Bird of Passage, Free on Kindle to Mark the Start of Spring.

Cover art by Matt Zanetti

My novel Bird of Passage will be free to download on Kindle from 4th - 6th April. It's another 'island-set' novel. I seemed to go through a period of setting my novels and plays on islands, until I exhausted that particular piece of inspiration, but it still nips away at me from time to time. So the rewritten version of an old novel, The Golden Apple, due for publication next month, is set on a completely different kind of island: a much warmer place altogether, La Gomera in the Canaries. And even The Physic Garden, set fair and square in early nineteenth century Glasgow, has a trip to the Isle of Arran as a central and very important scene.

Bird of Passage, though, is set on a fictional and unnamed Scottish Hebridean island, which could be just about anywhere, from Gigha, which I know well, to the Isle of Skye, or Mull or Islay, or some amalgam of all of them. Oddly enough, the perception of where it is seems to depend on the reader's own experience and that's fine by me. I love that process which seems to go on, whereby the reader recreates the world of the novel within his or her own mind.

Susan Price, reviewing the novel for An Awfully Big Blog Adventure describes how she realized that there was a connection with a much more famous classic novel:
'I was three-quarters of the way through this book – or even more – before it dawned on me that it was Wuthering Heights in modern dress. I was tipped off by a couple of sly and amusing references to twigs tapping on windows and ghosts, and by the hero disappearing for twenty years and then returning a rich man.
It’s not a re-telling, though – it’s a re-imagining. A dialogue with the older book, if you like. It asks, would the same story, the same deathless love, be possible in the modern age, and if so, how?'
Link to the rest of the review here.

A very young me, in Wuthering Heights mode!

Susan is right. I wasn't attempting a retelling. I wouldn't dare. But Wuthering Heights has always been my all time favourite novel. I was born in Yorkshire and was trundled over the moors to Top Withins when I was still in my pushchair, or so I'm told. Bird of Passage is a book I was desperate to write, partly because of my own obsession with Wuthering Heights, but I spent years hunting for the right story, the right setting, the right set of characters.

Reviewing the novel for the Indie eBook review, Gilly Fraser writes:
There are no pat answers in this story and no neatly contrived solutions. Endings are jagged, situations remain unresolved. Yet at the end of the book there is a feeling of satisfaction that things did work out as they should – at least to some extent. I think that makes the story and its characters all the more realistic and credible. It’s hard to pigeonhole this book to a specific genre. It’s a love story, yet sometimes defies the label. It’s contemporary, yet dwells quite a bit in the past. As to its audience – I think this would appeal to readers who don’t need to be led by the hand and who enjoy
challenging relationships. Wholeheartedly recommended.

Read the rest of her review here

One of the nice things about reviews - especially when they are positive but quite analytical - is that they give you as a writer a new perspective on a novel. It's odd how often you're not entirely sure what you've written, or what you might have achieved, even though you've been in the thick of it, even though you may have had all kinds of intentions for the book. 

I'm often asked to describe the kind of books I write. It's a question I find genuinely difficult to answer, and reviews like Susan's and Gilly's help me to find some answers. My books aren't really romances in the conventional sense because they don't always have the traditional happy ending or even the traditional structure. They have a resolution of sorts, and I hope they give the reader a sense of satisfaction, but the characters don't generally walk off into the sunset. Or not often. One reviewer who loved this novel still found it heartbreaking, and people who have read The Physic Garden, even while they tell me they couldn't put it down, still tell me that they simply couldn't bear what happens in the end. I know what they mean because I couldn't bear it either, and I wrote it! 

Whenever I finish a novel, I try to work out what kind of book I've written. I know that may sound a bit daft. But when you're in the middle of a piece of work, you're so buried in the time and place, so deep into the minds of your characters, that you really can't see the wood for the trees. So it can be very helpful to stand back and try to analyse exactly what kind of novel you've produced. At first, I despaired of finding any common denominators within my fiction. Everything I write seems to be quite different: some are historical, some contemporary, some are more literary than others, some quiet, some complex.

