Kirsty McKenna discusses her book The Dying Swan, and the line between real and imagined places in her work. The Dying Swan, a gripping drama surrounding the hunt for an elusive killer known for trademark ritualistic burials, dramatises not just how girls or women are victim to sexual abuse and its shattering impact, but the normalisation of inappropriate sexual attention. McKenna’s novel also provides a backdrop gleaned from real life experiences. “I thought of Tess as a child kidnap victim due to one of my childhood memories and an extremely near miss,” the author explains. “I was about seven and had walked to the local shop to buy something and as always, my dog Rags followed me. Rags was a stray that my parents had taken in and our bond was so close. He was a black raggy looking dog. “I crossed the quiet road to get tom the shop and as I got to the other side a car pulled up. A man with very dark hair and a beard asked me to come over to the car, I was apprehensive as adults always tell their children not to approach strangers but when an adult like the man asks a child to do something they do it. The man said he had some sweets for me so I headed for the car, as I got closer my dog lunged in between myself and the car growling at the man and foaming at the mouth, my dog simply would not let me pass. The man quickly drove off as Rags was trying to get him through the window.” Though her storytelling in The Dying Swan may be fictitious, McKenna packs it with chilling realism. The author grew up amid a serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, aka The Yorkshire Ripper who killed 13 women and attacked at least eight more between October 1975 and November 1980. “He lived just across the valley in neighbouring Frizinghall,” McKenna said. “The tension at that time was awful. Women had to be chaperoned everywhere for their own safety. My mum worked at the local picture house and dad would walk to meet her, so she was safe. “The man who tried to entice me into his car that day looked awfully like Peter Sutcliffe. I know he attacked adult women and not children, but you never know.” Born in Shipley, West Yorkshire, to a Glaswegian father who was a builder and a Yorkshire mum who was a housewife, McKenna worked in casinos most of her life. During her early thirties, she studied law, gaining a law degree. Ten years ago, she followed the calling of her Celtic roots and moved first to Glasgow, then settling in Argyll and Bute near the town of Dunoon. She started studying archaeological research as she was always interested in what lies beneath her feet, becoming “obsessed” with a module titled Death and Burial, which focuses on ancient ritual burials. “I passed with a postgraduate diploma but realised I didn’t like academic writing, although I thrived writing theoretically,” McKenna recalls. “When I studied archaeology, I became fascinated with ancient burials and skeletal remains, I knew a little about osteo archaeology and so my character Dr Tess O’Brien was created. Her beauty and vulnerability are based on an article I read about Picassos muse The Girl with The Ponytail, Sylvette David. In her interview she spoke about the downfalls of being so beautiful and those were negative attention and childhood abuse. Tess’s looks are based on Sylvette, someone so stunning that all genders stop and stare. I also wanted Tess to have suffered trauma, she is not a victim but a fighter.” In McKenna’s beautifully written and painstakingly researched The Dying Swan, the protagonist Dr Tess O’Brien flees to Scotland following a painful breakup, seeking refuge in Glasgow University’s archaeological department. Haunted by the trauma of her teenage kidnapping, she is drawn into a chilling investigation of murders and war crimes worldwide, uncovering disturbing parallels to her past. “I have a good friend Lucy Rose who was an archaeologist and she being exceptionally beautiful and blond also inspired my character,” McKenna said. “Tess is kind, funny and a good friend who is also extremely intelligent, I want people to like her, to aspire to be her, when she is sad, angry, happy, or scared I want people to feel it. She loves hard so when she falls in love it is all consuming and she has a trusting nature in some respects. “Tess is obsessed with bones, this might seem macabre to some but to her this is where she feels most comfortable, she also feels compassion and empathy for the victims she excavates, knowing full well that could have been her as a thirteen-year-old victim of sexual predators. “In the writing I also look at how girls or women are victim to sexual abuse, comments, assault. I wanted to show how most women at some point in their lives have been victims to inappropriate sexual attention so much so it can seem normal. I wanted Tess to highlight this.” Kirsty McKenna’s The Dying Swan will be out in paperback in the Spring. – the first novel in the Dr Tess O’Brien crime series. Image : DAVID COHEN on Unsplash
