Creative life

Leave a comment Posted on articles, Creative life, Essays, reading, research, Travel

Captive in Fairyland–the Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle

 

Today I’m republishing a piece of mine which has aroused quite a bit of interest over the years–it’s about the fascinating story of an extraordinary man called Robert Kirk who wrote an even more extraordinary book called The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (first published in 1691). It starts off with a visit we made years ago to the site of Kirk’s life–and mysterious end.

Enjoy!

CAPTIVE IN FAIRYLAND: THE STRANGE CASE OF ROBERT KIRK OF ABERFOYLE

by Sophie Masson

Aberfoyle, Perthshire, March 2001

Fairy tree with wishes, Dun Shee, Aberfoyle(all photos of Aberfoyle sites by Sophie Masson)

It is a pretty track from the manse to the hill. It is spring, and the trees are beginning to put out new young leaves. Subtle colour permeates the landscape; the pale purple of growing tips, the russet of lingering winter, the film of green beginning to thicken, the darkness of the evergreens. It is a brilliant sunny day, bluely, sharply cold, after massive snowfalls which almost stopped us coming north at all. The path up the hill is through quiet oak woodland, over mossy rocks, through carpets of dead leaves, over little runnels of water where late snow has melted, through dark patches of mud. It doesn’t look like much of a hill from a distance, nothing like the high frowning Trossachs all around, gaunt in their velvet-brown winter austerity, and Ben Lomond in the distance, capped by snow. This hill is round, soft, gentle. But the walk is a bit steeper than it had seemed from the bottom; and there is an ambiguous atmosphere in this quiet, beautiful, light-filled place which makes me remember the expression on the face of the woman down in the village who had shown us where to go. ‘You’ll see what you’ll see when you get there,’ she’d said, with a little smile that could be interpreted in any number of ways.

Minister’s Pine(on left of pic), Dun Shee, Aberfoyle

We get to the top, to a clearing on the summit. In the middle of the clearing, there is a tall, lone Scots pine. The Minister’s Pine, it is called, around here. And all around it are leafless oak trees, of varying sizes. And on the oaks, long, fluttering ribbons: some bright, some faded and bedraggled. On the ribbons, words. ‘To the fairies of the place: a wish’. ‘I ask for the help of the fairies in..’ ‘Fairies, will you give me..’ There are one or two ribbons tied to the pine, but the words are too faded to read, as are indeed many of the ones tied on the oaks. You can’t tie much to the pine; its branches are mostly too far off the ground, its long slender shape not like the open-armed embrace of the oaks.

It is not a place where you want to stay. After the first two or three reading-aloud of wishes, you somehow don’t want to look at any more. A hand placed on the pine’s scaly bark is quickly withdrawn; the leafless oaks with their cargo of strange blossom look stranger and stranger. The evergreen,. alone of its kind amongst the circling oaks, takes on more and more of of a mute appeal. Yet that is surely just because you know the story. Because you know what that pine is supposed to mean, so that it takes on more and more the aspect of an enchanted prisoner standing helpless and speechless, as in a dream, within the ambiguous circle of his captors. You’d thought you’d want to stay there, soak in atmosphere, think, imagine; but no. Not really. Nobody says a word as we walk down, back into the wood, and come out at the entrance to the path just as a forestry worker in a van draws up and after a brief nod at us, prepares to tie a plastic ribbon across the entrance: foot and mouth precautions, you see. Nobody will be able to get up there now for days, weeks, months maybe. We only just made it in time.

Ruined church, Aberfoyle

Down the track, past the manse, across the bridge, and there is a ruined church. There is a graveyard at its back, which faces the hill. We wander amongst the stones, noting the names: McGregor–for this is McGregor country; Macintyre; Mac Donald; MacLaren, MacFarlane, Menzies, Primrose, Swan, Keir..And Kirk. Robert Kirk. Here he is, commemorated in a slab of red sandstone, and these Latin words, written, according to local hisorians, in what appears to be 18th century script:

Hic Pultis Ill Evangeli Promulgator Accuratus et Linguae Hiberniae Lumen M.Robertus Kirk Aberfoile Pastor Obiit 14 Maii 1692 Aetat 48.

Here lies the accurate promulgator of the Gospels and luminary of the Hibernian tongue, Mr Robert Kirk, pastor of Aberfoyle, who died 14 May 1692, aged 48.

Robert Kirk grave with epitaph and etchings

There are also three designs on the stone: an etched thistle, to represent his proud Highlands background; a shepherd’s crook, to represent his calling; and a dagger, to represent–well, we shall see. No mention on this slab of stone of the Minister’s Pine, or the other life of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.

No mention of the strange story surrounding his death. No mention of the strange book he wrote a year before his death, which ensured his immortality in more ways than one. Nothing ambiguous about this stone, pinning Kirk firmly to the earth, to time, to death, to sensible pursuits. Only in recent times has a small plaque been erected on the wall of the graveyard, noting discreetly that the gravestone of Robert Kirk, the ‘Fairy Minister’, was to be found within. The modern tourist authority knows that it is not Kirk’s prowess in evangelism or translating the Bible into Gaelic that attracts modern pilgrims from far away. But it doesn’t want to be too closely connected with the strangeness of the other thing, the ambiguous, elusive nature of just what it was Kirk did, and how he came to be both beneath that firm slab of stone, and in the lone pine on the hill.

Everything about Kirk in Aberfoyle is like that–glancing, elusive, quickly passed over, ambiguous. To get information on him seems like trying to hold quicksilver in your hand. There is no biography of him, though there is any amount on characters like Rob Roy MacGregor, a contemporary of, and related to Kirk himself. There is little information in any of the tourist literature; nobody seems to have thought him worthy of extended examination. He merits only a tiny paragraph in the Scottish Dictionary of National Biography, though the local Aberfoyle paper, Strathard News, featured an article on him, written to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death in 1992. Perhaps it has to do with the lingering distaste of the traditional supernatural in Presbyterian Scotland, which has never seemed to come to grips with the complexity of belief as has, say, Catholic Ireland. Or perhaps it is something even stranger, undercurrents that cannot be named, cannot be pinned down, despite the best efforts of sensible epitaph-writers. For in Kirk’s life, death and legend, lies an extraordinary story, a story not of irreconciliable dualisms, but of things which mesh together in strange and illuminating ways.

The Dun Shee seen from Robert Kirk’s grave

The exact date of Robert Kirk’s birth is not known–some sources say he was born in 1641, others in 1644. He was a native Gaelic speaker, the seventh son of the Reverend James Kirk, Minister of Aberfoyle. In traditional Highlands belief, being a seventh son confers upon one the power of second sight–perhaps one of the reasons why Robert Kirk chose later to delve into beliefs surrounding second sight and the contact that second-sighters, or seers, have with the fairy world. Aberfoyle, of course, is at what local tourist literature calls ‘the gateway to the Highlands’–it in fact represents the transition point between the Lowlands and Highlands, and shares bits of both cultures.

