Frida Eats Flowers

So here it is: Frida Eats Flowers, my latest dark, surreal li'l ditty I, again, originally wrote as a haiku, but it worked out laid out this way anyway. I'm rather pleased with the end result: the stitched handwriting, the fabric (fat quarters Katie and I found in a crafts shop in Swanage, hell yeah!), the satin-stitch lotus flower, the buttons...there's a sunbeam in my belly, mefeels.

Let me introduce you to Frida: she is a character from the next novel I want to write called The Aviary, another fantasy but this time set in a fictional coastal town based on Tyneham, the abandoned village near where I live in Dorset that had been evacuated during WWII to allow troops land for target practice. The government at the time promised the residents that, after the war, they may return home. However, they never followed through with that promise, and to this day the village is a ghost town, open to the public on weekends for walks and time-travel into the past, when the military aren't firing their guns at targets posted on Warbarrow Bay. 

In the story, Florence and Frida are 14-year old twins. Frida however was born blind, so Florence guides her and describes to her the appearance of things. Frida becomes obsessed with birds and the idea of flight, especially as the war starts and the planes fly around the coast; and meets a man, ostracised from the village, who has the gift of sprouting wings from the backs of human beings. Their friendship ultimately ends in tragedy, coinciding with the evacuation of the village. 

Years later, when Florence is a grown woman and a trained ornithologist, she returns to the coastal village to supervise a voluntary mission to clean up an oil spill on the bay and rescue hundreds of birds that have been washed-up and muddied. There she is reunited with the man responsible for Frida's disappearance. And coinciding with all of this, during Florence's work on the coast, a strange bird is washed ashore, a species Florence has never heard of or seen before...

It's intended to be a fairytale-esque young adult novel, like the first one that I'm trying to find an agent for at the moment. We'll see if I ever get round to writing it. For now I'm enjoying embroidering and writing short stories to post on this cloud.

The character Frida that I stitched is inspired by the illustration on the cover of the above book, The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart. Hence the face and the lotus flower, the latter of which I have used to decorate the ditty. 

I started embroidering these little stories because after having finished writing The Thicket Dwellers I wanted to try something different and creative, so I took up a craft. It is also born out of the snobbery I feel is involved around the topic of 'What is Proper Publishable Poetry'; and frustration I feel with writer's agents not responding to submissions, with disheartening rejections and 'but please keep trying'-s, and the possibility that agents don't read a word of what you send anyway, but send an impersonal slip as a response stating that they are currently not accepting submissions. Should I accept that perhaps my writing is shit and therefore give up? Fuck no. 

So instead I'm combining my love of writing prose and poetry with my new-found enjoyment in embroidery, and intend to blog about it and soon, hopefully, sell it, where there's no one to send me rejection slips. But I also intend to take said agents advice and 'never give up.'

 Nina x