Marian Womack's Blog, page 2

writing: inspiration

After spending Christmas in Cambridge, I imagine England will end up looking like this. The river was very full of water, the moorhens were abandoning their nests by the river in order to venture into the Common, simply because the days were being so very wet. I have been asked to write a short story for a forthcoming issue of Presencia Humana, the first Spanish magazine specializing in weird literature. I was thrilled when they asked, but knew I would have to write it during this holiday. Recently we've had a very busy schedule. I have this running joke with a friend who, like me, runs a small press, has a two year old baby son, and her husband is a poet… We both think we should get t-shirts saying exactly this, as the message would epitomise exactly the main problem in our lives, that we have absolutely no time. I didn't manage to write the story in Cambridge, but the rising water inspired me. My parents-in-law told me great stories about previous floods, and I managed to write the skeleton of the story to finish it here before the year expires. Ha ha ha. I will certainly try to do my best. So that is inspiration #1.


Inspiration #2 has been the Berlin Natural History Museum, the Naturkundemuseum. We are great fans of Natural History Museums, Anthropoloy and Archeology collections. I should perhaps not write this here publicly, but I much prefer them to art collections… I simply cannot resist the cabinetofcuriosityesque quality within them, those wonderful never ending selections of interesting, bizarre items, a true Wonderland which shows that the real world contains absolutely everything that is weird and marvellous… I found them the most inspiring places in the world, precisely, for writing purposes. After spending seven years living at Oxford, one of the things I miss the most is spending time in the Pitt Rivers Collection, which even managed to make it into my first novel. In Berlin I was mesmerised by the butterflies. Reading the panels about venomous butterflies something caught my eye: "Sie warnen vor Giftigkeit". They warn they are poisonous. Through their rather incredible colours. So that's it. I would love to manage to mash these two ideas together, weave them into my weird short story. It will be an interesting exercise.