Holding Homes

By Amy Doffegnies: 

Believing that there is no place like home is akin to my belief in fate; it brings me comfort, but I stop short of certainty. After almost a decade away, I thought that moving back to my native Cumbrian village of mossy dry-stone walls and black winter branches would be simple. Like the Herdwick sheep that graze the highest fells, I have long been hefted to this home. I have strayed far – making homes in Australia, Thailand and Myanmar  – but never letting go of the secret wish to return. When I arrived back I felt the glee of homing and of finally being stationary. But in past months my mind has remained in flight. It flitters far, even as my body, clambering up the deep fells, has willed it to slow, and stay. 

Some days I see only symmetry. The other days it is more difficult to write and I breathe at the surface. I am a wanderer amongst people who have their place. For people here, home is unambiguous. The snow-haired gent who, with a craned back, ambles past our house, bickering with Dad about the Labour Party and the broken northern rail service. They share the autumn fruits of the tree beside the beck, taking apples at their respective heights. Then there’s the damson-eyed boy from school. In a yellow puffer jacket, he reads Japanese manga comics on his train home, as it laces across the sands of Morecambe Bay.  

The question of whether there is still no place like home loiters around my heart. I wonder if I am the only one – was I mistaken in hurrying back for ‘home?’ Across the countertop, a young woman I went to high school with serves coffee to pay for her next flight. I met with a fellow Cumbrian in Myanmar last year, lanky and handsome, a farmer’s son and now part-time model come English teacher in Yangon; his students speak English in a thick northern accent. 

Wherever I have been, I look to poems to steady me. Alongside poems I have taken to carrying other things, fragments of collected homes, physical symbols of vast parts of me that exist, invisible. I hold on to these proofs my other homes, bicycles and blankets. I orient myself by larger, more containing things than before; I follow the phases of the moon, the very same that hung over me in other places.

Opening a freshly acquired copy of the New Cumbrian Anthology of Poems, I come to Robert Macfarlane’s question, which resonates:

“What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?”

Nowhere else do I know being a daughter, at home, by the whip of the hearth, it’s different. Nowhere else do I know the pair of white egrets, homing in the evening to the field’s trees. Nowhere else, the grandfatherly brown buzzard patrolling or, by the level crossing, the wink of a deer; or standing in the rust strewn stream, the glint of an eel (or was it?) 

And still, there’s something other than here that I cling to, on strolls past square hedges, down green lanes. What of those things I knew of other homes? Am I to know them nowhere else? 

*

Sitting on my single bed, under a charcoal fleece and the winter half-light, I hear Pay Pay’s voice at the end of the phone, the rain hammering on his tin roof and the infrequent thud of a mango dropping. Pay Pay (‘Dad’, in Burmese) recently moved back to a small town in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta region, where he grew up. From the comparatively modern Thai border town of Mae Sot where we met eight years ago, Pay Pay’s home for a quarter century, it’s a shift. Our life circumstances and the places that we have returned to are worlds apart, but we both find ourselves plunged back into places that we once called home.

This gloomy afternoon, Pay Pay asks with a hint of rascal, “Thamee (daughter), what do you think about fate?” his voice emphatic, accented. My adopted (additional, essential), far-away father is an erudite and graceful rebel. Pay Pay is a former member of the Burmese Communist Party, ex-political prisoner and teacher. 

On my days off in Mae Sot, usually on Saturday mornings, I would make my way by bicycle to my Burmese teacher’s front room. His small classroom, like an open shop front, doubled as Pay Pay’s kind-eyed wife Ei Ei’s tailoring business. At the front of their home sat a line of carefully nurtured pot plants: rosella, yellow roses, a small papaya tree, and Pay Pay always standing to greet me, hands on hips. He taught me the basics of Burmese language and though I didn’t yet know the colours of the rainbow, the vocabulary list he gifted me across the desk included ‘democracy,’ ‘demonstration,’ and ‘election,’ – start with the essentials. 

Quickly, I learned that Pay Pay was a poet, a fact that sang in his speech. In that Thailand life, Pay Pay woke at dawn to teach a full load of classes. He drove an old motorbike and stayed up late at night, busy with translation work and absorbing international news. As my friends played a weekly women’s football match across from Pay Pay’s house, I’d stop by. Over tealeaf salad he told me of the letters that he and his wife wrote to each other while he was in prison, and the story of his exile to Thailand, away from the regime that had imprisoned him. In the place where Pay Pay became my family, I grew my first home away from home; home expanded and was added to. Silently, the place was taking hold and nestling deep within, made of slowly forged connections. 

Jolting me back to the moment, “Do you believe in fate, Thamee?” Pay Pay asked again. “I think so,” I say. It’s something I want to believe in, but in truth, I’m not sure.

*

A year on from this phone call, I’m back again in the Cumbria of my school days, time suspended. The pandemic struck and I bolted from the city to the shelter of space. But being back here last year, after so much time spent away, I had learned the difficulty in coming back to a place where I once belonged, having since belonged in other places, and still belonging elsewhere. A jigsaw piece grown huge from holding other homes, my heart sways here perilously between disquiet, loss, and deep love of this place. The paradox that my (former?) home can be the loneliest place is something I didn’t anticipate. 

