Finally a fulltime Writer

At least for a few weeks

So, I’m into the third week of my Voices of Axholme project, funded by St Hugh’s Foundation for the Arts Artists Respond bursary. How am I finding it? I’ve cut back my day job to about one day a week and so the rest of the time is available for me to write and research and think. How does it feel to finally have that time? To have been given permission to be creative?

Firstly, I have to acknowledge how grateful I am to have been given this opportunity by St Hugh’s. It’s a joy to see days stretching out before me, which I can order as I choose. It’s surprisingly tiring – the hours spent researching old histories and tales in the library, following all my thoughts and story strands which seem to shoot off in every direction, having conversations. I definitely feel as though I’ve done a full day’s work when I finish each evening.

Secondly, is the realisation of how vast my subject is. There are so very many stories to be told from this very small part of northern Lincolnshire. When I sketched out the project I had the idea  I would somehow be able to tell all the stories of Axholme. But now I’m asking, which stories? Beginning to understand it would take a lifetime even to scratch the surface – the history, the topology, the geology, the people past and present, centuries of experiences, the flora and the fauna. Every stone and shard of pottery holds the germ of a story. And what of the storytellers who were here before me? Whose voices speak out from the old books and documents I find? Though the fictional landscape is ostensibly thin there has been a procession of historians and  antiquarians, word collectors and myth makers who have added their pages to the literature of this place. The more I read the more I realise the debt I owe them all and wonder how and what I can add to this tapestry they have woven, are still weaving.

So, my first two weeks have been spent discovering what is already there and learning from the voices of those who have gone before me. I have had invaluable help from Tim Davies at North Lincolnshire Library Service who has a seemingly encyclopaedic knowledge of the local history and resources of the library. I have done extensive reading of the historical sources and learned that some of the early writers were quite capable of turning their hands to fiction when their written sources were silent. Abraham de la Pryme wrote an exciting account of a battle between Roman soldiers and the local tribes as though he had been an eyewitness.

I have had conversations with farmers and their families, with artists and with those who have their roots deep in the Axholme landscape. Their stories alone would fill volumes.

I am taking time now to assess how I might start to use this material in my own stories, how not to repeat what has already been said, how to do justice to those who have gone before me and those who still live in the Isle, whilst giving expression to my own voice. How do I sing my own song of this land?

My next steps will be to delve deeper into the existing stories, trying to locate their essence, to find a way into the retelling. And I will play with ideas for narrative and form, allow myself to let go of the idea of outcomes and embrace creativity for its own sake. Let’s see, over the next days and weeks, where that might take me.