Quicksand Tales

by Keggie Carew

  This critique is aimed at giving some useful and constructive guidelines concerning material submitted for consideration in Quartos writing-related events. Time does not permit an in-depth assessment of each individual typescript but listed below are some of the pointers that might help with future submissions. No further correspondence will be entered into concerning the submission or the critique and the judge’s/editor’s decision is final. Nevertheless we hope this critique offers some valuable advice.

  Beneath came a list of headings with a subset of questions, each with a YES/NO to be ringed appropriately by the judge/editor, along with your twenty-five quid’s worth of criticism. Not for me. There were no YES/NOs ringed at all.

  Opening:

  Is there a strong opening, introducing subject/character/scenario which makes the reader want to read on? YES/NO

  Does the submission ‘begin at the beginning’ or waste time and wordage with preamble? YES/NO Suggestions for improvement:

  All blank. I won’t inflict my poem on you, but will just say my submission began, ‘Yes a little creature / I shall try and make a little creature’ – straight from Beckett, but in italics to show I wasn’t pretending it was my own. Anyway, no comment and no suggestions for improvement, either.

  Middle:

  Does the typescript maintain the reader’s interest? YES/NO

  Not ringed. I stared in disbelief, brow creased, shame puckering the inside of my cheeks. Surely ‘I will burn with love and coo and coo / Who begat Who begat Who begat / YOU?’ was a little interesting, and fractionally effective?

  Are there any superfluous details/characters, etc. which could be removed to tighten the piece? YES/NO

  Fair enough, not applicable.

  Suggestions for improvement:

  Blank.

  Ending:

  Is there a positive link with the opening? YES/NO

  Yes, yes! There was ‘Grey spew of an old man’, which was definitely linked to ‘Yes, a little creature’, for God’s sake. But zilch.

  Has any surprise ending been used effectively? YES/NO

  Yes, yes, thrice yes! Shame was turning to anger now.

  Was the ending predictable and/or easy for the reader to spot? YES/NO

  What? He (definitely a he, I had decided) didn’t condescend to ring NO for even this.

  Suggestions for improvement: of course blank.

  Choice of Title:

  Has the writer used imagination to create an effective and eye-catching title? YES/NO

  What was I to read into this? ‘A Ghost Story’ was at least a title, bad or good. I wasn’t getting much for my money. Except that now my eyes were flickering towards the bottom of the page, skipping the ‘Original thought/treatment of subject’, skipping ‘Description’, skipping ‘Narrative flow and pace’, straight to the inch-wide box at the very bottom of the page: ‘Any other comments’. Here there was a whole box full of handwriting. For it was here that something had snapped and my poet-judge had gone straight for the jugular; his handwriting stabbed the words into the page, upright and furious, as if he had written them with his fist:

  My one complaint with this poem is its lack of accessibility. It’s bloody arrogont [it is clearly spelt arrogont] to assume the reader can see your idea without any effort on your part, and you haven’t made much have you?

  I was being told off. My breath stopped, my skin cooled. I swallowed, my mouth dry with smarting humiliation. He wasn’t finished, but he was running out of space, so the writing got smaller.

  To be honest Plath on a bad day is better written than this.

  And smaller, tighter, more urgent to squeeze in his final, all-knowing, damned-by-faint-praise, worse-than-anything killer blow.

  However I’ve given you a B simply to encourage some more [sic] your vigourous [sic] imagery but [illeg., illeg.] with more attention to structure next time.

  He knew, of course he did, that the patronising encouragement would be worse to read than the rage. Plath on a bad day? Plath on a bad day would be A+++, by my reckoning, for a lousy Quartos critique. And it is not like me to pick up on spelling – glass houses and all that – but this spelling was very bad indeed. This spelling was even worse than mine. And, I reiterate, I won’t inflict the poem on you, except to say that ‘I LOOK at you / clamp my mouth onto your cool fatty arm’ surely is not a bad line – yes, why on earth put LOOK into caps, but I still get the temperature of cool baby flesh in my mouth when I read it. ‘THUMBSUCKER’, again in capitals, is a bit aggressive, I concede; and ‘Looks like a severed head utteringobscurerhetoric’ is possibly over the top; and ‘masticating ivory mouth / nipping’ is not very nice. Too much ‘cooing’ and ‘skull-pounding’, I admit. But what about ‘Suggestions for improvement’, what about ‘useful and constructive guidelines’ and what about ‘we hope this critique offers some valuable advice’? What about my twenty-five quid’s worth?

