LITERARY PC

 The opening two lines of my recently published novel, Mrs. McPhealy's American, read thus: "Every village has its idiot. Locharbert in Scotland had three." 

Now readers seem to have one of two reactions to this. On the one hand, people will tell me, "You had me in the first two lines!" These readers think this is a funny observation. On the other hand are the readers who are offended that I would make reference to "idiots" at all. These readers dismiss the book before they have even started. Claire McDougall, author, is to be relegated to Coventry, a highly occupied zone these days. So, let me give my defence for opening my book this way.

First of all, I am not pulling the notion of a village idiot out of thin air. It's an age-old concept. From time to time, I see someone wearing a T-shirt that has the following written across the chest; Your village called. They are missing their idiot. I find that mildly offensive, I have to admit. It is distasteful because the intention there is to cut another down. However, it is made in jest. It is teasing, not something used much in American culture. When I first came to the USA, I would "tease" someone, only for that person to take what I had said as a serious accusation. For instance, to a woman concerning her overbearing husband, I might say, "Don't forget to put the arsenic in his tea." I could easily say this in front of him, because it is said as a joke, and that's what jokes are for. All jokes hold an element of truth, otherwise they wouldn't be funny. The jester to the kings and queens of old fulfilled this function: nudging a person in power towards a truth through the vehicle of laughter is a vital role. something we could surely use these days in this climate of deadly serious and polarising politics. 

When I handed the script for Mrs. McPhealy's American to one editor, she warned me that some readers might find this opening reference to idiots unacceptable. I refused to take it out, however, because I don't see it that way. But to appease her, I quickly followed those two lines with a phrase that rebranded these three idiots as sages. Anyone who has gone to the trouble of actually reading my novel, cannot come away with the feeling that my aim was to denigrate these three brothers in a small Scottish town. On the contrary, these characters are my Greek chorus. It is they who know what is really going on in the town. All the history and undercurrent of the town has filtered down into these three, and I use them to tell the reader what is really so, especially when appearances would suggest otherwise. In other words, they are a literary device. And I use the well worn metaphor of a village idiot to set it in place.

There you have it. As with so much of the cancel culture we live in, it helps to widen the lense and not throw out the baby with the bath water, to use another metaphor. In my own country, I have this problem with women who won't countenance the great Scottish poet Robert Burns anymore, because he was a fabled womaniser with a slew of illegitimate children who once penned the memorable line about "fucking [a woman] until she rejoiced." Harvey Weinstein, his accusers bellow! No, I say quietly. The man was born in the mid-eighteenth century. Largely because of Christianity, women at the time had little agency. Robert Burns gave them them some.  I wouldn't have wanted to be married to the man, but he also wrote this beautiful line, "but to see her is to love her, and love but her forever; her nature made her what she is and never made another." Again, the context matters.  I'll be the first to admit that Burns had his flaws, though he was not a fraud, but if we were to dismiss him for not fitting into the mores of toady, we would rob history (more particularly Scottish history) of some great literature. And it's not as though we are incapable of balancing two contradictory impressions. 

To get back to Mrs. McPhealy and the idiots. They shall remain, because they represent this point. They may be lacking in what scholars would regard as intelligence, but my precise point is that there is more to a human than his or her IQ score. As I have written in other books, that kind of intelligence is highly overrated and has got humanity into some serious pickles. The quiet knowing that I write about in my book is far more the measure of the man. And definitely more the measure of the woman. 

Ruminations on Drumpf

This morning, I heard a bird crash into my sliding glass door right across from the bird feeder. Going out to investigate, I came upon a little purple finch on its back, unbreathing, beautiful and yet suddenly vacant. The sunflower seed it had risked its life for was still wedged in its beak. Poor little scrap of a thing. I picked it up and cradled it in my hand for a while. Its body was still warm, and I suppose I fancied that given the warmth of my hand, of my own life, somehow, a miracle might happen and it would start breathing again. But it didn't. I laid it between the wilted flowers in my window box on this cold autumnal day with the first of the snow on the ground. 

