The Creative Cafe Project

My story 'Jazz Cafe' is on the menu at the Cafe Lit Creative Cafe Project site today as a Mango Smoothie.  If you love scribbling at cafe tables with a cappuccino on the side, and haven't found the Cafe Lit site yet, please check it out - there's some great work and some very good stuff for writers.

New Use for a Kindle

Neil is on an island, far out in the Gulf of Thailand, where it meets the South China Sea.   There's no electricity, no mobile phone signal and no wi-fi.  But he's discovered that if he walks along the beach at one end of the island he can get a signal on his Kindle - not good enough for email, since it comes and goes - but enough for Twitter.  And, yes, you can  Tweet on a Kindle.  So my entire relationship now consists of a series of Tweets - an affair in 140 characters.   Plot for a novel?



As for me - I'm twittering from the John Rylands Library in Manchester where I'm doing some more research.  And I'm being followed by three very lively authors from America who want to come and visit me in Italy!  Sounds like fun.

Dark Satanic Mills

The poetry festival was held in one of Arkwright’s old cotton mills - Masson Mill at Matlock Bath -  which has been preserved, partly as a shopping centre and partly as a museum.  Unlike many museums, this is not a reconstruction. The machines have been preserved just as they were when they stopped working and the mill has the eerie feeling that you might have just walked in while the workers have knocked off for a coffee break.  Not that they had many of those.  They worked long hours and conditions were terrible.

My great grandfather came from northern Ireland to work the cotton mills of northern England, beginning at 12 as a cleaner, crawling under the machinery to remove the build-up of lint.  It was very dangerous as the looms travelled backwards and forwards on rails, constantly moving.

some very pink lint

Then he became a loom operator and eventually a pattern maker, putting holes in the card that programmed the loom.

A pattern punching machine

The pattern is hung in the front.

I had the whole place to myself and it was a very moving experience to wander through what would have been his working environment - it made it all very real to me and made me feel that I should write about it.  He died, like many mill workers, of emphesema.  

It was great to be able to just wander around.  The machines were complex and fascinating and the workshops were wonderful - at least to someone odd enough to love rooting about in hardware shops and ironmongers.  They looked like my father’s toolshed on the farm - utterly chaotic - and they had that unmistakable smell of iron rust and old machine oil! 

Raw Cotton

first stage spun cotton

A bobbin machine

It was all very dark, so difficult to take photographs even though it was one of the most photogenic places I’ve ever been to.  Every corner, every basket of bobbins, every strange machine was just posing to be photographed.  And in the dying vats there were cubby holes of dyed cotton in every colour you could imagine.

For a lover of history, it was a fantastic experience and has given me a lot to write about -my notebook is crammed!

Poetry this Way

It's not often you get the opportunity to wallow in poetry for three days, listening to it, reading it, talking to other poets, but that's what I've just had.   The Derwent Poetry Festival is small as festivals go but intimate in a way that  some of the bigger ones aren't.

Templar have a reputation for producing beautiful books and, as one of the three winning Straid poets, I was very pleased with the look of mine - as were Martin Malone and Susanne Ehrhardt with theirs.  I'd met Martin before, but it was the first time I'd met Sue, who is a doctor and has worked for Oxfam in a number of third world countries and is a very good poet and really interesting person.    Martin's also had a pretty diverse life, working as a rock musician, sound engineer and teacher, in Saudi Arabia and finally in Cumbria.  He currently plays in Simon Armitage's band, Scaremongers and works as a special needs teacher.

Also reading at the festival were Jane Weir, talking about Walking the Block, her biography in poetry and image of the textile artists Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher.   Another poet new to me was Christopher James whose pamphlet The Manly Art of Knitting was also being launched.

Stayed in a lovely B and B in Matlock Bath - B & Bs aren't what they used to be - mine was furnished and kitted out like a five star hotel - everything you might possibly wish for from a mini-bar to a tooth-brush (and it turned out to have free wi-fi too!).  And towels twisted into swans on the bed and the most amazing display of fresh fruit for breakfast.  Not to mention the fact that the owner rescued me from a disaster with public transport and drove me to the poetry festival.  There are still nice people in the world.  Thank you Roger!

Now back at the Mill for a few days before going off to do some research in Manchester for a new book proposal.  It's colder than Italy and very misty, grey and autumnal.  I miss the light. 

It's finally launched!

It’s finally going to be out!!!   So forgive the outbreak of exclamation marks!   This weekend is the launch of my new collection from Templar Poetry at the Derwent Poetry Festival.    The books aren’t on the Templar bookshop website yet, but we’re assured that the web update is on its way and any books ordered online (£8.99) will be delivered asap, just  e-mail    info@templarpoetry.co.uk    Should also be on Amazon.co.uk sometime next week.  I’m reading with several other Templar poets as well as my co-award winners, Martin Malone and Suzanne Ehrhardt at the Arkwright Suite, Masson Mills, Matlock Bath if anyone's in the Derby area over the weekend.  Mimi Kalvati is the guest poet reading on Saturday night and there are lots of others.  It sounds good fun and I’m really looking forward to it.  Won’t be able to blog from there, as the B&B I’m staying in doesn’t have wi-fi.   And no, I don’t have a smart phone, or a Blackberry.   But I’ll take lots of pictures and hope to do an update once I’m back home on Monday.

