

(There is a Mhairi that I know. She is sweet and good and generous. She is my inspiration for the charity work that I do. She helps me be a better person. And I love her for that. And she has a giftshop and so I wanted her to come to Port brokeferry.)

MHAIRI’S PORT BROKEFERRY GIFTSHOP

There’s a gift shop just tucked back from the front. You could easily miss it except that a sign on the street tells you where it is. The shop is called ‘Port Brokeferry Gifts’, the name painted in big green letters above the window. There are leaflets in the hotel and in the café and on the counter in the bank, telling you all about it.

The girl who runs it is called Mhairi. She was at the Art School and then she did a little teaching. Now she has the shop. It sells fishing boat models carved from wood by an old fisherman called Aiden. And sea birds sculpted in stone, and driftwood pieces painted to look like strange fish. There’s a ceramic mermaid with yellow hair and a silver tail. And a ship’s figurehead, a woman with her breasts thrust before her and her cheeks painted red and her hair in flamboyant stiff curls flowing behind her. There are old oil lanterns polished and brassy to look like new, and old photographs in black and white showing fisherwomen in long dresses and men with clay pipes. There are pieces of clay pipes, too.

In the window there are paintings. Watercolours of the beach. In one you can see Mad Martin holding his hands high and seagulls hanging above him like they were kites. You know it is him from the clothes that he wears.

There are three of Mhairi’s oil paintings as well, always three, colour splashed on stretched canvas in broad brush strokes. Pictures of the sea and the houses in Port Brokeferry. They don’t sell in the winter, but when the tourists come, Magnus sees them go and he feels the loss of them leaving the window. Mhairi is quick to fill the gap the gone-paintings have left behind them. She has a whole box of Port Brokeferry pictures, but the ones the town has lived with all winter, their familiarity somehow makes them belong and their going something like a theft.

One year Magnus bought a picture, one he couldn’t bear to see sold. It shows the sea on one side and on the other the whole stretch of the front with the shops and houses and the silver grey of their windows. He’d passed Mhairi’s shop every day for months, stopping to look at the painting. He felt that this one belonged to him even before he bought it, even before he made up his mind to buy it. He did without beer for two months, and bought cheaper cuts of meat and smaller pieces of fish. Eggs were cheap that year. Magnus ate lots of eggs. Then he had enough and the picture was his.

But what he wished most of all was that it could have stayed in the shop window forever. It looks different on his wall. Maybe it is the light, or the wall or that it hangs there alone, not one of three.

There are no people in Mhairi’s own pictures. Magnus likes that.

PB piece

(Another Port Brokeferry piece... this one set in the hairdressers... remember it is called 'Christine Cuts Hair'.)

EVELYN AND MORAG READ THE LOVE NOTES OF LACHLAN DAVIE

Evelyn tries to catch Morag’s eye. There’s something she wants Morag to notice. As if it cannot be true unless Morag sees it too. She clears her throat, as Blair the postman sometimes does, as if she is about to say something important. She hopes that Morag will look up from cutting Lillian Carey’s hair.

Instead, it is Christine who looks up, and that is not what Evelyn wants. She fusses over the arrangement of shampoo bottles on the shelf beside her. Sets the scissors and hairbrushes straight, the combs and silver clips. Then she checks in the mirror to see if Christine is still looking or if she has bent her head over the bookings in the diary again.

‘It’s turned out nice,’ says Lillian Carey.

‘It has that,’ says Morag pausing to look out of the shop front window at the day. Mad Martin on the other side of the glass picks a cigarette end out of the gutter and slips it into his top pocket. Morag shakes her head and sets to once more with her comb and her scissors.

Evelyn sees again what she wants Morag to see. There, at the nape of Christine’s neck. Just beneath the hair. Writing, in black ink. She knows it could not have been written by Christine herself, not even with a mirror balanced to show herself in another mirror. Evelyn cannot see the words, not all of them. But she thinks she sees a name there. One that she recognises. That is what she wants Morag to see. Her seeing it would confirm it.