I am given to drama. I spend my life making up stories. And it may seem a stretch from a dead purple finch to the aftermath of an American election. The sunflower seed, the promise of food on a barren day in November, might equivocate to the promise we saw of a tide-turn from global politics, the rule of crazy men to something softer, more caring and inclusive, more womanly.  I am far from alone in this, but something died in me as those election results came in and the horror of what was unfolding became apparent. The arc of justice that had seemed to be bending at last in the right direction, suddenly let go with a ping and doubled back on itself, the sound of sardonic laughter in its wake. Things had seemed so hopeful of stopping the trajectory of a serial monster and bringing him at last to account, of handing over the reins to a prosecutor, of all serenipitous things. There she stood, lady liberty, a woman whose career had been marked by concern for the disadvantaged. Now everyone of us is at a disadvantage. Even those who are currently dancing in the streets will turn more sombre when the reality of what they have wreaked dawns up on them. 

The only redeemable quality you can credit the oncoming Drumf administration with, is that they warned us. All the xenophobia, misogyny, recklessness was painted on their banners. They warned there would be hardship before they rebuilt the economy they so gleefully talk now about collapsing. "We are not going back." in one afternoon became a tiny echo in the footsteps of those who are now rewriting all the road signs. Back, they say. No through road. Get back! 

God knows America needed to change, and perhaps there might be some teeny glimmer of something in that knowledge. The USA currently stands number 29 in the global index of democracies. Americans can tout their Land of the Free ideology all day, the "Greatest democracy there has ever been." But then America has always had a hard time admitting what is so about itself. As the global index indicates, America is barely a democracy at all. The concept of "one person, one vote" doesn't enter into its constitution. The Electoral College made this country ripe for exploitation, for gerrymandering, for the rule of the minority. And that is what was handed to its citizens on November 5th 2024. Served up like a twisted Thanksgiving prayer on a stinking trash bin lid. 

Publication Blast Off

 September 28th 2024

Just a few days until the publication of my new book Mrs. McPhealy's American! Many thanks to Sibylline Press who took a chance on it. I can't say that I am jaded, having only four, now five, published books to my credit, but self-preservation is tempering my excitement on this eve of publication. The reality is, I have been here before, starting ten years ago when Simon and Schuster thought my book Veil Of Time would become the world's next Outlander. I let myself be persuaded, even though I knew that Veil Of Time was quite a different kettle of fish. Turned out, I was right. Publication day came and went and the numbers didn't match their expectations. As is the practice with big name publishers, they cast many lines into the ocean, and then they wait for a bite. On March 14th 2014, the fish were not fighting over my bait, so the line got yanked, and that was that. 

How to make it in the publishing industry is an ill-defined art. Publishers are a bit like the makers of flu vaccines, looking mainly at what has come before, searching in the dark for what is to come.  Consequently, the success rate is extremely low. Just because Cheryl Strayed had a blockbuster hit with a journal kept while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, doesn't mean the next literary wanderer is going to meet with similar success. The odds actually work against it. So, the whole enterprise is something of a crap shoot. These days, it probably depends on the inner workings of algorithms as much as anything else. The modern author is dependent on clicks as much as bait.

Sibylline Press put together a beautiful book trailer (who would ever have thought that would become a thing?) with gorgeous pictures of Scotland and a heavenly soundtrack.  

They have me reading the first chapter on YouTube and a Scottish actress reading a different chapter on the same platform. They arranged for me to travel to Denver this week for a conference of the Mountains and Plains Independent booksellers. I will have 4 minutes to make my pitch. It's three pages long. I have it written out because I would rather put on my specs and read.  I am a Scot. I am ill at ease with extemporaneous.  

It's all a game of dice. Who knows what will take the readers' fancy? You can move the pieces around and put on your pretty frock (in this case, my kilt), but you're at the mercy of the literary gods, no matter what you do. You never know, little Sibylline Press in California might achieve what Simon and Schuster failed to do. I know one thing, they won't be yanking my line any time soon. For that I am grateful, and for the hard-working, unrelenting ladies whose mission this book has become. 

SCOTTISH GOURMET

Ode to a Haggis: Americans often tell me how proud they are of coming down from Scottish stock. They wear the kilt and can tell you what their Gaelic surnames mean (BTW NicDougall means "Daughter of a dark stranger." Beat that!) . But mention haggis, Scotland’s traditional dish, and they will disappear in a puff of disgusted expletives. Because, you know, it contains eyeballs of sheep, newt’s entrails, dust of ground wizard, and vomit of witch.  No one of sound mind would go near the stuff! Or would they? 

