The Lancashire Writing Hub are thrilled to announce the winner of the first competition to select the best pieces of writing submitted to our “Your Writing” page for comment and feedback from other writers.

Wigan poet Stephanie Robinson’s haunting poem “Older” was the clear winner, with J Field’s “Dancing in Reverse” and David Hartley’s “Scenes from a Car Crash” coming in as runner’s up.

As well as showcasing Stephanie’s poem on the LWH website, Stephanie also wins a copy of Jenn Ashworth’s fabulous novel A Kind of Intimacy. LWH have also interviewed Stephanie, and her approach to her writing is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, and you can read the interview below the poem. So, without futher ado, we give you Stephanie Robinson’s “Older”:

Older.

Part One

Night is falling powder fine
and the rust rooftops become
dusted with flecks of blue and black and
It will rain tomorrow onto your bare skin
“ashamed dull empty”

Ink thickly dropping seeps
to form marks that mean the world that
honesty will never allow
our own way

There is no way that
pushed frontward then think
“to have contempt for the world”
the soft glow of flushed cheeks
the brave sky is marbled grey and later

Scratched and written
the brown of your eyes looks harsh
against black ink against
what it is that you do in the afternoon

Troubled minds will caress and think
cool gloom will fold us together
your bare skin still wet from the rain
shoulders neck eyelids

This entire time we are
tipped in gold as grey as the night
the subtle
sound of pencil on paper

Indoors I have drawn a line
across your body
“the lessening of something else”
listening to the gray evening the soft
powder on the rooftops

Part Two: Settlement

Become awake in the early afternoon, the window is open and the air is warm and soft. You have your cigarette next to the glass. The heavy sound of cars and of distant drills doesn’t fit into the room properly. You walk over, no—you stop by the phone “three weeks” you say and you say it again. As I button up your shirt, I think about the fallen leaves that will be on the roads that lead through quiet woods.

It is not long before you are unbuttoning your shirt again. And mine.

I have small hands and try my hardest to satisfy,
the sheets smell soft,
I feel dry, you have dry skin but it is soft too
I can see the brown leather bound books
over your shoulder that rises and falls
Conker brown, the silky wooden shelf
My thigh is cool on the iron bed frame
You wrote about this much, much later

Cooler outdoors—and we loose the smell of tar as we walk to the north of town. You buy us hot waffles and eat yours with your hand in your pocket. I feel stupidly young with cream on my lip, and next you, you are thirteen years older and I thought you were married.

“go to those trees”

Bark has an earthy wooden smell. There—you smile because I’ve got it right. I can see slate blue peering through brown branches, I am cold, but I keep getting it right. Sit, stare, a wood pigeon lands and sends a beige-blue flurry downwards. Continue along the road, the fallen leaves are quiet. Here are the grasses, you want to lie down. My back damp, my hands cold.

“…what differentiates the excitement that makes us proud and more alive, from the excitement that leaves us ashamed, dull, empty? There are two big drives in everyone: the first is to like the world, respect it; the second is to have contempt for the world – to get an addition to self through the lessening of something else.”
(Ellen Reiss— Excitement, Byron, & the Trouble about Sex)

In the dimming mist, I find the gate. Rust comes away onto my hand, and I wipe it on my coat. You haven’t moved — the sparrows are tiny next to the gulls. Gravel fades into tar and my shoes make the familiar click, and that’s comforting. I hear the men in the bar talking for the sake of talking, for the sake of speed. Things get sharper as I am back in town, even the people, so I pull my coat tighter around myself, and people can see the shape of me. Scrabbling for it’s grip on the sky, the sun falls finally and I open your door.

7:00pm and the room is dark, cold. I find some amber brandy in a confusing faceted bottle. We have lost our way today. With my coat still on my shoulders, I try to get rid of the smell of the cigarettes I’ve smoked, the window still letting in the sounds of cars and road work.

Part Three: Nihilist

it came to nothing

she didn’t believe me

had she learned to read

wouldn’t have torn

thin like bible paper

She lay me flat, think of nothing.
I found myself trusting what she told me to trust.

She was very beautiful.
Plato.
There are only realms. The chair over there is in our realm, it is a copy. the painting of the chair is the lowest form, it is a copy of a copy. the real chair is in the highest realm, the original.
Part Four

Art n. 1 the expression or application of creative skill ORIGIN ME: via Ofr. From L. ars,art-

Early morning
You have another cigarette

I remember what you said
your voice was soft
you are muffled
under the snow

I felt my need for you
well up
when you drank your coffee
the ice almost blue

The nihilists came and built you a new door

Our battle ended when you

the birds sang
the red berries dropped into the snow
I needed you then
I felt you warm in my arms
your heat mist breath
the delicate flakes of white that
rested in your hair
on your eyelashes

they knocked four iron nails,
drilled the brass hinges,
cool voices

Scraping through myself I heard you whispering the sky was reddening and the sun was coming
I still want you.

