© Still Here Magazine
If you’ve read my recent posts about the state of the world – a world hostage to the crazed and destructive whims of the current occupant of the White House – you’ll be surprised to hear that I’ve just had a short story published in a magazine-issue whose theme is ‘hope’.
Issue 3 of the digital literary magazine Still Here features 19 poems and 18 pieces of fiction, each of which – in the words of editor Alauna Lester – “is a reminder that there is always light, even when it filters in quietly through the cracks.” For that reason, the issue is titled Sunlight through the Cracks. My contribution is a story called Learning to Leave and, as it’s set in Northern Ireland and doesn’t contain any elements of fantasy or horror, it’s attributed to Paul McAllister, the penname I usually put on stories of that sort.
The story, and its title, were inspired by an academic paper, Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community, which was written by Michael John Corbett and published by the University of British Columbia in 2000. I read it in 2008, when I was beginning to study for an MA in Education and Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA). One of the MA’s tutors, Professor Bryan Maddox, sent a copy of the paper to his students. At the time, I suppose my course-mates and I had a missionary-like zeal about the transformative powers of education – we believed the world would be a much better place if all its inhabitants got to go to school, full-stop. Corbett’s paper, though, advised caution, noting how one Canadian coastal community had suffered, not benefitted, from the educational system its young people had gone through.
By making us to read the paper, Bryan was playing devil’s advocate. He wanted us to stop and think about the medicine we were so keen to prescribe. Education, at least not in a one-size-fits-all form, isn’t necessarily the solution to everyone’s problems. (Bryan, incidentally, was a great teacher. I spent much of that year at the UEA tearing my hair out in frustration at lecturers who believed it was acceptable to subject their students to multi-slide PowerPoint presentations, overloaded with text, with zero time to process anything. Bryan, though, kept the number of slides he used to single figures and encouraged discussion and reflection, and you walked out of his lectures feeling you’d actually learned something.)
Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community struck a chord with me because its message corresponded to something I’d noticed a few months earlier. I’d accompanied my dad on a trip to Northern Ireland and, for the first time in decades, visited the little village in rural Country Tyrone where I’d spent my childhood. And, years afterwards, the memory of that visit, plus the message of Corbett’s paper, compelled me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write the story Learning to Leave. However, because it appears in Sunlight through the Cracks, it isn’t wholly bleak. Some hope appears late on in the narrative, from an unexpected source.
As usual, Alauna and her team have put much care and effort into producing Issue 3 of Still Here and it’s a visual as well as a literary treat. You can download a copy of its third edition, Sunlight through the Cracks, here.