Sofitel

In this rented room
his thoughts are
of who
owns whom.

Bar, Graphite on Paper, 2011

The place smells stale, it smells of things that have been bottled up too long and are beginning to seep out. He positions himself at the bar. The tumbler is thick, squat. Whisky covers ice bricks: his optico-acoustico-olfactory pleasure is satiated. The verb 'articulate'. Words. He's not scared of them. Words are for playing with, it's not a thesis, although he is an educated man. The verb 'orchestrate'. Whisky. First the words, now the images, time to watch them flow before he messes with them. Cut and paste, rearrange, but stay shy of delete. Never delete. Conditional 3, if he hadn't done that he would have done something else. They all would. Things would have been different. Things would be different. Things wouldn't have gone stale. Yes, they would. Same stale, different bottles. Same man sitting in a bar, alone. A different bar, but the same alone, which is the point. 

A Wee Poem: Lignite

You dig it up.

It’s been buried for years –

millions of them.

It used to be trees.

They must have been beautiful.

You burn it.

The smoke makes patterns.

Dark blue on sky blue.

People see things.

Beautiful things.

Some people

claim to see trees.

Others stare into the ashes

Trying to rekindle the memory

Of a moment’s warmth.

The Next Stop Is Croy - A Wee Film

Here's a short film of my story, 'The Next Stop Is Croy', which was first published in Spilling Ink Review

Part 1

Part 2

Taken from my collection, 'The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories', which is available here and here.

The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories

Reviews:

`The Next Stop is Croy and Other Stories' is a skilfully written collection of short stories that takes the reader straight to the bittersweet spot of the human condition. Exploring familiar terrains of shame, frustration and loss, the writer differentiates these stories by revealing those elusive, critical moments in life that knit together to make a boy into a man. The writer manages to distil a lifetime into the spoken (and unspoken) language of fathers and sons. I've had the honour of publishing other works by Andrew McCallum Crawford and I hope that you seize the opportunity to read this moving collection of stories.     Amy Burns

*****

This is a short collection of six, easy to read stories which recount various incidents in the life of a young Scot. We see their surfaces, their separateness, but we're also made aware of the echoes between and the depths beneath them.

In a foreword, the author prepares us for the collection by reminding us that they're stand-alone pieces which `in no way' constitute `a novella or a novelette'. Equally, though, he acknowledges that strong links and themes run through them and the resultant grouping conveys very strongly their potential as a `continuous narrative'. The tantalising effect of the sequence is to make us want to know more of what happened between the episodes and events he chooses. As it is, we can enjoy each passage as a self-contained story but, simultaneously, we create our own version of how the relationships shifted and developed in the `gaps'.
They're all told from the perspective of a single narrator, Alan, observing and experiencing the separation between his own lifestyle, choices and opportunities and those of his father. The language often seems to suggest confrontation and yet there's no mistaking the tenderness, nostalgia and love that informs it. There's an artlessness, a deceptive simplicity about many of the exchanges between Alan and his father when we hear the abruptness of the delivery, the seeming carelessness of the remarks and hidden accusations, and we know that both parties want to say other things, want to express the love that connects them. It's a love that never gets articulated and yet it suffuses nearly all their contacts.
The writing is clever. There are no great tragic outpourings; tragedy is a very personal experience, marked by memories of seemingly trivial things - finding lost golf balls, sharpening a saw, cutting through a counter, sensing yet never penetrating a secret shared by two girls. But, when recollected, they have the resonance of major life events, signifying much more than their surface suggests. The stories convey the fragmentation of life, its refusal to cohere into a constant flow, the power of memories and the helplessness we feel before them.
The feeling which remains is that Alan is somehow lost in his own life. It's failed to settle into the meanings he seeks for it, remaining instead as a collection of disconnected fragments, each consisting of elements which should draw them together. So in the end, we come to realise the artfulness of those claims in the foreword. Our lives consist of fragments - we can group and structure them to imply a significance but, in the end, the idea of a `continuous narrative' is a myth. We need to live in and understand the moment. Above all, we need to be prepared to see the value of the trivial and tell the emotional truths which are the real driving force of our being.     Bill Kirton

*****

28 years ago Alastair Gray changed the landscape for short stories by a Scottish Author with "Unlikely Stories, Mostly". Those of us who love Contemporary Scottish Fiction have since found the ground rather barren.

Andrew's new collection is like finding a flower sprouting out of cracked concrete - it's unexpected and he's yet little known. But it is eminently readable, even when it hurts a bit.'

He'll kill me for writing this.     Steve Alker

*****

Andrew McCallum Crawford reaches into his wordsmiths toolbox to investigate the relationship between boys and fathers. Although the stories have a Scottish background there can be no doubt the truths of the relationships will be felt worldwide. As before, the humour and veracity of Scottish life is laid bare... this is quite simply the work of a fine author on the rise. Buy it before he gets too famous.     Peter Murphy
 

The book is available on Amazon co uk and Amazon com.

