Words Unlimited

The Week In Other Words & Music

Maybe it's because the weather is suddenly so sunny and the days long but I seem to be getting out more. It's so easy to lose sight of the pleasure of writing or any creative activity. There's no better way to return to that pleasure by finding pleasure in the creativity of others. I feel well nourished this week by music and poetry.

Sunday 22 June
In Aldeburgh for the 'Musicircus ' - part of the Aldeburgh festival - a re-creation of a John Cage Happening, first performed at the University of Illinois in 1967. Fast forward to a Suffolk seaside town 2014. Between 11am and 1pm on Sunday morning, around 700 musicians lined the beach and the Crag Path to play. The 'audience' was free to move among them, creating their own 'concert'. Highlights for me: the percussion section of the CBSO, freed from the back of the concert stage, came forward to play a spirited piece on upturned dustbins.

More drummers paraded along the sea front - students from The Guildhall, London.

On the beach there was the lone piper with boats plus the mugs and plates hanging from what looked like a clothes airer and many more.

As a kind of 'finale' the whole of the CBSO turned up shortly before 1pm. Dressed in Sunday casual gear, and conducted by Thomas Ades, they performed part of Ravel's Ma Mere l' Oye in a tent on the front. Seagulls joined in. Ades's face was fascinating to watch as he conducted - not something you'd see in the concert hall at Snape - it was filled with the joy, the pleasure of making music.

 

Monday 23 June

To The Rugby Tavern, London, for the launch of two new chapbooks from Shearsman and readings by two fine poets, Martyn Crucefix and Robert Vas Dias. Crucefix's subtle poems in The Time We Turned explore memory and the Cumbrian landscape.

Vas Dias's Arrivals & Departures brings together his prose poems. Reading Crucefix on the bus home, I was reminded of the power of the unpunctuated line; Vas Dias reminded me what fun you can have with a short prose piece.

Tuesday 24 June

To Keat's House, Hampstead for the launch of the latest issue of Poetry Review - refreshing interlude, indeed. Evening sun in a beautiful garden, meeting other poets, sipping wine, before going inside to hear some stunningly fresh poems. Sean Hewitt and Sarah Howe are both young poets to watch and it was interesting to watch Simon Armitage watching them read. Doesn't seem a moment since he was the 'young poet to watch' and there he was, the voice of experience.

Sarah Howe described her work as 'hybrid, like me, half Chinese, half English. They are somewhere between a poem and a footnote.' 

Sean Hewitt's rich lyric poems took us deep into the woods. 

 

Simon Armitage's reading took us back to his childhood, that watchful boy up on the moors above Marsden, West Yorkshire. There was an elegaic quality to some of these deeply felt and pin-point accurate lines. As if to lift the mood, and to remind us that he also has a

sense of humour, he ended by reading 'Bringing It All Back Home' from Seeing Stars. It was a treat to hear him read from that marvellous book, and it reminded me, for the second time this week, of the power and potential of the prose poem. I shall be re-reading Seeing Stars and look forward to my copy of Poetry Review, due through the letterbox any day.

Earlier in the evening we had a further treat as the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize was announced - Mir Mahfuz Ali.  He gave a powerful reading of 'MIG-21 Raids at Shegontola'. The Geoffrey Dearmer Prize is awarded to the best poem published in Poetry Review during the year by a poet who hasn’t published a full collection at the time their work appeared in the magazine.

Mir Mahfuz Ali now has a collection, just out from Seren, Midnight, Dhaka. Another one to add to my reading pile.  Well, if the weather changes, I've plenty of creative company to keep indoors.

The Facts & The Fantasy

The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters – another extraordinary novel from Michelle Lovric – is published this month.  As with all her fiction, it is following and ferreting out facts that leads to the weaving of such fantastical stories. Here, she talks about her routes through research from extremely long hair, to quack medicine and the landscape of Ireland

 photo: Marianne Taylor

PJ: For the latest book you’ve had to research, the real Sutherland Sisters, hair, Ireland, quacks and showmen etc. Where do you start?

ML: The True & Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters started when a medical historian friend, Bill Helfand, told me about the Seven Sutherland Sisters, an American septet who rose to fame and fortune peddling quack hair products by letting down their long hair on circus stages. Bill said, ‘I think these girls might interest you.’

He could not have been more right. Their story, like my novel, may seem incredible, but the facts of their lives gives my tale credibility, I hope.

After reading every scrap of material I could find on the Sutherland girls, I looked into the quackery hair products like the ones they sold. I love quack medicine, and have written about it in earlier novels, The Remedy and The Book of Human Skin. Its premise is the lure of words. Worthless chemicals are endowed with almost magical qualities by the process of naming them. Their titles evoke foreign doctors, exotic ingredients, aristocracy. I am interested in the powers of the word as almost sympathetic magic. So as usual I headed straight for the Wellcome Library on that subject. And speaking of sympathetic magic, I looked into beliefs about the power of hair. Cut hair is a dangerous thing. Witches can use it to create storms or make a child wither and die.

