PB's HAIR SALON

(No news, so here's another Port Brokeferry piece - and it is set in the hair salon called 'Christine Cuts Hair' and Morag and Evelyn work there and Christine manages the shop now.)

MAYBE IT IS AND MAYBE IT ISN’T

‘Do you think it’s love?’ says Morag.

‘What? Lachlan and Christine? Love, you say?’ Evelyn shakes her head. ‘Never see them together from one Sunday night to the next. It’s the drink and sex is what it is. That’s all it is, too. She might fool herself that it’s love, but I know Lachlan Davie. He’s never loved anyone but Lachlan. If he was made of chocolate, he’d eat himself.’

They both laugh at this. At the other end of the shop Christine looks up from the appointments book and they try to appear busy. Evelyn turns up the radio a little and Morag polishes the back of the chairs with a yellow duster. The phone rings and Christine turns back to answer it, her pen poised to record a name and a time in the diary.

‘But the writing on her neck? It’s still there. A little fainter, but there,’ hisses Morag. ‘That has got to mean something.’

‘Means Lachlan Davie was drunker than usual. That’s all. ‘Lachlan lies with Christine’ is not the same as ‘Lachlan loves Christine’. He was never so drunk as to make that mistake.’

‘And the writing on Lachlan?’

‘Nobody’s been able to tell what it says. Could be a shopping list, for all we know, or the phone number of a girl at the bar. Lachlan has more than Christine in his sights. Especially when there’s a drink in him. Ends up with Christine only if she is as drunk as he is.’

Morag is a little surprised at Evelyn’s take on things. It is not the usual way of her, she thinks. Morag wonders if there is something up with the boy at the fair. Kelso’s his name, if she remembers right. A year ago now, but Morag saw the way Evelyn was looking at the trucks arriving yesterday. And then later in the day, Evelyn had asked Christine to cut her hair. ‘Make it look nice,’ she’d said. ‘Special.’ Kelso is someone they haven’t talked about. Not back last summer and not since. Maybe it is love, Morag thinks. Maybe she’s just been looking in the wrong place.

But then Christine gets flowers. Delivered to the shop at the end of the morning. Yellow roses and green sprays of gypsophila, sometimes called ‘baby’s breath’. Delivered by a boy in black leather on a motorbike, a whole armful of them wrapped in purple and pink cellophane. Christine has to sign for them. There’s a card too, in a small envelope with her name written on the front.

Morag is cutting Mrs Downs’ hair. A last minute appointment, though Mrs Downs didn’t say why she was having it done. Morag looks across at Evelyn and raises her eyebrows.

Evelyn is not convinced. ‘Yellow roses, not red,’ she says, loud enough only Morag can hear.

After she reads the card, Christine slips it down the front of her dress and into the cup of her bra. She asks Evelyn, if she has a moment, to fetch a vase from the back of the shop and to put some water in it.

A Rose in PB

(Two of my pupils have done well in a national writing competition - feels even better than personal writing success. And here's someone new in Port Brokeferry... though she has been here before.)

FOR THE GOOD OF ROSE

The doctor said she should. It would do her good, he told her. It would be a tonic. A lift to her spirits. So Rose rented a one-bedroom cottage on the front, windows looking out to sea, the gate twisted on its hinges, and seashells on the mantelpiece above the fire. She paid three months in advance, and bought a ticket to the station. She booked a car to pick her up from the train and take her to Port Brokeferry.

Rose’s sister came to see her off. Carrie stood on the platform. Looking old, Rose thought. Waving till Rose could see her no more. Then Rose closed the window, sat back in her chair and wondered what she’d done, her mind racing ahead of where she was, or running back to where she’d been. It was something the same in her head.

She’d visited Port Brokeferry as a child. Years and years past. With her mother and sister, and an uncle who’d shared her mother’s bed. Rose had a memory of that time, and photographs of two girls playing in the sea and laughing, or building fantastical castles in the sand, or eating ice-cream cones that needed two hands to hold. Rose and Carrie, their arms about their mother, all black-and-white smiles and eyes squinting against the sun. There were no pictures of the uncle; Rose does not remember exactly when he was air-brushed out of their lives.