Rob Roy, 1820’s engraving

Robert was brought up at Aberfoyle, and it is reasonable to assume that he saw the burning of woods and houses around the area by the forces of General Monk, one of Cromwell’s army commanders in 1654. Aberfoyle was a royalist stronghold, both then and later, and the burnings were both warning and reprisal. In 1661, a year after the Restoration of the monarchy, Robert graduated with an MA from Edinburgh University, after obtaining a bursary for his studies from the Presbytery in Dunblane. He then went on to further studies at St Andrews. After his ordination, he was inducted to the parish of Balquidder, not far from Aberfoyle, in November 1664. This was also Rob Roy’ MacGregor’s country–Kirk was related by marriage to the MacGregors, as he was to the Grahams by birth. It is interesting to speculate on whether the two men knew each other–Rob Roy was about 10 years younger than Kirk–and how Kirk, educated in Lowlands English-language culture, but deeply steeped in Gaelic language, folklore and history, managed to reconcile all these different aspects of himself, much as MacGregor did, in many ways. A bicultural background can be a huge advantage, as well as a drawback; and the man of agile mind who is able to jump between them, using one to inform the other, can be in a fortunate position. But also a difficult one.

Whilst in Balquidder, Kirk married Isobel Campbell in 1678, and the couple had one son, Colin. However, Isobel died two years later, on Christmas Day. Her gravestone, with an epitaph cut on it by her husband himself, is still to be seen in Balquidder. Later, Robert remarried, to his first wife’s cousin Margaret Campbell(note that because of the fact bearing the very name of MacGregor had been banned under pain of death by King James I in 1603 following a rebellion, many MacGregors, including Rob Roy himself at one stage, went by the name of Campbell, a name to which they also had kin-claim). Robert and Margaret Kirk had one son, also named Robert.

Whilst at Balquidder, Kirk began work on translations of the Bible, Psalms and the Catechism in Gaelic, and wrote up a helpful Gaelic vocabulary. He also translated the Psalter into Gaelic metrical versions–and this was published in 1684, and was the first ever complete translation for Gaelic speakers. His work was reckoned to be both important and elegant, displaying a great deal of literary talent as well as skill in translation. However, the Presbyterian Synod in Argyll was not altogether comfortable with the tone of Kirk’s translation, considering it a little too open-minded, almost Episcopalian. Not for ten years was a version of his work published under the approval of Argyll.

Meanwhile, Robert was not worrying himself overmuch about whether Argyll approved or not. He was taking part in a great deal of theological and metaphysical debate, travelling to Lowland Scotland and England on occasion to take part in discussions. A long way from being the stereotypical Presbyterian bigot, he was most interested in combatting what he saw as the dangers arising not from resurgent Catholicism, but fashionable scepticism and materialism–an aim he specifically mentioned when writing his next book. In 1685, he was appointed to his birthplace, and his father’s old parish of Aberfoyle, and it is perhaps this return to his origins and his childhood which stimulated him into starting work on his next project, his most famous and infamous book, and the reason for which he has not been forgotten altogether.

We do not know exactly when Robert started this book, which was published in 1691 under a ponderous title:

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies; or an Essay on the Nature and Actions of the Subterrenean and(for the most part)Invisible People Heretofoir going under the name of Faunes and Fairies, and the lyke, as described by those who have the second sight.

Naturally, in referring to it from now on, I will shorten this simply to The Secret Commonwealth.

The Secret Commonwealth is a fascinating book. Written in a matter-of-fact and occasionally turgid style, it recounts the habits, appearance and attitudes of the supernatural beings called, variously, elves, fauns or fairies–or rather, as his second-sighted parishioners were more likely to call them, the Sith. The details of Sith lives are very specific, and strangely compelling and suggestive, mysterious whilst being of an odd sort of realism. These beings, he points out, are very close to humans, living close to human dwellings, often underground, wear clothes of the same style and colours as their human counterparts in the region where they lived, so that in the Highlands, they wore ‘plaids and variegated garments’. However, though their appearance was similar to that of humans, their size varied, with some being of human size and others much smaller. ‘They speak but little, and that by way of whistling, clear not rough,’ he went on, and ‘their bodies be so plyable through the Subtility of the spirits that do Agitate them, that they can make them Appear and Disappear at leisure.’ They took the nourishment out of food, sucking the inside of things, leaving the husk behind; they had servants who were ‘Children, like Inchanted puppets‘; they laughed little, and that more like the rictus of a skull than real amusement; they had ‘pleasant Toyish books‘ in their libraries, and tended to be rather rather restless, moving about especially on Quarter Days, when second-sighters would see great crowds of them on the roads. (Kirk points out ruefully that these days were also the times of the year when his church was the most full, as parishioners flocked to take refuge in the sacred building). He also said that their world was the source of the gift of second sight, and that second-sighters could always see them, whereas ‘normal’ people could not. The second-sighters, he wrote, said that each human being, however, had a fairy double, or co-walker, a ‘doubleman’, and that this doubleman walked with a person all their lives, invisible to everyone except the second-sighters, until their human double, or host, died, when the Doubleman would disappear. If a person’s fairy double was seen separate from his or her human host, when the human was still alive, it meant that person would die very soon. Kirk recounts many cases when this happened. (The notion of the Doubleman was also used to great uncanny and powerful effect in Christopher Koch’s extraordinary 1985 Miles Franklin award-winning novel, The Doubleman, which is partly based on some of Kirk’s findings.)

One of the interesting things that Kirk mentions is that in the Highlands, it was mainly men who were supposed to have the gift of second sight, and women only rarely–therefore it was mostly men, and not women, who were in contact with the fairy world. From this world, for the second-sighter, would come the gift of healing, of prophecy, of poetry. But the second-sighter was not, as it were, in control–it was very difficult to force the fairy world into anything, and people were very wary of talking about it at all. In fact, here as elsewhere in the world(and fairy belief is found all over the world), there were euphemisms for the fairies–they were the People of Peace, the Good Neighbours, the Friends, the Little People, and so on. And he stresses that many of the second-sighters are terrified by their gift; that when they see the fairy folk gathering on the roads, their hair stands up on their heads; and that they suffer through seeing things they’d rather not see.

Manuscript pages from Robert Kirk’s notebooks(reproduced from Kevin Manwaring blog,https://thebardicacademic.wordpress.com/2017/04/03/the-remarkable-notebooks-of-robert-kirk/)

There are too many stories gathered together in Kirk’s book to recount here, and that is not the purpose of my essay, anyhow. The Secret Commonwealth is fascinating not just as one of the earliest ‘scientific’ sources of Highlands folklore, not just fascinating on account of its depiction of the strange alien lives of strange alien beings, but also because of  how Kirk’s stated aims and his perhaps unspoken underlying beliefs contrasted and meshed, and what bearing the book has on the development of the later legend of the Fairy Minister. As well, to look briefly at some of the social and historical and cultural elements surrounding the book, might be useful.

This was a transitional age: between Stuart and Hanoverian; tradition and modernity; magic and science. It was to become slowly an age in which the uneasy peace between England and Scotland brought about by James VI of Scotland and I of England’s accession to the English throne had brought, was suspended. It was to signal the beginning of the 18th century calvary of the Highlands, the destruction of the clan system, and of many traditional aspects of life. Kirk’s book is a priceless cultural, human and social document, written by a man who wrote both as insider and outsider, a bicultural man fluent in both worlds, a true ‘walker between worlds’. It is believed that Kirk collected many of the stories in his book through talking to his parishioners, but it is also possible that at least some of them could have come from his own experience, and his own thoughts on the matter.

