The Panther & the Almond Tree

About a year ago, I came across a fantastic podcast called “A Writer’s Life”. I would recommend it to any serious writer, especially if you have a sarcastic sense of humour and don’t mind being offended at times. This podcast is actually so good I’ve listened to several of the episodes twice, some even three times, and I’ve actually cried with laughter listening to podcast host Dan Black’s fantastic rants and ramblings.

One of the things I have to thank Dan Black for, was that he did something to rekindle my interest in the classics. I’ve struggled for a long time with overcoming the notion “old books are boring”, because for so many of them, that’s absolutely not the case. Besides, as I’ve matured and gotten a bit older, my own tastes have changed to, and I’ve grown used to styles that I found too dry when I was fourteen.

The list of classical authors I had never read, goes on for miles. Even the most famous ones I had barely touched, certainly not since reading simplified excerpts at school. Authors like Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, the Brontë sisters, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway. A favourite of Dan Black’s was Gabriel García Márquez.

And so it was with great joy that I, a couple of months ago, discovered my parents actually owned a García Márquez novel, namely the famed “Love in the Time of Cholera” (“El amor en los tiempos del cólera”) from 1985.

Life got a bit busy after that, as life does, but now I’ve finished it, and oh my. What a wordsmith.

We’re all unique, of course, and we prefer different things. I have a distinct weakness for rich details and imagery, and striking metaphors, such as the quote in the post “wounded panther”, which uses exactly this as a most striking metaphor. It’s used nowhere else in the book, and yet it is so clear, so striking, exactly what is meant. I went around for days after reading that line, chewing on the words, tasting them.

Oh, the beauty. Oh, that I might learn to write like that. Oh, that more people would strive to write like that, employing precise and original imagery to convey their meaning – not getting caught up in cliches, nor in sugary “literary” language which is so caught up in being literary, that it becomes exhausting or even boring to read. (Will I be mauled by trolls for saying something like that? Oh, come on. We’re writers. We can we should we must do better!)

I did wonder for a while what to draw for this post. I realized that drawing a panther here would work against the very thing that I think the metaphor does so brilliantly – that that thing is something which really can’t be done with imagery. Metaphores are a treasure of writing and storytelling, communicating on a different level than lines drawn with a pencil. So I drew some blossoming almond tree branches; the almond tree being another, but much more concrete, image in the book.
PS: The last episode of “A Writer’s Life” was put up on November 11th, 2015, but nonetheless, the 34 that are up are amazing. You can find them here: http://awlshow.com/ or wherever you get your podcasts (probably).

Internationality

A few years back, my accent was very posh and very British. Since then, it’s been Americanised, and it’s taken on a funny Australian twang that comes and goes. It’s quite common for people to guess at where I’m from, and quite rare that they get it right.

I’m familiar in the role of “international”. I was cast in that role long before I ever identified with the word. In the beginning it was my olive skin that did it, and my dark hair, and my eyes – my brown eyes that were so dark when I was a kid, that the doctor couldn’t check if my pupils were expanding or not. Living with Americans in college, I heard a number of stories about the environment in which they grew up; stories of racism, white people and black people. By comparison, the environment I grew up in seems almost surreal. I was the minority, true, but because my eyes were not blue, and my hair not blonde.

But what I want to share right now has nothing to do with looks. I want to talk about the English language, and about accents and even spelling, in the context of being an international person. (By “international” I mean a person who has been moulded by more than one culture and place).

When I had English in school, I was given the choice between British and American English. Either one was fine, so long as I was consistent with it. For example, if I chose British, my teachers asked that I spelled words “colour”, “humour”, “defence” and “centre” rather than “color”, “humor”, “defense” and “center”, and that I would say “pavement” rather than “sidewalk” and so forth.

But why is it, actually, that I should choose British or American, when I am neither of those things? This question goes along the lines of a subject I had in school when I was about 18, called “International English”. In it, we were exposed to the idea that English, being the world language that it is, no longer really abides to the rules that it used to. A language doesn’t live inside grammar books – its rules are only those that are recognised by its speakers. And English speakers are phenomenally diverse. So shouldn’t accents be allowed to be, too?

