"Kissing Moths Not Frogs"
I'm delighted to be hosting friend and wonderful writer Vivienne Tuffnell on the occasion of her latest book, a collection of short stories called "The Moth's Kiss", several of which I had the privilege of reading as they were being written.
Viv and I share the imperative to interrogate life and our surroundings, to really dig deeper under surface appearances, although we take different stylistic approaches in our writing. But while I content myself with sitting at home and processing everything as thought experiments, Viv has a huge wealth of knowledge and experience in many different fields which she brings to her writing and being. Deeply spiritual, she has a wonderful
blog about all things to do with the human psyche, both the things that damage it and the things that help heal such assaults.
Viv never veers away from dealing with deep, deep emotions and she doesn't sugarcoat the darker things in life whenever she happens to be discussing them in her writing. I can't recommend her writing enough.
Over to Viv-
Folklore fascinates me, and it's younger
sibling, the urban myth comes a close second. Once you start looking at them
both, you realise there is a hoard of inspiration for writing but also they're
something that thread through much of modern consciousness. When it comes to
superstitions, most people claim to be above it all, but there are things that
seem to undermine that.
The tear-drinking moth is one of those things.
I thought it was a myth and I casually asked my
brother to confirm this. His area of expertise is lepidoptera, and I grew up
with bugs of all sorts so I'm deeply grateful that he stuck largely to
butterflies and moths as his primary interest. He's had a room full of
tarantulas since I left home, and would like to breed scorpions too. When I
mentioned the moth that drinks tears he surprised me. It exists, and he sent me
links to some photos of it. It looks harmless enough until you realise that
this moth does not merely wait patiently for tears to spill from sleeping eyes,
but rather it provokes them. It uses its sharp proboscis to poke the eye and
make it water, causing serious irritation and spreads various disgusting
diseases. Creepier still is the evolution of a moth that drinks not tears but
blood: http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2008/10/081027-vampire-moth-evolution-halloween-missions.html
I'd be lying if I said I set out to write a
story about the tear-drinking moth. I didn't. I'd got to a part in a novel I
was writing where I needed to step back and look at the narrative from the
outside. The novel in question is the third in a series, the first of which is
The Bet, and I was trying to
create a penetrating sense of menace, of that creeping sense of being watched.
So I stepped outside and in a number of pieces, I became the observer, watching
and waiting and plotting. Most of it is liable to sit on my hard-drive, unseen
but the short story I named The Moth's Kiss for its reference to the
tear-drinking moth was obviously capable of
standing alone as a story in its own right.
I enjoy writing short stories; it's a very
different discipline to that of writing a novel. As a result I write a few in
bursts and often do nothing more with them. I've published one collection of
shorts, with a theme of ancient deities interacting with the modern world, and
I wondered if among the many stories stuffed onto my computer I had sufficient
to produce another collection with a theme.
That's when I had the idea of The Moth's Kiss
as first tale in a sequence of stories with related themes. Initially I thought
of it as scary stories, but on reflection I realised that each of the selected
tales dips into some well-embedded folklore and urban legends. A Devil's Pet
visits the abiding belief that cats are uncanny and evil. Black Hole is
entwined with some quite new beliefs, made widespread by such books as The
Secret, that we can draw to ourselves what we need or deserve by merely
focusing our thoughts on our goals with sufficient confidence; I took this
so-called Law of Attraction and had a little fun with it. Both Green Willow and
Bitter Withy incorporate both
ancient folklore of the willow tree being the champion of the discarded lover
and other more recent legends, such as the oracle of iPods on shuffle.
Each of the ten stories links to some abiding
belief whether ancient or modern or a combination of the two. I have heard that
Einstein is said to have recommended that for intelligent children you should
read them fairy-tales and for more intelligent children, read them MORE
fairy-tales. I'm not convinced about the intelligence bit but fairy-tales,
folklore, urban legends all emerge from various strata of the collective
unconscious and point not just to our primal needs but also our collective
primal fears. This is why we can be transported back millennia by a good story
well told; it takes us back to a time when that prickling feeling of being
watched was worth heeding for it may have meant that Smilodon or other ambush
predator was lurking in the long grass licking its lips. Such a tale reminds us
of our fragility even in our technological bubble and there's really nothing
like being shocked by a brush with death (even fictional) to make us feel vibrantly
alive again.
The Moth's Kiss is available from Amazon UK: USA:
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