Category: Insight

Magali Román was born in Buenos Aires and earned a dual B.A. from Temple University in Philadelphia (covering European History and English Literature). Having worked as a writer for four years and contributed to numerous publications across that period, Magali undertook an MSc in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh beginning in 2018. While on the program, Magali and a number of other Edinburgh MSc students collaborated to publish From Arthur’s Seat, a collection of poetry and prose by colleagues, prizewinners, and University of Edinburgh faculty. From Arthur’s Seat is the fourth installment in an anthology series begun in 2016 and breaks new ground with its definitive structure and style. 

In this interview, Ogilvie editors Calder Hudson and Angela Hicks ask Magali Román about her definitive approach to the From Arthur’s Seat publishing process. 

 

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One of the taglines for the 2019 From Arthur’s Seat is ‘You are about to start on an adventure.’ Was it also an adventure to put together and edit? What were your main priorities when you and your team set about creating the anthology?

The tagline emulates the choose-your-own-adventure structure of the anthology, but I think anything that involves 30 writers working together is by definition going to be an adventure. When I was planning this year’s anthology (the fourth!), I really just wanted to make something new–something that would set our year apart from what had been done before. Each volume of From Arthur’s Seat has consistently improved on its predecessors. I wanted our contribution to go further, to examine and reconstruct what an anthology could be. There is an element of adventure in trying something completely new, so the feeling was in the project from the beginning.

 

You have been a writer for many years. Were any of the skills you developed through your experience as a writer of particular use to you as editor-in-chief? 

I think the best skill you can cultivate as a writer and editor is to be realistic. When editing somebody’s work, you have to be completely honest with what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise you’re wasting people’s time. As an editor, it’s your job to get the writer to fulfill their highest potential. That doesn’t come from coddling people or beating them down with criticism. It’s a weird balance that requires you to be honest with yourself and with your writer about whether you’re both doing the best job you are capable of.

As editor-in-chief I think it’s also important to be realistic about your goals and the work it takes to achieve them. I wanted to run FAS like a professional publishing house, so I delegated a lot and tried to steer my team to follow the vision I’d set for the book. We formed the team in October and set project deadlines six months before anybody submitted a first draft. When you start a project you’re really excited about, you have a million ideas and it’s very easy to overpromise and underdeliver. You have to be realistic with your time, and what you can achieve with the resources you have. How much good work can you realistically get done, considering that you are working with people who have full course-loads to worry about? I think it’s quite easy to get overwhelmed in this position, but I never did because I always knew that we had set the right goals for our team and we had the resources to deliver.  We were ambitious, but not delusional.

 

In the adventure-choosing vein, you’ve included a small section towards the start of the book which provides readers with an alternate way to read the anthology beyond just going cover-to-cover; they can read along thematic and narratives using the guidelines provided. What was the inspiration for this? How early in the editing process was this structure decided on?

It is actually hugely hilarious that I came up with this idea because I normally find most postmodernist lit gimmicky. But anthologies, to me, present a really interesting chance to play around with structure. In an anthology each story and poem stands on its own as it is, but they also belong to a larger, unified physical book. When I was reading through everyone’s submissions, I realized that certain common themes kept coming up: isolation, surveillance, the act of writing, fatherhood, war, et cetera. I grabbed all the submissions and made different piles, mixing poems and stories that seemed like they could have taken place in the same universe. The stories were great on their own, but putting them together as chapters of a larger story added new layers of meaning. It made the reading experience fresh and exciting. I was also watching the film “Bandersnatch” at the time and thought the episodic nature of an anthology–stories that stand alone but share certain themes–would lend itself really well to a choose-your-own-adventure structure.

I came up with this structure and ran it by Merel de Beer, our executive editor, and then presented the concept to our editorial team. It was important for me to have feedback on it because I wasn’t sure if the idea would be too weird to pull off. But I think this concept has really allowed the anthology to present each writer as both an individual and as part of a collective. It also allowed us to connect prose with poetry. Poets and fiction writers are traditionally kept separate in our program, but poetry and fiction are intrinsically linked together, so it was important to us to present them as two sides of the same coin. Writing is such a lonely act–it’s important to remember that we form part of a larger community that is always there, even if we don’t realize it.

 

Setting up the different narrative paths must have taken some doing, all while organizing the rest of the analogy to boot! Was it difficult to decide the themes and to fit all the stories into one and only one? Did you consult with writers about the themes, or did you extrapolate them from the anthology as a whole? 

As editor-in-chief I was responsible for issuing final edits on every story and poem, so I was intimately familiar with the themes present in each piece, and mostly likely had had a conversation with the writer about what ideas that had inspired their work. Merel and I picked out the themes (which we called threads) together over a few brainstorming sessions. We did not consult with the writers mostly because we felt that as editors we were distanced enough to look at the big picture. We didn’t want to rewrite people’s stories for them so we designed the choose-your-own-adventure structure to be subtle. If you don’t read the instructions at the beginning of the book you probably wouldn’t know that there’s anything different about this anthology.

 

You all developed From Arthur’s Seat while also continuing your MSc. Was balancing the ‘down-to-earth’ editing process while also writing creatively on a regular basis a challenge at all, or did the two projects act as good counterweights to each other? Did working on the anthology provide any opportunities or cause any challenges?

I actually loved the ‘down-to-earth’ editing process because it felt like a real job. I think graduate school can sometimes feel like you’re play-acting at being a writer–perhaps you’re writing stuff that your peers approve of or your professors reward with good grades, but in the real world success depends on getting published. Your classmates owe you critique and your professors owe you advice, but the publishing industry doesn’t owe you anything. I wanted to lead this project because I wanted to know what it was like to do it for real, whether my ideas would translate into good sales and whether people would actually like what we had to say. Mostly I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.

I did find it challenging to prioritize my own writing at times with so many deadlines to manage. Being in charge means you have to work for everyone else, so your own projects often have to take a backseat. And a big part of being in charge is having to say no, even to yourself, and standing by that no. There’s always going to be people who dislike your creative choices or think they could do better, but part of your job is to trust in your vision and stick to it. Honestly, sometimes it’s not about making everyone happy but rather about pissing off the right people. That’s when you know you have something good.

 

At the end of the publication process, you also helped organize launch events for the anthology alongside the team’s event planners. What was that experience like? Did it feel like an extension of the publication process, or something separate? Was it exciting or nerve-wracking to share the anthology with people outside of the MSc?

We were really lucky to have two event planners in the team who organized a wonderful event, because for me presenting a book was an extremely nerve-wracking experience. I consider myself a pretty good editor but I hate talking in public and I’d never presented anything that I was so involved in, so I was pretty anxious the entire night. Seeing our writers’ parents and friends come to support them made up for it, though.

 

In addition to launch events, From Arthur’s Seat also had team members dedicated to social media and also had a podcast. What inspired you to pursue these angles as a team?

My ultimate goal for this anthology was to promote our writers and their talents. FAS is technically a student project but we packaged it as a professional, independent anthology of new writing. When we looked into expanding into social media and audio, the definitive question was always, ‘what can we do to jump-start our writers into their careers?’ Can we give them a social media campaign? Can we get them talking on a podcast about their inspiration? Can we get them to perform live? A new anthology comes out every year, so we wanted some footprint of our authors to live on after the books sold out.

As young aspiring writers, we spent all year listening to people tell us (in the nicest, most soothing way possible) that we’re probably never going to make any money off our writing. We had an opportunity to provide people with publishing experience, so I wanted to give everyone who wanted it the chance to develop a skill that could go on their CV after the program ended. What can they contribute to the team, beyond writing? Are they interested in audio production, event planning, web design? I wanted people to be able to get jobs out of this experience if they wanted, so expanding FAS into audio and digital gave us the chance to develop those skills. Of course it helped that we had talented people on our team who were really passionate about those areas.

 

What was it like editing an anthology which also contains your own writing? 

It’s weird; I don’t really consider myself a writer in this anthology. I kind of forget that one of my stories is also in this book. I don’t know why–maybe because I spent so much time editing and talking to people about their work and so little time thinking about my own writing. It was easy for all the editor tasks to get in the way of your own creative work, so I would often kind of leave my own rewrites until the last minute. If I could do it again I’d probably try to remind myself that I’m a writer too, not just an editor. That being said, I had a job to do, and if my own writing had to take a backseat for a few months to make a beautiful book for everyone else then so be it.

