Sunburnt Saints is published today! It’s a fantastic achievement by editors Andrew Leach and Hannah Persaud to get this anthology from conception to publication in just a few months.
My contribution, ‘Outage’, is a story of love and darkness, and I’m very proud and honoured to be among so many talented writers.
Many thanks to writer and broadcaster Antonia Honeywell for dedicating her latest Chiltern Voice Book Club programme last Sunday to Seventy2One’s new anthology Sunburnt Saints. I was one of several contributors interviewed for the show, and we all got to choose a favourite song. So tune into the podcast to find out our picks. Oh, and to hear us talking about writing, of course: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/chiltern-voice-book-club/id1540563708?i=1000543272780
Antonia’s show is a great mix of book chat and music, and she’s got some fantastic guests coming up. It’s on http://chilternvoice.fm every Sunday 2pm-4pm, with the podcast landing shortly afterwards.
I’ve loved the Uffington White Horse on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border since I first visited as teenager. One of the many figures carved out of the chalk hillsides across southern England, it’s the only one that has been dated to prehistoric times. Nobody knows for certain who made it or what it represents, though some say it’s a depiction of Epona, the Celtic goddess of fertility.
Over the years I’ve tried to write about this place many times, but nothing quite gelled. Then I read that in previous centuries there was an annual ‘scouring’ of the horse – a clean-up operation to keep the figure free of weeds. This scouring would be accompanied by much debauchery. The work is still done annually by volunteers for the National Trust, with new chalk hammered into the ground to freshen up the whiteness, but without the debauchery.
It was this notion of ‘scouring’ that really caught my imagination. Could this be applied to a character, perhaps in the sense of metaphorically sloughing off skin to reveal a new identity underneath?
So, the story would be called ‘The Scouring’ and have that element in it, plus lots more – betrayal, affairs, strange apparitions, debauchery . . . I did draft after draft over a couple of years and by the time I’d finished, I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written.
But then several beta readers showed me that what I’d done was really not working at all.
Hard to take, of course, but once I’d licked my wounds I realised they were right. A line I once wrote in one of my many unpublished novels came back to me: ‘There are only three things wrong with this piece of writing: the beginning, the middle and the end.’
I went back to the drawing board, changed the title and the characters, and the whole premise. And the beginning, the middle and the end. The only thing that remained was the figure of the white horse itself.
More drafts, and finally there was ‘Uffington’, which to my astonishment has won the HISSAC Short Story Competition. You can read it here: http://www.hissac.co.uk/uploads/Shorts2021.pdf
I’ve greatly enjoyed Rose Tremain’s novels and her latest was no exception. Here’s my review of Lily in this month’s Literary Review: https://literaryreview.co.uk/capital-murder
Ian Critchley 