The Cabin

On Christmas night I slept in my cabin in Highland Perthshire. This tiny wooden shed is where a whole number of my books have been written: my most recent novel, 2020, due to be published by Saraband here in Scotland in the spring, was written by hand in just four weeks within its walls. My short story The Ice, the title story of my collection of short fiction and published also on Smashwords, was written here in sub-zero temperatures. You can see images of the cabin on my website; if you look at the left hand side and the section Kenneth Writing, you can watch my walk in the rain to begin work there. There were no sub-zero temperatures this Christmas night: all across England people were being rescued from their homes because of the floods. But the rain kept me awake all the same, and I woke early, huddled and shivering in my sleeping bag.

Then I thought of the thousands, and the hundreds of thousands, coming into Europe day on day from the south. Most from Syria, having made it in perilous boats from Libya. They come in a seemingly unending stream, this greatest outpouring of people since the Second World War. And among them thousands of children who have no parents at all. And they face many different kinds of cold.

And that led me to thinking about the first Christmas and the whole reason for Christmas, and an awareness of the truth that the man and woman who arrived at the stable were refugees themselves. They were poor and doubtless hungry, and most likely they were shown some pity because of the need of the mother-to-be.

No wish to sound sanctimonious: simply to remember what I do have. Choosing to sleep in my cabin was for fun; a kind of reverting to boyhood and the joy of being able to go out to the garden at night, to see it under the stars. And a reason to say thank you.

www.kennethsteven.co.uk

A Dog's Nose

Writing is a strange and utterly unpredictable business. The things you write which you dearly hope may reach far corners and become special to others remain all but unread, and the pieces which you dashed off on the back of an old envelope and thought nothing about go far beyond your wildest dreams. It has proved rather like that with my newest book for children.

Many years ago I was living on the west coast of Norway. I read and spoke the language, and I worked in the local library, searching for something that might give me a good story. After long hours of hunting I found just one sentence in an old book. According to this particular legend, during the voyage of the Ark across the great seas, Noah's precious vessel had sprung a leak. And Noah, who had become good friends with the dog during the first two weeks of the voyage, used the dog's nose to plug the gap in the planks. And that is why ever since the dog has had a cold, wet nose. Just one sentence. But I knew that this was my story.

To begin with, I simply used it in primary schools to tell to children. I embellished it, of course, and after a time the rough edges were smoothed and it was ready to be written down. I then sent the story to unthinkable numbers of publishers and kept on believing the story was going to make it as a picture book for younger children. And always the publishers wrote back and said they had enjoyed it and been amused by it, but that it wasn't quite right for them....

But I didn't give up. I knew that story of Noah and the dog's nose had to find a place somewhere. And strangely enough, it was a Norwegian publisher that took the risk on it first. The illustrations were magnificent: the big pages held a dozen stories from that whole world of the Ark. The book went on to win that year's prize for picture books in Norway. And then the story was bought by a German publishing house, and by one in Italy, and in Spain, and so on.

Now, at the end of this year, Why Dogs have Wet Noses has appeared in 11 languages. The irony is that it was published most recently in English, by Enchanted Lion in New York. So that means it is available in the United Kingdom too, as well as in Russia, Japan and several other countries too.

It reminds me of what I was told by a famous American children's author many years ago, when I was determined to start writing. She said that her first book had been rejected 86 times. And the 87th publishing house said yes. If you truly believe in a piece of writing, you won't give up on it. Because there will be a home for it one day.

The Jay

By yesterday it had been hammering rain for two full days. I went down to look at the River Tay and knew I had never seen it so full in 15 years of living here in Dunkeld at the heart of Highland Perthshire. Parts of the village were flooded; greenhouses and the park were four feet under water.

This morning, Sunday morning, I looked out and saw there wasn't a cloud in the sky. There wasn't a breath of wind. It was still early and I decided to walk up out of the village into the woods to where there's a strange and special pond surrounded by rhododendrons and pines. When I walk like this in the early mornings I like to be as quiet as I can be. I want almost to become a part of the woods, to disturb as little as humanly possible. The streams were still gushing with water; the woods loud with rushing silver streams. But all I could hear aside from that were my own boot-steps as I walked up and up to turn into the woods and circle the pond. As I came round the far side I was facing east, into the low bonfire of the rising sun. And then I heard the shriek of a jay, and saw it flying low over the water into the sunlight. The mind and the memory took a picture. The blue flash and the beautiful nut-brown of the wings; the branches breaking the light of the sun. And when I was still remembering what I had seen, I began walking down the track and there were six young deer looking at me, waiting and watching. We stood, unafraid, blinking, as the rising sun shone over us.

