SCOTTISH POETRY LIBRARY POETRY AMBASSADOR 2021/2022

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry-ambassadors-2021/?fbclid=IwAR0ehGbUBdXHj74qWLI9750GLXUJcjjWeiWgTcC8rDmizc1FObIpq2iPKN

Very pleased to be one of the four Scottish Poetry Library's 2021-2022 Poetry Ambassadors, responsible for promoting poetry in the South of Scotland.

Looking forward to working with my fellow ambassadors and SPL over the next year.

The SPL’s Poetry Ambassadors scheme is intended to cover the whole of Scotland, moving beyond the central belt to take in the entire sweep of the country, its people and its languages.

Link above for further details of the post.

Tom Murray is a full-time writer, mentor and editor based in Dumfries and Galloway. A widely published poet, he is also a fiction writer and playwright. He has mentored over 60 writers across his many residences, which have included Scottish Book Trust Reader in Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries, Creative Writing Fellow to Tyne and Esk Writers, and Clackmannanshire Writer in Residence. He is currently Open Book Lead Reader in the Scottish Borders. He was an editor of the Scottish Borders based literary magazine, The Eildon Tree for 11 years. His publications include:  The Future is Behind You (poetry), Sins of the Father (play), The Clash (play) and Out of My Head (fiction).

THE PERMANENT ROOM--A short story.

 

The librarian stared across the desk at him. ‘I have to ask sir.  Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ Said John.

‘If you could please speak the words of finality sir?’

Walking through the rainy streets, and up the forty-nine steps to the library entrance, pushing open the heavy oak doors, John hadn’t paused or hesitated once.  He had woken up that morning finally sure.

He didn’t hesitate now. ‘My name is John Grant and I walk freely to the Permanent Room.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said the librarian. ‘You have chosen a book?’  

John nodded and said.  ‘Art history.’

The librarian looked pleased. ‘This way sir.’

John chose his book from the shelves, Paintings of Vincent Van Gogh, then followed the librarian towards the Permanent Room.

The main concourse of the library was quiet, but John knew the various rooms would be full no matter what time of day.  As they passed the History Room the door opened and a man, approximately the same age as John, emerged. They knew each other but neither could remember where from or the others name. It did not matter. They had books in common.

John stopped to the annoyance of the librarian.  ‘I’ve been there,’ said John nodding towards the book The Wars of Napoleon gripped in the man’s hand.  The man’s hand shook slightly, his face flushed, eyes struggling to focus on John as if a million and one images were vying for attention.

‘It’s my favourite,’ said the man. ‘Waterloo, what a mess though. I don’t know why I keep going back.’

John knew why for he remembered the man now.  He worked in the bank and had advised John about different types of mortgages.

‘I was at the Peninsular War in Spain,’ John said, as the librarian coughed impatiently behind him. ‘Saw Napoleon himself. Or they said it was him. He was away of in the distance.’

The man stepped closer and whispered.  ‘He nearly ran me over with his horse.’ His face flushed even more, and he was smiling.

It had been a mistake going to the Peninsular War John had discovered.  The life of an infantry man was no joke.  John had cut his visit short, far too much blood and guts for his liking.  He needed somewhere to be truly happy and not numb the daily pain by witnessing others even sadder than him. He didn’t like what he had become secretly smiling at others misfortune. 

‘What room are you in today?’ asked the man.

The librarian coughed another impatient cough and John indicated towards the Permanent Room, and John said.  ‘Must get going.’

The man nodded.  ‘I’ve never found a place for me. Not yet. I’m happy for you.’    

The sincere tone took John by surprise.  He nodded towards the book. The man shook his head. ‘Okay to visit.’  The man attempted a smile. ‘Better get back to the grind I suppose.’ He then turned and walked slowly to replace his book on its shelf and headed even slower towards the library exit.

‘Sir?’ said the librarian.

‘Sorry,’ said John.

‘It’s just that I’m on a break soon,’ said the librarian.

Once through the door there were ninety-nine winding breath bursting steps up up to the Permanent Room itself.  The librarian slowly made his way up the steps, every now and then glancing back at John.  This was deliberate as was the winding steps.  A final test and chance to change your mind.

John didn’t.

The Permanent Room itself was circular with a glass dome that looked towards the heavens. Far above the streak of an already gone aeroplane. A raised leather couch sat alone in the middle of the room.

