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. 

Getting Out of the Way of Your Own Writing

February 2023

There is a romantic tradition predominant in the West that favours seeing the artist (not just writers but artists of all types) as this:

It is a picture of the solitary artist, stripped down to the grimmest self, tearing art out in the way a harakiri warrior rips out his own entrails. The author in this paradigm is divided within himself, tormented and always trying to dodge the oncoming train of writer’s block. The unbearable weight of dragging art out of him or herself takes its toll and thus we have the tradition in the West of writers and heavy drinking. Examples are legion: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, Twain, Steinbeck, Poe, Kerouac, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, John Cleever, Hunter Thompson, Anne Sexton and Dylan Thomas who literally drank himself to death in one sitting. 

“Write while you’re drunk,” Hemingway famously said, “Edit sober.”

But to look at art in this way is to disconnect the artist from the creative process itself. The desired result is seen as out beyond the self and only under unusual circumstances (as with the help of a bottle) do the two come into happy coalition. It is my contention that the very first step into writer’s block is this disconnection of the writer from the field of creativity, what we sometimes call "the flow." It is out at this distance, that the Hemmingway cycle kicks in.

"Edit sober." But, out here, we are easy prey for a type of creative schizophrenia. We compare ourselves and our work to others. We even compare ourselves to ourselves: to how we have sounded before, how we ought to sound. We encounter the dreaded block because we start reaching for an outfit instead of settling into our naked selves. 

 

There is a different way to view the creative process, however, a better paradigm:

 “The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “mensch” in a higher sense – he is “collective man” – one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.”  

Carl Jung wrote this many decades ago, but it is an approach that goes a long way to dispelling the image of the tortured artist. If the creation of art is not all up to you and your “creativity,” then a huge burden is lifted off your shoulders. On this model, if you’re facing writer’s block, you’re simply standing in your own shadow. What you have to do is to step around, face the sun and not block it. 

 

I think that through the ages musicians have recognised this model of creativity better than their literary counterparts. 

Beethoven saw the role of the artist as “disseminating divine rays among mankind.”

Brahms claimed that he received his art in a flow direct from God. 

Elgar wrote the main theme for his cello concerto on a napkin after waking up from surgery.

Paul McCartney claims he dreamed the melody for “Yesterday,” the most recorded song in history, and it took him a while to allow himself to claim it.

James Taylor describes songwriting as a “Mysterious and uncontrolled process.”  “I don’t know much about God,” he says, “But if everything does originate with God, then certainly songs do.”

So, if this underbelly of what James Joyce called “The uncreated conscience of my race," is available to all and particularly to the artist, the question becomes: how do we go about connecting ourselves to it?

First of all we have to see that we are not separate from it but are an integral part of the field itself. Everything we need to write down or slap on a canvas or put into song is already contained within us. I think the key here is listening, deep listening.

Of course, in our culture we are bombarded with sense stimuli and so we have learned to surface-listen, just as we surface see and surface evaluate. What is lacking is stillness, not something our culture favours. 

Creating art is not invention, but reflection. You have to let go of the reins, and, when things go quiet, listen, and then listen even harder. It is not a lack of skill that is missing in the sufferer of writer’s block. It is the art of listening. When you open yourself and listen, you are becoming the kind of channel that Jung is talking about.

Let me cite a couple of trivial examples of recent writers who have done this (even without realising it) :  

 

When JK Rowling was sitting in that dingy little café in Edinburgh Scotland writing down what must have seemed at the time this whacky story of muggles and wizards, she had no notion at all of what this story was going to amount to. The key was that she was following what arose spontaneously out of her.  What she was channeling was “the uncreated conscience” of her race.

Wonder and magic are so innately human, that you can only suppress it for so long. JK Rowling sitting in her Edinburgh café was willy nilly tapping into this Vesuvius of feeling; what she was countering was the long-held Christian fear of the pagan.  But who would have thought? She wouldn’t have thought it, when Harry Potter was getting rejection after rejection from publishers. Who would have thought that this silly story about wizards and speaking hats and flying cars would go on to sell 450 million copies in 73 languages? 

And then there's The Da Vinci Code. In 2000 Dan Brown published a book entitled “Angels and Demons,” which introduced the protagonist- crime-solver Robert Langdon. Brown was unknown at the time and the book sold poorly, which was disappointing to the publisher and presumably to Dan Brown himself. 

At this point, Dan Brown could have given up. But he didn’t. Three years later he went on to publish The Da Vinci code. It was very similar to its predecessor in structure, in writing style. The protagonist is the same Robert Langdon solving a similar kind of intrigue in the same impossibly short time. What’s the difference? The difference can be summed up in two words “Sacred Feminine,” another area (though not unrelated) that the church throughout the ages has systematically repressed.  

Dan Brown's expectations were low.  But little did he know: The Da Vinci Code became a best seller in the first week and has gone on to become one of the best selling books of all time, selling 81 million copies in 44 languages. 

So, Art from the Heart, deep listening, re-connecting yourself to a field of energy and creativity that you are already a part of. This is certainly a much more helpful paradigm than the one of the solitary individual in a pre-set and unforgiving universe pulling meaning and art out of a machine encased within the cage of the skull.

The model of the tortured writer needs to shift. You can lay down your arms, let the battle cease. It is not up to you and your creativity. The muse is your friend, but she's not a person who takes hissy fits and deserts you. Being tied to your own solitary brain is the equivalent to being tied to an Iphone (much like my teenage daughter is) but without service. There is no use in shaking the phone when it isn’t receiving service, no more does shaking yourself when you can’t think of what to write. Just wait a while, listen deeply until you are connected again. More precisely, get out of the way of yourself (or again as my teenage daughter would put it – get over yourself!) 

“You do not even have to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, remain still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

Kafka