ABSTRACT

When a writer catches the scent of a story so alluring that they have to drop everything to track it down, they often don’t know where it will lead or what genre or form it will shape-shift into.

Maggie Butt describes two stories which took over her life, which drew her to research she never expected to undertake and to outcomes she couldn’t have predicted. In each case the story itself dictated the published form.

The first was a moving WW1 story. She expected this tale of civilian internees to become the basis for a few poems in her third collection, but it eventually resulted in the publication of a book which was a collage of photographs, paintings, extracts from memoirs and letters and her own poems. The structure was based on that of an historical documentary.

The other was a WW2 story, told to her in a lift. She thought she’d put it to rest by writing it as a long narrative poem, but it struggled to its feet and led her off through the Czech republic, Poland and Germany, and finally to an internationally published commercial novel.