By Team GRB
Earthly Rewards (Thi Wurd, 2024), arrives alongside a couple of other anthologies – this year’s volume (#42) in the Association of Scottish Literature’s ongoing New Writing Scotland series, and Nova Scotia, a new collection of Scottish speculative fiction from Luna Press.
Ahead of this Friday’s second of two celebratory launch events, we investigate a collection which traverses the (sometimes surprisingly short) distance between angelic visions and sunken portaloos.
Before we start, it’s maybe worth reflecting on the anthology’s (any anthology’s) place or purpose, in relation to the ongoing exercise of Scottish writing. Anthologies, necessarily, are snapshots – accounts of a moment in a writing community’s time.
Read Gerard Lee McKeever’s review of the first thi wurd collection, and you’ll quickly see that the ‘Cancelled Country’ surveyed in that book was a very different political, socio-economic and cultural landscape to the one we inhabit today. As such, anthologies can sometimes struggle to achieve the canonical life or permanence of novels or single-author collections of poetry or stories.
There are exceptions, of course (there are always exceptions) – Donny O’Rourke’s, ‘Dream State: New Scottish Poets’ would be one such; Kevin Williamson’s ‘Children of Albion Rovers’ another. Only time will determine how well Earthly Rewards survives posterity’s reckoning. For now, it’s enough to consider this survey of writing “which has its heart in Glasgow” for what it is, and what it has to say.
To begin with, though, some thoughts on the writing. While the short story can be a safe, enabling space for experimentation (for example, where the form is used to explore what can be done with language and meaning, when the author doesn’t have to sustain attention and focus over the span of a novel), it’s fair to say that (despite the reference to ‘experimental writing’ on the cover) this is a collection of prose and poetry written mostly in a tidy, effective but unassuming register. In other words, the way these writers say things, rarely gets in the way of what they have to say.
Several stories centre forms of specifically Scottish family drama and, as such, lend themselves naturally to this kind of approach. Showing, not telling. Things left unsaid, meaning as much or more than those that are spoken. In this way, relationships between sisters (Debra Waters’ ‘Accidents & Emergencies’), fathers and sons, (Caoimhín de Paor’s ‘MARK II’), or mothers and daughters (Catriona Shine’s ‘Dead End’) are unpacked, taken out of their boxes and held up to the light.
The writing in Earthly Rewards tends to foreground ideas (mostly, very interesting ideas) over flashy displays of linguistic acrobatics. There are exceptions (again, there are always exceptions) – Sean McMenemy’s ‘Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches’ bursts with Graeme Armstrong-esque swagger, while Carl Thompson’s ‘Arkansas’, evocatively charts the course of a relationship while deliberately not naming that which the story directly addresses. (Class – it’s all about class!) Elsewhere, the taut demotic Scots in Ian Farnes’ ‘Bonfires’ (also all about class) showcases that most valuable (and sweated-over) of scrivener’s skills, the ability to edit well – to cut away the verbiage and get to the stubborn, elusive remaining words, that say best the thing you need to say.
I’m stood at the threshold, daft.
There’s been too much of this shite,
ever since my boy was born:
thinking of what others felt,
or might be feeling
still.
Earthly Rewards begins, appropriately enough, in Glasgow itself. Joe Murphy’s eponymous first story evidences one of the recurring themes of this collection – the way that ordinary and familiar spaces in cities can become suddenly or unexpectedly liminal. Murphy’s unnamed narrator traverses the boundary between the demarcated life he lives in his flat, on one side of a close, and his neighbour’s – a woman whose world has previously moved in parallel to his, with little crossover and interaction – and, in doing so, has to confront the awful ease with which a person can make the crossing from life to death:
She was lying on the rug, the flickering blue glow of the television playing over her skin, arms resting neatly across her chest as if she had been positioned that way. Her eyes were glazed and disturbingly dark, as though the pupils had swollen up, her mouth open just enough to show the bottom row of teeth, head tilted to the side to reveal the tip of the large tattoo that ran down her left side.
It’s an affect of population density, the way large volumes of humanity living on top of one another force the collective [psycho]geography of cities to stretch, becoming porously multi-versal. A city like Glasgow’s bewildering scope for connections (and disconnections) across implied or enacted social and cultural borders (like the visitation of a confident American stranger to one of Glasgow’s roughest boozers, told here in Chris Kinghorn’s ‘The Sparrow’) creates opportunities to appear and disappear, slip into and out of sight.
These liminal spaces can swallow people, as has happened in Sarah Davy’s ‘Dirt’, an account of life-still-going-on in the context of mysterious and sudden absence; they can transport between the present and the past, as in Martin Geraghty’s ‘Case Study’; or, as in Catriona Shine’s ‘Dead End’ (the story at the centre of this book and the point at which its first half shifts and moves into its second), they can be put to imaginative literary effect, in a ‘meta’-sense, as self-referential plot device and symbol for the loss of a parent.
A few days ago, when Mom had weakened but was still alive, I jogged up the road a stretch and back again. My soles still recall the gravelly give of it, but where the road used to be is tufty and bushy now. It’s as if it was never here.
‘Dead End’ appears where it does in this collection, perhaps, to mark a turn from urban density towards a more quixotic second half. Up till this point, Earthly Rewards has been mostly (not entirely, but mainly) a collection of stories set in cities. Not just Glasgow (London features, as do other places) but settings are often city-familiar. Characters travel by Uber or bus; the grim backdrop of a busy, hospital A&E department is manifested in Debra Waters’ ‘Accidents & Emergencies’; Eilidh Cameron’s ‘Eden’ navigates familiar pressures of work on health against the backdrop of Glasgow’s Finnieston; while both the protagonist, and the narrative of Bechaela Walker’s ‘without (extract)’ wander along an urban canal, with its sunken Portaloo and “tarry earth [. . .] speckled with star-shaped flowers from the tree above, like confetti”.
All this said, by the last of its 252 pages, I found Earthly Rewards poised in the act of balancing these scenes of the urban/quotidian with off-setting instances of the fabular uncanny – often manifesting the porosity (soft places) between the two along the way. Joe Waite’s ‘Holes’ is a good example of this – a cheerfully familiar setting made grotesque by one significant shift. Elsewhere, Ian Alexander incarnates the relationship history of a dysfunctional couple as a macabre bedtime story and Jerry Simcock’s protagonist Jimmy vacillates between real and imagined ‘angelic’ visions.
Is this contrast at all unexpected? Or evidence (for good or bad) of the continuing influence of the Caledonian Antisyzygy on Scottish writing? Can we ever be other than a nation somewhat at odds with aspects of its own self? It’s perhaps unfair to expect a collection like Earthly Rewards to answer that question – but what it does do, though, is provide an interesting and enjoyable survey of Scottish writing just now.
Earthly Rewards is available now from thi wurd.
Tickets for a second, celebratory event (‘Earthly Rewards (southside version)’, to be held at The Glad Cafe on Friday, 23 August) are also available.
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