Cath Barton on the creative process behind ‘A Suitable Feast’ from Issue 14. You can also listen to Barton read the story below. 

 

My story ‘A Suitable Feast’ was essentially a response to my anxiety during the COVID pandemic.

When Italy was locked down in early March 2020 I had no idea that would happen here too. I naively thought that if the virus did reach the UK we would be safe outside London! I actually wrote a story at that point about people falling sick with a mystery virus and the consequences for a couple of holiday in Switzerland (‘At the Hotel Swinburne’, eventually published as Willesden Herald Short Story of the Month in May 2024). No story is totally easy to write, but I remember no anxiety about the process.

I know there are people who found lockdown a liberation and were able to get on with their writing and enjoy it. Not so for me. It would be a long time before I could write again at all. During the first lockdown the only writing I did was a daily diary page and a five-minute free writing exercise online with strangers, Monday to Friday. I was – like many people – afraid. We had good reason to be afraid, as our government(s) blundered along and we had no idea what was going on and – without exaggeration – whether any of us would survive. I was lucky, very lucky. I have had COVID, twice, but was not very sick on either occasion and did not suffer any long-term effects, though my anxiety easily flares. I am very conscious that many others were not so lucky. I think that a combination of my own anxiety and awareness of the dreadful consequences of the pandemic for others made me shy away from writing another pandemic story. We had had enough of it in reality, why put it into our fiction too, I thought.

But I have always said that I write fiction to make sense of a senseless world, so an experience as big as the pandemic was bound to find its way into my work eventually. Looking back I see I wrote the first draft of ‘A Suitable Feast’ in January 2022. COVID was far from over and I was yet to have my first bout of it, but some sort of hope had been rekindled. To quote Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot:  ‘I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’

Baking was something I did during COVID. By chance I had done a one-day sourdough baking class just before the first lockdown. Obviously in lockdown I was at home a lot, which is just what you need for the sourdough process! So I baked bread every week and shared it with a friend. Kneading the dough was a soothing process and I was producing something, for all that I was not writing. I experimented with different flours, different bakes. I also experimented with other cooking, and it was an article in a newspaper about the cuisine of the Levant that provided the first impetus for ‘A Suitable Feast’. The narrator of this story is a musician whose career has been sideswiped by the pandemic. Like me she is afflicted with anxiety. Like me she bakes to relieve that anxiety. Unlike me she goes further and sets up a catering business, and she gets a rather unusual request to prepare a feast of Levantine food. Ostensibly this is a treat for a young man, but it turns out that there is more to it than this. Whether readers will realise what is going on before the end I do not know; there are clues, but my hope is that there is enough tension to keep the reader’s interest, and at least provide an entertaining diversion from the on-going craziness of the world.

Nowadays I bake much less; I keep anxiety at bay by getting out into nature, walking the hills and running, and, after a fallow period, I am (thank goodness) beginning to get ideas for new stories.

Cath Barton’s first published novella, The Plankton Collector, which won the New Welsh Writing AmeriCymru prize in 2017, has just been republished by Parthian. Her further novellas are In the Sweep of the Bay (2020, Louise Walters Books), Between the Virgin and the Sea (2023, Novella Express, Leamington Books), The Geography of the Heart (2023, Arroyo Seco Press) and The Miniaturisation of Sheila Trinket (forthcoming, Arroyo Seco Press).

A pamphlet of her short stories, Mr Bosch and His Owls, was published in 2024 by Atomic Bohemian.