Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
Island of Buildings (a short film)
by Brenda Baxter
Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
Lady Bay Urban Island (a short film)
by Brenda Baxter
Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
An excerpt from ‘Urbanislands’ a short book by Nottingham writer and artist Brenda Baxter.
Arriving in Nottingham from the station walk towards the city centre. Soon it will be possible to circumnavigate the island’s perimeters and explore its centre. You’ll notice the street names and other aspects of its geography speak of a past island life. The buildings are bound by an interlocking system of roads and traffic lights where it’s still possible for the traveller to walk with some ease of entry and exit. The flow of traffic is both predictable and relentless, like the tides and estuaries. Soon you will come to know them and even take comfort from them.
There is a struggling island community and one that can be similarly experienced in islands in the North West of Scotland or Ireland. George Pett built here in 1914 and that building still stands. Many of its inhabitants have long since fled to other shores to make a living. Rumour has it that the Owner of the island has abandoned islanders and that there is little hope for their future livelihood. Maybe you will be able to encounter them on walking the island and maybe you will share a conversation for they have become shy and uncertain, wary of strangers, suspicious of tourists with cameras and fine talking ways.
Ocean is the place to meet the islanders. It’s one place that welcomes strangers. Tales are exchanged and those who congregate on its steps or in its doorways invite flights of fantasy and gruesome stories of the past. I’ve come here to understand the nature of things here and to find a way to escape the prospect of this island disappearing.
We’ll be posting video works by multi-media artist and writer Brenda Baxter in the following days.
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Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
Grace Darling at Alnwick Castle – after the Forfarshire
by Kathleen Bell
‘And there was no more sea.’
Inland tastes of chaff and honey.
The earth is rich with grain.
Pigs, sheep are humble. Silent, the soft-eyed calves
tender their docile necks to the farmer’s knife
and streams run sweet.
By night the seals swim close
pushing through nightmare in a moment’s grace
till they slide, laugh, clap – bloated mistakes
disturbing dreams.
The taste of salt is gone.
I am made soft as soil. My task is set:
obey the ladies, watch, give answer to their
endless questions.
‘Books and my father schooled me –
I learned the Bible, sermons, tales of peoples,
countries elsewhere.’ Read polish clean write cipher –
oceans and words.
‘Always busy at home,
we harvest the sea. Cormorant, sea-weed, eggs
are good for food.’ Seals we must skin and salt,
which we take, eat.
The woman flapped like a bird
when we rowed to Harcar. ‘Spray was fierce, hit hard’
at her closed and stone-dead sons whom we took, laid
limp on black rock.
‘But surely suffering saves?’
Riches do not ennoble. I have been carried
far from my work and set among ladies –
dull, indolent, useless,
wicked as seals.
Writer’s bio:
Kathleen Bell’s recent pamphlet at the memory exchange (Oystercatcher, 2014), was short-listed for the Saboteur awards. She has poems in the current issues of New Walk, PN Review and Under the Radar, and has recently been included in the anthology A Speaking Silence, literary magazine Hearing Voices and the on-line poetry magazines The Stare’s Nest and Litter. She writes fiction as well as poetry, and teaches Creative Writing at De Montfort University.
Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
We’re featuring three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.
My Garden, Sixty Miles From the Sea
1.
this is the wrong island
2.
the MS Oldenburg bounds across the Bristol Channel
my stomach churns
an old man wearing blue dungarees
and a dishevelled demeanour
waves binoculars at a pair of guillemots
dolphins fold the waves like silk
the Rat Island oystercatchers shout
welcome, welcome, look at me, look at me
hammers on the hold door reply
we’re here
3.
red wine swells nine voices to climb
torch-beams to the glass-captured moon
a burnished beetle follows me
from the seals’ playground at the tip of Brazen Ward
to Long Roost, where ten thousand razorbills
and eight puffins nest
a dunlin trips over my feet
on its way to the next puddle
skylarks, invisible, fill the sky
five adults and seven children picnic
by the concrete engine block
of a WWII German bomber
I wish the gulls would hush
as a newborn lamb takes its first steps
two puffed-up pigeons huddle and grumble
by the one-roomed cottage where I shiver
and can’t sleep for laughing
4.
I am never more than half a mile from the sea
the sea which is always flat and grey
when I return to the wrong island
Author Bio:
Pippa Hennessy has published poetry, short fiction, graphic short stories and creative non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. She is Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Project Director for Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and works for Five Leaves Publications. In a past life she was a software developer, but she’s feeling much better now.
Transportation Press: Featuring the Nottingham Writers’ Studio
We’re featuring three poems by Pippa Hennessy, Project Director for the Nottingham City of Literature campaign and director of the Nottingham Writers’ Studio.
In Old Light Cottage
A threadbare armchair enfolds me
the flue howls back at the gale
that portrait of Wellington gazes
out of the window at the lighthouse.
Handwritten scrawls fill the log book
not mine, not yet.
June 28th 2000
Saw a puffin. No time to write.
Boat leaving soon. Sad to go.
August 13th 2000
Another lovely stay. Did lots
of walking.
Then twenty-three and a half pages
in one hand.
October 23rd 2000
…The electricity went off at 12:23
tonight. I had to get up to go to the loo
at 2:14. The flue kept me awake for 3 hours
and 47 minutes altogether…
That October, when he wrote that,
we were here for six days
and another
because of the storms.
Slipping and sliding
down the Clovelly cobbles, our pink labels
matched his.
Hello. We’ll be neighbours
he said, standing too close.
I turned away to laugh with my friends.
We drank and tied our tongues in knots
in the lighthouse, for six days
and another.
The girls won all the games
and I fell in love
with this peat-topped block
of granite, glued by the Gulf Stream
to the Atlantic’s edge.
We celebrated the extra day,
he complained
his train ticket would expire.
Now I know too much of what he did,
when the flue screamed.
He didn’t write that he asked me for
a safety pin
to hold his trousers up
so he could get to North Light
on schedule.
He didn’t write
that our singing woke him up
when the boat was cancelled.
His review of the garlic bread
served in the tavern
was detailed
and informative. He didn’t mention
that we sat at the long table
playing bridge
loudly while he ate, alone.
He wrote:
7:58am, I washed up.
8:13am, I took the rubbish
out to the bins.
He didn’t see
the oystercatchers digging for worms
just behind the cemetery wall
or the gravestones
of medieval chieftains standing
where they had stood for centuries.
He didn’t hear
the seals singing as they rode the storm.
He didn’t feel
the spindrift skidding like rabbits
across the heather.
A threadbare armchair enfolds me
the flue howls back at the gale
and I write
18th April 2002
I am here.
Author Bio:
Pippa Hennessy has published poetry, short fiction, graphic short stories and creative non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. She is Development Director at Nottingham Writers’ Studio, Project Director for Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature bid, and works for Five Leaves Publications. In a past life she was a software developer, but she’s feeling much better now.
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