From Glasgow to Saturn

by Kathrine Sowerby

Marion and I sit half way up the dune while the boys run in different directions below. The tide is as far out as it will go. In the distance white horses tip and glisten on the water under the crisp line of Raasay and we watch the last families pack up and leave the beach. One has a sledge to pull all the shoes, the wet towels, changes of clothes across the sand. A couple walks ahead of their crying daughter while her protests are carried downwind. Another family peel off their matching wetsuits, deflate their dinghy, and walk inland in order of size. Our older boys have clambered out of sight past the headland. The youngest is near the water burying his truck, digging it up, burying it again. Let’s round them up, I say to Marion then run in deep strides down the dune. The turn‐ups of my jeans, full of sand, are weights bumping against my ankles.

The wind falls away as we reach the grassy curve of the bay and we
brush away the pinpricks of biting midges. We take the path that cuts through
the ferns and I tell the boys to mind out for dog shit at the side of the path, to
remember and check for tics later on. There’s a ditch where the path meets the
road that leads down to the military base, up to the car park, and the older
boys and Marion scramble up, laden with bags and boots. I’m dawdling at the
pace of my youngest. He treads carefully on the gravel, his little feet angry at
the transition from sand to stones. A woman is coming down the road.

She has grey, cropped hair and a beige skirt, in her sixties, early
seventies I guess, and carrying a metal detector. I prepare a greeting in my
head. You’ll have the place to yourself, I’ll say. Happy hunting. But she
doesn’t meet my gaze. Her jacket is open and I think for a second she’s
wearing a superman T‐shirt but as she walks past, head down, I recognise the
Lonsdale logo. I remember a flatmate at university and his brother who came
to visit without warning. His head was shaved, his maroon DM’s laced to the
knee. He wore the same T‐shirt. I turn and walk backwards watching her. On
her back is a Converse rucksack. It dips above and below the line of the ferns.
My son takes my hand and pulls me back round.

Marion and the older boys are leaning against our car parked on the
grassy verge. The only car left in the car park is an old Ford Fiesta. Haven’t
seen one of those in a while, I think. You’ve got the keys, I say to Marion. I gave them to you, she says. I pat my pockets, pull my cagoule from the bag
and shake it. A lighter, a dud biro and a train ticket fall to the ground. Marion
is looking at me, arms crossed. Check again, she says. I stick my hand deep
into one pocket after the other and find nothing. Fuck.

The truth is I’m calm. We’ve had a great day and I’ll wander down to
the beach, retrace our movements. I’m confident. I’ll be as quick as I can, I say.
Marion is taking the Tupperware box from the bag, rooting through the crusts
and sucked flat juice cartons.

I glance up at the dune scraped out of the hillside where a single red
welly is lying at the foot of its slope and I head for the cluster of rocks that
was our base for the day. The woman from the road is on the hard sand near
the water swinging the metal detector in slow arcs in front of her. As she
walks steadily forward water pools in her footprints.

Excuse me, I shout. She doesn’t hear me. I walk closer. Excuse me, I
shout again and she turns, a startled look on her face. I was wondering, I say,
I’ve lost my keys. We were sitting over there. I point to the rocks, black now
in the flat, end of day, light. The woman is staring at me and I think for a
second maybe she doesn’t speak English. There was a German man and his
young daughter on the beach earlier. They lay on their towels, then walked
into the sea, thigh high, and splashed water up their lean torsos. My keys, I
say again, have you seen them? She shakes her head.

I look back at the sand dune, to the other side of the bay, out to sea and
back at the woman. She is standing with her hand in her pocket and I want to
ask her to show me what she has in there. I imagine her fingers curled round
old coins, bottle tops. They have a bottle opener as a key ring, I say, a silver
one. I haven’t seen them, she says.

