I am very fortunate to be on a two-week trip to England and Greece for the purpose of gathering ideas. I’ve spent time in the British Library, which is a massive institution that houses 170 million books, and I’ve spent time at Delphi and the Parthenon, both well-curated ancient sites. These have been rich experiences that have led me to new ideas and deeper understandings of old ideas. Many of the ideas feature stones, such as the fallen stones of ancient temples in Delphi.
I have also wandered… through the streets of Athens and the narrow roads of Galixidi, a 19th-century shipping town on the Gulf of Corinth… through the brick and stone arches of a Byzantine monastery in the Parnassus mountains… through the pastures and woods of West Sussex… and through the galleries of the British Museum, crowded with antiquities, some of which came originally from Athens, many of which are carved from stone.
The wandering has been just as fruitful as the deliberate researching. In both ways, and in all these places, I have been gathering ideas. From the odds and ends of archaeological debris scattered around the Acropolis to the amazing hodgepodge of junk in a shop near the Plaka, from the sign reading “Father Christmas has gone for a cup of tea” to the deer pelting down the path through the rain, I’ve collected a host of images and ideas, many of which will find their ways into novels that I’ll write in the coming years. Elsewhere on this website, I have said that writing is like the story “Stone Soup”: the stone is an image or an experience tossed into a delicious mix of things borrowed from life and brewed with made-up ingredients.
Along with the many stones I’ve gathered on this trip, which I hope to toss into the soup pots of novels-yet-to-be, I have also rediscovered one stone that I gathered years ago and tossed into a pot and forgot all about. Outside my friends’ kitchen window in West Sussex, growing in defiance of the damp, chilly English November, is a large and hardy rosemary bush. The rosemary that grows on the island in The Rosemary Spell originates, in part, with this unex
pected rosemary bush, which grows in the town of Cuckfield (pronounced Cookfield) whose name I borrowed for the fictional town in my novel. Like an archaeologist digging in Athens, I’ve unearthed one of the stones that formed the base of my soup.
It is appropriate that I have put the finishing touches on The Rosemary Spell in Cuckfield, drinking tea and watching the wind and rain batter the rosemary bush outside the window. This stone, this image has done its work. I can hardly wait to see what soup comes from the stones I’ve gathered on this trip. I’ve already set them to simmer.