Words Unlimited

Book of The Month - March

For a book to make my Book of The Month it needs to have re-readablity. I’d always intended this slot to be a way of recording the most memorable novel I’d read in a month.  But, for the third month in a row, I haven’t chosen fiction.  For me, the most re-readable book this month was Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places.

In fifteen fairly self-contained chapters, Macfarlane recounts his search for wild places within the British Isles. Are there any truly wild places left? His locations include a deserted island off the Welsh coast, a loch-filled valley on the Isle of Skye, the Essex marshes, the Peak District, the Burren in Ireland.

At the start he explores the etymology of the word ‘wild.’ Yes, wildness is something to be feared, some dangerous force, but alongside this notion, he notes, is one that, ‘tells of wildness as an energy both exemplary and exquisite.’  As he sleeps out on a frozen lake, or trudges across a Scottish moor, or searches for the white hare beneath a rain-swept Tor, it is this sense of the sublime he brings to us, safe and warm reading at home.

But when exploring the holloways of Dorset or the marshes of Essex he revises his view. He begins to see wildness not far from urban life - ‘The weed thrusting through a crack in the pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.’  Here, wildness is about the ‘sheer force of ongoing organic existence, vigorous and chaotic.’

His writing is compelling; fine prose that often has the spine-tingling quality of poetry and yet always readable and accessible. The book is part of that growing genre, the so-called, New Nature Writing. It’s a genre that is post-pastoral; writing that pays close, subjective, attention to the natural world now so dominated by humans. As Macfarlane has said, this kind of nature writing ‘needs to admit to the poison in the system.’

But the book isn’t preachy; far from it.  Each particular location, and his journey within it, provides a frame for much more than field notes or eco politics. Here you’ll find dramatic storytelling, history, memoir and meditation.  He moves effortless between evoking the intensity of his physical experience – sleeping out on a cliff top; a history of place – the famine roads in Ireland; memoir – his boyhood experiences of camping and hiking; cultural meanings – maps as both useful grid and human story; meditations – what is the nature of time?

Macfarlane is no hopeless Romantic either. He admits to feeling, ‘the draw of the city, my own routines, my need for libraries, luxuries, connection, variety.’  I know what he means. Much as I love the idea of sleeping out on that frozen Cumbrian lake, I’m glad Macfarlane has done it so that I don’t have to. But I will re-read his account of that, and other adventures, again and again.

Ashley Dartnell

Farangi Girl is the remarkable memoir of Goldsmiths creative writing graduate, Ashley Dartnell. In short scenes, intense as any page turning novel, Dartnell charts her extraordinary, chaotic childhood in Iran and Florida. She talks here about writing as pearl diving, shaping memories into a story and how reading saved her life

PJ: It feels as if this is a story that needed to be written – when did you first start to write some of these scenes?

AD: In my head and heart? When I was about ten years old. In ‘real life’ I began taking writing courses at lunchtime in about 2004 with the wonderful writer and teacher, Martina Evans, at City Lit where I wrote some of the episodes (including the opening chapter when we drive down from the Caspian). I continued to write bits and pieces while I was doing my MA at Goldsmiths, particularly in Blake Morrison’s Life Writing course.

PJ: Did you do much pre-planning, or did you just start from the most vivid memories and grow the book from those?

AD: It was a many-staged process. Initially I wrote episodically—often stimulated by memories of tangible objects. For example, the scene I referred to above, wending our way down from the Caspian on the Chaloos Road, derived from a writing exercise Martina gave us where we read a poem by Seamus Heaney, 'A Sofa in the Forties' where he and his brothers and sisters turned an old couch into a rollicking old steam train. After hearing the poem, I instantaneously thought of my father’s old gray Rover with its cracked leather seats and that fateful journey down the mountain impeded by dozens of watermelons on the road.

During this phase of the writing, I was accessing memories from some deeply subconscious place. The American poet John Ashbery talks about writing poetry ‘by lowering a bucket down into a kind of underground stream flowing through his mind--a stream of continuously flowing poetry.’ In my case, I felt as if I were diving into a sea of memories and every day I would plunge in, never knowing who or what I would find. I would write furiously for hours, almost in a trance. At the end of the day I would often not remember what I had written.

PJ: So, you had no sense of structure at that point?