Quite a while ago, an agent told me (and I'm paraphrasing here) that my work was too well written to be popular but too accessible to be really literary. She saw it as a fault. The more I speak to my readers though, the more I see that a lot of people out there are looking for stories which are well written and grown up, but accessible too. And I think that's what I write. Mainly because that's the kind of book I like to read. Lots of them are love stories. But I suppose they are 'grown up' love stories. I wish Amazon had a category like that, but they don't yet - and 'adult' has quite a different connotation! Even the Physic Garden, which isn't really a love story at all, but a story about male friendship and betrayal, is a grown up tale.

Bird of Passage is a very grown up love story -  about past damage and the obsessive attachment that is the result. And of course it is, unashamedly, a homage to my much loved Wuthering Heights. If this sounds like something you might enjoy reading, it's free to download for the next three days, here in the UK and here in the USA.

How I Got Where I Am Now (Part 2 - Edinburgh Days )

Edinburgh was a revelation to me. As far as I remember, only one other girl from my school went there and we were in different faculties. I never saw her. I was reading English Language and Literature and - for my first year anyway - staying in the East Suffolk Road halls of residence. It had the air of a rather superior but chilly girls' boarding school. It was an all female establishment and the formidable warden would periodically issue a summons to the top table at dinner. Boys were frowned on in general and definitely had to be 'out' by a certain time, although we didn't always obey the rules. In fact we didn't often obey the rules. We were reading about feminism and the world was at our feet. I made real, enduring friendships in Edinburgh, people I still see and write to, people I like very much indeed. The kind of friendships where you can just pick up where you left off, even if you don't see each other for a long time. You can tell who they are, because they all call me Cathy even though just about everyone else uses Catherine, now. But I still answer to Cathy!

Top Withens in the 1920s

I'd been writing plenty of poetry before I went to Edinburgh: lots of deeply romantic adolescent stuff. I'd also tried my hand at writing for radio, which I still loved,  though I hadn't done anything with the fairly dire results, just filed the scripts away in a drawer, most of them typed on an elderly Remington which my dad had bought for me while I was still at school, and on which I slowly but surely taught myself to type, faster and faster.  I still have the machine and it's practically an antique. Nobody has typed anything on it for years. It looks like a prop from a movie and I love it to bits.

I even had a go at dramatising Wuthering Heights, just for the fun of it. I had a special relationship with Wuthering Heights, and it's one that has never really gone away, even though in all my years of writing radio plays and dramatising classics, the BBC has never, ever let me get my hands on this one. It was my mother's favourite novel. When I was just a little girl, she and my father had taken the bus to Haworth and trundled me over the moors in my push-chair, as far as Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse which was said to be the place, although not the building, which Emily had in mind for the Heights.

It was while I was at Edinburgh University that I wrote poetry. Lots of it. And stories and reviews and parodies. Between lectures we would sit in the basement cafe of the David Hume Tower in George Square, setting the world to rights and making plans for the future. We girls wore long skirts and maxi coats, bells around our necks, flowers in our hair - the guys were in old army greatcoats or shaggy, smelly, Afghan jackets and bell bottom trousers. We listened  to Judy Collins and Joni Mitchell on the Juke Box and smoked Gauloises, a little self consciously. One of the bookstores in the town was such a hotbed of another kind of smoking altogether that you couldn't browse there for more than half an hour without feeling light-headed. Outside the Fine Art department, beautiful Ian Charleson held court, admired as much by men as by women. There was a sit-in in the old Quad. I was there, but can't for the life of me remember what we were protesting about.

One of our lecturers, the late and much lamented Paul Edwards, who had translated many of the Icelandic sagas with the equally lamented and ever kindly Hermann Palsson, encouraged me to carry on writing. Paul used to hold court most afternoons in his big, untidy room at the top of a stair in Buccleuch Place. By the time I was in my third and fourth years, specialising in Mediaeval Studies, a friend and I would be invited up to what was essentially his literary 'salon'. There was home brewed beer and home made wine, and it was a place where visiting writers and lecturers hung out and talked about books and politics and new writing. He was clever, charming, iconoclastic, a little dangerous, but very protective of us younger visitors. Even then, these meetings were  frowned on by the authorities. I can't imagine that anyone would ever get away with sessions like this now in our deeply sanitised academic worlds, but I remember them as some of the most exciting and inspirational times of my life.

