Unemployed

Well, take a deep breath .......   today is my last day of gainful employment.  I have just stepped off a cliff of security.  From now on I'm going to have to live on what I can earn as a writer, without the safety net of university creative writing tuition and the Royal Literary Fund Fellowship I've been enjoying at Lancaster. Scary stuff.

I took my books off the shelf, my personal belongings from the filing cabinet, took one last look at the tree outside my window and locked the door. I have very good memories of friendly colleagues and polite, hard-working, interesting students. Lots of thank you cards on my table at home - some quite exotic. And little presents of flowers, chinese red tea, a carved wooden desk jotter and chocs. It's lovely to feel appreciated. But I also feel a little sad.

On the plus side, I'm now free (after a couple of weeks of organisation) to begin my new life in Italy. Risky, exciting, financially mad. It's also a challenge. Will I be able to write there? Will any of the ideas I'm working on turn into publishing contracts? I've got a year to change my life before the savings run out. Wish me luck!

At University

I now have a new job - as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lancaster University.  The RLF is a wonderful organisation -  originally founded in 1790  as a charity to keep writers (and their families) out of the debtors' prison, they've been helping authors such as  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence,  and James Joyce ever since.   They've benefited from bequests from wealthy authors, like A.A. Milne, whose estates have swelled the coffers.   The rights to Winnie the Pooh currently fund the RLF Fellowship scheme  - which was a brilliant idea.   Writers are put into universities to help students with their academic writing:  the writer gets financial support in the form of a proper job, and the university gets a useful member of staff.  

I was lucky enough to be appointed as an RLF Fellow in 2006 and am now in my first term as the new Fellow at Lancaster.  It's a scary feeling starting a new job - Lancaster is one of the top ten universities in England and the students all look very bright and enthusiastic.  AAAgh!   But everyone is very friendly and welcoming, and I have a lovely office which looks out onto a courtyard with a gigantic tree.  In the first week I have managed to find the photocopier and the kettle and have achieved a staff card and an email address.  I have also seen an actual student!

I'm very concerned about the new government's plans to scrap the current cap on student fees.  Students already leave university with a crushing level of debt.  How do you afford to make a relationship, have kids, buy a house when you're already more than £30,000 in debt?   The idea that only the children of rich parents can now afford to go to university makes me very angry.   I grew up with the concept of free education and went to university fully funded in the nineteen eighties.  My parents could never have afforded to send me to university if they had had to pay.  They struggled to keep me at school - even uniform items were difficult to afford and I was usually in hand-me-downs.  My own children got to university during the era of student loans, unfortunately during a period when I was a single parent and unable to give much financial support.  Only one child made it to graduation but - oddly enough - now earns less than any of the others.     

I think we've got to completely re-think our approach  to education in England.  We need to value practical skills just as much as intellectual ones and we need to fund training (both practical and academic) for those unable to afford it to enable all our young people to realise their potential.   We also need to provide much more part-time study so that students can support themselves while studying and make it possible for people to re-train when they find themselves in the wrong job.  18 is far too young to choose what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

OK - I'll put the soap-box away and shut up!  I'm going to be quiet for a few days anyway.  I'm off to Knutsford literature festival tomorrow to give a book talk and then dash by taxi and train to London to do a book signing at New Zealand house (they're celebrating Katherine Mansfield's birthday).  Then at 5am on Saturday I'm getting into Neil's ancient car to drive down to Italy - hoping to get there on Sunday evening in time to fly back on Monday to go to work on Tuesday!  One of these days I'll be able to stop travelling and get some peaceful time to write.  

On the Train Again

If I’ve been off the blogosphere for a few days it’s because I’ve been travelling. The Royal Literary Fund hosts a summer party in London to allow its Fellows to meet each other as well as representatives from the university they’ve been appointed to. It’s one of those occasions when writers feel properly pampered - and we get to talk to each other.
One of the nicest things to happen to me has been being chosen as a Fellow. I spent two very happy years at Teesside University and now I’ve been given another post at the University of Lancaster, starting in October.
It’s a very unusual kind of job. The Royal Literary Fund has a long history of supporting impoverished authors - dating back to 1790. Coleridge was one of their beneficiaries, and Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were all helped out at one time or another. But more recently the Fund has moved away from just giving charitable donations. In 1999 it set up an innovative scheme that would help to support authors more widely while also providing a much needed service to students in universities.
During the nineteen eighties and nineties there was increasing concern about the levels of literacy in higher education. By licensing the rights to the Winnie the Pooh books, money became available to put writers into universities to help students with their academic writing. It’s a brilliant idea. The universities benefit and the writers benefit.
Without my RLF appointment it would have been very difficult to finish the Katherine Mansfield biography so quickly. The university supplied the research facilities and I had the security of a regular income while I wrote the book. Working with students was also hugely enjoyable.  So, on a summer evening in London (a bit warmer than the wild north) I raised a glass and said ‘thank you very much’ to the Royal Literary Fund and my employer - Winnie the Pooh!

Withdrawal symptoms

I’ve thought of doing a blog for a while, but resisted it until now. I’m a secretive kind of writer - the finished product is public, but I like to keep the process private. Also, a blog seems a bit like having a conversation with yourself - cyber navel-gazing? But I’ve begun to wonder if doing a bit of that will help me through what seems to be what psycho-jargon calls ‘a transitional point’.

My life is totally directionless at the moment - rather like standing in a hallway surrounded by doors, all shut and none of them labelled. I’ve just finished the Katherine Mansfield biography, and my stint as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Teesside university, which I thoroughly enjoyed, has also come to an end. The money will be hard to do without and it was really stimulating to be in the company of other writers - sharing an office with Bob Beagrie and Andy Willoughby was fun. Carol Clewlow and Marion Husband were also in the department, though I didn’t see them very often.

Finishing a book is strange - you go through a period of what I can only describe as bereavement. For five years my life has been driven by and centred round Katherine Mansfield. Now, she’s gone and I hardly know what to do with my time. I feel totally lost. There’s quite a bit of administrative work still to do - the permissions, the illustrations and the editing - both of which are quite tedious. Do people realise how much work there is at the business end of writing? Or how long it takes for a book to get published after you finish it? The first draft of KM went to my publisher in January and I completed the rewrites at the beginning of May, but it could be spring 2010 before it appears.

I should probably be lying in the garden with a glass of wine in my hand, soaking up the sun, but I can’t suddenly stop writing, so perhaps keeping a blog will help the withdrawal symptoms until I have a new project. Any ideas out there for another book?