AD: I felt like one of the pearl divers in the Indian Ocean who plummet deep into the ocean to gather a ton of oysters for just one precious pearl. I collected countless memories and wrote them all down—almost 200,000 words worth. But many of these memories, although important to me personally and often quite interesting on an individual basis, didn’t actually ‘tell my story.’ This led to the next phase of the process when I shucked a great deal and crafted a (still unwieldy) manuscript, that focussed on the essential mother-daughter story that flows through the book.

baby Ashley with her mother

After that – much editing, moving from the past tense to the present and then back again, adding the adult voice in separate sections and then reintegrating it, adding political and cultural information about Iran and then removing it, all the while focusing the episodes ever more precisely on the central story.

PJ: As well as your own memories you say you had letters, photos and the testimony of others who were around at the time. Did those sources provide incidents that you couldn’t initially remember, or did you use them to back up your memories?

AD: Essentially, I used the archaeological evidence to verify the story. It was crucially important to me that every single incident in the book be factually correct. There were a few things I was unable to confirm that I dropped, but luckily I was able to validate almost everything. As it was, some minor things slipped through—I have one incident slightly out of order chronologically and my uncle recently told me that my grandfather worked in a paper mill not a sawmill. One of my best sources of not only verification, but also inspiration, was my godmother, the woman called Yosy, who plays a big role in the book and in my life. I was back and forth with her throughout the writing and then she came and stayed with me part of a summer and we went through the manuscript literally word by word to ensure it was as truthful as possible.

PJ: There's a lot of dialogue in the book. Can you tell us about writing that and staying truthful?

AD: In terms of the dialogue, because obviously I made that up (unlike Frank McCourt who claimed he actually remembered every line of dialog in Angela’s Ashes, I make no such claim!) I felt what was important was to stay true to the person’s voice. Both my parents had extremely distinct (and very different) speech patterns, so I was able to capture their voices relatively easily. In fact, when I was writing scenes in which they were speaking, I felt as if they were sitting on my shoulders, little homunculi, whispering, chatting, yelling, singing directly into my ears.

Ashley with her father

PJ: Without giving too much of the story away - I’m thinking of the hairbrush incident - you were very forgiving! The book is a testament to a child’s unconditional love for its parent.

AD: Ah, interesting that you think it was a testament to a child’s unconditional love—I would say that my brothers’ and my resilience in the face of a pretty chaotic upbringing had to do with the fact that we all felt that our parents loved us more than anything. That is not to say they were not flawed, that they didn’t have complicated lives, that at times they didn’t treat us in a way we (and probably they also, in retrospect) wish they hadn’t, but the fact is, our parents loved us heart and soul.

Ashley, brothers and mother in Iran

PJ: You are fairly even-handed, highlighting your mother’s strengths and weaknesses. Did that decision to give a rounded view come through the writing process?

AD: With what came up in the writing process I was quite surprised, actually quite shocked. When I started writing the book, I thought it would be a romantic adventure story—more Gerald Durrell than Jeannette Walls. What emerged during those intense pearl harvesting sessions was, however, as Graham Greene writes in The End of the Affair ‘...the bitterness leaks again out of my pen...’ So much pain, so many sad memories—at times it felt unbearable. I couldn’t believe that we had endured it all.  And yet we had, and survived and thrived. And that, I believe is down to that bedrock knowledge that our parents, particularly our mother, loved us as vehemently as a wild animal loves and protects its young. Plus, I had an added life preserver and that was my passion for books and reading. It’s not an understatement to say that reading saved my life. From books, I escaped the realities of our life, I learned how to live, and I made lifelong friends. Francie Nolan, the young girl in Betty Smith’s Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Doris Lessing’s protagonist Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook, Evie Taylor, the mixed up girl in Anne Tyler’s A Slipping Down Life, the steadfast wife, O-Lan, in Peal S Buck’s The Good Earth—these characters are part of me forever. Reading can provide inestimable comfort during difficult times.

Ashley's mother

PJ: At one point we learn that your mother tried to publish her life story but a New York publisher thought no one would believe that so much had happened to one person – did you have any such response to your manuscript?

AD: I don’t think so—remember that when my mother did that outline in the seventies, the whole memoir genre had yet to be established. It is only in quite recent times that memoir and autobiography evolved from being the jurisdiction of great men (think St. Augustine, Montaigne, Benjamin Franklin) to encompassing people with no special accomplishment other than simply having lived (or survived) a fascinating or difficult life.  There are so many misery memoirs out now that deal with such truly unbelievable and traumatic material that I think my story, while compelling, hardly seems unbelievable.

