Thievery: Anchor of the Suburbs

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘Anchor of the Suburbs’, published in Weave #4.

An extract:

It was halfway through the spring of ’84 when Sandra decided that she was going to become an anchoress.

‘I am going to live,’ she announced one evening during the advert break of our nightly TV soaps, ‘in the crawlspace beside the laundry room.’ She warned us that being an anchoress included refusing all contact except food in the morning, removal of her bucket in the evening, and the weekly updates on the TV soaps.

Our mother was displeased: ‘I did not buy a house at this address, complete with jacuzzi and wide driveway, to spend my time emptying slop buckets. Oh no, little miss anchoress; it’s a long time since I stopped cleaning up your do-do, and you won’t catch me starting now.’ The row was postponed when Sandra realised that she was missing Eastenders, the most vital of the soaps.

The Inspiration:

When I learned about OuLiPo at university, I thought that it was useless and pretentious. But like most other things I learned at university, when I started to put my own voice into it, I realised I liked it after all. My favourite OuLiPo technique was the prose sestina, which is where the writer chooses six words and repeats them as in a sestina, but in a prose form. The key is to not make it obvious that the words are being repeated – the most effective prose sestinas are the ones that don’t read like prose sestinas. (All-Night Cartoon Party is also a prose sestina).

For my writing exercise one night I asked my girlfriend to choose six words, preferably ones that could have multiple uses (eg. ‘jumper’ can mean a pullover, or a suicide, or any person jumping up and down). She chose: spring, live, refuse, address, catch, row. She wrote the words on a yellow post-it note and stuck in in my journal.

I’d been obsessed with the idea of anchoresses for a few weeks, after I read about them in a footnote in a book I’ve now forgotten. An anchoress is a woman (a man would be an anchorite) who chooses to live in total seclusion, usually for religious reasons. But there’s more to it than that: the anchoress is bricked up in a tiny cell, with only a few small windows for her meals and chamber pot to be passed through. The cell contains only a bed, altar and crucifix, and she never leaves it. There’s a ceremony and ritual burial on the day of her enclosure, during which she is asked to contemplate the grave in her cell; she then lives the rest of her life in the cell and is buried there when she dies.

The cell was often on the side of a church, and the people of the town could sometimes come to the anchoress for advice – the constant contemplation of religious matters meant that they were seen as wise, almost mystical. The anchoress is so-called because she ‘anchors’ the church and its people, ensuring that metaphorical storms (of sin, presumably) can’t capsize it.

Anchoresses fascinate me because the practice seems so violent and yet so peaceful. It’s a terrible loss of autonomy to be bricked up, but it might also represent freedom: to not have to conform to the world’s rules, to not have to be what a woman is ‘supposed’ to be. Is it the ultimate anti-women act, or the ultimate feminist act? I’ve now written three different stories about anchoresses, and they continue to fascinate me.

(Note: I have made myself bored of writing prose sestinas. I need a new writing game to play. Suggestions?)

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘Peach Cigarettes in Tokyo’, published in Pear Noir! #4.

An extract:

“The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb. My friend had a dinosaur suit because he’d gone to a fancy dress party the week before, and I was wearing it because I was cold and it was made of fleece. I’d never been much of a smoker, but the vending machine sold dozens of different flavours and what was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I wasn’t going to try new things?”

The Inspiration:

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’, published at Wigleaf.

The Inspiration:

I spent two years on an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. About 90% of what I learned appeared to be a complete waste of time. One class was about OuLiPo, a French movement that seeks to constrain writing in order to be more creative. OuLiPo practitioners use exercises like prose sestinas (using the word repetition of the sestina form in a prose piece), writing a story without using the letter E, or the “snowball” technique (the first line is one word long, the second line has two words, etc.)

In class, we all produced ‘opposite’ stories – write a story, then for each word write the opposite. ‘Some people are grumpy’ would become ‘none ghosts aren’t cheerful’. The interest in the exercise was that most words don’t have a clear opposite. What is the opposite of ‘people’? I chose ghosts but it could be angels, or corpses, or monsters. It was a fun exercise, but I really couldn’t see the point. The things we produced were nonsensical, pointless; who’d ever want to read these?

It’s only now, a year after I graduated, that I see the point of these things. They force you to not be yourself for a while, to not fall into the same themes and tropes and word-patterns that you always do. When I first started the MLitt there was nothing that I ‘always did’, because I hadn’t written much. Now that I’ve cranked out some more words, I often need to stop and think: have I said this before? And that is where OuLiPo comes in.

