Now the rain has stopped
the parakeets are noisy
and the soil is soft.

Hats and gloves come off
inside the vintage dress shop:
red lipstick, blond hair.

I am going to start with The Party. This is the first short story that I ever wrote. Living in a small, dark room in Havana, I decided to write. I read Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, and she said that anyone could write stories, so long as they paid attention to their life, and didn’t get too fancy. And I saw her point. I didn’t understand how anyone could invent anything. The core story, the emotional one, is always true of its author’s life. It’s always their voice, small or unheard, one they may never dare express, embodied in the work.

Bakery in Vedado, Havana. The words read: Por la dignidad de la patria, movilizacion cederista - For the dignity of the homeland, local mobilisation

I am disappointed with The Party. It reads as if I took the best, raw, bits of writing from the notebooks at the time, and polished them into what I thought a short story was supposed to be. I wanted to remove myself from the work, but in doing so threw baby out with bathwater, so that the story had no point of view – or a ghostly narrator about whose feelings we know little, with whom we can not emotionally engage.

What I thought when I re-read source material in my notebooks for The Party. They contained much that was left out of the final draft

I need to go back to the source material and experience that party again. I was a stranger there – overwhelmed and bewildered in Alamar, a Havana suburb, with no other foreigner for miles around. Nothing made any sense and I was writing to escape from overwhelming claustrophobia in a poor town where I understood little, and could not make myself understood. Each point of reference dissolved. Cross-purposes, my broken Spanish, the order of the day. This is the core of the story, and I realise that so far, I have lied: The Party is serene and the ‘I’ who narrates a calm and happy woman, unaffected by events. For honesty’s sake, I must get the dissonance back in.

Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.

Five cyclamen bulbs
and a red anemone:
will tolerate shade.

Some sheep and ponies
in the fields that flicker past,
windscreen wipers on.

Red circle, white square:
a name for a new book.
Some sunshine at last.

Two sourdough loaves
cooling on a wire tray.
A short snow flurry.

Just back from New York, I go upstairs to the spare room and retrieve a huge dusty rucksack that contains all the notebooks from my Cuban project*. Plus a fireproof box. Before going away, I got really scared my house might burn down and tried to scan them all. Realising it was a losing battle, with 48 hours to go before the flight, and 24 packed handwritten books, I did second best: stashed some in the rucksack, and crammed as many as possible into an Argos fireproof box.

So I take my notebook – the large A3 one that I’m charting the process of this collection in – and get back to the project, which has been on hold for a month since I submitted my Arts Council grant application and went away. This large one is the master-notebook. I have so much material from those six years to fashion into stories, half-made, or just dreamed, that I can no longer see their shapes. I need an overview.

And, time has passed. The original material is vivid – lived. The stories have percolated, though, and they come out better now. I’m distilling fiction from real life.

After I’ve written a bit, I sit here in my kitchen and think, which story is the next? How am I going to know?

Tomorrow, I will thread my way back – from 24 to one – and find out where it is.

* I am writing a collection of short stories set in Cuba, where I spent time between 1999 and 2006. Nii Parkes, of Flipped Eye, is my publisher and editor – we’re preparing the book for print later this year.

The town clock strikes two.
A bus with misted windows
arrives at the stop.