Some days, the fields have been a tonic. The first days back I lived that phase that always comes first after returning: every corner is alight and for a time I fully draw in the air: half-sea, half-mountain. Nettles, jagged-edged stamps of spring line the verges, and bluebells shine in the woods, an uneven amphitheatre. One day, a red deer, this time in full view, an injection of bandy limbs vital after a day inside. More common, but still my favourite sight, is my Dad’s sheepdog plaining through the shallow stream, part-seal, part-collie, her black tail a thick, white-tipped whip above the water. 

The questions have not left, they swirl around stubbornly still, questions of my place and purpose, and where I fit, and where is home? I sometimes feel far, far from my other homes. I won’t give up my anchors set down in disparate spaces, spread far across continents. 

Sometimes, coals of knowing glow, in unexpected moments. Walking out on the cold sands surrounding Humphrey Head, bare feet, careful to step where it’s firm enough to tread, Dad’s lone figure is metres ahead – yes, this is home.

Sitting on my bed, again, I watch a video clip of Yangon during the pandemic, its streets are naked now, but it’s the same jungle city, masses of trees and silver skyscrapers, scattered through with golden pagodas – yes, this is home.

And appearing in my dreams, the luminous backyard wattle tree I could see from my Canberra bedroom window, a kookaburra too, on lucky days. Out the front bony bicycles slumped against our resident Terrence pine, its needles treaded into the ropey rug inside – yes, this is home.

As my chunky Aussie boots feel through the grasses of Morecambe Bay, I know, in the space that bodily movement allows, that home is everywhere I have been long enough to love. I know these waves of comfort will not stay, skimming in like sheets of water over sticky sands. For home to be amorphous is not straightforward, but it’s the only way I know. 

I used to think that fate might eventually fix me to one place. Now I don’t know a fate that will show me where to go and where is home. On good days though, I think it shines light through my way, from home to home, through bluebell lit woods, and on.

***

Amy Doffegnies is a writer and poet currently living between Cumbria and Oxford. Her work has been published in Mekong Review, New Mandala, Frontier Myanmar and Kendal Mountain Festival Review. She has a PhD focused on human rights and Buddhism in Myanmar. 

Nowhere else to go

By Fiona M Jones:

I’ve always loved moss, and I can’t explain why. In my view, every stone wall should be covered in moss, every wooden fence-post topped with it like a tiny wig, and every unfrequented roadway carpeted in vivid velvet-textured life. 

I like to see the crumbling brickwork of nineteenth-century coalworks swallowed up in a slow tsunami of mosses, and I like to watch old fallen trees turn green again in its grip. I like moss so much that when my children were little and they’d invent imaginary solar systems, they always made a green mossy planet for me—and they’d leave me there with a cup of tea while they waged their spaceship wars on intergalactic baddies. 

I’ve never understood why people wage war on moss, blasting it from their stonework and spraying their lawns to kill it. Moss isn’t a baddie. I feel a secret sense of triumph when I hear of city councils, desperate to solve their crisis-level air pollution, building concrete frames of mosses to purge their unclean air. They’ve finally discovered that moss knows what to do with diesel fumes as well as bare ground and fallen trees. 

And here’s my favourite place of moss, in these Coronavirus-shutdown times when Boris has told us we can only Walk From Home, and Once A Day; and the local farmers say Don’t Touch Our Gates. From Crossford village you follow Waggon Road south to the 985, then walk along to the right until the Charlestown exit. Just before the narrow bridge, you take an almost invisible footpath to the right, skirting a new plantation of baby trees still hidden inside their protective tubes. You find yourself quite suddenly above a rushing burn in the greenest valley you’ve seen for months—sheltered and damp and multi-hued in green where new spring growth has just begun to compete with the darker tones of ivy and the yellower greens of moss. 

Down the trodden path beside the noisy water, you come across the remains of stone buildings, ruined, rebuilt in brick and metalwork, ruined once more by time and creeping vegetation. A semi-cylindrical metal barn, the most recent building, stands open too, disused, roof sagging and ready to fall in a cascade of asbestos-laden rubble. Most of these constructions would have pertained to coal-mining. Across the burn, on the steeper side of the valley, three long-abandoned coal seams open onto the burn, mysterious dark entrances of sliding scree hung over with ivy from above. 

If you follow the burn downhill, you come out under a disused railway bridge, full of nesting birds, on to a flat muddy shore of driftwood, seaweed, flotsam and seabirds; and here, if you look in the right place, you can find multitudes of squirming, wormlike fossils in the crumbling mudstone above the tideline. 

Assuming you’re wearing sturdy clothes you can fight your way along the ivied, brambling railway until you come to lower Charlestown, then back around by road to make a longer walk. Because, after all, it’s springtime, the clouds are almost shining, and we’ve nowhere else to go. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Arrowhead

By Katherine Peters:

Arrowhead, named for the lake which lies at the heart of a nameless pinewood, was, for the first decade I lived there, a wilderness. We’d moved from the prairies, driving east until our endless views were obscured by a dark spray of pine. Within days my siblings and I had laid giddy claim. Though the wood was once leased by the Diamond Match Company and slated for development, no evidence existed to disrupt our explorations except the cant marks we came across now and then, a diamond-enclosed D burnt into bark. Cities a remote apparition, this wild tract uninterrupted except for a few hunting camps and peopled by eagle, moose, bear—the center of my world was, for most, the end of the world. 

