Output details

Flyaway

Flyaway is the first-person, present-tense story of a character aiding a wild swan to fly, coupled with the care of a sick father. I asked myself creatively how the healing influence of family and wild nature might bear on a young girl’s experience of family illnesses . A question also in my mind was whether wild swan migration could function revealingly as a metaphor for the “journey” of a long-term illness, while at the same time being present for its own sake in the novel. Could it be a way of engaging a young audience emotionally with the experience of long-term illness without being dauntingly explicit? And could that experiment lead to other points of comparison between, for instance, family and flock? The challenge was also to explain, for a young readership, the details and power of a whooper swan migration as well as long-term illness. Secondary research drew upon my experience as an environmental educator for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds at Newport Wetlands,; it also involved extensive reading about mythological and cultural links between swans, journeys and illness.