Rambling thoughts on cultural identity. Oh, and Pinterest

National identity is a funny thing. My parents came over here in the sixties and I was born in Birmingham, along with my sister a couple of years later. Like many, my parents went back home a few years later and that's where I grew up until I came over to Wales in 1998. I love living over here and have no intention of going back to live until the onset of my dotage, but I am, most definitely, Irish. A couple of months ago the fact that I was born in Birmingham came up in conversation with friends.
'I never knew that,' said one. 'So you're not actually Irish at all?'
Wrong thing to say.
Short version: 'You're not truly Irish unless you've been an immigrant at least once, and I've been one twice, so FECK OFF.'
Longer version: 'I was born in an Irish community in England, I was hauled back and reared in rural County Cork in the 1980s (the most benighted time and place for formative years, and SO BORING I made up stories using the little black flowerheads of plantain), I spent university summers in London in traditional Irish student fashion, I got married in a church and I emigrated again in traditional fashion. I've got the ancestry, the accent and the Catholic guilt complex; all the hangups and the history except for having been born in the place. I say again: FECK OFF.'
It might be the 'feck off' that clinches it.

Let me recommend a couple of Irish authors. I'm in the middle of Dara O Briain's Tickling The English, an attempt to pin down the English character - if there is such a thing - in his stand-up tour around the country in 2009.  It's great to read someone else observing the English; I find myself nudging my English partner and reading bits to him. I've also resolved to catch Dara next time he's on tour.
I've also just finished Marian Keyes' new novel, The Mystery of Mercy Close. She's done it again, this time dealing with depression. I can't recommend it highly enough. While you're at it, read her last novel This Charming Man (domestic violence and alcoholism). And Rachel's Holiday (drug addiction).

On the Kicking and Screaming front, I recently joined Pinterest. It's easy to join, and then it's simply a case of uploading pictures or of installing the 'Pin It' button into your bookmarks (easy to do) so that you can pin pictures of pages on the web onto your Pinterest page. I rather like it. The major thing to watch out for is copyright; the pinning button (as I understand it) automatically links back to the source page of your pins, but apparently it is possible not to include this, which means of course that the source is not credited. It is easy to be responsible, but presumably not all users are, so on the flipside it makes sense to be sure that you're happy for any personal photos you upload to be repinned all over the place. I've read that the security isn't up to Facebook standards, so it's recommended that you login every few days to make sure your account hasn't been hijacked. That being said, I opened the account and then forgot about it for a couple of weeks, with no dire consequences. I've added the link to my account here.

I'm still delighted with Twitter. I probably check it only three or four times a week, but it's always worth it, just to hear the chatter and chaos, but also to pick up writing news, tips and occasional competitions that I wouldn't have known of otherwise. I'd like to give back a bit more, but I'm still in the shy and retiring phase, just occasionally retweeting interesting stuff.

Finally: I am still blogging! Occasionally late, but it is, at last, becoming something I just do. The world doesn't need another writing blog, but I'm going to stick with this.

Writing what you know and omnipresent choughs

I’ve been sorting through the zillions of unfinished stories in my files, and found half a dozen that I’m going to concentrate on for the next few weeks. They’re ones I feel have legs, stories that I want to communicate. They range from 100 words to 3,000 words but they all have one thing in common: they’re reflecting a facet of myself. Heavily disguised, but I’m in there. That’s okay: ‘writing what you know’ is oft-repeated advice, for excellent reasons. 

However, what if writing what you know intrudes a little too much into the setting and colour of your story? I work in the countryside, in nature conservation. Not all my stories are set in this world, but landscape and wildlife and the outdoor world feature strongly in my writing. If there isn’t a character who’s just been chopping wood, there’ll be someone off to survey a quadrat in a chalk meadow when the Inciting Incident happens. If wellies don’t make an appearance, a landrover will, probably with a terrier in the passenger seat.  And at some stage, someone will observe a pair of choughs. The character might see the pair and remark on it out loud; they might hear their call and search the sky; they might see the birds while sitting alone on a rock mulling over a key plot point. But you can depend on it, there will be choughs. They are in Every Single One of the six stories I picked to work on. 