With John Schofield, Brian McCabe and Andy Greig among others!

Poetry was flourishing in 1970s Edinburgh. A friend called John Schofield organised a series of big poetry festivals and I participated in them, reading my own work, helping to organise sessions and publicity, herding poets from one venue to another, occasionally attempting to mediate between literary giants who clearly loathed one another. They were incredibly well attended, with poets coming from all over the UK and beyond. Robert Garioch and Norman MacCaig were writers in residence during that time, neither of whom, alarmingly enough, would now be sufficiently 'well qualified' for the post in an academic sense. After graduation, I stayed on in Edinburgh for another year, working part time in a small art gallery on Rose Street and writing obsessively. I had several collections of poetry published: one an anthology called Seven New Voices (Liz Lochhead was one of the other new voices!) one with Andy Greig, called White Boats, and a third solo collection, called A Book of Men, which won a Scottish Arts Council New Writing Award.

Much later, I would use some of these experiences to describe Kirsty's time in Edinburgh in Bird of Passage. She wasn't me, but I can tell you that I saw her one day, sitting with a friend, in a cafe, not far from the university, saw her in her long Indian cotton skirts, which I sometimes wore too, with her long red hair (mine was much darker) remembered her for thirty years afterwards, and eventually put her in a novel which also, oddly enough, turned out to be a homage to Wuthering Heights.

Meanwhile, I had also gone back to writing radio drama. But that will have to wait for next week's episode.

Dear Emily Bronte - How To Make Your Lovely Novel Better

Last Tuesday, I wrote a blog post for my regular slot on Authors Electric, titled Dear Emily. A 'previously undiscovered piece of literary correspondence', this was a letter from Humongous Publishing (look out for more from this unique company in due course!) asking for edits on Wuthering Heights. Today, checking the stats, I see that there have been more than 800 page views in that short time and a lot of interesting comments, many of them from writers saying the same thing: this was very funny, but all too horribly true.


It was all too horribly true, I suppose, because I lifted a surprising number of the comments directly from letters and emails I have received over half a lifetime of writing and submission. In fact I think I'm about to take a vow not to 'submit' anything - with its sense of relinquishing control to another - ever again. I always think of myself as a forgiving kind of a gal, so I was amazed how - once I began - all of them just came boiling to the surface. 

But it set me thinking. I've also had some good editors and artistic directors in my time, not one of whom would have written anything like this - so what was it about this string of  'helpful suggestions' which rang so many bells with so very many writers?

I think it's something that demonstrates a total misunderstanding of how the creative process works, but we all encounter it from time to time. Good editors will ask lots of difficult questions. But they will always be questioning the book you have written, the book (or play) that exists. They will be forcing you, the writer, to examine it more closely, to find out more, to tell the tale you want and need to tell. Or even more accurately, the tale that wants to be told.

As soon as somebody starts to suggest glib alternatives - why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Can't you make him or her do this? Or be like this? - the red mist descends. Or it does for me. Because I can't 'make' anything do or be what it doesn't want to be.  

When I was writing Bird of Passage, I spent months knowing that there was something in Finn's background about which he could neither speak, nor even think. It was something so traumatic that it must account for the way he was, in himself and in his relationship with Kirsty. The trouble was, I didn't know what it was and Finn couldn't remember. Some hypothetical editor might have said 'why don't you make it...' but I couldn't do that. I couldn't make it anything. Instead, I had to find it out. And I did. In the middle of the night. I woke up thinking 'oh - that's what it was. That was what happened to him!'

Strange as it may seem, it was as if the story had existed somewhere all along, as an entity outside myself. I don't know whether other writers feel this way, but I suspect a lot of them do. And I suspect that's why we find it so maddening when somebody else tries to manipulate our fictional reality with inappropriate suggestions.

Romance, Erotica and What Women Like.

I am giving NO MORE unsolicited publicity to THAT BOOK. Oh well, go on then. I suppose I am, but only indirectly, and because I want to consider a topic which fascinates (and sometimes troubles) so many readers and writers. This morning, the newspapers are full of the 50 Shades phenomenon but I don't much want to add to the extraordinary word count except to say that (on the principle of not commenting about what you haven't actually read) I downloaded it as an eBook, read about 10% of it and then returned it for a refund.I couldn't keep going. It seemed explicit but not terribly erotic.