‘Can I get you a tea or a coffee, Mrs Carey?’ says Evelyn, leaning in close, one hand on Morag’s back, gently tapping against her as if she was sending a secret message in morse code.

‘Tea would be lovely, dear. Thank you.’

Morag looks at Evelyn in the mirror. Follows the nod of Evelyn’s head and sees what Evelyn sees: the writing on Christine’s neck. She looks back at Evelyn, one eyebrow raised and a smile on her lips.

Then Morag moves towards the reception desk where Christine sits. She pretends to be looking over Christine’s shoulder at the list of names in the book. She is really looking more closely at the words of Lachlan Davie, written onto Christine’s skin. ‘Lachlan lies with Christine’ is what she reads. Then the words fold out of sight below her collar. A high collar today, Morag notes. All the buttons done up as though she is hiding something. Christine is writing in the book and there at the cuff of Christine’s long-sleeved blouse Morag sees other words on the skin, not so easily read, but recognisably the same hand at work.

Later, after Lillian Carey has gone, and Christine has just ‘popped out’ they laugh fit to burst at the thought of Lachlan Davie writing drunken messages all over Christine’s body. They speculate, too, on what he would write across her tits and down into her pants. They laugh most at that.

A Writer's Disgrace

Plenty of e-mails these past few days supporting what I have said in the post below this one: that this 'mad writer woman' is making things up when she says that the writing workshop she ‘owned’ closed because of me. 'Nothing could be further from the truth,' wrote one writer. The writers in the group were forced to reform under a new-forged name because this writer woman would not let them continue to use a name she felt she had ownership of even though she had made moves to leave the site herself. I tell you, there is something amiss with concepts of ownership here. You can’t play, the ball is mine and I just want to sit on my ball! And two other writers saying to me ‘please do not reveal that I wrote to you – her power to blackball other writers is frightening’. Not my words but the words of people she worked with. And an anonymous comment posted elsewhere says I am the disgrace!

Anyway. Enough for now. Find below another in the Port Brokeferry series.

AIDEN MARKS THE CHANGES

It’s different, is what Aiden thinks. The bay and everything in it. Different from how it was. Even the air. Smells familiarly of salt and the sea, and yet something is missing. The sounds of the gulls are quieter than before, and everything in the early morning is eerily still. Or as still as still can be with the sea coming and going every day.

All his years spent in Port Brokeferry, and Aiden has seen the changes. Used to be there was fish landed here, in the harbour. Boats queuing to land a silver catch. And the laughter of men who have come home safe again, their boats heavy in the water. There is not laughter like that these days, not even with Dodie and his squeak-squeak bike and his red flying scarf.

When he was a boy, Aiden remembers there were horses pulling carts with big wheels, a whole line of them at the shore. Driven by men smoking long pipes and talking a different language it seemed, when they talked to their horses in clicks and clacks of the tongue. The carts stacked with still silent-singing fish packed in ice or salt in wicker baskets and taken to waiting trains ten miles from Port Brokeferry.

Then, as a man, Aiden seeing the bay from out at sea. The flickering oil lanterns that the women set in the windows, the yellow light as though the village was set to flame, just one room in every house. And the roofs all shiny grey in the moonlight, and the hills behind seeming to dance, when it was the boat that was dancing. Aiden, every looking-back-leaving, not knowing if this would be his last. For it was so for some. Jonathan, hands like shovels and the man as big as a door, and as broad; the sea just scooped him up in her arms and carried him away, out of reach of everyone on ‘The Purse’. He did not shout protest, or cry, or wave. He just gave himself up, as a man gives himself up to the bed of a woman. Murdo, too, taken before he was even wed, though there were plenty of girls in Port Brokeferry who grieved afterwards, lanterns left burning in the windows of their houses for days upon days. One girl outstaying the rest, grieving still, they say, though she is grey now.

Then came a time when the boats set out less and less to sea. Tied to the harbour as though every day was a Sunday. Men, their hands in their empty pockets, not knowing what it was they should do with themselves. Many left, following the last fish onto the ten-miles-away-trains, just as fully lost as Jonathan and Murdo and all the other sea-wed men.

