A Dog With Three Legs

Writing About Place

Firstly I have to say a huge, huge, thank you to all who pre-ordered The Silent Women, I’ve been really touched by your response, also to those who have said they will buy copies at the launch, which will also support our local independent book shop, thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Launch will be on Wed August 2nd at 6.30 Collected Books, Durham. I will post a link for tickets when it’s up on the website.

Pre-order is still available with Linen Press - HERE

Now to thinking about place -

In four days time I will be flying off to the Languedoc, my very favourite part of France. We go back some way now, the Languedoc and me, ever since I spent two months living and writing there in the ancient town of Agde. This was less than a year after quitting my job at Low Newton Women's Prison, so the contrast of waking every day to the blue skies and white heat of southern France and nothing to do but write, with getting up at 6.30 to drive to the prison and spend most of my day in a windowless office, was extreme. It was a very happy and liberating time for me.

I have always been a writer who finds inspiration in place, it is often where my writing begins and though I have still to write my 'Languedoc novel,' my time in Agde offered up the gift of the new - flooding my senses, sharpening my thinking, and my observation. There is so much looking and seeing in a new place, and that’s good for a writer. I'm hoping I will catch some of this on my visit this time.

Every story we tell, every character or group of characters we create need a setting, a context, a place, a backdrop. However large or small a part landscape plays in our novel, it’s the writer’s job to evoke it, to create its mood and atmosphere, to draw the reader into the landscape, whether exterior or interior. To do this we need to know our way around it, even if it’s imaginary. This is why I often draw/scribble maps of the places I’m writing about. See below, scribbled!! map of part of the Airing Courts in The Silent Women.

Being somewhere for two months brings new knowledge of a place and a growing sense of  the different communities who live there. I came away from Agde knowing much more about it than when I arrived, and after reading about the three-legged dog in my comments last week - thank you Warren -I remembered this piece of writing,

By the time I left Agde, I knew...where to buy the best croissant and how the price of cherries altered according to the day -  where to eat moules frites and plat du jour ...  the clarity of the light, the way it fell on the water and flickered beneath the trees ...the road the fisherman cycled home after a day at the canal...the field where the bee eaters lived... the way to the sea past banks of thistledown... the walk to La Guingette, the postman, the librarians, where the man appeared naked on his roof terrace... where the kerbs were too steep to lift a bicycle onto the pavement.... where there was a dog with three legs...I knew the colours of the shutters and doors... the silence of the afternoon...the way the language sounded but only some of what to say...

I still have my notebook from this time, full of observations and more detailed notes, plus smells, sights, sounds, tastes etc. To capture a place all you need is a desire to get under its skin, a notebook and pen, five senses, a series of lists.

A sense of place distinguishes a piece of writing. It may be a distillation of different places. There must be a very good reason for not describing place. W G Sebald

I'm thinking a lot about fragmentary writing at the moment so here are some fragments from my notebook of that time. I think of them as postcards. There’s something about a postcard – the image that captures the view and then in that small white space just about enough room for a ‘hello, wish you were here,’ a neat piece of flash fiction, a simple description, or even a poem.

Today we visited the Abbaye de Valmagne, founded in the year 1139, once one of the richest abbeys in the south of France and among the most ancient Domaines in the Languedoc – the Cistercians being expert in wine growing. All visit, a ghost hung on my shoulder, whispering in the buttery light of the cloisters …in the garden quince and cardoons, lavender, honeysuckle and bay, pink geraniums in green urns… in the evening Chopin and Gershwin, red wine on the tongue, earth and blackberry.

La Guingette is my kind of place, where nothing quite matches but the whole is a beautifully stitched quilt. The profusion of pot plants: rubber, avocado, bougainvillea, trailing spider plants, agapanthus and geraniums, blur the café’s edges with the liquid green of the water and the tracery of the plane trees overhead. Here, at tables set on a rough floor of gravel and dried leaves, beneath canopies of bamboo and a myriad of umbrellas you can enjoy a bottle of chilled rose and a delicious Roquefort salad, with aioli. And all at a leisurely pace – perfect for Sundays and we find, perfect for people-watching as the families arrive for lunch and the café gradually fills with the murmur of conversations, a Renoir mix, in all its vibrant colour and its couples dancing by the waterside, an accordion played in that soulful French/ Louisiana way. 

Tonight I rode my pink bicycle for the first time, through the town and along the path by the river. It was just a practice run – early evening, sparkling water, tidal breeze turning the leaves and grasses silver in the sun – it was an evening painted by Monet. He would definitely have approved of my pink bicycle!

(I loved that bike, it reminded me of the bikes of my youth when I cycled everywhere but I have to confess that it was somewhat dangerous as I was prone to falling off after a couple of glasses of wine!)

I’ve been writing in the cool belly of the house – the kitchen, inside the thick stone walls of what was once a bakery – and then coming up for air onto the roof terrace. Often there is a cool breeze here, up with the gulls, and in the air the scent of fish from the quayside

 To remind me of winter weather I am using my weather diary which I kept from January to March in the UK– no more than a few lines a day just enough to keep my characters bathed in fog and ice – while I wander through narrow streets of high windows and ornate balconies, in the quiet heat of the afternoon, the dogs asleep, the murmur of a radio from a doorway, a lace curtain lifting in the breeze…

We need to know the ways in and out of a place, its history, who lives there, who came before, how to pass through it, its pathways, its lines of desire which are the tracks, often very different from those proscribed, made by humans and animals: cow paths, goat tracks, fishermen’s trails etc. and what lies beneath it all.

This is best discovered by walking, and as we walk, or as we pause–for that coffee or even that ice cream, the ice cream sundaes in this part of France are to die for, and anyone who knows me knows I rarely resist an ice cream–by making notes, just as a painter would make her sketches.

You will not be surprised to know I’ve packed my notebook. Two notebooks in fact, one never feels sufficient, and I’m hoping to send you a postcard next week from Marseillan, (near Agde) but only if I can manage Substack, via my phone! If not see you the week after.

I leave you with Rebecca Solnit, in Wanderlust, a History of Walking,- when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

Happy Wandering

Thanks for reading

Avril x