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
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
Duncan Fraser describes the inspiration behind Terrarium Hostel – a story of ordinary lives against a backdrop of cosmic stakes, exploring themes of connection, belonging, and self-discovery. “Ultimately in this book I am concerned with the question: Is it wise to try and communicate with technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilisations?”. Duncan Fraser An odd little incident many years ago provided both my motivation and the germ of the story. I lived in hostels when I was 18. One of my roommates saw a science fiction short story competition advertised in a newspaper. He cut out the entry form and presented it to me saying that I should write a story and send it in. This took me by complete surprise because I had never expressed any interest in science fiction or in writing. He seemed to have an inexplicable confidence that I could do it. I thought it strange for him to think of me like that because at the time I would never have passed for an artist or an intellectual or even as someone vaguely intelligent. A few years later I did have an intellectual awakening and I did start writing but I wasn’t interested in science fiction. However, as the decades passed, I remembered the incident and felt a nagging compulsion to accept what I began to think of as my inescapable fate. And so, about forty years later, I started to contemplate writing a science fiction story. I have been fascinated by the idea of extraterrestrial civilisations for a long time. In recent years, as I would be standing at a bus stop on my way home from work on wintry evenings, my attention would focus on a particular star in my line of sight. I would begin to daydream about an alien civilisation around that star. It would be at about the same stage of technological development as ourselves, maybe slightly ahead. And rather than weaving a story about its leaders or warriors or astronauts, I imagined what the lives of its ordinary workers might be like. Perhaps workers living in a hostel. A hostel in space. A hostel in a city in space. I later discovered that the star I was focussing on at the bus stop was called Zeta Herculis. Intelligent alien life forms will almost certainly be so dissimilar to us that mutual understanding might be very difficult. In the story that was forming in my mind, I came up with a solution to this problem by introducing the device of an artificially intelligent technology that translates the utterly alien communication into a comprehensible message in our own idiomatic language and with every detail of the alien world given a recognisable correlate in ours. BUY THE BOOK Dollop, a homesick young man, keeps a diary of his life in The Terrarium, a vast space city, as part of a groundbreaking extraterrestrial project. Living in a hostel with two peers, Backlog and Methane, and the enigmatic older man Octave, he feels uncertain about his future and lacks ambition. But after slowly building up his confidence, a shocking truth emerges that compels Dollop to reassess his identity. TERRARIUM HOSTEL is available on back order in paperback £9.50 Add to Cart ABOUT THE AUTHOR DUNCAN FRASER is an award-winning Scottish writer and poet and the author of the sonnet cycle The Campus of Love (Matador, 2018).