The rocking of the train and the clacking of the wheels on the tracks and the stuffiness of the carriage, soon had Rose dosing. She dreamed of how it would be. The boats filling the harbour, jostling for position, and the rattling of the cables and the folded sails, the wind rolling in off the sea and every breath with the smell of fish in it, and the Port Brokeferry air hung with the screaming and screaming of gulls. At night, ‘The Ship’ all lit up like the sun had slipped inside, and the smell of whisky and beer and tobacco smoke leaking out onto the street. And music, too, the sawing of fiddles, and the nasal gasp and sigh of the accordion, and men and women singing.

‘It’ll be good for you,’ Carrie had urged. Rose nodded, hearing her sister’s voice in her sleep. ‘And I can visit some weekends. It’s just what you need. Maybe you’ll find the inspiration to write again.’

‘Maybe,’ said Rose out loud, and the other lady in her carriage heard what she said.

Rose thought she could smell the sea as she stepped down from the train. A man with a cardboard sign and her name written in marker pen was there to meet her. He took her case and said that he hoped she’d had a pleasant journey. She told him she had and that she’d slept.

The Port Brokeferry front was not as she remembered it. Nor was the harbour or the yellow sand. Not the sea or the gulls. It was all very much quieter, Rose thought. Maybe that was a good thing. She wasn't sure.

The Minister's Voice in PB

(My school Easter hols draw to an end and I can feel quite pleased at how productive I have been. Of course I have put off the bigger projects so this might seem like displacement activity, but I have written 8 short stories in two weeks - always some rubbish in there, but three or four very good pieces. The last two, not in my usual vein, and they are all the better for that. Feels good.)

THE MINISTER’S DUTIES

It was Lillian called me. Said he was worse than before and that maybe I should come. Not that he was asking for me, you understand. He wasn’t. I never expected that he would. Even though we had played cards and shared words every alternate Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for almost ten years. He told me stuff he never told anyone else. I am used to that. People confide in me. It goes with the job. And they trust me with their innermost secrets. Nevertheless, I did not expect that Tom would be asking for me. But it was for me to bring God to the close of things, so I drove the thirty so miles to be with him.

I knocked on the front door, as I always did, and went straight in. Doctor Kerr was just leaving. He nodded at me and snapped the lock on his bag shut. He said he’d call in again later in the day. Then he picked up his stick and left.

‘It is good that you came, Minister,’ he said as he passed and he laid one hand on my shoulder, lightly and briefly.

Tom was not alone. A girl in a school blazer was there. She was reading out loud. Poetry. Nothing I recognised. My entrance silenced her and she got quickly to her feet, as one who has been caught doing something private. I recognised her at once.

‘He’s sleeping,’ she said.

I nodded. And accepted the chair that she offered me.

‘Lillian asked if I would sit with him till you came. Just so someone was here.’

I had not ever seen her in church. Her mother sometimes. But not the girl. In the street I had recently noticed her. Quiet and serious. She reminded me of a girl from my own past. A little taller, but her hair the same, and her eyes. I did not expect to find her here with Tom. I lost all my words for a moment, and some of my breath. It is wrong, I know, but I wanted to take her hand in mine. Just to hold it. And to close my eyes and be transported back to another time before the church figured so large in my life.

Maybe all old men have such thoughts.

‘You were reading to him?’ I said at last.

‘I don’t think he heard.’

She was moving towards the door and try as I might I could not think of anything to say that would keep her there a moment longer.

When she had gone I found reasons enough. A whole pocketful of them. I might have asked her about the book she had so quickly slipped into her blazer pocket. And what she had been reading. I might have asked after her mother and her father. I knew that all was not well in her home. And school, I could have asked how things were at school. I should almost certainly have asked her name, for I had forgotten it. I made a mental note to talk with her mother next Sunday and to find out, or maybe I could ask Lillian if she came over.

Tom coughed in his sleep and so brought me back to my duties.

Eileen and Magnus - A Small Connection

(Read this somewhere, about a major human illness/condition that could affect billions of us: 'As scientists pursue a treatment worth billions of dollars, the brutal competition among them poses a serious threat to the traditional ethic of sharing vital research.’ - See, there is a NEED for ideas to be shared. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Magnus and Eileen in Port Brokeferry.)

MAYBE A SECOND DATE FOR MAGNUS

Magnus sees Eileen in the street. He is just about to go into the bank. He feels in his pockets for the keys. He stops when he sees her. He brightens. Magnus can’t help smiling at seeing her. She is neither late nor early. She smiles at him and asks him how he is.