The fairy hill at Aberfoyle, the same one I described at the beginning of this essay, was one of his favourite walking spots. He was often to be seen walking from the manse to the hill–and it is there that he was found stone dead on a sunny May morning in 1692. It is not inconceivable that in writing his book, ostensibly as a quasi-scientific endeavour to convince English readers of his class and calling as to the spiritual validity of the beliefs of the Highland (or ‘Erse’ as he called it) he was in fact describing his own spiritual and imaginative experiences as much as those of his second-sighted friends. English author and academic Dr Diane Purkiss, whose book, Troublesome Things(Allen Lane 2000), is a most interesting and complex study of fairies and fairy stories, notes, in a passage on Kirk and his work, that ‘belief in fairies actually warmed and grew as people began to be afraid that scepticism was a bottomless black vortex into which Christianity itself might be drawn‘(page 185). Kirk was certainly worried about this–he states specifically in his preface that he wants to combat scepticism and materialism. But it is not his only motive. After all, he was a seventh son, of a minister, what’s more, a man bearing the name of ‘Kirk’, possibly a family that had long been associated with spiritual and metaphysical matters.

Kirk, however, was no fool. He knew that to write directly about fairies himself, in an age which was very much a transitional one, but which prided itself on its new scientific and ‘objective’ aspects, would be tantamount to intellectual, not to speak of theological suicide. Keeping a wary eye on fundamentalist misunderstanding was also a concern. In the event, the Presbyterians said nothing about this book–perhaps they were not particularly aware of it–but in presenting his material as a kind of anthropological study avant l’heure, Kirk ran a great deal less risk. This kind of book was having a certain success in literary and intellectual circles in England and Scotland at the time, particularly in England, where it was becoming quite fashionable to collect folklore. Magic and science were still closely linked. Many members of the Royal Society, to which people  such as Isaac Newton belonged, for instance, were great collectors of, and in some cases(including Newton’s)firm believers in, and students of, magic. The antiquarian and wonderfully garrulous and zestful writer John Aubrey, a contemporary of Kirk, had written at some length on English fairy beliefs, recounting many wonderful stories, and had also corresponded with a Scotsman–not Kirk–who had sent him a great deal of information on second sight. The Scottish connection was important, because a great many English people of Aubrey’s day and class considered that, as a ‘savage’ society more in tune with ‘primitive’ beliefs, the Scots, particularly the Highlanders, presented a less ‘untainted’ version of traditional supernatural beliefs of all kinds. (In fact, this was not really the case; fairy beliefs in the Highlands as elsewhere evolved and changed over time, and there were some areas of England every bit as traditional in their descriptions of fairies as the Highlands: but they were different, often not such fierce fairies as in the Highlands, and therefore thought to be ‘tamer’ or less ‘pure’ as folklore). John Bovet, who wrote Pandemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster, in 1684, also recounted some tales of Scottish fairies, with descriptions of their lives and homes, which were remarkably similar to the descriptions given by Kirk. He also, incidentally, describes an English story of a fairy market, invisible to all but a few, yet tangible entirely, which is also very close to the visions experienced by the Aberfoyle second-sighters: this is not an instance of Kirk copying from a source, however, but of his accounts tallying closely with those of other writers, not only in Britain but in other places, the invisible parallel world being a common feature of fairy lore in many cultures all over the world.

This whole area of folklore and belief, its collection and examination by proto-scientists, was of interest to more than just enthusiastic antiquarians. It was also studied in more practical circles–Samuel Pepys being one King’s employee who thought that the phenomenon of second-sight might have military applications. Employed as he was by the Navy for so many years, he thought it might be useful if the second-sighters could be employed to ‘see’ at a distance how many enemy ships were coming, or what the outcome of a battle was likely to be. Rather unfortunately, there is no record of whether this was indeed tried–perhaps it was and failed, and everyone decided to keep quiet about it–sceptical critics were an occupational hazard then as later, when psychics were employed by both Pentagon and Kremlin along the lines of ‘Why not? It can’t hurt, anyway!’

Kirk could have told Pepys and others like him, though, that the fairy gift cannot be used in such ways. Unpredictable as the Muse, capricious as talent, it cannot be pressed into service. But the fact that some people possess it was enough for their neighbours to be wary in their dealings with them; to make sure to keep on their right side, to be ‘looked after’ in the same way as healers and priests were looked after. The fairy gifts were not supposed to be used for ill, and there was a strong belief that if they were, the harm would rebound upon the unwise wielder of power; but they were seen as dangerous in the same way that nature can be dangerous. And that is another thing. I’ve been writing about ‘supernatural’ but the kinds of talents referred to by Kirk, though uncanny, were not seen as anything but natural. They were natural because Nature, God’s created world, encompassed the fairy world. And so of course Kirk and his parishioners were matter-of-fact about it all. They did not need to explain, or even to ‘believe’, for that word implies the presence of doubts somewhere in the background. Such things were true, as true as the oaks on the fairy hill.

It is time here to make a few general remarks about fairies and the fairy world. Fairy belief is one of the most elusive aspects of traditional cultures all over the world. In each place, this parallel Otherworld is seen slightly differently, and called by different names, but it still shares some remarkable similarities worldwide: a taboo on speech whilst in the fairy world, for instance; or the fairies’ love of dancing and feasting; or the odd passage of time in the fairy world. As the Irish scholar and writer Dr Angela Bourke points out in her extraordinary evocation of a 19th century ‘changeling’ case in Ireland(which has many related features to the case of Robert Kirk), The Burning of Bridget Cleary, (Pimlico 1999), ‘Fairies belong to the margins, and so can serve as reference points and metaphors for all that is marginal in human life.'(page 28) Stories about them are highly complex, mysterious yet often very realistic; fairies’ love of secrets, of promises, of bindings in word and deed is often evoked; their transitional state between good and evil, their unpredictability, their fateful appearances, are all best understood through story, through dream, through imagination. They cannot be pinned down, analysed, entirely. Other aspects of folk culture, such as witchcraft and its portrayal, are perhaps more suspectible to being ‘explained away’, rationalised, ‘understood’. In the post-medieval past, witchcraft, of course, was demonised as an evil thing.  The tendency prior to the Renaissance was to see it as a necessary, if frightening thing. After that, and especially after the Reformation, witches were seen as evil. But even then witches were never seen as less than or more than human–they had merely, so the old cant had it, sold their souls to the Devil–or devoted them to the Goddess, as the modern cant has it. But fairy belief could not be shoehorned by Renaissance and Enlightenment rationalists and organisers into such useful dualisms. It remained defiantly ambiguous, ungraspable, quicksilver, the very mirror of the nature of the supernatural beings it represented. Though in Presbyterian Scotland there was some attempt to link fairy beliefs to witchcraft, these received short shrift in general in other religious organisations. The Devil was a serious matter, to be believed in by right-minded folks. Fairies–well, who could really believe in them?