  Thus I gave up entering poetry competitions. I stopped writing poetry; I would try fiction instead. I would write a novel about a son trying to discover the identity of his father, which his mother withholds from him. Three years later (not quite the 10,000 hours hard labour that Malcolm Gladwell posited was necessary to be expert at anything, but nearly), The Dog Star lay limp in the bottom drawer, with the reams of poems and short stories, and bulging notebooks and scraps. The wishbones weighed heavily. And as I try to wrap this story up, eerily prescient, and out of nowhere, the last few lines of the wishbone poem suddenly come to me:

  gripped by finger and fumb the splintered sticks snap and this kilo of potential

  pulled and not pulled

  turns out to be as lucky for me as for each cooked chook that

  bore its bone

  for wishful thinking on its back.

  THE INVISIBLE STORY

  The email read: ‘A giant, site-specific musical theatre event! . . . developed by a unique creative team of storytellers, a composer, a designer and an arctic explorer.’ My friend had forwarded it. She was going on a two-day weekend workshop as an experiment – to help a scriptwriter resolve a difficulty with the script. ‘A dynamic system,’ the email went on, ‘for revelation and solution.’ She was the invited composer, and thought I, as an artist and keen storyteller, might be interested in taking part. I scrolled down the list of the unique creative team. I had heard of some of them – well respected in their fields. An epic saga that crosses the globe, hmm. Revolutionary, I liked revolutionary. A unique and experimental event. The email came just at the right time. I had been working on my own for too long. I needed to get out more. Interact. So I took it as one of those fortuitous opportunities which every now and again presents themselves, and said yes. Yes! I really should have paid more attention to the blurb.

  And so I arrive at the conference centre, a red-tiled converted mansion in north London where the workshop is taking place, early, brushed up, a little shy. Not wanting to appear too self-conscious I walk in breezily and head straight for the cafe and get a cup of tea. I sit near a friendly-looking group of older women who are already here. They smile welcomingly, and one of them moves her chair round to include me. Five minutes later, I realise I have mistakenly joined the Rebirthing Society. An omen perhaps. We laugh. I return to my tea, begin to read the email we were sent of the story so far. Which doesn’t appear to have got very far at all.

  A tiny doubt creeps in. No. Let me be as open-minded as I can. I am not going to jump to conclusions. Don’t let me be the cynical person.

  Thank God, my friend – and my connection to all this – has arrived. She is at the doorway, talking to someone she knows. I go over. She introduces me to the large, billowing, slate-blue silk shirt standing next to her, who is The Creator! and The Writer! We shake hands. But his eyes fall on something over my shoulder. The others. Almost thirty of us, including his unique creative team.

  We sit in a large circle around the edge of the conference room, which has French doors leading out into a garden, and a Christmas tree in the
corner covered in red balls. Some people seem to know each other. I sit next to a bearded young man. I turn towards him, hold out my hand and (accustomed to people calling me Peggy) begin to articulate my name clearly : ‘Ke—’

  He lurches back in shocked amazement. ‘—ggie,’ I finish, disarmed.

  His face relaxes into a smile. He tells me he thought I was clairvoyant and was about to say his name, Ke . . . nton. We laugh. I look around the group, twenty-eight of us. Old people, young people, a long maroon skirt, a big flower on a t-shirt, a man like a snowman with thick white hair, a man with a friendly face who looks like a dog, a furry jumper, a leather jacket, dangly earrings, a checked shirt, a big pendant, a head of pink streaked hair, a woman wearing a headscarf tied behind her head like a Dutch person. We are given an Aboriginal poem about a tree. We all like trees, of course we do. We listen to a recording of Joseph Campbell reading a speech from Chief Seattle.

