Hinterland

A Place Writing Special Edition

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Hinterland cover artwork is by Camilla Brueton: Untitled #9 (The Tax Office Collages)

Hinterland is a quarterly publication, which is described by the publisher as a magazine, though it looks more like a paperback book. Each issue is a collection of creative non-fiction writing from new and established authors, and Issue 11 was produced in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University’s Centre for Place Writing; hence, it merits consideration by anyone interested in the field of Place Writing as well as those eager to read a curated selection of creative non-fiction.

Issue 11 opens with three pieces of flash non-fiction and I’ll focus this post on my response to them. The rest of the book consists of ten longer essays, all deserving of close reading, and fascinating for their difference and diverse subject matter.

1. The Ridge Above Cefn Onn by Camilla Brueton.

This is a very short, visually attractive, piece of prose. It is written in the first person and I presume the narrator is Camilla Brueton. (Noting that such assumptions can be problematic, I am nevertheless going with it.) Over thirty-three lines of text we learn that Camilla visits a topographic high point from which the city of Cardiff can be seen in the distance. The title gives us a location that we might discover on a map. Then, in visually descriptive and specific phrases, you can imagine seeing what the writer sees:

Rooftops trace street patterns

through a canopy of trees

The line breaks give the reader a chance to pause and I find myself taking a short breath between each phrase. I gain more from the reading when I’m forced to take it slowly; words roll around in my head.

Guest Editor of this special issue, Andrew Michael Hurley, says that ‘seeing places from different perspectives can create very different feelings.’ I agree, and this is a good example of how we can gain new interpretations of place from physical distance, especially when it is far enough to see a cityscape in its entirety.

Camilla’s situation on the ‘ridge’ is not a single experience but one that is commonly repeated as she indicates the regularity of her being there:

Every time you come up here, it’s different

the weather and the seasons doing what they do.

Repeatability is a trait in Place Writing. We are blessed in the UK to have such variable weather, yet how often do we revisit a place and repeatedly write about it in terms of its geography and meteorology?

2. Departing by Linda Mannheim.

Interestingly, this three-page piece is written in the third person, and the reader learns of the experiences of a nameless protagonist—‘she’. Scenes of life on a London commute unfold for us. ‘She’ endures the physical daily grind while dealing with the emotional loss of someone close to her from cancer; this person is referred to as ‘he’. This is their private story being told in the past tense by an omniscient narrator, and because significant details like names are missing, the reader is kept at a distance. Yet, the writing is packed with imagination and emotion as it describes a world that is starkly real:

The bitter cold danced in damp air and smacked her cheeks. And she couldn’t explain herself, couldn’t even speak. And he was not there.

The last sentence, ‘he was not there’, is hauntingly repeated at the end of every paragraph; it’s an introspective mantra we can interpret as a cry of anguish, or as a means of confirming and reaffirming the event of death, as we’re carried on tides of remembering.

Simple factual statements emphasise the impact of loss through action; the reader empathises with the protagonist’s disorientation through classic examples of the ‘show, don't tell’ technique:

When she stands on the Northern Line surrounded by straphangers, she loses track of the stops, sometimes goes too far, sometimes has to then double back.

And again, repeatability is here in the retracing of steps:

She walked over to Barts (…) stared at the entrance that she used to walk into to get to his ward. And he was not there.

I would like to know the criteria used to choose the pieces for this edition because while place writing sits comfortably in the creative non-fiction genre the style of this piece reads very much like fiction. I wasn’t surprised to learn from the published author bios that Linda has written three books of fiction. But, given that this is presented as non-fiction, it is up to the reader to decide if the author is writing a form of memoir, or if she is relating the experience of someone she knows. Such ambiguity stretches my mind a bit—that’s good, isn’t it?

3. 1989 by Hannah Garrard.

Over three and a half pages, Hannah Garrard recounts significant events in history from a child’s perspective. Instead of writing as an adult, remembering past events, she regresses to when she was a child in 1989 and uses vocabulary that helps the reader share her experience. The opening line compellingly sets the scene:

My twirly ballet dress was the same purple as the birthmark on Mikhail Gorbachev’s head.

Who could doubt that this is a child speaking? We don’t know her age but the piece goes on to show the child’s bafflement as she tries to understand the world around her. It gives the reader a unique insight into communist Russia at the time, or the ‘youesessare’ as it is written in child-speak.

Hannah uses colour to link disparate events, from observing a girl begging for cherries to the catastrophe unfolding in ‘tea-and-man square’. Colour firmly braids the narrative together and enables the author to illustrate word pictures:

The News showed red everywhere, in the sky and on people’s hands and faces.

The bloodiness that comes through in this piece of writing makes it hard-hitting; it takes history and politics, social history and world events, and sees them through a different lens. In an effort to present the child’s innocent lack of understanding, it would have been easy to trivialise scenes of trauma, yet Hannah works some magic, in the mode of a memoirist, to bring childhood, history, and place together.

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These three pieces are very different, as I hope you can appreciate from my brief overview, but there is one thing that links them and that is distance: firstly, geographic distance is witnessed by Camilla Brueton; secondly, Linda Mannheim creates authorial distance by using an omniscient narrator; and thirdly, Hannah Garrard puts time at a distance as she travels back to remember how it felt to be a child.

Reading through the whole book, which covers 180 pages, I’m even more astounded than before at the complexity that can be found in a collection of Place Writing, and congratulate the editors—Andrew Kenrick, Yin F Lim, and guest Andrew Michael Hurley—on their enterprise; it cannot have been an easy task to bring it together.

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• Are there any elevated spots near where you live? What vistas unfold when you are there?

As ever, I welcome your thoughts. And please share your current reading here.

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Credits & Links:

For subscribers around the world who may not know who or what ‘Barts’ is, it’s the commonly used name for St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, which was founded in 1123. It specialises in heart and cancer care.

Hinterland, Issue 11, can be purchased here. The cover price is £10.00. For clarity, I have no commercial connection to the editors or the publication Hinterland. Photos are taken by me from my purchased copy.

Check out MMU’s Centre for Place Writing.