A Personal Anthology, by Angharad Hampshire
Two years ago, I moved back to the UK with my family after living abroad for many years in Hong Kong and Sydney. The experience of starting all over again has made me think about the concepts of home and belonging. I keep coming back to the word ‘tether’. What is it that ties us to people and places? When does a place start to feel like a home? What makes us feel like we belong? The texts I’ve chosen address these questions in one way or other. Some speak directly to the places I’ve lived in; others speak more generally to this theme. Some are short stories in the traditional sense of the word, while others push that boundary through being poetry, essay, novella; I hope you’ll bear with me for that.
‘Blueback’ by Tim Winton (First published in Australia, Pan Macmillan, 1997. Now available Penguin Group, Australia, 2014)
Tim Winton is one of Australia’s best-loved writers. Cloudstreet is frequently voted Australia’s favourite novel. Winton wrote ‘Blueback’ for children; however, the novella is as worthy of adult attention. (If you’re in any doubt about that, please read Katherine Rundell’s brilliant essay ‘Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise’.) Like Cloudstreet, ‘Blueback’ deals with concepts of home, the fierce pull of a place.
10-year-old Abel Jackson lives in Longboat Bay on the Australian coastline. His father, a pearl diver, was killed by a tiger shark when Abel was young. He lives with his mother Dora, subsisting off the land and the sea. Diving for abalone, Abel comes across an enormous blue groper; he names the fish Blueback and thus starts a lifelong companionship.
Like many children in rural Australia, Abel has to go away for secondary school, but his heart remains in the bay: “I’ll wither up and die away from this place, he thought as they bumped off down the gravel road. This is my place. This is where I belong.”
Dora and Abel battle to save their bay from the rapaciousness of mankind: divers strip the reef bare; developers want to turn the bay into a holiday resort. Abel fears for Blueback’s safety: “That summer he learnt that there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being.”
Dora is the hero of the tale. Through years of dogged campaigning, she succeeds in getting the bay declared a marine sanctuary. Abel grows up, becomes a marine biologist, and travels the world with his wife Stella. But all the while, he yearns for Longboat Bay. Stella suggests they move back: “Do you want to be homesick or to be home?”
Tim Winton is an environmentalist, and this book is a clear cry for conservation. For me though, it’s also the story of how our hearts have a way of pulling us home.
‘My Country’ by Dorothea Mackellar (First published as ‘Core of My Heart’ in The Spectator, 5 September 1908 and available to read online here. Collected in The Closed Door and Other Verses, Australian Authors Agency, Melbourne, 1911, and hundreds of Australian newspapers and books since)
‘My Country’ is one of the best-known Australian poems. Many Australians can recite its second stanza by heart: "I love a sunburnt country / A land of sweeping plains, / Of ragged mountain ranges, / Of droughts and flooding rains. / I love her far horizons, / I love her jewel-sea, / Her beauty and her terror / The wide brown land for me!”
Dorothea Mackellar grew up in Sydney but spent a lot of time on a family property in rural New South Wales. The story goes that in her early twenties, she was speaking to a friend who’d recently returned from England and was complaining about the things that England had that Australia didn’t. Mackellar wrote ‘My Country’ in response. It is a love song, not to a person but to a place. When it was published in 1908, she shot to instant fame.
I lived in Australia for six years and have dual citizenship. The landscape, as described in ‘My Country’, is the most beautiful you’ll find on this planet: the russet earth of the Outback, kangaroo-filled valleys, rainforest-lined beaches, vast kingfisher skies. I understand the pull it had on Mackellar’s heart. However, like all places, Australia is not without conflict.
Mackellar’s biographer Deborah FitzGerald addresses “the invisibility of Indigenous Australians in this work” and notes that “My Country has been politicised over the years by both the left and the right in order to justify differing ideology about drought, bushfires and climate science...”
It's worth reading the response to ‘My Country’ of fourteen contemporary Australian poets, who address issues related to land and belonging in Transforming My Country: A Selection of poems responding to Dorothea MacKellar’s ‘My County’, edited by Toby Fitch and published in 2021 by Australian Poetry Ltd. Another contemporary companion to this poem is Ziggy Alberts’ heartfelt song ‘Together’, which he wrote in the wake of the 2020 bushfires. It’s hard not to be moved by both.
‘The Boat’ by Nam Le (Collected in The Boat, Canongate, 2008; you can watch an animated version of it here)
Nam Le’s family fled Vietnam in a boat after the Vietnamese War. He arrived in Australia as a baby with his parents and older brother in 1979.