‘The book sir.’ 

John handed the librarian the book. 

‘If you will sir,’ said the librarian indicating the couch.

John climbed onto the couch and lay back staring up through the glass dome.  Clouds you imagine had emptied themselves of all the rain in the world, draining the dregs to drop rhythmically onto the glass dome. 

The Librarian glanced at the page in the book John had chosen. ‘You do realise that this will only work if the character remains anonymous?’ John nodded.  ‘This not being an unnamed character in fiction, research might uncover the identity of this person in the future. You know what they are like, these scholars. Especially with Mr Van Gogh. If that were to be the case…’

‘I understand,’ said John. ‘I will disappear.’

The Librarian sighed. ‘It’s just…This room used to be so dusty with lack of use. Now…

‘I am sure,’ said John.

The Librarian nodded. ‘I commend you on your chosen page. If ever there was a page to live permanently in, you have chosen well.’

John smiled. ‘Have you ever thought about…?’

The librarian said. ‘Close your eyes please sir.’

John did and the librarian began to read from the page.

‘One anonymous source that has come down to us, from a fragment of a letter of the time, is how this person would witness Vincent walking into the night, easel under his arm.  It was a quick urgent walk as if, to quote the letter, ‘the stars above would scatter if he did not capture them immediately.’

The Librarian’s voice began to fade, and John opened his eyes and there in front of him was the Yellow House and Vincent Van Gogh emerging into the night with his easel under his arm.  Vincent hurried straight past John as if not noticing he was there.  John followed close behind and the rest of the page ran though his mind in his own voice.

‘Vincent worked quickly, every now and then staring for a time up at the glorious stars. I must admit I sneaked as close as I could to witness what he had painted. ‘If you want to see properly.’ Vincent said, ‘stop skulking about.’  I hesitated but he urged me forward and I stood at his shoulder, and the canvas was a glorious mirror to the glory of the stars. I admit I had never properly looked at the stars until that moment. ‘Well?’ Vincent snapped. Before I could answer he said. ‘It is…Not what was in my mind.’ He went to rip the canvas in half.  ‘Please Vincent, don’t.’ He looked at me.  ‘You know my name?’  ‘Yes.’ I said.  He looked at the canvas. ‘I will keep it. Now if you don’t mind sir,’ said Vincent and turned back to his work. ‘Can I watch Mr Van Gogh?’  He thought for a moment. ‘Not at my shoulder, and not a sound.’

John sat on the small hill overlooking where Vincent worked. It was damp as if the rain had recently stopped.  He took out the paper and pen from his jacket and wrote the words that would make it into a book one hundred years later.  John didn’t care about that though.  He had finally found his own page, and where he was meant to be, staring up at the starry sky with wonder as if he were newly born.

CHANGES

                                         

It was getting more difficult to change the older Joe got.   The first change as a teenager was straight forward and thinking back on it now, he’d hardly noticed it was happening till it happened. It had started to become more difficult in his forties. He’d hardly slept the night of the change and when he’d woken it had taken a whole day to recover.  His fifties change had taken three days to recover. Of course, once the renewed energy had kicked, he soon forget the lying on the floor the whole room spinning and every muscle stretching anew over his bones.

Now in his sixties the memory came back, and he wondered if it was worthwhile.  I mean what else had he to do in life?   What did he need the renewed energy for? 

He had almost decided not to change when the familiar restlessness kicked in.  Maybe there was still life in him yet?

After the restlessness came the familiar shivers and the feeling of his skin shaking loose from his bones.  The ache along his shoulders and down his arms and sides, the stooping and the slowing of the walk closely followed.  His joints next, beginning as always with his fingers, and then of course his toes. His knee and elbow joints though always the worst and this time he wanted to scream with the pain.

His face was always the last to begin to ache, his teeth, his jawline and finally the headaches.  When the headaches came it was time to sleep.

It took him a long time but eventually as the dawn began to rise, he drifted off to wake suddenly to the sound of the church bells announcing nine o clock.  For a moment he thought he had got off lightly but then the room began to spin faster and faster.  He told himself not to move and go with the room. After an age, the room began to slow, and he took his first look at his new skin.  It was bubbling in places struggling to settle. 

He forced himself to sit up turned towards his old skin lying on the bed. All the times he’d changed this was the part he never got used to.  The old skin had begun to deflate and would soon be flat as a cardboard cut-out.  Only then did Joe make the mind shift that he had been born anew once again. 

