Mslexia

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New Writing

Submit for Issue 47

MSLEXIA 2010 WOMEN'S POETRY COMPETITION

Try these exercises in serendipity.

» Visit a bookshop; close your eyes and select a book at random. Turn to page 100 and write down three phrases that intrigue or attract you from that page. Use them as the basis of a poem.
» Go to a museum; wander in any direction, but count your steps. When you reach 100, focus on the nearest exhibit. To establish its physical reality, describe it as accurately as you can. Now think of it as a metaphor – for loss, envy, coldness, anger. Rewrite your description of the object as a poem, incorporating the metaphor.
Devised by Margaret Wilkinson

◊ Closing date : 26 July 2010 ◊ Competition guidelines

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Into the Deep

Christina Patterson introduces her selection of prose and poetry

Like much of the British electorate, I was, for a while, undecided. At work, we were debating the virtues of a hung Parliament – the virtues, in other words, of mass indecision. At home, surrounded by piles of double-spaced paper of prose and poetry submitted to Mslexia, I was finding it more tricky. I knew how I was going to vote, of course, but I didn’t know how I was going to shrink those piles of paper into a few flimsy sheets. Not because, like the party leaders, they were all pretty unconvincing, but because they were nearly all so bloody good.

Five months before, a routine trip to the hospital had highlighted a shadow that had proved to be a lump that had proved to be breast cancer for the second time. Suddenly, I was ‘in the deep,’ not waving, but floundering around in decisions I didn’t know how to make and questions that can’t be answered. The night before I lost my breast, I felt that I might drown. The night after, I was clinging on, but it felt more like the raft of the Medusa.

At least, I thought, before I went into hospital, I’d have some time to read. Friends brought me books, but for the next three months I just stared at them. I’d read a page and then, as the words started swimming before my eyes, feel lost. Reading is, for me, like breathing, but for the first time in my life I couldn’t do it. And then suddenly I could. At first, it was just newspapers, and then the new Martin Amis (if there’s a novel in which breasts feature more prominently, then I haven’t read it) and then Colm Tóibín’s blissful Brooklyn, and then Jackie Kay’s wonderful new memoir, Red Dust Road – and then the box from Mslexia arrived. What riches! Really, what riches. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.

The short story, I learnt, is the perfect literary form for those recovering from a major operation. It offers narrative satisfaction in bite-sized chunks, but it offers other kinds of satisfaction, too. It offers instant access to a different world, a different life, a different mood. One sentence, and you’re in: diving deep into the well of another person’s linguistic world, another person’s psyche. With a short story, you sink or swim very quickly. I was swimming a lot.

There were, as you might imagine, a lot of boats, a lot of beaches, and a lot of mermaids; there was a lot of swimming, a lot of diving, and a lot of drowning – or nearly drowning – and there was an awful lot of deep, blue sea. In almost every case, the swimming, or diving, or drowning, was also metaphorical, and in some cases it was purely metaphorical. You can, it swiftly became clear, dive deep into almost anything – love, fear, pain, regret – and you can drown in almost anything, too. Cancer, as I’d discovered for myself, offered plenty of opportunities for diving, and drowning, and popped up in at least one story and a scattering of poems. The body’s failings, in fact, was a big theme: in ‘The Swim,’ a short story about a man with Parkinson’s which very nearly made it to the final six, in ‘The Turning of the Tide,’ about a man in a wheelchair, which did, and in a handful of stories about the constraints of old age. If subscribers to Mslexia are finding themselves doing quite a lot of caring, it’s certainly being put to good use.

Some writers made bold use of the surreal. None bolder, perhaps, than the author of ‘Pet Shop Boy,’ a quirkily funny account of family wrangles over a tiny human diver that’s purchased as a pet. The story was one of a number that could easily have made it into the final six. Another was ‘Baby Skeleton,’ a macabre glimpse into the life of a woman who worked in a handbag shop, and yet another was ‘Igloo,’ an account of cruelty, and social awkwardness, on a train.

