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New writing
SHOES

Guest Editor JULIA DARLING introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of shoes

SHOES have been walking through my work for years now. A pair of empty red shoes walked up the stairs in Gert Hardcastle’s nightmare childhood in my first novel, Crocodile Soup. Like many of the writers who submitted work on this theme, I have been haunted by the bloody Grimm’s tale ‘The Red Shoes’, in which a girl must hack off her red-shoed feet in order to stop dancing.

In my next novel, The Taxi Driver’s Daughter, I used the image of a tree filled with shoes as a central motif. Without it the book is rather ordinary, but I found that shoes are very powerful symbols, and placed out of their natural context – i.e. on feet – they carry all kinds of strange messages.

The delightful thing about the tree of shoes is that it actually exists. In the park near where I live in Newcastle there is a ragged tree that is filled with shoes. It was begun some years ago. I think some drunken students flung their shoes into branches and they hung there for a while. The idea caught on and soon all sorts of people were coming to hang their shoes in Heaton Park. The council (as in my novel) kept on taking the shoes down, but they kept on arriving. My own daughters have thrown shoes up there. The tree has come to represent something: a place of magical wishes perhaps, or just something enchanting and lovely.

People have since tried to start other trees. Someone started making a tree of dolls, but it didn’t survive. In my research I discovered that shoes in a tree can represents souls after death. In the case of the Heaton tree I think we have created a place of ritual for ourselves, which we crave beneath our materialistic skins.

For the complete essay, and for Julia's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of shoes, read issue 24 • Subscribe!

Read a poem chosen by
Julia Darling:

Clearing out
by Kaye Lee

For more on the late JULIA DARLING, go to www.juliadarling.co.uk