His new skin itched and ached, but the bubbling seemed less now. With every renewal it took longer for his new skin to settle on his bones.  Never the same fit as his younger skin had been. 

Struggling to stand he examined himself in the mirror.  Not bad. The skin still aged of course but tighter and no longer grey and tired looking.  It would see him through whatever time he had left.  Not many he knew changed beyond their sixties.  That was okay. A last shot at life that’s all he wanted. 

Joe rolled his previous skin up and fitted it into the disposal company envelope.  Everything was so organised these days.  One phone call and his old self picked up and taken away.    

It took a week for the skin to properly settle.  The occasional bubble here and there especially if he grew tired.  Joe could cope with that though.  It was good to have energy again. Things to do, what he didn’t know.  That didn’t matter, it was the possibility that mattered.

THREE FAVOURITE WRITERS ET ALL.

 

To choose only three writers that have had, and continue to have, an influence on me, has been an interesting challenge.   I decided, despite being in the main a playwright, not to choose any playwrights.  It would be nigh on impossible to choose three playwrights as they all bring so much to the party.  In terms not only of story and ideas but technical—the practical application of stage craft.  Those elements fill a lot of my creative mind regarding writing plays.

So to take a step back from my day to day process and three prose writers, all cracking storytellers, who continue to give clear direction to my own writing.  In the form of ambition and a restless creativity, 

Robert Louis Stevenson is my first choice.  A restless man and storyteller, who worked across what are now labelled genres, children’s; historical; travel books and much more.  I imagine he thought of them as simply ways of telling a story.  I love all the classic tales:  Treasure Island and Kidnapped but it is the short stories I constantly return to. To me some of his best writing is to be found in such tales as The Beach of Falesa and Markheim.  Two very different stories but a mark of how Stevenson was not only a constant traveller but a constant creative explorer.

I only started reading Angela Carter a few years back but from the off I felt a kinship to her writing and view of the world.  A world rich in imagination and monsters.  Before the stories it was probably the film of The Company of Wolves where I first encountered her world.  A way of looking at the emotions of the world as far removed from what is termed realism as you can imagine.  I have always thought that realism deals in the main with the surface of things, surrealism, the fairy tale structure explored and expanded by Carter gets to the core of the human condition.  Book wise I started The Bloody Chamber.  Not versions of fairy-tales but challenging preconceptions about them including how women are represented in them.

From my first reading of J G Ballard I was hooked.  He explores a totally different world from Angela Carter.  He filters a recognizable world and twists it into illuminating shapes uncovering desires, fears, the fluid reality that lurks within.   The Drowned World.  was the first story I read and I go back to it over and over again.  It doesn`t flinch in its telling.  

DUMFRIES PLACE

I only moved to Dumfries in August last year, but The River Nith in the Whitesands has very quickly became one of my favourite places.  I have written several poems about that stretch of water but the inspiration is more to do with clarifying effect it has on my creative mind.  The waterfall section is my favourite. I understand that the seagulls are not that popular with some but they bring fascination to me as they, and other birds, sit and play on the precipice of the waterfall.  They display no fear and maybe that is what draws me to this spot.  To push on, explore, like the writers mentioned above, like the water down the waterfall, go with power, flow and energy of the narrative.    

PANDEMIC COMMENT

I am lucky.  I have worked at home for over twenty years, mostly on my own, so I am used to life indoors and my own company.  I am used to shutting things out and creating an internal landscape from which to work.  Maybe that is why I don`t   tweet,  facebook or write directly the current pandemic.  It might in the course of things emerge creatively further down the line.  Sometimes I feel the pressure to write about it but it would be false if I did.  I write what I write. 

I am fascinated though by the writing produced whether poetry, plays, or social media.  Whatever medium the writing takes these outpourings will be invaluable in years to come.  A million and more plague journals all around the world.  In the past there were limited viewpoints   about life lived during a plague or troubled time, or any time really. As informative as these accounts often were they were still limited in their perspective.  So much of the past is silent. 

Now we have so many competing and contradictory at times viewpoints, many a time from the same source. Maybe too much I don`t know but better that silence I believe. 

 

 

 

I WOULD BE ME.

 

The park wasn`t his of course, he was only its gardener, but since he had begun, he had worked to bring perfect colour to the flower beds.  Save for the last thing it was now exactly how he wanted it.  It smelled like home.

