January 26, 2010 · 10:43 am

anna, light, pearlant

In the early 80s I wrote a note about a little girl called Anna, having a tantrum in a bookshop. Something about her relationship with her mother, whose name I have forgotten, made me feel Anna would have a disordered life. I never could make anything of this note. It lay dormant for 20 years, then gave birth to Anna Kearney in Light. It was dormant again until this morning when I took the original Anna out of her box &, handling her very carefully in case she fell to pieces, wondered for the millionth time if I could do anything with her: only to realise, finally, that I already had. This Anna’s mother was thin, epileptic, nervy. Hindsight leads me to suspect she didn’t eat much. This Anna is my key to the Anna I need to write in Pearlant–a woman now 50 years old & setting out on the last part of the unconscious journey of the author.

About these ads

3 Comments

Filed under the book

Tagged as ,

3 Responses to anna, light, pearlant

  1. D. Moody
    January 26, 2010 at 7:45 pm

    Anna is what touched me most from Light, I’ll gladly read more of her.

  2. Brendan Byrne
    January 27, 2010 at 12:46 am

    This is a great argument for the enforced silence theory of writing. Keep it to yourself, keep it real deep, and it’ll do its work there. This can be taken down a couple of routes, most of them pretty obsessive. This site (and my own) seem to disobey that rule, as they move towards openness and some kind of honesty. However: when I was younger, I was a complete bastard about writing, refused to talk about it, denied I even did it, just so I could keep everything tight and close to me, not let any of it go, in the hopes that it would make me better. It wasn’t till I stopped all that nonsense that I became any good at all. Maybe it’s the details you can’t remember that do all the work, like your Anna. Either way, it’s good to hear that she’s got some life in her.

  3. uzwi
    January 27, 2010 at 9:55 am

    Hi Brendan

    I get the best of both worlds here. Since the bulk of entries are out-takes from my notebooks, journals & commonplace books past & present, they’re stuff I would have written, or have already written, anyway: more a part of that internal dialogue than anything else. At the same time I make sure that plenty of material stays private. You get an instinct for what to reveal & what to keep to yourself. & then there are the sudden unplanned events–you write a blog entry out of nowhere, & it tells you something important, or it’s a new direction or whatever: very satisfying.

    For me the most powerful events are unconscious anyway: as you say, it’s the stuff you don’t remember that grinds away down there doing the work. The “site” in Nova Swing is a metaphor about that, which originated in a TTA messageboard rant during a discussion with China Mieville about “influences” & praeter-sources.

    Also–do you find this ?–engaging some of the material in public is another way of working. You make little intense bits of stuff & people get to see it very quickly, & then you make more stuff. I busk here, & that’s fun.

    Hi D Moody: I’m glad you liked Anna. I stand in a very complex relationship to her. A couple of pieces in the new short story collection are about a version of her.