I wasn't shocked but I was - well, what is the word? Saddened? Disappointed? My knowledge of bondage and so on (mostly gleaned, I have to admit, from those faintly bizarre but entertaining television documentaries you sometimes come across when browsing Sky Channels late at night!) is that it is essentially fantasy play, indulged in by equal partners in a very specific set of circumstances. The participants always seem to be well aware of the difference between fantasy and real life. Presumably the writer of 50 Shades was indulging her own personal fantasy. Which is fair enough. But I do find it worrying when a whole tranche of hugely popular novels - I'm thinking of the Twilight series as well - involves revelling in a kind of helpless female submission which is very far from playful. If I'm watching or reading about this kind of thing, give me Buffy confidently kicking ass any day.

It's of interest to me in a more specific way because in considering THAT BOOK, I have admitted to myself that in a couple of my own novels, Bird of Passage and  The Amber Heart I have written quite explicitly about physical as well as emotional obsession.

The central premise of both novels is that two people from vastly different backgrounds find themselves enmeshed in a powerful mutual attraction. All the same, the books are very different. In Bird of Passage, the roots of Finn's desire for Kirsty lie in his own traumatic childhood and his need to belong somewhere. The story explores what happened to him, why it happened and the effects of that appalling trauma, spreading out and influencing others, like a stone thrown into a still pool.

In The Amber Heart, I wanted to explore a mutual physical attraction so powerful that it overrides all considerations of status and propriety within the milieu in which it is set. For Maryanna and Piotro, it begins in youth and continues throughout their lives. And like all such obsessions, it is as selfish and destructive as it is life affirming. This is really what the 'story' of the book is about - as well as a great many other things. Ironically, I reckon it was this physicality - the erotic elements - which lead a number of traditional publishers to turn it down on the grounds that nobody wanted to read that kind of thing any more, did they? Well, not written by a woman, anyway.

Except that maybe they do.

But we struggle to find the right words to describe sexual attraction - as I have struggled with this blog post - without straying into 'erotica' territory. Not that there is anything wrong with erotica. Or with romance either. But I believe that it should be possible to write about an intense sexual attraction without the need to become genre specific.

A few weeks ago I found myself travelling by train with a friend and fellow writer. We discussed the 50 Shades phenomenon and started to name films and books which, as women, we had found sexy - genuinely, physically sexy. We named more films than books, which suggests that there may be a dearth of novels which tackle sensuality from the female point of view.

My friend named The Big Easy, with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin and I was quick to agree. Amid a sea of cinematic seduction scenes which make sex look like some kind of bolted on (and frequently unsexy) titillation, all that huffing and groaning, it's a beacon of sensuality. One of my own favourite movie scenes is the divine Antonio Banderas with the equally divine Salma Hayek in Desperado. Forget the preposterous violence. Watch it for that central scene where an injured but still dangerously mesmerising Banderas finally gets together with fiery Hayek.

Banderas and Hayek in Desperado

I'm sure my female readers are thinking of their own particular favourites by now. I could probably come up with a lot more, given time - but for the moment, my third film would have to be Dirty Dancing with Patrick Swayze, teaching 'Baby' to dance and running his hand down the warm, ticklish inside of her arm. Which of us women, watching that scene, has not felt it too?

In all of these a brave heroine is matched with a hero whose character is spiced with a good measure of danger. It may be the standard stuff of romance, but there's a bit more to it than that.What all of these films have in common is a thread of demonstrable physicality running like electricity between hero and heroine - I want to describe it as a warmth, because that's what it seems like - and because that in itself is innately 'filmic' it may be one reason why my friend and I thought first of films, rather than novels. 

Top of the novels is - for me - Wuthering Heights. The passage which I think first taught me how to write about physical passion, way back when I was in my teens, is this one:
'An instant they held asunder, and then how they met I hardly saw, but Catherine made a spring and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive. In fact, to my eyes, she seemed directly insensible. He flung himself into the nearest seat and on my approaching hurriedly to ascertain if she had fainted, he gnashed at me and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy...A movement of Catherine's relieved me a little presently; she put up her hand to clasp his neck, and bring her cheek to his as he held her: while he, in return, covering her with frantic caresses, said wildly - You teach me how cruel you've been - cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy?'


