Words Unlimited

Notes on a Watery Weekend

Water – forms up to eighty percent of our bodies; covers two-thirds of the earth’s surface; we can’t live without it; can’t survive long in it. As a character in my third novel Taking in Water, says, ‘Pay attention to water, water rules the world.’

So, last weekend, I couldn’t resist an event titled, Taking The Waters. Organised by Gareth Evans and Aldeburgh Music, over two days at Snape Maltings, Suffolk, the event brought together academics, writers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists for, ‘a weekend navigation through the cultural meanings of water.’

It was a mixed bag, a curate’s egg, but some bits were excellent.

A few jottings from my notebook …

Robert MacFarlane launched the programme with an elegant, affectionate talk on his friendship with the late Roger Deakin – a presiding spirit.  MacFarlane conjured up the legendary wild swimmer through anecdotes and passages from Waterlog. In water we are, ‘differently minded because differently bodied,’ said MacFarlane - Deakin’s frog’s eye view.  ‘Water is a visionary substance.’ Prepositions become crucial: are we in the stuff, on it, under it, thinking through it? Might water think us?  In and through water might we re-think/imagine that inter-relationship – us/world.

Deakin was a major influence on Macfarlane’s own exploration of water and wild places. Influence, a watery word suggesting in flow and infusion. Archipelago was another key word that recurred throughout the weekend. How are the fragments connected? How to think/flow/‘slip shape’ between ponds/islands?

Someone remarked that there seemed to be rather a lot of men rambling around East Anglia and writing about it. I was pleased to find that one of them was Ken Worpole.  He suggested that this need to walk signalled a reconnection with place away from the road. Much writing about place in the 30s and 40s had been for the motorist, those Shell Guides. 

Worpole’s 350 Miles, An Essex Journey recorded a view from the footpath. He certainly achieved what he set out to do: rescue Essex from its dismissal by Country Life as ‘being of no interest.’ Using Jason Orton’s photographs of that same journey, Worpole took us into a defensive and shifting landscape – marshes that constantly change with the tide, never quite the same place twice, water and land in perpetual negotiation.

Warpole walked in order to experience, ‘the mystery of being at the water’s edge,’ and to challenge the stereotypical view of the Essex coast as fish & chips at Southend. The beach, post-religion, he suggested, becomes a site from which to stare out – like Caspar David Friedrich’s monk – to reflect on doubts and uncertainties; a place which we might re-configure ourselves. The sea – mother/place of return/place of spontaneity – is a place where we can create meaning.

 

Perhaps we stand and stare because there’s so much we don’t know about what lies in the deepest ocean.  Musician David Rothenberg brought noises from the underwater world on stage as he played his clarinet in a kind of call and response with a recording of the song of a humpbacked whale. Apparently, whale songs are complex compositions of up to 24 hours duration. Having just embarked on singing lessons I am humbled by this fact.

After the lyricism of water, walking and whales, Noel Burch’s and Allan Sekula’s film, The Forgotten Space, brought a shift in gear.  Burch introduced it as ‘a political economy of the sea; an Agit prop documentary.’ Far from signifying order, proposes the film’s thesis, that ubiquitous rectangle the shipping container is the cause of chaos - personal and environmental. Inside this ‘rational’ space lurks trading madness. Cod caught in the Atlantic is shipped to China, filleted by cheap labour, shipped back, deep-frozen, for consumption in America.

 

The film offered some terrific, telling images but too often their impact was lost amid longueurs. With a film essay surely selection, editing is all? I’m thinking of Adam Curtis’s recent All Watched Over Series broadcast by the BBC last summer. Curtis’s repetition, minimal use of words, cutting and juxtaposition made compelling viewing. There’s a powerful one-hour visual essay somewhere in The Forgotten Space’s 112 minutes.

Jay Griffiths took us back under the sea as she read from her book, Wild: An Elemental Journey, evoking a wilderness that few will ever witness – the abyss. To journey there is to see colours gradually fade until all is ultra violet and then blackness.  There is ‘no season, no sun, no pull of the moon,’ only ‘ugly fish, blind creatures sucking, rasping.’

 

Top-of-the-bill on Saturday evening was a ‘premiere presentation’ of Swandown, a collaboration between writer Iain Sinclair and artist/film maker Andrew Kotting. Having admired Kotting’s Deadad project and Sinclair’s London Orbital I was curious to see this.

Swandown involved travelling in a swan pedalo from Hastings beach along the coast, eventually up the Lee valley to the Olympic Park, and filming the journey. Before attempting the pedalo voyage, Kotting walked the land route with a decoy swan under his arm as a lure, a conversation piece.  They described the project as, ‘a travelogue and odyssey of Olympian ambition. A poetic film diary about encounter and culture… an endurance test and pedal marathon.’  The two-hour event turned out, indeed, to be an endurance test.