In 2008, Le published a collection of short stories called The Boat. The stories cover themes associated with migration, but also examine people who feel connected and disconnected, rooted and adrift.
The final story in the collection is also called ‘The Boat’. Its protagonist Mai is a 16-year-old girl whose father fought for the South Vietnamese against the Communist North. After the fall of Saigon, he was put in a reeducation camp, where he lost his sight. In the wake of the war, fearing what the future entails for them, Mai’s mother pays for Mai to escape the country. Mai travels several hours by bus to meet an ‘uncle’ who takes payment to get her on a boat overcrowded with other refugees. Mai departs, leaving her parents and little bother behind. At sea, the boat is hit by a huge storm:
“Hugging a beam at the top of the hatch, Mai looked out and her breath stopped: the boat had heeled so steeply that all she saw was an enormous wall of black-green water bearing down; she shut her eyes, opened them again – now the gunwale had crested the water – the ocean completely vanished – and it was as though they were soaring through the air, the sky around them dark and inky and shifting.”
The boat loses its engine and starts to drift. Days pass. They run out of water and people start dying. By the end of the story, Mai is one of the few who have survived. Someone on board spots land, but we’re left hanging, unsure of what will happen to Mai.
The story is an exercise in empathy. Its final scenes bring to mind the ending of Paul Lynch’s Booker Prize winning novel, Prophet Song. Should Mai feel fear, or should she feel hope?
This year, 16 years after writing The Boat, Nam Le released his second book. 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poetry that examines how concepts of identity and authenticity can straitjacket a writer, and I assume, by extension, a human being. I’m extremely interested in what he has to say about both.
‘Off the Record’ by Xu Xi 許素細 (Collected in Insignificance: Hong Kong Stories, Signal 8 Press, 2018)
Xu Xi ran the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing programme at City University of Hong Kong from 2010 to 2015 when it was closed in a move that was criticised by writers from Hong Kong and elsewhere.
This collection was published after that closure, as the territory accelerated from postcolonial status as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China to full Mainland Chinese rule. The stories deal with Hong Kongers as they grapple with the rapid changes.
The protagonist in ‘Off the Record’ is a 62-year-old Hong Kong American journalist who’s moved back to the city after many years abroad to help his ageing mother and dying father. His main preoccupation is women past and present, and most of the story revolves around them.
However, the thing that interests me most is his relationship with the city he grew up in. He is at once disillusioned by it, but at the same time drawn to it, conflicting sentiments that I relate to; it’s possible to love and hate a place at the same time.
The story is set in 2014, during the Umbrella Movement, a time of heightened political unrest.
It opens with a quote from a speech Chairman Mao made to the CCP in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution. The speech in its entirety, we are later told, warned party members against dissent and somewhat pointedly reminded them they were lucky to be alive.
Our protagonist comments that despite the changing political situation and fears about what the CCP might do to quash the unrest, “…people carried on, surviving as best they could, thriving when the heavens smiled upon them, weeping when tragedy befell.”
Whether we like it or not, the places we call home are constantly changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Change benefits some people, harms others, and is simply ignored by many as they muddle along. Sometimes, it’s not even that a place is changing, it is our personal attitude to that particular place.
The story ends with these sentences: “History proved the Chairman wrong, spectacularly wrong about so many things. But that one time, at the start of another new moment in China, he might have been right. Familiar old stuff was just that, old, and being alive, having survived, was way better than being dead.”
‘And How Much of these Hills Is Gold’ by C Pam Zhang (First published as a short story in The Missouri Review, July 2017. Available online here. Later published as the first chapter of the novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Riverhead Press/Virago, 2020)
C Pam Zhang wrote this piece as a short story and put it aside. It was only later that she decided to expand it into a novel. So, I am counting it as a short story. To me, it is perfect.
The story is set in the American West at the end of the Gold Rush. But, unlike the rugged cowboy heroes of classic Westerns, Zhang’s protagonists are two girls of Chinese descent, 12-year-old Lucy and her 10-year-old sister Sam. The story opens with the two girls standing over the corpse of their Ba, a failed gold prospector and a brute of a man, made all the harder by poverty and drink. Their Ma is long dead. Penniless and destitute, their mission is to survive in this inhospitable land and to find somewhere to call home.
