Author Archives: fcmalby

F. C. Malby is a novelist, poet and short fiction author. Her debut novel, Take Me to the Castle, won The People’s Book Awards. She is a contributor to four print anthologies, and her stories and poems have been widely published internationally online and in print.

Swimming Home

swimming home

Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home is a book that has been on my to-be-read pile for far too long. I managed to reading it, amongst other books, while I was away last week. Shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2012, I was expecting great things from this book and it did not disappoint.

As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe’s enigmatic wife allow her to remain?

Both the unusual cover and the concept grabbed my attention from the start and I knew that this would be an allegorical journey in many ways. Levy’s use of visual constructs and rich symbolism retains a powerful hold over the reader’s experience. The wording is lyrical and enticing, wasting nothing. She casually underplays the devastating story as it reaches an unexpected climax. It has been described as a ‘literary beast’ of a novel and, although initially skeptical, I can understand why; I would agree. Reviews have been mixed, understandably, as her style is highly specific and will not appeal to all. Her power to draw in and to shock is almost a surprise and I found myself rereading parts of the text in disbelief. She uses subtle repetition to great effect and the prose has a circular narrative in that it ends almost where it begins. The outcome? Well, you’ll have to read it and decide what you think. I would highly recommend it to those who enjoy literary fiction and a short, sharp shock. I look forward to reading her newer short story collection, Black Vodka.

Creativity: What is it and why do we think it belongs to just a select few?

130423 Image With One of Arthur Koestler Quote...
130423 Image With One of Arthur Koestler Quotes on Creativity (Photo credit: bitesizeinspiration)

This post was sparked by an interesting article  I read at the weekend on Creativity by Ayd Instone, who has worked with Oxford University Press, Macmillan Publishers, a range of UK Universities and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals. Ayd has a degree in Physics and Physical Science BSc(hons) and has worked as a technical author. He is the author of four published books about creativity and innovation. In the article he discusses people’s conceptions of creativity and their misconceptions about what it is and whether creativity is born or made. The frequency with which the nature/nurture debate crops up led me to think about why people are so intrigued by creativity, and by whether we are born with a determined set of skills, or whether we  can learn to become creative.

When I was younger I was persuaded that creative types were dancers, artists, photographers and musicians. I didn’t even consider authors; as far as I was concerned, Enid Blyton and Judy Blume’s words magically appeared on the page without any planning or inspiration from the authors. I gave no thought to the process behind writing the books which I devoured over the years. As time rolled on, and my reading tastes changed, morphing through a selection of C.S. Lewis and John Buchan, Yeats and travel diaries, photography books and biographies, I left university to pursue a teaching career and I met creativity in the form of Lawyers, Scientists and, yes, even Accountants. We have preconceived ideas of what creativity is and who carries this illustrious concoction of innovation and ideas.

The reality is that we are all born with a degree of creativity and the extent to which it is used and developed depends on our focus. I have met photographers with great technical ability but little creativity or desire for creativity, and I have watched lawyers branch out into painting and music, or bring creativity into their daily working life. The misconception that creativity is only or a select few paralyses people into thinking that they can’t or shouldn’t try new skills, that they can’t bring creativity into their jobs and their everyday lives.

As a writer, creativity comes to me in the form of ideas and stories, but it is fuelled by how I choose to spend my time: reading, visiting galleries, watching films, travelling, collecting photography books and going to the World Press Photo Awards each year. The form it takes and the inspiration will vary from person to person, but what we choose to spend our time on will fuel how creative we become. It will feed our minds and grow and morph into something new. How are you going to spend your time?

For those of you who are following my short story releases, Skeleton Bunker was published today.