(Here’s a link to the RSPB’s chough page. Irish and British choughs have lovely blood-red bills to match their legs, but the only royalty-free images I could find were of alpine choughs, whose bills are yellow. I’ve never managed to catch one on camera myself; too busy looking up with a grin and saying ‘Look, choughs!’ to my companion or random strangers.)

I’m not going to write them out of the stories I’m working on. They’re beautiful birds. So are the others that sneak in (if it’s a Scottish story, it’s almost a cert that someone will rhapsodize over black guillemots). But I am taking it as an opportunity to set myself a challenge. As I finish each piece and start working on another, I shall use other experiences from my life for background colour, or draw on the worlds that my friends and family inhabit - the more uncomfortable and distant from my current life, the better. I spent four years in my twenties working in a hospital as an audiologist, in a soundproof room with no windows. Horrid, horrid, horrid. It’s unbelievable to me now, and I shudder to think of it; it was a horrible time. Yet there’s a huge bank of story material there just waiting to be plundered. Likewise my sisters’ experiences: between us we’ve got everything from bending the croissants in a French bakery to working in a sexual health clinic.

There's an enormous number of worlds out there, and that's before going into fantasy or science fiction. It’s time to explore a bit more. 

Good news and good news

I've had a brilliant day. First of all, Himself and I spent the day cycling from our home on Anglesey all the way around Snowdon and home again, a loop of over sixty miles taking in Beddgelert and Llanberis. We're immensely proud of ourselves and have been competing all evening with tales of the mightiness of our quads and how it didn't really take much out of us at all (belied by creaking and wincing getting into and out of the post-ride bath). Here's Bike having a rest halfway up from the Nantgwynant valley bottom.

Second, while we were tucking into Pete's Eats' peerless carrot cake in Llanberis, I picked up an email from Gail at 5minutefiction to say that my flash story Alley Cat had been published on the website today and sending me the Amazon gift certificate of £10 in payment. And third, I got home to find a story I'd submitted to the People's Friend sitting on the mat, rejected. Hang on, I hear you cry. A rejection? I thought this was a good day. Well, it is. That was the first story I have ever submitted to a woman's magazine, ever. It's not the end of the world that it wasn't accepted.  I submit things and get rejected like a proper writer; I've grown up at last.

Right, I'm off to spend that certificate on the new Marian Keyes novel!

Two female authors to try

This week I read two books by entirely different women writers, back to back. If you haven't read either of these authors before, I urge you to try them. These books are great introductions to them.

First, Sophie Kinsella's Twenties Girl. You probably know that Sophie Kinsella is the pen name of Madeleine Wickham, who had published several stand-alone novels before adopting the pseudonym for her very different Shopaholic series of novels. Since I finally read the first novel of that series earlier this year she has become one of my favourite authors. Twenties Girl  is one of her more recent novels, which she chose to write under the pseudonym, presumably because in style it is more similar to the Shopaholic novels. And perhaps also because Sophie Kinsella is such a well-known name now.
Don't be deceived by the lightness of touch of her writing. The novels may be humorous in tone - and they are often very, very funny indeed - but they always turn out to be about something other than what you expect. With her first person viewpoint and present tense narrative, you are inside the heroine's head, slammed up against the present, experiencing it all as it happens. Twenties Girl is a very funny and original ghost story, but it's also about mortality and the alienation and helplessness of old age, with two good-old-fashioned love stories wound through it for good measure.

The second one was Anne Enright's The Gathering. This novel won the Booker Prize in 2007 and I'm embarrassed that it's taken me until now to read any of her novels. I was prompted to by a recent edition of Book Club on Radio 4 when it was the featured book.  The story is tragic, centred on the gathering at home in Dublin of a large, scattered family for the funeral of the narrator's brother, Liam, which provokes her to try to pin down and record long-ago, half-remembered events in her childhood which might have started him on the path to his death. The writing is hard and clear; very very funny at times, shockingly matter-of-fact in others. There's no way I can do justice to the book: just go and pick it up. I'm reading her more recent The Forgotten Waltz now.

By the way, I picked both of these up from my local library. If you don't use yours, please try to do so. We must support our libraries!