Mslexia

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New Writing

Bugs

Carol Birch introduces her pick of prose and poetry on the theme of Bugs

The ‘Bugs’ theme was threefold: most of you wrote about creepy-crawlies, but technological and viral bugs featured strongly too. Surveillance techniques and the vulnerability of personal information are obvious concerns, and in this electronic age it’s easy to see why. I once heard a voice coming out of a turned-off speaker in my room, and just for a second a strange, Kafkaesque world opened before me. But I’m far more familiar with those viral bugs which strike me down with sniffles and aches whenever they feel like it. As far as insects go, I’m largely immune to the shudder factor, though I do make exceptions for things without legs: I’ve stroked a tarantula with pleasure and am a tick-remover par excellence, but the sight of a worm or a maggot reduces me to idiocy. According to my mother I wasn’t always like this. I used to bring in worms from the garden, wash them and give them state burials inside hollow marrow bones discarded by our dog. I have no memory of the worms’ ordeal, but I do have clear recall of something that never actually happened. I remember my mother picking up a mop and saying ‘Oh God!’ in a tone of great weariness. Under the mophead was one great squirmy grub the size of a fat puppy. The reality, of course, was that instead of a giant maggot there was just the usual revolting mass of ordinary ones. Memory plays tricks.

What all the bugs in your stories and poems shared was a sense of otherness. The electronic ones were silent inhuman witnesses, invasive and parasitic. The body-invading variety were handled with care and a great deal of thoughtfulness – some of you even considering the viral point of view. Those bugs that crept or crawled or scuttled or flew were mysterious: some beautiful, some threatening, some touchingly pathetic.

Making a final selection was far more difficult than I’d anticipated. There were a few that were always going to make it, a few that had no chance, but so many hovered around in the debateable lands that it was necessary to go back again and again and agonise. How to choose between two equally good pieces when only one could be included? In the end, I suppose, it came down to gut feeling.

The poems were particularly difficult to judge because the standard was generally higher. Of those left out, some were lovely but purely descriptive and didn’t grow in the mind. Some caught moments artfully but didn’t relish language. One or two read like prose with artificially broken up lines. Then there were those which were very nearly perfect but had one fatal flaw, a kind of toe-stubber which caught me every time. These worried me, but for the final selection I decided only to include poems I could read through without actually getting the urge to change anything.

Some poems might have worked better as stories, and vice versa. This raises the question of definition: must a story tell a story? I balk at strict rules when it comes to literature, and nothing much happens in some of the greatest short stories ever written. What is needed is a sense of completeness, of a story being fully comfortable in its medium. I turned down a sad meditation, a gentle musing, a memory, an observation to which the insect theme seemed to have been artificially tacked on – all were well-written, but in the end they just didn’t work as stories. Others were nearly there but let down by a weak ending or a tendency to say more than necessary. A short story must not seem like an incipient novel, even if it is.

The final selection then consists of the ones that rose again and again to the top of the pile like cream. All were well-written; all used the theme and the medium skillfully.

Unsurprisingly, children featured in many of the entries, especially the curiously detached cruelty that insects seem to bring out in so many of them. How easy it is to project things onto these creatures, so alive but so safely alien! In Andrea Hosfeld’s ‘Summer Spray,’ the bees become ‘them’ to the children’s ‘us’ in an apocalyptic game. ‘We felt wise and dangerous,’ says the young narrator, in a story which captures the true seriousness of play. A later sense of unease gives subtle testimony to the way small incidents can assume enormous meaning, impossible for the child to understand or articulate. A similar sense of regret deferred comes across in Lynsey Calderwood’s ‘Smellin Helen.’ Helen is the little girl with nits, the one who wets herself and stinks and is social death. Who’d want to be seen with Helen? In a story that is compassionate without being remotely sentimental, Calderwood nails another painful childhood dilemma, the struggle between kindness and the need to belong.

Julie Mellor’s ‘Cockroach Earrings’ looks at childhood cruelty from another angle, tackling the fascination with observation and dissection to chilling effect. With its innocent callousness and carefree-yet-nostalgic ending, this poem manages to be moving without hinting at emotion. That is no mean feat.

K S Searle’s cockroach love song was original and off-the-wall. Far from objectifying the subject, ‘Cockroach’ takes on not only the bug’s point of view but its sexuality. This is a bold move, but Searle pulls it off with aplomb, and builds to a triumphant and beautifully written climax. Another ambitious poem, Helen Burke’s ‘The Maggots,’ kept pulling me back. The idea of maggots as tired clubbers (‘the queer pitch of the stars swimming around/Their feet…someone singing out of key that/Turned out to be themselves’) shouldn’t work but it does, and its initial obscurity lifts when you realise these are medicinal maggots.

‘Bishy Barnabee Way’ by Judith Lal delivered more than it promised: this poem was a grower. The bugs are outrunners of a wildness scarcely tamed by domesticity, of confusion and endless unknowability. It gives a strong impression of the approach of death, and of acceptance and freedom. The fly in Judith Taylor’s clever ‘Flight’ also symbolises freedom. Simple and perfectly complete in itself, this poem makes the theme integral, using the metaphor lightly and playfully and conveying a situation and state of mind in very few words. It also moves beautifully from start to finish, smooth as silk. Freedom is again a theme in S Shaw’s ‘Rainclocks.’ In the sanitised modern now, the poet dreams of the wild living world once held at bay by her grandmother’s broom, and longs ‘to beat a carpet/with more force than is strictly necessary.’ The rich bug-world of childhood is lovingly recalled in a celebration of good old muck.

Anna Macgowan’s ‘The Bird and the Bug’ and Katy Darby’s ‘Quarantine’ both tackle health bugs. ‘Bird’ is a deceptively simple story that wears its skill lightly. The style is relaxed, earthy and playful, but the story is multi-layered and must have taken some doing. Nothing much happens, but somehow a rush-hour tram journey becomes the setting for a moment of low-key catharsis encompassing past, present and future. Ultimately, this story is about companionship and the way someone can be simultaneously irritating and endearing.

‘Quarantine’ takes us into a world eerily recognisable as our own in a future where society operates on a health caste system and relationships are ordered according to a rigidly controlled bureaucracy. High-tech and ideas-driven, it never loses sight of the human need for emotional connection. Communication is also at the heart of Jess Sully’s strange and tremendously atmospheric ‘Longwave.’ The narrator eavesdrops on the end of the radio wavelength, ‘where ghosts staff the radio stations,’ and the background hum is the hiss left over from the Big Bang. Here, waves carry random voices, mundane conversations come and go – until something altogether more profound and disturbing breaks through and she hears ‘what is there on the hiss when no-one else is speaking.’

Writing is hard work. The majority that were left out – and some that got in – needed tightening, and those that missed by a whisker could have made it after another couple of reworkings. I balk at rules but here’s one: never let a piece go till you are sure that every word is necessary.

Across both categories there must have been about ten near-misses it pained me to leave out, but in the end I chose those I felt were most finished. It was a close thing though. So much talent, so many ideas. So little space.

CAROL BIRCH is the author of ten novels including The Naming of Eliza Quinn and Scapegallows. She won the 1988 David Highman Award for the Best First Novel of the Year for Life in the Palace, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize with The Fog Line, and she was longlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize for Turn Again Home.

All selected prose and poetry is published in the current issue of Mslexia. To read New Writing in full subscribe now.