And yet, strangely, who couldn’t? Anyone who has ever been in a quiet wood, anyone who has unexpectedly caught, out of the corner of their eye, a glimpse of a shadow dashing past, anyone who has felt some odd quality of glamour, of fateful knowledge, gathering around a person, knows that there are unspoken, almost unspeakable, undercurrents to the human soul that cannot be pinned down, like dreams that cannot be recalled on waking, but that were nevertheless there. The persecutors as much as the persecuted know this. You can ignore it, laugh at it and pretend it doesn’t exist; you can try to analyse, saying fairies are the symbolic expression of nature, or the soul, or imagination, or whatever; you can fall completely under its sway; or you can simply accept it, and get on with your life. Which last is the version most people chose. And continue to choose.

It is not known what the general reaction to Kirk’s book at the time was, but perhaps he did not have enough time to judge what its reception would be. A year after the book was published, he was dead, at the age of 48. He had gone for his customary early-morning walk on the fairy hill, and when he did not return, was looked for, and found dead on the hill. At once, the story sprang up in the village–and was recorded by his successor in the parish, a Reverend Graham–that he had been punished by the fairies for revealing their secrets. He, a favoured son, a second-sighter, had been a Judas. And fairies hate traitors above all things. The people, said Dr Graham, were convinced that he was not really dead; that a ‘stock’ or facsimile of his body had been left there on the hill, but that Robert Kirk had, body and soul, been imprisoned in the heart of that great old Scots pine on the hill: a fate recalling that of Merlin, who, as some medieval stories tell, was imprisoned body and soul in a tree in the forest of Broceliande. Another version was that a funeral had been held–but that the coffin was filled with stones. All was not lost for Kirk, however, the Reverend Graham went on to say. Margaret Kirk was expecting a child at the time Kirk ‘disappeared’, and the captive himself appeared to one of his relations, begging him to help him escape from fairyland. It could be done in this way: the cousin was to bring a dirk to the christening of the child at the manse, Kirk would appear, and then the cousin must throw the dirk at the vision, pinning it with cold iron–as everyone knew, a bane against fairies–and bringing the lost minister back to the earth, even in death. However, though the cousin dutifully brought along his dirk, when the vision of Kirk appeared, the cousin was so dumbstruck that he could not move–and the opportunity was lost. His family seemed to have resigned themselves to his fate. Colin Kirk, Robert’s oldest son, who became a lawyer in Edinburgh, reportedly said, in a rather chilling bit of fatalism, that ‘Father has gone to his own kind.’ But Kirk himself did not give up. He could be saved, he told people in dreams, if, when a child was christened at the manse, a dirk was stuck into the great chair that had belonged to him and was still held at the manse(at least till 1943).

But unfortunately no child seems to have been christened at the manse since 1692–so Kirk is still trapped in that tree on top of the hill. The gravestone in the churchyard, it is said, is not 17th but 18th century: and there is no body in the grave. And the dagger I referred to earlier–that is the only coded reference on that sensible marker to the fairy story: for it is said to be the dirk that was never properly used. The great English folklorist Katharine Briggs, writing briefly of the case in her 1978 book, The Vanishing People(BT Batsford), notes that local people in Aberfoyle, at least at the time she was collecting her information, in the 1940’s, said that when you crossed the hump-backed bridge near the fairy hill, you would sometimes find a burden on your back: the soul of Robert Kirk begging to be freed.

And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still. There are innumerable stories of fairy contact in countless cultures throughout the world, but Robert Kirk is not anonymous–fairy-taken, he, like Bridget Cleary in 19th century Ireland, real, documented, flesh-and-blood people, have stepped out of the human world, the world of the ordinary, sideways into a strange, parallel universe where nothing is quite as it seems.

Note:

Since 1691, The Secret Commonwealth has been published several times: first in Edinburgh in 1815(this was the version used by Sir Walter Scott for his novel Rob Roy, which mentions Kirk and the Fairy Hill of Aberfoyle); in 1893 with an introduction and editing by Andrew Lang, in 1976 with an introduction and editing by Stewart Sanderson for the Folklore Society; in the early 1990’s by Element Books, with an introduction and notes by R.J.Stewart. More recently, there’s an excellent edition published by the New York Review of Books, with an introduction by Marina Warner; and it’s published within the superb compilation of texts, The Occult Laboratory, edited by Professor Michael Hunter. Manuscripts of The Secret Commonwealth are rare, but  two are held in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and one in the Advocates’ Library, also in Edinburgh.

 

Books cited:

Bourke, Angela, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, Pimlico, London 1999.

Bovet, John, Pandemonium, or the Devil’s Cloyster, London 1684.

Briggs, KM, The Vanishing People, Batsford, London 1978.

Koch, Christopher, The Doubleman, Chatto and Windus, London, 1985(new edition Minerva, Random House, London and Sydney, 1996)

Purkiss, Diane, Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy stories, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London 2000.

Also to note:

Briggs, KM The Anatomy of Puck(opinions on fairies in 16th and 17th centuries), Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1959.

The Good People, by Hannah Kent, Pan Macmillan, 2016. Set in Ireland in the 19th century and based on another real ‘fairy’ case, this is an engrossing and disturbing novel.

 

3 Comments Posted on Authors, Creative life, creative process, Creative work, family history, Juvenilia, Literary world, presentations, Publishing business

Short overview video about my life in writing and publishing

I’ve just uploaded a short video I made, based on some presentations I’ve made recently, which is a bit of an overview of my life and career in writing and publishing. Hope you enjoy…

The original background music by the way is by my very talented son Bevis Masson-Leach, aka music producer Papertoy.

Leave a comment Posted on articles, Authors, Creative life, Creative work, Interviews, Literary world, Non fiction

My article on maintaining a literary career, now published in TEXT

What’s it really like maintaining a literary career, especially in a regional area? What role do literary organisations like writers’ groups and writers’ centres play? In Wearing many hats: literary creative practice in New England, an article of mine which has just been published in the prestigious journal TEXT, I explore these and other aspects of the regional creative life through my own experiences and the experiences of other local creators, through interviews I conducted.

Hope you enjoy reading it!

 

2 Comments Posted on Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Illustrators, New books, Picture books

Interview with Paul and Beth Macdonald, authors of The Hole Idea

It was exciting recently to get a signed copy of a beautiful new picture book, The Hole Idea, written by Beth and Paul Macdonald (known to many in the children’s book world as owners of the wonderful Children’s Bookshop in Sydney) and illustrated by well-known illustrator Nathaniel Eckstrom. It’s also the first title for new publisher Book Trail Press. It’s a gorgeous book, with an imaginative, funny, touching text, lively illustrations, and beautiful design, and will I’m sure find many fans.

I caught up with Paul and Beth to ask them about the book, and their new and exciting enterprise.

First of all, Paul and Beth, congratulations on the publication of The Hole Idea! Can you tell us something about how it started? What was the inspiration for the book?

Thank you for your congratulations.

This book represents two births.

We have set up a new imprint Book Trail Press– a collaborative publishing house that publishes four picturebooks a year.

We have both written books in the past but were keen on writing picturebooks.

The Hole Idea started with an idea formed in a writing workshop led by children’s author Zanni Louise.

You are joint authors of the book. Can you describe what it was like to work together on the text?

