A Book of Banished Words

Delighted to have a short piece in Nancy Campbell's just published The Polar Tombola: A Book of Banished Words (photo from @BirdEditions).

More on  Nancy's live literature event  here: What happens when a language begins to disappear?


I first met Nancy on Twitter via a photo of a snowdrop three years ago and we came to 'know' each other through my dear late stepdad. My own banished word is described in 'The Hoot of an Owl', here is a fragment:

Coxsackie – pronounced cook-sah-kee – is the name of a small town on the Hudson River in upstate New York. Derived from Native American language, it’s said to mean the ‘hoot of an owl’. Poetic when whispered, but Coxsackie can also be a bully, swaggering its hard-sounding ‘C’s.

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Life is truly stranger than fiction. How could I have known in winter 1982 that the hellish illness that had ruined my year in France - yet to be diagnosed as Coxsackie virus, which in turn triggered ME - would, thirty-five years later, be represented in a piece in a beautiful art book whose author had (by then) done a residency in my stepdad's childhood home in Greenland?