Mslexia

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New Writing

Skin

Guest editor Alex Clark introduces her pick of poetry and prose in Issue 44 ◊ Jan/Feb/Mar 2010

Mermaids, snakes, long-dead Vikings, mysteriously spreading tattoos and seductive mannequins: all manner of the exotic and the unexpected featured in the stories and poems that you submitted in response to Mslexia’s call for work on the theme of Skin. But your imaginations did not only extend in such far-flung directions; also on show were many quieter and more obviously domestic stories, pieces that focused on their characters‚ battles with the frailties and challenges of their own bodies and those around them. In all, the stories and poems that I read demonstrated an impressive diversity of scope and ambition.

In part, that is surely due to the suggestive nature of the word itself, the fact that its very starkness can allow for all sorts of interpretations and connotations. Our skin, most obviously, is what we live in, and what forms the barrier between us and the outside world – our environment and surroundings, and other people. It is both defence against external threat and something that we ourselves display to others to make them notice us; it is no surprise that many of the pieces that I read were concerned with what happens when that defence breaks down, or with the aftermath of prejudice, as in several stories dealing with issues of race. Similarly, there were many striking explorations of the byways of sexuality, in which the protagonists were portrayed as simultaneously shielded and trapped by their skins.

In all creative writing, of course, it is necessary to put on another skin, even (and perhaps especially) if one is writing directly out of one’s own experience. Writing fiction requires an enormous act of empathy and imagination in order to put oneself into a second skin – to see worlds both exterior and interior through another set of eyes, and then to communicate one’s observations and perceptions to an unknown readership. It was noticeable that an abiding theme emerged: one of characters attempting to get to grips with their identity, to map out the territory of the individual and give it voice. Here were figures seized with the need to feel at home in their own skin, to understand what it was that motivated and defined them.

Of the fiction I selected, perhaps the clearest example of that struggle was a story called ‘Exposure,’ in which a woman in the grip of a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder battled to get through the day. The reader learns that an exposure is a technique used to counter phobias, anxieties and the rituals associated with keeping them at bay. The central character, temporarily reassured by a fall of snow that has made her garden seem less threateningly chaotic, attempts to perform the apparently straightforward task of cleaning her lavatory; at the back of her mind, alongside numerous terrors, lurks the imminent return of her husband, and the need to keep the worst excesses of her disorder from him. What impressed me most about the story was the way a precarious mental state slowly unfolded before us, complete with its own, iron-clad internal logic, its contradictions and complications. The result was an intricate piece of work that was simultaneously chilling, heart-wrenching and, at unexpected moments, even humorous.

I also loved the humour of ‘Off the Shelf,’ a story that one wanted to believe in wholeheartedly, despite the fact that, alas, few of us suddenly sprout wings and take to the skies. The narrator, a supermarket worker whose physical disabilities appear to have led her into a lonely and unfulfilling life, undergoes a bizarre metamorphosis: on a hot, sweaty evening, what she believes to be heat rash in fact turns out to be a row of feathers gradually appearing on her shoulders, ready to sweep her off her bedsit balcony and high above the humdrum streets. Where this story succeeded was in its ability to take a jeu d’esprit and make something else of it: a portrait of an ordinary life, suddenly made extraordinary, which somehow shed a light onto all our fantasies of escape and transformation.

We were back down to earth with a bang in ‘Full Circle,’ which, unlike ‘Shelf,’ took as its subject matter confinement. Several writers dealt movingly with the depredations of old age, and this story did it exceptionally well, describing an elderly man who, despite being of English ancestry, has lived his life in India. Returning home‚ to Britain, Harry feels only estrangement and isolation. The story centres on his memories of India, and in particular a servant whose death left him stranded in his own home, and his relationship with one of his carers in this country, a lesbian whose partner has recently had a baby. With very little in common except a shared horoscope, it seems unlikely that Harry and Coral will be able to communicate very effectively. But as the story progresses, probing at the complexities of homeland and race, we realise that there are many ways to forge bonds and mutual understanding.

I also very much enjoyed a rather gruesome story of paternal love. ‘A Cold Unfurling’ plunges us into the world of teenage girls and the horrors that their fathers go through when they begin to become sexually aware. In the case of Ike, a cattleman whose wife has abandoned him and who finds solace in taciturnity and the odd glass of whiskey, the thought of his daughter’s entry into the world of men proves near enough unbearable. But how can he prevent his child from growing up? The world described is not entirely unfamiliar to most of us – emotionally repressed men struggling to deal with the chaotic world of female sexuality – but this story handled it with unflinching understatement and toughness.

My final choice is also, in a different sense, a story that takes us through a rite of passage. The little boy in ‘Amila and Me’ knows that he must grow up, and when his father tells him that he is to join a group of men who will escort a herd of cattle through the mountains to the tannery in Kanpur, he is thrilled to be let into their secret game. Several days on, exhausted, cold and with his beloved cow Amila struggling to keep going, Rishi is less than sure that he wants to be admitted to the world of the adults. Writing through the eyes of a child is never easy, requiring the skill to make a voice believable without seeming faux-naif, but this was an admirably assured piece, culminating in Rishi’s wide-eyed arrival in a city the like of which he has never seen before.

The poetry writers among you responded with no less inventiveness and gusto, taking particular delight in the sensual aspects of skin. Here were miniature hymns to tactility and connection, to the fleeting perceptions we have of one another’s bodies. The poems that I selected from a wide-ranging field often approached their subjects sideways in order to look at them more fully: a painted banister in a railway station spoke of the passage from past to present, a cloud of bees described the movement between two lovers, and a body on an operating table was imagined as music made into anatomy. Elsewhere, there were skinned rabbits in not one but two poems, although the poets were aiming for and achieving entirely different effects, and a less easily describable but no less evocative portrait of memories of a house in the countryside.

Each poem did what poetry does best: take a moment of perception or emotion and present it to us afresh, in words that are less linear and straightforward than prose, but tell us something about the strangeness of subjectivity and experience. At a time when poetry often seems marginalised for the sake of more readily profitable arenas of publishing and bookselling, it was encouraging to read so much new and ambitious work.

Indeed, it was a great pleasure to read all the work submitted, and in particular to see the range of responses provoked by a single word. Writing to a pre-designated theme is one of the more challenging exercises a writer can encounter and it is often hard not to make the results seem exactly that – an exercise. But the energy and vitality of the work that came to me was a breath of fresh air that demonstrated how many talented and committed writers there are out there.

ALEX CLARK is a literary critic whose work has appeared in The Observer, The Sunday Times and The Telegraph. She currently writes for The Guardian and the TLS. She’s judged many literary awards, including the 2008 Man Booker Prize, and is a regular radio broadcaster. She is writing a book about family structures for Faber.

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In all creative writing, of course, it is necessary to put on another skin, even (and perhaps especially) if one is writing directly out of one’s own experience.

ALEX CLARK