We work together and live together seven days a week. This was a really natural process. We discuss the main framework and our ideas. After we get a first draft written –the fun begins! We argue (not too much) and push back and forth. After 47 drafts and much debate our book was ready to go.

At what stage was Nathaniel Eckstrom the illustrator brought in? And how did the three of you work within the picturebook experience?

Although Beth is an illustrator (and has a picturebook coming out in July with Dirt Lane Press) we understand that a great picturebook has to be a marriage of text and pictures- the illustrations must speak to the text and vice versa. Nathaniel Eckstom was the perfect choice for this story. He is the award winning illustrator of seventeen books- and we knew his style was a natural fit for Finnian. He was bought in at the beginning stages – after just the first few drafts. We were keen to make it a collaborative process so wanted his input from an early stage and actually met around the table to develop the book together.

What was the process like for you, from first spark to production of the book? What were the challenges and pleasures?

Taking a book from the idea, through the writing and design process into print was a huge learning curve for us. We really wanted to understand all aspects of creating books. We really believe that it is a collaborative creative process. The book is the result of a team of six people- two editors, a great designer, two authors and an illustrator. We met, we discussed, we crafted a work that we are proud of.

We also learnt so much about the printing process and lots of new jargon!

The Hole Idea is also the first title in your new Book Trail Press publishing enterprise. How do you see Book Trail Press developing?

Book Trail Press is a boutique imprint. Our goal is to create four picturebooks a year. Books with heart, incorporating quality language. Books that focus on the creative process. We have commissioned an illustrator for the second book and the third is underway.

Paul, you are of course also an award-winning and popular bookseller, with the Children’s Bookshop being the most loved and long-lasting specialist children’s bookshop in the State. How did your deep knowledge of literature and the industry as a bookseller influence the way you approached the creation and production of The Hole Idea?

I felt a wee bit of pressure knowing that we had to create a quality book. We surrounded ourselves with the most talented creators we knew and recognised that creating a great book is a collaborative process. While we were asked to submit the manuscript to several publishers, the challenge was to produce a book from first spark to delivery of the first print run. It’s been a fast learning process.

You are now covering pretty much every major aspect of the book industry, as authors, publishers and booksellers! What’s it like, wearing all those hats? And what have you learned, as part of the process?

Wearing multiple hats is good- you need to see ‘the book’ as many things. It is first of all a narrative that must resonate, but it is also an art object, a possible focus for teachers in schools and must leap off the page as a great read aloud.

Hopefully the book sits proudly next to quality picturebooks in good bookshops and is a book that booksellers are keen to handsell! You can’t forget the importance of the bookseller!

Finally we know that creators need to promote their work through social media and get on the road- we are off to Freemantle, Melbourne and Brisbane after we have hosted two launches in Sydney. That’s the fun part!

At launch of the Hole Idea, Children’s Bookshop, May 25: Paul(at back), Nathaniel and Beth. Photo by Kristin Darrell, posted on Facebook

Leave a comment Posted on Book talk, classics, Creative life, fairy tales, Inspirations, Literary world

Glimpses in old books…

I love antique books, a love inherited from my father who over decades has collected an eclectic range of extraordinary old books. I love their beauty, the stories they contain, and the sense of holding something that is a direct link to people in the past, not just authors and publishers, but also readers, who over the generations or even centuries have held them in their hands. And I also love the unexpected unofficial glimpses these books can give into those very same previous readers and owners, everything from old clippings, tickets, menus, dried flowers and other such things you can find tucked into the pages, to inscriptions, bookplates and scribbles left by previous readers/owners.

Here’s a couple of examples from my own collection: both are from 18th century books pertaining to fairytales and their tellers, which I am presently using to work on an exciting new project(more details on thst soon!)

The first is a 1786 edition of one of the volumes of the very famous Cabinet des fées compendium, which in 41 volumes gathered the fairy tales written by (mostly) French writers of the l17th and 18th centuries, such as Charles Perrault, Madame d’Aulnoy, Mme Leprince de Beaumont, Mademoiselle de la Force, and many others. This particular volume, number 37, is of great interest to anyone interested in the area(as I am!) as it’s an index of the authors with full notes about their lives and works plus an introduction to the fairytale genre as it was written at the time and a list of all the other volumes in the Cabinet des fées. It’s fascinating in itself, of course, but where an old copy of this parts company with say, a new edition of the same work, is that traces of previous owners remain it it. In this case, they are two bookplates: the first of which, pasted on the inside cover of the book, proclaims the book to be from ‘Case G, Shelf…(unreadable number, perhaps ‘2’) of ‘Brynkinalt Library’. The second bookplate, pasted on the second internal page, just before the title page, informs us that that it is ‘Ex Libris Ellis’ (from the Ellis Library, or Library of the Ellis family) with two women’s names underneath: Lilian Fitzmaurice and Madeleine Blanche.

A couple of searches on Google revealed to me something about the people behind the plates. The library name and the dragon symbol on the frst bookplate had made me pretty sure it had come from somewhere in Wales and so it proved to be but intriguingly, the Brynkinalt Library was not a public library, but a private one once housed on an estate that has belonged to the one family since the 10th century. Could the eighteenth-century faces that stare out at the viewer from the painting featured on the Brynkinalt website have once been bent over this book?

I had no idea, of course, but it’s fun to speculate! And hmm, maybe there’s material for a good story in it 🙂

Investigating the second bookplate also produced an interesting result: the book had once belonged(presumably after it had left Brynkinalt library) to a renowned Canadian scholar in French literary studies and art history, Dr Madeleine Blanche Ellis of Montreal (1915-2008). The bookplate also cited Lililan Fitzmaurice, who turns out to be Dr Ellis’ mother (Lilian’s husband and Madeleine’s father was George Porter Ellis). Mother and daughter are mentioned together on the bookplate, and the book comes from the library of the Ellis family. Was Madeleine still living at home at the time? Or did they own the book together? Small mysteries perhaps; but intriguing glimpses, as well, into past lives.

The second book in my collection that offers an intriguing glimpse into past lives through unofficial additions to it is another book from the 18th century, also within the fairytale genre; a 1799 edition of the first volume of Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s Magasin des Enfants (first published in 1756) which contains within it her famous retelling of la Belle et la Bête, or Beauty and the Beast. It’s a fascinating book of course, and there’s a lot to say about the tale itself and how it differs(very positively!) from an earlier version by an earlier fairytale-writer, Madame de Villeneuve, but that’s a story for another day. Today, what I want to note are those unofficial, marginal evocations of a previous reader’s relationship with this particular copy of the book. And it’s a very different story to the other one!

This reader, whoever he or she was (or else, and more likely, it was more than one person), clearly saw in the book an opportunity to practise hand-writing skills as well as a handy notebook for daily tasks. There is no defacing of the actual text of the book, only the flyleaves, front and back, and the title pages. On the front flyleaf and title pages are flourishes in sepia ink of letters, words and sentences, mostly in French, but the half-title page has these words in Italian as well: ‘Signora Maestra’, which I believe means ‘Madam Teacher’.

I bought the book on Abebooks, from an Italian second had book dealer, so clearly the book had been in Italy; and the look of the handwriting suggested a child, most likely an Italian child learning French, possibly at home, under the guidance of a ‘Signora Maestra’ (and what she thought of the defacing of the book I can only imagine!)

