Sunweys and widdershins is my latest story to spread its wings and find a home in the outside world. It was published by the lovely Soor Ploom Press on 6 March 2023 and can be read and listened to on their blog.

This isn’t a new piece, however, having been first – and substantially – written in October 2021. It’s also the first externally published piece in over a year. On this writing journey I am learning that tenacity and luck are sometimes as important as my writing skill in getting my words out. Also that finding someone who not only agrees to publish my writing but who says, please can I publish your story because ‘I loved it’, is well worth waiting for.

Sunweys and widdershins can trace its origins to my list of ‘words and phrases’ that serve as writing and title prompts. Two words, ‘whirligig’ and ‘widdershins’ were the seed and the egg of this piece and, together with my desire to keep my writing anchored in Scotland and an abiding fascination with things that seem to happen in the spaces between reality and fantasy, gave rise to this wee story.

I leave it to my readers (or maybe even listeners in this case) to decide what the piece means for them, but during writing and editing I was thinking about the powers of nature, folklore and superstition, motherhood and identity, congregations of magpies, and tiny nudges that precipitate change.

Spoiler alert: this piece describes the development of my story ‘A construction of loss’. I recommend reading the story first here.

My most recently published story, ‘A construction of loss’, was begun a year ago in February 2021 and has evolved through eleven versions and half a dozen rejections. It finally found a home in Glittery Literary’s fourth anthology of short stories which came out in early February 2022.

The location described at the very end of the story was my starting point for writing it – although I didn’t know then what story I was going to be writing. During lockdown we walked nearly every day along, around and across a nearby sports field. At the far side of this field is a badgers’ sett built within an old midden – a town rubbish heap from, we estimate the 19th or early 20th century. The badgers’ digging throws up all sorts of old items including animal bones, broken pieces of crockery and many, many glass bottles of curious shape and size. The place fascinates me with its mixing of life old and new, human and animal, and I wanted to include it in a story.

When I start to write a short story or flash fiction I often have no more than a word, a thing or a place in mind – something that has intrigued or interested me. I mull this ‘prompt’ over until I find an opening sentence and then I begin to write. The story unfolds as I write it and I almost feel sometimes as if I am its first reader more than its writer. ‘A construction of loss’ began in this way and found its own voice. I had in mind a fun story riffing off Wind in the Willows (incidentally, Kenneth Grahame is buried very near here) but what emerged was something quite different.

Beyond the field is a river and we have kayaked or canoed it several times. This then became the obvious way to bring the characters of my story together. As I wrote, a more serious and sombre tone settled onto the story and it became about loss and the things we live for.

Writing about a talking animal in a story that is not for children, nor even humorous, is challenging. It is for my readers to judge whether I have done it successfully. This published version was, however, hugely improved by the input and advice of some early readers who helped me see where I was straying into the twee and reminded me that less is more and how tiny words can make big differences.

I love to read Scots and can give a fair recital of a few Burns’ poems but, bar a few words, I don’t speak it in my daily life and I’ve never tried to write in it or with it before.

My son has a book that tells the creation myth of the Giant’s Causeway that stretches out from the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland. Legend has it that it was built by Irish Giant and leader of the Fianna, Finn McCool (or, Fionn ma Cumhaill), as a crossing to the west of Scotland, which is just visible on the horizon on a clear day. A larger, but less famous, Scottish Giant, called Benandonner, took the opportunity to cross over to challenge Finn to a fight. In our book’s version of the story Benandonner is bested by the wit and wisdom of Finn’s wife, Oonagh, and sent packing. Finn himself does practically nothing except behave, literally, like a big baby. This might not have prompted me to write except that the title of our book has always particularly annoyed me: ‘The legend of Finn McCool and his wise wife’. So Oonagh does all the work but doesn’t even deserve a title credit!

Angela Carter and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others, have written stories and poems that tell familiar tales from a woman’s or sometimes specifically a wife’s perspective. I am a huge admirer of their work. So, frustration with the framing of the book about the causeway and in homage to some literary heroes – as well as a desire to have a go at some written work using the Scots language – led to my wee telling from the perspective of Benandonner’s imagined wife, Ailsa. It’s a practice piece so I’ve just published it directly on my writing page.

You can read the piece here and I’d love to know what people think.