I walk inland searching for a glint of metal. The wet sand turns to
powder with ridges of shattered shells. The millions of tiny fragments fill my
vision and make my eyes ache. I walk back to the shore. The woman is a
silhouette against the water. I lift my hand to shield my eyes, bring her into
focus. Can I borrow it? She looks at me blankly. Your metal detector. Oh, she
says, I don’t think so. She clutches it to her as if it were her child. They could
be anywhere, I say. I notice she’s wearing canvas shoes. The water has crept
over the soles and sodden the material. Will you be out here long, I ask. Can
you help me, perhaps. My family…

I don’t really like anyone else using it, she says. Her voice is soft but
firm. Surely, I say and step towards her. She steps back. You could walk alongside me. I take another step towards her and I’ve got my hand on the
aluminium rod of the detector. You’re being a bit unreasonable, I say giving it
a tug. She has both hands on it now, pulling away from me. We stay like this
for a while, pulling backwards and forwards then I let go. She staggers. Her
mouth opens but no sound comes out. She’s falling and I lunge to catch her
but instead I land on her with my full weight.

Something is pressing into the skin on my forehead and when I open
my eyes I see the teeth of her zip and the letters, N, S, D, rumpled across her
chest. I watch the cotton for its rise and fall, but it’s still. My head is on her
and all I can hear is the muffled breaking of waves. Eventually I lever myself
to one side. Her head is tilted forward at too sharp an angle, propped up by a
rock. Her eyes are open, looking past me. I get up and walk quickly without
looking back. There’s no one around. The sky is clouding over.

I step from the sand to the grass and there, lying in the middle of the
path, are the keys. I’d forgotten. They’re not hidden, not tucked under
anything, obscured from view, just sitting there, like someone has simply put
them down. I pick them up and clench my fist around them, pressing the
blade into the fat of my palm.

Voices echo round the hills, sliced through for the coastal road to pass.
I follow the curve in the path and see my eldest sons sheltering under an
overhang, hands cupped at their mouths. Marion is sitting on a rock in the car
park. The rock is dotted with shells cast in resin and information plaques
about the geology of the area. The shells look ridiculous. I think of a climbing
wall we took the boys to once and the plastic footholds carefully arranged to
give the best climb. I made it to the top but had to be guided down by an
instructor. By the time I reached the ground my hands were shaking
uncontrollably.

I’ve got them. I hold the keys in the air. He’s got them, Marion shouts
up to the older boys. She climbs off the rock and helps our youngest to get
down. Where were they? Marion asks. Her hair is pressed in damp curls to
her forehead. It’s starting to rain, I say, let’s get going.

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Kathrine Sowerby lives in Glasgow and is the author of story and poetry collections The Spit, the Sound and the Nest and House However (Vagabond Voices). Her new book Tutu will be published by Dostoyevsky Wannabe in 2021. 

This story was first published in Issue 18, the rest of which can be read in our Archive.

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Image

To wake, to describe music, she thinks
“This is so moving it feels as if
something is coming loose in me.”

To wake from the ship she drags
from canal to canal over wet cement,
fag in her mouth, her husband and lover dead.

To wake from her stood at the late cart,
a dark man selling candy or a pill with syrup inside.
Some woman of the night leans by and says,
“Darling, if you knew what happened
when I took that last,” as she swallows the sweet, sweet…

To wake in the glass canal light of an empty street,
worn grain of the wood of the deck on my cheek;
the doors of an empty city float by
as if in a dream, her life caught
between my mind’s eye and the careless lip of reality.

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This poem was first published in Issue 11, which can be read in our archive.

Books by JL Williams include Condition of Fire, Locust and Marlin, House of the Tragic Poet, and After Economy. She is interested in expanding dialogues through writing across languages, perspectives and cultures and in multimodal and cross-form work, visual art, dance, opera and theatre.

Published widely in journals, her poetry has been translated into numerous languages. She has read at international literature festivals and venues in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Turkey, Cyprus, Canada, Hungary, Romania, Montenegro and the US. She wrote the libretto for a new opera, Snow, was Writer-in-Residence for the British Art Show 8 in Edinburgh and plays in the poetry and music band Hail of Bright Stones. In 2019, she was awarded a bursary to develop a new opera with composer Samantha Fernando at the Royal Opera House. Williams curates writing events and creates workshops and professional development activities for poets. www.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk

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FGTS: JL, in a Q&A back in issue 23 of FGTS you said that the book you wished you’d written was The Metamorphoses by Ovid. In your collection Condition of Fire, you responded to those stories. What draws you to myths and old tales, and how do they interact with our contemporary world?

