In January 1987 I began studying for a masters in International Relations at Syracuse University, New York State. I was able to choose most of the modules, needing thirty credits for the degree. At the start of my first, cold semester, I tromped up through the deep banks of snow for my opening class in Social Conflict Theory under Professor Emeritus Louis Kriesberg. There were around ten post-grads in a smallish room. Rather than outline a set syllabus, Lou asked us what sort of social conflict we wanted to study. It turned out ten people could have very different ideas about what social conflict theory might be, all the way from understanding tank numbers and naval tonnages to domestic abuse. It was quite an active debate as I recall, with a smiling Professor Kriesberg largely watching on. I think it was really a neat way for him to get to know his new students. The overriding subject though, which everybody had tacitly agreed they wanted to learn more about by signing up, was conflict.
Thirty years later I did a second masters, this time in Creative Writing at Chichester University, England. You might assume this was a more sedate area of study, but probably the most common critique in writing workshops was that a given story didn’t contain enough conflict. It didn’t have to be pistols at dawn, but there always has to be enough grist between or within characters to satisfy the readers’ constant need for strife. And boy could some of my colleagues write some truly dark stories! My recently published short story collection on the echoes of the American Civil War, In the Shadow of the Mountain, tries to show how the bloodletting of that great conflict, shifted and morphed through grief and trauma into the lives of survivors and on into the generations beyond.
With so much conflict in our current world, it got me thinking about my own writing and interests. Last spring I was at a Civil War Round Table conference. Two indulgent days listening to and discussing battles fought during the campaign for Atlanta. I loved it of course. Fifty people, wondering how they personally might have fared from the safe vantage point of one-hundred and sixty years on. Only it didn’t feel as distant as it did at earlier conferences. It may be that the casualty numbers in Ukraine will come to match the civil war’s three-quarters of a million. And the bloodletting in Gaza and Israel is way beyond the dead of Gettysburg. The human need for conflict, whether you want to read about it or practice it, seems as strong as it ever was.
I was listening to a history podcast about the Titanic recently. There were first, second and third-class passengers on that ship, yet if you watch the movie or read accounts from the time, the second-class passengers are largely airbrushed out, as they undermine the neater binary conflictual storyline between rich and poor. Even our entertainment, from contact sports to Love Island, is all essentially pitched as conflict. It makes me gloomy for the future that this is the way we are hard-wired to understand the world.
We were in Western Australia earlier last year, visiting friends and touring with them along the southern coast. They took us to a dramatic lookout point where you can step out onto a metal grid that extends partially out towards the cliff on the other side, the Southern Ocean rolling and crashing down in The Gap forty meters below. It’s awe inspiring. The Aboriginals used it as part of their creation myth, telling a story about two brothers who were fighting over the same woman. The elders got fed up with them and put them on either side of The Gap, one with a boomerang and the other with a spear which they hurled at each other. Both were hit and plummeted down into the water, one transformed into a shark and the other a swordfish. It’s a colourful story. But even way back then it seems the aboriginals chose to define the world around them through conflict, or maybe they just understood it was needed for a good story.
Shire’s Union
Short Story Collection
Shire's Union 
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