As I said in the beginning, I used to have a very British accent (think Lucy Pevensie going “We could play hide and seek?”). But it isn’t anymore. Other influences has moulded and shaped it into something else, something that confuses people and makes them wonder where I’m from.

I no longer see why my accent should be this or that – I am not an actress pretending I’m from a certain place, nor am I very skilled with imitating accents. My accent actually holds within it some of the beauty of language. It tells a story; my story.

It tells you that I am not just where I was born. Nor am I American or English or Australian, or any other specific nation. I am international, and I cannot hide it. It’s reflected in my words, my interests, my thoughts, the food I cook and the drinks I prefer. It’s reflected in the way I pronounce my A’s and R’s and in the melody of my sentences.

Likewise, your language and accent reflects who you are and what your story is.

If you are an English speaker who speaks no other language, don’t worry – that’s a story too, as valuable as mine. But don’t tell me you don’t have an accent. You do. No word can ever be spoken without an accent. “Standard American” is an accent too, just as Georgian or Russian or Swedish or Cantonese. And if you, like me, are an ESL person (ESL = English Second Language) and feel awkward about your accent: don’t. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having an accent (although, you know, work at being able to communicate well).

I will not bring this to a neat conclusion. All this is meant to be, is me sharing some ideas that have been tumbling around in my brain.

–

The picture is a drawing I made of a random picture of a guy. I didn’t know where he was from, and really, I don’t think I could have guessed, which I thought illustrated my thoughts in this post quite well.

Rats (short story)

You might be able to recall the picture of the flabby, middle-aged woman sitting on the ground, wearing nothing but sweatpants and a sweat-stained bra, an agonized look on her face as she holds on to her fatally wounded daughter. If so, even if you don’t know my name, you know my face. You know my tragedy.

I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t have any vanity left; my grown daughter Lylie was lying next to me, her bleeding head in my lap, her hair a tangled mess of blood and dirt. Without thinking, I pulled my cotton sweatshirt over my head and proceeded to tear it up using my teeth and the strength left in my desperate, trembling hands. Goosebumps spread across my flabby, bare arms and back. Very carefully, I started wrapping the improvised bandages around Lylie’s head.

Thick dust lingered in the air like the morning fog from the Thames, except no amounts of sunshine could make it evaporate. Within minutes, blood was seeping through the improvised head bandage. Lylie’s screams had ceased and become faint mumbling and moans. Everything in me screamed of the danger of the situation. Holding on tight to my daughter, I looked up, hoping against all hope that there would be a doctor, or some sort of Eastern emergency personnel present.

Instead, I stared up into a photographer’s camera lens.

“Help me!” I tried to yell, but the horrendous dust made me choke, and I started coughing in stead.

The photographer lowered his camera, and looked at me. His black eyes shone with compassion. And yet, he did nothing. I knew he was Eastern straight away. His clothes and shoes were regular enough, but the camera, and even more, the way he carried himself, stood out. I’ve always thought privileged people walk differently. I don’t wish to be rude, but you have a distinctive air of self-righteousness about you. It’s like you think good things are yours as a sort of birthright.

Everywhere around my daughter and I, the brown dust from the collapsed factory building hovered. Through this dust, people were disappearing and reappearing like ghosts.

“They didn’t say anything,” Lylie gasped.
“I know, I know, Lyle.”
“Hh… how – agh – could this happen…?”
“Be calm, baby girl. Mummy’s got you.”

Lylie managed to grit her teeth, but not much more.

When I first saw the gigantic, churning pillar of dust rising towards the sky, a few hours before, I didn’t think much of it. I realized some disaster had occurred, but I didn’t have time to mull it over. I was the mother in a family of six, which included my alcoholic husband and a son with some sort of mental disability I couldn’t afford to pay for a doctor to diagnose. I had my hands full.

When the screaming from the floor below started, after someone had received a telephone call and I discerned the words “Ashford and Tate” and “disaster”, I got worried. Force of habit made me glance at Rhys, the father to most of my children, but he didn’t notice. His eyes were open, but something about them reminded me of a dead fish left in a fishmonger’s chest after all the ice has melted. Rhys was somewhere else, mentally. He just lay there on his dirty mattress, too sick to walk or to care.