His mother had been happy in her garden. 

`Her little island of joy. ` She used to call it.

He touched at his hair under his cap and watched the last of the visitors leave the park.     

He`d said one day.  `I`m going to be a flower when I grow up. The most colourful flower in the garden. ` His mother had stopped then and turned to smile at him.   His mother`s smile the rarest of flowers.

` And what flower would you be? ` She`d asked.

` I would be me. ` He`d said.

She had returned to her pruning.

He made his quick way to the largest of the islands of flower beds, which mapped the park.

The soil was soft from the recent rains, and he easily prepared it for planting like he`d watched his mother do so many times.

He planted himself in the soft earth in the centre of the flower bed.

He removed his cap to reveal his hair all orange, yellow and green.      

` I would be me. ` He smiled as the rain came again and he bloomed at last.

 

 

THE LAND OF WALLS

 

Mary`s face tight, the words wrenching her grinding teeth apart, prising open her vice like lips.  ` Is this the Wall of Resentment? `

The Stonemason began to mix the Sand and Clay.

Mary at the Stonemason`s face.  ` Look at me.  I`m not invisible. `

The Stonemason continued to stir, sprinkling lime into the mix.

Mary`s face pulsed. She stabbed under each of her eyes with her index finger. `Wrinkles. And here. ` She lowered her head.  ` I dye my hair and still it shows through. `   Mary`s rapid breath on the Stonemason`s face. ` That `little madam` voice of hers. You know what she had the cheek to say? `My mother just accepted it when she went grey. Not that you`re as old as my mum, Mary!  Just saying. ` Just saying!!  She hardly wears any make-up the little... ` 

Mary screaming.  ` I`m not old.  I can`t be old. It`s not fair.  Smiley smiley everybody loves her.  ` She’s a breath of fresh in the office don`t you think? `

The Stonemason mixed in the Iron Oxide.

` No I don`t think. ` She shouted into the Stonemason`s face. ` I was once a breath… ` 

Finally Magnesia added.

` I was.  ` Said Mary.

Mary turned and left the way she came as the Stonemason placed the finished brick in the wall.

The wall shuddered for a moment, and a crack scarred the wall above the Stonemason`s head.

The Stonemason checked the base of the Wall of Resentment.  The bricks were vibrating with the weight.  As always the Wall of Resentment would be the first to go and then the Wall of Anger in the next valley. Others in the valleys beyond would tumble like dominoes.   

The Stonemason waited as John approached.

John`s face tight, the words wrenching his grinding teeth apart, prising open his vice like lips. ` Is this the Wall of Resentment? `

The Stonemason began to mix the Sand and Clay.

John at the Stonemason`s face. ` It`s not fair.  Why me? `

 

 

 

 

DO GHOSTS EVER DIE?

 A very short story I wrote a few years ago. I used to work in the textile industry. This was written after I left driving past a factory (not the one I worked in) in the process of being demolished. A workman was sitting eating his lunch. I imagined all the other workmen through the years when the factory was a factory.

 

DO GHOSTS EVER DIE?

The man sat on the loading bay in front of the rotting corpse of the factory, that rose fully four storeys above him.  All about him the bulldozers cracked the factory like an egg, for the silent workmen in helmets and masks to fill lorry after lorry with the dust strewn remains of the buildings.    

The man did not have a hat. The man did not have a mask. The man carefully unfolded the package that lay beside him and began to eat his carefully prepared lunch.

Dust swirled, and bricks tumbled, and wood cracked, but the man sat, and ate, and wiped his face free from the sweat of the mornings work.

A sudden tilt of the head back towards the factory, and a disappointed face, and the man rose and stretched, then folded his carefully prepared sandwiches away.

He looked out at the small crowd that had gathered on the hillside opposite the factory, that watched and winced with every whip of the bulldozer against the crumbling building.

A sudden shout and the workmen turned to gather at the safety of the gate. Then the sudden gathering of noise and the man walked deep into the bones of the factory that crumpled to dust, and he was gone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE REMOVAL MAN

 

Some people, maybe most people, you can’t see their younger selves when old, or older. 

Not the removal man.  Everything about him, the way he rocked as he moved as if listening to some long forgotten (to most people) song; the constant jokes and stories; the whispered confidences; you were his mate as soon as he met you.