Let’s start with what haggis is: a sausage. When our Celtic ancestors banded together to go on a hunt, they could salt the flesh of the animal and bring it back to the village. But the offal deteriorates quickly, and so they would make up the haggis and eat it where they were. They brought oats along for this very purpose, and to that added suet and mace and nutmeg, onions, liver, heart, (in Scotland lungs, but we won’t go into that. Hell, the Germans eat fried brain!). Most cultures include offal in their diet. Americans, too, if they like liver. I am told that when the matriarchal wolf takes the best of the kill, she goes for the offal, because it is highly nutritious and digestible. So, they took all that lovely she-wolf fodder and stuffed it into some kind of skin. Traditional haggis gets stuffed into a sheep’s stomach. You boil it, you revere it, and, if it is Burns Night, on January 25^th, you sit it on a silver platter, walk it into the gathering to the birl of the pipes, and recite a nice wee poem to this “chieftain o” the puddin’ race.” A hallowed hush descends as the reciter of the night pulls out his sgian dubh knife from the top of his sock and sinks it into the beast. 

 And then, says Burns, “O what a glorious sight, warm-reekin rich!” Call me a she-wolf, call me a Scottish heathen, but, when haggis is served with a good whisky sauce, I love the stuff. 

 

Oatcakes: 

Someone was asking me lately which items of Scottish food I cannot be without. Oatcakes are one of those. In my book, Mrs. McPhealy’s American, the title character Steve has been courting local midwife George. She finally responds to him one day but is swiftly removed to a birth, leaving Steve in her tiny house. At first, he is pleased just to be among her day-to-day living, happy to fall asleep in her bed, but after several hours, he goes looking for something to eat. As he later tells her, “All I could find around here was a couple of dry placemats made out of oats.”

Perhaps you have to grow up with oatcakes to appreciate them, and perhaps if you don’t have a slab of Islay cheese atop, they are less than appealing. But it is the contrast of flavours that is important here, a nuttiness that sets of the sourness of the cheese. It is hard in America to find a really mature cheddar. What passes as “seriously mature” and only sold in specialty shops, is what a Scot would regard as just cheese. On a recent trip to my homeland, I brought back a slab of good cheese, declined to declare it at the border (good thing they didn’t have dogs!) and am eking it out in my fridge. It has an aroma the minute it emerges from its wrapping. It slices very well, falls in thin sheets of aromatic pleasure. But it asks for something to rest itself upon, and these little rounds of thinly baked oats, are just the job!  

CULLEN SKINK:

So, it sounds like something you might scrape off the bottom of your boat, but be not afraid, it is the Scottish version of fish chowder. Skink is an old word for a knuckle or hock (because that used to be the stock base rather than the current smoked fish), and Cullen is the name of a village in North East Scotland. 

This delicious soup is what you might reach for on one of those afternoons Scotland is famous for: low hanging cloud, mist hovering over hillsides of bracken, intermittent rain. It's July, but you still might need to stoke up that fire in the hearth. You might be inspired to throw together leeks, onions, potatoes, in a creamy broth, and at the last minute add a few pieces of smoked haddock. I'd take a girdle scone with that with lashings of butter. For the body and soul, it's just what the doctor ordered! 

SHORTBREAD:

To a Scot, shortbread is a universally appreciated delicacy. So, when I recently offered some to an American guest and they demurred, it was all I could do to stop the word Sacrilege!! escape from my lips. Scotland has made a fair commodity of this little confection, selling 170 million pounds worth of the stuff per annum. The main retailer these days is Walkers from the highland town of Aberlour. These days, you can find shortbread as far afield as America. And rightly so, for what could improve an afternoon more than a good cup of tea and a few rich, buttery, crumbly “petticoat tails,” or, in a dream scenario, a plate of the homemade variety. Made only of flour, butter and sugar, what could go wrong? 

 

A modern variation of this ancient recipe caters even more to the Scots' sweet tooth: Millionaire’s shortbread.

Who could turn their nose up at this? For me, it's a hill I would be willing to die on.

Publishing

In the year 2008, Paul Harding, musician and sometime author, sent his manuscript Tinkers to a very small publishing house in what had once been the Bellevue mental hospital in New York City. This wasn't his first submission, but dogged rejection after rejection had followed all the others. Authors of all stripes know how this story goes: the optimistic envelopes that go out, the dreaded months of waiting, the judgement by faceless gatekeepers that "your book is not right for our list." Stupid lists. It's a gruelling process, second only to the endless lines of prospective divas wrapped around audition halls in New York. The underlying irony of all of this, you realise sooner or later, is that you can't get noticed if you haven't already been noticed. 

