Dartington: Day 2

Beautiful sunny day - though I woke up feeling the effects of too much wine and partying the night before.  There were lots of interesting people at dinner - Howard Marks, the drug courier who has come out of jail to write crime thrillers (Sympathy for the Devil); comedian Harry Hill, who was quite unlike his TV persona.  I sat next to him but was too diffident to strike up a conversation. What do you say to someone famous for their wit?
Food writers Joscelyn Dimbleby and Elizabeth Luard were very good company - Elizabeth could remember dancing with Mick Jagger at parties in the sixties (check out her memoirs!).  Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review was there briefly, and Blake Morrison - who is as nice as his books suggest he might be.  He was sitting with Ted Hughes wife Carol.
So, a very enjoyable dinner.  Being shy is a distinct disadvantage though - I’ve never been good at this networking malarkey and have absolutely no small talk.  But I do like people and enjoy listening to interesting conversations.

We ate our breakfasts on the lawn after the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated, but it turned out to be only someone burning the toast.  After my Christchurch litfest event was prevented by an earthquake, I did wonder whether my Dartington appearance would be thwarted by the Hall burning down - probably giving rise to the legend of the Mansfield Curse!!

In the end the talk seemed to go smoothly - all beautifully choreographed by staff and a very good chairperson.  Though nervous I was soon feeling better in front of a friendly, welcoming audience - I even sold some books afterwards.

The only downside was having to get into the car and drive 350 miles home afterwards - a gruelling 8 hour motorway epic on a hot sunny day we would have loved to spend on the lawn at Dartington.  I shall just have to write another book and get invited back!

Dartington Hall: the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture

The bliss of Dartington Hall and the Ways with Words literature Festival!  The Hall is one of the most beautiful buildings in the south west of England - grey stone walls crammed with history.  Add in the delight of many of your favourite authors, green lawns to lie on with the sunlight filtering through the cherry trees, a glass of wine in hand and Waterstones’ book tent just across the grass, and  - as a way of spending the afternoon - it takes a bit of beating.

I first came to Dartington 20 years ago to talk about Christina Rossetti, so it is wonderful to be here again to celebrate their 20th anniversary as a literature festival.   The bedroom I’ve been allocated is like a royal suite - one of the heritage rooms with antique furniture and medieval graffitti.  The bed was so big I needed a step-ladder to get into it!  Sadly, I couldn’t take a photo of the wall drawings because the white wall just reflected back the flash.  A ship has been carved into the wall, probably by soldiers billeted here at the end of the 14th century.

           
Once we’d unpacked and recovered from the 7 hour drive, we went to the Ted Hughes Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall, given this year by Blake Morrison.   He was brilliant on Hughes’s poetry and his life, making illuminating connections between the two informed by  interviews he had had with the poet.

I hadn’t known that Ted Hughes had given up his study of English Literature because, after struggling for hours on an essay,  he dreamt that a fox came into his bed, burnt and injured.  The fox put his paw (a human hand in the dream) on a white page and left a bloodprint on the paper.  ‘Stop this,’ he said to Hughes, ‘You are destroying us.’  After that, Hughes transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology believing that the structures of critical thought taught by the university system ruined creativity.   The fox became the equivalent of a ‘spirit guide’ and it occurs three more times in his poetry - the marvellous Thought Fox, and the ‘fox for sale’ poem in the Birthday Letters.   Later Hughes told Blake Morrison that for a poet  ‘Prose is a killer’.

Apparently Hughes felt that the real fall in human history had come with the loss of animal innocence - and that our egotism, introspection and self-consciousness separate us from our creativity and prevent us being whole.   He often quoted the phrase ‘Every man must skin his own skunk’, and he believed that every poet must be true to their own experience - getting to grips with what was real.  Poets who could do that became healers.

Later he apparently acknowledged that much harm had come from his decision not to write about his own tragic experiences  - the deaths of  Sylvia Plath and then Assia Wevill and her daughter by Hughes.  Not dealing with grief and its consequences, he said, creates a canker inside that eats away at your creative self - it ‘takes a piece of yourself away, like an amputation’.

More from Dartington tomorrow.

Ways with Words

Not much time for blogging at the moment.  I'm madly packing suitcases, arranging the house so that someone else can collect the mail and water the plants, and preparing a talk for the Ways with Words festival at Dartington  Hall on Thursday morning.   It's a long drive, so I leave tomorrow, returning for a few hours on Friday to collect the suitcases before catching a plane for Italy.   It's frantic, but also very exciting.

Rather nervous about Dartington.  It's a lovely festival in the most beautiful surroundings,  but the hall is usually packed with an audience passionate about literature and expecting the best from their authors.  It's one thing performing on the page, quite another on the stage!  My talk is going to focus on Katherine Mansfield and her relationship with DH Lawrence and his wife Frieda when they lived in Cornwall - not that far from Dartington.  Fingers crossed!

No Tuesday Poem from me this week, but please go to www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com web site to have a look at what others are posting.

Going Down - a newspaper sinks with (almost) all hands

Extraordinary scenes in London this week as one of the most profitable newspapers in Britain has the plug pulled after revelations of a systemic culture of corruption, political skullduggery, police bribery and phone hacking.  Now we know how they got all those stories about footballer's fancies and politicians' peccadilloes.  The sight of white-faced journalists (with families and mortgages) having to pack their things and leave the office after only two days notice is sobering.  Many of them weren't even employed during the crucial period, or were too junior to have been involved.