 

Is there anything else you feel shouldn’t go unsaid when it comes to the anthology–both regarding its development, and now that it’s out in the world?

This anthology looks like it does because of the work of a lot of people. Designers, editors, PR managers, and mentors are just as important to a publication as the writers whose work you read. Nobody accomplishes anything alone.

 

More students are beginning the Creative Writing MSc in Autumn of 2019; is there any advice you’d offer the next group of Creative Writers about the anthology publishing process–or, indeed, any general advice you’d offer any writers, reflecting on your experience?

Start as early as you can and be as ambitious as you can. There are no rules to the process at all. When we started the only thing we were expected to do was make a book. By the time we finished not only did we have a book, but we had a website and a podcast. So why not go further? That would be my advice for whoever comes after us. Go further. Why not? Why not make an audiobook, a zine, a documentary, FAS merch? Who’s going to stop you?

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From Arthur’s Seat is now available in stores and online, with more information available via the anthology’s website (as well as Twitter and Facebook). You can read more from Magali (including a selection of her short stories) via her website.

Born in London, Temi Oh is a graduate from King’s College London (in Neuroscience) and a postgraduate from the University of Edinburgh (in Creative Writing). Her studies brought together a vast breadth of scientific knowledge with her love and aptitude for writing of all stripes. Her debut novel, Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, fully intertwines these areas of expertise—telling the story of an interplanetary team on a twenty-three year mission to reach a new, habitable planet… and the dangers, within and without, that they face.

In this interview, Ogilvie editors Calder Hudson and Angela Hicks talk with Temi about the process of writing and publishing her first novel—discussing her reflections and insights on the book’s journey from its initial draft to its publication on March 7th, 2019.

 

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When you began your Creative Writing postgraduate degree in Edinburgh, you’d only recently completed your Neuroscience degree. How did your scientific expertise feed into the book—or did the book help shape your interests in science?

Throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked on the book—after lectures, during the holidays. In my final year, I signed up to study the Extreme Physiology Module, where we learnt about what happens to the human body under extreme conditions such as high altitude, hypothermia, diving, and zero-gravity. I attended talks delivered by guest lecturers including Dr Kevin Fong, who told us about working in A&E and about space travel. Dr Anna Bagenhol —who was revived after a skiing accident that caused her heart to stop for hours—delivered a lecture about the body’s reaction to hypothermia. The module also provided a great opportunity to do some first-hand research into the life of an astronaut. Our group went on a trip to a human centrifuge at Farnborough where I was spun around a 60-foot metal arm until I reached 3.5 G (so my body was 3.5 times heavier than normal). I kept asking the operator to push the acceleration up. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how my characters would feel launching into space. I felt dizzy for two days afterwards.

 

Speaking of characters—Do You Dream of Terra-Two? features a number of different Point-of-View characters. Was it hard to find individual, distinctive voices for each one? And was there one you kept coming back to more than the others—a favourite perspective to write from?

While writing each character, I tried to remember that everyone believes that they are the hero of the story. It was a bit like method acting—trying to fully inhabit each character while writing them, taking into consideration how their previous experiences might shape their current behaviour.

It’s a little irrational, but it feels unfair to have a favourite. Like taking sides.

 

In early drafts, there was one additional PoV character, Solomon, who was later cut. Was it difficult to remove a core member of the cast?

Oooh… behind the scenes secrets! I never feel emotional about cutting anything. It’s like sawing off a rotting limb. When I reached the point where I realised Solomon had to go, it was the only option. Although he was a great character and I liked him, I had to consider his role in the story as a whole.

 

Can you tell us more about the editing process the book has undergone, and what it’s taught you as a writer?

Thanks to the people in my workshop group in Edinburgh, I wasn’t a complete newbie when it came to the editing process. With their suggestions, the first couple of chapters were pretty polished by the time I sent the book off to agents. But, it’s a long book and when I got an offer from my agent, she said, “I think the book is good, but it needs some work. And some re-writing.” She helped me perform plastic surgery on the novel for a few months before we sent it out to editors; it was such a new collaborative experience because I’d been working on the book alone for so long and in some places, I’d got stuck.

I have so much to say about the editing process! In the first stage, it was really intensive, huge structural changes. For the next couple of re-writes we focused on tone, style, consistency. Family I spoke to during that time baulked at the thought of anyone suggesting I make changes to the book. But I think it’s important to emphasise that editing is teamwork. Everyone has a different editorial style, but, in my experience, my agent or editor would identify problems and plot holes and it was my job to bite my nails for a few weeks and think of solutions. Other times, my editor might suggest her own solution to a problem, and if I agreed with it, I’d get to skip the nail-biting stage and think about a way to write it.

Copy-editing was the best because, by that point, I had made all of the difficult changes. My publisher sent me a track-changes document that the copy-editor had already gone through, fixing grammar and pointing out (for example) scenes where the sun sets twice. After we’d finished, it was so gratifying to read. Awkward phrasing hammered out, prose like silk.

 

Are there any authors who really influenced your writing in Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

I had a real problem with dialogue, like a kind of tone-deafness. For years, people who read my writing would say that the prose was quite lyrical but the dialogue often sounded stilted.

I endured a couple dark months of the soul wondering about this—about how to fix it. And then I read Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal. It’s a gorgeous book where the characters burst into unexpected soliloquies in every chapter (In the beginning the saxophone teacher says: “I require of all my students… that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away
with private fury and ardour and uncertainty and gloom…”) and I realised that, in fiction, a writer is allowed to have the same stylised fun with dialogue as with the rest of the prose.

 

Do you have a particular writing process? Are you a coffee-shop sort of person? Late-night writer?

It’s always changing. I really wish I had a routine. I wish I had Murakami’s routine (I read that he gets up at 4 am, writes all morning, and then runs for 10km or swims for 1500m) but, for me, Writer’s Block is some resilient strain of sickness that’s soon resistant to whatever I try.

Throughout my teen years, I wrote all the time. All weekend on my laptop facing out onto the council flats on the street opposite. When I got Writer’s Block I’d walk down to Londis, buy a bag of jelly-babies and by the time I’d finished slowly eating them I’d have an answer to whatever it was I was worried about. Maybe that’s why I have so many fillings now.

In university, and especially in Edinburgh, I had set up a really nice writing desk with all my books, but I’d spend most of the year writing on the floor in front of the electric heater.

I need lots of coffee. I seem to work best when I’m slightly sleep-deprived and when it’s dark outside (early morning or late in the night) when I don’t feel as if I have a lot of other options and when no one would pick up the phone if I tried to call.

I wrote 50% of this book on a typewriter which I love to use because it’s a lot harder to edit.

 

Has the publishing process taught you lessons you think other writers might value?

Traditional publishing can take years. My agent sold my book to my publisher almost two years ago, which, I have been told that—even by traditional publishing’s standards—is quite a while. Some of that time was spent editing, but for most of it I have been writing Book 2 and working at my day job. I didn’t realise how the passage of that time would make me feel. For about four years, this book was my baby; I took it everywhere with me, was duty-bound to defend it. But, now that I’ve let it go, I feel as if I’m play-acting the person who wrote it.

Everyone will tell you not to read your reviews, but the internet is always there! And you’ve waited for years to see what the world thinks about this story you were dying to tell. Don’t feel too guilty if this is a lesson you’ll have to learn the hard way.

 

On your website, there is an option to take an Astronaut Test to see if the reader would be capable of embarking on a long space mission like the one in your novel. Both of us failed, but did you pass? Do you think you’d do well on a 23-year mission into space?

Hah! I get so many questions about this. I didn’t make it. I failed and everyone I know failed so for a while I had a suspicion that no one could win. But now a few people have tweeted me to tell me that they have so maybe it’s true that only the best of the best can make it.

I’m certain that I would not be selected for a real mission into space. I like to be comfortable. I can’t say that I’m a risk taker. Plumbing matters a lot to me. In one interview I read an astronaut said that sometimes going to the bathroom can become a ‘hand to hand combat’—I was horrified.

 

The premise of the novel is that a ‘New Earth’—a habitable planet across space—has been discovered. If you were part of an exploration mission, what things do you think you’d miss most about ‘Old Earth’?

My favourite place to be is in a coffee shop in a Waterstones with two or three free hours in front of me. So I would miss everything about that experience.

