Cafe Tissardmine is a unique place which enables a creative stay in the Moroccan Sahara amidst rock, shadow, a roof of stars and of course, sand. I’m travelling there for my 8th time and for the 2nd time going as far as Marrakech by train (pictured by Robin Dance at Perth Station).
After the last visit I wrote about the journey and its various stresses for the Saraband anthology of women’s travel writing, ‘There She Goes’. Considering I’ve taken to rail, yes for enjoyment, but more out of concern for my lifelong contribution to climate chaos, it’s interesting that my departure, and likely the whole journey, will be defined by waves of storm and associated delay and disruption not only in the UK (passing white churn of sea off Northumberland, lakes for fields in Yorkshire) but down to southern Spain and into Morocco which is experiencing a particularly snowy and flood-prone winter.
I aimed to travel ‘light’ and with no more than 2 bags (take 3 and I’ll lose one). At the last minute, the small bag I’d chosen was too small and I reached for a cloth tote bag instead. The first to hand was branded for the ‘Dangerous Women’ project which ran from 2017 and invited explorations of what this term might mean. This was a happy reminder of an impromptu writing project.
At the time both Jane Austen and Nan Shepherd were about to appear on British bank notes. So writer-friend Sarah Salway and I teamed up to voice a ‘social media’ chat between them for Dangerous Women. Working on a shared Google document, we kept in mind the preoccupations with freedom of our subjects. For one it was the wandering of gusty mountains, for the other economic independence.
But both women challenged the patriarchal norms of their respective times, even their very creativity might have been considered ‘dangerous’.
This reminder of a randomly-arising writing project was a pleasing way to set off on a new adventure carrying a tote-bagful of blank notebooks and trying to feel ‘dangerous’!
Cafe Tissardmine
A kiss in the dark from a stranger*
(*Stephen King on the short story) Recently I’ve gone back to writing short fiction. It’s a joy – my first writing ‘home’. After three non-fiction books published in the last four years, returning to ‘making things up’ is vitally refreshing and the short form engrosses me. It also recalls me to my first writing and…
Voices in the Landscape
The joy of writing friends is often felt most keenly when we get together for events and book festivals. So it’s a happy opportunity that I’ll be appearing with Polly Pullar and Karen Lloyd on Friday 29th May at my local community cinema, the Birks of Aberfeldy. Each of the three of us share a…
May – Sea Marked goes home to the South West
I’m very pleased to be going to the south-west of England in May and taking Sea Marked to events in two of the book’s vital locations. First to the Taw-Torridge estuary in North Devon where my seafaring ancestors came from. This was the locus of much of my exploration in the record office, on the…