Iota Fiction
Editorial
I’m in Vicenza, Northern Italy. The shutters are down, though between its slats I can see the heat
shimmering like a shoal over the rooftops. It’s one o’clock in the afternoon and I’m alone. I’ve
eaten the figs - fragole dei boschi and its gorgeous companion the peach; sometimes eating helps
the words come. I say sometimes. I stare back at the computer screen. The phone rings. It’s my
youngest son. He’s in Cornwall. He rings to tell me he’ll be back in Italy in a couple of days, but
for the moment he’s full of the coastline, St Ives, or more specifically Peter Lanyon the painter. My
son’s a fine art student, still finding his feet. For the moment he’s in love with Lanyon, ‘Mum, he’s
brilliant’, he effuses, and I can hear the bubbling excitement in his voice.
After putting the phone down I think hard about what he said. I suppose Lanyon’s remembered
most for his painting, famously for transforming the art of his native landscape. Rejecting the
picturesque notions and conventions for the gritty reality of Cornwall, spaces inhabited by miners,
farmers and fisherman, the ancient historic and industrial environments that he felt were
vanishing, but it was his eclecticism, his willingness to go beyond one prescribed form that
proved compelling. This broader ambition to reach further made him a great painter as well as an
inspiring figure.
I suppose what I’m trying to say is that this desire to experiment, to roam, is akin to unfettered
reading and an engagement with all forms of writing that extend the depth and breadth of reading,
and ultimately lead to an informed critique of writing. Lanyon, physically as well as mentally,
explored the land he loved and felt wedded to. Over time he walked, motorcycled, drove cars
across the land’s contours. He lay on the ground face down, back down, looking towards the sky,
sideways to the rocks, sea, beach and coves.
The story is Lanyon straddled his legs, peered through them like a wishbone, face forward craned
over his shoulder, eager to see the land, its altered perspective. Not satisfied with this he took to
the sky, first as a climber scaling sheer cliffs, then from the air, as a glider pilot. In his efforts to
disrupt a conventional perception of the surrounding world Lanyon was prepared to take risks,
create new challenges. For it’s the imagination that gives the sense of a place inhabited, not merely
the place itself.
Close, critical and discursive readings, to my mind, are key to fine writing. Surely it’s only by
exploring a range of fiction drawn from all genres that we begin to refine, to make informed and
critical choices about what we read, or do not read, and ultimately this leads to questions about
what we want to write about, if we are also writers.
Beyond his modes of observation Lanyon experimented at first, as a lot of writers do, with
different styles, techniques and materials. Although painting became his primary concern, he
drew extensively on printmaking, ceramics and sculpture, he worked with wood, plastic and
glass, made object based ‘constructions’, as he called them. As all writers and poets will recognise
he devised work from what he ‘found’, such as objects from the beach, or dredged from the river
bed. How many times has a work of great literature arisen from a tale overheard, or a newspaper
cutting; where would Dostoyevsky be without those? Or the poet without the small ads, urinal
graffiti and so on?
Lanyon was also concerned with the concepts of the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds of landscape and its
effect upon man, just as ultimately the writer is often concerned with the nature of the self; though
they may get there in many different ways and call it something else. But for Lanyon, it was as
much about the cave or mine, as it was about everyday surfaces like grass or stone or spoil heap.
I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that this is all I’d hoped this first fiction issue of Iota
would be. I kept being told tales; how one type of writing is valued as legitimate, whilst another is
not. This is absurd; good writing is good writing, is it not? What
happens if we eat the same meal everyday? I’m digressing, but if you look at the diverse works of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Ecco, Borges, Isabelle Allende, Fellini, Neruda, Sergio Leoni,
don’t we see the hand of the Italian writer Emilio Salagari, Father of Italian adventure fiction? Or
perhaps the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri and his
acknowledged debt to the work of Pirandello.
I didn’t want this review to focus on one style of writing alone: no pigeonholes here. The pieces
are drawn from a large body of short fiction submissions and commissions. Short narrative fiction,
the essay and life writing are all featured. And so many book reviews are of ‘the present’,
contemporary works that are ‘live’, ‘out now’. With this in mind I thought it might be interesting to
have another look at novels that perhaps got overlooked, along with forgotten classics or works
said to define a period, or are perhaps innovative in some way. In time we hope to extend this
philosophy and would welcome comments and suggestions. I hope that Iota Fiction becomes a
place were innovative, fresh and challenging new writing gets the chance of an airing. There. I
hope too that the works represented here are like the pieces of coconut you sometimes see
displayed in Venice, cut into sickle slices, exquisitely arranged on a tiered cake stand, sprayed
with a little jet of water which bubbles over their surface keeping them fresh, cool, ready for the
first bite or as the poet W. H. Graham said in his moving elegy, 'The Thermal Stair', of his friend
Peter Lanyon, ‘Out of sight to quarter a new place.’
Jane Weir
Editor
Iota Fiction
Vicenza