Obviously, family. But also, the candy-floss colours of apple blossoms in the spring and the way they scatter like confetti across the asphalt. Going out on a summer’s day at lunchtime in the city where I work, and seeing all the people in suits gathered out on every green space eating lunch out of paper bags as if it’s a music festival but only for an hour or two.

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You can find more about Temi via her website. A list of Temi’s live appearances, interviews, and podcast specials—as well as a means of contact—are available on the About page; more information on Do You Dream of Terra-Two?, as well as an except, is available via the About the Book page. Do You Dream of Terra-Two? is published by Simon & Schuster in the United Kingdom and by Saga Press in the United States; the book is available in stores now and can also be purchased on Audible .

Two years after The Ogilvie first launched, Angela Clem, Angela Hicks, and Calder Hudson–the review’s founders–discuss their plans for the future (namely, Year #3).

The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the authors (though in this case, the authors are coincidentally The Ogilvie’s entire staff).

 

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Discussion: The Ogilvie Turns Two

 

AH: So this month is the second anniversary of The Ogilvie–the Ogilversary, as Calder likes to call it. And in the UK at least, the second anniversary is traditionally paper, which feels appropriate for a literary magazine, even if we are completely digital.

AC: It definitely doesn’t feel like it’s been two years. Time flies and all that. We’ve published so many phenomenal authors so far! I’m particularly excited by how we have returning contributors published alongside new names. It has been great to see The Ogilvie expand into what it is today, and I think we all have a lot of excitement for what’s to come.

CH: Yeah, I’m pretty stoked for what’s in store this year. I’ll be focusing on the Insight section in particular. I’m really proud of how it grew last year and the spread of interviews and personal essays we’ve taken on, and I have more interviews lined up this year to continue that trend. There’s a lot to talk about–here in Edinburgh and beyond–and I’m looking forward to getting all the takes. 

AC: Right. Obviously we’ll still be taking Fiction and Poetry submissions, but what we noticed over the past two years is how many good stories can be found behind the authors themselves. Interviewing up-and-coming folks in the industry can offer our readers brand new perspectives. We do have a few specific interviews in mind to start with, but we’re also looking forward to expanding our network and engaging a wider audience.

CH: There are some really exciting developments happening all around Edinburgh as well this year. One particular highlight for me is the arrival of Cymera, a Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror festival slated to take place at the Pleasance in early June. It’ll contain lots of author appearances, a Creator’s Hall, and even a bespoke fiction competition. Really looking forward to that–all the coverage I’ve seen so far is top-notch.

AC: How about you, Ange? Any other new plans or announcements for this year?

AH: Well, for our monthly round-ups of 2018, I took photo black-and-white photos of the Ogilvie park. This year I’m thinking about moving into colour photos, or at least sepia ones.

CH: The park always does look good in full technicolour, despite Edinburgh’s best attempts to render itself monochromatic due to cloud cover. 

AH: And in other plans, I hope to do a lot of reading in 2019. I’m still making my way through The Goldfinch, which is a great book, but very long. Once I finish, I intend to read a lot of short fiction. And I’m hoping to do some more of my own writing.

AC: I’m hoping this year will allow me to rediscover reading “for fun”. After moving for work late last year and as the American political climate continues to deteriorate, I’m looking towards reading and self-education as a way to combat the ignorance and fatalism around me. I’ll always leave room for fiction, of course, but I’m tackling a long list of public policy and history reads, mostly from the independent socialist publisher Haymarket Books. I just finished two of their published poetry collections: Schtick by Kevin Coval and Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez.

CH: One particular book I’m super keen on that’s coming out this year–I’m pretty sure it’s actually already out on Audible–is Do You Dream of Terra Two?. I read some of the early drafts of this book during my MSc, so it’ll be amazing to see the finished version, and to talk with its author, Temi Oh, in our first interview of the year. It’s a joy to be buddies with creators you like; you can inundate them with rabid fan questions! 

AH: Here’s to 2019–the year we bombard every writer we know with requests for interviews!

CH: Hype!

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Angela C., Angela H., and Calder can be contacted via their respective Twitter accounts.

Julie Barker is a South African writer and producer based in Glasgow. She produced a short film, The Hide, which won best drama at the 2017 WOF Festival in Brighton.  She also wrote for the series Armchair Detectives which screened on BBC 1 in 2017. In 2015, she completed an MA in Creative Writing for which she wrote a novel called Other People’s Countries. From 2013 to 2016 she worked for River City as a Story Editor and Producer. She is currently working on a series of memoir pieces; Home is one of those extracts.

 

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Home

 

My earliest recollection of home was of a geographical emptiness. Apartheid created the illusion that we lived in an unpopulated country. My first memory of travel was driving through the South African Karoo, a vast semi-desert which was once an ancient seabed straddling the centre of the country. We rattled for a day through searing heat. Our pale blue Peugeot climbed sluggishly up barren hills and emitted clouds of smoke, choking passing dung beetles. We were travelling from our home in Johannesburg to Cape Town. There is no other way to get there other than driving through the Karoo. It was the first time I had a sense of what infinity must be, felt that continual impulse to move forward in a landscape where the sun reached closer than anywhere else, its flames licking at my heels like a furious goddess.

As a young white child, I had a hollow awareness that my home wasn’t quite right. The adults that steered my upbringing seemed to suffer from relentless tension; half whispers described the masses plotting our demise. Their behaviour inferred an existence on the brink of annihilation.

When I was eleven, a woman called Elizabeth cleaned our house. It was the late 1970s and she did not have a pass–the document which allowed black people to travel from one province to the next. It was designed to constrain movement and keep black people out of white areas. One day Elizabeth and I were home when there was a knock on the door. Elizabeth begged me to tell whoever was there that I was alone while she hid beneath my bed. When I answered the door, two policemen asked me if there were any black people in my home. I was frightened and led them to Elizabeth. They took her away. I was so distraught that my mother took me to the police station to find her. We were told Elizabeth had been ‘sent away’. My mother gripped my hand hard as she was strongly warned never to employ anyone without a pass again. That was the day I learnt that women have no power, that black lives don’t matter, and black female lives matter the least. My home–‘my tribe’–made me angry and ashamed and I was driven by a single driving impulse to escape.

In the late nineties, when I was twenty-six, the country of my birth became a democracy. It was a heady time filled with the promise of possibility. Johannesburg is an intoxicating city, covered by a glittering acidic dust from the gold mine dumps that lurk on its outskirts. These lunar-sculpted hills are a constant reminder of how an astonishing city gave birth to itself. During the post-apartheid honeymoon, Johannesburg was seduced by its own political success. The first democratically elected government built houses and uplifted people.

I was thoroughly immersed in the changing status quo, an active participant in creating a new world. I wrote for a newly-created television show that reflected the changing society as it happened, so to speak. The first inter-racial romance, the first HIV-positive character, the first gay wedding, the first contrite apartheid assassin. I could do or say anything and the lack of censorship was breathtaking. It felt as if my innate ability as a writer was aligned with serving humanity. The show became the first television programme to be watched by both a white and black audience. It gave birth to the phrase ‘one nation viewing.’ I had finally come home.

However, there were the difficult and controversial aspects to re-creating the South African experience on screen–such as white writers creating black worlds. There needed to be a balance of my own inbuilt prejudice and my constant need to expand the limits of experiential understanding. I had to do this in ways that were honest and unpatronising. I created stories very far outside my immediate experiences. I embraced this; it felt like a re-education of what my country was.

Alongside my social immersion, the city’s growing affluence and a cheerful disregard for city regulations, there remained a menacing undertow–a desperate violence born from oppression and shame. It was a discordant nihilism which ran like an endless motif beneath a buoyant nation, inexorably exposing fault lines. The contradictions had been there all along. We had not known how to identify them in soft focus. Twenty years on, and the wealth divide between black and white was an even more corrosive wound. While no one can deny my sincerity, my inherent privilege blinded me to what should have been utterly obvious. No matter how well intentioned and how self-aware, if you do not play on a level field, you exist in an unfair universe.

My contribution to television began to feel less like a writer reflecting their world and uncomfortably more like a colonial reflection on ‘how to exist.’ My home once again felt ‘not quite right.’ Except now I was inducting my own children into the cult of privilege, inadvertently reliving apartheid, with a home being cordoned off by electric fencing, armed guards and dogs, and serviced by other people.

