When Shape and Blank Space are Storytelling Too

Day three of my week of blogs then to celebrate publication day for Hostile Environments (tomorrow) and today’s plant of the day is the globe courgette which you can see growing here in a pot on me patio outside the writing shed. I’ve never grown a cucurbit in a pot before – they usually go into the ground in beds as they get so big, and I’ve never grown globe courgettes before this year at all. Never saw one before this year in fact, and now they seem to be everywhere – happen someone hybridised them last summer and are knocking the seeds out cheap. The cucurbit family which includes pumpkins, cucumbers, melons and all manner of gourds is very easy to hybridise – in fact if you gather then keep the seeds from year to year, you never know what you’ll get the following summer. They have male and female flowers that are fertilised by flies that spread the pollen. No fertilisation and the fruits just stay small and drop off, fertilised and they swell into whatever. I planted these globe courgettes in a pot because I forgot to label them as seeds in the greenhouse and wasn’t sure what fruit they would yield until they started to appear and was pleasantly surprised when they became these lovely shiny deep green beauties. They are very good for stuffing and roasting – even the skin in crispy delicious done in the air fryer. What I didn’t expect when growing them, was the early advent of the wee cyclamen underneath. These gorgeous pinky petals usually only poke through much later in the year, bringing showers of pink and red and white to garden as the days start to darken. I’m thinking maybe the shadow cast by the huge green zucchini leaves tricked them into thinking it’s October and so out they popped – and they look so lovely there like a younger, sibling basking in the protective shade of their older sister – which lead me to thinking, on this book-publication-day eve, how stories can change depending on where they are placed inside a book and how they are set on the page. Flash fiction of all the prose forms is the one most aware of how it exists as a form or a shape I reckon. Not always though – sometimes a great flash is a great story written in the (brief) form of a story with a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order). But so often it’s not. So often flash sits on the page aware of the page – like a poem does, making its shape part of the story telling even. In recent times this sort of flash has been called hermit crab flash because – well you can see why – because hermit crabs borrow their shells – but I like the term hybrid flash better because quite often non-conformist flash fictions don’t borrow a shape , they are the shape. The storytelling, the beating heart of the story – its life and soul comes from the shape – it’s not an afterthought or tacked on afterwards. Here’s one of my flash fictions that does what I just described. How it sits on the page, the blank spaces in between the words even, the pause and moments of quiet, the emptiness are all part of the intrinsic storytelling. And so too is the juxtaposition of the form and story which at once jar against each other and meld together – a bit like the lovely cyclamen and the huge courgettes – strange but satisfying flower bed fellows. But before you read it – I just remembered that, yet again I’ve not mentioned that bloody PhD application thang I’ve been banging on about for three days now. Tomorrow it will have to be…

How To Keep The Hunger At Bay

By Jan Kaneen

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees then go pick apples. In the wet’s best, on the darkest day of autumn, when everything smells of mold and mushrooms and the garden looks like rust and cinders. But don’t let the fruit ruin waiting for perfection.
2. Stand under gnarled branches catching raindrops, marveling at how young the skin on your palm looks, not like the windfallen wrinkles everywhere else.
3. Place apples in appropriate receptacle. I use a trug made from sheets of birch. It’s got a long flat bottom so the apples lie side-by-side without bruising when I hurry down garden to get out of the weather.
4. Wipe fruit carefully so skins shine like wintery cheeks, like Georgy’s used to when he came inside for a warm on snowy days and the stove was lit.
5. Don’t peel. A little skin will give the edges a ruddy tinge, and anyway, it’s good for you – full of roughage and it makes your hair curl – least that’s what I always told him when he used to pull his face.
6. Slice into cored crescents that look like rose petals and place into buttered tart dish. I arrange mine in circular swirls that coil inward and make a pattern that looks like forever.
7. Make caramel by heating butter and sugar. Most recipes say not to stir but I do because that’s the bit he loved best – standing on his three-legged stool at the cooker in his Winnie-the-Pooh apron, watching the crystals dissolve into liquid gold, like alchemy.
8. Add four pinches of cinnamon. One for mummy, one for daddy and two for Georgy, then a squeeze of lemon. An edge of sharpness is necessary to cut through the syrup.
9. Pour over apples then take block of shop-bought pastry from fridge. This is a matter of preference of course, so feel free to adapt to personal circumstance, but forty-odd years of following this recipe has taught me life’s too short for homemade rough-puff.
10. Roll thin and place on top of apples, tucking in edges like a child’s blanket, then bake for fifty minutes.
11. As scent of caramelized apples creeps like yesterday into warm kitchen, pour a glass of something lovely and remember – when you planted the sapling a lifetime ago, when it meant nothing and you were so impossibly numb-and-sensitive-at-the-same-time you couldn’t feel anything though everything still managed to hurt – opening your eyes, birdsong, hearing your own name… and a year later when you finally scattered ashes round the reedy stem… and the year after that, harvesting the first crop.
12. Smile or cry. It doesn’t matter which.
13. Take tart from oven and cool, but not too much. Grief, hope, love, remembrance – all are dishes best served warm.
14. Eat as many slices as you need, savouring every last bitter-sweet mouthful until you’re so tip-top full to the brim you think you’ll never be able to manage another bite.
15. Take another bite.