Looking at Rhys always made a horrendous anger swell inside me, but it also reminded me why I could not rest, or give in. It was too shameful a thing that my eldest daughter was the only one in the family with work, and I couldn’t allow myself to become an even heavier burden to her. My brave, strong Lylie, she was the light of my world. If it weren’t for her, our entire family would have been ruined. We had always been like rats swimming from a sunken ship, but Lylie was the one who found the piece of wood we clung on to. She kept us afloat.

But there by the factory ruins, hours later, hope was bleeding out, even before my eyes. It bled out through my fingers as I pressed my hands against the sides of Lylie’s head on top of the soaked bandage. Panic rising in me, I realized I was loosing her.

When the emergency personnel arrived – too few and too ill equipped to have even the slightest hope of being able to meet the overwhelming need. By then, corpses and soon-to-be corpses were lining the pavements, and there was a growing crowd of sobbing and screaming relatives and friends. By some miracle, Lylie was among the first twenty who were rushed to the makeshift hospital inside St. Paul’s Cathedral. There, her head was patched up; she received blood and – despite my screams of protest – lost her legs. There was no avoiding it, I had known that ever since I saw my daughter being half carried, half pulled out from the collapsed building, her legs dragging after her in a funny angle. After the operation, a doctor with an Indian accent told me Lylie had been lucky.

I was awake almost until dawn, curled up on the rug on the floor next to my daughter’s hospital bed. Lylie was still unconscious, machines beeping around her. The sound of screaming, mainly from victims’ loved ones and not the victims themselves, echoed off the cathedral walls. Now again there were flashes of light; Eastern journalists and photographers present to document the disaster.

For a time, I sat with my fingers in my ears, trying to block it all out, while staring at the ceiling, which seemed higher than the sky where it soared above me. The magnificence of the cathedral took my breath away. It was utterly unfathomable that there were once people in this land capable of constructing buildings like this.

It wasn’t something I thought about often, but the notion always became more intrusive when I was surrounded by awe-inspiring architecture, and that horrendous night was no different. I recalled what I had learned during my few years of school: that our ancestors became lazy, resting on their former victories and choosing to live wasteful and unsustainable lives, caring nothing for further innovation and development, or for the fact that society and market forces was developing and changing. And develop and change, they did. The East developed with lightning speed.

It strikes me as bizarre to think that the world once looked like a mirror opposite of what it does now. The poor and suffering whom the rich wished to think as little as possible about mostly used to live in the East. The West was once a glorious empire. In some distant past, our lives used to matter.

At some point before dawn, Pip showed up. The terror and fear I was feeling burst out of me like an attack from a mistreated street dog someone tried to pet.

“You’ve left Rhys and Ridley alone, you stupid girl?!” I hissed at her, though my concern for Lylie had actually made me forget all about Rhys and the other children. “Philippa Jane Clarke, are you positively mad?!”

“They’re not alone,” answered Pip, with the sort of mature calm one wouldn’t expect to find in an eleven-year-old. “Mrs Eavesbrook’s there.” Pip looked at me, eyes grave. I could tell from the dark rings around them that she hadn’t slept. “Will Lylie be okay?” she asked.
“They took her legs,” I said.
“What?”
“They amputated her legs. Sawed them clean off.”
Pip went pale. Suddenly I saw a glimmer of the child she actually was, or should have been. I wanted to hug her, but my arms were too heavy to move.
“They had to,” I added, trying to sound more comforting. “They couldn’t fix them. A piece of a wall fell on them. They looked … it was …”
Tears ran down Pip’s face.
“I know,” she whispered. “The newspaper said so.”

She opened her shoulder bag and took out a crumbled copy of The Guardian. The title read: “Ashford Factory Collapse: Hundreds killed.” I let out a gasp of disgust as I realized I was on the cover. In a flash, I remembered the black-eyed Eastern man with the camera. The sight of the picture horrified me. I looked as ugly as a haggard old witch, and absolutely devastated. Lylie’s head bandage was bleeding through my hands.

