Creative Writing

Fragments was a series of three short stories performed at Haworth Art Gallery in October 2024. Each story uses a short form, 200 words, to develop punchy images of life. This is the video taken during the event, live and direct! The stories as a book can be found on the website under ‘fragments’.

Fragments 

The Fragment by Seamus Heaney (in Electric Light, 2001, London: Faber & Faber – p.57). 

 

‘Light came from the East,’ he sang.  

‘Bright guarantee of God, and the waves went quiet.  

I could see the headlands and buffeted cliffs. 

Often, for marked courage, fate spares the man 

It has not marked already.’ 

 

And when their objection was reported to him –  

That he had gone to bits and was leaving them 

Nothing to hold on to, his first and last lines 

Neither here nor there – 

‘Since when,’ he asked, 

‘Are the first and last line of any poem  

Where the poem begins and ends?’. 

 

Exactly, I thought.  And did not know the interplay between Beowulf and Heaney and swimming and moving country. I know risk. Of losing a job at an age of danger, of working classness as an everyday risk. Not so much the courage to face that which we take but the shame we face down.   

And I know fragments and that life is not pinned to these single stanzas and pages of life that flick one after the other to create order where there was none. Make it to death, the end, the end that makes it all seem that was fine all along even if it never felt fine at all.  And now it is, they are not even here to see that it was.  Probably that means it was not at all fine. 

 

And so Fragments takes from Heaney the semblance of a poetry that is not all about poetry at all. More like Zephania who talks about Bought and Sold poets in fact, in being a poet who desires no prizes but does require a publication.   

No matter what is rhymed or reasoned, the world unfolds in uneven lines and crevices and different paper thickness makes for smooth and ruffled edge. The page before does not relate to the one after, not always.  What sticks in us is the electric burn of accident. We would love the golden glow of love or achievement to be what lingers.  we do not get to choose and so we can be burned by acidic memory or tainted by dull aches of not very much.  These are the fragments that tell the tale of a life.    

Since when?  Since forever.  And here the attempt has been to string something together like pearls without string, falling over the edge of unclothed tables in backrooms onto hard floors.  Bouncing into memory banks, not placed there with white gloved archivists.   

 

The idea of Fragments is wild in the challenge to brings to how we see our past, our experience, our memory.  Not wild as ragged or without form.  Wild as in open to change and the space for transformation.  We are not bound by our pats and they are not fixed entities.  they provide the material for our fabulations, or imaginations, our paces of being and of our becoming.  Neither is ever completed. 

 

The stories here indicate a series of events with the pattern of activities rendered vital through how they shape the nowness of the author.  If you think of your own, the ways your own fragments are created is a meeting point, of then and now, not as causation but as exchange, of engagement and encounter. We shape and our shaped, continually.