The back flyleaf meanwhile told a different tale. There are some ‘handwriting practice’ scribbles on it but also something quite different: an actual laundy list 🙂 ‘Twenty pieces’ proclaims the heading, which then goes on to list the various articles: draps(sheets) a jupon(petticoat), mouchoirs de poche(pocket handkerchieves), torchons(teatowels) and more. ‘Twenty pieces’ proclaims the heading. The words are in French, in a different, firmer hand to the other, and hints at an adult rather than a child or adolescent. Was it the laundrymaid who wrote those words, or more likely the lady of the house, or perhaps a housekeeper, noting down the articles that had been sent off to the laundry? I don’t know, anymore than I know why you’d use a book as a makeshift aide-memoire, and just once too(the kid scribbling in the book seems more understandable)but here again are glimpses of people from the past, anonymous but whose presences flicker into view, even if briefly, in a rather touching way.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Book talk, Creative life, Illustrators, Interviews, Literary world, Picture books, Publishers, Publishing business

Interview with Sandra van Doorn of Red Paper Kite

Today I’m delighted to bring you an interview with Sandra van Doorn. I met Sandra and her husband Edward at last year’s Independent Publishing Conference in Melbourne and we had a great time chatting about books, publishing, creative work, and France!

Sandra is a French illustrator who has had books published in several different countries, including the award-winning Sleep Well, Siba and Saba (written by Nansubuga Nagadya Isdahl). Born and brought up in France, then globetrotting to the UK, USA, Russia, Europe she’s now living with her husband Edward in sunny Perth, Australia.

But now Sandra is embarking on a brand-new adventure. She is the founder and publisher of Red Paper Kite, which will exclusively publish picture books, and is launching its first title (Hugo) in May 2019.

Sandra, can you tell us about how you came to establish Red Paper Kite? 

The idea of creating a small press for picture books simply came from a need for more creative space and professional growth; publishing picture books felt like a natural evolution from being an illustrator.

As someone who has also done the ‘double act’ of creator and publisher, I know it’s a steep learning curve, setting up a publishing house. How’s the journey been so far for you?

You are right it is a very steep learning curve!

And it can be overwhelming at times.

As a tiny press, I juggle many facets of the business on my own. Finding the right information is not always easy, you find yourself constantly asking “Am I making the right decision?”

But you do knock on a few doors, and meet amazing people along the way, people who are genuinely interested in making your journey easier. People like you Sophie!

I feel grateful for the support I have received from within the industry – particularly my publisher in the UK (Lantana Publishing), who has been very generous in sharing their journey as a small publisher.

But in truth part of the adventure is figuring things out.

What can you tell us about RPK’s Books?

When I was a child, I used to scribble in all my books. It got me into a lot of trouble, but I firmly argued it was meant to be that way. I wanted that idea to translate into our books by creating books that give permission to our readers to scribble and add to the narrative. So, all our books include colouring pages.

Our readers become the illustrators and authors for a moment, they are part of the story. They can stay with our books a little longer, get to know our characters a little better … It’s a fun experience.

Visual narratives can be understood across the world, but of course different cultures have different approaches to illustration and picture books. What are the differences (and commonalities) that you see between, say, French and Australian picture book traditions and trends? (Please do mention any other picture book cultures you might like to as well!)

In France picture books are more than a childhood phase – there is a love for visual art rooted in our culture that goes beyond age, and so we are huge consumers of picture books – even in our adult life whether you have children or not.

Our cultural heritage definitely influences our approach to illustration; our illustrations can be more poetic, sentimental and censorship is a little broader in France.

But rather than comparing, we can choose to embrace and mix all those differences, aiming at creating a richer reading experience. Because really, who wants to read the same type of books over and over?

What are you looking for, in terms of both texts and illustrations, for Red Paper Kite?

There is no perfect profile, but we are curious about authors and illustrators who don’t feel too mainstream. A little fun, a good dose of quirkiness. Stories that reflect the world we live in.

Stories that will appeal to grown-ups too. A story within a story.

I guess we love stories and people with that little “Je ne sais quoi”.

 You will be launching the first Red Paper Kite book in May can you tell us a little about it?

HUGO – The boy with the curious mark, (written by Yohann Devezy and illustrated by Manuela Adreani) is coming out in May.

It’s a sweet story about a boy born with a curious mark, a rainbow.

Hugo’s Rainbow broaches a theme that gets revisited over and over, but with a contemporary edge to it.

His story will teach the importance of acceptance no matter what your difference.

You will love HUGO. Because really, who doesn’t like a rainbow?

How has starting a publishing house impacted on your career as an illustrator? (Or how do you see it impacting it?)

Well … I miss my drawing table!

Hopefully I will get an opportunity to draw again. I still hope to illustrate a few classics, such as Alice in Wonderland or Le Petit Prince.

Can you tell us something about your work as an illustrator, and the books you worked on? How did you start as a professional illustrator?

My career as an illustrator started when I was living in Vancouver, Canada.

I decided to attend art classes at Emily Carr’s University, and Paper Hearts – my first picture book project – was picked up for publishing. It was the beginning of an amazing (and sometimes wonderfully hard!) journey.

After that, I was lucky enough to meet Alice Curry (Lantana Publishing) via the Bologna Children’s book fair which led me to illustrate books about Uganda. It was a wonderful experience, pushing boundaries professionally and culturally – sitting at my desk, I was travelling and discovering a part of the world I didn’t know much about.

Meanwhile another publisher in Greece contacted me and that’s how I worked on texts I couldn’t even read!!

What illustrators have influenced you–from childhood to now?

My all-time favourite is Lisbeth Zwerger– her work is pure poetry and her talent is beyond words.

And then you cannot go past Rebecca Dautremer, Manuela Adreani, Benjamin Lacombe, Elodie Nouhen and Anne Herbauts.

 

Leave a comment Posted on announcements, Celebrations, collaborations, Cover reveals, Creative life, New books, News

Celebrating our home town in a new picture book

I am delighted to announce today a project that’s had to be kept under wraps till now: the picture book Join the Armidale Parade, text written by me, gorgeous illustrations by talented local illustrator Kathy Creamer, and published by local publisher Little Pink Dog Books. Look at the gorgeous cover! Commissioned by Armidale Regional Council, Join the Armidale Parade is a fun picture book for children and families, celebrating the beauty, diversity, colour and vibrancy of our hometown of Armidale, in northern New South Wales.  My story, told in bouncy verse, is focussed around a little girl whose family has recently moved to Armidale, and who takes part in its colourful annual parade, held in the autumn. And Kathy’s created the most fabulous illustrations, full of fun, humour, joy and plenty of Armidale landmarks and references:-) It’s a book that can be enjoyed by both locals and visitors, and even those who may not know Armidale but can appreciate the fun and warmth of a festival parade. It’s, I think, the first time that a picture book for children has been set here.

Although I was brought up in both France and Sydney, and my husband David in the UK, we have lived in this region for a long time now, built a house and brought up three children here. Although I’d had a few short pieces published before I came to this region, my writing career properly took off here, and all my books have been written here. I’m delighted to have been able to collaborate with Kathy, Little Pink Dog Books and Armidale Regional Council in Join the Armidale Parade, a book that pays tribute to a beautiful, creative and friendly town.