PJ: Which memoirs or works of life writing sustained you as you wrote Farangi Girl?

AD: Anais Nin’s journals were the first works of life writing I recall and I gobbled them down. Of course, Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing and The Children of Violence series, which although they are fiction, are heavily autobiographical. 

While I was writing Farangi Girl, I read many contemporary memoirs and analysed them microscopically: Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood; Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss; Aminetta Forna’s The Devil that Danced on the Water; Jeanette Wall’s The Glass Castle; Mary Kerr’s The Liar’s Club; Philip Roth’s Patrimony; Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight; Blake Morrison’s And When Was the Last Time You Saw Your Father. In addition to studying the genre generally, I also read memoirs by Iranians such as Daughter of Persia by Sattareh Farman Farmaian; Prisoner of Tehran by Marina Nemat and Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi. Literally, I read dozens of memoirs.

PJ: The scenes read like vivid fiction – always a dramatic incident, the main players on stage with lively dialogue – did you ever think of making this material into a novel? Would you like to tackle a novel? 

AD: Thank you—I am so pleased you thought so—I worked hard to write the book so that the sights and sounds of Iran were vivid and the characters as alive and colourful as they actually were. Yes, I did think about fictionalising it, largely because I wanted to protect my parents’ memory and those people who are still alive who may be upset by the revelation of the many secrets. In the end, I realised that the people I wanted to protect all knew the story and that fictionalising would hardly shield them. I felt strongly that the best way to be true to the material was by writing it as just what it was—my life story. Also, I thought the amazing photographs added so much to the story and they are clearly part of a memoir as opposed to fiction. A smaller consideration was that I felt it was extremely difficult to publish literary fiction, whereas there seemed to be a market for literary memoir, particularly if Iran, which is such a controversial place, was part of the story.

And yes, I am really keen to get started on my next book which is fiction. Right now I am pretty engrossed in the marketing of Farangi Girl, but I am trying to get the research underway as I do a lot of background reading and research to prepare for my writing.

PJ: So it’s definitely fiction next?

AD: I’m doing research for a book set in Iran in the middle of the twentieth century—fiction and maybe suspense. Stay tuned!

PJ: What are you reading at the moment?

AD: Just finished the breathtaking Samarkand by Amin Maalouf. I’m at the beginning of the exciting phase of reading scores of books to prepare for my next one. I love to read, so this part of the journey is pure pleasure.

PJ:  What would you say to someone about to embark on a life-writing project?

AD: BE PREPARED! It’s a much more emotional journey than you expect (even if you expect that!) Negotiating the material so you don’t unduly hurt the ones you love while being truthful is like navigating a class six rapid on a balsawood raft. On the other hand, the emotional journey can actually lead to great personal growth.

Once the book is published, the imbalance of information is quite daunting—every talk or book group I do, everyone knows everything about me and I know nothing about them. Given that I am not a Katie Price ‘bare all’ kinda gal, this has been challenging for me. On the positive side, however, I have had the most extraordinary reaction to the book—letters have flowed in from all over the globe telling me how moved people are by the story and I’ve heard from people who knew my parents when they were young as well as old friends and acquaintances of my own—that aspect of it has been by far the most gratifying.

More on Ashley Dartnell and Farangi Girl, here.

A Building On My Brain

Poetry London Launch

To the South Bank yesterday evening for the launch of Poetry London, Spring issue, No 71. An evening of first class poetry with readings from contributors to the magazine - Sam Riviere, Amanda Dalton, Paul Batchelor and Selima Hill. But in that top line up Amanda Dalton's reading stood out. Mesmerising poetry. She read the sequence 'Feral', which appears in Poetry London, and other poems from her brand new collection, Stray. The book is just out from Bloodaxe and long awaited. 

There's lots of good things in PL's new issue, including Kathryn Maris's interview with Christopher Reid.

I'm excited to announce that I'll be publishing, very soon, a in-depth interview, here on Words Unlimited, with Amanda Dalton about her writing of Stray. Watch this space ...

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Catching up with reading back issues of the London Review of Books [why don’t I just read it when it arrives in the post?] I came across this quote in Christopher Tayler’s essay length review of Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 Book 1 and Book 2, and 1Q84 Book 3,

“At his best, he [Murakami] ... has a compulsive storyteller’s ability to hustle the reader over the threshold of assent and create a feeling of being led into a coherent inner landscape.”

