Tag: Kirsty Logan

‘Between Sea and Sky’ by Kirsty Logan

‘Between Sea and Sky’ is concerned with the excavation of a Scottish town’s hidden secrets and underlying truths “except [a mother’s] own truth, of course. The truth of how she got me”. Composed of short narratives split between mother and son’s voices, this potent and dark retelling of ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’ brims with the affectual aspects of language, staying true to its folk-song origins. In the story’s opening, a mother sings to her baby who is strapped to her chest by a seal-grey sling:

“Oh my darling wee fishie, I won’t let go of you
I cannae hear you speak but I know you love me too
Oh my darling wee fishie, I’ll hold you close to me
I cannae see your eyes, but your love is clear to see”

Shortly after her son’s birth, she continues her work as an osteoarchaeologist, digging up bones that the locals in the town would prefer to keep buried– hidden with unspoken stories under the earth. She and her fatherless son are treated as outsiders, made to feel shame by a community of women who “each think it could be their own husband” she slept with.

I listened to this story within Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold in its audiobook form on a long walk in the local woods. When the narrative switches to her child’s longing to know the origin of his birth, I listened with a quickening heart. A story echoing my own. ‘Between Sea and Sky’ explores motherly love and also a child’s desire to know where they’ve come from. When the child discovers his father, he’s revealed to be a man of the sea, the child himself thus part-selkie. It’s then decided that the boy will spend six months in the water and six months on land, his mother continuing to speak to him in his absence. Though, as the child grows, his yearning to be with his mother throughout the year deepens. At six years old, he feels “apart and incomplete”, knowing the “time for words had passed; I needed actions”. On a stormy night, he leaves the sea to visit her, turning up at her small house by the beach unannounced. I will not say what happened next, but perhaps you can imagine. Logan’s tale crescendos with its raging storm. The border between sea and sky (or water and air) becoming fluid, undefined. When I heard the final lines of this tale, I can remember exactly where I was standing in the woods, the exact shade of light through the trees, the exact way the wind lifted, goosebumps rising like small worlds on my skin.

First published in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold, Virago, 2020

‘Half Sick of Shadows’ by Kirsty Logan

Another collection where I truly could have chosen any story, but this one spoke to me the most. A couple arrive at Camelot theme park with their young daughter with the intention of leaving her there. The sense of dread as I read this was also joined by a sense of understanding and recognition. This story, then, is a painful read for me. It felt as if Logan had seen the darkest thoughts in my mind and plucked them out onto the page. It makes me think of every time I’ve dismissed my daughter when she wanted to play, every time I’ve just wanted to be left alone, every time I’ve thought I can’t cope with this anymore. “- Was she really that bad? Maybe if we’d tried harder with her. Everyone else manages it.”I’m not sure I’m supposed to relate to the cruel parents in this story but I do. In my darkest days, deep in post-natal depression, would I have left my own daughter in a magical abandoned theme park if someone had given me the option? The answer to that, as the title of the collection alludes to, is not something I would dare speak in daylight. 

first published in Things We Say in the Dark, Harvill Secker, 2019

‘The Ghost Club’ by Kirsty Logan

I first came across Kirsty Logan when I read her debut collectionThe Rental Heart, a queer reimagining of fairy tales, and have devoured all her stories full of magic and queer women. In A Portable Shelter Logan cleverly links her short stories through a framing narrative, a Scheherazade-like tale of two women, Liska and Ruth, who take turns telling stories in secret to their child growing inside Ruth. There are stories of selkies and fisherman of lighthouses and witches but it is the final story that I have never been able to forget. The premise is a sort of support group for people who see ghosts of loved ones and who want to disprove their existence. It’s a thoughtful and sensitive exploration of what it’s like to grieve and the role that death plays in the lives of the living. Logan writes, “If no one ever died, maybe we would never learn what it meant to miss them.” That this is the last story in the collection is fitting, a death to balance Ruth and Liska new baby, a poignant reminder to question how much we can prepare our loved ones for the harsher realities of the world. What portable shelters can we carry with us as protection? How safe can you make the world? How much of death do you need to know to truly live?

Collected in A Portable Shelter, Vintage, 2015

‘Tiger Palace’ by Kirsty Logan

This story has stayed with me because it is all about possibility. As it says in its last line, “…stories can have any ending you like.” Tiger Palace is a re-imagining of the Beauty and the Beast fairy story. A beautiful but cruel empress lives in a palace in the middle of an impenetrable forest populated by man-eating tigers, waiting for the arrival of a man who will free her. But what if the traveller who arrives is not a man, but a woman, and what if they might both become beasts?  What if…? In this, as in her other alternative fairytales, Logan explores different ways of living for all of us, whatever our gender or sexuality. Her stories are about cycles of life and second chances. Rich stories, to give us hope.

(First published in Diva and included in The Rental Heart, published by Salt, 2014)