Aiden stayed. All his years in Port Brokeferry, marking the changes, writing it all down in black leatherbound notebooks, the changes great and small. And it is different now, so that even if Jonathan and Murdo and all the rest returned, they would not know it was their home..

Theft or Not Theft

Noah built a boat in the Bible. When someone dies it is customary for a will to be read that disperses that dead person's belongings to his friends and close relatives. Names from myth and legend and literature carry 'meaning' and so writers will borrow these names to say something about their own characters. What am I talking about? Read on.

That mad woman is at it again. Now I am charged on her blog with something new. She says that she had to close down her writing workshop site because of me. To let you understand I was summarily ejected from the site when this woman decided I was ‘bad’ and no access allowed by me to any of my many pieces of work on the site. That should have meant that the site could continue. It has, after all, reconfigured itself under another name so is still operating in pretty much the same form as before.

This mad woman, who flings her frustration around making a sham of all her other ‘good’ qualities of tolerance and understanding and justice, was already withdrawing from the site she had set up. She had a sabbatical even when I was there, leaving me at the helm while she was away, and she came back only sporadically to participate in exciting projects that were initiated by myself and other members. That she is not part of this new set up is a decision she has made and not one that was necessarily shared by other members of her original site since some of them continue to work in the same way on this new site.

The truth is that after I was thrown out I did receive support from writers from this workshop place – more than this mad woman could know or ever will know. One who has shown me support has asked me not to publicly reveal his/her name because he/she is frigthtened of what this mad woman can do to a person’s reputation when she is angered. I can understand that fear. The sphere of influence of this mad woman feels very broad.

And what is it that I am supposed to have stolen from her? What exactly?

I wrote a flash fiction piece called ‘A Pebble From The River For Annie’ where, as penance, a woman called Annie slips a pebble in her shoe for a wrong that she does and walks forever after with a limp. This ‘idea’ I discovered later in a poem that this woman had written. It is not a new idea and so I do not claim ownership of it. She said in her defence that her poem had been workshopped some time before my story was read by her. But if it hadn’t, then this is the level of theft that this woman accuses me of: the theft of an idea that cannot be owned.

This woman wrote a story where a boat was being built and the builder had a name from Greek myth as a forename. (Just as Stephen Dedalus borrows his surname from mythology in Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man’!) At the end of this woman’s story the body of a dead man (not the boat builder) was laid in the boat and his friends dropped farewell gifts into the boat before it was burned as a funeral rite. I read this piece of hers and studied it and gave her helpful detailed feedback on how the piece might be tightened. She had asked me to do this as she had with several of her stories. She commended me on my insights. Then some weeks later on a workshop site I did a flash fiction piece on the theme of ‘madness’. We were encouraged on the site (by this same mad woman mostly) to tackle some flash fiction writing exercises blind – like automatic writing… just setting the pen free on the page and not trying to control what we were writing too much… she even suggested doing it drunk to see what the creative inner voice threw up. I wrote a piece about a man called Noah who was mad with grief for he had just lost his wife. As part of that madness he built a boat in his front garden, and the neighbourhood children laughed and pointed at him and everyone thought him mad for there was no use for a boat far from any water as they were (some biblical influence there, I think).  I afterwards recognised that this had also some influence from the tv programme NCIS with Gibbs building his boat in a cellar – a boat that would be too big to get out without the demolition of the cellar…  all as part of his madness and grief over his lost wife and child. In my piece Noah put wheels on his boat and a sail. Before departing he dispersed all his belongings as gifts to his neighbours. Then the village wakes one morning to find the boat and Noah gone, his gifts to them on their front steps and wheel tracks as gouges in the front lawn of Noah’s house.