So, imagine Paul Harding in one of these lines, having his expectations cut off at the knees. Doors slammed in his face, and all that jazz. I have been in these lines myself for much of my writing career, most writers have. And anyone who has seen the portrayal of publishing houses in the recent film "American Fiction," understands how accurate the portrayal of the whimsical powers that order this. I can see them taking a look at "Tinkers" and tossing it aside. Not right for our list, or more damning: no market for this book. Because this kind of puts the period at the end of your aspirations: not only is your great literary effort not worthy of this publishing house, it doesn't stand a chance within the literary world as a whole. 

I studied with Paul Harding one summer, because I had read Tinkers and knew I had something to learn there. I barely ever pick up contemporary literature, but this one had me hook, line and sinker. The craft was outstanding. But it was a little too stream-of-consciousness, a little  Faulkneresque, perhaps, for modern tastes. It wasn't like anything else on the shelves at the time, and those editors in fancy or not even fancy publishing houses no doubt judged it held no click bait value. 

My story is that I have stood in all those queues for an opportunity to publish my books. I would get to the front of one line and then have to try another. And another. After a while, a person just runs out of steam. My big break came when an editor at Simon and Schuster  thought I was going to be the next Diana Gabaldon and took me on with Great Expectations. However, I was not the next Diana Gabaldon. I could have told them that if they had asked what auience my book was aimed at. Publishing day came and went. The numbers didn't stack up,  and so I was turned from prospective big bucks into an author that had failed the algorythm. They wouldn't entertain the sequels to the first book. The door had opened for a moment, and now it was shut. Thank you, ma'am. Not a sob story. That's just the way it goes in the world of corporate arts. 

Just to say, I understand the despair, the dispondancy Paul Harding must have felt when no one in the publishing world would give him the time of day. Until, one day, five years later, they did. Not corporate publishing, but a tiny publishing house in a building that used to house what society deemed its refuse. The irony is not lost here. But that was a very good day for Paul Harding and an even better one for Bellevue Publishing. Before it even came out, Tinkers was being noticed. Fifteen months later, it had won the Pulitzer prize. 

So, there you go. A success story, a little display of literary justice for someone who has spent most of her career gazing through the publishing shop window. I have a book coming out in October called "Mrs. McPhealy's American." It had failed with the publishing powers that be, just like Tinkers. In fact, in my book, there are even Tinkers (of the Scottish variety that lived on the shores of Scotland when I was growing up, not the kind of tinkerers in Harding's book.) I put my book back on the shelf I reserve for my unpublished works, and there it sat for years until last year Sybelline Press picked it up and opened their door. 

I am not saying that "Mrs. McPhealy's American," is on its way to a Pulitzer. The powers that govern that universe are as whimsical as the publishing world itself. Just to say that despondent authors shouldn't be blinded by the bright lights. Corporate America has made a mess of most things. The arts is only one branch of that destructive outgrowth. So, thank God for the small publisher, the independent book seller, the people with integrity who are trying to keep the flame of good art alive. Every writer with something to say and the craft to say it owes them a great debt.

Cyprus Part Two

After a fair amount of island hopping in the Caribbean, I have come to the conclusion that I have had enough of post colonial islands. Presumably they once all had an indigenous population and a culture of their own but that was before the British Empire marched in and robbed them of both.  But the cultural wasteland of the caribbean in the wake of colonial takeover is not unique to the Americas. Cyprus bears the same hallmarks. These days, like its cousins in the Caribbean, Cyprus doesn't seem to know who it is. In the restaurants you can order hummus and souvlaki, not to mention fish and chips.

Like these other wandering island identites, it has come down to a dependence on tourism. In days of yore, Cyprus was the copper center of the ancient world. It used to be a Mecca for devotees of Aphrodite. Now it is home to a large British ex-pat population that likes foreigness to a small degree but is much more comfortable with creating its own Little Britain of the Aegian. Thus, it joins Mallorca, Tenerife, Malta, all these former territories struggling to remember what they were before. Scotland enjoys something of the same dilemma. 

I didn't know what to expect when my plane touched down in Paphos, Cyprus. In my youth, I spent a few months wandering around the Greek isles, but this was not that. Greece has never doubted its own worth . If you go to Greece, you get Greece. Of course, my youth was a long time ago, and things may have changed, but there is so much uninterrupted history there. Wherever Greeks roam, they take Greece with them. The blood is strong.