“You were on the news, too,” Pip said. “The picture is everywhere.”
For several minutes, I could barely breathe. I fixed my eyes on Lylie’s head where it rested in a crisp white pillow. Her head was wrapped in actual bandages now.
“Why did they let them work there?” Pip asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The article says the building had been deemed unfit as a factory. And yet it kept going; new floors and yet more new floors being built. The rules and the regulations were ignored entirely.”
“Deemed unfit?” I said, opening the newspaper. “Where does it say that?”

Pip pointed it out to me. My eyes skimmed over the sentences, and I realized she was right.

“’Cause we’re rats,” I muttered, cold anger flooding my veins.
“Sorry, mum?”
“To the people of the East, we’re like rats. If we die in a disaster like this, they don’t care. They’ll feel sorry about it for a while – my goodness, I hope my ugly crying face haunts their dreams! – but they won’t actually do anything about it. They love their precious, wealthy lifestyle too much, and their cheap things from foreign factories. The rich business owners, they know that even if a factory collapses, they’ll find new workers. Oh they’ll plead and apologize after this one, but just you wait. There will be no change, because there are always more rats. We have nowhere else to go.”

“The Easterners could help us,” Pip said.
I took a deep breath and forced myself to smile, and not protest. Pip still had an ember of childish innocence burning in her, and I didn’t want it to die.
“Yes, Pippa,” I answered. “If they wanted to, they could.”

Rip

A sideways glance
Was enough to see
Something to rip the heart
Right out of me

Even though this is normal
The new everyday
So common newspapers
Rather focus on who might be gay
The hard truth is
By now, it’s barely even news anymore
It’s all happened too many times before

And yet it is always different
When it happens close to home

Today there are people dying
Dying in cobbled streets I’ve walked
And there are people crying
People with whom I might’ve talked

My instinct is to scream:
“You’re not welcome here
This is my neighbourhood
I will have no war here!”

But then, that doesn’t help
And nor is it true
Because the whole world is my neighbourhood
We’re all in this mess together
Whether it is Sweden or Syria
Whether they’re bleeding – or you

Here’s what I want to convey,
What’s on my heart to say,
And I don’t bloody care if it rhymes anymore:

I have no faith in complicated procedures
In military campaigns and angry speeches
In pointing fingers and declarations of hatred

I have faith in forgiveness and in grace

                           in inclusion
                           and tolerance
                           and equality

Let’s take responsibility for how we meet

e v e r y    s i n g l e    o n e

Let’s stop inadvertently creating humans so desperate
They think that in order to be heard
They must rip peaceful places and people apart

They do not know what they are doing
And I don’t think they are more to blame than we

Fish

Once, I carried an enormous fish home in my arms, like it was a small child. It certainly weighed as much. A couple of my friends were walking with me, squirming and giggling so much that for every few steps, they had to stop and recover. They’d never seen a fish so large, not in real life. What a brave soul I must be, to start out on such a daring adventure as this: to cook this monster.

Writing “Sands of Time”

“From the smell of petrol in my dad’s garage, to the mess of a painter’s workshop as some  gigantic oil portrait is being created – I’ve always been a lover of creation processes. I am the sort of person who doesn’t like TV or movies very much, but I will watch any amount of behind the scenes and making-of footage. I just find it endlessly fascinating.

That’s why I want to share some of the “background material” of some of the things I write, and why I’d love to read background material of your writings too: because I enjoy the process as much (despite the blood, sweat and tears), and sometimes more, than the finished product.”

Okay, so I have the audacity to quote myself, but this is after all another post on exactly the same thing, and it is the first time here on my blog. Last time, I posted it on my profile on TheProse.com, and as I suppose writers will know: sometimes when you’ve labored over a text in order to say something, you just think to yourself: Why reinvent the wheel?

Now. Whoever you might be, who has stumbled across this post (you are most welcome) – I want to share with you about creation processes. Not because I’m a master, but simply because this is the sort of thing I find interesting. There is a reason I called this space a “wordsmithery”. I want it to have a smithery sort of feel. I want it to be a place of tools and ramblings about outlining processes and imsomnia and glasses of wine and all the things that belong right here, in the wordsmithery.

As I wrote in the shortstory itself, it was a reponse to a challenge (“most unusual apocalypse) on TheProse, though ultimately it failed to meet the wordcount criteria.