Educator and writer Shivan Davis talks about his tragic, tender and wholly unforgettable debut novel, On Winter Hill. How would you introduce On Winter Hill to your readers, and what do you hope they will take away from it? I would probably introduce On Winter Hill as a meditation on first love and friendship. I’d describe it as a coming-of-age story grounded in a sense of place. Hopefully readers will find it true to life and enjoy spending time in the company of the main characters. Can you remember what the seed of this was, as a novel? The seed of the novel arrived through a dream. I keep a notebook beside my bed to record particularly vivid or profound dreams and this particular dream ended up being the final chapter of the novel. I hastily wrote down the gist of it and knew almost immediately that I had the essence of a novel in my hands. In a sense it made the writing process of the first draft easier as I knew how the story had to end, I just had to work out a route towards arriving at that destination. What inspired the choice to use an idyllic setting to explore such unsettling themes? I followed the age-old wisdom of “write what you know”. As well as that, I always felt the need for the action of the novel to occur from around May to September. The novel charts the memories of the narrator so it was important that the events I described took place against a familiar backdrop for me to build a world around the characters. The theme of grief pervades the novel. What inspired this decision? Alongside providing a framing device for the novel, I hoped that the theme of grief would intensify the memories of the narrator and explain his decision in the prologue to meditate on this episode of his life. The recollections of the main character Sahil and his first love Elena, their getting to know each other, that initial attraction , the intensity of their conversations, are the mainstay of the novel. How were they to write, and where did these characters come from? The characters in the novel, including the narrator are either semi-autobiographical, literary composites or entirely invented. Sahil is fairly autobiographical although I have deposited parts of myself in a number of the characters, particularly George. I really enjoyed writing the dialogue between Sahil and Elena. I knew from the beginning that I wanted the novel to take place over the course of a single summer which meant that the progression of their relationship had to develop quickly and intensely without straining the reader’s credulity which was tricky. In terms of the source of where they come from, I suppose I took the stuff of life, remolded it and embellished it. Sahil and Elena losing their virginity together plays quite a crucial role, symbolically in the novel. What was your thinking around this and what it means to Sahil? It definitely serves to make their relationship more intimate and comfortable— something reflected in the ease of their dialogue in the subsequent chapters. I think it’s an event that means more to Sahil than Elena. It makes the ending more painful for the narrator and the overarching storyline more meaningful, at least that was my intention. Your work is elegantly and thoughtfully written, so how much time do you spend crafting your sentences, on average and at the most? I learned a lot about the writing process through this novel, in particular just how much of the process boils down to editing and redrafting. ‘On Winter Hill’ went through a number of redrafts and, in terms of crafting sentences, what helped pare the writing down was reading the manuscript aloud, time and time again, and being subsequently directed by the ear, not the eye. Are there writers whom you admire or have influenced your writing? A few novels in particular influenced On Winter Hill, namely ‘The Leopard’, ‘Nevermind’, ‘The Country Girls’, ‘My Antonia’, ‘Old School’, ‘Mayflies’ and ‘Giovanni’s Room’. In terms of my favourite writers, I’d have to name Cormac McCarthy, Edward St Aubyn, Edna O’Brien, Clare Keegan and James Baldwin. On Winter Hill by Shivan Davis is published by Foreshore in March in paperback. ABOUT THE AUTHOR SHIVAN DAVIS is an English novelist and educator. Alongside teaching, he has written on educational issues and has been published in Schools Week and TES. He has appeared on Newsnight and Times Radio and regularly contributed to The Graham Norton Book Club.
