Finishing a Fellowship

What a great conclusion to my three years as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Stirling University. First, my grand ‘walk home from the office’. Then the Publishing MLitt celebrated its thirtieth birthday and World Book Night on April 23rd by sending a whole lot of books ‘walking’ as dominoes, including my ‘best foot books’. Then the launch of Kathleen Jamie’s new book of essays ‘Sightlines’ for which the gorgeous wall pictured below was painted in the Pathfoot Building alongside a celebration of the Fergusson Collection of paintings (which I’ve had the joy to walk past every time I’ve gone to work there). Then a ‘farewell’ reading this Tuesday for Creative Writing students and assorted lecturers alongside fellow-RLF-Fellow Eleanor Updale and Charles Wallace Fellow from India Nabina Das. And finally as I cleared my office yesterday evening, a chance to join the Publishing students for the final showcase of their book production projects – very fine results indeed. I’ll miss my work, the students and colleagues there very much, but now as one door closes, another opens…

Being naked: New literary journal

An essay of mine about walking barefoot through a Kenyan village with activist and writer, Philo Ikonya is featured in Algebra, Tramway’s exciting new digital literary journal. Walked in 2009 as part of my walking and writing project, I'm thrilled to see the piece appear here for the first time.

Developed in partnership with Storm ID, Algebra is edited by writer Beatrice Colin, and the first issue includes fiction, poetry, memoir, photography and visual art from a range of contributors. Take a look here!

'The theme, borrowed from Keith Farquhar’s recent exhibition More Nudes in Colour, Glasgow, is nude or nudity, and the range of pieces include a story inspired by the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempick, as well as a set of poems that focus on the body. Elsewhere, writers go on barefoot walks or present a personal history of tattoos, stand naked in their kitchens or examine the spaces, both emotional and physical, that are usually hidden from view.'

Reading by local authors at the Drovers' Tryst Walking Festival, Crieff, October 10th

I'm also running a 'walking and writing' workshop earlier that day in the beautiful setting of Innerpeffray Library.

Robin Jenkins Literary Award - on the short list!

see the other blog

Where fiction and mountain rescue meet

MOUNTAIN STORY COMMEMORATES 100 YEARS OF S.O.S.

My short story about a mountain rescue, ‘The Weight of The Earth and the Lightness of the Human Heart’ is broadcast on Friday 4th July as part of a week of BBC Radio 4 stories themed, ‘S.O.S. – Save Our Souls’, to commemorate 100 years of the international distress signal. The story was recently published in my second short story collection ‘The Searching Glance’.

The story was inspired by my own adventures on foot in the hills, talking to a member of a mountain rescue team and learning about the mythology of the iconic hill, Schiehallion. The Producer summarises the story, ‘a climber teeters between life and death on a remote hillside as a rescue team search for him. This small human drama catches the attention of the mountain itself in a tale which skilfully blends love, loss and mythology in a lyrical ode to human tenacity’. Ralph Riach is the reader. The story is particularly apt for 2008 which marks the 75th anniversary of mountain rescue in Great Britain.

During the week, this and other commissioned stories by Colette Paul, Paul Magrs, Alison Joseph, and Stuart MacBride, include the most literal portrayal of an SOS signal to the loosest interpretation of a cry for help - and everything in between.

The following day I leave for the Alps, to follow in my father’s footsteps on his summit-bid of 1952. This is part of the project for which I was awarded a Creative Scotland Award in 2007 to write a series of ‘journey-essays’ inspired by human stories in ‘wilderness’ areas. The ten walking journeys include a Scottish drove road and ‘Mozarabic Trails’ in south-eastern Spain.

Creative Scotland Award!

I am thrilled to be a recipient of a Creative Scotland Award 2007. These Awards are supported by the National Lottery through the Scottish Arts Council and ten are given annually to individual artists who live and work in Scotland. They provide a unique opportunity to experiment and realise imaginative ideas in a major project.

My project will be a series of 'journey-essays' which link walking and writing. Walking is vital to my imagination and creative process – a meditation, a journey, a narrative, all closely connected. But as Rebecca Solnit says of the literature of walking, ‘the necessary combination of silver tongue and iron thighs seems to be a rare one’. Hopefully, I will prove to have both!

The focus is ten journeys driven by a fascination with landscapes that appear to be ‘wild’, but which are rich with human, but possibly hidden, meaning. Some will follow physical traces like a dry-stane dyke or a ‘well-worn’ route in a place where walking to get somewhere is the norm. Some will follow narratives. I will follow footsteps, such as my father’s ascent of Finsteraarhorn in Switzerland in 1952. I will trace memories, listen to whispers in the land and document my own responses. And I will experiment with how to craft narrative non-fiction so that it has the depth, intensity and resonance of my short fiction.