Zhang’s landscape is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s frontierland: harsh, arid and violent. “Noon sucks them dry. Street stretched shimmering and dusty as snakeskin. End of the dry season, rain a distant memory. They kept quiet, saving spit. The clapboard buildings loomed gray now that heat’s flaked the paint away. People lounge in shadow like dragon lizards. Like lizards, only their eyes move.” By centring of the experience of two Asian American girls, Zhang broadens the quintessentially male territory of the classic Western, allowing her to explore gender, gender identity and race, and their intersection with poverty.
The epigraph in the full novel is This land is not your land, a play on the title of the famous Woodie Guthrie song. The antipathy felt in that slightly changed lyric sums up the story of migration for so many people.
The writer Daisy Johnson describes Zhang’s talent as ‘dazzling’. I cannot think of a better word. Each word shimmers; each sentence sings. If I ever reach the stage where I can write as well as C Pam Zhang, my work in this world will be done.
‘The Match’ by Colson Whitehead (First published in The New Yorker on 26 March 2019 and available to subscribers here. It is an adapted version of a chapter in Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Nickel Boys, Fleet, 2019)
I include this short story, despite the fact it is also part of a novel, because I couldn’t curate an anthology without including a piece of writing by Colson Whitehead. Also, by any objective measure, this story stands by itself.
Whitehead is one of my literary heroes, The Underground Railroad among the best books I’ve ever read. Whitehead writes the brutality of racial violence with unflinching directness. I called on his writing when recreating scenes of real-life brutality in my own novel.
The Nickel Academy, in which the story is set, is based on the Dozier School for Boys, also known as the Florida School for Boys, a juvenile reform school that was a hothouse of abuse, rape, torture and murder.
Its inmates - I call them that though many had not committed any real crime - were separated within the institution by race. ‘The Match’ is about the annual boxing match between the best black boxer and the best white boxer within the school. This year’s favourite is Griff, the prize fighter on the black boys’ side. He’s roundly disliked because he’s a bully, but “no matter what he did the rest of the year, the day of the fight he would be all of them in one black body and he was going to knock the white boy out.”
The white superintendent tells Griff that he must “take a dive” and let the white boy win. However, Griff, who has “stones in his fists and rocks in his head”, miscounts the rounds and ends up winning by mistake. Griff’s ‘punishment’ is to be dragged outside in the middle of the night, strung between two oak trees, hands tethered to iron rings hammered into each of their trunks, and beaten to death.
“When the state of Florida dug him up, fifty years later, the forensic examiner noted the fractures in the wrists and speculated that he’d been restrained before he died, in addition to the other violence attested to by the broken bones.
“Most of those who know the story of the rings in the trees are dead by now. The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep in the heartwood. Testifying to anyone who cares to listen.”
Testifying to anyone who cares to listen. It strikes me that that is the point of all writing. And no one does it better than Colson Whitehead.
‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (First published in The New Yorker in February 2010, and available to subscribers here. Published in book form by Faber and Faber, 2010. Revised paperback Faber and Faber, 2022)
The cruelty meted out to children by adults in the Florida School for Boys is reminiscent of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries, as described by Claire Keegan in Small Things Like These. Though that novella is among the finest I’ve read, it’s Keegan’s short story ‘Foster’ that has had the most impact on me.
‘Foster’ is narrated by a young unnamed Irish girl who is sent away to live with relatives she doesn’t know because her mother is pregnant and her parents have too many mouths to feed. From the outset, it’s clear that John and Edna Kinsella care for the girl more than her parents ever have. “‘God help you, child,’ Edna whispers. ‘If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.’”
Edna bathes the girl and clothes her, cleans out her ears and brushes her hair. John talks to her kindly, holds her hand, and gives her money for choc-ices in town. These are the parents you wish the girl had. The Kinsellas have their own reasons for wanting to pour out their love; we discover that the couple lost their own child in an accident.
Keegan writes about the small kindnesses people show each other and the quiet powerplay between people who do not much like each other. Her writing is spare; it’s as much about what people don’t say as what they do, what doesn’t happen as what does: “My father takes rhubarb from her, but it is awkward as a baby in his arms. A stalk falls to the floor and then another. He waits for her to pick it up, to hand it to him. She waits for him to do it. Neither one of them will budge. In the end, it’s Kinsella who stoops to lift it.”
Keegan has a way of making you ache with longing for her characters. The ending of ‘Foster’ is enough to hollow you out. The first time I read it, I cried and cried. Keegan has said that, for her, the girl ends up back with her parents. However, she’s also said that it’s for the reader to end the story for themself. For me, the final sentences offer ambiguity. When the child utters the word ‘Daddy’, so clearly intended for Kinsella as she grasps him tight, I find myself willing her back into his arms and choose to feel hope.