My parents built our home just about from the ground up. Durable post-and-beam raised out of sixty-foot pines from our acreage; later, profusions of phlox, hydrangea, rose given their concentrated hue by acidic forest soil. From the safety of our cultivated lot, books in hand, woodfire blazing in an old stove, we listened to the loons sounding the dark. 

Over the next years the woods were measured, divided, clear-cut, cheap housing raised at regular intervals to accommodate Portland’s low-income surfeit. A different wilderness emerged, generated by reduced constructions: the effects of economic hardship and limited access to education compounded over generations, and the pain of societal indifference. Social illness could be read in the band-aid consumption and accumulating refuse that seemed to barricade many of the occupants in and the rest of the world out: foreclosures, empty swimming pools, plastic playhouses embrittled by the sun, cars run into the ground, rusty skidoos, powerless powerboats. In school, stories littered the daily periphery, whispered in lunch-lines and recess queues: abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction. My guerilla war with loggers and excavators converted to elaborate daydreams in which, by reconstructing each house I could transform the lives of its inhabitants. Darker moments found me lighting a Diamond match in mind’s-eye, rebuilding from the ground up. Even my daydreams of opulent elsewheres corroded under the glaring realities we encountered in wealthy coastal villages, where facades concealed the same spectrum of human health. 

I returned home last year after a long stint abroad, with an accumulated disarray of remembered objects collected over a decade of travel and curated within me by no order I could name. After years of remote horizons, I was confined suddenly to the network of unpaved paths that, labyrinth-like, encircle the lake through the thickest stands of remaining trees—roads for which no map exists, with street signs that echo and intersect each other in their attempt to bear witness to what they have displaced. Getting lost is a given. I walked the tracks relentlessly for months, in all weather. 

At the same time, my mother was sorting through the objects my grandmother had left behind after her death, reading the tags affixed to each on which she had written, in her close hand, a detailed account of the object’s history, care and storage instructions. The narratives of these travelling objects—paths extending over decades and thousands of miles—intersected largescale events with their keepers’ unseen emotional lives. Garden tools, well-used, in pristine condition; a level in sound working order; a passport for “no country”; a feather blanket filled with prewar down and carried through combat zones. They spoke the private register of political violence: lost homes, wartime flight, immigration, work camps, death camps, mass graves. If they spoke of being marked and hunted, they also spoke the hope of being free. Textually inscribed, each object posed a question. How—now, today—do we take symbols in hand: till an unspeakable past to cultivate our rocky lots. We understood, finally, that familiar stories, told and retold, had formed a set of care instructions for life: collect knowledge because it is priceless and weightless; live sparingly; love richly; conserve resources. The narrative instrumentality that moved compass needle cast its shadow, pointing us uncompromisingly onward, and also to invisible sites of trauma. Inherited texts marked us “From Away” in a community with their own sets of cultural blueprints. They also generated resonances I discovered on returning.  

On my walks, I travelled deeper into the cultural landscape. Unexpected encounters destabilized long-held notions. I met a pastor-turned-carpenter with nine children, the oldest of which had won an opera scholarship. A woman who lives in what she calls the “Keebler House” and edits the local Gazette, for whom Arrowhead is the center of the world in the way it is epicenter of the earthquakes that shake the state. There is the young boy who leapt, rope-swing in hand, from a giant pine by the lake, only to get tangled in the cable and plunged headfirst, arms bound, into the water. And there is the man, referred to distrustfully by many Arrowhead folk as “The Big Indian,” a six-foot-tall crippled war veteran, who dived in and cut him loose, then returned that night with an axe to cut down the pine and himself free of the stereotype. A pack of boys that had transformed the old tennis-court in the woods into a skate park with cement blocks and sheet-wood, for the sheer joy of movement. A little girl who fishes at dusk most evenings from the shore, catching sunfish mostly, scales glittering lilac and silver in the dying light, and kisses them each as they gape speechlessly at her before tossing them back. 

In quieter moments, flashes of returning wildness pierce: the sharp long calls of geese in storm darkness; an eagle diving from a great height over the lake to face me up-close, dark eye casting out his challenge; a hawk in hunt, lifting laboriously toward her shrieking nest, a squirrel dangling in her talons like a paraglider gone wrong; a cyclone of swallowtails drunk on magnesium; water-made diamonds—wind-cut, cloud-sieved. Permeating all, like insight, the clear scent of pine. Nature I had considered lost re-emerged on these walks, relocating me though I travelled the same paths. A world I thought gone—one unowned, fiercely free, writ with love and connection—I discovered displaced within. 

***

Katherine Peters recently completed a dissertation on landscape and literature called “Disruptive Geographies” and teaches at University of Southern Maine. She is currently at work on a series of essays about her travels, as well as a book project. Her work is forthcoming in Canary.