Magnus has a whole speech rehearsed. Learned by heart. There are things he wants to say. He has practised in front of a mirror. Said the words out loud. The words desert him now. He only nods and says he is fine.

Eileen fiddles with her hair. One loose lock of it. Pulls it again and again through her fingers. Magnus read somewhere something about that, how a girl playing her hair through her fingers is a message to the man she is talking to. He watches her tuck the strand behind one ear, a quick and easy movement of her index finger.

‘See the fair is here,’ she says.

Magus looks to the other end of the town and the trucks parked there. He wonders why she mentioned the fair. Maybe he is supposed to read something into that, too. Maybe she expects him to invite her to the fair when it opens. He could do that, he thinks.

He nods again. Then it is awkward and he knows he should be saying something. He doesn’t. He reaches into his pockets for the keys. But then does not take them out of his pocket, thinking that might send her away when he wants her to stay.

‘Look,’ she says.

He is listening.

‘About before, you know…’

He does know. He thinks he does. It’s what he keeps thinking about. It’s why he has been trying to catch her eye in the street ever since. It’s why he has a speech rehearsed. It’s why the words have left him. What he doesn’t know is what she is going to say.

It is awkward again and silent. She looks away towards ‘The Bobbing Boat’. She checks her watch and he can see her beginning to move away from him.

Then he speaks. So quiet at first that she comes back and asks him to say it again.

‘Before,’ he says, ‘it was nice.’

Eileen’s turn to nod. She is smiling, breaking into laughing. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘That’s what I meant. It was nice. It was.’

They are both laughing. Magnus finds a confidence in that and in her agreeing with him. ‘Are you doing anything after work? Maybe we could…’ and he doesn’t finish what he is saying, his mouth having run ahead of his thinking.

‘That’d be great. No, really. Great.’

Callum calls across the road that Eileen will be late if she doesn’t hurry.

She leans in close, one hand on Magnus’ arm, and she kisses his cheek. Then she is gone and in that going is missed again, her hand on his arm and her kiss. Magnus takes out the keys and opens the door of the bank. He punches the number code into the alarm not yet realising that he hasn’t named a time or a place.

Eileen has forgotten to say that she will be later than usual in finishing at the cafe.

Izzy in Port Brokeferry

(The title of this Port Brokeferry piece takes us for a moment to Cologne in Germany. It is interesting that this small, out of the way place has these ties with faraway places. And I am growing to like this nosey woman called Izzy and I want to know what she is going to discover in the letters and postcards that her mam keeps.)

NUMBER ELEVEN, URSULAPLATZ, KOLN

Mrs Campbell is well today. Well enough she takes her turn in the shop, against Izzy’s counsel. Mrs Campbell moves stiff as stiff and coughs a little, but says it is nothing. Izzy hangs about, stacking shelves and unpacking magazines and arranging them for sale. She is watching her mam, sees the small knotted crease on her forehead, like she maybe has a headache. When Mrs Campbell sees Izzy looking she tells her she’ll be fine so long as Izzy goes.

Upstairs Izzy creeps into her mam’s room. She remakes the bed and opens the window for air. She picks up the clothes that have been dropped on the floor and the books and the opened letters – bills mostly. She creates some order in the room. It will be her excuse if she is caught there.

Then Izzy lifts the lid on a small black lacquered music box. The mechanism stopped working a long time ago so there is no music, just a ticking sound like a clock that has been speeded up. There is a small wooden dancer, smaller than Izzy’s smallest finger, and it stands on the point of one toe ready for the music to spin her into jerky circles. There are two small compartments in the box and Izzy lifts the lid on one. Inside there is a key on a pink ribbon. Izzy takes the key and uses it to open the top drawer beside her mother’s bed. She goes to the door of the bedroom to check that her mother is still in the shop, then she returns to the open drawer.

Tied up in the same pink ribbon that is attached to the key, are small packages of postcards, all showing pictures of Port Brokeferry, a lot of them the same, but sometimes a new view and taken together they are like a gallery of the village through the years, through all Izzy’s years and some from before. Each postcard has an unfranked stamp in the corner, and they also form a gallery of sorts.

Izzy takes out one of the bundles and unties the ribbon. She picks up the first card and turns it over to read what is written. All the postcards are for a man called Johannes. There’s an address on the same side as the stamp. It is somewhere in Germany, a place called Koln, a place called Ursulaplatz and the number eleven.