Unfortunately the captain of the ship and the chief engineer seem to be almost the only members of staff to get a lifeboat.  Doesn't seem fair.

The News of the World crash is going to change things.  My guess is that it's the end of the line for the extreme power that the media has exercised for the past several decades unchecked.   The Prime Minister has already called in the men in dark suits to reform the Press Complaints Commission and  we don't yet know how far the reforms will go.  When politicians start tinkering with press freedom, one can't help but get a little anxious.  But the current situation  - where newspapers can operate above the law with owners too powerful to be called to account - is untenable.

I know people who feel so strongly about the Murdoch empire they won't have anything to do with literary events sponsored by them - I was given a very uncomfortable time when I agreed to do a creative writing workshop for the Sky Arts programme recently.   I was very torn - but there isn't a lot of employment for authors and you sometimes find yourself at literature festivals with sponsors you don't necessarily approve of.  After the revelations of this week, my reply to the invitation might have been different. 

The Tuesday Poem: William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

William Blake, from Songs of Experience


This poem always makes me shiver, but it is so beautiful I keep going back to it. I suppose some would say it's because the poem articulates a universal truth, the mortality that lies at the heart of everything. For me, it's also a poem about passion and about the transformation of one thing into another. The worm that munches the rose petals, thrives and eventually becomes a butterfly, or moth, laying her eggs on yet another rose.

Roses, roses, roses and more roses

We've had a few days of really lovely weather up here in the north - after months of poor weather and rain nearly every day.  Suddenly the garden has sprung to life and the roses - about a month late this year - are opening everywhere.  The mill looks at its best.   I have a passion for old roses - the ones with wonderful names like Cardinal Richelieu and Madame Alberic Barbier, Ghislaine de Felisonde, and the beautiful Queen of Denmark.  Couldn't resist taking a few pics to share - the perfume is unbelievable.  This is one thing I will miss when I go to Italy.  At the foot of the steps to the garden I've got one of the David Austin roses and the colour and scent are wonderful.  I love the chaotic patterns of the petals as they unfurl.

I'm also very keen on wild rose species and have two - a red one from China which the bees go wild for, and another white one called Rosa Alba. 

The Apothecary's Rose has striped petals and is supposed to be very ancient.

In order to deter Saturday night revellers from climbing into my garden  I've got some really prickly specimens on the fence.   Stanwell Perpetual flowers all the time, but is lethal!   And then I have a German rose called ParkDirektor Riggers - single, dark red and very precise.

I'm particularly fond of rambling roses - scrambling up trees and up onto the cliff behind the mill.  This one is called The Rambling Rector.

And this is the crowning glory - four storey's high and a pillar of colour and perfume.  Paul's Himalyan Musk.

Hard to leave England when it looks like this!  But Neil rang me last night, spending his first night in our new home.  He described the lights twinkling in the valley below, the sun setting in the distant sea,  and it sounds utterly magical.  Two more weeks!

The Next Big Author Scam

A few months ago I posted about what appeared to be a good competition for new writers working on a novel.  
The Next Big Author invited writers to begin writing a novel and submit the first chapters during the second half of May.  It had to be new writing - anything you’d already written was barred.  The top five would win a critique with a big publishing house, with the possibility of a contract if successful.  It seemed very exciting.  
But what happened next was a big let-down for most of the authors who joined.  When the submission date arrived in mid-May, writers were told to load their chapters into the already existing (and overloaded) You Write On dot com.  They were instructed to join the peer critique process, revise and edit.   Silence.
So, in fact there was no point in being part of The Next Big Author at all.  Those who joined, wrote the first chapters of their novels and submitted them within the date guidelines, have simply been thrown into the YWO pond to compete with the short stories, novels (both published and unpublished) and children’s books that were already on there - many of them for years.  The Top Ten includes work that goes back to 2008. 
There is no separate category or rating system for people who joined The Next Big Author, so one is forced to conclude that the whole exercise was simply a drive to get some new writing onto YWO.  This is very unfair, if not downright dishonest.
And what about You Write On?  The peer critique idea is generally a good one because you get feedback from readers on your own work and you have to work hard reviewing theirs - which, in theory, hones your own editing skills.
The flaws in the system are that everyone wants a five star rating for their own book and, because it’s competitive, they aren’t going to give anyone else a five star rating because that would mean they might go higher up in the charts. Reviews are also either very subjective ‘I don’t like this kind of writing.  It didn’t do anything for me.’  Or painfully Creative-Writing-Text-Book ‘I think you should Show not Tell more in the Third Person Revolving mode’.   The process also favours commercial, main-stream fiction because it’s such a broad audience - anything difficult, or a little out of the way, doesn’t do so well.  James Joyce would never have got anywhere with Ulysses!
The other problem is that YWO also operates as a publisher - for less than a hundred pounds you can get your work published by them and readers/reviewers can buy it either as print-on-demand or an e-book.  That means that new writers are competing in the ratings with already published stories.  There is no separate chart for them either.
It’s worth having a look though - you don’t have to load any work to join, you can simply sign up as a reader and browse.  YWO is keen to sell the work of those authors it publishes.  I would advise anyone to take a look before they decide to submit work.  And there have been some notable successes, such as ‘The Legacy’ which was picked up by Orion and then won the Costa.

And what happened to the three chapters I uploaded to try the whole thing out?  Well, I did make it into the top twenty (with about three hundred others!) and that - as any author will tell you - is just not good enough!!