Idealistically or foolishly I wanted to recreate that seductive sense of infinity (it feels remarkably similar to living on the cusp of immense change) to exist in a space where everything is novel, unexpected and therefore life-changing. In my forties, it felt like this would be my last chance. Ironically, it was privilege of being born to a British father that gave me the opportunity to make another choice. Work and luck sent me to Scotland. Glasgow is nothing like the flamboyant chaos of Johannesburg.  Scotland in the summer of 2013 was a year away from the Independence Referendum. It hung in the air like a dirty word for some, and the possibility of a new future for others. It was a captivating reminder of South Africa’s first democratic elections–a time when people would vote with their hearts.

In the first few weeks, I bathed in the serenity of the merchant city dancing with pink blossoms and the lime green of beginnings. On a particular walk alongside the Kelvin River I imagined myself back in Johannesburg. It was an immersive vision, a sensuous jangle of noise and dust, drenched in a brilliant and angry heat. I opened my eyes to pale wisps of cloud in a silvery sky. The city’s gentleness was a shocking contrast to my other home. I realised I would never be able to merge the two. Egalitarianism is the lifeblood of Glasgow. It is evidenced in simple wedding bands, the salesperson who suggests you go to the shop next door as the item you want is cheaper there, or the person who hangs your lost jumper on a tree in the woods, with the hope that you may find it on your next visit. But it doesn’t pulsate like a heartbeat out of control. It doesn’t roar from an unassailable pain, or sing from the ancient bones of millions. I ached for the complexity and dysfunction of Johannesburg. My new home felt like a photographic negative.

Loss tore into the epicentre of my gut. I was overwhelmed by a savage attack of what-ifs. I was alone in this pretty city. My family and the sanctuary I had built existed in a fading life. I had built a monument to familial functionality, the children’s bedrooms, their parties, our parties, the food we had cooked, the DIY we had done, the friends we had accrued over almost two decades. Not to mention the years of therapy to sort out my racist tendencies and other childhood torments. I now lived in a basement flat in the West End beneath the sprawling interconnected lives of another family. My family were to join me in three months, but what if we could never reclaim that refuge?

There are very few words which succinctly articulate sudden and visceral rootlessness. As I settled into new routines, I began to feel like a non-participant and an observer of someone else’s life. The sense of floating through a half-life in a grey city increased. I understood on some level I was depressed. Yet it felt like something far deeper than a lack of serotonin. It came to me that I was suffering from homesickness, an absurd ache for a country where, because of the actions of my forefathers, I did not have the right to call myself citizen.

One day, I attempted to plant shrubs in the garden, and could barely penetrate the thick clay ridden soil with my spade. I tried a gardening fork. The soil was so compacted and loamy that it took every ounce of strength I could muster. As I shovelled the compost into jagged holes I had managed to fashion, it began to rain. Of course it did; this was Glasgow. The clinging wetness clouded my vision and sorrow spurted out of every pore. I ignored the fact that weeping intensely over badly fashioned plant holes was perhaps an extreme reaction. I sobbed for my new home, which was small, and my new life, which was difficult. Not life-threatening or dysfunctional, but challenging, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I realised the sanctuary in Johannesburg with its lush Swamp Cypresses, which I never tended to with my own hands, and the shining parquet floors, which I walked on for nine years and never cleaned myself, were monuments to a subconscious drive towards creating ease. And I missed it like new sobriety tormented by its own violent addiction.

As I rode the tsunami of regret it came to me that believing I deserved a life of ease was the essence of entitlement, because to live with constant ease is to be numb and oblivious. It is to tourniquet self-awareness, pain and regret, which are the seeds of resilience, empathy and wisdom. While there is nothing wrong with creating a safe space for my family, it should not be used to shelter me from growth. It was the moment I finally understood why I had left.

In between the past and the future stretches the most challenging expanse of all–the present. It is strange waiting between the death of one identity and the birth of another. Home is a fairy tale–the constructs of a culture, brick walls, smells and memories. Home is surely the collection of all our selves, past, present and future, that bear witness to the environments they have learnt from and lived in. Just like we are more than one self, home can never be one fixed place. It is an internal sanctuary where we question, battle with and embrace the endless reimagining of who we are.

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You can read Julie’s previous submission, Festina Lente, here.

Before turning to writing fiction, Tracey Emerson worked in theatre and community arts. As well as acting, she ran drama workshops in various community and healthcare settings, focusing on work with adults with mental health issues. Her short stories have been published in anthologies and literary magazines such as Mslexia and Gutter Magazine. Her first novel, She Chose Me, is released on October 15^th 2018.

In this interview, Ogilvie editors Calder Hudson and Angela Hicks speak with Tracey about her approach to writing, her perspective on the process and on emotional memory, and about She Chose Me’s path to publication–as well as what to expect next.

 

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I’m interested in hearing about the history of the novel. When did this idea first come to you and how did you go about developing it?  

The idea came some years ago in the form of a question, which later mutated into the first line of the novel: What would she say if she were with me? I’d been thinking about a situation from my past and imagining it coming back into my life.

I began developing the idea whilst doing my PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Edinburgh. At first, I thought my premise required me to write a dystopian novel. I did and it was a spectacularly instructive failure.  I went on to write a two-viewpoint literary novel that was the first step towards the finished product.

 

She Chose Me has come a long way, then–from dystopian novel to fast-paced psychological thriller. When you came up with the novel’s premise, did you always intend for that to be the story’s overtone? For that matter, which came first–plot or genre?

I had no intention of writing a psychological thriller. The idea came first, the genre afterwards. I think the reason it took me so long to see the obvious fit between the idea and the psychological suspense genre is that I never thought of myself as a writer who could ‘do’ plot. I never imagined I could write a story containing twists and reveals. Ideas are stubborn though. They hold out until they get the genre they want.

 

Why psychological thrillers? Is there something about this genre which appeals to you?

John Mullan describes the psychological thriller as the form where genre fiction and literary fiction overlap and I agree. This type of novel has room for suspense, psychological complexity and the examination of social issues; it also encourages formal experimentation, especially with chronology and viewpoint. Luckily, I love writing first-person narration, which is well-suited to a genre often reliant on the unreliable narrator.

The challenge for the writer is to find authentic ways of creating narrative suspense. You have to hook and hold the reader’s attention and you have to strive for genuine story twists. This entails wrestling with structure. You have to be solving the story puzzle at the same time as you’re writing it. This can be both a headache and a lot of fun.

 

Authors always have to field questions juxtaposing a ‘write what you know’ approach versus choosing to write about what they want to write about, regardless of whether or not it draws on their own lived experiences. So, in the spirit of that tradition: where does your own process fall in this discourse–one camp or the other, or a bit of both?

A bit of both, for sure. Events from my own life inspired this novel, but I had to go way beyond them to create a story that would be of interest to other people. In any scene, I can usually find some aspect of my own experience to use as a jumping off point or as a character motivation or to provide setting and background. I think most writers do this, even if only subconsciously. Perhaps this ability to draw on lived experience is what allows writers to go so far beyond it.

 

Some of your short stories and nonfiction have been published previously, but this is your first novel. What was that change like, creatively speaking?

It was a leap of faith. Short stories came quite naturally to me and still feel instinctive. Writing a novel was a big challenge and it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to go about it. It was all worth it, including the bottom drawer novel and the wrong turns. Now, when teaching or mentoring, I can talk from experience and am able to steer others away from the rocks when necessary.

 

You have mentioned on your website and elsewhere that you have a background in theatre. Do you find this informs your prose writing? Any valuable lessons learned?

Theatre has absolutely informed my prose writing, although it’s taken me some time to consciously acknowledge and appreciate that. I was discussing this topic recently with a couple of actors-turned-writers, and we agreed the drama background has given us a good instinct for pace and, unsurprisingly, an affinity with writing dialogue. I have a strong sense when writing early drafts that I’m improvising, and I often tell myself just to ‘get something up on its feet’, an expression used during theatre rehearsals. Whether working on a script or devising material, actors usually need to block out a sequence of actions that give them the physical surface of a scene. They can then rerun and refine this action whilst investigating the subtext of the dialogue and character motivation. Drafting and redrafting works this way for me. Once I’ve got something on the page, I can then start working out what’s really going on.

The concept of emotional memory is also useful–although you might not have the same lived experience as a character you are playing, you can usually find some analogous situation from your own life that arouses similar emotions; you can then access these emotions and transfer them to the scene you’re playing. I use this technique a lot when writing.