I will know now that you compared this to this and that after all that you despised art.

**********

LWH interview with Stephanie:

JB: How long have you been writing, and what most inspires you to write?

SR: I have been writing since I was about eight years old.  I won a local poetry competition when I was in year 5, and that made me think that maybe I was okay at this sort of thing.  Since then I’ve just written poetry as a part of my daily routine, from being very little I loved making words sound good next to each other.  Nowadays most of my writing goes towards my M.A, but I still write independent pieces to submit to webzines etc.  It would be hard to pin-point an exact ‘something’ that inspires me to write, as I find that most of my ideas arrive when I’m going about every day sort of business, thus my first drafts are regularly on receipts and scraps of paper.  The one thing I will say is that reading, no matter what genre or form always maintains my thirst to write, I read and read what I can, when I can.

JB: Your winning piece of writing, ”Older”, is an interesting mix of formats. Can you tell me a bit about the processes you went through when writing it? Did you intentionally structure it that way, for instance?

SR: This piece was a way of establishing my writing style, as it were.  The ‘story-line’ of the poem was pre-determined; the form, was not.  I had been reading Lynn Hejinian and Lee Harwood at the time, and though I did not become captivated by the content of their poetry, their use of form brought something entirely new to me.  I got some audio files from one of my tutors at university of these two poets reading aloud, and to hear the way in which these poems were spoken, just blew me away.  The mixed formats that are apparent in ‘Older’ are a way of pushing away the traditional parameters of poetry. Prose-poetry, for example, uses the full capacity of the line, extends images across the page width, as a story would, but still contains poetical characteristics, a lack of punctuation would be to name one of my own.   Hejinian and Harwood provided me with an insight into trying new forms, and ‘Older’ was the result of my experiments.  The story line I thought of randomly, a central idea of ‘an older lover’ came to me when I used to work in a Jewelry store, and then as the hours passed, I formulated scenarios around that central concept. 

JB: What kinds of writing do you most engage in (poetry, short stories, novel, etc) and why?

SR: I am primarily a poet, like I’ve said, because it’s something I’ve done from being young.  It’s habitual now, but I find a real sense of freedom in poetry writing.  I’ve engaged a couple if times in writing prose, but I find even short stories difficult to complete.  I find there’s lots of ideas swirling around in my mind, and they all want to be in the story…saying that, I’m attempting to write a story at the moment about a fishing boat that accidentally captures a bizarre looking mermaid type thing. 

 JB: Tell me a bit about what you are working on at the moment.

SR: Most of my attention at the minute is going towards expanding ‘Older’.  I’ve decided to make this piece long, fragmented, but following an extended story line.  I’m going to submit the finished piece to my M.A for my final manuscript.  When I’m not working on ‘Older’, I’m writing other little pieces of poetry, but to be honest they tend to be integrated somewhere into the ‘Older’ storyline.  It has comsumed me.  I’ve also got the mermaid short story on the go, it’s working title is ‘Waterlust’ but we’ll see if it actually gets anywhere.  I am also chief editor for a little website I’ve set up for ideas based around The Gothic.   

 JB: I’m particularly impressed with the way you use senses – sight, touch, taste, smell – to create a wonderfully internalised voice and layers of meaning in “Older”, and conscious that this might be an unanswerable request, but if there’s anything you can say about how and why these work for you, that would be great – even if it’s a question of whether you start with the senses and move down the layers of meaning into the psychological or vice versa.  

SR: Empirical evidence, that which we gather through our senses, is that which can (mostly) be identified by all.  Not only that, I find that I can manipulate this ‘evidence’ in order to take thought further; for example, everyone can relate to the smell of rust on an old gate, but to describe the smell of rust on an old gate in order to describe an emotion, say sadness, is more difficult to do, but in the end, is more profound.  I place the protagonist in the poem ‘Older’ in a woodland, but instead of saying that she feels cold, abused, confused, I use the image of the blue-beige collared dove, disrupting the leaves.  I use the presence of cigarette smoke to portray anger.  It’s basically my way of obeying the old school rule of ‘show don’t say’.  Psychology is a very difficult thing to deal with, but by using sensual language, one can bring the internal into the external, and hopefully right to the heart/mind of the reader.

Profile

Stephanie is a poet from Wigan, currently attending Edge Hill University studying for an M.A in creative writing.  She had her first poem published at the age of 8 in a small local anthology, since then she has been part of the writing team for Incorporating Writing online magazine, and her contributions included a review of the H.G Wells novella ‘The Time Machine’ and an interview with journalist and writer Erwin James.  She has her own webzine, which is in early stages of publication, for which she is creator and chief editor; the webzine is a space for a collection of works based on The Gothic. 

She is currently a librarian at Platt Bridge library and is facilitator of an under 5′s reading and craft group.  She plans on starting an adult creative writing group some time after Christmas. 

Her webzine address is www.thegothicpages.tk

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