He's describing the literary equivalent of ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ Of course we’re all far too literary and worldly to respond to the nursery question. And yet isn’t that what a global bestseller such as Murakmi is tapping into? Our instatiable desire for a story?

So, as you re-draft your first chapter, that’s what you’re aiming for - to hustle the reader over the threshold and have them believe in your fictional world. You probably have less than a page in which to achieve it.

Cheryl Moskowitz

Cheryl Moskowitz has just published her first collection of poems for adults, The Girl is Smiling. She talks here about the virtues of self-publishing, the way a poem finds its form, the differences between writing poetry and prose, and why you might want to look on your poems as guests at a dinner party

PJ: Can you tell us something about Circle Time Press – the process of self-publishing? 

CM: It doesn’t feel quite right to call it ‘self’ publishing as there is so little about the process that I would ever be able to do by myself.  Circle Time Press was set up in 2009 by Alastair Gavin, my husband. Initially, it was to publish my collection of poetry for children, Can It Be About Me?  I’ve been working as a writer in schools for years, with a demand from teachers and children for me to have something I could leave with them. I’d had enthusiastic responses about the poems from three children’s publishers but all said the same thing: they weren’t publishing single author collections. Finally, I was advised by an editor at Walker Books and by the CLPE (Centre for Language in Primary Education), who were also keen on the manuscript, to get it published myself. The book’s been a great success. It was chosen as a recommended title by Children’s Poetry Bookshelf at PBS, and has now been taken on by Janetta Otter-Barry for her children’s poetry list at Frances Lincoln Publishers. It’ll be out in August 2012.

PJ: I see. So you thought you’d go that route with your adult collection. Whose was the editorial eye? 

CM: It was becoming increasingly frustrating fending off questions from people at readings asking where they could buy my poetry. Having been through the process once, with Alastair having proved himself an astute editor and excellent book designer, I was excited for him to tackle my adult collection.  We could get the book out in less than a quarter of the time other publishers might take. I handed over the first draft of the manuscript to Alastair last September and had a proof copy to look at by November. Final tweaks and edits and all those unavoidable wrangles with the printers were negotiated during December and January and the book was in my hand by the beginning of February 2012, a mere six months (as opposed to the usual two years) from start to finish.

Although he was my main editor, Alastair wasn’t the only one to cast a critical eye.  I took many of the poems to my various writing groups: Clink Street, Mimi Khalvati’s Advanced Poetry Workshop and my North London Stanza.  Three poet friends in particular have acted as close readers and offered invaluable advice and support throughout the process: Wendy French, Maggie Butt and American poet Leslie McGrath.

PJ: Several of the poems concern your relationship with your father. I notice you chose to thread them through the collection. I enjoyed going in and out of that relationship. Did you ever consider putting them together as a sequence?

 CM: I did think about trying to group the father poems together but gave up on that idea quite quickly. A sequence suggests some kind of continuity, something linked up over time and that is not something I’ve ever experienced in relation to my father. My relationship with him is characterised by absence. He left our family when I was 11 and I’ve only spent time with him on a few occasions since. Ironically, most of that time has been since he’s developed Alzheimer’s. There are huge gaps in my knowing of him, who he is, his history. My father does always seem to emerge as a subject in my writing, my fiction as well as my poetry. I’m sure I’m using the writing to deal with that absence but it is like trying to darn a blanket that has too many holes. The job, it seems, will never be done. The poems about my father pervade the collection, just as he has remained a preoccupation throughout my life, but it is important that they be mixed in with a good deal else that is essential and nothing to do with him. 

PJ: Your poems range across some difficult material – can you say something about your choice of quite a cheerful title?

CM: I wouldn’t describe it as a cheerful title exactly. The poems’ topics do cover a wide range but what binds them together, I hope, is a combined sense of vulnerability and strength. I wanted the title to embody both. The girl is smiling is a line taken from the last poem in the collection, ‘Snapshot’. The second part of that line is, ‘it is not a lie.’  The title is intended to suggest that there is much to be uncovered beneath that smile.