Not A Wee Fiction: Mine

I don't have to go inside. I can see the oil stove burning in the middle of the floor, the patrons gathered round, talking, shouting, laughing, smoking. The scene could be duplicated in a thousand shops. And the talking, shouting and laughing would be the same in all of them, talk of money and the lack of it, of the state of the place, of what things have come to, of thieves, traitors. There is a lot I could add to the discussion, but I prefer not to. I remain, willingly, ametohos, left out, I have no stake in the debate. I am not of these people, I am from another place, a place with similar problems but no sense of itself. I am a stranger, ametohos, in both places. I am losing my mind. This is no personal choice, although it is the result of one. To find the richest seam one must dig deep. But the deeper one goes, the darker it becomes. There is blood on my hands from tearing at rocks which refuse to yield. I force a way through. I have to put myself in that place, to feel it. The seam, which is the past, is reached. It is a gallery of illusions, blackened with dust. Torn skin smoothes a mark in the kimberlite. The image is nothing more than a stain, meaningless. But I am now in the place. I lose myself in it. This is where I have put myself, willingly. A personal choice. This is where I have to be, where I must be, buried in this dark, mad grave. No longer ametohos. I hack at diamonds.

The Rank Amateur and the Roman à Clef

He wrote a book. It was a minor hit. Nothing major. It got a handful of good reviews. It dealt with a defining moment in his life. This defining moment had to do with things falling apart. There was no analysis of the event, only a few details of the event itself, the facts, and some of the things which followed. He was all for people drawing their own conclusions. It was a roman à clef, which was irrelevant in the great scheme of things, seeing as he was a nobody.

A minor hit.

The names, as they say, had been changed. He didn’t want to hurt anyone, he wasn’t that type of person. In any case, the names weren’t important, it was the facts, the event. He hadn’t written the book to examine other people’s motives. He had written it to understand the past, and how the past had affected the way his life had turned out.

Then something happened, or was made to happen. Something directly related to the book, caused by the book, but at the same time unrelated to it. This thing that happened was founded in reality, in the present. He could write a good story, it was true, but when it came to emotions and people who play games, to reality, he was a rank amateur. He had created an aura, and the fragments of that aura were lying on the ground at his feet, shattered, broken beyond fixing. But when he looked more closely he saw that the memory, the memory of the event, the defining moment, was still intact. This was his delusion, the key to the roman à clef. For that he was grateful. Grateful to himself, no one else.  

A Wee Poem: Player

He scans the ground ahead,
left, right and centre.
Eyes are for seeing.
There's a line you shouldn't cross.
It's a line that marks a boundary.
He imagines it as
Thick
White
like a line
on a tennis court.

But this is no game.
There are no rules.
Although there will be losers,
eventually.

He knows this.

He scans the ground ahead,
left, right and centre,
his eyes
peeled.

He will never find the line.
The line is invisible,
which,
in a game
that isn't a game
with no rules
only losers,
is fair.

In any case,
he crossed it
days ago.

The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories: fancy doing a review on Goodreads?

The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories by Andrew McCallum Crawford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It might be a bit cheeky of me to review this book - after all, I wrote it. However, reader reviews have just started coming in on Amazon, so I thought I'd paste some excerpts here.



"...takes the reader straight to the bittersweet spot of the human condition...the writer manages to distil a lifetime into the spoken (and unspoken) language of fathers and sons..................the humour and veracity of Scottish life is laid bare..................Andrew's new collection is like finding a flower sprouting out of cracked concrete..."



AUTHOR BIOG



Andrew McCallum Crawford grew up in Grangemouth, an industrial town in East Central Scotland. He studied Science and Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and went on to take a teaching qualification at Jordanhill College, Glasgow. His poetry and short fiction have appeared in Lines Review, The Athens News, Junk Junction, Ink Sweat and Tears, McStorytellers, Weaponizer, New Linear Perspectives, Spilling Ink Review, Drey 2 (Red Squirrel Press), Ironstone, The Legendary, the Midwest Literary Magazine and the 'The'. His first novel, 'Drive!', was published in 2010.'The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories' came out in October, 2011. He lives in Greece.



View all my reviews

The Next Stop Is Croy and other stories

Well, here it is. It begins like this:

The stories in this collection were not written in the order in which they appear here; they certainly were not conceived as part of a continuous narrative. However, I have decided to bring them together because of the chronology and themes which, it turns out, run through them. Please bear in mind that this is in no way a novella or novelette. It is a collection of short stories, and each story stands or falls on its own, as short stories must.

I find that the more I write, the more personal the writing becomes. I am putting more of myself into the work. This is not to say that my stories are autobiographical (although, admittedly, one of the stories in this collection is based entirely on something that happened, more than twenty years ago). There are moments of personal experience in the book, but I have used those moments, those brief scenes from memory, as the basis for something else. Exactly which elements from my life are contained in these stories is of no consequence. Readers may wonder, 'Did that really happen?', but in the final analysis it doesn't matter. They are Wee Fictions. They mean what they mean. And they will mean something different for each person who stumbles across them.

Do come and have a look. The Amazon pages for the book are here (.co.uk) and here (.com).