  The writer tells us he is The Writer! He introduces us to the facilitator who is going to facilitate the workshop over the two days and whom he says we are very honoured and lucky to have. We introduce ourselves. It goes round in turn. Everyone is happy to be here. Very, very, happy. Excited. Honoured. An incredible opportunity. Someone just says, Lovely! Lovely! Lovely! One woman shuts her eyes as she speaks, reaching out with her hands as if searching for the words; the ones she finds tell us that anything that addresses what is happening to the planet, well, she needs to be here. There are actors, writers, therapists, TV producers, artists, designers, healers, a painter of butterflies, musicians, directors and a ‘psycho-synthesiser’. One person is called Myrrh. One person lived in The Wilderness for a long time. The soul is an organ of registration of the body, someone says. Another invokes the guardian angels of the project. I am beginning to sweat. It is my turn. I say I am happy to be here, then look swiftly to Kenton on my left. The proverbial baton is passed on until each person has spoken and we are back to The Writer! The Writer! tells us, ‘This is, this is not messing around with a play at the Royal Court, this is really, really big!’ Most of the group nod.

  The facilitator stands. A velvet scarf the colour of claret coils loosely like a well-fed python around her throat, the fat resinous beads of her amber necklace glint on her satin chest. Her voice is whispery, deep, earthy, rivery, all calm and willowy, her tonal moderation not up or down, but a steady middle note with little variation, slightly soporific. We are to call forth the soul’s energies. We are told of the value and beauty in trusting our bodies. We are informed that ‘Constellations’ are sensitive to issues of Time and Space. We are instructed to surrender to the Truth of the Story. I look across the room to my friend, who is listening intently. Then the facilitator talks about ancestors and I find myself wondering if little insects are trapped in her amber beads, insects that might be a million years old, our minutest ancestors embalmed in sap turned to precious stone, nestled warmly on the bosom and in the vibrations of the rivery voice. Then she tells us to make a large circle of Time. From the oldest to the youngest. We each must find our place. And so we do.

  The oldest in the group says he is depressed to be at the end of the circle: the end of his life. The younger ones rush to declare the respect they feel for their elders. I am reminded of what Jung wrote at the end of his autobiography: describing his feeling of advanced old age, he quoted Lao-tzu, saying something about all around him looking clear while he alone felt clouded. I decide to share this and make a hash of it. The facilitator gives me a withering smile – I’ve interrupted her. Too keen (desperate, more like), too quick, and anyway, it’s not suitable. Wish I’d never said anything. I grope my way out. Now the facilitator wants a circle of closeness to The Project. We are to find our place again. The Writer! stands at the beginning of the circle. I am at midnight. Next to him. But on the wrong side.

  ‘How does that feel?’ the facilitator asks everyone.

  Apparently, we have just constellated. Now we must constellate the story. Right. The facilitator places cards on the floor on which are written elements of the story. We are to walk around the story. As fast or as slow as we want. Let our bodies guide us. There is ‘The Boy’, there is ‘A Secret’ (but The Writer! doesn’t know what it is), there is ‘A Room’, there is ‘The Family’, there is ‘A Journey’, there is ‘Unhappiness’ . . . Nothing is specific. Some of the story cards have question marks. The last one is blank with nothing on it at all. Right. So this could fit any story. Nothing about crisis, or consequence, or conflict, or climax. Nothing about . . . er, story? Okay. Slowly I’m getting it. It’s a story without the actual story. Which is why we’re here.

  There might not be a story, but there is an event that sets off the story, actually not an event, a character – a boy, in a place, and he does something. The thing that he does – though maybe I shouldn’t write this as it might infringe on The Writer!’s intellectual property – the thing that the character does . . . is to look into a hole. Now I think about it, I don’t think I need worry about intellectual property, because a very long time ago, a character I created, called Muddle, looked into a hole. Muddle came from a children’s book called The Trouble with Muddle, but this particular story was called Muddle and Shrew Find a Hole, and Juliet Stevenson read it on Children’s Hour on Irish TV.

