HAUNTINGS

In This Missive:

• On The Run in Central Europe—revisiting a blog post from 2007
• Write with me THIS SUNDAY
• US readers, ASHES & STONES kindle is $1.99 until the 30th

This full moon, I’m revisiting a blog piece I wrote 17 years ago, after a stay in an ‘abandoned orphanage-cum-artists-residency.’ In hindsight, I realise I was unkind to the town of Hoorn in the Netherlands. After having lived in so many places—each with its own ghosts—only now do I realise you can’t hold a haunting against a place. Anywhere you find yourself, there will be more residents-human and non, both living and dead, and they might have really good reason to be pissed. 

In 2007 I joined my artist friend Edith Abeyta and brewer Bob Tower during their residency in the Netherlands at an renovated artists space which was once a 15th century monastery. The time I spent in this space still haunts me. 

After returning to London, I researched the location and found it had been a site of mass hysteria in 1673, when the adjacent Weeshuis, once also part of the monastery, was an orphanage. Though I can no longer trace the source where I found detailed information about this episode, other more recent books cover this in sensational detail. During my stay there, the structure itself was being broken down to allow for renovations, adding to the distortions I felt. 

In my imagination, the mania suffered by the orphans has become melded with the phenomenon of ‘tulipmania’. In the mid 1634, Hoorn was a site of a regular flower mart, a locus of ‘Tulipmania’— The sale of these flowers was established on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and the tulip market collapsed just three years later, in 1637. Four decades later another mania took hold—that of children in an orphanage in Hoorn. They began to bark like dogs, and exhibit other uncanny behaviour. I imagine the best medium to untangle these threads would be fiction. 

The labyrinthine structure of the monastery was a place where strongly felt I was “fairy led”— the sense that you going in circles trying to find something you know should be in a certain place. During my stay, I erupted in tears with the sensation that I was crying for someone or something else, or that I had been taken over by the grief of unseen presence. 

ON THE RUN IN CENTRAL EUROPE

When I arrived in the Netherlands over a week ago, I stayed in a massive building which was first a 16th century cloister, and after the dissolution of the Catholic Church here, it became an orphanage. I was there to assist my friend Edie who was doing an art piece there and when she told me about it and said, “Think The Shining” I thought she was joking, but it’s pretty right on.

In its last manifestation, the place was an ill used art space. For several years students had abused it as studio space. There were four of us in this massive building. The place is so large that the first time I went to take a shower I walked through 5 hallways and down one flight of stairs and up another, through 7 other rooms. I ended up right back in front of my own room.

There was talk of the potential remodelling, but no one could give Edie or Bob, who was brewing the beer for her art piece, any information about when it would start. The people who run the art space were out of the country while all this was going down.

Tuesday arrived, as did the developers who began at the main entrance, shattering the glass-walled foyer and tearing out the dry wall. They were going to gut all the internal walls and remove the shower and front entrance. It has a certain Kafkaesque absurdity to it. We had to flee, as Edie pointed out, like the nuns centuries ago. We left Hotel Mariakapel in a cloud of dust and showers of broken glass.

My initial intention was help Edie with the installation, to write a bit, research potential agents/publishing options for the completed novel and kick around ideas for the next project. But what’s happened instead is a kind of whirlwind tour. We took off to Cologne to drink beer and try to relax and maybe find a way to laugh about it all. That’s where I am now.

Before arriving in Cologne, we spent a few days in Amsterdam, wandering around, eating space cakes and dodging bicycles. It was pretty heavenly. It felt a lot like a kind of ancient San Francisco, or maybe I should say I felt the same way about Amsterdam as I did about San Francisco when I visited as a teenager in the mid 80s– filled with wide, happy hope– someday I will live here, I thought. Maybe it is a cliche to be an American falling in love with Amsterdam, but it is a bustling place scored by water, softened by the drift of pot smoke. We avoided the red light district so the city seemed to me relaxed, civilised and whimsical. 

As we were leaving Amsterdam several days ago, we walked toward the train station, stopping in a small market to pick up some snacks for the train ride back to Hoorn. In the doorway behind me, a kind of junkie version of Neil Gaiman stood cradling a black cat in his arms. He said something to me that I didn’t understand, squeezed past and I watched him put the cat, heavily pregnant, down in the back of the store, slap some money on the counter and leave. The cat wandered slowly out and looked for him, but he had vanished. She sat down and waited patiently, and I looked around for him. He had abandoned her. She let Edie pet her and for a moment we entertained the idea of taking her back to Hoorn with us. She looked us over, eyes like big green beads, knowing on some primal level that we were plotting to take her to a god-forsaken, half-demolished building in the wet countryside, and she was an Amsterdam kitty, bastard master or no. Her tail straight and flicking at us, she took off.

I’ve been thinking about her. About the narrative I imposed on her to make it bearable: the paradox of a restless soul with a wilful love of place, and the blessing of feral fecundity in a careless world. [That novel never did find a publisher. I kept feral and fecund, despite all attempts at domestication. There’s a lesson in there, somewhere.]

There are still a few places left for my workshop this Sunday! In this two hour workshop we will centre on facets of place writing informed by anti-colonial re-enchantment of land, place, and home. 

28th of April, 2024. 7pm GMT £25, tickets via Eventbrite

I’ll share practical tips for forming or renewing a sense of place in your writing.

Together we’ll examine our places, sharing discoveries and challenges as a group, exploring forces shaping our place-writing from gentrification to the Scottish Diaspora, and more. 

ASHES & STONES is an Amazon Kindle Deal for April!