The book will be published on May 1.

 

Leave a comment Posted on Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Culture, forthcoming books, Interviews, Picture books

Winter of the White Bear: a forthcoming picture book by Martin Ed Chatterton

Today I’m delighted to bring you a very interesting and thought-provoking interview with award-winning author and illustrator Martin Ed Chatterton, about an unusual project he’s been working on: Winter of the White Bear, an extraordinary picture book to be published by Dirt Lane Press this October. You can watch a compelling trailer for the book here.

Martin, I believe that Winter of the White Bear is a book that grew out of several inspirations: your PhD, your previous collaborations with Margrete Lamond, now publisher at Dirt Lane Press, and no doubt other things. Can you tell us something about how it came about? 

The starting point for Winter Of The White Bear was my PhD which I completed at the end of 2017. That had, at it’s core, a polemical examination of the toxic legacy of the Atlantic Slave Trade in my home town of Liverpool in the UK. I wrote my doctorate in part see if there was a way in which I could simultaneously access the slavery story in both a contemporary and historical way and the result was The Last Slave Ship, a novel with a dual storyline, one set aboard the Uriel, the final slaving voyage from Liverpool in 1809 and a narrative following a present day race hate crime which results in large scale rioting. The two storylines intersect at the end.

The PhD came about partly through curiosity about my family tree. On my wife’s side of the family, the maternal line is ‘black Liverpool’. The apparent ‘invisibility’ of ‘blackness’ in that side of the family got me asking questions and that led to (sadly) the growing realisation that I’d been raised in the most racist city in the UK and that my wife’s family had undoubtedly arrived in the city via Liverpool’s armpit-deep involvement in the genocidal Atlantic Slave Trade. In this case ‘we’ (white Liverpool) played the role of the Nazis, stocking, crewing and profiting hugely over 120 years by selling people. Over half of all the slave ships that sailed from Britain sailed from Liverpool. The city grew rich on the back of slavery. Present day Liverpool racism, both institutional and cultural is, I believe, directly traceable to residual guilt about the city’s blood-stained past, and denied thorough examination by an overpowering cultural ‘Scouse’ identity, described by American academic Jacqueline Nassy-Brown as ‘brutally localised, excruciatingly white.’ It’s not going too far to say that if the novel is published in the UK (as it is due to be), there could be trouble ahead. Liverpool does not take criticism well. If you’re interested, you can download the PhD exegesis here: https://epubs.scu.edu.au/theses/572/

Anyway…all that is by way of background. Winter Of The White Bear not only arrived because of my interest in slavery but because of the direct involvement of the very wonderful and most excellent, Margrete Lamond, my publisher (and editor) at Dirt Lane Press. Myself and Margrete go back a long way: to 2004 to be exact when I first moved to Australia. At the time she was working at Scholastic and commissioned me for my first Aussie book (I illustrated Ogre In A Toga by the lovely Geoffrey McSkimming). Margrete kept in touch when she moved to Little Hare books and she published The Brain Finds A Leg, a blackly comic surreal teen comedy set in a thinly disguised Byron Bay where I was living at that time. The book did decently, getting shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Award (where we lost to the picture book of Mao’s Last Dancer…still bitter, although I do love Anne Spudvillas’ work). And then we did other books: a follow up to The Brain, a series about William Shakespeare as a ten year old boy, a novelty book about a nude Santa. All the usual stuff.

Then, about six or seven years ago I wrote a crime novel on spec and Margrete was kind enough to do a broad structural edit on it before my agent shopped it around. A Dark Place To Die was published by Random House here and in the UK and was then optioned as a TV series (still ‘in development’ with Escapade Media/Mam Tor). The book led to a series, all set partly in Liverpool (and Byron Bay, Berlin, California…) and, to close the circle, The Last Slave Ship is also set in the city. When I met Margrete last year she suggested doing an offshoot from my PhD for Dirt Lane Press and I jumped at it. I’d been seeing what they’d been doing for a year or two and loving the social commitment and aims of the company. I do a fair amount of what you might call ‘mass market/commercial’ writing and illustration. Probably the best example of this are the co-writing gigs I have with James Patterson, the US publishing behemoth. So Dirt Lane and Winter Of The White Bear are as far from this as it’s possible to be (note: I am by no means sneering at the idea of White Bear doing well commercially!). And it’s the best/most satisfying thing I’ve done (in books) in a while.

What has the story’s journey been like? Did you need to do many drafts? Did you work with Margrete from the start on it, or has the process been different to that? 

I wrote the first draft very quickly. Having worked so much in the past with Margrete on so many disparate books we both have confidence in each other. That confidence gives me free reign to try things out, as I know Margrete will spot when it works and when it doesn’t. Perhaps the title (for Margrete) might be more accurately that of ‘producer’.

There were a couple of things I knew I wanted right from the outset. The first was no comedy. In my children’s fiction I’m primarily, and proudly, comedic. However, there’s no room for that here. So, no funnies. Secondly, I wanted this to be absolutely international. This wasn’t about Liverpool, or about the Atlantic slave trade. At least not in the specifics. This was about stripping back slavery to it’s evil essence: coercion for gain. Margrete and I had a couple of arm-wrestling moments, most pointedly on the issue of making this a white bear against a black bear. My view was that there needed to be a stark difference in the two bears as this introduces, in simple form, the idea of ‘the other’. Defining another group as ‘other’ is key to being able to enslave. And the clearest, most unequivocal example we have of that is white enslaving black. Of course there have been multiple (and ongoing) examples of slavery where that ‘otherness’ is less clearly defined but I felt strongly that the ‘not all slaves were black’ argument has been hijacked (erroneously) by the right. Besides, the genesis for this book lay in a specifically white/black arena. I didn’t want anyone to be in any doubt.

There were quite a few drafts but all following a principle I knew would be there. I started big and went small. The first draft came in around 2000 words; clearly too many for a book of this kind. But, as I knew that at the outset, and, as Margrete was the editor, I was confident we’d whittle down. Which is exactly what we did. The final word count is around about 700 words.

How would you characterise the visual narrative of the book? 

Being a writer/illustrator often has it’s advantages, but nowhere more so than in a picture book. The visual narrative of this book emerged from two sources: the first are the paintings I do for pleasure. I don’t sell them or exhibit: they are for me and they are a long way from my ‘normal’ work. I began my professional life as an illustrator and that’s still very much an important part of what I do. Winter Of The White Bear is an opportunity for me to swing hard at the ball and make some of those gestural, free marks I make in the comfort of my own (secret) studio.

The second part of the visual thrust for the images is digital. Everything has been produced on screen. I’ve been drawing with the cursor, using collage, overlays, brushes, effects and photography to make the images. I forced myself not to draw anything and ‘import’ it as I would do normally. This has, I hope, resulted in a fresh approach, albeit using techniques honed over the years. I think this imagery will be seen as different for me…but it’s always been there.

With its fable/fairytale form and light touch, Winter of the White Bear can be read on many levels, and by readers of many ages: what do you hope people will take away from it?

