Jaffareadstoo is delighted to be hosting today's concluding stop on the
Elemental Blog Tour
Introducing the author
AMANDA CURTIN is a critically
acclaimed writer and book editor who lives in Perth, Western Australia. Of
Scottish ancestry, she spent years researching Elemental, travelling to The
Shetlands, Aberdeen, Peterhead, Great Yarmouth, Edinburgh and all along Scotland’s
north-east coast, discovering the superstitions, folklore and customs of
fishermen in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Using archival images
and documents — and even teaching herself the Doric and Shetland languages — in
Elemental she crafts a vivid portrait of a lost world, and connects it
compellingly to our own.
Amanda ~ welcome to Jaffareadstoo and thank you for inviting us to be a part of your blog tour for your novel, Elemental...
Where did you get your inspiration for the novel?
Three little scraps of paper in a
file where I squirrel away ideas could be said to have inspired Elemental: one said ‘fishermen’; one,
‘consequences’; one, ‘butterflies’. The second of these was the most obvious
and formative, but if you read Elemental
you’ll also see the other two weaving through the novel.
I was intrigued with some of the
Scottish fishermen’s superstitions I had come across years ago, and then my
reading started to expand in wider circles—to fishing villages, fishing boats,
fishing methods, fish curing, fishwives… Eventually I came across a reference
to the herring girls, and I was (if you’ll forgive the pun) hooked; I knew that
the character that had been beginning to form in my head would be a herring
girl.
I was—and remain—fascinated by those
teams of women and girls in the early twentieth century who left their isolated
villages in the north of Scotland to follow the seasonal migration of the
herring from the north-west islands to the Shetlands, down to the north-east
mainland and as far south as Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft—a journey that began
around late February or March and ended just before Christmas, by which time
the girls were having to break the ice in the farlins (tubs) of fish. Imagine
what it would be like to be on your feet, gutting herring all day, sometimes
for ten hours, or twelve or sixteen—just as long as the boats kept coming in. I
admired their skill, their endurance, their incredible speed with the knife; I
loved their camaraderie and their pride. I wanted to write about those strong,
brave ‘quinies’.
My main character, Meggie Duthie
Tulloch, is fictional, but everything I read about the women and girls of that
time—in newspapers, oral histories, memoirs, government reports—helped to shape
her, along with her sister Kitta and friend Clementina. I saw some wonderful
photographs at museums and libraries during my research, and I kept photocopies
of some on the wall above my desk. I began with the word ‘fishermen’, but it is
women who became the heart of Elemental.
 |
| Scribe Publications 11 February 2016 |
It has taken a lifetime for me to
see that the more afraid people are of the darkness, the further into it they
will flee.
Nearing the end of her life,
Meggie Tulloch takes up her pen to write a story for her granddaughter. It
begins in the first years of the twentieth century, in a place where howling
winds spin salt and sleet sucked up from icefloes.
A place where lives are ruled by
men, and men by the witchy sea. A place where the only thing lower than a girl
in the order of things is a clever girl with accursed red hair. A place
schooled in keeping secrets.
Moving from the north-east of
Scotland, to the Shetland Isles, to Fremantle, Australia, Elemental is a novel
about the life you make from the life you are given.
Find Amanda on her website
Follow her on Twitter @lookingupdown
Huge thanks to Amanda for her guest post today and also to Molly at Scribe for her invitation to join in with this exciting blog tour
Do take a look at what has been happening on the other stops on the tour
~***~
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