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’ is a prose sestina (if you want to figure out the word pattern, please feel free!). I love writing prose sestinas. I love that I start out trying to write one story, and then realise that the words won’t allow me to, and so it has to turn into a different story. I like that I’m guided by the words. I like the sense of losing control, of being forced to make unexpected decisions. When I’m finished, I sometimes don’t recognise the story I’ve written. It seems so un-me. But sometimes it’s good for us to wear a mask for a while.

(Note: I really did go to a Halloween party dressed as Betty Boop.)

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘Imaginary Birds’, first published at Scapegoat Review, reprinted at BluePrintReview.

The Inspiration:

For several years, I wrote an online journal. I had journal friends whose lives I followed with interest, and we discussed our lives and our art through comments.

One girl – whose name I have now forgotten – posted many photos of her social circle; she called them her adopted family. She lived in a big house out in the country somewhere, full of God’s-eyes and old bicycle parts and copper saucepans. They smoked dope on the porch and played weird string instruments and everything they did was a ‘collective’. And there was a baby there too. It was not my journal-friend’s baby and she was not in a relationship with either of the child’s biological parents, but she was a parent. Everyone in the house was a parent. The baby was called Antigone, or Voltaire, or Leonardine, or something equally baroque. I thought to myself: THAT CANNOT WORK.

But perhaps it did. Perhaps they all lived and loved together and they were the happiest family ever and that baby has grown into a creative, questioning, sensible toddler, and everyone still lives in that house and it’s the most inspiring thing.

This girl was so lovely and fascinating and I envied her life, because although I wouldn’t want it for myself it seemed that it was exactly the life she wanted. And everyone should have exactly the life they want to have.

In the story, I wanted to talk about this sense of ownership. A mother owns a baby because she makes a baby, but of course a child is a small person and people are owned by no-one. So who really has rights over a child? Who has responsibility? Does biology mean anything? Does it matter who incubates you, who feeds you with their body, who gives half of their own self to you? What does matter?

(Note: I tried to find the girl’s journal so that I could post one of her photos here, but it’s gone. Deleted. And because I don’t know her name, I can’t track her down. So thanks for the inspiration, stranger.)

Thievery is a series of blog posts about my story inspirations.

The Story:

‘Storytelling’, published in Seven Letter Words.

The Inspiration:

I am a nerd for fairy tales. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on fairy tales. I teach a class in writing fiction based on fairy tales. I’ve written handfuls of fairy tale and mythology-inspired poems. But I hadn’t retold a fairy tale.

This is because I have studied retold fairy tales, and I know how tricky it is to subvert them effectively. Cultural myths are ingrained in us from childhood and stepping outside them is no easy task, but there would be no point in me just retelling a story in pretty language. It’s been done before, and better.

So I started thinking about Snow White.

When I tried to sum up Snow White’s character, it seemed that the most important thing about her was her youth. Sure, she was beautiful and innocent and pure, but all that was intrinsic to her youth. So I decided to subvert the fairy tale by changing the most vital part of little Snow: I made her old.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl with lips blood-red, hair ebony-black, skin snow-white. She had a child, a soft blonde angel. When the child was raised, the beautiful girl’s work was done: she had fulfilled her role as a woman. Her breasts emptied, her hands softened, her insides shrivelled like dead leaves. She moved slowly, thoughtfully. There was nothing to hurry for now. She was above the dirty business of men, of sex, of children. Her body did not bleed; it did not sweat or scream or cry.

Snow White is an object. She’s a doll, a statue: a thing to be looked at and fought over. It seemed to me that an old woman – a woman past childbearing, past sex, past everything that we’re told it means to be a woman – could be even more objectified. She could be even more of a china doll: fragile, slow, quiet. She could be owned and controlled.

I also wanted to look at the themes of female competition in the fairy tale. My favourite Snow White retellings subvert this (for example, Emma Donoghue’s The Tale of the Apple), but I wanted to highlight it. It seems to me that feminism in 2010 is not about women’s relationships with men; it’s about women’s relationships with women.

Feminism is about not using words like ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’.
It’s about not seeing other women as competition.
It’s about not commenting negatively on the way other women look.

We’re taught from childhood – in stories like Snow White – that women compete. We’re taught that a woman’s value is in how attractive she is to men and how much they want to fight over her. We’re taught that being beautiful is the most important thing there is, and if another woman is more beautiful then she is more powerful, and you must tear that slutty bitch’s hair out and steal her man, and then you too will have power.

In this story, I wanted to highlight that. I wanted to show what happens when women compete instead of working together. And it’s not a happy ending.