Susurration

Anne Holloway

When my sister turned her back on me, she left a hole.

In I fell, down to the belly of the earth, 

lay foetal

like a tiny ammonite

lodged in the silt

my calcifying tears a welcome quilt.

There is comfort in becoming a fossil.

I hear

my children’s voices

stalactite threads descending.

I uncurl, slowly.

Above me I see the moon 

where the hole had been,

stars, stitched across the bruised sky.

There are whole universes out there.

Below my ammonite companions sing

this hurt will pass

unfurl or become stone.

I climb.

Susurration, poem

Interview by C. VanWinkle
November 15, 2023

What was the prompt that you responded to?

The prompt was quite surprising, actually. It was a square, patchwork quilt. I don't even know the dimensions of it because I've just seen it on the screen. It's predominantly mauves and purples, with stitching that isn’t just to hold the pieces of fabric together, but to give it substance and body. It has what looks like a moon with two sickles, one on either side, almost back-to-back. And then there are these two threads of fabric coming down the right-hand side.

What was your gut reaction to it?

I was quite surprised to get a quilt. It's interesting because my sister is part of The Quilty Nook, which is an online quilting community run by a guy called Zak Foster in the US. She loves it because she logs on and they just sit and sew. They also have more formal events, but what she loves is the fact that she can be talking to someone across the other side of the world and just be stitching away at something. She will often sew things to do with my poetry. She never really bothers with Christmas or birthdays, but I will get random packages throughout the year with quilted things, of my poems or lines of my poetry sewn onto something. So to get a quilt as a prompt was like, “Oh wow, it’s a quilt! Who knew?!”

It's funny you should mention Zak Foster. He actually contributed a piece to Bait/Switch not so long ago.

Oh really! How strange!

Yes, and through him we’ve found quite a few other quilters, which has been wonderful. So how did you get started writing your own piece?

I immediately looked at the white moon and the two back-to-back slivers of moon and a line popped into my head, which was “When my sister turned her back on me.” It just popped into my head. So that was the starting point and it surprised me. The poem isn't about my sister. I use the word ‘sister’ in the poem to mean a very close friend.

The quilt itself is quite jolly, pretty, brightly colored. The stitching along the bottom is like waves or ammonites. It was ammonites that I went to, but it's sort of like the waves of the sea all the way across the bottom, and it made me think about the strata of the earth. That's where my brain went - to ammonites, and layers of earth, and the sea, and nature.

As for the moon, I used to dabble in tarot cards, often when that card would come up, it would mean that there are stories around about you and you need to hold onto who you really are and try not to listen to all this bad talk. And the moon to me is a feminine, sort of fecund, fertile thing. And then there was that sense of betrayal that came in. So that's where I went.

It's really remarkable that you included so many details from the quilt into your piece. I didn't make the connection between those spiral-shaped stitches at the bottom and the ammonite thing. It’s really impressive how much you integrated the prompt.

The way I write is quite dark in a way. I do write about ordinary things, but there’s a bit of sadness there. I think that’s why I go beyond the surface all the time.

You mentioned layers of earth, and also stalactites.

Yes. Stalactites, tights, the ones that hang down. I went to fossils and subterranean caves and darkness and dormancy. Those two threads of fabric that were hanging on the right-hand side and trailing down looked like stalactites, from my perspective as a fossil lying in the silt in a dripping cave.

The line that really struck me was: “There is comfort in becoming a fossil.” I thought that was very powerful, the idea that giving up holds some sort of attraction.

That one line, “When my sister turned her back on me,” took me back to a period in my life when a very close friend completely flipped and, before the internet, “unfriended” me. I just thought, “What the hell—?” At the time, I had two quite small children. I think they were six and eight, something like that. And there was comfort in withdrawing from all the stresses and pressures of life. There was comfort in staying under the duvet. Had I not had two small children, I would have stayed in that sort of static, stasis, I suppose. And honestly it was them saying, “Mummy, mummy, what's for dinner?” that meant I had to come out of it. And it was at a time in my life when I was a single mum, and I was working full-time, and I was running a household, money was very tight, and there were lots of needs going on.