Last night, before I went to sleep, I knew a poem had to be written. Of course I'm thinking of Christmas, and Christmas is all around me. In recent times I've wanted to write poems about the nativity, about the real reason for Christmas, just as simply as possible. That was my intention now.


When the miracle happened it was not
with bright light or fire,
but a farm door with the thick smell of sheep
and wind tugging at the shutters.

There was no sign the world had changed for ever
or that God had taken place -
just a child crying softly in a corner
and the door open, for those who came to find.






For more on all my work, please visit my website: www.kennethsteven.co.uk
or contact me by email: info@kennethsteven.co.uk

Advent

Today the snow arrived in earnest. The village of Dunkeld, encircled by its hills, was slowly turned white and silent by thick flakes driving out of the west. For some reason I thought in the evening of Iona, that spiritual home off the west coast of Scotland, which from childhood has been somehow my purest home. I know that will sound contrived, but it's the truth. I remember that about the age of four or five I started having strange and vivid dreams of the island, recurring dreams that haunted me and do to this day. And when I'm back now, when I'm on my own and walking against the wind into the west, I'm not an adult any more - I'm no age at all. I'm just myself, the self I was meant to be. All that foolish, false layer that we wrap ourselves in is taken away. I feel myself again, and whole.

But I haven't been to Iona this year: not once. Normally I run a writing course there in the autumn at one of the hotels, but not this year. And so I'm missing it, because it's too far removed from the mainland to visit at a whim. Getting to Iona, even from inland Scotland, is something of a pilgrimage in itself. And that is good, except when, like now, I yearn to be there even for a few hours.

Here is one of the poems I included in my book 'Iona, the other island'. It's about a real stone that I found not long ago on St Columba's Bay at the very south end, one of the precious green stones that are translucent and polish into marbles of light. It seemed appropriate for the first Sunday in Advent.


A little cave of green stone,
smoothed by centuries of sea
to a pebble small as a pinkie nail -
chanced up out of the waves' reach.

Hold it to light and it changes,
becomes a globe of fractures -
a cavern of ledges and glinting,
not one green but many at once.

And suddenly I think of it bigger,
as the whole of the human heart;
carrying the cuts of its journey -
brokenness letting in light.


'Iona, the other island' is published by Saint Andrew Press

Willow

Tomorrow I will set off for Stuttgart in the south-west of Germany. It's there that my four and a half year old daughter Willow lives with her mother. The pain of the last three years - separation and all the bitterness of divorce - has been worse than anything I could have imagined. It is made much worse by the hundreds of miles that separate us. I was told at the very beginning of all this nightmarish process that I had rights as a father: of course I had rights. What no-one told me was that rights are meaningless unless you establish them in a court of law: until that is done you have nothing. And the establishing of them costs all that lawyers are able to drag from you: not only money, but dignity also. It has been a humiliating and exhausting process. Over those three years I have scribbled words on backs of envelopes; I have written fragments I was barely conscious of writing at all. Poetry was hardly in my head: I lived in four different houses, out of a stack of boxes and bags. How could poetry be in my head? And yet poems have crept in through the cracks of the darkness all the same, and after a long time I gathered them up and read them and put them together. SPCK in London have just accepted this new collection for publication in 2016: I think it is appropriate that it should be entitled Letting in the Light. And this is the last poem from the book, remembering the day my beloved Willow was christened.


We drove through grey silence;
the skies drifting with snow
in a winter that would not end.

At the church I made promises
in a language I did not know -
and a German bell rang out,
strange in the muffled day.

And then you ran to me, Willow,
and you carried the sun in your running;
you poured into laughter and ran
as though all the war was over.

And inside a shell broke
that Easter Sunday morning;
a shell like a bird's egg
flooded over with warm light.

The long folly of words,
the gunneries of rage,
the anger of small conflicts -
useless, forgotten, gone.

The land left open
for the love of sunlight -
the beginning of another spring.

