Joya: AiR / Shona McCombes / GBR

photo Simon Beckmann

Joya: AiR / Shona McCombes / GBR

“I came to Joya: AiR at a transitional moment: one week after moving house, a week of living crowded among boxes and plastic and paint, I arrived in this space of absolute spaciousness, clean simple lines and sparse open landscapes and sky. Rooms uncluttered with the debris of everyday life – a place for the mind to roam around without stumbling on something that stops it short.

It was transitional in other ways, too, the season changing palpably through the course of my November week here. Subtler than the sulk of the northern winters I'm used to, where the sun slams the door on you and holds a long grudge; here it's more of a gradual cooling off, a gentle turning away.

Like other transient spaces, there's something suspended about Joya, a cocooning. But there's also something like a narrative thread: a coming and going of people who each weave their own small set of journeys, an exchanging of routes, a passing down of stories (the moonlight dance, the sunrise hike – moments I missed that became part of the lore of the place).

Sometimes, the outside punctures it. During that one November week: news from the Argentinian election, from the Dutch election, relentless news from Palestine. The book I was working on – set in the Netherlands (land of carefully controlled waters and slowly sinking foundations), backgrounded by the Brazilian election of 2018 (land of vibrant mix and violent clash) – starting to feel real again, in good and bad ways. The book had gone through a long lull, and maybe it had felt like those vicious forces were going through a lull too, for a moment, the biggest and brashest of them briefly quieted – but none of it really gone, of course. The world expands and contracts; the work continues”.

Shona McCombes

Shona McCombes is a writer from Glasgow. Her fiction has been published in Gutter Magazine, New Writing Scotland, 3:AM Magazine and Extra Teeth, among others.