::mslexia workshops::

Write on the Wild Side #25
a writing workshop with Linda Anderson

THEME: FLYING

INTRODUCTION

THE DESIRE to fly is such a powerful human longing that our childhood stories and myths are full of it: angels and fairies; Santa and his airborne reindeer; Harry Potter learning to steer his broomstick. ‘Magical realist’ adult stories sometimes include miraculous flying too. Isabel Allende’s first novel The House of the Spirits (Black Swan, 1994) about the Trueba family in Chile combines the everyday and the marvellous so matter-of-factly that we glide easily into acceptance of characters with green hair, the gift of prophecy – or the ability to fly.

In Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (Picador, 1985), about a world-famous winged woman, Fevvers, a trapeze artist, who tells her life-story to a journalist. He initially wants to expose her as a fraud, but becomes enchanted with her and joins the circus as a clown. Although this is a comic fable, Fevvers’ wings have an important symbolic dimension.

The novel is set in 1899, a period when agitation for women’s rights began to emerge. When Fevvers first spreads her wings, Ma Nelson, the mistress of the brothel where Fevvers spent her childhood, declares that she is ‘the pure child of the century that just now is waiting in the wings, the New Age in which no woman will be bound down to the ground’. Ma Nelson stops Fevvers from playing Cupid in the brothel and gets her to pose as Winged Victory. But this symbolism does not reduce Fevvers to an icon. She is also a real, individual woman with faults and appetites, who stuffs herself with food and dreams of bank accounts.

EXERCISES

#1
Growing wings
Try a bit of magical realism yourself. Imagine an ‘ordinary’ character, male or female, who begins to grow wings. It starts with an itch in the shoulder blades, and then something sinewy and feathery begins to sprout. How does your character respond? How do others react? What does the transformation mean, if anything?

Airplane travel represents the ultimate in freedom and adventure, whisking us through time-zones and setting us down in faraway places. But the flight itself can be an experience of entrapment as you sit squeezed into your tiny space in your DVT socks. Add to this the possible hazard of getting a nightmare seatmate – a bore, a drunk, an evangelist – and you will really need that holiday when you finally land.

The most chilling story I ever read about strangers getting into conversation during a flight is ‘Girl on a plane’ by Mary Gaitskill (in Because They Wanted To, Picador 1997). The story focuses on John, a computer salesman who strikes up a conversation with a woman sitting next to him. Not long after they begin to talk, she confesses that she is an alcoholic. He finds her attractive and decides to reveal nothing of himself, to keep things light. But when trying to reassure her about a failed relationship, he grabs her hand and blunders into his own confession: ‘If you want to talk about mistakes - shit, I raped somebody. Somebody I liked.’ This has the effect of shutting down their communication: ‘at the speed of light she was falling away, deep into herself where he couldn’t follow.’ But the unplanned revelation startles John, who had previously exonerated himself. When they leave the plane, John utters an apology to the back of the woman’s head. It is as if she now stands in for the victim.

There is something about air travel which makes intense encounters possible: the enforced confinement with nothing to do, the sense of being temporarily ‘nowhere’, the niggling fear of something going wrong with the plane.

#2
Seatmates
Invent your own fictional scenario in which two characters fetch up side by side on a plane and begin to talk. They don’t have to be swapping confessions. One of them might be boasting or lying. You might want to make your story comic. But try to move your plot towards an outcome in which one of the characters is unexpectedly changed by the encounter.

Another feature of air travel is the baggage we carry, literally and metaphorically. Journeying gives us a chance to be unfettered, to try out new aspects of ourselves and yet we find it hard to resist the comfort of our familiar things and ideas.
There is an hilarious illustration of this near the beginning of Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (Faber and Faber, 1999), her novel about an evangelical Baptist missionary, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and four daughters to the Belgian Congo in 1959. In order to flout the airline’s luggage restriction, the sisters each wear several sets of underwear and dresses and conceal items underneath their clothes, including Betty Crocker cake-mixes, pinking shears, a hatchet and tins of devilled ham. They ‘lumbered like cattle off the plane ...into the swelter of Leopoldville’. The irony unfolds as we see how ludicrously unsuitable their goods are in their new context.

#3
Weighed down
Invent a character who is flying to an exciting destination where s/he hopes to act or feel differently. List five or six items associated with his or her old life which s/he cannot bear to leave behind. What happens to these items in the new setting? How does your character let go of them?

Flying can also mean fleeing. Fleeing can be simply ‘flight from’ but can also be, more hopefully, ‘flight towards’. Colette Bryce has an unusual metaphor for a flight towards independent selfhood in ‘The Full Indian Rope Trick’ in her collection of the same name (Picador, 2005). Here’s an extract which gives the flavour of defiant release in the poem:

Guildhall Square, noon,
In front of everyone.
There were walls, bells, passers-by;
Then a rope, thrown, caught by the sky
And me, young, up and away,
Goodbye.

#4
Exercise 4: Goodbye
Invent a character who feels oppressed by something big – a religion, a job, a parent – and show the oppression in vivid particular details. Imagine what might trigger your character’s decision to escape.