Rain

There is a title I have never yet used that remains nonetheless in my head: It rained when it should have snowed. There is rain all round my house here in Highland Scotland tonight: there has been not a sign of frost yet. I find it strange how people react to what is an undoubted change: they're grateful for mild days. So are the tabloid newspapers, rejoicing over the hottest July day and exulting the fact that the temperature in London has broken all records. It rained when it should have snowed. Yes, in my childhood there would have been snow in the hills by now; our nights would have been frosty. Most years the snow lay for at least two weeks: I built a slide in my garden and, like every other boy since time began, I bewailed the final melting of the ice. Now we are shocked when the ice is there for more than a few days: it is almost as though something has gone wrong. No, it is the mildness that is wrong. A few years ago I spoke with a man on the west coast of Greenland who showed me the bit of coast beyond his window where he had grown up. Once upon a time there was thick ice in winter, he told me: we used to drive over the ice to visit friends, he said. Now there is no more ice: it retreats ten miles further north each year. It rained when it should have snowed. And will anything be done about the melting at the Paris summit? I fear we'll make promises that we'll change our ways by 2020 or 2045: the deadline will be pushed on a little further yet again. As it rains when it should snow.


AFTER THE STORM

The valley lay in the window
Dazed and damaged.

The river horsed under bridges
Swirling with earth and rain.

The fields were filled with mirrors, glass stretches
Reflecting a breaking sky.

The house was silent, left unhumming -
We were powerless, there was nothing we could do.


(From Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London).

The Road

There is one book that has had a huge impact on my psyche over the last few years. It's a thin novel that was sent to me by a friend from Edinburgh: she had put between its pages a short letter and sent it on its way, telling me how much it had meant to her. I am not the reader I once was. That book, together with its letter, lay forgotten in one of the many piles about the house until I came to move it once too often. Now it demanded my attention and that night I opened the book. To say that I was haunted by it is too feeble a description by far. I am not sure that any book has occupied my thinking in the way that this one has done: 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. On the surface it is the simplest of stories: a man and his young boy are walking a destroyed landscape in search of something. We learn piece by piece what it is they have left behind and what they are moving towards, or may be seeking. And yet we don't ever know the full truth. This landscape, a ravaged America, has witnessed some terrible disaster. The trees, the rivers and the sea are all dead. The land is occupied by a few bands of merciless marauders, and all of them use the artery of the road. But what endures in one's reading of this book is a sheer pervading sense of the love possible between a father and his child. One scene stands out for me above all the rest. At one point the two break into a petrol station and find a dispenser which has long since been toppled over and raided. Just one can of cola remains. The father opens it and gives it to the boy to drink. He simply sits and watches his son drinking, happy to witness his brief happiness at a few fresh mouthfuls of dark bubbles.
I think it was most likely 'The Road' that set me thinking about the fragility of our world and the savage stupidity of the way we abuse and consume it. However long ago I found myself writing a poem which gained the title 'The Ghost Orchid', named after yet another species we have destroyed. The poem is published in my last collection 'Coracle' from SPCK in London.


One day, when the air is sore to breathe
And the seas are dead and heavy, thudding
Over empty shores, and only a dwindling of us

Remain - strange, in hiding,
From yellow and red skies,
From scabbed earth -

We will draw in caves
The eerie shapes
Of everything we remember;

We will weave out of firelight
What fields meant, what horses were,
The story of flowing water, of birds bringing morning into song.

And for a while
Before we have grown old
Like moss on rocks, furred and searching with age,

Our children will believe
It was that beautiful,
That good.

Scotland

I've grown up in the Highlands of Scotland. My mother's people came from Wester Ross, one of the wildest parts of the country, with more deer and sheep by far than humans. During the 19th Century many thousands were evicted from their crofts by the landlords, the lairds, and sent to the growing cities or to America or Australia. Most of them never returned. It's often a landscape that foreigners fall in love with: these rugged miles of heather-covered, treeless hills. Yet it's actually a ravaged landscape; it has been transformed by man, and by centuries of bad management. But even to this day you can find the remains of those ruined crofts; the scars and the sadness of the clearances are still all too evident. At the moment, Scotland is in the process of working out what it wants to be; whether it will remain part of the United Kingdom or find the courage to become independent once more. This poem, now part of my volume of selected poems Island, reflects on all the questions we're asking.


The State of Scotland

See this land through a broken window,
all huddled in mist, rocked by storm,
the whole long drudge of winter.

Half its people want to leave;
the other half who want to stay
don't choose, they have no choice.

Our history is written in the hills. We are filled
with pride for what we think we did
and guilt for what we didn't do.

We drift into cities since we cannot stand
the sound of our own thoughts. We spend our lives
being loud, and trying to forget.

Do we want freedom or just the chance
to mourn not having it? We are willing to fight
for all that we don't want.