What her mother has written on the left does not amount to much. She tells Johannes about the weather in Port Brokeferry – sometimes the rain so heavy it bounces on the pavement outside the post office, sometimes the sun so hot that the milk curdles if it is left on the step past mid-morning. And she tells Johannes about Izzy sometimes, small things: Izzy falling asleep in church one Sunday, and Izzy getting a star on her work at school, and Izzy holding hands with a boy called Tom; Izzy does not remember anyone called Tom.

Not much more than that really, and the postcards all end the same, with longing and a promise that she will visit soon, or one day, or next year. And then ‘love’ and underneath Izzy’s mam’s name: Audrey, and sometimes a single kiss. And not ever sent to Johannes at number eleven, Ursulaplatz, Koln, Germany.

Izzy reads three or four and then binds the pink ribbon around the postcards, ties a neat bow and replaces the postcards in the drawer. She twists the key till the lock clicks and returns the key to the music box.

Downstairs in the shop, Mrs Campbell quietly rubs at her back, and she bids Sinnie good morning and they talk about the weather and the fair on the green and what it is to be young. And Izzy, hearing what they say, wonders what a young Audrey had to do with a young Johannes.

Why PB is still here.

(Someone asked me why I keep posting these Port Brokeferry things here when I could enter them into comps and do well with some of them. They are here because they hang together and belong with each other. No publication that I know of would allow this to happen. So I put them here. And it's like giving something away for free to a stranger... and as such makes me feel good.)

CORINNE THINKS SHE IS OLD ENOUGH

Corinne has stolen a book from the library at school. Slipped it under her sweater when the librarian’s back was turned. It’s a slim volume of poetry. She recognised the name on the spine. It was the spurned poet called William that Mr Dodie Bredwell had taught them about. The poet had a funny name, too: William Butler Yeats.

She keeps the book under her pillow, like the words could leak through the fabric and the feathers and into her head as she sleeps, filtering into her dreams. She hasn’t told anyone about the book. She wonders how long it will be before it is missed from the library and if the librarian will recall Corinne lifting it down from the shelf. The date stamp on the inside cover shows that it has not been taken out of the library for more than twenty years. The book is held together with tape and some of the pages are loose. Maybe it will never be missed.

Corinne reads the book before she sleeps. Then again when she wakes. One poem at a time. Reads it over and over until she has made something like little sense out of what is written. It is not the same reading the words herself, not the same as listening to someone else read them. Not the same as hearing Mr Bredwell making music from what was on the page. Some of the words she does not know. She thinks of asking Mr Bredwell to help, imagines him keeping her back over lunch, pulling a chair next to his, sitting so close their arms touch, and the two of them reading together.

Her father has spent the night in the livingroom again. Corinne can hear him coughing in his sleep. There is an atmosphere, too, in the house. A coldness in the silences at table. All the sounds of eating magnified into pain. A brittleness in the air, so fragile that a single word can break things. That’s not how love should be, Corinne thinks - only it is so for the poet as it is for her parents, all pain. It doesn’t have to be like that, surely.

She tries learning one of the poems by heart and then saying the words out loud with her eyes closed. It would be better if someone was there to hear her, she thinks. She copies out some of the poetry from the book and reads over what she has written.

‘I whispered, ‘I am too young,’

And then, ‘I am old enough;’

Wherefore I threw a penny

To find out if I might love.’

There’s a boy at school she has noticed recently. Quiet and not like the others. His name is Munro. ‘Tall and thin as a tree.’ That’s what she writes in her own small attempt at poetry. ‘With eyes that follow you from place to place, or maybe it is my eyes that follow him.’ She is pleased with what she has written. She sets Munro’s name under Mr Dodie Bredwell’s in her diary, and Mr Bredwell’s name under William Butler Yeats. Beneath Munro’s name she writes ‘if I might love.’ Then she crosses the four words out.

In PB again

(Here's someone new in Port Brokeferry - except she is not really new and the small connections she has to the place and the people there are familiar to the reader who has been following the 'story' so far.)

A PORT BROKEFERRY DAUGHTER COME HOME

The place looks something the same, Moira thinks. Sharper than it does in memory, perhaps, but nothing so very changed that she does not recognise it as home. She has booked a room in the Victoria Hotel, under a different name, her married name so no one will make the connection. She doesn’t really know why she is there. Back to the start of things. Maybe that’s what everyone does. When the world begins to unravel. Returning to where the thread of one’s life began.