Far too much time was given to showing a speeded up film of Kotting’s walk - migraine inducing. As the film flickered in the background an under-rehearsed Sinclair and Kotting larked around on stage. In the pub afterwards someone remarked that it was all a bit ‘Top Gear.’ Sinclair and Kotting claim to be ‘Urban Shaman and landscape Ombudsman.’ On Saturday it was more a case of Sinclair playing James May to Kotting’s Jeremy Clarkson. Too much laddishness – what was the significance of taunting the real swan with the decoy?

A work-in-progress it might be, but perhaps too loose to offer to a paying audience?  Maybe something will emerge in the finished film.

Two quieter voices on Sunday made more impact.  Manu Luksch’s Kayak Libre project offered a more engaging encounter with water in the Lee Valley. The Austrian-born artist talked of her fascination with England’s canals, their changing use and the ways in which these routes have re-shaped the land. Many were now forgotten spaces. Kayak Libre invited people to book a ride in her Kayak ‘Taxi’, the ‘fare’ being a conversation about imagined future transport. Low down on the canal water in a different ‘audiosphere’ her passengers talked freely of ‘ghost boats,’ and systems of tubes in the air. You can see the routes, hear the conversations, here.

Local artist, Simon Read, lives on a converted Dutch barge. He has immersed himself in issues around the shoreline management plan for the Suffolk coast. Conceived of in separate zones, how might action in one area adversely affect another?

As he researched he noticed that with radar, sonar etc there were ‘ways of mapping – more than a hand can do.’ Such data often translates into jargon most people don’t understand. His maps of the coast and the Deben flood plain attempt to put all that information on one sheet of paper. For him the process of map making is ‘a meditation on what’s happening to the land.’ The result: beautiful artworks, useful maps. See his work at the link above.

This weekend immersion was stimulating. I came away with a clutch of books from the excellent bookstall. Top of the pile being, Macfarlane's The Wild Places. 

It looks as if this focus on ‘Place’ will become an annual event. Let's hope so. Given the news this week might ‘drought’ be apt East Anglian subject next year?

Quote No. 17

"That’s how my novels get written. Small scenes that build and merge, and then you recognize the larger context."

This is Michael Ondaatje from a long and fascinating interview in Bomb 58. Worth reading the whole thing.

Small scenes certainly built and merged in The Cat's Table which, for me, was a stand-out book from my reading last year.

Interesting how this chimes with what Hockney said about creating a large painting.

Simultaneous Submissions to Agents

These days, when silence seems to be the new 'no', first time authors, understandably, get impatient. It must be tempting to send your manuscript to every agent in town in one go. But beware. I've just picked up this on Twitter from Curtis Brown agent, Karolina Sutton:

It's fine to submit material to a few agents simultaneously. It's not fine to submit to more than one agent at the same agency.

Did that just apply to Curtis Brown or was it universal, I wondered, and Tweeted her back. Her answer was swift: Universal

Happy Birthday Dickens

Two-hundred and still very much alive through the energy of his writing.  Claire Tomalin's wonderful biography reveals the many facets of the man behind the books. If you haven't read it yet, I'd say it's a must for any writer.

This video will give you a taster - Dickens walking to sort out his ideas, Dickens performing, acting, being his characters.

More on bicentenary events, here.

 

 

Finish That Book!

Posting this as a note-to-self but I'm sure it's going to strike a chord for others. I'm definitely at the 'muddle in the middle' stage with current WIP so was pleased to come across this on YouTube. Worth saving. I love this straightforward, uncomplicated wisdom.

 

 

Michelle Lovric

Prolific writer Michelle Lovric has just published a new novel for children, Talina In The Tower. She talks here about the endless magic of Venice, inspirational egrets, the difference between writing for children and adults and the joy of blogging

  photo © Marianne Taylor

 PJ: Another new children’s book out! Tell us something about it.

 ML: Talina in the Tower is set in Venice in the late 1860s. It’s an historical fantasy about a city invaded by semi-magical beasts, the Ravageurs. These hyena-like creatures think they have a claim to Venice, and seek a bloody revenge against the Venetians. My heroine is Talina, the most impudent girl in Venice. There is also a large cast of talking cats, loquacious rats and other opinionated creatures. I guess the theme of the book is ownership. Who owns a city? Can you own another creature? What can a child own? With all these questions of identity and proprietorship, there is also an element of shape-shifting.  It is set 30 years earlier than my previous children’s novels, The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. It is much shorter than the previous two books and, I think, quite a lot funnier.

PJ: Is Talina officially a prequel to your other two books – I notice that Professor Marin features?