‘The Republic of Motherhood’ by Liz Berry (First published online in Granta and available to read here. Collected in The Republic of Motherhood, Chatto and Windus, 2018)
I had my first baby a long way from home. I missed the support network of family and old friends. My son was a terrible sleeper, and the sleep deprivation nearly broke me. I don’t think the difficulties of adjusting to life with a newborn baby are well enough discussed.
In my current role, I have a fantastic mentor, Professor Abi Curtis at York St John University. I discovered Liz Berry’s poetry in an anthology Curtis edited about early parenthood called Blood and Cord, which contains poetry and short stories about love, loss, grief and loneliness. I liked Berry’s poems so much that I bought The Republic of Motherhood to read more. The titular poem sums up the time in my life when I felt the most untethered:
“In snowfall, I haunted Motherhood’s cemeteries, / the sweet fallen beneath my feet - / Our Lady of Birth Trauma, Our Lady of Psychosis. / I wanted to speak to them, tell them I understood, / but the words came out scrambled, so I knelt instead / and prayed in the chapel of Motherhood, prayed / that the whole wild fucking queendom, / its sorrow, its unbearable skinless beauty, / and all the souls that were in it. I prayed and prayed / until my voice was a nightcry, / sunlight pixelating my face like a kaleidoscope.”
The novel I have enjoyed reading most this year is Claire Kilroy’s Soldier Sailor, which is also about how hard early motherhood is, another work of genius as far as I’m concerned.
‘Shit Life Syndrome’ by Stu Hennigan (awaiting publication)
The project I’m currently working on is run by the writing development agency for the North of England, New Writing North. A Writing Chance aims to open access to the writing industries for new and aspiring writers from working-class and lower-income backgrounds, and for those who face barriers due to intersecting challenges. I met Stu Hennigan, a working-class writer living and working as a senior librarian in Leeds, through this project.
Hennigan is known for non-fiction. However, I think it’s his fiction that people should read. He writes about working-class lives in the North in the vernacular with beautiful Douglas Stuart-like phrasing.
In this story, Jonny meets up with his childhood friend Nat, who he hasn’t seen in months because she disappeared leaving a note asking him not to try and find her.
“In another world they’d have been childhood sweethearts. They were spawned at opposite ends of a scruffbag terrace where what passed for gardens sprouted fucked fridges instead of flowers and every other house had at least one gaffertaped binbag where a window should’ve been. Devonshire Street, it was called. Folk said it was named after a Duke or summat, whatever one of them was.”
When Nat eventually contacts Jonny from Brighton, he saves up and makes his way there. We sit with them on a beach near the charred remnants of a burnt-out West Pier as they get drunk and high.
Though Hennigan lays out rusty, unshiny lives, his characters do not seek pity. He refuses to sugarcoat his stories or make them redemptive to appeal to middle-class readers, saying he’s against “reductive, stereotypical crap”. Hennigan believes that the best endings are ambiguous, which I happen to think too; good writing should make people think.
At the end of this story, Nat flings off her clothes, completely wasted, and heads out into the sea, even though she can’t swim. Jonny, who can’t swim either, has no choice but to follow her. The scene brings to mind one of my favourite songs, The Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’: “He saw her shoulders go under and threw himself forward but she was just out of reach, his fingers grasping empty air and as a fuck-off wave rolled up, crested, poised, a heartbeat from shrouding the tranquilized gaze of the bored, uncaring sky.”
‘Shit Life Syndrome’ was praised by an editor at The New Yorker as a "work of evident merit". I suspect it’s too peculiarly British to strike a chord in the States, but a publisher here should pick it up. We need more stories like this, and work of this merit should be published.
‘The Things We Ate’ by Kit de Waal (Collected in Common People: An Anthology of Working-class Writers, edited by Kit de Waal, Unbound, 2019)
Kit de Waal was involved in a previous iteration of the project I’m working on, which resulted in this collection of short stories and essays.
Food is one of the things we associate most strongly with home. De Waal’s shortest of short stories is a list of the food that she grew up with:
“Sliceable, fry-able, pink and trembly Spam, steak and kidney pies cooked in a tin that opened with an exciting key. Tinned pork in see-through jelly. Red, molten corned-beef hash, sardines – skin, flesh and vertebrae – and six pigs’ trotters in lemony water, the lungs of a chicken, the neck of a lamb. Ribs.”