Moira lies in her hotel bed with the window and the curtains open. It is bright. All the sunlight filling up her room, and the sound of the sea and gulls calling and the air having a taste. If she closes her eyes she can imagine that the clock has been turned all the way back and she is in her childhood bedroom, and her father is raking the fire into life, and her mother talking to herself in the kitchen, and her sister Annie singing in her cot.

Annie gone from Port Brokeferry, too. Married and living in England with a man who treats her well. Two kids of their own and both grown to be something. Annie writes sometimes. More than Christmas and Birthdays, but not much more. They talk on the phone twice a year, too. Moira hasn’t told Annie. She hasn’t told anyone.

Annie gone, and her best friend Elspeth, and her mother and father. Not much to keep anyone here in Port Brokeferry. That’s what she thought back at the end of school. Moira worked some days in The Bobbing Boat Café then. It is still there. She saw that. A striped awning the only difference as far as she could tell, and now Guthrie working the till instead of his father. She remembers Guthrie. Helping her close up the café at the end of the day. Wiping the tables when it was her job and drying the dishes that she'd washed. Afterwards holding her hand in his in the dark behind the counter. More than that some nights. They were kids then and she might have stayed for him if he’d asked.

Moira opens her eyes again and looks at the ceiling above her. White like a blank page. That’s what she thinks. Knows why she has that thought, too. Maybe that is why she is here. So she can rewrite the years. Start over and maybe make it different from how it has been.

She noticed that the fair was arriving yesterday. Trucks with heavy wheels turning onto the green at the far end of the village. She wonders if the fair has changed much. Bound to have. Fashions change and the world moves on. Noisier, probably, and the rides with bigger dips and more thrills. No ‘Tunnel of Love’, she thinks, remembering a night with a man whose name she has forgotten. A new teacher at the school, he was, and he kissed her in the ‘Tunnel’ where no one could see. He had a small house of his own and afterwards she spent the night there. They talked into the early hours. Laughed a lot. Drank some too. Then they went to bed together. Moira thought it was love. When the time came, he didn’t stop her going from Port Brokeferry either.

It's Been a While

(Back to Port Brokeferry... feels like I have left this a while. Here is Kerry, the woman who travels out to see the seals at The Snag and who buys scones and bread from Callum's bakery shop... only there's been changes in her life recently.)

KERRY’S LETTER NOT FROM WARD

Kerry couldn’t sleep. Not more than a couple of hours, anyway. Been that way for months now. Since things changed. She should go to the doctor. That’s what her mother would have told her. He has pills for to help you sleep. That’s what her mother would have said. Kerry had too much on her mind, that’s why she was awake. No amount of pills was going to make all that go away, the things she worried about. She hadn’t told her mother.

Kerry got up. Made no sound, except the small crack of her bones and the noise she makes in the back of her throat with the effort of moving. She crept into the back of the house and closed the kitchen door before putting on the light. She sat down at the table. There was a letter propped up against an empty milk jug. She hadn’t opened it. She knew what it was and could guess what it said.

The clock on the wall told her it was ten past three. Always three or thereabouts. Kerry picked up a pen and on a clean sheet of paper she began writing. She wrote out columns of figures and scribbled calculations in the spaces on the page. Things never added up the way she wanted them to. Never the way she needed them to. Not any more. Not since Ward had left.

Her head was dizzy from all the counting these days. She’d had to make changes. Callum had noticed. ‘Just the bread?’ he’d said to her only last week. He’d already put two scones into a bag, one fruit and one plain. ‘Just the bread,’ she’d had to say. Lillian had thought she was maybe not well. She’d said as much.

Edwin had missed her on ‘The Silver Herring’ the day before. He’d kept back the boat for ten minutes to wait for her. He laughed about it when he saw her in the street later that day and said how sorry he was that she had missed the trip. He felt sure the seals had missed her too.

Ward still sent something. Not as much as at first, but something. She’d begun by putting it into a separate account. Savings for a rainy day. Something put by for when things were harder. Then she’d had to dip into it. A little each week. Then not a little.

Magnus at the bank had asked to speak to her about her financial affairs. That’s what he called it. He smiled when he said it, kindly, and said he could maybe help. He meant well, she understood that. Financial affairs; it sounded odd to her, like something that should be kept secret.