The process of researching a character works much the same way in theatre and prose-writing and many of the same techniques can be applied to both. Acting, however, often involves a more physical and sensory approach to inhabiting character, and I still like this feeling of immersion. Much of She Chose Me is set in London, and I made numerous visits there to hang out in the same areas my characters stayed in and to experience life as they might. Once I’d worked out where my main character, Grace, might live, I visited an estate agent in that area and asked what flats they had for sale. I picked one that looked right for Grace and pretended to be interested in buying it. The estate agent drove me along for a viewing, which I stretched out for as long as I could. I also took a lot of pictures. This experience helped me get a feel for Grace’s everyday life and a lot of action was subsequently set in this flat.

 

Writing is often thought of as a solitary enterprise; how does that conception relate to how you found writing She Chose Me–and to your writing process in general?

Writing is solitary in the sense that you alone are laying down the words on the page/screen and, for me, solitude is an essential part of that. Thus, writing She Chose Me did involve long stretches in writing jail. However, the writing process also required a huge team of people–those who helped with research, tutors and mentors, my agent, the team at Legend Press and all the writers whose novels informed my writing. Not to mention friends, family and the people I share my life with. Without all of that support and those interactions, I wouldn’t be able to be solitary.

 

You recently tweeted about a conversation with your niece where you described publishing this book as a lifelong ambition. Ambition fulfilled! What’s next?

I should probably clarify that writing a novel was an ambition that had lain dormant for some time. As a child, I read relentlessly and wrote short stories and loved English Literature at school. I could have followed a straighter path to becoming a writer from that point onwards, but other interests distracted me–sport, science, boys and theatre. Theatre won, but in my late twenties some lost, hedonistic years led to a spell of poor health and I turned to writing as a creative outlet. I didn’t start writing seriously until my early thirties.

In answer to your question, my next ambition is to see if I can get a second novel written and published. I’m working on one now, The Victim’s Code. It’s a psychological thriller, narrated by a man who doesn’t know if he’s a victim of a terrible crime or an accomplice to a perfect murder. I’m having fun with it! I’d also like to publish more short stories, and I’ve got material better suited to radio plays or possibly even to the stage, so I’m keen to develop my skills in these areas. And a short film script I’ve had sitting around for a while might get a dusting off at some point. In short, writing is next. Lots more writing.

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You can keep up with Tracey via her website and Twitter. She Chose Me, written by Tracey and published by Legend Press, is now available in stores and online.

Rebecca Smith is a writer and a radio producer. She was brought up in the wilds of Cumbria and now lives in Central Scotland. She has work published for the Dangerous Woman Project as well as in Northwords Now, Dear Damsels, and Glasgow Review of Books. She has two children and a very soppy silver cat.

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The Estate

 

When I was four we moved to a private family-run estate in the Lake District. Dad was employed as the forester and we were given a small house with no central heating but with a view most people would sell a kidney for. We lived on the edge of the forest, on the brink of the lake and under the shadow of the hills which grew into mountains in the distance.

My memories of childhood are grounded in nature. When I think of it now, I remember a never-ending expanse of dark green branches and slate grey waters. The soft brown undergrowth of the woods in autumn and fields of sheet white snow that we would score sledge marks down until the winter sun set. I was free to explore this landscape with my family, my friends and–as I grew older–on my own. On this land, I grew into the person I am today.

I spent a lot of time walking as a teenager. After doing my homework, ringing friends or writing in my diary about my latest crush, I would go for a walk. I spent hours walking, exploring. Often I would go across the fields opposite my house, past the sheep with straggly wool and down to the river with the ruin near one of the local farms. I would sit on the slate wall of the old house, legs swinging, dreaming of the boy I wanted to miraculously appear. What would I say to him? What would he say to me? What would we do…? It was all very Brontë–esque. Of course there was never any chance of seeing him, or anyone else for that matter. There were only a couple of houses within a few miles’ radius and when you were walking–back before mobile phones, before GPS–you really were alone. I loved it. The tourists in the Lakes tend to be confined to the villages and towns, with the pull of tea rooms and beer gardens, or trudging up the winding paths to the mountain peaks. I was lucky enough to enjoy the privacy of the private estate, experience its emptiness, its wilderness, its space.

This landscape, this beautiful privacy, spoiled me.

I now live on a new housing estate in Central Scotland. These box houses with the latest central heating sit side by side along a new avenue of tiny baby trees, not full enough to cast a shadow. It’s peaceful; it’s safe; my son can play with his friends on the street. The walls of the living room don’t crumble when I hang a picture. There isn’t a family of mice living under the skirting boards. The carpet isn’t peppered with burn holes from a spitting open fire.

And yet. I avoid looking out of the front window at number 24, a kid’s picture-perfect drawing, the house that mirrors our own. I can see its inhabitants’ silhouettes when they stand up in the living room against the light of the window at the other end of the house. The street light shines in through the cracks in the curtains. All the way up the row, the front lawns are so neat, so clipped. I plant daffodil and bluebell bulbs in odd places around the garden to make it look less uniform, less like next door’s. I line the walls with bookcases and old postcards. It’s a blank canvas after all.

I have tricked myself into liking it here as I don’t have a choice right now. Circumstance states that it’s easier to live in a house like this, without the chopping of wood, without constant driving to get anywhere to see my friends or go to the supermarket. From here, it’s easy to go into the city and see a play, or to do some shopping and have a fancy meal. It’s easier to maintain contacts and, to some extent, a career. It’s close to my son’s school and close to the motorway. It’s affordable. Yet I miss the expanse of green. I miss the chopping of wood and the driving on winding roads at dusk, spotting the family of deer in the field by the river.

I still need an injection of wilderness every now and then. I don’t holiday on city breaks, but find the most remote place to stay. I go back home (the Lake District will always be home) as often as I can, to the corners of it only my family know. For quick fixes, I drag my seven year old to the woods. There are some great council-run forests near us. It’s not too hard to find somewhere resembling a summer evening when I was fifteen. But it’s not the same–the paths are always worn thin, the dull groan of the B road or a motorway never far away. And there will always be someone else looking for that peace and quiet, walking by you, pushing away your own magic of being alone.

If I could, I would make it so everyone had their own piece of wilderness when they wished for it. A tree swing, a rocky bay by a loch, a den in a rhododendron bush. It’s all out there, waiting to be explored. I still live by the belief that fresh air and freedom works wonders for the soul. Go and explore. There’s nothing better.

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You can find more of Rebecca’s work via her Twitter, @beckorio.

Editors Angela Hicks and Calder Hudson reflect on some of the exciting events and releases which transpired in August of 2018 in the midst of Edinburgh’s many features and festivals.

 

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Discussion: August Recap

 

A: Last month was certainly busy. With the Fringe in town, we had the chance to attend a lot of really exciting lit events, and also to catch up on reading many of the books which came out this summer.

C: Yes; The Ogilvie is all online, but as editors, we’re based in Edinburgh–and the Scottish capital gets very cultural during August. We went to events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF), and at Book Fringe, and also at the Fringe Festival. It was a hectic time, but in a good way.

A: Do you want to kick off with your favourite event from the EIBF?

C: Yes indeed–though there’s a ramble which comes with it. Namely: I’ve lived in Edinburgh for I guess about three years now, and in my time living here I’ve never been as awestruck. The opening of the 2018 Fringe Festival on August 11^th stands out even by the high standard of previous EIBF kick-offs. I left Charlotte Square on the opening day even more excited than I’d been when I first got there.

A: That’s exciting–what was on?

C: For starters, speakers–there we a number of really great events, including one with Laura Bates, who began the Everyday Sexism project. There were also phenomenal panel discussions; one which I cannot speak highly enough of was called ‘Freedom to Write’ and addressed matters of inclusivity, expansion, internationalism and diversity as they relate to Scottish publishing. It also introduced me to the work of Raman Mundair–I was trying to frantically write down some of her lines at the event itself, since a lot of them were fantastic, but I didn’t capture every one so I’ve since gone in search of more of her writing.

A: That’s really cool.

C: There were tons of amazing international speakers. Hearing Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o speak was an absolute privilege and reintroduced me to the discussion surrounding translation in publishing, and the often unspoken effects which translations can have. I think sometimes, as readers, we… hm… I guess we can’t see the trees for the forest, to put it one way. We get so fixated on the prose we read that we don’t understand its composite pieces, and the immense history that has shaped our reading diet, our conception of literature and “capital-L Literature” as a whole… this event is making me think a lot more thoroughly about that, about all that really, and I’m much better off for it.

