Slow water: on writing, swimming and time

This year the world slowed down around me, and I slowed too: my body told me it was time to stay close to home, and by mid-summer I was ill enough that walking half a mile was plenty.

But I was looking far beyond the small fields I could wander in. A piece of luck linked me with the artist Ardyn Halter, 3000 miles away in Israel. Together we were asked to explore the idea of A Common Place,  alongside writers and artists from across the world, brought together by the Eames Gallery and 26.

Our pairings were random - our names literally pulled from two hats and called out over Zoom in late June as the heat rose outside and the roads stayed empty. Though the world beyond our doors was closed we were making connections - and the next day Ardyn and I spoke for the first time.

Ardyn lives in Israel and I'm East Sussex, and we didn't know each other's work before that first conversation. How did we begin to find our common place? I'm not sure I remember exactly, but my notes are scattered across the page ... 

WATER

        read the water

strong waves

                            fear of below

different person each time

                                            LAYERS

coming home

what colour is feeling?

maps

memories

joy and chemistry

                        never entering same water twice

Some current had pulled our conversation to the water we share - my local, silty river Medway, and the Mediterranean where Ardyn swims daily before dawn. Since the beginning of this year I've been slowly travelling down the Medway towards the sea - swimming, walking, canoeing my way down the river I've known intimately since I was a baby, to a sea I barely know. That sea is connected to all sea, just as the land beneath my feet here, miles inland, flows into the river and on to the sea. This time of year - mid-December - I can clearly hear the water in the soil trickling into the tiny tributaries that gather over the fields and carry this morning's rain all the way to Israel, maybe, if it doesn't get distracted.

Water is slow, even when it moves fast - the rivers are filling and moving quickly after a week of rain here, but on every bend, there's an eddy, a nook where water pauses. Early sun lifts mist from the fields, carrying the water back into the air. Air, earth, water, all one.

My route down the river has slowed right down. I'm getting stronger and can walk a handful of miles now, but the world outside is closed again - I've almost reached Rochester, but it's out of bounds. So, like the water beneath my feet, I'm trickling slowly, wandering almost at random in the fields, up the hills and down the valleys where the streams gather.

But just look at the painting that Ardyn made, Sea Swim. Isn't it utterly gorgeous? It has all the emotion and sensation of the moment swimmer and sea come together. I love it.

And I have a poem, Flow, written after a summer of slow swimming in cool water on searingly hot days. My one constraint was that it must be 62 words exactly. It grew from rough notes made on a day after a walk along a tiny stream, thinking about tides, and from every swim I've ever slipped into:

A Common Place is at the Eames Fine Art Gallery until 24 December 2020.

Time out: the difficult but essential art of doing nothing

My doctor has told me I need a break. Doesn't that sound luxurious? I pictured lying on a sofa all day, looking out of a window at a blue sea. Perhaps people would bring me cups of tea and cake?

And for a week or so I did lie on the sofa because ironically I was exhausted from working flat out to clear my desk in order to have a rest. No one brought me tea, because no one's here during the day. I cooked dinner because I like cooking, even though I swayed as I chopped and stirred. I did a little light invoicing, sorted out my aunt's accounts, answered a few emails. Nothing demanding, but it didn't feel like I was resting.

I googled 'medical definition of rest'. The long and the short of it is that there isn't a definition of rest. It could mean complete inactivity, but rarely does. It could even mean going for a run each day.

The challenge is what to do if you're meant to be resting.

If I were well and needed a rest, I'd probably head up a mountain, or get on my bike and cycle all day. I might catch a train and wander round galleries and see new plays. I'd probably get in the car and visit far off friends. (I definitely wouldn't be here at my desk.) But I can't do any of these things because doing any of them would exhaust me: working flat out for months with a gastric infection and then Reactive Arthritis has drained me physically and mentally.

I can't even rewrite my novel (it's been sitting in first draft on my desk for months) because I don't have the energy. I have to tell myself this is ok: how come I can't do like a proper ailing artist and create great work from my sick bed? Well, maybe because I'm not a proper ailing artist: I intend to get well, to regain my energy, and then I'll write. (And did Proust and Keats run a household or earn their share of the bills? Did they have families demanding their attention? I think not. I shan't research this further because quite simply I don't want to know about someone who did all of this while really ill - it's not helpful.)

