A Short Intermission

Thoroughly enjoyed the reading yesterday with Martin Malone and the party afterwards with friends.  Thank you everyone who came on a really terrible Lake District day with howling winds and horizontal rain.

Now wrapping Christmas presents, hoovering the carpets and packing the suitcase to start traveling back to Italy.  So I won't be posting anything for a few days.  Looking forward to getting back to the sun and the peace and quiet - this visit has been very hectic.  Haven't read a book or had any peaceful writing time for three weeks! But there is an exciting new project brewing.......    

Looking forward to seeing Neil again  - he's flying back from Cambodia on Wednesday.  And I'll be posting later in the week as soon as I get the suitcase unpacked.

Night Before Nerves

Just getting myself together for the northern launch of 'Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21' at the Wordsworth Trust tomorrow.  Trying to decide what poems to read .......    trying to decide what to wear ........   Taking along a few bottles of wine for the patient supporters who are (reportedly) coming (and a bit of dutch courage for myself!).   Have a repeated nightmare where I go along to a reading and I've come to the wrong place and there's no one there - another one is not being able to find the pages I'm supposed to be reading from.    Some writers really enjoy performing, but I've begun to realise I'm not one of them  -   I'm the hide-in-the-closet and write kind of writer!

Oh - and just discovered that Wendy Robertson has done a lovely review of the poems on her blog at http://www.wendyrobertson.com/not-saying-goodbye-at-gate-21/#comment-633
Thank you Wendy!

Book available from www.templarpoetry.com

Talking about Biography and Fiction

Just been back to Lancaster University, where I was Royal Literary Fund Fellow last year, to meet this year's fellow Philip Caveney   who writes scarey books for young adults.   We'd been invited to give a joint seminar - actually just a posh way of saying that we gave a talk about our own writing to the university staff and whoever else wanted to come along.

Philip started out writing thrillers for grown ups but moved to young adult when his ten year old daughter asked why he wouldn't let her read any of them.  The first YA was written for her and since then he's been very successful.  He read from his latest WIP about a young boy who falls through the floor in a museum in Edinburgh and finds himself back in time and face to face with an infamous Plague Doctor during the time of the Black Death.  It was wonderfully entertaining.

I couldn't compete with that!  So tried to give some insights into how I write and the different approaches to writing biography and fiction and the fact that biography hasn't always been valued as much as fiction - biographers have been vilified as hearse chasers, vultures picking over the bones of the dead, purveyors of literary lace curtain twitching, and upmarket tabloid journalism.  Like a kind of literary Burke and Hare we sell other people's lives and live off the proceeds.

Virginia Woolf said that biography neglected the imagination and worked 'at a lower level' than the sublime art of fiction.  But why should it do that?  I've always thought of biography as a 'found' novel, where you are given the plot, the characters and some of the dialogue and you have to create a riveting story that brings it all to life for the reader.  A novel on the other hand, could be thought of as a fictional biography.

Jane Eyre, a literary fraud

Because I write across both genres I spend a lot of time thinking about the differences between them and how one can feed into the other -  using the techniques of one genre to solve problems in the other.  I've also been puzzled by the recent debate about fake memoirs.  It seems that if a novel is discovered to be autobiographical it isn't a crime, but if a memoir turns out to be a work of fiction this is a sackable offence for an author.  Very strange, since one of the most famous novels of all time began life as the autobiography of a governess, edited by Currer Bell. 

These days, Jane Eyre would never have made it to the shops, the book tour would have been cancelled and the author blacklisted.  Because this is what happened to Love and Consequences published by Penguin USA.  It was, according to the sales team, a riveting, un-put-downable read, but as soon as it was discovered to be (mainly) fictional, it was unreadable and the author guilty of 'a huge personal and professional betrayal'.

 

Tuesday Poem: Tim Jones

And Not to Yield

Leave home, and your ego
blooms as the square of distance. Return
is a necessary corrective,

a diminuendo of corridors,
anxious crowds, missed messages.
Fretting at the baggage claim:

did they even put your cases on the plane?
And the knowledge that, not far away,
an angry wife is pacing.

Pity Odysseus. Penelope
(the suitors done and dusted)
is on the surface calm

but furious beneath: all that crap
he put her through! She lets it out
in flechettes of resentment.

Odysseus learns to dodge or hide.
All he wants is a quiet life,
a place to write his memoirs,

but she keeps inventing tasks for him.
"I'm not bloody Hercules," he says, and,
"Didn't I tell you there could be delays?"

Tim Jones, from 'Men Briefly Explained'.



This newly released collection from Tim is excellent. There are some very impressive poems in it, but I also liked the way the collection framed them - the flow of the narrative through it. I was very happy to review the book and Tim quotes a paragraph on the back cover.

"Tim Jones writes about how it feels to be a man, of male relationships – father, son, brother, friend, lover, husband – exploring territory that men traditionally don’t talk about, saying what is often unsaid, confronting stereotypes, and genetic imperatives. He writes with a blend of economy, humour and compassion that is rare in poetry, often finding the unexpected phrase - ‘a diminuendo of corridors’ - or an unusual, but exact, image - ‘mountains piled like thunderheads’ - to surprise and illuminate. This poetry is how New Women want their New Men to be – strong, sensitive and empathetic."  Penelope would probably have preferred Odysseus to be like that too.  Living with (or more often without) a hero is hard work!   Odysseus also features in the Derek Walcott poem posted by Mary McCallum this week.

For more Tuesday Poems please visit the website at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

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!