JL: Life is so fleeting. Beginnings and endings rush past. Human beings are natural storytellers. We have language, we have narrative, we have drawings on cave walls, we have time, we have fire. I had a baby seven months ago, and I can feel the story in her already even before the words take hold. Listening to the tales of the ancients… it is an honour to be able to hear some echo from their minds and beating hearts. It reminds me that we are all connected, that this experience of being human is a shared one. Even when it feels as if life is flashing by, or especially when it is, I draw comfort from the depth of experience of humanity. We repeat ourselves. It is nature, it is what we are. As a species on the verge of collapse, there is much we could learn from the myths and legends of our ancestors.  

You often work with other writers, musicians, theatre-makers, sound and visual artists. Why is collaboration important to you, and how do other disciplines and artforms influence your writing?

Collaboration is an exercise in communication, which is what all art (I include writing in that box) is aching toward. When I was younger, I often felt isolated from other people – I wanted to be able to read minds. At some point I realised that reading is a kind of clairvoyance, as is listening to music or looking at a painting. We are not so alone and making with others not only opens doors between locked rooms, but it also allows me to do so much more than I could on my own. Art forms such as theatre and opera demand collaboration. You cannot do it on your own. Working in those areas has been very joyful and educational for me. Our culture puts so much, perhaps too much, importance on the value and power of the individual. It is good to write on my own, to feel the privacy and independence of that, and then to expand into collectivity and conversation.  

I am also very interested in mutation and shape shifting, poetry becoming a painting or vice versa. Something beyond ekphrasis, a kind of tapping into and translation of the maker’s energy. If you listen hard enough you can pull it from one form into another. I like the idea of writing a libretto, sculpting a figure, editing a film and knowing that if I am doing it, I am still writing a poem. It can go the other way as well — the energy of film, sculpture, music into poem. 

What have you been reading recently, and what excites you in new writing these days?

I have been reading baby books! Especially enjoying Phillipa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) – everyone should read that one, and Safe Infant Sleep: Expert Answers to Your Cosleeping Questions by James McKenna. 

Two new poetry favourites are Morgan Parker and Yona Harvey. 

A dear friend introduced me to the work of Ariana Reines and I am keenly awaiting my copy of A Sand Book. Another dear friend just advised me to read Lote by Shola von Reinhold.

Tess Taylor’s Rift Zone and Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange arrived from the US last week, and Shara McCallum has a new book due soon that I’m eagerly awaiting. 

I am a big fan of too many local poets to name but I write with a group called 12 and they are super amazing. I had the privilege of mentoring four poets for the Clydebuilt programme last year and they are each very special – David Linklater, Frank McHugh, Roy Patience and Hannah Summers.

I get excited when I hear words that seem to be coming from the origin, a place deep inside the writer.

FGTS published your poem ‘Image’ in issue 11, do you remember what led into the making of this poem?

Gosh it was a long, long time ago… I do not remember exactly but I am sure the ship dragging came from a documentary I watched about Vikings in Russia pulling boats overland between rivers. It is a dream poem and I suspect it did come at least in part from a dream. I sometimes use dreams as a starting point, then try to make them into something else. 

Finally, is there something from your time at the University of Glasgow that you hold onto and continues to inform your writing practice today?

Michael Schmidt encouraged us to get the ‘I’ out of our poetry. I avoided that ‘I’ for ages but I have been letting it back in, which feels like a reclamation. It is good to be aware of the ‘I’ though… 

Most importantly I think it’s the people I met there, the wonderful writers and the sense of community, those folks and others I have met since who buoy me and inspire me to write from the origin and sing with the collective. 