I’m glad you think it has a light touch. It would have been easy to slip into a preachy tone so I think using fable helps prevent that. Allowing the reader to join the dots is something I try and do in all my writing. Using fable also helps blur the age lines. We’re so used to the fairytale form that it can become a Trojan horse in which we can smuggle in meaning. Another aspect of the fable/fairytale as form is that it allows darker themes and narrative. While Winter Of The White Bear deals with hard subjects it barely comes near to the horrors in, say, Hansel And Gretel.

I made the decision to echo the Atlantic Slave narrative in several key ways in the book. For example, when Little Bear reaches a point of desperation she chooses to allow herself to sink beneath the waves. ‘If she sank far enough she would no longer have to catch fish for White Bear.’ Slaves taken from West Africa frequently committed suicide as a means of escape. One of the first acts for the Liverpool slavers on arrival in Africa was the installation of suicide netting around the ships. Slaves were valuable and the more of them alive at the end of the voyage, the higher the profit. The hideous conditions aboard ship were finely calculated to ensure that as many slaves survived as possible at as low a cost as possible. Profit overruled morality at every turn. Slaves also saw suicide as an act of resistance so it was important for Little Bear to reach this point. Of course, I don’t make this explicit. This is a book for children so Little Bear’s ‘death’ is deliberately ambiguous. The appearance of her (murdered) father also speaks to the importance of ancestors in African belief systems. Little Bear’s subsequent ‘campaign’ and escape from her oppressor can be viewed as what happens to her in the afterlife, or as wish fulfilment, or simply as a magical reality.

I hope that young readers take one very simple message from this book. Namely that using force to enslave anyone is wrong and that we have to remain vigilant to prevent this happening.

 Winter of the White Bear comes out in October, but you are already performing readings of it in schools. What other events are being planned in the lead-up to its release? 

After starting work on Winter Of The White Bear I decided to make a ‘rough cut’ audio of it as a work in progress. I then showed that rough cut reading to schools I visited in Australia and China in late 2018. I always saw the book as something that would translate very well to the screen and I have made a full reading for the 2019 school visits.

I’m keen for Winter Of The White Bear to get ‘out there’ in as many forms as possible. I co-opted a French actor/producer friend of mine, Michel Duran, to do the reading for the video of the book. Michel is based in Vancouver and, I think, adds an extra flavour of ‘the international’ to the project. We have worked together on a number of film and TV projects (as Sugartown Media) and we are developing Winter Of The White Bear as a potential animated feature film. We’re also working with Angela Salt, another friend of mine in the UK who runs a creative children’s content company called Salt Content. Pat Davern, of Grinspoon, is also involved in writing a suite of songs for the project. He has provided the theme music for the project and we are at work on the ‘hero’ song, You Will Find A Way, right now. Pat and I have worked together on a number of projects beginning with Pat’s Alexander The Elephant picture/music book in 2015. We’ll be putting out a video for the song in the lead up to Winter Of The White Bear being published.

We have also partnered with The Freedom Hub (thefreedomhub.org) in Sydney for this book after meeting with Sally Irwin, The Freedom Hub’s founder. The Freedom Hub was formed specifically to combat modern day slavery in Australia. Using two cafes (one in Sydney, the other on the Gold Coast) as the ‘hub’ element around which programs of aid for people caught up in human trafficking are rolled out, the organisation is an important beacon of hope. It’s a real shock for many people to realise that there are an estimated 4,300 slaves in modern day Australia and The Freedom Hub are doing a fantastic job of raising awareness of this and giving practical help where possible. They are also committed to doing what they can to ensure slavery is eradicated around the globe. We are super proud to have them on board with Winter Of The White Bear and will be flagging them up at every opportunity. The book will be launched on October the 17th at The Freedom Hub by Benjamin Law who has kindly agreed to do the honours.

 I understand that two other books came out of your PhD, including an adult novel and a graphic novel: can you tell us a little about them?

The Last Slave Ship, the novel I wrote for my PhD was due to be published last year but sadly the publisher went bust just prior. The nature of the novel (hard-hitting, experimental to a degree, polemical) meant that it wasn’t a good fit for my usual (commercial) publisher, Penguin Random House, so finding a good home for it has been a priority. My agent in London has been scrabbling around and we are pretty sure it will be out this year with Dead Ink in the UK who are another socially conscious independent publishing house. That’s by no means a given as yet but we think it will happen. I’m pretty keen on it being released as, along with Winter Of The White Bear and Archangel (the graphic novel I’ll discuss below), it would mean that three very different  ‘slavery’ stories have emerged from the research, covering all age ranges.

The novel itself tells the story of the doomed final slaving voyage from Liverpool in 1809, sailed by a hard-bitten crew conscious that this is their last opportunity for a big payoff. Slavery has been outlawed in Britain so it is a risky, but potentially profitable, business. Running parallel to this story is one that revolves around the aftershocks following a vicious race hate killing in contemporary Liverpool. The central idea behind the book can be summed up by my ‘pitch line’: ‘The last slave ship didn’t leave Liverpool in 1809, Liverpool is the last slave ship’. And another: ‘What do you do when you’ve witnessed a crime committed by an entire city?’

In a spot of cross-pollination, I’ve mixed in characters from my three previous  ‘Liverpool’ crime novels (A Dark Place To Die, Underland, Remission) and narrative themes of memory/amnesia, ‘saying the unsayable’, witness and guilt. There are intertwined sub-narratives in there too about Hillsborough, about Scouse identity and the importance of Antony Gormley’s Another Place as witness: a sculpture installation sited on a beach in north Liverpool which has been something of an obsession of mine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw_WO8Y5a8s).

At the beginning of my doctorate, I was interested (and still am) in the notion of cross-media. Something that ‘fell out’ of that was me writing a piece of faux fan-fiction, imagining a fan response to The Last Slave Ship…which was, at that time, unwritten. That became a YA novel called Archangel which is a re-imagining of the slavery narrative, set in a future post-industrial north American hunter-gatherer settlement built on the remnants of a vast shopping mall centuries after Earth has been abandoned by the ruling elite. The climate is frozen for large parts of the year and the growing of harvesting of timber occupies much of the time for the ‘tribe’. This isn’t a dystopian vision: the population functions in harmony with their surroundings until the humans who had abandoned the planet return to ‘harvest’ labour. Dirt Lane Press asked me to develop Archangel as a graphic novel. As a first step I’ll be rewriting the story as a screenplay; the thinking being that will be a format more easily adaptable to the graphic novel format. I’ll let you know how we do!

Leave a comment Posted on announcements, Audio books, Book talk, children's fiction, Creative life, Readers

Listen to a great reading of my story, The Neptune Clock

Over at Read Me A Story Ink, the wonderful site run by booklover, bookseller and reader Robert Topp, there’s a whole searchable treasure-house of short stories for children, each carefully chosen for their quality and readability. The stories are available as printable PDFs, and some also as audio files(all with the full consent of the authors, of course). And I’m very happy to say several of my stories are available there, including a couple which are available both as PDFs and audios featuring Bob’s warm and lively readings. The latest of these is The Neptune Clock, one of my favourite stories, first published quite some years ago in ‘Tales of the Deep’ edited by Paul Collins and Meredith Costain, and since published another couple of times. And now you can listen to it at Read Me A Story Ink! Catch it here.