Mirror, Mirror
Click on the images below for an edited recording in two parts of a word and image workshop for Book Week Scotland, 21 Nov 2024. In Part One, Kirsty Gunn reads from a short story, "Mirror, Mirror" from her new collection, Pretty Ugly (Rough Trade Books, 2024), and a short exchange between Kirsty Gunn & Gail Low ensues over some of the themes and features of the story. In the last section of Part One, Gunn sets the first of her creative writing exercises. In Part Two, Gunn sets more creative writing exercises and Jean Duncan talks participants through creating word-and-image concertinaed books; both creative activities stem from the morning's reading and discussions.
The Dress
Is it an outdated tradition to pass your wedding dress onto your daughter? Or maybe it’s always just been a sentimental thing?
I would have worn my mother’s beaded, lace and silk gown in a heartbeat if I could have, but my wide hips, broad back and pointy shoulder blades were no match for my mother’s delicate build.
The four decades old fabric was also too fragile to alter. A bride of forty in her day was unheard of, already labelled a spinster. We packed my mother’s dress back into its polythene cover and hung it back up on the attic storage rail in the house my parents lived in for as long as I could remember.
So, now I have my own dress. A two-piece in ivory coloured satin with a silver embroidered bodice and a full skirt with a matching silver panels down the front. The bodice pulls me in so tightly like the ones you see in those period drama films. I imagine my mum on my wedding day, one foot pushing on my buttocks so she can lean back and pull the silk ribbons in even tighter. The herring boned bodice squeezing me in so I can no longer exhale fully.
The skirt and bodice fit so well together you’d never know it’s a two piece. At the back of the skirt a long train sweeps out. It even has a small hook I can pick up and place over my wrist to lift it up when I am dancing. I tried on so many dresses until I found this one. It’s so pretty.
The day I found it was extra special because my dad had decided to come dress shopping with mum and I; I was his little girl after all. While mum and I were in the changing room with the bridal assistant my Dad sat outside on a gold gilded throne-like chair. He was treated to glasses of fizz, cups of tea and chocolates while Mum and I sweated away squashing me in and out of dresses. Mermaid. Aline. Strapless, Bohemian. Ball Gown. But when I stepped out from the curtains in this two-piece dress my dad paused for the first time that day.
No instant ‘no’.
No shake of the head.
No laughing out loud.
He paused.
‘That’s it.’ He said, simple and straight to the point.
‘That’s it,’ he repeated.
I turned and looked in the large bridal room mirror and paused as well.
Really paused.
‘I love it.’ I said. ‘I love it.’
That was the day I chose my wedding dress, not my mother’s dress but one of my own. The smooth, silky material and detailed embroidery was stunning. As I traced the pattern of the thick silver threads down the central panel my palms skimmed the corseted shape of my breasts. Reaching my waist my hands glided over my hips following the sumptuous folds of the fabric. I didn’t want to take it off. I felt as beautiful as the pictures of my mum on her wedding day. Almost.
So this dress… this beautiful expensive ivory dress, full of hope and dreams. The one I swirled and danced in on my wedding day. The one I didn’t want to take off. The one I fell asleep in. And the one that sits in my attic space, dry cleaned and perfectly pressed hanging in its dress bag with the silver embroidery visible through the small, oval transparent window.
The one that my daughter who was never born will never wear.
Marianne L. Berghuis
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Threads
Sometimes the most complex seemingly disparate things in our heads come together in our thinking like spoons in a drawer whilst simpler ideas just won’t align. I’m reading Dan Pearson’s recent ‘Dig Delve’ about garden design trends and abstracting from them what is memorable and important brings to mind the jumble of clothing in our wardrobes and drawers— scarves and hats, jackets and jumpers no longer worn but, for reasons of their connection with persons and events in our pasts we are unable to relinquish.
My friend likes to read Derek Jarman’s books about gardens, as I do, and talk about her own city garden that runs long and narrow almost all the way to the Cherwell (in my imagination, at least). In these times of considerable uncertainty, not knowing how her cancer will respond to this second round of chemo, her ideas overlaying with his. ‘Modern Nature is a kind of talisman for me’ she writes in a blaze of WhatsApp-words that capture the power in their landscapes of what is hidden and what is not. Where land and sky collapse, as horizons must, only in flares of a delicate light. Jarman ‘allows souls to usher forth and whisper of transience’… our mortality.
And it’s in these flares of a delicate light that I, too, find connections. Flares dispersed by visitations on our fabrics, on the clothes that we wear, which intimate our mortality. Like these viscose threads here spun into a cloth that had been for some years a dark blue scarf, spangled red, white and gold with an inimitable Paisley pattern, which belonged to my father. It first appeared in a cache of black and white photographs from 1957. I wore it too, intermittently, as a student in the 1980s when it became unfashionable to wear university colours. My father wore it for a short time after that until it was laundered and folded neatly into a drawer and forgotten, a drawer that wouldn’t be opened again until I really had to. All those iterations of its past, my past, caught and pulled back in this moment now of just looking. Our lives re-presented in a tassled weave of light and colour.
William Hume
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Beth McDonough’s poem and concertinaed book…