I write poetry very slowly - so much of the creative energy gets used up by writing prose in order to pay the bills.  It’s ten years since I last had a collection out - an exhibition of poetry and photographs (called Secret Eden)  to celebrate Visual Arts Year.  Before that it was a small pamphlet called ‘Unwritten Lives’.   So this collection has been a long time coming.  But whatever I write in order to make a living, poetry is where I start from, where I feel most comfortable, my natural voice,  and I can’t tell you what it feels like to have the poems out there to share with others. 

It may seem odd, but it means more to have one small poetry collection published than all the biographies put together.   This really is the blood on the page, rather than simply describing someone else’s blood on the page.  This is my chance to show that I can do what the people in my other books do.  Does this make sense?   I’d argue with anyone that biography is an art form, a found novel, a creative act, but deep in my bones, there’s a car sticker slogan or two lurking in the back window - ‘Biographers do it second hand’.  ‘If you can’t write, write about people who can’.

Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21 is about journeys - departures and arrivals.  I seem to have been waving goodbye to people at airports and train stations all my life - I once counted up that I’d had 27 addresses in three different countries by the time I was 25.   The poems are also about different kinds of goodbye - the failure of relationships, the deaths of close relatives.   It contains a few of the most popular poems in the earlier pamphlets  (what the Pri-mate calls ‘Kathy’s greatest hits’!).   But there are a lot of new ones gathered together from little magazines that have published individual poems over the last few years, some that are too new to have been published anywhere, and a few more from E-zines such as the Tuesday Poem blog site.

I have a few review copies to give away - if anyone would like one please leave a comment or email me on kathyferber@yahoo.co.uk

Travelling and Plagiarism Scandals!

I'm off to the UK  for the launch of 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' at the Derwent Poetry Festival.  By an odd coincidence I've just waved goodbye to Neil who is off to Cambodia via Milan and I'm not looking forward to the next 3 weeks on my own.

Interesting story unfolding in Book World - Q.R. Markham's much hyped spy fiction 'Assassin of Secrets' released only a few days ago has been withdrawn after a tip-off that passages had been 'lifted' from classic spy novels.   Amazon described  the book (pre-revelation) as   'a narrative hall of mirrors in which nothing and no one are as they seem'.  It proved to be absolutely prophetic!

Red faces and big losses for Little Brown and Hodder who have withdrawn all copies -  end of career for author who didn't include the quotation marks.   According to the list on the Huffington Post and a number of blogs, this isn't just the odd phrase picked up and unconsciously repeated,  the book seems to have been a patchwork of other people's novels including classics such as Ian Fleming.  Even Markham's interviews were quotes from someone else.   How can this happen?   Do editors no longer read?  Don't they check for plagiarism?  Apparently the Huff Post compiled their list by putting phrases into Google and seeing what came up.  Shouldn't the publishers have done that?  I have to do it with my student's work to check for originality.

Rain still causing chaos in Italy.  Neil managed a couple of shots from the train as he passed through the Cinque Terre.  At Vernazza you can see the huge mound of rocks, mud and debris that's still being bulldozed from the streets.

Tuesday Poem: Christina Rossetti

A Pause

They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
     And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay;
     While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
     Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
     My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:-
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
     Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
     Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
     Put on a glory, and my soul expand.

Christina Rossetti,  written circa 1853

Christina 1848 by her brother Dante Gabriel

 

Christina Rossetti's father was an Italian political refugee and poet.  Her mother was the daughter of another Italian writer, Gaetano Polidori.  Christina's uncle was John Polidori who accompanied Byron and Shelley to the continent and wrote The Vampyre.  Although she was born in London and spent most of her life there, Christina was very Italian in temperament - which didn't fit very well with English Victorian notions of womanhood.   She and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the 'two storms' but while he was allowed to go his own bohemian way, Christina had to conform and she found it difficult to subdue her rebellious disposition.   Much of Christina's poetry is about loss, loneliness and renunciation - themes that mirror her own life.  She broke off two engagements to men she loved  passionately because of religious differences (one was a Catholic, one an aetheist).   She seems to have regretted both decisions in later life.   Her mother was deeply, inflexibly, religious, an older sister became a protestant nun, and Christina's life under their influence was very restricted.  She was always very shy and spent most of her life at home, avoiding social contact,  writing poetry - some of which was erotic and passionate.  Her most famous poems are 'A Birthday',  'In the Bleak Midwinter', which was set to music by Holst, and 'Goblin Market' - one of the most erotic poems in the English language.   The poem above, A Pause, was written at a time when she had just broken off her engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson who had converted to Roman Catholicism.  

Christina Rossetti:   Learning not to be First, originally published by Oxford University Press,  is available as a Kindle book on Amazon for £2.86.

For more Tuesday Poems, please go to the hub on www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

For a review of  contemporary American poet Stanley Plumly's collection 'Now that my father lies down beside me' , go to my book review site .