A Year Walk

We return in 2020 with a piece from our books editor Marcel Krueger, on a walk in Ireland to reflect on the year gone and what is to come:

Setting sail
From a crushed rooftop
Fathoms deep
Shallow as a raindrop
- Down, The Tides

On one of my last days in Ireland in 2019 I set out for the mountains. I park my car in the car park of the Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale north of Dundalk, in the foothills of the Cooley Mountains, and set out on the Táin Way, the 40-kilometer looped trail across the Carlingford peninsula. But I'm not trying to do the whole loop in a day, or even half of it. This will be my final walk in Ireland this year, before I travel to the continent to celebrate Christmas with my family in Germany and France, and I want to walk up one of the hills that I've always bypassed on previous walks here, the 370-metre The Castle. It had been raining all night, but when I set out there's only a low-hanging, dirty-grey overcast sky and a few raindrops coming down. I walk up the small road that leads from the car park to the trailhead, past suburban houses decorated with Santas and sleighs and yapping dogs in the garden.

I first encountered the Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, or year walk, playing an atmospheric game with the same title on my phone. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas or New Year’s Eve, during the night. Almost all regional variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room, not allowed to talk to anyone or eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. If the year walker managed to follow certain instructions and to solve particular challenges (such as potential encounters with supernatural beings), they would catch glimpses of what would happen the following year. I always tried to do a proper year walk myself on New Year's Eve but have failed so far, and so I guess my short excursion into the Cooleys today will have to do as substitute. It will give me ample time to reflect on both past and future, and encounter enough things in my life that might represent a challenge. 

I travelled a lot in 2019, maybe too much. I drank many beers and ate cheap airport food and put on a good few kilos, and I can feel it as I huff and puff up the steep trail that leads to the forest halfway up the hill. But due to the weather I have the trail almost for myself, and after half an hour I settle into my own rhythm and am promptly rewarded with a fine view past Drumisnagh and Trumpet Hill west of me towards Dundalk Bay and Dundalk town itself. The cloud cover is still a good hundred meters out and there is the sun glittering on the Irish Sea, so I can make out the spidery Dundalk pile lighthouse from 1853 in the bay, the curve of land at Soldier's Point on the Navvy Bank, one of my favourite locations in town, and St. Helena's Park just around from where I live. It feels good to have the sea and the mountains close. 

I'm writing professionally (as in somebody paying me to publish my words on paper or the internet) for ten years now, but 2019 was the first time I felt that my writing might make a tiny impact. People have started booking me and my words as part of academic conferences, readings and workshops, and it seems, unbelievable for self-taught history nerd like myself, that my knowledge is worth something, that I somehow can assist others in sharpening their understanding of the world. I published a magazine featuring many amazing writers living on the island of Ireland, gave a reading at the Leipzig book fair for the first time in my life, spent five months as the official writer-in-residence of wonderful Olsztyn in northern Poland, gave talks and readings in crumbling Prussian palaces from the 17th century, in a 16th-century water castle in Wroclaw, an academy set up for cultural dialogue between the Baltic states just 10 kilometres south of the Danish border, Northern Ireland's best independent bookshop, the modern library in the city of Gelsenkirchen, and in the birthplace of legendary German writer Wolfgang Koeppen in the lovely seaside town of Greifswald. It was a good year.

Like always when out walking alone, I feel a certain dread. I tried, but I can never fully and innocently seem to enjoy scenery just for itself - my imagination is always in the way. I see hidden gathering places of Neonazis in rural Brandenburg, skeletons of previous wanderers in the gorges of Crete where sheep have died, phantoms in the Irish mist. I enjoy these moments of childish dread up to a point, but then on the other hand it seems I have read too much W.G. Sebald to look at a nice place without seeing tragedy and horror. 

It is the same today. The higher I get, the more the rain clouds close in and the dark patches of conifer forest on both sides of the sandy trail seem ominous and menacing. Maybe, because of this dread that is the constant companion of many walks, it also feels as if the scales will soon need to tilt, that my personal triumphs need to be balanced by tragedy. In recent years I have the feeling that more and more misery heaped upon the world by old white men, and I'm often at loss at what to do about this. I go out and as often as possible tell my small stories about my grandmother and my granduncle and how Fascism and totalitarianism ruined their lives and killed them, and I try to write as much as possible against the rising tide of ignorance and hate that encroaches on us all, but I don't know if that is enough anymore. I often feel like the proverbial 'small chubby Berliner who tries to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter', as Erich Kästner called my favourite Weimar Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, a dedicated anti-fascist, once. I'm a small chubby bloke on a hill in Ireland and equally helpless. 

My dismal contemplations are interrupted by a jolly group of hikers in all colours of the Goretex range coming down the hill towards me, who must have made their way from the other side of the peninsula and covered 25 kilometres this morning - compared to my measly ten up and down a hill. They cheerfully wish me good morning and ramble on, maybe towards a late breakfast or an early pint. The scales tilt up again.