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‘As a species on the verge of collapse, there is much we could learn from the myths and legends of our ancestors.’ – JL Williams

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by Angie Spoto

I am a liquorice woman 
a fennel creature 
a saffron thing that doesn’t care 
for your opinions or your thoughts on the matter 
or your advice to me because I’m not asking 
I’m just here reading 
and that doesn’t mean I want to talk 
it doesn’t mean I want you in my ear 
or your fingernail running rogue 
across the grains here 
at the table in this low-lit 
pub where 
let me repeat myself 
I’m just reading 
reading by myself here 
and running a grain of fennel 
around my teeth 
crushing it between molars 
and flicking it across my 
two incisors and telling you again 
look I’m just reading. 

Did you know 
I’m a liquorice woman? 
I’m a pepper thing 
I’m a girl with cardamom 
stuck between her teeth 
and let me say this one more time: 
leave. 

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Angie Spoto is an American fiction writer and poet. Writers who inspire her include Angela Carter, Leonora Carrington, and Ursula Le Guin. Her most recent endeavours include a lyrical essay about her Italian family, a collection of horror surrealist fairy tales, and a fantasy novel about grief. She is working toward a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow and volunteers with the Glasgow-based social enterprise Uncovered Artistry, which supports the creativity of domestic and sexual abuse survivors. She is Artist in Residence at HIV Scotland. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Crooked Holster, From Glasgow to Saturn, and Toad Suck Review. angiespoto.com

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This poem was first published in Issue 38, the rest of which can be read in our archive.

Crackerjack

I need love like a microwave
to turn me inside out
as popcorn in slow-motion:
cracked kernel curves unfolding
for easy sustenance
entertainment
good health

I don’t care if I burn
some people like charcoal

but I want expansion
and yield
an application of heat
in close quarters
lest I, hard and shiny,
not yet tender and exploded
crack a smile

when at long last
with an open hand
curled at the tips
to stop my spill

we ping

and I’ll know I’m ready

still waiting for my salt
still waiting for my sweet
hot butter

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This poem was first published in Issue 37, which can be read in our archive.

Ryan Vance is a writer, editor, designer and general literary busybody, with a penchant for speculative fiction and queer representation, based in Glasgow, Scotland. Occasionally dabbles with photography and gaming, and continually pines for the perfect dancefloor.

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FGTS: Ryan you recently published a digital pamphlet of poetry and short fiction called Minor Mishaps and you are working on your first full collection, One Man’s Trash. Where does writing start for you? What moves you to write?

Ryan: For me, writing begins at the end – knowing that when you send something creative out into the world, you’re setting up a moment of connection. We all hold these vast private universes inside ourselves, and for the most part our star-maps align, and that’s great, it’s reassuring. But every so often we discover constellations completely unknown, and exploring those uncharted territories can be intimidating and lonely. If you come out the other side with a story to tell, there’s a chance someone listening might say, hey, actually, I’ve been there too – and then this anomaly you thought nobody would ever be able to explain becomes a shared resonance. Being able to create that instant of discovery is really special.

Which is a fancy long-winded way of saying: I crave validation!

You are also an editor, working on Gutter, We Were Always Here, and The Queen’s Head. All of these projects have been rooted in Glasgow, and Scotland more widely, is there anything you think characterises contemporary Scottish or Glaswegian writing?

This is a difficult question for me to answer, because even though Scotland is where I began taking writing seriously, and all my projects have grown from the Scottish writing community, and I’ve lived my entire adult life in Glasgow… I’m not Scottish. I’m Northern Irish. Even though I would accept Scottish nationality in a split second, I know I don’t share the deep cultural roots which would afford me the validity to say anything conclusive on what characterises Scottish writing, contemporary or otherwise. 

What this status does allow me, however, is a small degree of perspective on how open Scottish culture is to outsiders – and it’s a mixed bag. There’s this pervasive idea that Scotland aspires to be a progressive utopia, and compared to other parts of the UK it’s easy to assume that’s been achieved, but I don’t personally believe we’re even close to celebrating any degree of inclusivity. And as a cis, white, able-bodied, university-educated man, I know I only see the most surface-level effect of exclusion; cleverer people than I, from much more diverse backgrounds, will have more in-depth perspectives on the nuances of cultural exclusion in Scotland. And among communities who do experience discrimination, a conviction persists that change for the better isn’t just possible, but imminent, and worth fighting for. To quote Refuweegee, we’re all fae somewhere. That optimistic, unquenchable solidarity with the wider world feels uniquely Scottish. But the higher you climb through cultural institutions, the more often that openness butts heads with a more conservative idea of Scotland, the more gatekeepers you encounter. And Scotland’s a small country. There aren’t that many gates to keep. But there’s plenty of gatekeepers.