September

Scotland is entering its twilight months. Like an old ragged bear she is creeping into the darkness to go to sleep. Year on year it's the same: the once familiar places that were filled with children's laughter and the brightness of summer take on new shapes and turn somehow different. All that was known becomes a little stranger. It's still September, and there is length to the evenings, but come early November and the return of the mists, days are sometimes barely lit at all. I love this place, this strange and wonderful land, because it's a perfect cave for the imagination.


ENOUGH

Out of the scurry of the days
A place of late sunlight, and the sky
Swimming into blue unclouded;
The trees held in a bonfire of the last sun.

Enough to wait here by the wood's edge
And let the things still hurrying to be done
Fall silent, as the first stars
Vague the orange of the far-off west.


(From the collection Coracle, published in London by SPCK).

Father

It's Sunday as I write and today, as on many days, I think about my father. Perhaps it's because the day is sombre: Highland Perthshire is quiet - almost as if the birds themselves know it's a Sunday. The leaves are beginning to turn from their summer green and the rowan berries are in bright clutches outside my study window. I have just returned from the mad rush of southern Germany to all this quiet, and it is made more evident in the wake of such constant noise.

I didn't really have a great relationship with my father - not until after he was gone. When I was a young boy we kept missing each other; that's how I like to describe it now. By that I mean that the things we said and wanted to say kept on being misunderstood, misheard. Afterwards I thought it was almost as if we were somehow standing talking and not quite hearing what the other said. And then he was suddenly gone. I had grown up with older parents, and I was blessed to have him so long.

It was only after his death that I began to write poems for him, about him, about us. I never imagined that such poems would come to the pen (and that is the great thing about poems, you can't know truly predict them ahead of time). Perhaps my subconscious was working through some of the things that weren't dealt with on this side. All I know is that they brought comfort, and even understanding. When I think of him now I see him laughing, with a face full of laughter. Not mocking, just happy.

This poem, from my collection 'Coracle', is one of the last of such pieces to be written.


A Kind of Coming Back

Sometimes I imagine the phone ringing in the night -
That worst of all nightmares - and staggering out
Into the darkness of the hall. My small voice
Asking the question - afraid, white, far away -
My father answering, ten years dead, as though
Nothing at all had happened. Asking me how I am
As in the old days, when I came home from university,
When he put down his pen in the study and turned
That half-smile on his face. I'm fine
I whisper now, ghostly, into the nothingness of the night -
Knowing this cannot be, this is impossible.
I'm glad, he says, serious at last, as though he means it,
And puts the phone down, leaving the humming nothing
Of that no man's land between the worlds.

Iona

I try to visit Iona every year and this year I won't make it. Iona is my spiritual home: this tiny island on the edge of the Inner Hebrides of Scotland where the monk Columba arrived with Christianity all these hundreds of years back. It's much bigger inside than outside, if that makes any sense. On the map it looks nothing: a gnarled pebble-shape at the end of the island of Mull. But once you're there, distances lose all meaning. It can take half a day to reach the south-western tip of the island. What I love more than anything is becoming nothing on Iona. On a wild day in October you are fighting the wind every step of the way. And all you are, all you have achieved, all that you think is important about you, is somehow blown out of you and away.

That matters to me as a writer as much as anything else. There is a very real danger of becoming self-conscious about the whole process of writing - poems in particular - and I find they happen these days when I am least conscious of the whole thought of writing. Poems should happen; they shouldn't be worried out of the pen. And on Iona they happen most often that way, and it means the world.

A few weeks back, my newest book of fragment poems was published by Wild Goose in Glasgow. All the poems in its pages are nearly Haikus: they are three-lined meditations on the island and on my long association with Iona. A Wee Book of Iona Poems should be there to find via Amazon: I hope it will be in the fullness of time. Or contact me and I'll send on a signed copy: info@kennethsteven.co.uk


A gannet
made of faith
gimlets the sea


The last ferry's gone -
a drawbridge has been lifted
and the island left behind.


Sometimes
it's about little more
than a boat on a blue sea.

The gateway to another country

I have often felt that it was possible to know the day autumn arrived. Something different in the air, as though the earth had tilted in the night. Something different about the light; something that could not be explained or written down or fully understood. Perhaps sometimes poems are there for those places where there is nothing else, no other way of explaining. They are meditations on places which have not been explored or explained before.