The friendliness of the locals also reminds me of the beauty of living in a small, working-class town like Dundalk; that it does not ask anything of you, but if you immerse yourself in the community it provides a lot, a lot more than other, more urban or 'sexier' places. And maybe through my travels this year this has become even clearer to me. The place I live in has all I need. I have a house with a fireplace and a cat and a room for all my books and plastic skulls and pictures of rusting ships, a lovely independent bookshop down the road of which the owner is a friend of mine (everyone needs bookseller and librarian friends is all I'm saying), all the pubs in the world, the harbour and the sea two streets down the road and a peninsula with a mountainous spine to walk in. And it provides you with a place to come back to and be yourself.    

I emerge from the treeline, cross a fence and enter the clouds. The wind is strong here, just 300 meters above the sea, and I have to put on gloves and set up my hood. I can only see a few meters ahead, the trail, the heather and the bog all shrouded in grey. I stomp on, trying to find the parting in the ways that will lead me up to the summit of The Castle. As if foreseeing the bad weather today, it is indicated by a series of stakes leading up the hill. But to me, even though I know that these have been put there to aid walkers, they seem more ominous and eery, Irish totem poles. 

The destination of my year walk is not a church, but a wide grassy summit with a small cairn. I look around and see nothing but brown-green bog a few feet in each direction and hear nothing but the wind screaming into my face and battering my waterproofs. I look right into it, in the direction of the unseen sea, and once more realise that I like living in the North as it reminds me of mortality. 

In January 2019, across Carlingford Lough in the Mourne Moutains, just a few meters higher then I am now, Robbie Robinson and Sean Byrne die. In separate accidents, both lose their way due to clouds and fog and are killed by exposure in the ice-cold winds howling down the mountains. And there it is, another reminder that death comes for all of us, and because of this we all should work together, for abstract concepts like peace and love and keeping the planet alive, but also for keeping the border in Ireland open and the communities in the north and the south linked to each other, and to help people in need anywhere we come across them, on the streets of Dublin or the beaches of Greece. In my life, and especially 2019, I made the experience that unity is always better than fragmentation, that solidarity is always better than ostracism. But standing on the hill in Ireland alone, looking into the wind, it seems that many people are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, and eaten up by nothing with the hope to take their cheap wealth and gadgets with them when they die, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski.   

Before I walk back, down the hill to my car and back to the old crooked house in Dundalk where I have to pack my bag for my travels, I lean into to the wind and look down the surprisingly steep seaward flank of The Castle, which drops away into nothingness. The clouds obscure everything here, both the bottom of the valley and the future.  

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Five Questions for... Yuri Segalerba

By Sara Bellini:

These photos are taken by the series La Ciudad Nuclear by Yuri Segalerba. The Nuclear City is a semi-abandoned and never completed Cuban town built in the 1980s to house the families of the workers that were supposed to work in the new power plant. The Russians started constructions in Cuba following a bilateral agreement, but after the collapse of the USSR, they abandoned the project and its inhabitants.

Yuri Segalerba is an Italian photographer based in Berlin and Athens and published among others on Vice and art - das Kunstmagazin. His photography inhabits the liminal space between architecture and sociology and has a focus on abandoned places, geometric shapes and the personal and collective stories behind a place. At the moment he’s working on an ongoing project about Russian suburbs and a social reportage in Egypt. 

What does home mean to you?

I have been asking myself for a long time and I think home is the place where I have a family (a biological family or a chosen one) waiting for me. I realised this after years living in Berlin, when I finally found myself living with friends that I consider family and I started saying “I’m going home” not only when I was going to Genoa but also when I was coming back to Berlin.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I’ll answer without even thinking about it: Havana, Buenos Aires and Russia in general. (You’ll also want to know why I assume…) Havana and Buenos Aires are connected to my work as a photographer, because they’re two extremely cinematographic cities. Each corner is a photo and when I go to these cities I always come back with hard discs full of material - more or less good, but always very inspiring.

Buenos Aires feels like a home away from home. I usually arrive there at the end of long periods of being in South America and getting there means breathing European air again, to me it’s the link between Europe and South America. Let’s not forget that a lot of the people there have Italian ancestry, and I often meet third-generation immigrants from my city, Genoa, so I connect Buenos Aires with the feeling of home in South America.

With Russia I don’t know, it’s a more visceral feeling. Maybe I’ve developed this interest because of my name, which I didn’t fully understand as a kid (I don’t have Russian origins, my parents are not communists and they don’t particularly love Space, so it was a random choice). Russia is an incredibly vast and unknown country, very closed-off, with a consistent language and geographical barrier. I think I’m attracted to its inaccessible and unexplored sides, the nationalism of its inhabitants, this complex culture isolated from external influences, their cinema, their architecture...

What is beyond your front door?

Oh god, that’s such a difficult question! When you say “beyond”, am I inside or outside? Is it a physical or a meta-physical door? If it’s a physical one, which one is my door to me? Because I’m not so sure about it...

What place would you most like to visit?

All of them! I usually feel a sudden urge to go to a specific place and I just go. Lately I’ve been feeling that it's time to go back to southern Africa for example… And then there are places like Havana and Buenos Aires where since the first visit, when I was leaving them I was already thinking “I’m definitely coming back”. Every time I went back, I found myself thinking the same thing. And then Siberia...

