On Writing Place
A follow on for paid subscribers who didn't make the monthly meet up
On Monday night I met with White Ink members for our creative chat on place. Among other quotes, extracts and thoughts, I shared this with them by Carmen Maria Machado, author of In The Dream House:
“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.”
And it got me thinking about a time in my own life, which I will share with you, alongside the exercise and some more thoughts on place that I shared during our monthly zoom…
In the winter of 2012, rolling into 2013, I found myself living opposite my mother. I was 35 years old and I was alone, with a brand new baby, and nowhere else to go. I had sold my beloved north London flat, left all my friends and I felt I was going backwards in life, instead of forwards.
In the last few weeks of my pregnancy I had bought an old tumbledown house in the village where I had grown up. It was a house that had always fascinated me, mostly I think because it was set behind large wooden gates and tall privet hedges, but at the far end of the garden, you could just spot the top of an old Victorian lamppost – it always reminded me of the one in Narnia. Was there a magical land that lay behind this house? I wondered.
As a teenager, on the days when those wooden gates were left open and I spotted the elderly couple who lived there for decades pottering in the garden, my gaze had always lingered for a while. I’ve always preferred period properties to modern ones, and this was one that I longed to venture into.
And then one day I did. Only I was not a child then, I was an adult. An adult, as it happened, who had a child inside her and without the father of my baby to offer us a home, I needed to find one suitable, one that wasn’t my third floor flat in north London, one that was more conducive to raising a child in.
Although, come to think of it, this house probably wasn’t child friendly at all.