I wrote ‘Snapshot’ after working with a group of young carers in Westminster on a writing and photography project. The children used cameras to create self-portraits and produced some writing to go with them.  Because these were children who had the responsibility of having to look after siblings or parents, parts of themselves remained unseen. I was born with a large and very noticeable purple birthmark on my bottom lip. It was very much part of who I was but I often tried to hide it, especially in photographs where I perfected a way of smiling that disguised, as much as possible, the birthmark. At one point I thought I might call the collection ‘Birthmark’ but that title was already taken several times over: Mick Imlah’s collection Birthmarks,1988, US poet, Jon Pineda’s, Birthmark, 2004 and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story The Birthmark, 1846, to name a few.

PJ: There is a variety of form from sonnets to prose poems. For you, what is that process of a poem finding its form? 

CM: I think, as you suggest, it’s the poem that eventually needs to find its form rather than having one imposed on it by the poet at the outset. When I first began writing poetry (in my teens) I was resistant to the idea of established form. Like most young people, I wanted to make my own rules. I still enjoy that aspect of poetry, that each new poem can re-invent or redefine the form it is written in. But as my writing has matured (or maybe I have matured, as a writer) I have become more excited by the challenges of writing in traditional as well as non-traditional forms. ‘One For the Heart’ for example, is a sonnet. It’s a poem about the heart as an organ, and the process of open heart surgery but since the heart has always been symbolically associated with the idea of love the sonnet seemed the perfect form. The six lines of Louise Bourgeois’ text, which I use at the beginning of ‘He Disappeared Into Complete Silence 1947,’ determined this poem’s destiny as a sestina. The lines had an obsessive quality. I was obsessed by them and the artist whose work they were taken from. The sestina with its constant return to the same end words and circling of ideas is an ideal form for obsessing. When a poem finds its form it’s like finally being given a very clear job-description. You now know exactly what you have to do, no matter how hard or how long it might take you, the task is laid out in front of you.

PJ: I notice some daring lineation. For example, the use of short and very long lines within a poem – I’m thinking of ‘Adrift’, ‘Senescence’, ‘Pianissimo.’ Can you say something about that?

CM: I’m surprised that you’ve picked these three  – I feel I took much more of a blind leap with the poem ‘Loneliness,’ which has some extremely unconventional lineation, but I’m glad you’re not asking me about that one. It’s a recent poem and I’m not yet sure I can fully explain it! Certainly the process of lineating that poem felt similar to constructing an abstract painting where you keep adding and taking away until it just ‘feels’ right. The poems you mention, ‘Adrift’, ‘Senescence’ and ‘Pianissimo’ were written earlier but at very different times. It was certainly not a case of deciding to write all poems in this particular way, ie with a mixture of short and long lines. The process of choosing how a poem should sit on a page, where the lines should end, etcetera, for me is around one tenth logic and the rest instinct. The short lines in ‘Pianissimo,’ for example, act like little interruptions of thought effecting a slight disorientation. It’s a quiet poem as the title suggests but when I read it, it makes me feel a little dizzy. The long lines together with the short lines do this. They are supposed to. It’s a poem about seeing my grown up father reduced to living the life of a baby.

PJ: I like the way you used the forward slash as punctuation in ‘Lifted.’ I remember seeing an earlier version with short lines. Was that a way to preserve the lineation but at the same time, give you different line endings?   

CM: ‘Lifted’ is very much a poem driven by sound, rhythm and insistent repetition. I wanted to find a way to preserve that sense of pace and urgency on the page so it reads the same way I hear it in my head. The forward slash seemed to provide the momentum I was after and turned out to serve the poem on other levels too: as a punctuation mark the forward slash is used to separate alternatives, which is also what I’m doing in the poem’s narrative. Yes, the poem had an earlier incarnation with shorter lines - the forward slash is also a traditional way to indicate the ends of verse lines when printed continuously.

PJ: With prose poems, such as ‘Wednesday,’ there’s terrific compression but I sense a short story or a novel might spin from such material. For you, where does poetry sit in relation to your prose work?

CM: That’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently! I love the idea that there can be the stuff of a story or novel (or even a film) compressed into a poem and I’d like to think that a poem like ‘Wednesday’ could be a seed-bed for a longer work of prose. I have come to realise that I do not work all that differently as a poet than as a prose writer. Even when I’m working on an essay or a novel I find myself sculpting the words in minute detail, sometimes working and reworking a single sentence for days, changing the order of the words until everything is in its right place. This can make for a very painstaking and laborious process and probably explains why, despite how long I’ve been at it, my output of longer prose works remains relatively low. 