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

Reading: Chernobyl Prayer, written by the Belarusian Nobel Laureate Sviatlana Alieksijevič who met and interviewed the people that were living in Chernobyl at the time of the catastrophe in 1986.

Watching: A lot of movies, especially Russian movies, I really like Andrey Zvyagintsev, but lately I've started paying attention to Iranian cinema, it’s a window on a world that fascinates me and that I don’t know at all.

Listening: A bit of everything… Maybe it’s better if I don’t answer this, I’m a bit ashamed of myself!

Looking: Right now I’m in Genoa, so I’m taking this as an opportunity to look at the sea from my window, before coming back to the Spree.

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Beautiful Place: A novel by Amanthi Harris

We are extremely pleased to present an extract from the new novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE by Amanthi Harris. Set in Sri Lanka, this is a novel about leaving and losing home and making family, about being oppressed and angry and wanting a better life. 

‘In quiet distilled prose, Amanthi Harris takes a moment of change we all experience and brings it into poignant, evocative focus. Her story resonates like a personal and deeply felt memory.’ —Preti Taneja

***

The van followed the bay, passing through villages of houses with dark empty porches. Light shone deep inside in rooms where families had gathered to gossip and tease and worry and scold away the last hours of the night. Soon the van left the villages behind and the sea came nearer, blackly glistening past coconut groves of slanting trees silvery in moonlight. The van stopped at the edge of a grove and they stepped out to the roar of sea and cold rushing winds. Ria put on her jumper. High above her, the coconut trees swayed and bowed against a blue-black sky, the stars a dusty spray of sparkling white. 

“I’ll come back in two hours,” the driver said and gave Louis his card. “Hope you see some turtles.” 

“But where are you going?” 

“I’ll just be nearby – call me if you want to stay longer.” 

“You never said you’d be leaving us,” Louis protested, but the driver was already in the van. “Hey!” Louis cried, but it was too late, the van drove away. 

“How come there’s no one else here?” Ria said. 

“Maybe we’re too early.” 

“Or too late,” she replied. 

There was a glow through the trees from a thatch hut. They walked towards it. Over the door was a sign: ‘The Turtle Watch Museum’. An electric bulb swung from the rafters in the wind, dancing its glowering light over framed photographs of turtles lumbering onto night time beaches, digging in sand, or straining, legs splayed, squeezing out eggs. Louis read every sign, every caption, excited again. 

“This place is great – they’re a charity employing ex-convicts. They teach them about conservation.” 

“Ex-convicts?” 

“Good evening, sir-madam!” A short stocky man bounded into the hut and grinned at them. His eyes lingered on Ria. The man’s face was pockmarked and puffy, the skin yellowed and tough, the nose broken; eyebrows interrupted by the scars of old stitches. His smile though was joyful, unconnected seeming to the damaged features. 

“In our turtle watch we don’t steal turtles’ eggs – we’re not like the people down the road,” he told them. “Those people steal the eggs and grow turtles in tanks. Sometimes they eat the eggs. They’re very bad people, don’t ever go to their turtle watch, sir and madam.” 

“Where can we buy tickets?” Louis asked. 

“No need of tickets, sir – it’s all free at our turtle watch. You only pay if you see the turtles.” “Wow! That’s great!” Louis approved. 

“So let’s go and see if they come! This way, sir-madam!” 

The ex-convict came up beside Ria as they left the hut. 

“Sinhalese?” he murmured, his voice turned low and adult, a secret voice, brought out for the real conversation. She pretended not to hear. He pretended not to have spoken. 

“This way sir, follow me!” He darted away, become the happy child again. 

The ex-convict shone a torch ahead and they followed him, winding past coconut trees, their great hooves of trunks stamped in the ground. Ria took off her shoes and the sand was silky-cold and dry, slinking around her feet with every step. A half-moon cast its pale gleam over a wide empty beach. 

“No turtles yet, sir-madam,” the ex-convict declared, scanning the sea with binoculars. 

“When do the turtles come?” Louis asked. 

“It can be anytime, sir – soon, hopefully, soon! Dear God, please let there be turtles for sir and madam! Just keep watching the ocean. I will go closer and look for you.” 

He ran down to the water’s edge and strolled through the waves swirling idly in. He walked around a rocky outcrop and disappeared. 

Ria sat down on the beach, a sandy bank firm at her back. Louis sighed and sat down beside her. 

“Do you know anything about this place?” he asked. 

“No.” 

“Does your family ever come here?” 

“I’m not sure.” 

“You don’t know where your family goes?” 

“I know very little about them, it turns out.” 

There was no way on earth her family would have come to such a place – in the middle of the night, to look at turtles. 

“You should have asked Padma about this place,” he accused. 

“You arranged it!” she retorted. 

The ex-convict appeared on top of the rocks, walking a little unsteadily. He stood looking out to sea. The pale beam of his torch reached over the waves. 

“Something’s weird about this,” Louis said. 

