Curious Tales
  • Home
  • Publications
    • The Barrow Rapture
    • Bus Station: Unbound
    • Congregation of Innocents
    • The Longest Night
    • Naming the Hour
    • Poor Souls' Light
  • Events
  • Blog
  • Shop

Meeting Edges

27/5/2015

 
Until May last year my experience of Barrow-in-Furness had been fleeting, rushed changes at the train station. Sprinting through the underpass with too much luggage to make a connection north up the west coast of Cumbria or south to Manchester and beyond, always transitory, somewhere I needed to pass through to get somewhere else. Over the last decade or so it has become a familiar and personal non-place to me, missing my connection, waiting in the sparse entrance, an icy sea wind cutting through winter layers – always somewhere I travelled alone to visit the people I loved.

Barrow is situated in an isolated jutting peninsula on the North West coast, a purpose-built industrial town sandwiched between power stations, off-shore wind farms and the Cumbrian fells, partially surrounded by sinking sands shifting between Morecambe Bay and the Ravenglass estuary.

For my first real visit to Barrow last spring, I didn’t take the train, I drove from further up the Cumbrian coast, south over the barren moorland of Corney Fell, where on reaching the highest point I had a clear view of the Irish Sea, the wind farms and the horizon blurring land, sea and sky. All the way to Barrow.

On the approach into the town there is a sense of industrial layers. A still functioning Victorian brickworks on the northern outskirts, the modern seemingly unpopulated cuboid industrial estates and leviathan sheds rising out of the centre, mocking the brick terraced houses at their base and imitating the mountain landscape.

Heading out of the town towards the docks, the roads are wide and straight, it becomes difficult to tell which warehouse is in use, which gas tower, which hulking metal structure. Piers and pillboxes on the beach, stumps that would have propped up a bridge look like ancient monolithic monuments.

I took photographs to try to remember colour, structures and where things were in relation to the sea or the mountains, but the Barrow landscape documents itself. Its memory washes up on the beaches and seeps out from under flaking paintwork, badly made facades or fading signage. After walking for hours, I stopped taking photographs and instead began to absorb.

The work for The Barrow Rapture became black, white, grey and yellow. Black and white like the drawings for a graphic novel. Grey for the hazy horizon and concrete architecture. Yellow, for the gorse bushes by the docks, for the edging on the train station steps, for the seagull’s beak and for the line of sunlight between sea and sky. Fading grey, yellow, grey. The landscape becoming more and more yellow. The yellow becoming symbolic of something more spiritual and ethereal. Barrow becoming a medium between this world and another.

And so the story begins and ends in transition, as we all do, with a voyage and a crossing. The protagonist steps off the train at Barrow-in-Furness station and walks through the underpass alone.

Beth Ward

Picture

Curious Tales in conversation with... Barrow-In-Furness

18/5/2015

 
Maybe it's strange to think of writing as a kind of conversation. People have an idea, I think, of writers alone in garrets, scribbling away in self imposed isolation. It can be like that sometimes, for some writers, some of the time - maybe - but all the work we do at Curious Tales has conversation at its core. In fact, that's one of the ways we can tell if an idea one of us has is something we'd want to work on together. Does it involve collaboration and participation? Does the work itself engage with other forms - art, web design - and with other writers and artists? Our ghost story anthologies are always in conversation with another writer - a way of looking backwards and acknowledging our influences, as well as looking forward and attempting to give time-honoured traditions a fresh twist or new perspective. Bus Station: Unbound was a giant conversation with a building - part imagined, and part real - and the book itself is a strange, otherworldly conversation between itself and the reader, who is able to control the direction the story takes. 

For The Barrow Rapture, Brian, Tom, Beth and I started a long conversation with Barrow itself. We made trips to the place by car and train. We were researching, I suppose. Not like scientists do - we didn't have strict research questions and I don't think any of us turned up with a hypothesis - but we were, on those first visits, listening and making lists of questions the landscape prompted us to ask. We let ourselves be led by our noses, by getting lost, by turning up at the wrong cafe by accident. I took a left when I should have taken a right, ended up in front of a closed spiritualist church, and started wondering about conversations between the living and dead, between the present and the absent, between the embodied and the remembered. I started there.

We walked until our feet were sore. What does it feel like to be here, in this town? What does it smell like? What does the light look like in the late afternoon, and what do the shapes the shadows of those buildings make remind us of? What stories leak out of pub doorways, or are washed in by the tide? What plots and narratives are suggested by the way we move through the town, the way the roads siphon the traffic through the main and residential areas? What hidden histories and slowly evolving conflicts are embedded in this landscape: the thickening fog, the sea as grey as a draining board, the seagull shit caked on window ledges, thick as concrete?

We were in conversation with each other too  - over email, and in some informal workshops we held to discuss the work. It felt important to tread lightly - to be guests in the town, and guests to each other's imaginative interpretations of the journey we'd shared. Plot would emerge if it wanted to. Voice would take care of itself if we listened hard enough and chose the words with humility. As a writer, I'm a control freak and giving myself up to unknowing, learning to respond gently and to edge slowly into the fog was hard on the brain and good for the ego. We wrote our own sections of the stories independently, editing in response to conversations about tone, style and theme and editing again as the first versions of Beth's amazing artworks started to appear.

And a character did emerge from the early morning mist - thank god. She was alone and listening to the town, like we were. Someone curious, someone looking for something in particular. Someone with a backpack and an even heavier burden. In one version of the story, she starts with a visit to the spiritualist church because her mum used to take her there. It was her safe place. The place to go back to and wait if she got lost. We developed a design for the website too - one which would allow Beth Ward's haunting and evocative interpretations of the buildings and landscapes  take centre stage and work with the writing to create mood and tension and a design that would recreate or dramatise this sense of open ended exploration, of listening, of motivated but routeless wandering.

The architecture of The Barrow Rapture is fairly simple. The reader makes a series of decisions, deciding which landmarks to visit, and which to avoid. There are many routes and combinations through the work, just as there are many ways to explore a town - even a small one - on foot. Some of the locations are real, some imaginary, and some an amalgam of the two. There are several places to end the journey. And the reader can come home again - and find the town slightly different - as many times as she likes.

Jenn Ashworth
Picture

    Curious Tales

    The latest sightings and intrigue from the  Curious Tales team.

    Archives

    December 2020
    June 2020
    July 2018
    April 2017
    October 2016
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    August 2014

    RSS Feed

    LINKS

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.