A: I couldn’t make it to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s talk, but you did grab copies of The Freedom Papers—where his work features–as well as his latest biography. I haven’t got onto the latter yet, but reading through the former, it’s full of powerful writing.

C: I think it’s fair enough that you haven’t got onto the biography yet; I know you’ve been reading a lot of other new literature.

A: Yes! I’ve just finished Christina Neuwirth’s debut novella, Amphibian, which is this really amazing, surreal story in which an office worker arrives at her job one day to find that her workplace is being slowly flooded by her bosses as a new initiative to increase productivity. I think the book would appeal to everyone, but especially to anyone who’s ever worked in an office and had to cope with the slightly deranged actions of superiors.

C: Yeah, I can’t lie, that’s definitely part of why I’m looking forward to reading it. We went to its Edinburgh launch at Lighthouse Books. I really liked the actual style of the event–it felt much more natural and conversational than many launches I’ve gone to elsewhere. Much of that can, I think, be chalked up to compelling questions and a good author-interviewer rapport, which really helped embellish the good atmosphere you always get at Lighthouse Books. Every time I go there I have a wonderful time, spend much too much money, and get many too many books. But I guess that’s the literal price you pay.

A: Yeah; at Christina’s event, you also bought Claire Askew’s crime novel All the Hidden Truths, which I finished this morning. It was a very gripping book; it’s told from three different perspectives which helped keep the pace and intrigue high.

C: That’s another one at the top of my reading list; I’ve heard a couple excerpts and I know it gets super real. I don’t want to give away too much of the premise from the outset but there was one point where you had to ask me what “Men’s Rights Activists” are, which was a painful, painful reality to have to explain.

A: For clarification, I do, depressingly, know about Men’s Rights groups. I just didn’t know they shortened it to MRA. It’s not a great acronym since it already means something else. Still, if they want to pick a stupid name, who am I to complain.

C: I also went to an event for the anthology Trans Britain at Lighthouse, which was fascinating for a few reasons. Learning more about trans history in Britain was absorbing, and from a writing and editing perspective, hearing about the making of the anthology was also interesting. My exposure to Unbound books and the campaigns surrounding them has been relatively minimal–despite it having a big impact on how we consider publishing nowadays–so hearing Christine Burns talk about the editing and publishing process as she encountered it was really interesting. It seems like Unbound works well for anthologies in that it emphasizes the many voices and contributions which exist within an essay collection. This may have been a particularly powerful and poignant collection given its scope and subject, but it certainly seems to have benefited in many ways from emphasizing its own diversity.

A: You also managed to go to some lunchtime events at Lighthouse, right?

C: Yeah. One of those lunchtime Book Fringe events focused on the She-Wolves project, which adapted She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth into a performance piece. Transforming a work between genres is fascinating procedurally as it brings people from wholly different artistic realms onto one team and asks them to find joint purpose… and if the show’s reviews are anything to go by, this project succeeded. I’m fascinated to see where it goes.

A: Speaking of performances, I went to a production of The Crucible, which is a play that I’ve read before, but never had the opportunity to see performed, so it was really nice to see it on stage in the intended medium. Although perhaps ‘nice’ isn’t quite the right word. It’s an intense play.

C: There were a number of shows or events I saw which blended the line between panels and performances, which were all wonderful. Inua Ellams’ EIBF event was so spellbinding it really did feel more like a performance than a talk or a reading, although that’s probably a whole discussion in of itself with regards to poetry and performance. There were also some shows we got to see on the more Fringe-y side that pose questions about performance, storytelling, and how authors and audiences can interact–I’d never seen Adventurers Wanted in action before, and that was a thrill.

A: We also saw Austentatious, who perform improvised Jane Austen plays. They’re perhaps not ‘Culture’ in the way that events at the EIBF are, but it was a lot of fun.

C: Phew! As we said, a busy month, to put it mildly. Who knows what next year will bring?

A: We’ll have plenty to read in the meantime.

C: Thanks to Lighthouse and my empty wallet? Yeah, for sure.

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Angela and Calder can be found on Twitter (as @Ms_a_hicks and @CMA_Hudson, respectively). The Ogilvie’s editing team can be reached via theogilviecontact@gmail.com.

Laurel Robertson is a writer and farm manager living in Trentham, Australia, with a particular interest in the relationship between culture and landscape. Her works have been published in Wild Melbourne and Voiceworks.

Lachlan’s personal essay Passage reflects on her great-grandmother’s journey by boat to Australia from Scotland after the First World War.

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Passage

In spring my grandfather and I drive north-east from Melbourne to his hometown of Yea. He wants to show me the farm where he grew up. It’s not a long drive, only an hour and half in good traffic, but we make a day of it. We trace an indirect route through the Valley of a Thousand Hills and as we drive, Pa tells me about his parents.

It was the evening of April 16th when Mary left Waverley Station, her train passing under the watchful eye of the Balmoral Hotel’s clocktower and the great escarpment of Arthur’s Seat. It would take her down the spine of Britain: she was heading south for the very first time. Past Newcastle, to London, on to Tilbury with its docks, and from there across the sea. There were two of them in the carriage: Mary and her friend Bessie. Both bound on the same journey halfway across the world, to marry soldiers they hadn’t seen in years. It is impossible to know what they felt. If fear tinged their excitement, if they held hands as their train bore them through the night, if Mary knew that she would never return to Scotland.

They met during the war. William, my great-grandfather, was a gunner at the Somme fighting for the ANZACs. When he was given leave, he travelled to Edinburgh to visit his cousins. Mary Burnside, my future great-grandmother, lived in the house next door. The two hit it off and, much to the disapproval of Mary’s parents, spent a weekend on the shores of Loch Lomond. She later promised to follow William back to Australia and to start a life together there.

‘It was smaller when I was a kid,’ Pa says as we pass through Yea, a one-street town with only two blocks of shops. We cross the Goulburn River and turn left off the highway; the road quickly shifts from tarmac to gravel to dirt. We rise into yellow hills until we come to a gated driveway where Pa stops the car.

This is the driveway to the old property, he explains. We can’t go any further. Pa doesn’t know the current owners. A few old fireplaces stand up from the grass in the valley below us, marking out the site of an old homestead. ‘That was the original farmer’s home,’ Pa tells me. ‘The property was subdivided after the war. Government didn’t have enough money to pay their soldiers so they gave them land instead.’

We look out across the land sweeping north and east, a mass of hills crinkled like an unmade bed. The air is hot around us.

‘The one thing I always want to know is what season it was when she came here,’ Pa says. ‘Coming from Scotland, it must have been a shock.’

Mary was disappointed by the few hours she spent in London. It was night when she and Bess checked their luggage into the station and went out to see the city for the first and last time. The weather was worse than it had been in Edinburgh, and they were tired from the hours on the train. After a brief look at the dark Thames, they returned to St Pancras and caught the train to Tilbury.

The S.S. Bahia Castillo stood at port like a fortress with its magnificent chimneys towering over everything in sight. It was a German-made steamer, used in the war to ferry munitions but given over to the Allies in reparation. Now it was bound for Australia, bearing supplies, returning soldiers, and a small group of passengers. Mary and Bessie presented their papers at the dock and were shown to their cabins.

Mary was shocked to learn she wouldn’t be bunking with Bessie; she found two English girls already unpacking in her cabin. Bessie was only a few doors down the corridor, but they were ordered to remain in their quarters, and Mary had to endure the English girls’ accents alone.

As the ship departed the guests waved down to a crowd assembled at the dock. That night there was roast chicken for dinner and Mary found the wishbone in her piece. She took it as an omen, telling her she had made the right decision.

‘I thought you should have this,’ says Pa, holding out what looks like a black exercise book. ‘Considering you’re the writer in the family.’

I hold the book and realise it is very old, the lacquer on its cover cracked. The corners of its spine are frayed. I open it to a random page, careful not to harm the brittle paper. It is filled with line after line of perfect cursive–written with the unmistakable flourishes of a fountain pen.

‘It was your great-grandmother’s,’ he explains. ‘It’s her journal from when she came out to Australia. I thought you might write something about it.’

Few relics remain from Mary Burnside. Of all my family she has been surrounded by the greatest mythology. She died before I was born, and what I know of her I know only through story. This journal is a precious fragment of family history.