Across the water, at the other end of the bay, lights shone in the town where life went on unknowing of them. It was the first time Ria had been anywhere so deserted in Sri Lanka, so far away from the places she knew, and everyone. The trees leaned over velvet rocks and the pale soft sand of a primal Sri Lanka, a pre-world of hushed dark beaches and a muted rocking sea sweeping the shore all through the night – long still nights, full of unknowable secrets. These were the beaches where war bodies would wash up, maimed and distorted after night-time abductions – even now, in peace-time, the abductions went on for different, more secret reasons. It seemed impossible to end the savagery; it seemed a part of the unreal beauty of the island, so spoiled and churning under the surface. 

But here was its raw splendour, its secret night-time source, potent and untainted before it was lost in the world of people. 

“Why aren’t there any other tourists here?” Louis demanded. 

“Maybe they didn’t want to see turtles.” 

He made an exasperated noise and glanced at her impatiently. 

“It’s better like this, don’t you think?” Ria said. 

“It feels like a scam.” 

“I don’t see how. We haven’t given the guy any money.” 

“Everything in this country is a scam – that’s why my friends left, they’d had enough. It was always the same: hire cars, safaris, Buddhist temples – you name it, there was always a way they could con you.” 

“But we don’t have to pay unless we see turtles.” 

Louis jumped up, full of a new restlessness, a fierceness in him. “Hey!” he shouted to the ex-convict. 

The ex-convict spun round. 

“Where are your turtles?” Louis yelled. “Are they coming any time soon? I’m getting tired, I want to go home!” 

The ex-convict tensed, his round belly turned solid, thin legs locked. Like a fat sparrow, Ria thought. But dangerous. 

“I think I might just call the driver!” Louis taunted, waving his phone. 

The ex-convict scrambled down from the rocks and came running. 

“The turtles will come, sir! Just wait and see – just a few more hours. Madam – you tell sir, to wait a little!” he panted. 

“What’s it to you if we leave?” 

Louis stood taller than the ex-convict. He looked down with a cold angry smile at the ex-convict’s pitted fleshy face. Louis’ hair shone in the moonlight, swept back from his fine-boned face, the perfect lines of jaw and chin and lips. Ria looked away from that perfection, winning so easily above the beaten face below. Louis was so much stronger, so much luckier than the fat-sparrow ex-convict. Louis started to type a number on his phone. 

“No sir! Please sir, stay!” the ex-convict cried. “The turtles will come! You just have to wait – how can I know what time they will want to lay eggs?” 

Louis went on typing then put the phone to his ear. The ex-convict grew still, watching in silence – no more pleading, no more explaining about the turtles. The torchlight made his cheeks seem waxy and hard. ‘Tourists missing from Turtle Watch Beach’ – Ria could already see the headline. A small square of text with their names, ages and occupations and an inaccurate account of what had happened. 

“The driver will be back in an hour, let’s just wait till then,” Ria insisted. 

“Yes, wait!” the ex-convict agreed. 

“Maybe the turtles will come later,” Ria added. 

“Yes, later! The turtles will come later!” 

“Yeah, right.” Louis ended the call and sat down again, looking away. 

The ex-convict jogged away to a distant spot at the water’s edge. Ria sat down beside Louis. He didn’t look at her. She watched the sea alone, feeling his silence for the first time and him closed to her. He checked his watch. His arm touched hers and she felt the muscle hardness of him under the softness of cashmere, and he felt apart and other. He would always be other, separate from her; she would never truly know what he was thinking – why he had smiled at her that first afternoon on the veranda, why he had asked to join her for dinner. How did you ever know when you knew someone, when it was safe to allow that last private door inside you to open? She understood now why people had horoscopes read before marriages – even the arrangements of stars in their constellations were a comfort faced with the unknown of another’s mind. She watched the night-time sea surging in surly bursts onto the beach.

“The sea looks so different at night,” she said. 

The waves slicked back in an oily sweep, receding into themselves – another sea altogether from its joyful, spraying, sparkling, sunlit self, dazzling all day. 

“It looks so pure in the mornings,” she reflected. 

“You shouldn’t have undermined me in front of that guy,” Louis said. 

“What are you talking about?” 

“You should be on my side, not his.” 

“I didn’t want to antagonise him.” 

“It was up to us when we left. What could he have done about it anyway?” 

“I don’t know . . . He might have friends nearby. Or he might have a knife or a gun – who knows? I didn’t want to risk it.” 

“That’s crazy! You’re always so afraid of everything!” His eyes were a scornful pale glare in the tan of his face. 

She glared back at him. He turned away.

***

PHOTO: Maxi Kohan

Amanthi Harris was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in London. She studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and has degrees in Law and Chemistry from Bristol University. As well as her novel BEAUTIFUL PLACE, her novella LANTERN EVENING won the Gatehouse Press New Fictions Prize 2016 and was published by Gatehouse Press. Her short stories have been published by Serpent’s Tail and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Beautiful Place - Salt Publishing (UK)
Beautiful Place - Pan Macmillan India
Amanthi Harris’ website

Five Questions for... Amanda Thomson

Amanda Thomson is the author of A Scots Dictionary of Nature, a collection of nature-related Scots words from 19th and early 20th century sources and a beautiful representation of the relationship between the Scottish people and their landscape. She teaches at Glasgow School of Art and in her art and writing she explores themes of place, home, nature and migration.