First, I sat down and wrote a list over “common apocalypses”. This list included zombies, diseases, various kinds of wars, chemical weapons, alien invasion, etc. To create another enemy of sorts wasn’t a route I wanted to choose, and then suddenly I had the idea of a city that, quite simply, slowly starts to fill with sand.

That idea stuck.

It reminded me, in its bizarre nature, of several of the things I’ve read by the brilliant Haruki Murakami, where the bizarre simply happens, and must be accepted. Though my story has a starting point in our world after oil has run out, and which is quickly deteriorating, that’s where any sort of “realism” ends, because the sands that start blowing in are of course the sand of time.

I wrote the short story in first person singular. That’s where I am most comfortable – I’ve always written mostly in first person singular. I think I favour the immediacy of it, plus I tend to connect quite easily with the character in this way, whereas when I try to write in 3rd person, I generally have a much harder time.

What I personally like about the story is that it sort of starts in medias res, without too much explanation of too many aspects of the world as it looks when Kate is telling the story. She only tells the things that relate immediately to her; she does not stop to explain, for instance, the implications of infrastructure breaking down, where her dad went, etc. Also, because I am a name geek, I liked the names a lot: Athena and Kate. Athena because this also said something about her mother, and about her own bitterness, and Kate, for the simplicity of it.

What else? Actually, if you have any kind of question about the story, I’d be happy to answer.

R x

Sands of Time (short story)

This is a shortstory I wrote as a response to a challenge on TheProse.com, along the lines of “write the most original apocalypse story you can think of”. I didn’t notice it had a maximum wordcount at first, which I exceeded, but I liked the result, so I decided not to participate in the challenge, but post the shortstory as it turned out, here.

*

When my mother found out she was pregnant with me, she tried to abort me with a coat hanger.

She told me this herself, without flinching. She is the strongest, hardest woman I know, with eyes that always gleam with anger and bitterness. And yet, I know that she loves me. Indeed, it was exactly because she loves me, that she didn’t want me to be born. She didn’t want me to have to come into this world.

My mother’s mother – my grandmother – was a naïve woman. I’d like to say she was uneducated, but “disinterested” would be closer to the mark. That woman believed it was a sort of law of nature that the things that are, will remain. So she believed that her parents’ reality would be her own, and that whatever the news proclaimed would not and could not ever change her dreamlike world of blue skies and green grass.

When the naïve woman had a daughter – my mother – she surrounded her with a blissful mirage of denial and wishful thinking. The daughter was taught that the world was beautiful and fruitful, that she could be whatever she wanted to be, that good food and sunshine were the lasting hallmarks of a good life. She even learned how to drive. But though she would eventually come into ownership of a car, it was only because cars, by the time my mother was eighteen, were dirt-cheap. Even I could by a car now, even in reasonably good condition, because what’s a car worth when you can’t drive it?

Besides, even if there was still petrol to be bought, the roads are now in too horrendous state for it to be any use. The asphalt is all broken up by cold and heat, smouldered so badly that some places even cyclists struggle to find a way – some places, you even have to climb, or make your way carefully around the open gullies. Cars are still everywhere, though. They’re as ever-present – and maybe as tragic – as the ancient ruins of Athens. That’s another thing my grandmother had a strangely romanticized view of. She even named my mother after the goddess Athena. My mother hates it, of course; she’s named after a symbol of a lost world. When she had me, my mother decided to call me Kate. I think she felt it was more neutral.

Outside of our house, my dad’s old car is standing, beneath a crooked old oak tree. I don’t know what happened to my mother’s first car, but my dad’s old one, that we still have, even though he himself is long gone.

It’s a 1968 Corvette Stingray. I remember my dad saying, on several occasions, that if you’re going to own a vehicle that you can’t drive, it ought to be a piece of art. He’d be upset if he knew that my mother and I have painted it azure blue. It’s not a brilliant paintjob, I’ll be honest, but I’ve seen much worse. My mother chose the colour, reminiscent of the skies of her youth.

I’ve never seen blue sky in real life. In this city, that just isn’t possible anymore. The pollution covered the sun and sky up long before I was born. You have to travel far out on the country, or to one of the many abandoned cities, to even get a glimpse of that brilliant blue, not to mention – stars at night. The world I know has no sun, no moon and no stars.