My novel is about sisters with torrents of beautiful hair falling from the appropriate places at the tops of their heads. But that raised the issue of what happens when hair grows in the wrong places? So I looked into the life of Julia Pastrana, the Victorian, so-called, ‘baboon’ lady, who was one of the most celebrated side-show freaks of her age.

Apart from words, I am interested in art. Hair in the nineteenth century was almost reinvented by the Pre-Raphaelite painters as a signifier of dangerous feminine libido. So I began to research those ideas, looking at the writings of Elizabeth Gitter, Griselda Pollock and Galia Ofek.

Finally I went to Ireland to do physical research on the post-Famine setting of the novel. That actually set the emotional tone for the book, as I have written here.

Ireland gave me fairies, witches, folk tales and most of all language. I adore the redundancy of Irish language. So several heavy tomes from the philology section of the London Library lived on my desk for many months.

The story of the Harristown Sisters ends in Venice, where I needed to look at the mid-nineteenth century, something I had not written about before. Fortunately the great photographic studios of Venice, including Naya and Ongania, were by that time starting to record the city’s Victorian life. I also wanted to pay tribute to my favourite Henry James novel, The Aspern Papers, so I re-read that, his Venice letters and looked at his circle of friends for their diaries.

After all of that, I sat down to write!  

PJ: How do you keep you keep track of all the threads – spread sheets? Notebooks?

ML: Until fairly recently I always kept the story in my head as a kind of organic thing, which grew and grew, occupying more and more of my brain. Some bits were lumpy. Some bits seemed dehydrated. I just tended it until it swelled into the right shape. Lately I’ve had some health issues that have meant I’ve been unable to keep my novelistic garden in virtual order. So I have taken more to writing things down.

I keep a handmade spreadsheet for all my novels. It consists of a grid made up of all the characters’ names, both vertically and horizontally. So there is a box in which to put the main issues of tension or amity between each of the characters. If there are blanks, I find ways to fill them. So everyone is threaded together.

The other thing I do is keep a timeline. This records the time of the day or night and the weather. Both these things allow me to monitor the comfort and exhaustion levels of my characters, which are crucial to how well they are dealing with the plot horrors I am pitching against them. This also stops you from writing 29 hour days and 1 hour nights.

PJ: Since you love libraries and collecting fascinating facts are you never tempted to turn your fiction, story-telling skills to a non-fiction book?

ML: I spent many years as an editor, writer, designer and producer of non-fiction books, about letters, museums, cats etc. I loved it. And in many ways, not least financially, I am sorry not to be in that world any more. It was very sociable, and I worked with a fantastic team of people. It gave me a wonderful lifestyle, taking me to all kinds of places – Paris, Rome, Buffalo!

I’ve been writing fiction pretty much exclusively now for about eight years. These days my goal is to synthesize research into my own writing. After all those years of looking at the work of others, I feel I have things to say for myself now, especially through experiences lived.

PJ: For creative research, you’ve said you sometimes write a character as a poem. How does that work? Do you go for sound, image, metaphor? How does the poem become prose character?

ML: Yes, I very often write a poem, a dramatic monologue for a character, or a dialogue, before smoothing it into prose or conversation.

Poetry makes you work harder at language. It makes you concise and it makes you more aware of the sounds of the words. Images need to be distilled without self-indulgence, efficiently, shockingly.

I wrote several parts of The Harristown Sisters in poetry. There is, for example, a description of Manticory’s red hair by a photographer. And something which does not appear in the book was an extremely long poem written in the voice of the Baboon Lady Julia Pastrana, in which I imagined myself inhabiting her body. It was a necessary exercise in empathy.

I usually place the poem in the relevant part of the book, reading what comes before and what after. Then I let it breathe a bit more … like the idea of Prévert’s “How to Paint a Bird”, where the bird is lured into a cage (a lovely metaphor for capturing an idea in verse).

The almost-final act for Prévert is to paint out the bars one by one taking care not to touch any of the bird’s feathers. And you know if the poem/painting is working, if the bird sings. Only then can you sign the work.

 

More on how Michelle Lovric creates her adult fiction, here, and on writing for children, here

Last Week In Other Words ...

It's always a good week when I get out, leave the computer, the current draft and deadline, in order to enjoy other people's words.

Saturday 7 June - To the Betsy Trotwood for the launch of poet Cath Drake's Sleeping With Rivers, which won the 2013 Mslexia Pamphlet Competition, now published by Seren. The book was also the PBS Spring Pamphlet Choice. 

Congratulations to Cath who gave a wonderfully animated reading.