  I made great big picture boards to illustrate the story and somewhere I have a tape of it. Proof, I suppose, so I think it’s probably safe enough to mention that the main protagonist of this giant site-specific theatre event (exactly like my Muddle) looks into a hole.

  We walk around the story cards. Then I notice that some people are hovering over the cards and deep breathing. Some people are swaying. The facilitator nudges The Writer!

  This is obviously good. This is very good. The woman in the headscarf is guarding one of the story cards. She is standing astride it, not letting anyone get near. Her arms come out in a protective manner, encircling the space. Another person is rolling their head. The facilitator nods again to The Writer! While everyone is walking around the story cards in a clockwise direction, I am going round the story backwards. I realise I am being the cynical person, so I sit down. Then the facilitator makes us stand by the story card we feel most comfortable with. I stand by the blank card. Alongside The Writer! Is this good? I don’t think so.

  ‘How did that feel?’ the facilitator asks.

  ‘My knees nearly buckled,’ says the dangly earrings.

  ‘That was so powerful, so extreme,’ says the furry jumper.

  ‘My hands were tingling,’ says a good-looking young man.

  Headscarf tells us, with a frowning and intense expression – her pupils getting darker and darker and smaller until they are jet-black pins – that she was alarmed whenever a man came to the spot she was protecting.

  ‘Yes, I felt the power of the feminine,’ one of the men acknowledges.

  There is a lot of nodding. Then we break for fruitcake and morning tea.

  Twenty minutes later we are sitting back down in our large circle. Now we must constellate the story in greater depth. The Writer! prowls the room in order to locate his main protagonist. The Boy. He gestures towards the good-looking young man, but the woman who spoke earlier with closed eyes and outstretched arms, who had to be here, thinks he is pointing to her. Her hand is on her chest with overwhelming pride at being chosen. No, no, he does not mean her, he means the boy (I mean young man) next to her. She slumps back. The young man rises. The facilitator leads him into the centre, directs him to find his place. We watch. He moves right a bit, left a bit, here, no there, forward, then stops at the top of our circle, facing out towards the French doors. I am quite close, I watch him looking out to a distant horizon.

  ‘Oh, and he has a dog,’ The Writer! remembers.

  The Writer! sweeps our circle, sees The Dog and leads him into the centre. The Boy tells us he feels much happier now his Dog is beside him. Now The Secret must be represented, so The Writer! lurches towards another young man, changes his mind and rec
oils away. He is sniffing, scouring – no, channelling – for his cast. I am channelling intently into my lap. The Secret is chosen. Then Nature is chosen. Leather Jacket is Colonialism, which later mysteriously and without a mention becomes Civilisation (no matter, but I thought that a very different thing). The Mother and The Father are chosen. The Grandfather is chosen. The characters are beginning to look like life-sized pieces on a chessboard. Two Grandchildren are chosen. The unchosen watch the chosen. There are now ten people in the circle. The facilitator and The Writer! walk around them inspecting them closely. The young stand with feeling and intensity. The older ones stand with seriousness. I am surprised how quickly everyone seems to have assimilated into this. Then I remember they are aspiring actors and wonder, meanly, if they are auditioning for a part in this giant, site-specific musical theatre event. But then I see that it is not just the young aspiring actors; everyone is standing with feeling and intensity. I am transfixed.

  The facilitator asks The Father, ‘How are you?’

  ‘I feel great relief,’ The Father tells her. ‘Proud of my Dad,’ he says, pointing to the Grandfather.

  The white-haired Grandfather is so overwhelmed with tears that he cannot turn round. Bloody hell.

  I look at my watch. We’ve only been constellating for fifteen minutes. Do they all know something I don’t? I notice that Headscarf – the intense protector woman with the knitted brow, black pin eyes, and the scarf tied behind her head – has still not been chosen and is leaning more and more forward out of her chair. Oh dear. Headscarf says she must kneel, she has an overwhelming desire to kneel. She kneels.