Mary was tired of talking with the girls in her cabin. She rose early, intending to step out onto the deck, but as she dressed, she was overcome by a swell of nausea and spent the whole day in bed.

A nurse visited Mary in the morning, telling her that only two of the 103 second class passengers had been out of bed the previous day. In the afternoon, Mary made it out of the cabin. On deck she met one of the stowaways, who had now taken work aboard the ship as a stoker down in the engine rooms. The man said his sister was aboard the ship as a second class passenger. She was bound for Australia to meet with her husband.

That night the new moon was reflected perfectly by the sea. It felt like they were sailing across a second sky.

‘It’s her fault I never finished school,’ Pa says. ‘She was always filling my head with stories of adventure. Of Scotland. Of Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robert the Bruce, and William Wallace. There was no room for school.

‘My father was good with his hands,’ he continues. ‘Whenever I was sitting down he would come into the house and get me up fixing fences or moving the cows into a new field. But my mother was the educated member of the family. The only one to finish school.’

Before leaving for Australia, Mary worked as an editor for a local publishing company. With her she brought a collection of books, and frequently ordered new editions from Scotland. On my shelf at home I have the complete works of Oscar Wilde, another heirloom inherited from Mary. As well as books, she passed on her love of the history of her homeland to Pa and to my father, and from him to me. After finishing school, I moved to Scotland to study, turning the arc of migration in full circle.

On Tuesday, the sea shifted from green to blue.

Mary and some others went to the washroom in the morning to do their ironing. There was only one iron so it took some time, but they enjoyed the chance to chat, and looking out at the water they spotted a shark. Later a sailor showed Mary a porpoise. It bounded across the waves, playing in the wake of their ship.

On Wednesday, the heat was unbearable. Mary sat on deck and watched the diggers play football. She drank lime juice and ate oranges with the other women. Wiping at the sweat on her brow she wondered if she would ever have another proper cold drink in her life. Water was always cold in Scotland. She hadn’t known to cherish it at the time.

That morning a sailing ship had passed their boat at full tilt, its deck seeming to tip dangerously close to the water. The Bahia Castillo signalled the yacht and the men aboard raised an unfamiliar flag. Mary wasn’t sure which country they were from, but she thought their craft moved beautifully through the water.

Thursday was a glorious morning. Mary and the girls spotted two more sharks, and another porpoise. The next day, towards evening, it rained briefly. Mary hoped it would last just long enough to break the heat.

‘She never wanted to go back,’ says Pa over breakfast. We are in a Fitzroy café. It is 2016, nearly a century after Mary set foot aboard the Bahia Castillo. I eat my poached eggs and smashed avocado and listen to Pa. ‘I offered to take her. We both did, me and Miles. But she never wanted to go back. I don’t know why. She left behind her parents, four sisters, and who knows how many cousins. They wrote to each other every week. Her parents sent her the newspaper from Edinburgh and she sent them the Yea Standard. But she never went back.’

Mary left Britain in a time of depression. The war left the nation poor and the population shrunken. ‘Everyone lost someone close to them,’ Pa says. ‘It’s just how the war was. If it wasn’t your brother it was your cousin.’

In Australia she found a nation no less stricken by the toll of conflict. Yea was a town of returned soldiers and their families. They met on the weekends and held picnic races. Her husband woke in the night screaming. His terrors would wake the children, and Mary would comfort them as William stood outside, his mind drawn once more to the Somme.

Mary didn’t have time to read. There were too many things to do on board, too many strands of conversations, too many people. She decided to wash her hair. Warm water was hard to come by on the ship but Mary smiled at the steward when she asked him for it and the man relented. Dorothy Bullock, one of the English girls, offered to dry her hair. They sat in the cabin while Mary washed her hair, and afterwards Dorothy rubbed it with a towel. After dinner, Mary and the others held a party in their cabin, inviting some of the diggers. They sat up playing cards and sharing stories of home, and decided to do this regularly.

Pa always tells me that the three happiest moments of Mary’s life occurred when she was living in a canvas tent by the Goulbourn River in the early years of her marriage. William taught her to ride a horse, kill a snake, and swim in the river. The farm on the river was their own private world, shaped by their hands. But life on the Bahia Castillo offered its own freedom.

Mary’s journal presents only a shard of this woman I never knew. It is a glimpse into an in-between time, leaving one family to create another. Aboard the Bahia Castillo Mary was her own person.

Two months after she had left Tilbury docks, Mary packed her bag and a digger carried it for her to the hold. In the morning they would arrive in Melbourne. At supper there was a farewell dinner. Mary retired early with her cabin mates and together they sat up late into the night. They spoke about the last nine weeks in each other’s company, and how sad they were that it all must come to an end.

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Readers can access more of Laurel’s work via Twitter.

Stella Hervey Birrell is an emerging writer and poet living in East Lothian, Scotland. Her first novel, How Many Wrongs make a Mr Right?, was published in 2016 by Crooked Cat Books; she also won the Glasgow Women’s Library Bold Types poetry competition in 2017. Her short pieces and poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Scottish Book Trust’s Nourish eBook and The Ropes and Frangipani journals.

 

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The Book of Wonder

 

Ten years ago, I decided to write a song about step-parenting. About blending a family. Until then, I had followed a well-worn LP groove–verse: what I thought; chorus: of disapproval (from my husband’s ex-wife); an apology-and-retraction middle eight (from us, always from us); followed by a hasty resolution back into the major.

Step-parenting is an under-represented topic in creative work. Apart from in fairy tales, of course. None of which I found helpful, unless you use them as a handy ‘how not to treat your husband’s children’ guide. Don’t favour your biological children, especially when dividing household tasks. Don’t leave them in a forest. Don’t put a hit out on them.

But not ‘don’t write songs about them’. I hesitated. I knew the children well enough to know it was the last thing they would have wanted. Only, I couldn’t hear my own voice anymore. All of those slights, flights and fights–I wanted to place them in another world, blood-let them from my system, layer them over with music. With a song, I could tell the truth, and stay safe. A song doesn’t have to reflect the detail of what it means. I had stopped saying what I meant, over and over again, and I needed somewhere to put all of these penned-in thoughts.

Songwriting is something my husband and I do together. Me on words, him on music. He sat and strummed some chords, and when he started picking down an arpeggio, we knew we were getting closer.

I sang about the tension, the taut string of differences of opinion. I sang about the children, their astonishing imaginations, how they spoke with us. There were plenty of bad days. A step-parent has to gather up evidence for being a part of something piece by piece, like tiny white pebbles. Other times, everything drew together, the strings harmonising, and we were an entity, a collective. A family.

I sang a celebration: we had created a new, if fragile, unit. I wanted to Morse it out there. It was hard to blend this family. But we were trying. And there was love wrapped up in the music, as well as in the shared car journeys and muddy walks across freshly cut fields–like the time my husband’s daughter and my husband took some loose leaf poems I had stuffed into a tatty blue lever arch file and made them into a neat little book. They gave it to me for our second anniversary. Something I could hold. Proof. A road map through the years of tentative, distant, unspoken love.

Something I could write a song about.

For years, the lyrics remained distant–‘she’ instead of ‘me’–as if I were asking for a friend. I weaved in and out, liking the song, then hating it. It wasn’t changing much, but my feelings about it were directed by how I felt about the kids. Hadn’t seen them for a month? Defriended on Facebook? Oh, I hate that song. Recent visit, a good one? A phone conversation, instigated by the child who is now a teenager, and has chosen to call? This song rocks. It became part of our band’s repertoire, but I continued to avoid it. ‘It’s too quiet,’ I said. ‘It won’t work in that venue.’  This was when the children were around less: their own lives had taken over anything we had to offer. I continued to avoid putting the song into a set list. Eventually our bass player told me:

‘When you don’t like singing it, that’s when you should push on with it. Keep playing it. At some point, you’ll come to a new place with it. A better place.’

I started editing again, in rehearsal and on the rare occasions it was played: a word here, a phrase of music there. We arranged it for two, three, five, and then six, as our band grew to the exact same size as our blended family. Bass, keyboard, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, drums, me. Husband, son, daughter, two more children, me.

Then I realised it was time to hold the song, not keep it at arm’s length. Enough time had gone by. It was OK to sing, and feel, and–for God’s sake!–be myself. I stopped asking ‘for a friend’. It transformed from an alright song to a good song with three words: I, me and my.