And now this letter. Not from Ward. From the woman he’d left Kerry for. She’d written her name on the back of the envelope and their shared address, hers and Ward’s. Kerry knew what it said. Felt certain that she did.

On the paper she'd written on she crossed some things out. More changes she would have to make if ends were to meet.

THE WRITER AS THIEF

This in my inbox today... from 'A PUBLIC SPACE' and I wish I could be in the Colorado Convention Center on the 10th!:

THE WRITER AS THIEF

And on Saturday the 10th, please join us in Room 112 of the Colorado Convention Center (street level) for The Writer as Thief: Stealing Effectively and Learning from the Greats, featuring Brigid Hughes, Aviya Kushner, Amy Leach, and Tim O'Sullivan:

This much is true: the best writers steal. But how do they steal, exactly, and is it ethical? We take apart the work of a few of our favorite writers, giving careful readings of specific passages and listening closely to the influences rumbling beneath the surface. We discuss what they "stole" from earlier writers in order to create that particular work of art, as we ask: what is the difference between emulation, inspiration, and plagiarism?

Once again it shows all those who are too quick to judge that there is a need for the subject to be openly debated. What is also interesting is the use of language in this little snippet.

FROG-SONG

I was going to post up another Port Brokeferry piece today. Then I got sidetracked and read a very long essay about teaching poetry to community college students in America, specifically teaching the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Then I read this from one of ED's poems and thought it chimed so wonderfully with how I feel and with the stuff on collaboration I posted below...

How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog

It is not important to know who I am. It is important, only, that I am and that I write. I write to leave a mark, to say that I was here. But it is not important to know who I am, just that I was. When it comes down to it, who was Shakespeare? I don't need to know. I just need to read him and know that he was and his works are the mark he left behind him. All the rest is just frog-song.

COLLABORATION

COLLABORATION

Are we worried when we know that Shakespeare’s plays are the result in part of collaboration with other writers? Does the public know the extent to which an editor works in partnership with the writer to bring the text to its publishable state? Should we be concerned that Carver’s short stories, the ones that made his name, were the result of intense and defining cutting by his editor – to the extent that there is now discussion about whose stories they really are?

There’s an interesting discussion of Carver here: http://www.slate.com/id/2235571/

Carver’s editor, Lish, did more than pick up on errors of expression. He sliced and diced through the stories, changing the tone and the values of some stories, paring away Carver’s writing to get to something sparse and tight. Lish openly takes credit for the stories that made Carver’s reputation. Should we be anxious about this?

Many editors have intense relationships with their writers, and can contribute a great deal to a writer’s success. This is not new. So why is Lish’s editing attracting so much attention?

I have worked on a couple of collaborative projects, one in particular that grew into something amazing and complex. The writer I worked with described it as being greater than the sum of its parts. We responded to each other’s writing in an intense and concentrated way and created a work that was vibrant and exciting. At the end of the day, whose work is it?

Of course, (and sadly) issues of ownership are in part to do with money and business. This collaborative writer, having fallen out with me, has forbidden me to use any part of her creation in a work of my own (making it impossible to use much of what was written by me). I have given this writer full permission to use my created character and my ideas, but not my actual words. Why this difference?

In the discussion of Carver, there is concern that a story can be the product of two brains rather than one. The critics find that a difficult thing to deal with. But what matters, surely, is the story itself and it has more value than the identification of who wrote what in the story. I find it interesting the relationship between Carver and Lish and the ‘dance’ they did together. I also find it interesting that Lish’s contribution helped not only establish Carver’s reputation but also influenced a whole generation of American writers and how they wrote.

Collaboration was the way of art and artists in the past and nobody had any problem with this. Not until Romanticism and the cult of the artist as venerated individual. Maybe it is time to rethink this matter. In our celebrity-driven society, maybe it is time for some sort of deconstruction…and that is why I think this discussion of Carver is interesting and relevant. I can enjoy both the pure Carver versions and the Lish-influenced versions, and there is something valuable to learn from them both; but I prefer what Lish has done with Carver’s work. There is a general consensus that the collaborative works are better, where Lish has worked with Carver on tightening and paring back and shaping the works beyond their original conception. It is time to re-examine the whole notion of collaboration as a way of producing the best in art… and when we do this we will have to reinvestigate the whole subject of ownership of ideas and intellectual property… and there, for those who ascribe to the cult of the author (wanting to see themselves as venerated), is the rub.

Thoughts?