Even then, as a young woman, I could acknowledge that Grim Heathcliff and Mad Cathy were in no sense love's young dream, and that this was very far - a million miles - from the tame kiss as a prelude to the happy-ever-after ending, the walk into the sunset. That was the whole point. Part of the attraction of Wuthering Heights for me is the intense emblematic physicality of it, from the description of the Heights itself where the fire is always blazing even when dreadful things are happening, to the vigour of its inhabitants with all their uncomfortable and disruptive energy, an energy which seems to persist through death and beyond. Too many overly romantic film versions make us forget just how young, selfish and cruel these characters are. Why? Does it disturb the film makers? Are they afraid to take a classic on its own terms? Is this not the way women are supposed to think - or write? But it is this raw, youthful sexual energy which, when frustrated, is transformed into casual sadism and madness. If it is ignored, the resulting production makes no sense at all. In a very real sense, all the heat goes out of it. 

So, three movies and one novel.
There's one more and you'll probably think I've taken leave of my senses altogether when I say that it's Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. But let me explain.

There's a key scene in the novel where our (young, feisty) narrator, Davie, has been very ill and has had a tremendous quarrel with (older, experienced, deeply dangerous, deeply flawed) Alan Breck. I've always thought Breck one of the most worryingly attractive and equivocal heroes in all literature, never mind Scottish literature.
'His eyes had a kind of dancing madness in them...' says our narrator. 'Altogether, I thought of him at the first sight, that here was a man I would rather call my friend than my enemy.'
Not only is Alan suspected of a cold blooded murder, but in our earliest encounter with him, we see that he kills people with skill and efficiency albeit only when he is attacked first. Later in the novel, David Balfour - sick, delirious and on the point of collapse - challenges a furious Alan to a fight. We know that Alan is a superb swordsman while Davie... isn't.
Provoked beyond measure by Davie's insults, Alan draws his sword but at the last moment throws the weapon from him. David responds to this gesture with a sudden physical capitulation:
'At this the last of my anger oozed all out of me and I found myself only sick, and sorry, and blank, and wondering at myself... but where an apology was vain, a mere cry for help might bring Alan back to my side. "Alan," I said. "If you cannae help me I must just die here... If I die ye'll can forgive me, Alan? In my heart I liked ye fine - even when I was at the angriest."
At this plea, both childlike and heartrending and made all the more powerful because David has never been short of courage - Alan instantly relents:
"Davie,"said he, "I'm no a right man at all. I have neither sense nor kindness; I couldnae remember ye were just a bairn. I couldnae see you were dying on your feet; Davie, ye'll have to try and forgive me."'

I never read this passage without a little frisson at the brilliant physicality of it. But then the whole book, indeed everything Stevenson writes, has an intense appreciation of the physical running through it. Perhaps because he had such a sickly childhood - and knew extremes of illness, even as an adult - he also knew how to value energy, warmth, physicality, the senses - and was never afraid to depict them in his writing. 
Interestingly, Stevenson's later novel, Catriona, has an equally wonderful evocation of youthful desire, the torment, the crazy sensuality of it all in the face of the demands of propriety. I dramatised both of these novels for radio, so became very familiar with them, and the erotic charge in Stevenson's chapters about the growing attraction between Davie and Catriona is particularly sublime. 


So - no firm conclusions, but a topic worth debating. 
I'll admit that there's a certain romantic element about all of these scenes. But I don't think that's what makes them sexy. I think that's more to do with an attempt to depict a feeling, an energy which many of us have known at some point in our lives. We recognise it when we see it or read about it. For most of us, even as we grow older, the heightened sensation, the sense of living more vividly, more warmly, for however short a time, is what we remember and desire to recreate, and perhaps what we find ourselves identifying with. Did I find that same warmth and vibrant sensuality in what I read of THAT BOOK? 
No. Not at all.
But I'm also aware that these are generalisations and other people may - clearly do - feel differently. 
What do you think? 