 

Now, I am unpicking the connection between kids and song. The lyrics are historical: it’s about children, and I call them ‘children’ when I want to annoy them. They are nineteen and twenty. We don’t see a lot of each other, but that’s OK. They know where I am, and for the most part, they don’t need me.

In the right venue, the band and I play Book of Wonder. I open my mouth to sing it, and I genuinely think it is beautiful. It is beautiful in the muddled way my family is beautiful. It is one of the best things I have ever written, and it’s not a coincidence that I have redrafted it for ten years.

It’s not a coincidence that family lasts forever. Sometimes it takes that long. Sometimes it takes longer than forever, for everything to turn out alright.

Ten years ago, I wrote a song, while I tried to blend a family. I write it, blend it still.

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You can find more of Stella’s work via her website and through her Twitter, @atinylife140.

Gina Maya is the creator of Edinburgh Trance, a website comprised of articles on cinema, books, theatre, and her life in Edinburgh. Gina has also published a novel, Utopia in Danzig, and completed an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Over the course of her life and career, Gina has lived in countless countries and cultures, which have informed both her fiction and nonfiction writing. In an article on her website, Gina describes herself as follows: “First of all, I’m me, made up of lots of pieces. Gender is the very important interface I use to engage within society. I sometimes think I’m trans, and other times non-binary, and perhaps most of the time I don’t stop to think about my gender at all. There are, in fact, several elements to my personality, varying by the second throughout the day.”

 In this interview, The Ogilvie’s Assistant Editor Angela Hicks speaks with Gina about her writing–fiction, essays, and analysis–and asks where these fields intertwine, as well as what lessons Gina has learned from her writing career thus far.

 

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You set up your website, GinaMaya.co.uk, in 2016. How did you decide what topics and areas to cover?

I originally overloaded. I thought I would cover a broad sweep of the art scene in Edinburgh: music, theatre, books and cinema. Then I realized the only thing I could afford to do, given how broke I was becoming, was go on a weekly trip to the cinema. It evolved quickly after that into the two things that I do in my free time: I exist, and I watch movies. So what emerged was diary and cinema.

Having said that, for one month of the year, when the Edinburgh Festival kicks in, my theatre reviews emerge like that desert flower, the Rose of Jericho. Then die again.

 

Did you have much experience of writing reviews, personal essays and other nonfiction pieces prior to your website? 

No, but I’d just finished my Masters in Creative Writing and it was really a question of ‘now what?’ I wanted to keep writing, and I thought it might be useful to keep an online diary about my transitioning, as I’d only come out as trans some five months earlier. Reading other people’s online accounts of transitioning had been useful to me, so that was a motivation.

 

I imagine it can be daunting and draining to write so prolifically, particularly when the subject matter is your own life. Do you feel writing about your personal experiences helps you, either as a writer or just as a person?

It’s interesting, on the issue of it helping me. When I started transitioning through the National Health Service, I thought I would have counselling to help me adjust psychologically. But that hasn’t transpired at all. Perhaps the NHS don’t have the resources, or don’t think I need it. But I think writing about stuff does help, although I don’t write about everything–there are one or two no-go areas that I might write in a private diary, just for me. I wonder if I hadn’t written my diary posts, if I’d be loaded with more mental baggage, more anger or bitterness.

On whether it’s helped me as a writer, I think recording stuff is useful. I remember occasionally writing something down around 2014-2015, on feelings of being in the closet. I was able to return to these perspectives on the Creative Writing course. I hope my current website posts can be useful to me when/if I write another novel.

 

On a more specific note, I notice that Tintin pops up in both your novel and on your website (the chapter “The Killers and the Wrath of Tintin” and the article Is Tintin Transgender? respectively). Is there something particular which draws you to that character? 

The Tintin thing goes way back; I grew up loving the storybooks and did wonder about Tintin’s dark side, and imagined a ‘dark’ Tintin adventure focusing on the possibility of Tintin being transgender. I explored the idea in the novel, then a few years later thought it wouldn’t hurt if I returned to the idea in a posting.

So that was something quite specific to my life, a gentle obsession. Gentle obsessions: I’m sure I have several of them, appearing in my conversation, or mused about in a diary posting, or played out in a novel. My novel is full of gentle obsessions–I think that’s what drove it.

 

Let’s talk a little more about your novel. When did you first begin writing Utopia in Danzig?

 A long time ago. Around the end of 2007, I began writing a script about a magical hotel where the guests never left. It was meant to be performed, a kind of dark comedy. At some point around 2009 it had become another obsession, not so gentle this time, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I turned it into novel form. From there, I wrote whenever I had the time and had it finished by around 2015. That’s a long time; from when it became a novel that’s six years of off-and-on writing. Whatever the novel’s merits, I guess it’s where I learned how to write prose in a much tighter manner than would otherwise be the case.

 

You self-published the book in 2016. How did you find that process?

It’s a kind of wilderness. I tried to do the right things. I got hold of The Writer’s Yearbook and looked up the agents who might be interested. I wrote to about twenty-four, and got rejected every time. I think at that stage I was ready to self-publish just to move on. I turned to a professional editor who gave me lots of feedback and nice support, which looking back was obviously the thing I should have done first. I got in touch with people to design the cover and the text layout, and finally uploaded on Amazon.

I have a section about it on my website, but otherwise I haven’t marketed it. I don’t know how I feel about it, and haven’t read it since the upload. It records a time in my life that I wanted to put out there, but I don’t have enough confidence in it to do anything more.

 

When you finished the book, did you feel that there were characters and concepts from it which you wanted to explore further?

Yes, originally. The country in which it took place was fictional and the way it finished was open-ended. I did imagine future scenarios. Part of me would love to return to the main characters. But the adventure was so surreal and layered in fantasy–as a means of expressing myself in a way I couldn’t in real life. Now I’m out, maybe I should write in a less surreal, fantastical way. I don’t know. I’ll only know when I write the next novel, but on my Creative Writing course, after I’d finished writing the novel, I’m conscious that I didn’t touch surrealism or fantasy, although I love those genres.

 

You’ve drawn inspiration from some of the places you’ve lived and from some of the people you’ve known in your writing; at the same time, the story’s setting is distinct from our world, and it exists in an alternate history. How much of Utopia in Danzig is based off of lived experience, versus imagination?

It’s based in a fictional European country which is an amalgam of Poland, Russia and Germany, and I have lived and worked in all those countries. I felt confident as such, but in making it a Jewish State, I wasn’t confident. It was actually my way of writing about being Welsh, from a Welsh-language community. I researched Yiddish culture, but emotionally, it was really about being from a culturally embattled minority, and of having a mixture of pride and defensiveness on the one hand, but also a yearning to not be involved in the survival of a culture that seems always to be struggling for its existence.

 

As you were writing fiction, were you also writing nonfiction like personal essays, or did you ramp up your personal writing when you started the website?

My fiction acted as personal essays. I convey quite personal stuff when I write creatively, either literally or emotionally. I also think writing fantasy can be deeply personal. In some ways, the website feels less personal. I don’t reflect much with the postings; I write one draft as a reflection on something, then upload. I think they’re the literary equivalent of busking: something comes into my head and I write without too much reflection or creativity. I wish I spent more time on the website uploads, but if I did, I might stop writing regularly. I guess that’s the trade-off.

 

True–you clearly spend a lot of time writing between reviews, fiction, non-fiction, and your doctorate studies. Do you find it hard to switch off from wanting to write or review?

It’s funny that you ask that; I had a Christmas break of not posting anything, partly due to circumstances, but I’ve found it difficult to get back into the swing of things. I’m not sure that I want to write on my site in the way I’ve been doing forever. Answering your questions like this, it does make one reflect on the future. So to answer your question directly, perhaps the switching off is happening now, as I’m writing this. I’m sure I’ll continue using the website, but perhaps it’s time for another project?

 

Speaking of new projects, do you have any writing planned for 2018 which you’re able to talk about now, or is it all still being kept secret?

There are no secrets, no big unveiling. A few days ago I applied to be mentored and funded for a literary project relating to LGBT identity, and it would be great if I got it. As with this interview, it made me reflect on how I haven’t tried to write creative fiction since 2016. I think that will change soon. I can feel another gentle obsession developing.

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You can find more of Gina’s writing on her website, GinaMaya.co.uk. You can follow her on Twitter; her novel Utopia in Danzig is available for Kindle.