Actually the older I get, the more I do think sometimes, “God, wouldn't it be nice to just… stop?” And then, you know, life. You think, “No, I've got friends, I've got work, I've got poetry, I've got this stuff I have to do, and you shake it off. But I guess that's depression, isn't it? I guess that's traumatic happenings and depression. It's hard to come out of that.

Oh absolutely. I think that’s relatable to a lot of people. How does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

There's a thread of family in my work. I do write about family a lot, both chosen family and blood family, and the relationships that you have within them. So that's very definitely in there. I also write about loss a lot. I had a collection of poetry out in 2018 called “There Are No Photographs,” which is part of a line from a poem which goes “There are no photographs of disappointment.” [laughs] So I write about jolly things like disappointment, which is in there. And nature. I'm not a hiking, mountaineering kind of person, but I do need to have the sky above my head to feel. And I know it sounds a bit corny, but I love to be barefoot in mud or on the beach. I live by the sea in the northwest of the UK. And I need that, I need to feel weather on me. It's quite a wild, rugged nature that I embrace, rather than, you know, pretty things. I write about memory as well, and this piece was all about memory. So I think it ties in really well actually. But isn't that what we do as artists? Don't we really just have one thing that we’re desperately trying to get out?

Yes! That makes sense. So of course you looked at this quilt, just an abstract collection of colors and shapes, and you saw what you saw in it because that's what you look for. Somebody else probably wouldn’t mention ammonites at all.

Because this was going to be for public consumption, I thought, “Oh bloody hell, I’d better check that it is an ammonite. What is an ammonite, anyway?” So I went Googling and I got stuck in a rabbit hole of what ammonites are/were, cephalopods, all that, and I discovered how they grow in that spiral. They get too big for the chamber they're in, so they build a new one and crawl into it, and they seal up the old one, and that happens again and again. That's how you get that spiral. And THAT… that’s a poem! Your home is too small, so you have to build a bigger one and you move into it, and you hole up. It's almost like when you leave home and you move into a bedsit, and that's too small so you move somewhere else. You leave that behind, the people that you shared the flat with, or perhaps furniture, and you move to somewhere new. That blew my mind. Now I've got my little Googling folder of all the things I discovered about ammonites.

I love that. If you write more pieces inspired by this experience, I would love to hear about it.

Oh fantastic! I'll definitely do that.

How do you like working from a prompt? Do you do that much?

I facilitate workshops, so I am forever devising creative prompts for other people, but I don’t often do them myself. I take people on a journey of writing lists, doing this and drawing on that, giving them prompts. Then I'll often come away thinking, “Why don't you do your own workshop?” So I don't use prompts like that…

However, sometimes I see something or hear something and use that (rather than deliberately looking for a prompt in a book or an image from a postcard) - a found prompt. Sometimes it will be graffiti I've seen, or a flower growing in a rubbish tip, or a conversation I overhear, that kind of thing. I post things on Instagram that I see and often I'll go back and think, “That's a poem.” My Instagram posts really are poems that I haven't yet written. Sometimes I'll go back through the images and think, “Why did you stop and take that photograph?”

That sounds like a really healthy way to keep an open mind about possible inspiration or influence.

What I find exciting about this experience is that I wouldn’t have been drawn to that image to write a poem, so to be given it is a gift. Thank you for that. I also love the interconnectivity of Bait/Switch. I just love the mapping of it, and the fact that this leads to that which led to that, and reading through the past volumes to see how this person came up with that. I love it! Absolutely love it! Because to me, that’s what being an artist is, really. It’s the connections. It's about making connections with people. I love the social element of it, that you're having unknown conversations with people.

That’s a great way to say that! Okay, last question. What advice would you give to a new person getting their prompt today?

Do it straight away. Don't wait. I love the fact that you give us a two-week window. I think that's really, really crucial. So just open that email and crack on with it straight away. Don't overthink it; I found myself overthinking and it was taking the spontaneity away. So be spontaneous, don't be afraid, just do it and have fun.

Call Number: M85VA | M87PP.hoSu

Anne Holloway is founding editor of indie publishing house, Big White Shed. Her first collection There Are No Photographs was published in 2018 and looks at memory and the landscapes we inhabit. She is happiest by the sea, now lives in Morecambe, on the north west coast of England, and believes we are all poets.