This woman’s claim is that I stole the idea of naming my character after a figure from myth from her; I stole the idea of a boat being built from her; I stole the idea of farewell gifts from her. That she claims ownership of these ‘ideas’ is patently absurd. These are things that cannot be owned. That her story may have been one of several influences somewhere in my head when I was writing I concede (along with a Terry Wogan morning programme I had listened to just prior to the writing of my piece and after which I made notes for the piece whilst sitting in my car). But that any of this could be counted as theft is clearly crazy. Only afterwards could I see where the seeds of my story were… and they were scattered across many fields. What is needed in this discussion of ownership of ideas is some sense. I wrote a post below called ‘Something Borrowed’ and I urge anyone interested in this matter to read Malcolm Gladwell’s essay referred to there.

I have already (see posts below on this blog) laid bare the borrowings this mad writer made from Raymond Carver’s writing in one of her stories. (borrowings that I think are a legitimate part of the creative process and so not, in my view, theft) I was led to discover these borrowings by her own admission that she had found inspiration in Carver. My ‘borrowings’ with my Noah story are much much smaller than hers with Carver – slight by comparison, and indeed owe more to a tv programme and the Bible than they do to her piece. My flash fiction story has been published in a competition anthology. This occurred after the mad writer challenged the publisher and sent him a copy of her piece. The publisher judged, quite rightly,  that there was no issue to answer and felt completely safe in publishing my story.

I said only recently on this blog that enough was enough on this matter and had resolved to say no more. Only this new charge has forced me to speak out again and she is back to calling me thief. If that I am, then she is too. I contend that I have not stolen from this writer and her claim that I have is patently mad.

Corinne

(I am wrestling with quite a few different writing projects at the moment. The cold, however, is nipping at my thoughts and makes me slow and low in energy. In a former life I am sure I was a creature that hibernated! Anyway, here is a Port Brokeferry piece that had an airing some place else, but tweaked it now belongs here. The picture to the left is by George Clausen and at the end of this post are pictures of the poet, W B Yeats, and his love, Maud Gonne.)

COR-BLIMEY CORINNE.

Mr Bredwell’s name is Dodie. It is a funny name. A strange name. Maybe that is why he gives us all funny names too. He calls Geraldine Jellybean, and Benjamin Bend-in-the-wind. They are not cruel those names. Just funny. Like Dodie is funny.

Me, he calls Cor-blimey, though my name is Corinne, and he puts on a funny voice when he says it. Not his usual voice, his lips twisted and sounding like he comes from somewhere in London, not the posh bit. Cor-blimey he says when he sees me, and I like it when he does.

He took our class once, did Mr Bredwell. It was when sour-faced Miss Grayling was off sick. Her name’s Alice, and some of the girls call her Malice. That’s a bit like what Mr Bredwell does, with the names, except Malice is cruel. Anyway, Mr Bredwell took the class. We did poetry.

First he told us about the poet. I don’t remember his name. William something or other. He was in love with a woman. That’s what Mr Bredwell said. Only the woman did not love him back. That’s called unrequited love. I remember that. And this poet, William, loved her and loved her. But it made no difference. He hung about her house, laughing and pretending he was alright. Mr Bredwell laughed then, pretending he was the poet. You could tell it wasn’t a real laugh.

The woman that was loved, Mr Bredwell called Maudlin. He said that the poem he was going to read to us was written out of love for her. He told us which page it was on in our books, but I closed my eyes and just listened, like it was music.

It was very beautiful, the poem. You could tell William was in love with Maudlin. He talked of laying the cloths of heaven at her feet. I could see in my head what those cloths were like – all starry and bright. I could see William laying down the cloths, like Sir Walter Raleigh and his cloak over the puddle for a queen to step on. In my head it was just like that. Then the poet said he didn’t have any rich cloths. All he had was his dreams. And he spread them under her feet. I remember the last line word perfect: ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’. I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world I had ever heard, and I hated Maudlin for not loving William after that.

Mr Bredwell’s name is Dodie. It is a funny name. Feels funny in my mouth. Makes me giggle when I say it. And he calls me Cor-blimey. And I have written the last line of the poem on a scrap of paper and pinned it above my bed.