Of course this is just my corner of that experience in Highland Scotland. Inevitably it would be different in however many other corners of the world. Yet that doesn't lessen the experience; somehow it almost makes it the more special, the more precious. Which comes back anyway to all that poetry means - surely.


PEARS

I think of that house in early evening
Somewhere at the end of summer

All the doors and windows open
Filled with the afterglow of sun

And the whole house heavy with the scent of pears.
There in the lawn that ancient tree

A hundred summers old, and maybe more,
Around it a deep, dark ring of pears.

I picked them hour after long hour
To thud into baskets, heavy and melting -

Leaving only the broken ones,
All drizzled and wandering with wasps,

And it was as if the house became some strange ship
I was filling for a long voyage

That the rest of our lives might be made of pears.





The poem comes from Kenneth Steven's collection Coracle, published by SPCK in London

Summer

I have decided to return from silence! I am still new to the world of blogging, and I felt for a time that it was rather akin to knocking gently against a wall and receiving no answer. I look forward to hearing from those who do read new work, especially poems, and who want to be in touch. My email address, via my website, is: info@kennethsteven.co.uk. This is a short message on a summer evening: yesterday evening when coming back from my writing cabin in Highland Perthshire a poem came to me. Of course it had to be scribbled on the bus, and on the back of a scrap of paper, but I suppose that often the strongest things are. They tend always to come from nowhere - poems especially - and that arrival from silence is hugely special. So here is the poem:

Twelve

The way once upon a time it was:
when nights lay empty with their birdsong,
and the sun all swollen red went down,
and you among the boys went running
a whole hill upwards into dusk -
where the badger setts lay shadowed
and stillness danced with midges all around.

Then you knew there might be magic -
perhaps a falling star, or fox cubs,
or the finding of a cave that no-one else had seen.
Most of all it was the thrill of this -
the being twelve years old and knowing sure
that all the summer lay ahead and many more,
that it was yours like wild fruit heavy, ready -

in fields and fields and fields far out of sight.

Kindle

This is a brief message after too long a silence. The days have been out of this world here in Highland Perthshire: it has been the sort of winter I most love. Not deep snow around the house: bare ground and bitter frost. The crackling of every star from early evening: that bang of cold when the back door is opened after dark and the night, silent and huge, reveals itself. Impossible to go out for a bucket of coal and not stop to listen to the hugeness of the night. And there, last night, a deer only yards from the house. I felt that sense of awe and wonder I have felt so many times over the years: this privilege at being on the threshold of another kingdom. The deer waited and watched; I waited and watched, the pail hanging useless and pointless at my knee. It's often the kind of moment when poems come to the heart: they are out of time moments, sudden exits from the real, everydayness of the world into somewhere timeless, somewhere precious beyond words. But I didn't write any poem last night: I have visited and re-visited such moments here in Highland Perthshire, and it is difficult to go back and tread old ground in a new way.

What are there on Kindle is a volume of my selected poems especially put together for North American readers. Second Nature comprises much of my best-known work, but it's very much intended for an international readership. If you find it, pass on word of it. And look out for the deer.

New Year

I have never understood why I can almost hear the Atlantic coming into the rooms of my little world here at the heart of Highland Perthshire each early spring. There's no explanation for it, yet as far back as I can remember it has happened (or seemed so). There is something quite wonderful about the west coast of Scotland in the first days of the year: when light comes (and seldom it does) it seems to blow into the whole of the heart and sweep all else aside. There is a magnificence and a wonder that takes away your breath. The cold is the worst I have ever encountered (far worse than the Arctic cold which I have lived through; far easier because it is a dry, still cold). On the western edges of Scotland the cold is being swept against you as if by chariots and horses: it is relentless, hurting, fierce beyond words.
And then suddenly there is light: for one moment, and all is clear and beautiful: each rocky outcrop, each hillside, each shoreline.

And of course for me the tiny island of Iona is at the centre of it all. Often it is cut of for days at a time in January (and long beyond). But it is in my mind; I am back there, fighting my way to St Columba's Bay in the hope of finding green stones, or struggling over the last headland to the finest bay in the west, Port Ban.

out of that battered coast
and all the winter can throw

the days of flurrying snow
and the wind searching

the long and starless nights
high seas and the power gone

the spring comes suddenly
in the twirling of a lark

a torn blue sky and the light
here and there in fragments

the jewellery of flowers
reds and blues and golds

rising from among the rocks
year after faithful year

Can anyone dare to say
they do not believe in miracles?

(From Iona The Other Island, Kenneth Steven - Saint Andrew Press)