ML: No, it’s not officially a prequel as I was asked to write a stand-alone and shorter volume this time. But … Venice is a tightly knit web of families and places: in my mind there is also a temporal web joining the people in my stories. So my Venetian characters leak in and out of my various books. Cecilia Cornaro, my portrait painter, has now appeared in three of my adult novels, at different stages of her life, sometimes as the lead, sometimes as an accessory. So I’ll confess there is a family tree buried in a file on my computer that links Talina by blood and marriage to the characters in The Undrowned Child and The Mourning Emporium. And yes –  it was great fun to write the elderly Professor Marin as a romantic young man this time. Also, we also have a glimpse at the young boy who will become the delicious Sargano Alicamoussa, a circus master who is himself a refugee from the adult novel that’s in a drawer.

PJ: Talina is passionate about many things including egrets – are they a particular passion of yours?

ML: I have always loved egrets: they are the embodiment of pure visual grace. Yet they also have a comedy element: their outsize star-shaped yellow feet and the way they tuck their lovely necks into an Sbend to fly. We had a devastating acqua alta in Venice in 2008, and the egrets started to appear on the Grand Canal after that, like a consolation prize. Now we see them often as they fish from our jetty – just below my study – at high tide.  I always think it will be a good writing day if I see an egret - something I’ve blogged about.

PJ: You’ve been writing a lot of children’s fiction lately, even though you started as an adult novelist? Have you given up on adult fiction?

ML: I have written three children’s books since my last adult novel, which was The Book of Human Skin. But I am deep into a new adult novel, about hair. Children’s books tend to be contracted in pairs, while adult books are more often one-offs: this is one explanation for the proportion. I also enjoy writing the children’s fiction very much. All my books being set in Venice, with Venice a character in them. I find the city perfectly adapted for fantasy fiction for young readers. Just walking around the city, one is already halfway to a dream. The imagination engages rapidly. The other thing about Venice is that she is very funny. The Venetians have a wonderful sense of humour, and the city herself plays tricks on you. The unexpected is lurking around every corner.

PJ: Do you think you’ll ever run out of new material about Venice?

ML: Never. The city is like a Tardis. Every street, every house opens up with yet another story. The problem is limiting yourself to using only those stories that further your plot, and not just stringing together a decorative necklace of anecdotes.

PJ: For you, what’s the difference between writing for adults and children?

ML: I don’t find an enormous difference. Obviously, one leaves any hardcore perversion outside the door when entering the world of children’s writing. I write for the 9 – 12 age group, and so I avoid sex and drugs. That’s not a burden: it’s not where my writing feeds anyway. I’d find it much harder to avoid fanaticism, crime, jealousy, greed, ambition and adventure, all perfectly permissible in children’s literature.  I do struggle, sometimes, with vocabulary. I don’t dumb down for children, however. I try to introduce unfamiliar words in a friendly way. I have a small team of child-readers who check my manuscripts and dutifully point out any words that they don’t understand, or cannot understand within the context they are presented. With their help, I am learning to contextualize any difficult vocabulary much more dextrously. This is a skill worth having for adult novels too.

Writing for children has taught me a lot about pace. There is so much competition for a child’s attention that you have to keep their fingers hovering above the page by means of action and suspense. I have become much more disciplined about longeurs in my adult writing now.

PJ: How do you balance writing time with publicity work? You had a busy time last year, including being filmed in Venice for the TV Book Club’s episode about The Book of Human Skin?

ML: For the last year, I have felt as if I have been living my life in sky-writing - everything larger than life, and scarily public. I heard an American finance expert recently summing up the attitude of investors: ‘You can keep the cheese. Just let me out of the trap.’ Having a book ‘out there’ presents some of the same dilemma … the cheese is wide coverage, reviews and good sales. The trap is losing your privacy and spending so much time on publicity that you no longer have time to write. You can control the nature of your ‘exposure’ much better when you write your own script – a reason why I love writing blogs.

Blogs are good for another reason, too. The normal life-cycle of a novel is a long one – two or three years. Blogs are quick. You can write them and post them the same hour: instant gratification and, usually, instant and gratifying feedback.

PJ: So you also blog regularly?

ML: I belong to two blogging communities of writers – The History Girls and The Scattered Authors Society, both of which also operate thriving private communities that are incredibly supportive and nourishing.  But blogs are – obviously – unpaid. And the squeeze comes when you are writing blogs in time that rightfully belongs to a contracted book with a deadline. Literary websites have concentric readerships, so each blog needs to be completely different, so as not to bring on a yawn every time a reader sees my name. I shall probably write about 30,000 words worth of blogs for Talina in the Tower – half a children’s novel. It’s a sobering thought.

PJ: Talina can read 2 books at once, one eye on each. How do you manage to read so much as well as write?