There is timing, and there’s timing. HOLY DISORDER, Geoff Smith’s semi-autobiographical novel, is set in a time of change and challenge for the Church of England, the 1970s. The question of women priests is coming to a head, as are issues of human sexuality and union with the Methodists. The protagonist Dave, a working-class lad from Manchester, is on his own star-crossed trajectory from theological college to ordination through a parish curacy to becoming senior curate at a cathedral and eventually rising to the dizzy heights of being chaplain to the local bishop, with a bit of extra-pastoral sex thrown in for good measure. The protagonist in Geoff Smith’s follow up, THE GORTON GOSPEL, is no less troubled, if not far more controversial. The story of Grace Givens, a non-binary lesbian, who returns to the struggling Manchester community of Gorton amid claims of them being the new Messiah, is braced for maximum impact at a time when the Church of England is facing its biggest crisis in modern times. The archbishop of Canterbury has been forced to resign, other senior figures are facing calls to quit and the church is reeling from its shameful failures over a prolific and sadistic child abuser. Smith, who remains, for now, an Anglican priest, insists THE GORTON GOSPEL is, first and foremost, a hymn of praise to the Manchester he remembers. “I was born and brought up in Manchester,” he says. “When I was five my parents bought a house in Gorton opposite Sunny Brow Park. “I have always been proud of my Manchester roots, the football teams, the Free Trade Hall, the Ship Canal and more recently the music. I went to school in the centre of the city Manchester Central Grammar School in Whitworth Street. I moved away from Manchester, where I was Vicar of St John the Baptist, Little Hulton, in 1978, two years before Shaun Ryder formed the Happy Mondays, also in Little Hulton, bad timing on my part?” Quite possibly. The timing of the publication of THE GORTON GOSPEL, however, could not be any less premeditated. “It’s a challenge for our times,” Smith says, “and a challenge which stems from three concerns that I have. What would happen if Jesus returned today in what some evangelical Christians describe ‘The Rapture’. Would he be welcomed rapturously? How would he present himself? Jesus brought a challenge to the spiritual leaders of his day as Grace Givens brings a challenge to the Church I describe today.” Smith, who was ordained in 1969 in Sheffield and has been a curate, a vicar and a cathedral canon, says his main inspiration for THE GORTON GOSPEL story was Professor David Ford’s commentary on John’s Gospel with his emphasis on love at the heart of the Gospel. “There is a story I love to tell about the elderly St John, asked to speak to his congregation in the first century AD, he simply says, ‘little children ‘love one another’,” Smith said. “In my understanding of the story the Gospels tell us that love is always redemptive and in the character of Grace Givens in the Gorton Gospel, I try to show that to be true. I made my main character a non-binary woman using the pro-noun ‘they’ purposefully. I made Grace the person they are in my story because ‘they’ are a challenge to the church today. The world is changing and for the better. As an early Methodist Church report describes it, alongside tradition and scripture, the Church needs to recognise ‘the spirit of the age’. The Living in Love and Faith debate in the Church of England is so important to the future of the national church and the church is getting it so very badly wrong. I hope that my story helps people rethink their prejudices.” In THE GORTON GOSPEL, Grace Givens is born and discovers Jesus in a mobile cinema showing a film about the life of Jesus. As ‘they’ grow older their understanding changes as they begin to cause a reaction in their neighbourhood by performing miracles. Eventually, Grace leaves Manchester but then returns to fulfil the mission they believe has been given to them by God. “The Living in Love and Faith debate in the Church of England is so important to the future of the national church and the church is getting it so very badly wrong. I hope that my story helps people rethink their prejudices.” Geoff Smith. In THE GORTON GOSPEL, Grace Givens is born and discovers Jesus in a mobile cinema showing a film about the life of Jesus. As ‘they’ grow older their understanding changes as they begin to cause a reaction in their neighbourhood by performing miracles. Eventually, Grace leaves Manchester but then returns to fulfil the mission they believe has been given to them by God. The narrative follows much of the life of Jesus but has been translated into Mancunian. Approaching Jerusalem Can life be lightly discarded? For Grace, returning to Manchester, to Gorton, involved risk. They knew that ahead of them was the risk of rejection, like Jesus two thousand years before them, they were returning to the place they had left. They knew that it was time to witness the truth at the heart of a lie, shared all those years ago on a dusty road on the way to Emmaus. The question: Who do you say that I am? It was, as Grace knew, deep in their heart, an almost unanswerable question. But as they headed towards the City they were setting in motion the wheels that would lead to confrontation and possibly death. From what they knew, had studied, had considered, they were fully aware, as Tim had explained in conversation, and declared from the pulpit, the church was called to discover ways of dying creatively in order to transform the world with love. Such a creative death was to be found on the cross, in the passion, this they both knew and yet feared, as they
