The Importance of Being an Outsider

There are two questions that people always ask me – first why I write about Cornwall (they inquire knowing I’m an American living in Dubai) and second how do you write about Cornwall if you’re not there (they assume it would be easier sitting in my Cornish home rather than in the villa in Dubai with the frangipani and the bougainvillea).

So to the first…I think, as writers, we have to write about what we are passionate about. Of course this changes as we do. Happily for me my love for the Duchy has grown since my first visit in 1989 when my then boyfriend brought me there for my first visit. I didn’t know at the time that this was the ‘Cornwall Test’. If I hadn’t fallen in love with Cornwall that weekend then our month long relationship would have ended and we wouldn’t be nearing our 24^th wedding anniversary.

The magic of Cornwall began one glorious June weekend in 1989 when the sky was piercingly blue and the hedgerows filled with foxgloves, but it has to be truly love if my heart leaps to the sound of pounding rain and a howling gale, or gets lost in the joy of a mizzly day. Have you ever been some place that moved you so much that you wanted to be a part of it? But know you would never belong, you could never hold it? Cornwall is that way for me. I long for it and it inspires me but that is a whole different subject.

What I want to talk about is the importance of being an outsider – for my writing. I wasn’t born in Cornwall, I wasn’t even born in the UK so there is no way that I can truly belong. Yes, we own our permanent home near the Helford River and my youngest was born in Cornwall, but I am an stranger. Initially this realization hurt but then I understood it was a gift. By being separate I see things differently, feel them differently, in fact, experience the place in a different manner. Nothing is taken for granted. This distance is useful. If you’ve grown up with something you almost don’t notice it but if it’s new then you it see down to the last detail.

Back in 1998 we were living in Moscow and each day the landscape shocked and astounded me for about six months. I thought I’d never become used to the tower blocks on the way to the boys’ school. I wrote to my parents during these months full of the differences, then a few more months down the line and I realized I’d become accustomed to it all…it had become familiar. It was no longer strange, it was home. It had happened without me feeling the change.

Familiar can be good, it can certainly save on the research, but think of how clearly things appear when you’ve been away. I fly back to England and the green hits me hard after the sand of Dubai. I reach Cornwall and the birds that wake me in the morning sing an old but yet new song…. the pace is slower, the air clearer, sweeter yet more pungent… I could go on and on.

Which leads to my second point…. how do I write about Cornwall when I’m away? Like many writers I don’t see the screen or the keypad… I see the scene, whatever it is, in front of me. So I can be sitting at my dining room table in Dubai looking out on the night scented jasmine but be ‘seeing’ Falmouth Bay in the late afternoon with its surface broken like fractured diamonds reflecting the setting sun bleaching out the blue sky. But what makes it more intense is my longing to actually be there. I am like a woman missing my lover, the big and small details make me ache.

Being an outsider means you observe things, you long to be a part so you look more closely at everything. Being away from your ‘love’ means you can call up the smallest details in order to make them feel closer. Gosh I do sound as if I have it ‘bad’ for Cornwall and I do. I will always be on the outside looking in and wanting to be a part of it… the unattainable.

This longing is really useful to a writer. To be able to call up all the stored details, the things observed from the outside. I want my reader to ‘feel’ Cornwall as I do. It’s the same concept for my heroes… I have to want them.

If I don’t fancy them, then how will my reader? Do you remember your first crush on a musician or a film star? Can you still see them even though you were never part of their lives? Do you remember the longing? It’s powerful and as a writer if you can use it you can convey the emotion to the reader.

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Tags: a Cornish House, expat writers, Liz Fenwick, women writers

Category: On Writing