Catherine Czerkawska
www.wordarts.co.uk 

Bird of Passage - What's In A Name?

If you have a quick look at the last post but one, you'll see that I was debating over the choice of name for my new novel, the one that I'll be publishing to Kindle in a few weeks time. I've scheduled it for 18th November, and I'll be having a launch event on my author's Facebook page, on or near that date - depends how quickly I can pull everything together. I say 'my new novel' but there are three novels - Bird of Passage, a big, romantic Polish epic called The Amber Heart and a brand new Scottish historical novel, which isn't quite finished, but soon will be, called The Physic Garden. I've scheduled Bird of Passage as an eBook this year, and I'll make some decisions about the others early in 2012. Watch this space!

Don't ask me how I've managed to get so much work ready to go, all at the same time, but a lot of it has to do with being 'distracted' by plays over the years, but wanting desperately to carry on writing prose fiction at the same time. Well, I did carry on writing it, but it's definitely 'mid-list' fiction, which doesn't slot neatly into any one genre. I've been having a hard time selling it in the current market - and that's even with an agent. I've had lots of 'rave rejections' as my colleague Maggie Craig calls them - editors saying how much they love my writing, but 'the marketing department doesn't think they can sell it.'

Only a little while ago, I heard yet another a literary agent talking about the death of the mid-list. Well, I hope she's wrong, because not only do I write it, but I love to read it. Besides, I'm pretty sure she wasn't taking Kindle and other platforms into account.  eBooks are - thank heavens - providing a home for the kind of mid-list fiction that so many of us love - well written, thought provoking novels, telling stories we want to read, a slow burn rather than a flash in the pan - perhaps not wildly experimental or narrowly structured, but absorbing fiction that leaves us satisfied in some deep way.

Anyway, after much agonising and consulting of friends (and then ignoring their suggestions, sorry folks - but the consultation really helped!) I went with Bird of Passage.It seems to me to encapsulate everything that the book is about. The novel has been described as 'Wuthering Heights Meets The Bridges of Madison County.' I've always loved Wuthering Heights, and it did start out as a sort of homage to that novel, albeit with a Scottish/Irish setting, and a story spanning the years from the 1960s to the present. Back when I was regularly dramatising classics for BBC Radio 4 - and although they let me loose on everything from Ben Hur to Treasure Island - they would never let me dramatise Wuthering Heights. I've blogged (crossly) about that before! So I decided that I had to write my own novel.

It's about a boy called Finn, who is sent to a Scottish island farm to work as a 'tattie howker' - the Scottish name for potato harvester. (There's a very old photograph of them above and a painting by my husband, Alan Lees, below.) Even when we moved to Scotland in the 1960s, people still came over from Ireland, usually from Donegal, to dig the tatties. They were sometimes treated very badly, and their accommodation was not the best. In Bird of Passage, Finn strikes up a friendship with the grand-daughter of the farmer, a girl called Cairistiona, always known as Kirsty.

Kirsty becomes a talented and ambitious artist, but her work is inextricably tied up with her love, not just for the island itself, but for Finn, who comes and goes like the mysterious corncrake which visits the island every summer. Finn, however, is psychologically damaged by a childhood so traumatic that he can only recover his memories piece by piece.  What happened at the brutal Industrial School, to which he was committed while still a little boy? For the sake of his own sanity, he must try to find out why he was sent there in the first place, and what became of his mother. As he struggles to answer these questions, his ability to love and be loved in return is called into question. He is the Bird of Passage of the title – a wanderer from place to place, a summer visitor who can call nowhere home.

Looking back at the novel now, I can see that what began as Kirsty’s story, gradually, over successive rewrites, began to change, and began to focus more and more on Finn. I found myself needing to know exactly why he was the way he was. It was as though he was insisting on telling his story and the more I wrote, the more central it became. Now, I think the balance is probably right. Kirsty is still a major figure, but Finn has his rightful place too. And there is a mystery at the heart of the novel that only Finn can solve - for himself, but for us too.

Meanwhile, a young digital artist called Matt Zanetti has done some superb cover art for me, a picture which seems to reflect the feeling of the novel  precisely. A picture, moreover, which convinced me that I had got my title right. But I'll save that for a later post!