  

Come Back to Port Brokeferry

(With so much snow outside and the schools closed, I have the time to edit this flash from Port Brokeferry and to post it. Remember Sharon - she is the maid at the Victoria Hotel.)

MR STRUAN COURTALD DOES NOT CALL

It is warm in the kitchen. The air all steam and oven breath and the radio playing. Sharon nurses a cup of tea in her hands. She looks up at the clock on the wall. It is past the time that he normally calls. She does not know why he has not called today, to see her in her black skirt and her white blouse. Her hair held back from her face and no jewellery, except the watch that he bought her. Her mother let it slip, Mr Struan Courtald’s buying of the watch. For Sharon’s birthday when she was sixteen. It came in a long slim box, like it was a pen. Inside, the box was lined with velvet so she knew it was expensive. At the time she’d thought it was more than her mother could afford and said as much. Now she knows it was not from her mother.

Sharon watches Dugald McVey. He is busy. He checks things off on his list, dancing around the kitchen, his face all pink and his hair poking out from under a limp white cloth hat. He is talking to himself. Never to Sharon, except to pass on the message that Mr Struan Courtald wishes to see her. But today he has not even done that.

‘Has he called?’ she asks him.

Dugald McVey does not hear, not above the noise of the music playing and his own humming along with song, not over the clatter of pot lids shifted and spoons dropped onto the metal surfaces and the dishwasher grumbling through a wash in the far corner.

‘Dugald, has Mr Courtald called down yet?’

He looks up then, still not knowing what Sharon has said.

‘Has he called? Mr Courtald?’

Dugald McVey shakes his head and turns his attention back to his work.

Sharon has another message to deliver. From her mother. She is to ask Mr Struan Courtald to drop by again. If he has the time. Just for a bit. If he can manage it. Something her mother forgot to tell him yesterday.

Every week for the past six months the same message, or something close to being the same. Two or three times a week. Sharon wants to ask. But she doesn’t. After all it was with his help that she had got this job, she was sure of that. And didn’t he see that she was well turned out and that she knew the rules? Didn’t Mr Struan Courtald take the time in the first weeks of her working at the Victoria Hotel to rehearse her through every step till she got it right?

Maybe she should just go. Upstairs. To deliver her mother’s message. It would be frowned upon, of course, being upstairs without a summons. What if a guest was to catch her in the wrong place? That wouldn’t do. Maybe she should write it down on a piece of paper and have it delivered to him. She looks at the watch on her wrist. Soon be too late to do anything, she thinks. Once the breakfast room is open then there will be no time for thinking about her mother’s message and Mr Struan Courtald invited to the house again.

Sharon sips at her tea.

The Work Begins Again... Returning to Port Brokeferry, too.

(Have made a positive start to the year... four new pieces of work spilled out and having some fun with the words again. And below we are back with the Port Brokeferry project... here's another one for the Tuesday.)

THE THREE STONE FISHERMEN

There’s a statue at the harbour. Carved out of a single block of grey granite. Three fishermen cut larger than lifesize. Their hair all windblown and their lined faces squinting out to sea. Like they are looking for something. They are strong men, their features betray them: faces serious and chiselled square, arms knotted and thick. They stand together, as though they are brothers, joined by the overlap of stone. Their fingers clutch at stone-rope that trails at their feet.

Their names are there on the granite base if you care to look: Finlay Hart, Hugh Preston, and Gavin Gladwell. And a date: June 17^th, 1882. Underneath that an inscription: ‘There Are Giants Amongst Us.’ Visitors always stop to have their pictures taken standing next to the three heroes.

Today, Mad Martin stands in line with the three big men, one hand raised to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun, and he looks to where they look. As if they might be searching for the same as him. He does not move, as though he could be cut from stone too. Nine seagulls call to him, but he stands as still as the three stone men.

He calls a name then. Sends that name skimming across the water, as he and Col once did with flat stones on the beach. Athol did too, but Mad Martin does not remember that. Mad Martin sees only Col beside him, bent low, jerking his arm back and forth and sending a flat stone dancing across the surface, sliding almost, in a slow arc.