Through a series of workshops at festivals of walking and mountains, I hope to stimulate others to link creativity, writing and ‘wilderness’ experiences.

This is a unique opportunity for me to focus, experiment and create from a position of financial security. I start the project in July this year.

Runner Up in the John Muir Trust Writing Competition

On Saturday I was delighted to collect a runners' up prize at the Fort William Mountain Festival for 'The Family Mountain' a piece I wrote about a climb up Pico Duarte in 2001.


The Family Mountain

First light cracks open a new world as we abandon the swelter of Santo Domingo for the Cordillera Central. The car windows seep cool mountain air onto our skin, reminding us of Scotland. Morag exchanges the salsa cassette for Capercaillie. Hugo snores on in the back of the car.
We pass wooden houses painted pink, purple, ultramarine blue -- vibrating against forest pitching upwards on either side of the road. The faces which smile and nod us past from the edges of the road, from rocking chairs, from the fields, are sharp-featured, more obviously akin to each other than the mixture of black and Latino at lower altitudes. These are the Dominican Republic’s mountain people.
We abandon the car at La Ciénega village (1100m) and meet our guide, Fé Canela, at the entrance to Bermudez and Ramirez National Park. Fé rides one mule whilst two others carry our luggage. One of these will also bear the negligible weight of Fé’s son, Stalin. We soon learn that family history is in the making – this is Stalin’s first ascent of Pico Duarte, the Caribbean’s highest summit, and it was his grandfather and Fé’s father, Juan Canela, who was the first Dominican to climb it.
Stalin dangles six-year-old legs over the basket panniers. He cracks the mule forward with the switch and a higher-pitched version of his father’s cry, ‘mulo!’. He’s formidable despite the lollipop stick angling from his mouth.
The trail follows the river through banana-leaf shade. We cast off our sleepiness, and chat as we skirt terraces of maize, and pass waving children. But we soon leave the song-filled, glossy-leafed valley to gasp up through occidental pine forest, decorated red with bromeliads. The trees part occasionally to expose us to the vertical bite of the sun and to increasingly impressive vistas.
We take an early lunch. The pumpernickel we found in a Santo Domingo supermarket goes down well with Fé, but not with Hugo. Stalin only wants the chocolate. The mules eat our mango skins.
It’s late February and I’ve arrived from Scotland winter-hill fit. Morag’s been sweating it out in a Santo Domingo gym. But Hugo’s been sitting in an office. He needs frequent stops, and progress is slow. Fé teases him onto a mule and things speed up. A little before the first summit at Aguita de Fria (2,600m) a new view cheers us on. The haze of the afternoon has fluffed up cloud to fill a valley below us. We’re soaring.
We reach the hut at La Compartición (2450m) just before the sun drops. Toasted marshmallows and Speyside whisky compete for our taste buds at a campfire; a full moon rises; we watch the red glow of a forest fire a few hills away.
At five the next morning we release the cords sealing warmth into our sleeping bags and stumble into boots for the final ascent. We set off by head torch and moonlight, silenced by sleepiness, climbing over pine trunks scattered like matchsticks by Hurricane George. Within the hour the moon drops over one of my shoulders as the sun awakes sudden colour over the other. Two hours through the forest brings us to a pinnacle of chaotic rocks topped with the Dominican Republic’s flag. Juan Pablo Duarte stares out high above the nation he founded, daring anyone within several thousand miles to be more elevated.
A short scramble and we join him, victorious above the trees in a crisp blue sky at 3089 metres. Stalin and Fé smile and embrace the ‘papi’ of the nation for photos.
Regaining La Aguita, we descend dust-slippery trails on a new route towards our day of rest. The litter trailed by a school party marks our way. Further markers are provided by Hugo as he casts curses from the mule’s back – ‘Diablo’, ‘Ay dios mio!’.
Finally we break out of the forest into a wide savannah which we follow to our campsite. This is Valle del Tetero. Eighty-five school children with ghetto blasters welcome us to the secluded spot. Spirits nose-dive. But the cool river laps at hot limbs, gushes into ears and nostrils, washes away two days’ dust. We pitch camp at a distance from the school group and stare up at forest-blanketed hills backlit by sun, white boulders, pines dressed in lacy swathes of lichen. Despite the drop to 1500 metres the night is cool and we’re in bed by half past eight, wearied by heat and dust and eight hours’ walking.
The school camp departs at first light, sun glinting off the rumps of the long line of mules as they’re whooped out of the valley. At nine I take my sleeping bag outside and enjoy the rapid creep of warmth. But it’s not long before the sun becomes masked by smoke hanging over our side of the valley.
Our day of rest is punctuated by the landing roar of a helicopter ferrying in men to fight the fire. They gather in the shade, gulping down plates of food and loading mules with sacks of rice, cases of ‘India Malt’ and bottled water. With short sleeves, baseball caps, and a digging tool of some kind, none of them look equipped for the cold nights here. They leave us before dark. That night by the campfire, we suck up the last drops of the Benavie. Our National Park host declares it the ‘papi’ of whiskies.
The cool morning makes noses and eyes stream. Hands fumble at buckles and clips. Setting off through bracken, pines, deciduous shrubs, we could almost be in Scotland. As we climb, the temperature mounts until we burst back into sunlight and the tropics, shedding fleeces. Men’s voices resonate up and down the trail and soon big groups approach and pass us, heading for the smoke-filled valley with fire-fighting gear. They stop to greet us, and measure with their eyes the muscles that carried us up Pico Duarte.
We rejoin our outward path at El Cruce (2100m) and then descend towards the village, back amongst big leaves, the smell of orange blossom. We wobble across the river on a bridge made of two poles to Fé’s house where we are greeted by his parents. Stalin, the youngest climber in the family, is congratulated by the veteran.
We sit in a house made of sky-blue planks. The gaps between them frame the blinking eyes of children who pause from running with dogs and piglets to watch us drink sweet black coffee that the family have grown and roasted here. We leave the old couple with kisses and retrace the river to the National Park office and La Ciénega. Today it’s getting acquainted with itself as a village without men.
Our car is black. It’s been sitting in the sun. The air conditioning is broken. We have to hose it down before we can consider getting in. Acceleration creates a breeze and a ribbon of dust marks our departure from the valley. ‘Macpherson’s Rant’ by Old Blind Dogs pulls roadside eyes away from avocado picking, school books, wash-tubs, as it beats out of our glassless windows.
But by the time we regain Santo Domingo, the salsa is playing again.