You could imagine him being the centre of a teenage group, not gang, the restless one, the one that drove the others on, kept them on their toes, filled their space with energy.

I could see him as a Mod.  Not the sixties variety but the seventies and eighties. 

‘You’re a fan of the Jam.’ He asks.

I nodded and thought removal men must get so many glimpses into other people’s lives.  The sadness, or maybe the joy, of leaving one home, the joy, or maybe the sadness, of moving to another.  The books you read, the furniture you’ve sat in, the bed you’ve slept in. 

Also the music you like and love.

‘The Jam.’

Paul Weller guitar and vocals; Bruce Foxton bass and vocals; and Rick Buckler Drums. 

Temporary connections are made over the packing of lives into a box to be transported elsewhere.

He holds up ‘In the City.’

‘Can never box this and put in the attic mate.’

I hadn’t mentioned putting anything in the attic. Maybe his mind transported on the magic music carpet to another place and time.

Here comes the proof with the Mod dance in our living room, and even though no music is being played, the record player already packed, it’s loud and clear, the jerky rhythm in his movement, the joy and energy in his face.

Where is he?

‘Taking over the dance floor mate.’

I hadn’t asked out loud but he’d tapped into the unspoken question.

‘You can shove that Disco crap. This was music.’

I imagine the gang all in a circle, arms tight, dancing with their elbows, feet stamping to the rhythm.  This was a boys only circle, lost in the moment, not even aware of any admiring female glances.  The pick-up lines would come later.

He sings ‘Sounds from the Street.’

‘Sounds from the street, sounds so sweet

What’s my name?

It hurts my brain to think.’

When I say sing I mean shout!  And suddenly I’m in his group dancing and sing/shouting like on the middle of the dance floor, lyrics bellowed forming word clouds above our heads, there for all to see amongst the packed dance floor.

When was the last time I had listened, never mind danced, to The Jam?

On my own magic music carpet now.

Where you taking me music?

 

A cottage just outside Galashiels when I was at the college.  A place I rented with another couple of students, far enough away from civilization to blast the music to the hills, and dance like there was only that moment.

Back before grey hair and jerky non rhythmic movement of age and too little exercise.  The present drags me back.

` Mate you a bit out of puff there! `

I was.

He laughs, not in a harsh way, on his way back out to the van.

I wait for the next half forgotten boxed memory.

MY FIRST LIBRARY

A short reminisce about my first library  that was published on the Cilips website in support of their campaign #librariesareessential

Apart from the school library the first library I joined was Airdrie Library.  I would like to claim it was to explore further my love of Shakespeare, or delve into ancient philosophy.

More prosaic reason:  to help me, so I naively believed, talk to girls.  My defence is that I was fourteen at the time, and the phrase `wouldn`t say boo to a goose` springs to mind.  I loved football and sports in general, and my reading was comics especially Roy of the Rovers.  Still love Roy of the Rovers, received an annual of stories as a Christmas present a few years back. I can`t remember back then ever, apart from in school, reading a book.

Airdrie library is a magnificent building with an observatory as part of the building.  I didn`t know that at the time and for a good few years after. Rather than study the stars I had the more pressing need to study words to impress the girls. Naturally the first books taken out were mostly eight hundred pages of close type.  A lot of words in type barely able to read without a Sherlock Holmes type magnifying glass.  Dickens was an early choice. Barnaby Rudge if I remember right the first novel I took out the library.  I got as far as the blurb and a drop jawed flick through the endless pages.  Not then but Dickens is now one of my favourite authors. Reading likes aren`t always instant but can grow with you. I also took out Victor Hugo`s Les Miserables mainly for the fact that it included some poems in French and English translation.  I imagined it casually falling out of my school bag.

` You speak French? ` She said.

` Oui. ` I casually replied.

It stayed in my imagination as I never had the confidence, or good sense prevailed, to try it.  It took me a good while but I did read Les Miserables. 

I still love a hardback full weighted book.  My bookshelves groan with them.

Even though I never did learn how to talk to girls in French, joining the library was the start of my discovery of a world I barely knew existed.

I had always been a dreamer, making up stories inside my head.  That walk through the library doors was the beginning of the realisation that I could write my own stories.  I did and eventually became a full time writer, after many years working in a textile factory.

There are many other reasons to enter a library alongside taking out books.

Company; information; the road to confidence; escape into another world.