ML: I read very fast. For many years I made my living as an anthologist, so I had to get through vast amounts of verbiage to find the very desirable nutshells. I loved every minute. I am also a consultant editor for The Writers’ Workshop. You need to read quickly for that work too, especially being conscious that aspiring writers are waiting anxiously for your opinions and advice. Reading fiction is a refreshment when you are tired from ‘putting out’ creatively, and absolutely not a chore.

PJ: What are you reading at the moment?

ML: At the moment I am reading the wonderful A Sea Change by Michael Arditti, purely for pleasure … and a stack of non-fiction books about dolls and hair for the current WIPS. I have just finished reading fantastic children’s novels by my fellow History Girls, Theresa Breslin and Katherine Roberts There is a sad gap in my reading, however: now that I don’t do anthologies any more, I really miss reading poetry regularly. I feel almost shy approaching a poem these days.

More on Talina In The Tower from Orion

Michelle Lovric's website

One Thing At A Time - The Bigger Picture

It's always interesting to reflect on writing by listening in to a practitioner in another art form discuss their creative process. Martin Gayford's interviews with David Hockney are full of gems.

For those days when the draft of the next chapter of your novel looks rather too sketchy, consider what Hockney does when working on a large, complex picture.  Think of your draft in terms of the painter’s charcoal sketch. The outlines might be there but what about the layers of colour, the detail of the brushstrokes?

David Hockney talks about painting from memory. In his case, the Yorkshire landscape. He’s observed and sketched it but back in the studio is working on a vast painting from memory.  He isolates a detail:

‘You decide: I shall go and look at this aspect this morning. If you don’t have a question in mind, there’s far too much to look at … Depending on what you decide, that’s what you see – and you ignore a lot of other things … How do you really see the clouds reflected in the water?’

In your sketchy draft what interests you most? What is your chapter's equivalent of clouds reflected in water? Ask a question. Look closer at the details. Start to build up the layers of colour.

More on the Gayford/Hockney book, here.

 

Book of The Month - January

The book that stands out from my reading this month is Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees.

I loved the variety of subject, tone and pace. Duffy is a poet who looks out at the world. Here you'll find her sharp gaze turned onto politics, ecology, Englishness, mother and daughters, sickness and death, plus, of course those bees.

Why is Duffy so consistently good? For me, what I come back to admire and enjoy is her confident and playful relationship to language. Reading Duffy makes me want to write. She makes ordinary words dance and sing, and makes it seem effortless. She challenges, dazzles. She makes you think, and makes you laugh.

She has a marvellous ear for the way we all play - or used to play as children - with language in everyday speech. Her box of sonic 'tricks' includes alliteration, repetition, lists, simple rhymes surprisingly placed. Often punning and playful but with serious intent. See 'Virgil's Bees.'

The bee poems are threaded throughout as connective tissue, buzzing in and out between the other work. Bees take us back to literary tradtion, 'Where the bee sucks,' and forward to consider the precarious balance of the planet.

Duffy may not have won the T S Eliot Prize but she certainly stole the show at the readings at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this month. In the end what makes Duffy a poet I want to return to is the power and persuasiveness of her voice. She is a dazzling performer, with a brilliant sense of timing. Whether on the page or the stage you trust, have confidence in, her voice, feel her presence. 

Hear her talk to Mark Lawson on Front Row about the writing of The Bees.

The T S Eliot Prize Awards Ceremony

To the remarkable Habersdashers’ Hall last night – never seen so much wood panelling and all brand new - for the T S Eliot Prize Awards Ceremony.

Chair of this year’s Judges, poet Gillian Clarke, talked of the difficulty of choosing a winner in, 'an exceptional year.' She spoke at some length about the merits of each of the 8 short-listed Collecitons as the poets looked on, each clutching the cheques for £1000 which they all recieve.

Shortlisted poets:

back row, l to r: Sean O'Brien, David Harsent, John Burnside, Daljit Nagra

front, l to r: Leontia Flynn, Carol Ann Duffy, Esther Morgan

Having reached the end of the list Clarke paused, ‘Is that it? Do I have to say now who is the winner?’

And so she announced the popular choice of John Burnside, for Black Cat Bone which, she said was, 'a haunting book of great beauty, powered by love, childhood memory, human longing and loneliness... an outstanding book, one which the judges felt grew with every reading.'

He’s a popular choice because he’s one of the finest poets around. His work is challenging, but as Clarke said, ‘always lets the reader in.’

 

Burnside reads from Black Cat Bone

For the first time in its history the Prize attracted TV coverage. See video of Channel 4 News item, here.

Listen to Burnside reading five of his poems, here.

Launch of DARK PARTIES

To Foyles in Charing Cross Road yesterday evening for the launch of Sara Grant's debut novel for YAs Dark Parties. A packed event, full of warm support from former Goldsmiths MA students and SCBWI members.

Of course, Sara read beautifully and there was a long queue at the signing desk.