What is lost, and what comes of it

For reasons of trying to focus a (tentatively planned) short story collection I wondered recently what it is that drives my writing these days. What theme binds it all together? I mused over the possibilities: anger, frustration, class, the north. And realised with a shock that it seems to be loss.

Given what kind of a year 2018 was it shouldn't have been so surprising, and maybe it's the 2018 hangover that's making me view some of this with a loss-filter, but if I want to make that the theme of a collection it's there.

Loss of family members and pets, naturally. Loss of youth. Loss of opportunity. Loss of friends and social networks. Loss of memory, vocabulary, personality, identity. Loss of dialect. Loss of places, buildings, green spaces. Loss of the past, of a different way of life.

I am without a doubt inclined to melancholy, and there are deaths that remain raw no matter the passage of years and will crop up in my writing forever, I'm sure. However, there are new kinds of losses that come with age or injury, or with a failed attempt to reconnect with friends or relatives whose paths diverged from yours along the way somewhere. Things you don't realise the importance of until they're gone.

Take the village of my early childhood, which my mum's family had already called home for a hundred and fifty years before my birth (and even then, they'd only moved a mile up the road). It seemed perfectly natural (not to mention eternal) when I was young that scattered across the place were relatives' current and former workplaces, and the houses of cousins, uncles, multi-generational family friends, and my paternal grandparents. Four generations of my family lived in their end-terrace for seventy years and more, and now there's a stranger's tarmac drive where once my grandparents' rose garden was admired and tended and enjoyed. The older generations have died, and for the most part the younger have moved away (I for one live nearly twenty miles away). New houses (and blocks of flats, unthinkable in my childhood) stand where horses grazed and on mill and factory sites that closed down as I grew older. I wrote a story called Worth a Mint? about returning to old haunts, memories, identity (and death) which is partly set there, but as it's well over 8,000 words it's been hard to find magazines to submit it to. That story is a major reason why I want to put a (non-genre) collection together in the first place.

It's not rose-tinted nostalgia, I appreciate having a phone and central heating (and broadband, and the ability to listen later to a BBC radio programme I missed) and I'd hate to go back in a time machine to the mid-eighties. For one thing I'd have to play the dried-pea game at New Year, in which younger members of the family were given a saucer and a drinking straw and told to transfer (with hands behind their back) as many dried peas from a tray to the saucer in a fixed time ("This was entertainment?" my cousin's daughter asked at the start of 2019 as she played on her smartphone, to which we had to explain that yes, it seemed like it at the time). However, I do seem to set a fair few stories in the eighties and nineties, if only because I have more of a grasp on what life was like then. Ditching the TV at the start of 2002 I lost my grasp on popular culture (some might say I never had much of one anyway) and certainly now with no smartphone and not being on Whatsapp or Facebook I feel disconnected from the majority experience. I'm even starting to be baffled by some of the allusions on Radio 4's News Quiz. Oh dear.

Which, I guess brings me back to the loss of youth and all that goes with it. The midlife crises in my stories, the attempts at reinvention, and regrets over the path not taken. As well as many a death of a parent or beloved aunt, or the disorientation of their dementia. All of these, and the loss of dialect, accent, roots, chip away at identity until eventually that can be lost too. There's plenty of scope for writing about all these facets and I keep revisiting different angles.

Loss is universal, even if we lose different people and places and abilities we are all still experiencing similar aches and regrets. I'll leave you with a link to Word Factory apprentice Sharon Telfer's gorgeous flash fiction My Father Comforts Me in the Form of Birds which has stayed with me since I first read it last year. (Though in case anyone is concerned, I'll reassure you that both mine and OneMonkey's dads are fine).