I always think of the library as like the Tardis.   So much bigger on the inside than out.  Once you travel in a library you are never the same person again but an expansion of yourself.  A library doesn`t belong to anyone or exist in the now, but to everyone and is timeless

Tom Murray Writer

Scottish Book Trust Reader In Residence to Scottish Borders Libraries 2013-2014

I CAN ONLY BE ME—NO LABELS PLEASE.

 Why do I write?    

Good question?  Or irrelevant?

Haven`t made my mind up yet but here we go having a think about it by asking another question.

Who am I?

This?

Tom Murray was born in the village of Chapelhall which is a couple of miles from Airdrie, and fifteen or so from Glasgow. He worked in the Textile industry for a number of years in East Lothian and then in the Scottish Borders. After many years living in in the Scottish Borders recently moved to Dumfries.  He is married with two sons.

 

Or maybe

Tom Murray is a playwright, poet and fiction writer. His recent plays have been widely performed, his stories and poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies in Scotland and further afield.  He was co-editor of the Eildon Tree magazine from 2000-2011

I might be?

Tom Murray likes football and tennis (watching, the days of playing long since passed).  Coffee and cake.  He loves reading, and a good murder mystery featuring a disgruntled detective with a disastrous home life, especially if teamed with an enthusiastic rookie who is everything they were before turning cynical.

That last part about the detective I`m exaggerating but the truth is sometimes I do like those programmes and sometimes they annoy me.

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer. 

Sorted?  Do you know me now? Can you see all of me, or the above in my writings?  

Is the above the all of me? 

No it isn’t and I recognize some of me in the above.  Truth is still discovering who me, is!

How to do that through the writing?

Write what you know?  

Never sure of that as writing credo.  I understand the basis of it to write about your direct experience adding a dose of imagination and storytelling editing to distance it from straight memoir.

If I don`t know all of me how do I know what I know? 

This is why I don`t believe that memoir, autobiography or biography strictly exist in the space advertised.  No such thing as a ‘true’ story but a version from a particular angle still edited like any story told. Memoir to me is a question not an answer. 

Not saying the facts aren’t correct but there is always interpretation and that interpretation comes from emotion as well as intellect, and of course always after the fact, and with all the other history since the time of the facts described.

So I would rather write to discover what I haven`t discovered I know yet! And then question that knowledge.  Use my imagination to create a character who is complex and whose actual reality is shifting all the time even if they don`t acknowledge it. Characters are not me but built from my knowledge drawn from direct experience, vicariously through others, films, TV, books, in fact everything I have ever seen, heard or felt.

My plays and stories may not be about me but they come from me, and not any outside or spiritual mystical process.

Place:  I do not believe in place.  Reading about Brion Gysin at the moment and he is described as a foreigner in every land.  I feel that and am fine with it. 

I write in many ways to escape place, to disappear as an artist into the art, as Joyce`s description of the artist in Portrait of an Artist. To me that means disappearing from the potted biography of yourself.  To escape a singular defined identity free to explore the multitudes that is lived life.

I used to live in a house with a spectacular view.  Visitors commented on it all the time, and if they knew I was a writer assumed it would be a point of inspiration for me.

When I was alone I pulled the curtains so I didn`t see the view.  The landscape I needed was inside my head and consisted of all the landscapes I had witnessed and processed via walks, and visits, and holidays, through reading, movies and TV and other folk`s descriptions.

If I do have a preference it is for industrial landscapes rather than hills and glens.  It might have come from the fact that my father worked, and then owned a factory, and then I worked for many years in one.  I look for stories and find them where people are, and still are in their absence in a forgotten and desolate industrial complex. I don`t look for defined beauty but where the stories are to me.  If part of me inhabits these places as an emotional memory that is fine.  Like the example of the TV detective comment above, some days I`m drawn to this emotional memory other days I`m not.

My imaginative emotional landscape shifts and grows all the time.  That`s one of the reasons I write—to explore truthfully and without judgment that shifting landscape.

I believe this type of landscape is where people truly live daily but it is difficult to pin down.  I don`t need to pin it down.  I love the ebb and flow of it.  I appreciate the places I have lived, and where I was born and brought up, but they are each only a changing part of me. 

Does the need for an identifiable place in fiction come with age? Is that why it is assumed that fantasy and science fiction are the preserve mainly of the young?  We have no actual home only thoughts but in the end the need to believe we have is emotionally strong especially as the actual end comes into view.