So this is what my life looks like at the moment, and I'm not complaining: I read in my hammock, watch the bees on the lavender, let the clouds scud past. I listen to podcasts. Friends come and we talk over coffee. Each day I walk a mile, extremely slowly. I have learned to identify some butterflies: the gatekeeper, the meadow brown, the ringlet and the black admiral. I have belatedly planted out my beans, sweet corn and courgettes, so late that they probably won't fruit, but each day I check them. I maintain the tomato plants in the greenhouse. I don't do my accounts, answer work emails, worry if various members of my family are ok. I am learning not to respond whenever someone asks me to do something. That's really hard but I can feel that it's the right thing to do.

Best of all, I've begun to think about my novel and how I'm going to rewrite it. I'm happy thinking about it, planning, writing notes. In the meantime I'm writing tiny things every day: a fragment overheard, the bones of a poem, the opening of a story. It feels so good, I think I'm beginning to recover. Maybe what I needed all along was to allow myself time and space to think and write? Maybe resting is essential to creativity? And both are essential to my health?

I think I've found the answer. The art of resting is to give yourself permission to rest. It's that simple.

I win a weighty prize!

Yesterday I had coffee (and a rather nice cookie) with Elise Valmorbida and we talked translation, writing in another language and the joys of taking yourself away to write. And that was good enough for me, but the reason why we met yesterday was even more wonderful:

I won a prize!

The trophy is an amazing object in itself - the real piece of letterpress from which my certificate was printed. It weighs a ton, and I can't quite move my fingers yet from carrying it home yesterday. It's sitting on my desk right now, making my day feel extremely splendid.

Winning this award was pretty much a complete surprise. Over a year ago I wrote a poem about the matron's mallet at the Foundling Museum. (I blogged about it here.) I read my poem there last autumn, and it was a pleasure.

I didn't really think about the poem again until a couple of weeks ago when an email pinged into my inbox telling me I'd been shortlisted by 26 for their award for the best piece of writing on a 26 project. Could I come to the annual 26 shindig, Wordstock, in case I won?

Sadly I couldn't as I already had plans. A few days later, sworn to secrecy, another email arrived. Could I possibly make a short acceptance video?

Good lord - I'd won!

Now winning an award is wonderful - even if you've read your work aloud to a polite audience and your mum says it's jolly good, it's hard to believe it really is worth anything (or at least I found it hard to believe it) until a team of judges picks it out and says, yes, we really like this!

So thank you, 26, I'm thrilled.

And thank you Elise, for that other huge positive of winning an award - getting to meet a wonderful writer and spend a seriously civilised morning together over coffee.

I need more time, or is that an excuse?

Last month I wrote about taking August off to write. It didn't go quite according to plan and I'm wondering if that's because I'm not dedicated enough to my writing. Maybe I'm not really a writer, deep inside? Do I need to be more single-minded, more disciplined? More obsessed?

A writer I respect once told me that writing must come first, always. It took me years to get over her dictum because I knew that a sad child or an ill partner would always come first for me, so I believed I couldn't be a proper writer.

The thing is, that life has a tendency of happening at you even if your main character is teetering on the brink and desperately needs you to write the next scene.

Real though my characters are to me, they don't die if I ignore them for a few weeks. They just get a bit pale and I get frustrated.

So here's what happened with my glorious month off. I spent the first two weeks of it sorting out family stuff that popped up the moment I cleared my desk. Very neat timing, very frustrating, but needs must.

Or must they? I'm willing to bet that Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and all those people I think of as serious writers didn't abandon their manuscripts for weeks while they drove around the country sorting out care packages, or interrogating GPs, or comforting someone whose life's about to change completely.  Or, come to that, buying the weekly shop and cooking the evening meals.

The thing is, these things I do are part of me, so they're also part of me as a writer. I don't write domestic dramas, but I do write stories with people in them and everything I do feeds my writing.

The problem is finding time and space to think about my story and put the resulting words on the page.

Not writing for those first two weeks of August was awful. I got angry. I felt bad about being angry but I'm just not going to write a novel when someone I love is struggling. In the third week of August though, things calmed down and I wrote and wrote.

Then I had one week left. Just one week - I'd hoped to finish my first draft over the summer and there was no way, absolutely no way I could do that. What's more my house would be full of people, and I'd never be able to concentrate - I wanted to be able to wander around talking to myself, lie on the floor to think, write at midnight or ten in the morning, whatever it took. So I took a deep breath, rented a flat in Hastings for four days, and caught the train with a bag holding my laptop and a swimming costume, and told my family that I was running away.

