Home | Giving Up Architecture – Eliza Mood
I suppose you might say ‘Giving up Architecture’ is a novel shaped by sea and stories. A little like my life. I identify with the North East of England where I was brought up; hills and coast, the sun rising over the sea. Now, though, I live almost as far North on the Western shore and watch the sun set across the bay.
And stories. As we all do, I grew up listening carefully to my mother, Maggie’s, retellings of her own adventures and those of the people who inhabited our little corner of the world. She has always had the flair of an oral teller; no matter how slight, or how many interruptions, the story was more important than anything else we might have been doing alongside – shopping or washing up or coping with the difficult times. The character performances could be hilarious – and we must reach the end, at all costs. The words ensnared you, the way she spoke them, even if everything else seemed chaotic; they created a spell, a sense of the importance of small things, the extraordinary struggle of human beings.
So, in ‘Giving up Architecture,’ the idea that turned into two teenage girls who wander back and forth along a shore during the last two years of World War Two, their parents preoccupied, telling stories, captivates me as a writer. Their little world is self-created and enclosed. It both separates them from the voices of war with which they live on a daily basis and at the same time, perhaps, brings them closer to understanding something of what is going on around them. And the character, Lou’s, name, so my dictionary of first names tells me, means hearer of the voices of war.
Although I wanted to write about the aftermath of war and its repercussions, I also wanted to say something about the power of kind of tales I used to tell with my class as a schoolteacher; tales about ‘Jack and Death’ and ‘Raven’ and ‘The Man who Wanted to Live Forever’, the kind of tales you might have told or heard, the ones that leave us with a sense that we are connected with other lives, other times.
Those were the stories I began thinking and writing about as a young teacher in Northumberland; somehow the research just seemed to grow. But that wasn't enough. I wanted to write a different kind of book about the stories we share, sometimes across cultures and times, retelling or rewriting them for ourselves as each new generation identifies itself as new and yet not so; to write about how stories can get under the skin, working away at a subconscious level even if not given admittance to our conscious minds. That was how Clem and his story came about.
Perhaps this website might be a place where we can share stories and experiences of writing about them or writing them. We might exchange some thoughts on my community discussion board; talk about ideas for supporting the creative writing of children and students, or about our own ideas for ways of collecting and storing those gems that fall in the dust each day. Or just tell.