Laura Lam
Creative Scotland has awarded me funding that is enabling me to continue developing a project that I’ve been wanting to write for seventeen years based on three generations of my family. Though I’m an experienced science fiction and fantasy writer, The Rowan Women (current title) is very outside my comfort zone in terms of genre (a strange blend of historical, commercial literary women’s fiction, and autofiction), as well as structure and process. My grandmother’s strand is nearly entirely fictionalised, building on the scant details we know, my mother is first drafting “her” sections and I’m editing them to echo my voice, and there’s a fictionalised version of myself at 15 and my mother at 50 as an interrupted frame. My mother reads every chapter as I write it and the writing process is very dialogic. It’s been an at times strange but good bonding experience over our family trauma, especially since we haven’t been able to see each other due to the pandemic.
The book spans 1930 to 2004, with some sections set on the East Coast of the US, but the bulk of it is in California (I moved to Scotland when I was 21). The book has near murder, murder, models, a spy, madness, and more, but at its heart it looks at mental health and how the journey towards healing from a past that tries to break you is never finished, but it is worth walking along that never-ending path all the same. If you’d like to read the much shorter version, the essay “These Shadows, These Ghosts,” in the 2017 404 Ink collection, Nasty Women, was my first exploration of writing about my family.
I will be working with Sam Boyce, a former colleague at Edinburgh Napier, where I’m a lecturer, and now a freelance editor. She has experience in this genre/these genres and a familiarity with my writing style that means she’s an invaluable guide on this exciting but daunting project. I have a first draft, but Sam will be pushing me on my rewrite, making sure I don’t pull my punches. I’m very grateful for the Creative Scotland funding as it will give me structure, support, and regular checkpoints to keep me motivated. I’ll definitely never write anything this personal again, but my mom and I are looking forward to seeing what happens with it when it’s done.