But in the end, I had to net my tiny catch, and drag it in. I started with history: “April 14 1912: 41° 46 North, 50° 14 West,’ a (fictional, of course) first-hand account of salvaging the bodies from the wreck of the Titanic. Written in the voice of a ‘dreamy lad with a dragging leg’ who suffers the daily shame of helping his mother in her laundry, it’s an imaginative reworking, and one that manages to be both punchy and poetic. ‘The Turning of the Tide’ is also about a literal sea and a literal tide, here involving a strange meeting between two people who are both out of their depth. ‘Breathing Common Air’ switches between a glacier, a deep-sea dive, a sofa and a mountain summit, and between the impulses that draw two people together, and then drive them apart.

That’s also the theme of ‘Cherry Blossom Boy’ and ‘None Of Us Will Be Okay,’ a title which could have served for a number of the stories on my shortlist. ‘Cherry Blossom Boy’ is a charming account of a romantic relationship with built-in obsolescence. Set largely on a tidal basin (one fringed with cherry blossom), it’s also, incidentally, the only piece of writing to mention the biggest issue of our time, the world economic crisis. ‘None Of Us Will Be Okay’ tackles a more obviously failing romantic relationship, this time on a holiday in Florence. Shot through with a wry humour that edges towards the savage, it’s actually about grief masquerading as irritation. But my favourite story of all is the one with the most banal title: ‘Odd Socks.’ Written in the voice of a child neglected, and finally abandoned, by his crack addict mother, it’s tautly written and extremely moving. It’s also the only story set in the underclass that most fiction ignores.

And then there are the poems. Another glittering shoal. You’d expect plenty of romantic tides, cross currents and swirling depths – plenty of sea as sex in other words – and you wouldn’t be wrong. Among those that didn’t make it to the final six, but which I liked, were a ‘Neap Tide’ in a bed, a ‘High Tide’ on a beach that’s probably a bed, and a water stain on a ceiling that becomes a ‘map of South America’ and a ‘land of fire’ and desire. The big surprise, however, was how many poems didn’t focus merely on the self and sexual desire. For someone like me who has a bit of an allergy to what the critic Alan Ross used to call the ‘I am sitting here beadily watching the world’ school of poetry, it was quite a relief. Instead, among the poems I admired, but couldn’t finally cling on to, there was one about Pepys writing his diary, another about ECT in the 1950s and another inspired by a letter to Henry James about a trip to the zoo.

In my final six, the sea featured in only one – ‘Chunnel Evacuation: A User’s Guide’ – and then obliquely. Most of the poems weren’t overburdened with a sense of humour, but this jaunty journey into a fishy post-French holiday emergency made me smile. So did ‘Natural Law,’ an elegant synthesis of physics and the physical, which reduces the laws of the universe, and the laws of relationships to one: Sod’s Law. ‘World Service’ is rooted firmly in the physical world, a world not of deep sea, but deep snow, and frozen sheep dug out and defrosted by an Aga. ‘Bunker,’ inspired by a Henry Moore painting, is a tender glimpse of lovers seeking safety from bombs, and solace in each other, in a tube station deep below the London streets. ‘Unzipping’ is about the contents of a handbag, and the contents of a life. It’s also, in a way that made me catch my breath, about cancer. And ‘Sirius,’ ostensibly about a trip to the planetarium, is about a life kindled, and lost. It ends, not with grief, but with the brave assertion that perhaps a brief life can be ‘enough.’

So here it all is: love and death, childhood and old age, the highs and lows of the human body and the human heart. And, of course, of the human imagination. In the shadow of death, the shadow we all live in, there is nowhere to dive but into the deep.

CHRISTINA PATTERSON is a writer and columnist at The Independent. A former director of the Poetry Society, and literary programmer at the Southbank Centre, she writes on politics, culture, books, travel and the arts.

All chosen poems and stories are published in the current issue of Mslexia. To read New Writing in full subscribe now.