I think they understood. My family is a lovely family.

Hastings was heaven. I wrote, I thought, I wrote and I thought. I swam and walked up the cliffs. I slept after breakfast and dreamed of my characters and no one interrupted them. I talked to no one except some old friends with whom I had supper one night, and Deborah behind the bar of the Crown pub opposite, who made me excellent coffee each morning. That's all the human contact I needed.

I'm back now, and working again. But a month away from my desk - even if half of it wasn't spent writing - has given me a fresh determination to finish my novel. I took a couple of hours off yesterday to write and I'll do the same today.

That's a piece of chocolate and Guinness cake, by the way, and some of the best coffee Tunbridge Wells can provide. Thank you Black Dog café, top writing spot of yesterday.

The thing is, I suspect that writing slow suits me. I've only just understood my second main character's motivation. I began to see it last week while watching a bunch of people at a neighbouring breakfast table in a conference centre play power over their muesli. I spent the next few days driving up and down the country listening to old, old music, with that scene simmering in my mind. It's on the page now, transplanted and transformed and I know what's happening in my story far better. Sometimes a good story just takes time, and I'm ok with that.

A Slice of Tongue

Now here's a strange thing - today I received requests from two English undergraduates in the US for more information about my story, 'A Slice of Tongue'. It appeared in Paraxis in 2011, and it seems they're writing dissertations on it.

I'm honoured and rather fascinated to know what they make of it.

They asked for links to reviews of the story but of course there aren't any, so I can't help there. They also wanted a bit of biographical information and some 'tips' as one of them put it. So I sat down to think about what made me write the story, and though I've no idea if this is helpful, here's what I came up with - simpler to put it here, I thought when the second request came in, than to email people individually.


I live in East Sussex, which is a rural county in south east England, and it's where I grew up - the landscape and places around me often play an important role in my stories.

I wrote my first short story, 'The Swimmer' in the summer of 2010. It was published in The Warwick Review, a UK literary print journal, and spotted there by Nicholas Royle, who picked it for Salt's Best British Short Stories 2011.  'A Slice of Tongue' was one of four stories I wrote in the summer after this (the others being 'All Fall Down', 'The Flotsam Cafe', and 'A Job Worth Doing').

'The Swimmer' was essentially realistic: it's highly descriptive and the river is recognisable to anyone who lives near me; its plot is grounded in reality too. In the stories that followed it, by contrast, I allowed myself to write almost by instinct, and all four have some degree of fantasy in their plots.

I wrote 'A Slice of Tongue' for an issue of Paraxis that had libraries as a theme. (Libraries are a political issue here, as many are threatened with closure through government cuts.) As with almost all my writing, the location was important in the genesis of the story. It began for me with a mental image of the inside of my local library, into which someone introduces an item of food - a forbidden thing in a place where everything is dry and organically dead - but in fact full of life in the stories on the shelves. Both the library and the butcher's are real places - I worked in a butcher's shop at weekends as a teenager, and spent hours in the library directly opposite it, but I gave myself the freedom to follow my gut feelings about both places, rather than the more prosaic reality, and the story is the result.

It feels rather strange to be writing about my own work - I don't think I'll make a habit of it. I'd prefer readers to make up their own minds, to have a personal response to the words on the page. But I'm rather thrilled that people are studying the story, so I hope this has helped a little.

Two new stories for December

From reading my blog, I realise that it might seem that I spend my time wandering about the countryside taking photos. But you'll perhaps be glad to know that I also spend time writing stories, and last week I heard that two had been accepted for publication. Things have moved impressively fast, and they're both out in the world already.

The first is in Litro, a London-based print and online magazine (http://www.litro.co.uk/). I wrote the 'The Flotsam Cafe' last summer after reading a call for submissions elsewhere, asking for stories on the subject of Britishness. It seems to me that - though we're rarely aware of it - we're people who live, physically, on the edge. We're an island on the edge of Europe, never really fully part of life on the mainland. We're never far from the edge of our land (try living in mid France - or the middle of the US, where the sea is a distant rumour). I wanted to include that feeling with a story about someone who's living on the edge psychologically too.


The second story, 'All fall down', is in Untitled Books (http://www.untitledbooks.com/fiction/new-voices/all-fall-down-by-sj-butler/). I wrote it a while ago, and when I'd finished it, I showed it to my son, who said 'It's great, Mum - really mad!'. I wasn't sure that I'd been aiming for 'really mad', so I put it aside. A couple of weeks ago I had another look, decided that I liked it after all, and sent it off to Untitled. I'm really glad I did.