Subject for a play I think? 

Magritte`s painting This is not a Pipe.

It is not a pipe; it is a painting of a pipe.

One of my poems My Father.

It is not my father it is a poem about a father. 

To summarise I`m male, working class Scottish from the west coast,  worked in a factory for number of years while writing all the time, and since 1999 have been a professional full time writer.

I am male but a lot of my characters are female because I write from emotions and everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am working class but I write from the emotions everyone feels the same emotions of fear, anger, and joy.

I am Scottish but I write…

I want to go on and discover what I know, which I`ll never do because every day more is added. I`m fine with that.

Labels:  Male, Working Class, Scottish, husband, father, son, brother, cousin and on and on.

My writing can contain them all and none of them.   I can write realistic stories with a father the main character one day, a mother the next, or surreal stories of falling into your own head or waking up as a shadow.  I can write both types of story one after the other. 

No labels please, I can only be me.  Whoever that is.

 

THE PUDDLE

A wee short story 

 On the first day I never noticed, why would you notice a puddle after a torrent of rain?

On the second day with the rain sun chased to another place, there it was.  It lay directly under an overflow pipe, so I assumed, or my logical brain assumed that was the cause and decided to ignore what my eyes knew, that the puddle was a perfect circle.

On the third day the sun still shone, the overflow refused to drip, and my brain agreed with my eyes.  Looking down into the puddle I saw nothing, and nothing reflected back.  Puddles do reflect don`t they?  I googled, they do.

On the fourth day I decided what I had really decided the day before.  I wouldn`t call the council, or the local university to investigate this....Discovery.  For that`s what it was, my discovery, and in a world where every corner of the globe paths have already been trod, is there anything left to be explored?  Even space the so called final frontier, is it?  Aren`t we primed for an eternal nothing or planets waiting patiently for our arrival?

On the fifth day I stood poised at the edge of the puddle, foot dangling over its surface.  I dipped my toe and watched the puddle lap my shoe, tried not to think of the possible dangers, but only the unknown possibilities of never witnessed before lands.  My shoe submerged further should have hit the path underneath, but nothing.

I pulled my foot back, my shoe quickly as dry as my mouth.

On the sixth day I lay on my bed for the whole of the morning, then with a sudden rush, and almost head over heels down the stairs, I rushed outside.  I was ready. 

The puddle was gone.

On the seventh day I lay half awake, half asleep on the couch, TV rolling around the clock in the corner.  I glanced back and forth, slept, and glanced and both my brain and eye saw as one.

Breaking News:  Police confirm they are investigating claims that a woman vanished, witnesses insist, after jumping into puddle.

 

 

THE HOUSE OF SLEEP

 

The opening of a series of interlinked stories.

               

A living room quiet except for the buzz of many TV`s chronicling the rise and fall of governments, disaster and joy, the lives of the God famous forgotten like Ozymandias in death.

Still except for the silent rhythmic exhale of breath throughout the house.  A woman late twenties, crepe full length Victorian dress embroidered with roses lay on her back, arm draped down the side of a couch, hand tapping as if playing a piano in the still air.  

On the chair by the drawn curtained window a roman soldier, sword at the ready across his chest, helmet as pillow. His legs and bare arms covered in barely healed scars.  A boy of maybe ten, in damp dirty clothes, face never washed, a crude carving of a soldier archer with bow but no arrows held tight in his hand, lay sprawled on the other couch opposite the lady.

In the centre of the room an empty rocking chair with the impression in its base as if someone had just stood up and left the room.

The clock on the mantelpiece chimed a date:  3^rd….March…1848. At the third chime a click of a door opening in the hallway and the woman on the couch opened her eyes.  She yawned and rubbed the sleep away from her eyes and sat up slowly. The corset under the dress pinched her sides, a sudden pain in her stomach.  She breathed out slowly till the pain was gone.  Her neck cracked, her shoulders ached, she stretched her legs out in front of his, as the living room door opened. 

Footstep impressions on the lush carpet, then the rocking chair groaned under a weight, and began to rock back and forth.

`Sit by my feet. ` Said a voice an echo of the woman`s own.

The woman struggled to her feet and with difficulty manoeuvred her bell shaped skirt and layers of petticoats.  She managed and sat at the feet of the rocking chair.

` Tell me how you died. ` Said the voice.

Lucy began….