Prague: A People, A City, A History

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Prague is a city close to my heart. I spent a few memorable months in a town closer to the Slovak border as a teenager teaching English. It was a bitterly cold winter of 1993, only months after the fall of communism and it was just as Czechoslovakia had become a new Czech Republic. It was a unique and life changing moment in history, both for a young girl from Britain and for the Czech and Slovak Republics. The red tape and bureaucracy involved in entering the country to work in a school was immense. I had to sign a form which was also required to be signed by the headmaster, the state police and central government, then photocopied eight times.

The experience was life changing and the memories of a people, as yet untouched by western culture, was an eye opener. Lives were lived simply and with family gatherings a frequent occurrence. The emphasis on Czech culture and folk music, and stories handed down through generations, on lives determined by fierce winters and the need for thick boots, coats and hats (none of which I owned), created a seed in me; a seed that would later grow to become a story.

As I listened to the lives of people who had lived under daily threat of the communist state police, and with the risk of imprisonment, a world opened itself up to me. This was a world where post was intercepted, movement restricted, media heavily censored and ordinary lives monitored secretly, and scrutinized by a power that eventually collapsed in 1989 after the Velvet Revolution and the fall of the Berlin wall. The chain of events across Eastern Europe was cataclysmic. I was amazed to hear different sides to a story that remains a powerful historical period. Girls my age missed the security of one hundred percent employment under a communist government and the comfort of rules and regulations, but as I listened I heard stories of those who were less fortunate and whose families were torn apart by deceit as people were forced to turn on their own friends and family, and parents were imprisoned for being deemed traitors, enemies of the state.

That a land so beautiful and so rich in culture and stunning in its elegance had endured such a savage and restrictive past, was a message to me that over the years grew into a story, and subsequently a book. Take Me to the Castle became my debut novel, published in 2012, and it went on to win The Peoples’ Book Awards in 2013. It was a story that had to be written, a story that developed out of listening to first hand experiences and of staying in Letovice during a unique turning point in history at a time when I heard not a single English voice and felt the chill of the snow as it reached Charles Bridge and the Vltava River, as it covered the musicians and artists, the castle and the cathedral. The silence betrayed a deeper history of Jewish graveyards and of former prisons and government offices filled with files on ordinary people.

I fell in love with Prague and I have been back since to a much changed city, but my memories of 1993 remain and will stay with me.

Photo credits clockwise from top left:

1. Word-visits.blogspot.co.at, Trips to Prague

2. Free-picture.net, Cities of the World

3. Wikimedia, Daniel Wabyick, Prague – sculpture (about the deteriorating effects of communism on man)

4. Prague-guide.co.uk, Velvet Revolution Memorial

5. Panic on the Streets of Prague, Prague-life.com

6. teflworldwidepraguereviews.wordpress.com, Prague Streets

Library Finds and Old Books

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My Father arrived on a flight from the UK last week armed with a selection of books which were being sold from a library. Among them were The First English Dictionary 1604 by Robert Cawdrey, Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English by Ernest Gowers (1948), and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester. For those of you who appreciate the smell of old books, they oozed the vanilla scent that is produced by aging paper as the lignin breaks down. You can read about the Science of it here . The content was of particular interest to me as a writer. I love words: their origins, use and translations and I used to collect dictionaries and the odd thesaurus, along with books of literary quotes.

Amongst the books my Father brought with him were a few on different parts of the world and a History of England which was originally presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, in 1974. The inscription made the book all the more unique in the age of eBooks and I was reminded of the wonder of old books. We used to have a second hand bookshop at the end of our road when I was a child with the most unusual books and the same wonderful musty vanilla smell invading your senses as you opened the door. I love eBooks for the ease and speed of getting into a new book, especially as I live in a country where English is not the primary language and where the English books take up a small shelf space in the upper corners of a few bookshops. But I will never tire of the scent of old paper, of interesting inscriptions placed in the front of second hand books, of the notes scribbled in the margins and of wondering who the owner might have been, or whether there is a whole story behind a string of owners. Neither will I tire of the physical turning of the pages and the feeling of holding a book in my hands as I curl up with a coffee and a few hours of peace.