Iter II

Cartwright, Anthony

Abstract

We have a family funeral in Telford.

“The only good thing about that place,” someone says, “is the road out.”

Iter II is a hybrid essay, combing teaching notes and prompts, flash fiction and critical reflection in the form of personal essay and family memoir. It builds on my teaching on the Creative & Professional Writing Programme at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and my own practice as a novelist, writing particularly about the experience of working-class families in the English West Midlands.

Iter II, or Watling Street, is these days known, at least in part, as the A5. The road runs from Marble Arch in London to Admiralty Arch, by the waterfront in Holyhead, before the boat to Dublin, and is haunted by the ghosts of industry and empire – the Roman, the British – throughout its length, not least from the English West Midlands into North Wales, which is where my focus lies.

We start in Telford, named for Thomas Telford, the great eighteenth/nineteenth century engineer, who, as well as designing the road itself (laid over the ghost roads that came before it), built the Menai Suspension Bridge, which carries it onto Anglesey, many other bridges along its route or nearby, and the miracles of the aqueducts at Pontcysyllte and Chirk.

It is with a re-imagining of Midland industrial and engineering process (by J.R.R.Tolkien, by Stephen Knight with Peaky Blinders, in steam-punk) that we continue with a discussion of ideation from haunted landscapes, and to show this, I offer my flash fiction, The Beetle Sea. There follows an essay tracing the formulation of The Beetle Sea to my own family’s history of itinerant work, hop-picking and boxing booths, before returning to Thomas Telford, the strange legacies of his work, and the hauntings of industrial/imperial/creative enterprise.

• Deposit Date: Feb 9, 2024
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Book Title: Haunting Lives
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11677587
• Contract Date: Jan 24, 2024