Bring Me Existential Dread or the Muse Will Sue

This isn’t true, or is it? I don’t know. I have not been here for some time. That can be said of many areas of my writing and personal life, for quite a wee while. A lot has been going on. Moving four times this year. A big bereavement. Renovating properties to try and ground my life in a way that allows me to work on novels with less pressure. Being a Mama, a friend and human with a heart that beats — in a world that has far too many reasons to create existential dread in even the most positive of people. My health has been really bad this last few years. There’s been hospital trips. Rounds of drugs. Getting better. Getting worse. Starting again. When it comes to the words, I had a total loss of faith. Are we meant to confess to that kind of thing? Are we meant to be shiny? Are we meant to be an image rather than a truth? It arrived. It stayed. I didn’t write my novels for about ten months. I felt separate from the industry. The things I was doing to be able to keep writing, trying to find other ways to get some security, were taking me further and further away from getting back to them. I could say I’ve never felt less like a writer than I have done this last year. I wonder if Jessie Kesson felt like this in her crofting years? I find I can’t take elements of the industry. It can be totally counter productive to art — this big machine that adores or denies millions of words each year. I don’t come from a world that had any security. I’ve been living in renovations for seven years straight — in the hope of providing for my family and so that I can still continue to write. Literature is a privileged industry. For those of us with a -+ in such things, there are many reasons to lose hope. However, I loved words a long time before anyone read them. My relationship to what I do is not confined to publication, or the industry, it exists out with those things. I could have picked so many other careers to make a good living from, and done really well from them, I adore making houses beautiful, I take old wrecks and restore them from scratch and at the end you’d never guess how derelict or smelly or weird they were when I got them. In the last ten years I’ve moved over ten times. I’ve slept with a baseball bat by a flame balled window, taken out wee-soaked floors, pulled out ceilings, knocked down walls, lived with bathrooms in the middle of a whole floor with no inner walls and all the electrics and rubble exposed, I slept in a hallway above the door, in the living room, on a sofa bed, on a sofa, at an ex’s, it sounds chaotic but I hid as much as I could so I could parent well with as much stability, security and comfort possible. My son stays with his Dad at weekends or during holidays where I would do the longest and worst hour on the houses and make it fun, and nice, and as normal as possible the rest of the time. I can make a nice space almost anywhere, with very little to hand. That’s a legacy from growing up in care and hating living in soulless spaces. I have worked as a painter and decorator, and an industrial cleaner, I am really practical and there is a certain pleasure to taking a house back to the bones and rebuilding it. I am an artist, so my eye to detail is acute. I recently read Tanizaki — In Praise of Shadows. I felt a huge recognition and solace in the essay. It’s exploration of aesthetics is so pure. I have gone a long road unseen this last year or so. Now I have come back to this place — where I type and think and begin to create worlds that mean something to me first and fore mostly. I know some writers would be appalled by that, those who write firstly and fore mostly for readers, or editors, or reviews, or glory. I write to become. It’s probably really impractical of me. I write to remain. I write to retaliate. I write to challenge, to rage, to love, to mourn, to lust, to hope, to pursue mortality in the ways it does me, I write to unfairness, and cruelty — I write to be. I have not been doing the longer pieces. The novels. Life has been taking me out and I lost faith in my ability to write these books, in a big way. Despite that I brought out my last poetry collection — There’s a Witch in the Word Machine. It’s a book I really care about and I’ll blog about that separately. So, anyway — I’m back in this space of fiction. I drive up and down the A1 listening to music way too loud and over these ten months of non-faith, non-practise (novels anyway) I have come to some big decisions. I worked out the structure of my 100 year-novel, I reclaimed its ending from the following novel and I am ready to stand by some things which I think are fundamentally vital as an artist. The right to create work that does not always comfort or soothe. The ability to believe in myself even when my content as seen as a threat or attack on liberal values (I still don’t understand this) because it pushes boundaries too hard, or perhaps keeping the multiplicity of real life inherent in  literature is so rarely seen in a world that has never seemed so culturally conservative. Is it incidental that we are watching the censoring of media, of challenging thought, the use of propaganda, fascist far-right dogma, the clinging to ideals which claim to be middle-class or elitist as the only way to save us, in a world that should know by now — there are no ‘classes’ of people, there are only those who have more money, and those who do not. What an archaic fucking idea? Class. I submitted two novels that were not ready. I was also told that coming from me, as a woman, as someone who is identified as working class (and doesn’t mind that) (but who has never belonged to any social group that strongly, who was always transient, who always saw through those things and thought them an utter waste of judgment and division, a form of social control so clumsily and creepily employed to keep people afraid of themselves and each other) I was told one of my books had made someone incredibly angry and the other might be best suited to a smut or porn publisher. It was an initial reaction. They aren’t finished yet. How intriguing though that had they been submitted by one of our well educated, upper middle-class white straight men, they would have been received totally differently.  However because they come from me there is some element of threat. I don’t write to threaten. I don’t write to anger liberals. I am responding to a hundred years of history in one of those novels and to patriarchy and social exclusion in particular. There is much to make a person feel a true and righteous rage when considering these things. I read a blogger whose articles I find hugely challenging at times. When I find them at their most difficult, it is because they are teaching me most about my own biases or ignorance of an area I don’t yet understand. I am not often considered as an educated person. My background in care is usually mentioned though. My most important education never arose in a classroom but I am close to finishing my third degree in a decade, a PhD. I had some really good reviews for There’s A Witch in the Word Machine. One described me as a sorceress, in an article where the male poet was described as an academic. It is problematic perhaps to think of someone from my background as — not capable of practising some kind of dark art — to be doing what I do at all, nevertheless, there is only one element of my background that is fetishised, the British media in particular only one want one kind of story. Contradiction is beyond them. I am more than qualified in the school of life, and I can hold my own with any subject I have studied. I am not one thing. Yet I am identified as threatening at times (in my work) because of the edge I bring to the literature I write. I am an edge walker. I am a risk taker. You don’t come from my walk of life and do what I am doing, without that ability to throw down your soul as the most truthful thing you own, and back it with humility. The novels were not ready. I am starting draft three of both of them. I wrote a play of my first novel in the interim and I can talk more of that later. I had support from writer friends and the Scottish Book Trust, and Editors and Edinburgh International Book Festival, and National Theatre Scotland, and others, to help keep my sense of reason in my year or so of lost faith. They helped a lot and eased me through a period where I just could not find the time or energy or self belief to write in the way I like to. Perhaps it is useful, vital, or necessary even at certain times in our life, to halt our big pieces of work for a good long time. My life has been beyond challenging this last forty-one years, and this last twelve months have been off-the-scale. Stick that in your discordant syntax detector. I’m standing by all the gaps. The unusual. The uncomfortable. I am thinking about my novels daily again. This time I may not stop for a decade. I may be glad of my years knocking walls down. May they have prepared me for continuing to do so, and more.