But Cyprus, in the spaghetti junction of East meets West, has, through the ages, passed from hand to hand, and no one really knows anymore who the first hands belonged to. Some say the Minoans, others some pre-Greek culture with remnants scattered in language and vestiges left in some traditions. The pre-Greek religious icons are of a different type: their goddess is not what would morph into Aphrodite of the sexy bum. The ancient icon is more primal, a nurturing mother figure with outstretched arms. A sort of cross. Perhaps the first.

Empires are a very regrettable development in human civilisation (or lack thereof.) The more recent ones were made possible by a 15th C papal bull that encouraged subjucation of the heathen. An empire, by its very nature, has already taken the arrogant step of declaring superiority over anything that is not itself. For this, Christianity has a lot to answer for. Not that takeovers didn't happen before, but the British one was more extensive, and, backed by the church, went under the guise of a type of nobility. These days the wastelands of the former British Empire suggest otherwise.  Once a colony, it seems, and like the Hotel California, you can check out but you can never really leave.

CYPRUS Part One

I was just in Cyprus, doing research for a book. Every time I go to a place to do this type of research, somewhere along the way, I seem to lose one protagonist and gain another. This book is the second in a series. The first took place in Israel, so I went to work there a few years ago to get a sense for the place. I was going to write a novel about Mary Magdalene, so I signed up to work at a Catholic mission on the shores of Galilee in the very town of Magdala where Mary, or Miriam in her native Aramaic, lived. I am not a Catholic. Neither am I a Christian of any stamp. But in my youth, I was. My father was a minister, and so I grew up entrenched in the Christian narrative. That is something very hard to shake, even when you are a radical student and you believe Nietzsche is nothing if not a misunderstood prophet. 

But Mary Magdalene is interesting. In the gospels, she is one of the wealthy women who supported the ministry of this Jesus character. Let's call him Yeshua, because that was his name. Yeshua Ben Yosev. The church, in its inimicable way, managed to take this woman and equate her with a prostitute in some other story. She was a woman in a patrarchy, for God's sake, and therefore suspect. 

I digress. This Catholic mission did not allow me, as a heathen protestant, to attend mass in Magdala, which took place every morning for the workers and the consecrated people that lived in the compound. So, instead, I would wander down the path through tall reeds to the shores of Galilee and walk along the water's edge. You know, it was surprisingly like a Scottish loch, with hills and a few houses. And even though I didn't find Mary Magdalene there, I did find Yeshua, and so I wrote a novel about his life, as much as possible trying to discard the religious dross and come up with a human story.

That was that book. Now I am embarking on a serial, because I can't let this thing go, my need to make sense of how we came to this juncture in the West (but really more than just the West, because Islam might not have happened if it hadn't been for this other evangelical religion expanding at full speed on the wings of the Roman Empire.) How have we come to a place where Jesus has become an instrument of division, when the mission of Yeshua was precisely the opposite? Really, very quickly Christianity went off the rails. It wasn't very long before people were killing in the name of this "mountain, field and lake preacher." This man who taught the primacy of compassion has become a paradigm of "us against the rest." A violent paradigm at that.

Scripture can take some of the blame for this, and here's where my new novel comes in. Take the first gospel in the New Testament, which is widely agreed to be Mark. He wrote it around 75 C.E. He had not known Yeshua. He spoke Greek, not Hebrew. He didn't seem to know about the geography of Israel. He didn't come from there, but he wanted to put in writing all those stories about Yeshua that had been circulating for decades. Mark doesn't have a virgin birth in his narrative. No shepherds washing their socks by night. No We three kings.  Mark ends his story with three women (our Miriam being one) coming to the tomb, finding it empty and fleeing. They tell no one. End of story. Later scribes stepped up and put that right for him. 

I went to Cyprus to find Markus, the writer of the first gospel (no-one knows where he wrote it, so Cyprus, the crossroads of East and West, seemed as good a place as any.) Who I found there was someone else from that time period, an older woman who tends the shrine at Aphrodite's Temple in Paphos. Marcus is going to be woven into the story, of course, just as Miriam was in the first book. The shrine to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, had been there since 12thC BCE, until the Christians came in and replaced her with their own symbol of Love, a male figure. The ruins of the shrine remain for tourists to wander among, which is what I was doing in Cyprus, knowing that somehow, with words as my only tool, I was going to have to rebuild it.