So if there’s one thing that feels particularly remarkable about contemporary Scottish writing, it’s a willingness to recognise the complexity of identity, but it’s a willingness often undercut by the structures that writing exists within, or in spite of. I will say this, though: I think we’re on the cusp of discovering how truly open the Scottish writing community is interested in becoming. There are so many Scottish writers, native or adopted, who previously found it difficult to be heard because of who they were, or where they came from, and personally, I can’t fucking wait for them to storm the gates and take over the castle. It’s long overdue.

What have you been reading recently, and what excites you in new writing these days?

Lately, if you want me to get excited about writing, it has to be done and over with quickly. I love a short, dense book. And I’ve surprised myself by getting very into Joseph Hansen. I’ve never been fond of crime as a genre; for my tastes, it’s too reliant on unflinching realism, brittle understandings of law, and copious dead girls. Which I realise is an unfair generalisation, and one which Hansen disproves with his Dave Brandstetter Mysteries. They follow the exploits of a wealthy, masculine, straight-passing, gay private detective, from the tail end of the 60s through to the beginning of the 90s, with a homophobic father and, eventually, a younger femme black boyfriend, investigating death claims in and around Los Angeles, with the express purpose of withholding money from the recently bereaved, because murder means his company’s insurance policy doesn’t have to pay out. Dave Brandstetter’s a character who can effortlessly navigate nearly every strata of society, during a time when civil rights are going through major upheaval, and he’s unerringly sympathetic to that upheaval, but in order to do his job, by default he has to be the most-hated person in any room. It’s a brilliant example of what crime does best: the interrogation of privilege, power, and the limits of each when faced with the demands of humanism.

Your writing is often involved with queerness and the speculative, how do these two things interact with each other?

How don’t they interact with each other! 

Speculative fiction is about allowing ideas to exist in their own right, whether or not they can be explained by commonly accepted wisdom or understanding, and exploring what happens when you accept those ideas on their own terms, letting them lead you where they want to go, not where you think they should, and trusting that those ideas are able to wholly comprehend themselves and their own internal systems of logic, and then embracing whatever consequences and discoveries that ensue with an open mind.

Queerness is exactly the same, only replace ‘ideas’ with ‘people’.

FGTS published your two poems ‘Show Offs’ and ‘Crackerjack’ in issue 37, do you remember what led into the making of these pieces?

Full disclosure? They’re not that deep. The idea behind ‘Show Offs’ is entirely on the page, which almost disqualifies it as poetry. For ‘Crackerjack’, I watched a super-slow-motion video of a popcorn kernel popping on YouTube and was mesmerised by the beautiful fluid motion of this transformation that, in real-time, is quite violent, and at the time it reflected what I thought love should feel like. For all my high-falutin’ ideas of what drives artists to create, and the multifaceted personal, social and political changes that can come from art, a lot of the art I actually enjoy making lacks finesse. Sometimes you just need to go cartwheel in the grass.

Finally, is there something from your time at the University of Glasgow that you hold onto and continues to inform your writing practice today?

Technical fluency in the Adobe Suite. I didn’t write much fiction during my university days, but I did hold an editorial position on the student newspaper for three years, and because we didn’t have a dedicated designer, every editor was responsible for the layout of their section. It’s a different way of approaching communication, of looking at the world, and of prioritising information. I don’t think even I’m aware of how thoroughly that experience informed my creative process, apart from perhaps being less precious about individual words and more focused on the overall impact of a piece. Years of trying to force florid copy into a finite amount of column space means my editing style can be quite blunt!

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‘I think we’re on the cusp of discovering how truly open the Scottish writing community is interested in becoming.’ – Ryan Vance

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