Guthrie looks up from his polished tables. He sees Mad Martin at the harbour. He laughs then. Shakes his head and returns to his work. Eileen is on time today. Guthrie is whistling to show he is pleased. He’ll drop some extra silver in her tips jar when she isn’t looking.

Mad Martin climbs down from the statue and empties his pockets of breadcrumbs there at the feet of the three stone men. The gulls seem to protest. He moves off leaving them to fight over their breakfast. He sees Athol Stuart on his way to the station. Athol calls and waves.

‘Have you seen, Col?’ says Mad Martin.

‘No, Martin, I haven’t.’

‘Do you think he’s lost?’

‘He’s maybe hiding,’ says Athol. ‘I’ll keep my eyes open for him.’

The three stone fishermen are not remembered. There is no mention of them in the leaflet produced for the tourists by the town council. Though their statue appears on several postcards of Port Brokeferry, their exploits are never talked of. If they are asked about, the locals shake their heads or shrug their shoulders, not knowing any more who they were or what they did. 

THE START OF SOMETHING NEW

LOOKING BACK AND LOOKING FORWARD

Have read a fair few blog pages this past few days, many of them making public people’s resolutions for 2010. Some call them wishes; others call them goals. Seems to me that many of them are more positive than in previous years, a sort of pulling up of the socks and ‘let’s get on with this thing we do’ sort of approach. Don’t know if that is anything to do with something new starting – the new decade... but I am certain it is a good thing.

Last year I made a fair few writing resolutions; some of them specific (to write 365 flash fiction pieces – a form I have a love/hate relationship with still) and some of them vague (to hit high in competitions). The former I had some control over, the latter I did not except insofar as I could choose to ‘turn up’ or not.

A computer disaster in the middle of the year (total hard drive meltdown) set me back some so I may only have completed around 300 flashes in total and almost two thirds of those completed before June were lost in the crash. I have picked myself up from that and am beginning to move forwards.

In competitions I earned more this year than any other year even though I did not ‘turn up’ for some I had my sights set on after the ‘crash’: I won the Biscuit Prize, and was first in the Southport Writers’ Circle Short Story Competition; I was second in The Legend Writing Award and in JBWB’s Winter short story competition with ‘Poking Wasps with Sticks’, and second in Trowell and District; I was Highly Commended in Lorian Hemingway for the second year in a row, and in Cinnamon Press, Yeovil, Calderdale, Binnacle, Biscuit Flash, and a whole bunch of other listings and commendations including being a runner up in the Kathy Fish Fellowship and losing a competition I won because the judge made an error in thinking I had already published the winning story. I did not hit as high as I had hoped to, but I should not complain.

I completed a novel with a good writer, a collaboration that had sparks of brilliance in it. Reading it over made me dizzy it was so good. Then the writer pulled the plug on it. This is still a source of sadness – art should rise above personalities, I think. I have my half of the book and it is in my head to do something with it. 

I have written a whole bunch of other stories and am nearing completion of another book for children and some adult stuff too. 

Oh, and my first book for children was published – ‘The Chess Piece Magician’… a great cover by Nicola Robinson and sales are doing ok, I think.

There was a lot of mess in the middle of the year and I ruffled a few feathers here and there. I have blogged enough about it below. I lost ‘friends’ and made others over this. I learned a lot – about people and trust and writing; oh, and the need to back up my work on computers. I am a better writer than I was. I am clearer than ever before in my head about what I want from all of this. 

I have several writing projects on the go at the same time and more ideas and plans than you could shake a stick at.

Next year will be better. I hope it will be bigger. I have a number of engagements pencilled in to do with the promotion of the children’s novel and I am resolved to ‘turn up’ at a few big competitions. I wish everyone out there and everyone turning up to read me here, a year of moving forward and collecting along the way shiny things to marvel at when you look back on the year in 12 months time… and don’t go poking wasps with sticks without expecting to get stung.