Lorna Fergusson – Tapping into Sensory Memory in France

Absolutely delighted to have Lorna Fergusson back on the blog after a 10 year absence! Apart from being a skilled and evocative writer, she’s a writing coach, editor and speaker. Her work includes The Chase and An Oxford Vengeance.

She runs Fictionfire Literary Consultancy and has taught on various Oxford University writing programmes since 2002. Her stories have won an Ian St James Award, the Historical Novel Society’s Short Story Award and been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Pan Macmillan’s Write Now prize. In 2021 and 2022, she was runner-up for the Mogford Prize. In 2024, she made the category shortlist in the Historical Novel Society’s First Chapter competition.

She’s developing one of her Mogford stories as a novel, as well as working on poetry and a book on mindset for writers. Her latest book is One Morning in Provence, a collection of stories set in France.

Over to Lorna!

Writers make things up, don’t they? Of course they do. But writers also tap into real knowledge, experience and emotions. We may set out to do that deliberately, or it happens once we are under way, unearthing memories long forgotten, memories which invest the story we’re writing with emotional resonance.

The power of place often comes first in my creative process. I’ve been lucky to live in some amazingly historic or lovely locations. I was brought up in the north of Scotland and have lived in Oxford for many decades. Hard to avoid inspiration there! I visit Cornwall every year – it is another of my soul-places. And then there’s France…

Shutters on a building in Arles

I’ve been inspired by France all my life, during many visits long and short. A half-share in a holiday home in the Dordogne gave rise to my novel The Chase, where buying a mysterious house in the forest teaches my main characters how the past resonates into the present.

Last year I decided to write a collection of stories set in France, one of which ended up being a sequel to the events in The Chase. Where better to start writing them but during a wonderful writers’ retreat in the Loire with my friends? And yes, I know the internet gives us all sorts of opportunities to ‘visit’ places virtually, but there really is no substitute for physically being there.

Visiting Amboise: Left to right: Jane Davis, Jean Gill, Alison Morton, Lorna Fergusson, Carol Cooper, Karen Inglis, Clare Flynn

What happened was quite extraordinary. I tapped into my own experiences of France, over a lifetime’s worth of trips. Each of those experiences was linked to a particular French region. As I invented people and adventures my own sensory memories flooded in and gave each story its flavour.

Ochre cliffs at Roussillon

When you’re writing, you want to transport your readers to the setting. You want them to feel they temporarily inhabit it. The mistake is to fill a story with dry facts. You are not writing a guidebook. When people travel, they are open to new thoughts, new realisations, new epiphanies, because a change of place has that effect. There’s a vulnerability. There’s a dislocation from familiar routines. Travel makes you look at things in a new light.

A theme started to emerge, as story after story flowed onto my iPad screen. I hadn’t set out with a single binding notion for this collection. It created itself. My characters, when they visited Paris, the Loire, the Dordogne, the Atlantic coast, Provence – these wonderful locations where they would be transient presences – found out something. Yes, they learned about French geography, gastronomy, history, culture – but more than that, they learned about themselves. They were confronted by memories, longings, forgotten emotions, important turning-points.

Avoiding a dry guidebook style, as I’ve said, is crucial. So too is an overly schematic diagram of human psychology. Good stories are well-structured but they should have an organic quality. The lessons and revelations in these tales needed to emerge as a natural consequence of interaction, not just with people but with place. And it’s here that the senses play such a crucial role.

We’ve all heard of Proust’s Madeleines: how the taste of a cake triggers a cascade of memory, not just of the flavour of the cake but of the ‘self’ one was when one ate it before. My characters were eating cake, or olives, or fine cheese. They were listening to the sound of olive branches bending as the Mistral blew. They were basking in the heat of the south, standing on top of the highest sand dune in Europe or gazing awestruck at the rose window of Chartres cathedral. I plucked sensory images from my own memories and gave those to the characters, fascinated by how they would take those impressions and run with them. They often ran in unexpected directions!

Hilltop village of Gordes

If you like writing about places, whether you’re describing an urban or rural landscape, a strange or a familiar one, help your reader out: go deep into the world of the senses. Don’t stop at the visual – remember sound, touch, scent and taste too. A choice image can do the work of a ten-line paragraph if it speaks straight to your reader’s sensory memory – and it will!

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I cannot agree more with Lorna and I heartily recommend her new collection of stories which will plunge you into la France profonde.

One Morning in Provence

To travel is to meet yourself…

The sensory richness of France unlocks unexpected truths for those who travel there.

A stressed-out publicist learns what getting away really means.
A divorcee’s new happiness bewilders her friends.
A woman’s dream holiday rental turns to nightmare.
Unhappy couples fantasise about new passion.
A young girl is transformed by wonder on her first trip abroad.
Pain strikes an older woman, in a landscape of impossible perfection.
A widower finally understands the consolation of art, unlike the artist who has spent his life denying it.

In these evocative stories flawed people are ambushed by hopes, regrets and longings. Inspired by the breathtaking beauty around them, can they change their lives?

Buy One Morning in Provence here: https://books2read.com/ProvenceMorning
(Ebook and paperback)

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Connect with Lorna:
Website:  https://www.lornafergusson.com/ and https://www.fictionfire.co.uk
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LornaFergussonAuthor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lornafergusson/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lornafergusson.bsky.social
X: https://x.com/LornaFergusson

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My thoughts

Living in France and having visited almost every part of the country since childhood, these stories resonated with me – each story was a delight as each one opened up a memory for me. I remember sipping an Orangina in a café when I was a child!

The star of the stories is always the place: you feel you are touching the gate wall, being thoroughly warmed by the southern sun and surrounded by the sounds and scents rising from the herbs and pines around you, all under a luminous blue sky characteristic of the south.

But the characters are achingly well-drawn. You are inside the mind of each person, their small and large concerns and feelings. And they are oh, so human.

France is a big country, but Lorna makes it easy for us by including a little map before each story.

A sumptuous read. Treat yourself!

Alison Morton is the author of Roma Nova thrillers –  INCEPTIO, CARINA (novella), PERFIDITAS, SUCCESSIO,  AURELIA, NEXUS (novella), INSURRECTIO  and RETALIO,  and ROMA NOVA EXTRA, a collection of short stories.  Audiobooks are available for four of the series. Double Identity, a contemporary conspiracy, starts a new series of thrillers. JULIA PRIMA,  Roma Nova story set in the late 4th century, starts the Foundation stories. The sequel, EXSILIUM, is now out.

Find out more about Roma Nova, its origins, stories and heroines and taste world the latest contemporary thriller Double Identity… Download ‘Welcome to Alison Morton’s Thriller Worlds’, a FREE eBook, as a thank you gift when you sign up to Alison’s monthly email update. As a result, you’ll be among the first to know about news and book progress before everybody else, and take part in giveaways.