Amanda has just signed a book deal and is currently working on a collection of hybrid essays about landscapes and a video and writing project about an alder tree. She’ll be the artist in residence at Small Halls Festival this November, and travelling to Southern Africa with other nine writers as part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival initiative Outriders Africa. 

What does home mean to you?

I’ve been thinking about and actually writing about home a lot over the summer. For me, it can go from the micro, and being with my partner, to the house that we live in, or the place where it is. It’s about a feeling of missing a place and longing to be there, and that deep exhale of relief once you reach it. It’s not something that any of us can take for granted at all, so there’s a thankfulness to know I have a place I call home, when there are so many in the world who don’t.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

Abernethy Forest, where I did my PhD and is now a place I call home; the North West Highlands. I am smitten with Scotland and the Highlands and Islands. 

What is beyond your front door? 

I have a field which hasn’t been grazed by sheep or cattle for a couple of months. It’s been full of white and red clover, germander speedwell and all kinds of grasses, occasional deer and hares, and the aforementioned alder. The farmer has just cut it and bailed hay, and the swallows and house martins are swooping by just now on their way south. 

What place would you most like to visit?

I love living in Scotland and would happily spend all my time here. I always love going to the islands – North Uist in particular for the birds, and Shetland, and I am not long back from Sutherland in the North West. Now, and unexpectedly, I am very excited to be going to spend time in Southern Africa.

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now? 

Reading, I’m jumping between books: Kathleen Jamie’s Surfacing and Sadiya Hartson’s Lose Your Mother. Looking at the Collin’s Book of British Insects to figure out what kinds of moths I’ve been seeing.

Watching – This summer there have been red deer and hares in the field, swallows and house martins on the wires and just now the sun is coming and going and the trees are flouncing in the wind. The rain’s coming over from the West.

Listening to – this summer I have been listening to Braebach’s Frenzy of the Meeting a lot, also Duncan Chisholm’s music; Kinnaris Quintet’s amazing Free One, and Ali Hutton and Ross Ainslie’s Symbiosis II is the perfect album for the drive between Glasgow and the North – A lot of Scottish folk music.

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Five Questions for... Jessica J. Lee

Two years ago we reviewed Turning, her memoir about swimming in the lakes around Berlin. This autumn Jessica J. Lee is back with the autobiographical Two Trees Make a Forest: On Memory, Migration and Taiwan. She is an environmental historian, writing tutor, nature writer and editor of The Willowherb Review, an online platform for nature writing by writers of colour. Jessica writes with the precision of a botanist but without the pretence that nature writing has no singularity, discarding the old cliché haunting the genre: that we all experience the environment in the same way, that diversity doesn’t matter and doesn’t exist. 

 What does home mean to you?

Multiplicity. It’s taken me a really long time to realise that home didn’t have to be singular, that I didn’t need to pick one place to call home. Both my parents are immigrants, and I’ve been an immigrant myself: instead of seeing that as a kind of “dislocation”, I’ve made a conscious choice to see that as productive, as a way of saying I belong to many places. I was born in London, Ontario, which people seem to find confusing because I lived in London, England for so long. Halifax (in Nova Scotia). Toronto. Berlin. Taipei. 

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I wrote my PhD dissertation about Hampstead Heath, which I lived next to through my early twenties. There was a beautiful lime tree that I used to hang out under, reading, resting, dreaming, crying: it bore witness to a lot of my most transformative moments in young adulthood. The tree came down in a storm in 2012, but the spot where it stood still draws me in. I have its leaf tattooed on my arm. 

 So I’d say there, but also: the bay at my family’s cottage in Canada, the cafe window in Berlin where I usually sit and write, the Taiwanese breakfast shop in Taipei where I get cold soy milk and hot shaobing youtiao. 

What is beyond your front door?

My street has one of the most beautiful views in Berlin, I think: it’s abnormally long and tree-lined and lovely. To the left, you’ll find more children and ice cream shops and wine bars and pet stores than necessary, and to the right you’ll find a busy road with a tram that races back and forth over the old Berlin Wall border all day. There’s a spicy hand-pulled noodle shop not far away, which is probably the best thing within walking distance. 

 What place would you most like to visit?

This is an impossible choice! There are so many countries I’ve yet to visit—Japan, Norway, New Zealand—but if I can be really specific, I’ll say Jiaming Lake in the Central Mountains of Taiwan. It’s a teardrop of a lake at the top of the mountains, famous for being a shallow, glassy mirror of the sky. People used to say it was formed by a meteor strike, but it was actually formed by glacial movement. But it’s a nightmare to hike to because of permits, the logistics of getting to the trailhead, the three-day trek, etc. I’ve twice had journeys to the Jiaming cancelled, so it’s become something of an obsession for me to one day actually make it there. 

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I have the bad habit of reading many books at once. Currently, Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall and Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo during the day, and Ben Aaronovitch’s The October Man as bedtime reading. I watch too much television—it’s one of the only ways I can switch off at home—so I’m currently finishing with Jane the Virgin. And for music, I’ve returned to Japanese Breakfast’s Soft Sounds from Another Planet on repeat. 

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