These days, there is the dust as well, and the sand, which finds its way everywhere, getting in through the tiniest cracks. In the mornings, I wake up with sand in my eyes and nostrils, and a throat that’s absolutely parched from breathing in the dry air. I can barely even make a sound before I’ve had a sip of water. Thankfully there is no shortage of water yet, though I expect I will live to see wells dry up and water pipes run dry. Horror-struck by her own harsh meeting with reality, my mother certainly hasn’t raised me to be an optimist – I truly am my boyfriend’s exact opposite.

My boyfriend remains relentlessly hopeful. Sometimes it annoys me so much that I can hardly keep myself from punching him, but it’s also what attracted me to him. And somehow he can stand being in my presence even on my gloomiest, most depressed days, when I feel like the dry air and lack of sunshine is sucking the very life out of me.

I must have complained about this one too many times, because now my boyfriend has decided we are going to find it. We are going to find the blue sky.

“That’s what they used to do, you know,” he told me. “With sick people. They’d send them to someplace warm and sunny. And then they got better.”

“I’m not sick.”

“Well, it would do you good anyway.”

“Blue sky. How will blue sky do me any good?”

“Come on, Kate, you know what I’m talking about. It’s like when you see a flower, you know, that’s so bright and fresh, and the sight of the colours makes you feel … just, better.”

“I’m not sure I know that feeling.”

“Flowers in spring don’t make you happy?”

“No, the opposite. They look so lost, and they’re always covered in dust, and I just keep thinking, ‘born to die’ … you know?”

My boyfriend looked at me for one long moment, and announced: “That’s settled, then. We’re going.” And before I could argue, he rushed to add: “How about this: We’re doing it for our grand children. We owe it to them. Because they might never get the chance.”

That night, my mother and I both woke up at the sound of a loud crash. The winds had already been howling when I went to bed, another sandstorm brewing, gathering strength. On the emergency weather forecast – by now a regular occurrence – the weatherman looked clearly unsettled, as he had to admit that it was “unclear” where the sand storm came from. There were, after all, no deserts in this country. But then, the sand storms didn’t just occur here. They were happening everywhere, across the globe. Winds of sand seemed to be blowing from some unknown source.

Moments after the crash ripped me out of my sleep, my mother stormed into my room, flashlight in hand. I was already sitting upright in my bed, and automatically closed my eyes against the piercing light.

“You okay, babes?” she said, shifting the beam of the light so that I could look at her.

I nodded, as I got up. Beneath my bare feet I could feel the rough sand on the floorboards.

“I think maybe –” I began, my voice a weak whisper. I reached for the water bottle on my bedside table and made myself swallow a few mouthfuls. It tasted like rust. “I think maybe the tree on fell – on the car. I thought it sounded a lot like metal … metal and glass.”

Sticking close together, we made our way to the hall, where sand had gathered in the corners and the air was thick with dust. The front door was shaking and rattling on its hinges, the wind screeching.

“I don’t think we should open it,” my mother and I called in unison.

My mother’s eyes were sad, but her face was stern and strong, as always. She crouched down and picked up a handful of sand from the floor. Holding it in her fist, she slowly released her grip a little, letting the sand trickle towards the floor. It caught the light from flashlight, shining like gold dust. The sight reminded me of something, though I didn’t know what, and for some reason, I felt melancholic.

“It means something, doesn’t it?” Though we were only a few feet apart, I had to yell so that she would hear me.

My mother looked at me.

“Yes, my darling. It means time is almost up.”

Hello.

Hello.

My name is Randi. I spend most of my time writing, some of my time drawing and all too little of my time reading. This is my blog.

You may imagine it like this: rather than picking up a person’s biography or diary, you happen upon random pictures of them, newspaper clippings and scraps of paper with scribbled-down thoughts, an empty coffee cup, and so forth. Piece by piece, the person start to emerge as a whole human being.

I do not know how to summarize myself, so chances are you will come to know me rather in the same manner.

Likewise, this space will take shape as I go.

Welcome.

*

PS: My name is Norwegian, and unpronounceable to most non-Scandinavians. In English I like it to be pronounced rhyming with Ghandi.