... and breathe out

At midday yesterday, despite me telling myself I was deeply calm, my body wagged a finger at me and put me right. Cold sweats, racing heart - what a wimp. So I sat myself down to finish my accounts with the radio blaring loud (The Avalanches' 'Frontier Psychiatrist' - what? Only 6 Music could play it), and that seemed to do the trick.

By the time I arrived at the Betsey Trotwood for the Best British Short Stories launch I really was as calm as I'd told myself to be - and quite right too: Nic Royle, the editor, was easy-going and so was the whole evening. Hard to be formal in a tiny cellar with standing room only, lots of beer, and tube trains rumbling under our feet. The readings were great - it's a pleasure to hear stories read the way their writers intended and I'm looking forward to re-reading the others' stories and hearing their voices in my head as I do.

So now it's launched, and I even have a copy - the ones Salt posted out last week still haven't arrived, so last night was the first time I'd seen my name in that contents list.

I have to say, it's a good collection - I haven't read it all yet, though I know the two stories by Hilary Mantel already from their original publication in the Guardian, but I love Claire Massey's Feather Girls and Adam Marek's Dinner of the Dead Alumni. Shall be reading the rest eagerly - a treat in store for when I've done my tax return. Revenue and Customs better be ready for the earliest tax return ever.

Proof I'm not perfect

Salt sent the proofs for The Best British Short Stories for me to check - hugely exciting to see my story there, and only slightly less so when I spotted a typo on the first page which I'd missed when it was first printed in the Warwick Review. Still, at least I found it before they printed the book - it's due out on 15 April, more details here http://www.saltpublishing.com/books/anth/9781907773129.htm.

I also had to check my biog in the back of the book - a pretty quick job as it's so short: "SJ Butler is a freelance writer and editor living in Sussex. 'The Swimmer' is the first short story she has published." Alongside the lists of novels, collections and illustrious magazines everyone else has published in, it looks a little sparse! Still, I'm thrilled to be alongside people like Hilary Mantel and Adam Marek, both of whom I've seen at the Small Wonder festival at Charleston and admired from afar.

Adam Marek read an utterly beautiful story about a father and son at Small Wonder last year, quite unlike the surreal stories in 'Instruction Manual for Swallowing'. I haven't seen it published, and in a way that's one of the joys of the festival - just occasionally we hear a story that feels as though it's being read once in its life, for us alone. Michel Faber read one he'd written specially for the festival, which he told us he didn't plan to publish, and it's still quite clear in my mind, all the brighter for not being written. Mind you, I'd love to read it and experience it again.

Salt Publishing are wonderful

I can't quite believe this, but Nicholas Royle has just asked to include my story 'The Swimmer' in The Best British Short Stories 2011, due out in April from Salt Publishing http://www.saltpublishing.com/  and  http://bestshortstories.wordpress.com/author/nicholasroyle/ . Blimey - I feel deeply honoured!

'The Swimmer' was the first story I sent out (and only the second I'd finished, if I'm honest) so I'm somewhat wide eyed and stunned. But finishing 'The Swimmer' last summer was what I needed to get me going (I've long had an extensive collection of brilliant openings), and I've since finished (or nearly finished) a handful more - I just hope I can produce something I like as much as 'The Swimmer'!.

The Swimmer: hot off the press!

Today my first short story is published - I sent it to The Warwick Review and was stunned when Michael Hulse, the editor, accepted it as it's only the second time I've ever sent a story out.

If you'd like to read it in full, I'm afraid you'll have to buy a copy of The Warwick Review at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/warwickreview/ - but to whet your appetite, here's a taste from the opening paragraphs:

The Swimmer

The alders at the river’s edge stand motionless in the midsummer heat. In the fields, the twisted cattle beans are black. A car buzzes out of sight, its engine muzzled by the thick air. Above it all, the sky is a bleached starling’s egg blue. Three weeks of windless sun weigh down on the fields: nothing moves except the water, slow, steady, a slick of olive green pouring away from her.

She sits at her desk in the back room gazing out at the river. Where it rounds the first bend there’s an eddy as the current twists out into the middle, pirouettes and continues on its course. The sun catches the ripples, sprays them silver for a moment. The light is so bright that she can hardly bear to look at it. 

            She is so hot.