Exploring Our Past Through Fiction: In Conversation with Maureen Cullen and Kirsten MacQuarrie

This week, we’re continuing the conversation from Ringwood’s Memoirs Event with another insightful episode. Join us as authors Kirsten MacQuarrie and Maureen Cullen reflect on their experience as panelists at the event and dive into their respective works Remember the Rowan and Kitten Heels. Building on last time’s discussion of memoir, Kirsten and Maureen explore how fiction, too, can illuminate personal truths and help us understand different ways of telling our stories.

Kitten Heels Blurb:

‘It was a man’s world, that was for sure. It certainly wasnae a thirteen-year-old girl's.’

Kathleen Gallagher is resourceful, brave and tireless — but fated to work in the bra factory like her mother. It’s 1962, and Kathleen resents her situation. She has to look after her three younger siblings whilst her mother works part-time; collect the wages from her absentee father; and sacrifice her social life for responsibilities she never asked for. When Kathleen’s grandmother dies, the entire family dynamic changes — leaving the relationship with her mother to suffer.

Kitten Heels is a moving coming-of-age story, set in 1960’s working class Clydeside and told from thirteen-year-old Kathleen’s perspective. Dealing with issues of poverty, mental health, and the role of women, Kitten Heels follows Kathleen as she finds comfort and support in the community of women around her — learning from the way in which these women find ways to grow, nourish and heal each other, despite hardships and institutional obstacles set in their way.

Remember the Rowan Blurb:

‘If hate were love, if love were hate, it could not make our tale untold.’

Divorced and living apart from her two children as she strives against the odds to carve out a career in 1940s London, poet Kathleen Raine is initially unimpressed when she meets Gavin Maxwell, a would-be portrait painter struggling to recover from a recent breakdown. Nevertheless, the pair soon bond over childhood memories and a profound love of nature, epitomised by a mysterious vision they share of a rowan tree.

When Gavin confides that he is ‘more of a man’s man’, Kathleen remains determined that their connection can survive. They share a cottage in the wildest reaches of the West Highlands, where they care for Gavin’s beloved pet otter Mij and for each other. But when tragedy strikes, love soon turns to hate, and Kathleen finds herself being written out of her own life.

Inspired by the true story of Kathleen Raine and Gavin Maxwell’s ‘some-requited’ love, Remember the Rowan illuminates their extraordinary relationship and shines a light on the woman behind Ring of Bright Water.

Despite the hardships Kathleen faced in her relationship with Gavin, she went on to become a well-respected and successful poet.