Ends

Walking Through the Story

On the ‘John o’ Groats’ tip of Zanzibar island, we take the un-European way. At sunrise, we walk away from the hotels and tourist shops that encrust certain bays and promontories, into a world of baobab trees and cassava plots, mangrove swamps and coral rag that have always been there and still exist, almost secretly to us, in the spaces between.

Looking for paths worn into earth by bare feet, or the places around the edges of plots where sharp coral rag has been polished by persistent journeys, we piece together a walk cross-country from one village to another. We pass from one bay where mangrove poles have been cut and lashed into bundles ready for collection, into another where fishermen prepare their boats. From a whisper of a trail to a broad path of flat red earth that shouts a purpose. From one set of directions - part told to us, part walked with us - to the next. Everyone we meet wants to know where we are going. When we tell them, they laugh, tell us it is far and point a little inland to the road from where we could take a car.

After two and a half hours, with the sun beginning to bite, we emerge at Kidote, a small village hugging the sides of the road. We are suddenly amongst many walkers, our sticky skin collecting dust chucked up by the vehicles which rip through every few minutes. I have noticed a ‘hoteli’, a small restaurant, when I’ve driven through myself. Hot sweet spiced chai sinks its talons into my mind. A soft donut-like andazi to dip in it. We stop expectantly at the open window. The young boy inside, greeting us from an apparently empty concrete shell, tells us that indeed it is an hoteli. But they have nothing, he tells us with laughter. Not a single thing.

At the stall over the road we ask if there is another hoteli. They direct us back towards the young boy but we tell them his news. Disappointed, we cross the road to await the bus. We sit there, and watch the passers-by, the shop-goers, hear the exchange of greetings. We clearly look demolished by heat and tiredness. And we hear again and again the story of how those wazungu sitting over there, walked all the way from Kendwa to visit the hoteli and found it bare. The story is ‘walked through’ over and over, perfected with details and even given a different ending, in which someone goes home to cook us up some chai.

I wonder for how many days afterwards this story will be re-enacted and embellished. Perhaps the old man with one tooth and brand new wellies who we met at the top of the escarpment will add his encounter with us to the story when he returns to the village from his boat. The two children who scattered like chickens from us will add theirs, and the women at Kendwa drawing water from the well will tell how we looked fresh and strong when we set off but stumbled a great deal on the rough rocks.

Like the path we found, the story of our walk might be gradually pieced together, crafted into something whole and satisfying to be retold in a quiet moment when the absurdity of Europeans is under discussion. And perhaps the punch-line, causing most hilarity, will be, ‘They said they have a car but they wanted to walk!’