PJ: Do you ever think of working on another novel or has poetry seduced you away?

CM: Poetry was where I first began as a published writer in my late teens and early twenties and has become my main focus again these past few years. However, I’m currently finishing off a short story collection and working on a new novella. And, now that the house is empty of children, I’m hoping to find the time, and the resolve, necessary to write another novel. The real difference for me between novel writing and poetry is how connected to other writers I can be in the process. A poem can obviously be written in a much shorter time than a novel (though not always…) so one comes up for air more often.  In the poetry world there is a wide community. I  feel comfortable sharing my work at its various stages and receiving their help and criticism. For me this has never been so when writing fiction or prose. Perhaps it’s some kind of wrong-footed magical thinking on my part but when writing prose, especially longer fiction, I find it practically impossible to speak about work-in- progress, or to show it to anyone, until it’s more or less finished. This can mean possibly a good few years of not really being able to answer the question ‘So what are you working on now?’ with any kind of clarity. This can have the effect of creating a good deal of emotional distance from family and friends. A scary prospect but a tunnel I know I must crawl back into before too long.

PJ: What are you writing at the moment?

CM: All the above, some poetry for a new children’s collection and a drama project for Under-5’s, not to mention working on the answers to this interview which has turned into a most enjoyable writing exercise in itself!

PJ: Which poets feed you?

CM: Of my seminal influences - those whose poetry got under my skin when I was still quite young and has continued to stay with me - I’m fed by the work of Sylvia Plath,  Eleanor Farjeon, Walt Whitman, e e cummings, Edward Lear, T S Eliot and Shakespeare.

More recently discovered and current favourites to go to for inspiration and pure enjoyment are Jane Hirshfield (for her quiet, exquisitely crafted meditations, especially in her most recent collection Come Thief), anything and everything by Charles Bukowski (who everyone else seemed to discover before I did and I dearly wish I could have heard him read while he was still alive) and Philip Larkin (ditto).

The Czech poet Miroslav Holub, whose work I only know in translation but I love his poetry and his essays, and use both in teaching. Swedish poet Tomas Gösta Tranströmer writes astounding poetry that can take my breath away. And my current desert island choice would be the collected works of the great Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz whose writing is so deeply felt and intelligent it’s almost like reading scripture.

PJ: What are you reading at the moment? 

CM: I’ve just been given the gorgeous looking Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, a graphic novel by wife and husband team Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot which tells the troubled story of Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter. It interweaves some autobiographical episodes from Mary Talbot’s own life and her relationship with her ‘cold mad feary father’ who was a respected Joyce scholar. I’m not very far in but I’m loving it. Graphic novels are a newly discovered delicious delight.

Poetry-wise I recently attended the launch of Notebook in Hand, the posthumously published new and selected works by the extraordinary Hungarian born poet, publisher, self-proclaimed anarchist (and much else besides) John Rety.  I remember going to the Torriano Meeting House in the 80’s and hearing John read his own poetry. Notebook in Hand is a beautiful looking collection that contains some of his very best and most moving work. Rety’s inimitable voice is audible on every page.

PJ: What would you say to someone working towards their first collection?

CM: I would warn against the temptation to try to pull together poems that have nothing to say to one another even if they count amongst your favourites. You have to be prepared to murder your darlings or at least to keep some of them corralled in a different pen. Think about the poems in the collection as you might a dinner party. Which guests (poems) would you want to bring together and why. If you made a seating plan, who would you seat next to whom in the hopes that some affinity was found or some interesting sparks might fly?  

In March 2012 Cheryl will be doing readings at various venues in the USA - full list here - with poet Anne-Marie Fyfe

Writing and Water

In between attending the talks on the Taking The Waters weekend, I took time out to experience the real thing. Increasingly, I'm using my phone camera as a visual notebook. That weekend I wanted to record different states of water -  textures, the way the changing light plays on the surface.

Though I’ve written a novel about the way water can shape a life, and several watery poems, for me, water means more than subject matter. Proximity to it has become part of my writing process. I try to take regular breaks by the sea or walks by a river. Perhaps something to do with having been born by the sea ...

I won't write directly about these images but, like jottings in my notebook, they'll tune me into something that stirred as my attention was held by the water.

Being by water steadies the gaze, invites a different quality of attention, a stilling of the busy, city, mind. Something about being by water stirs the soup of the unconscious. So much more seems to float up after a period of staring out.