The list is full of nostalgia, longing, familial happiness; reading it is like being wrapped up in a warm coat:
“And cocoa with sugar and unexpected, unaccountable heart-lifting chocolate shortbread biscuits after a winter’s night shift from a silent father who thought of his children on his long walk home.”
‘Dart’ by Alice Oswald (From Dart, Faber and Faber, 2002)
Oswald spent three years recording conversations with people along the length of the River Dart in Devon. Her poem ‘Dart’ is a polyphonic log of these voices, from a walker and chambermaid to fishermen and poachers to tin-miners and wool mill workers to a canoeist who drowned. We also hear the mystical forms of nymphs and ancient kings. It’s so much more than a poem: sociological research, documentary, creative non-fiction in vignette.
Here we have the ferryman near the mouth of the river as it approaches the sea: “Dartmouth and Kingsweir - / two worlds, like two foxes in a wood, / and each one can hear the wind-fractured / closeness of the other.”
The wind-fractured closeness of the other. Isn’t that beautiful?
We tend to see the other in almost exclusively human terms, but the other also exists in the nature around us. Oswald has said that she likes the “unfixity” of water, the impossibility of pinning it down to one time and place, “a whole millennium going by in the form of a wave.” A reminder that human life is ephemeral, however hard we try to tether ourselves to physical places.
One of the things that has horrified me most about moving back to the UK after a long time away is the state of our rivers. It is nothing short of a tragedy. Oswald wrote Dart in 2002. I wonder what condition the Dart is in now. I live in York, by the River Ouse, which is frequently pumped full of sewage. My granny lived in Hay-on-Wye. I swam in and canoed on the Wye all through my childhood; now it is full of algae blooms caused by phosphates from the shit of 20 million chickens farmed in its catchment.
Through my current work, I’ve met the brilliant writer Tom Bullough, who is currently recording the stories of more than a hundred people along the course of the Wye, from the Wales-England border to its source in the Cambrian Mountains. The result will be an installation that, much like Oswald’s Dart, “will represent multiple communities – their histories, hopes and concerns – but also, centrally, reflect upon the Wye itself: a river which, due to agricultural pollution and the impacts of climate change, has become infamous for its poor condition.” I’m so interested to see the work that he produces.
‘The Man Who Planted Trees’ by Jean Giono, translated by Barbara Bray (First published in French as ‘L’Homme qui plantait des arbres’ in 1953. First published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, 1996)
I want to end my anthology on a hopeful note.
This allegorical tale is about a young man who encounters Elzéard Bouffier, a shepherd, while walking in a denuded valley in the foothills of the Alps in 1913. Our narrator stops to chat with the shepherd, who takes him back to his hut. After a simple meal, Bouffier takes him out and shows him what he is up to, which is planting acorns. Over the course of three years, the shepherd has planted a hundred thousand trees, of which about ten thousand have grown.
“Because I was young I naturally thought of the future in terms of myself, and assumed everyone sought the same happiness. So I remarked how magnificent his ten thousand oak trees would be in thirty years’ time. He answered quite simply that, if God spared him, he’d have planted so many trees in those thirty years, the ten thousand would be just a drop in the ocean.”
The young man returns at the end of the First World War to find the deserted valley is now covered with native trees. He continues to go back each year, and each time there are more and more. The addition of so many trees has changed the environment completely; streams that were once dry flow again, and the deserted valley is attracting families.
A government delegation, in complete ignorance of the shepherd’s work, declares the area a “natural forest” and protects it. One year, our narrator takes a friend, who says of the shepherd: “He’s the wisest man in the world! He’s discovered a perfect recipe for happiness.” When the shepherd dies in his late 80s, he leaves behind an invigorated land.
The tale became a touchstone for the environmental movement in France and beyond. Jean Giono never took any royalties; he allowed the story to be distributed for free. My copy contains an afterward by Giono’s daughter Aline, who mentions other titles the story has had over the years, one of which is ‘The Man who Planted Hope and Reaped Happiness’. I prefer that title.
Bouffier’s active citizenship is quiet and plodding; it binds him to the land in the best possible way. The story serves as a reminder that amid all the loud, shouty voices, and all the bad we find in the world, there is also good.
Angharad Hampshire is a writer, audio producer and university lecturer based in York. Her novel The Mare is published by Northodox Press in September 2024. It is based on the true story of female concentration camp guard Hermine Braunsteiner, the first person to be extradited from America for Nazi war crimes.
* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.
* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.
* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!
* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.