The poems draw on her life growing up in Australia, they are witty, wise and inventive. Cath invited her key mentors to guest read. So it turned into a poetry feast with sets from Mimi Khalvati, Roddy Lumsden and Pascale Petit.

Monday 9 June - to The Troubadour to hear Paul Muldoon in conversation with Cahal Dallat. Muldoon says he first wanted to be a painter, which is, perhaps, why his work has a strong engagement with the image. He’s recently been inspired by the paintings of Rita Duffy. He admires the way a painter can explore an idea, distil it so you 'see it in an instant.'

There is also his passion for film, in particular the Western.  He often tells his students to treat the first draft of a poem as if it were a shooting script for a film – ‘what are we looking at?’

On rhyme: ‘I don’t think of using it, rhyme is what the poems want to do.'

On fashions in poetry, the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker says, he doesn’t see that any ‘single view is to the fore.’

 

 

Wednesday 11 June - To Tunbridge Wells for the launch of Digging Up Paradise, Sarah Salway's book of garden stories, poems and much more. It was one of the most warm and welcoming launch parties I have attended in a while. On a hot June evening Sarah did a reading outside, much to the delight of guests and passers by.

 

 

Writing and Courage - PEN/Pinter Awards

All acts of writing involve a certain amount of courage. The PEN/Pinter Prize reminds us just how courageous some writers must be in order not to be silenced.

The Prize, established in 2009 in memory of the playwright Harold Pinter, is awarded annually to a British writer of outstanding literary merit who casts ‘an unflinching, unswerving’ gaze upon the world and shows a ‘fierce intellectual determination … to define the real truth of our lives and our societies’ – The quotes are from Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

On 8 October I went to the PEN/Pinter Prize evening at the British Library to see Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy collect her award.

Duffy accepted the award with modest good grace, saying she didn’t feel worthy of it. However, she did proudly note that both she and Harold Pinter had benefited from a state education. How many potential young writers might we be losing as Michael Gove turns back the clock on state schools, she wondered. A scandal!

She read a selection of her work – with musical accompaniment from John Sampson -  amply demonstrating that she met Pinter’s criteria.  There was a long poem about the First World War and its futility alongside a wry, pin-sharp riposte to the teacher who had a Duffy poem banned from the school syllabus, ‘Mrs Schofield’s GCSE.’ You can read it, here

 

But that wasn’t the end of the evening. The award comes in two parts. It then fell to Duffy to announce the second part of the prize which is offered to an international writer of courage. Duffy had nominated the Syrian journalist and novelist, Samar Yazbek. Forced out of Syria because of her views and her writing Yazbek now lives in exile in Europe. You can read about her life in exile, here.

 
Clearly very moved by this recognition of her writing,  Samar Yazbek read her acceptance speech in Arabic. Her non-fiction, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, as already attacted much attention. Interestingly Yazbek has a novel due to be published here, Cinnamon,  translated by Emily Danby. It's due out on 5 November. Not long to wait. 

Raising The Game?

How can we keep a connection to the positive energy of the Olympic Summer before it evaporates, fast as the vapour trail from that final Red Arrows fly-past?

While sports clubs everywhere are overrun with new recruits – the inspired generation? – for many of us, certainly me, it’s too late to attempt to run 100m in under 10 seconds. But, aside from sport, how can each of us take inspiration from the Olympic Summer and channel such positive energy into other areas of our everyday lives and, more particularly, our writing lives?

The ‘E’ word

Interviewed before the Paralympics closing ceremony, comedian Jimmy Carr said, ‘I’ve had the summer off – from cynicism.’  Exactly.

We’ve watched athletes compete and co-operate. We’ve marvelled as ordinary people performed extraordinary feats of grace and endurance. We’ve talked about excellence and having fun; we’ve cared and shared. The Games Makers have shown it’s possible to get a buzz out of doing something without getting paid. If one word can sum all of this up, it’s ENTHUSIASM.

There, I’ve said it – the ‘E’ word. It tends not to be cool to be enthusiastic but, in the face of such amazing events, our bottled up enthusiasm couldn’t help but surface. 

It’s probably not simply British reserve or Metro cool that keeps us wary of overt displays of excitement. The word derives from the Greek entheos - ‘the god within.’ When enthusiasm entered the English language c1600 it meant to be possessed by God or deluded that one had a direct channel to God. Enthusiasm was close to an unhealthy fanaticism.

Over the centuries the word has lost its religious connotations. Now, it refers to having great excitement for or interest in anything, but I suppose that could include extreme right wing politics.  Just as the Olympics have created new associations around the Union Jack might the idea of being overtly enthusiastic gain a new respectability?

What might this mean in terms of writing?

The American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson on this subject:

‘Enthusiasm is the mother of effort, and without it

nothing great was ever achieved.’

How often do we writers talk about the fears and setbacks rather than the founding enthusiasms that get us tapping at the keyboard in the first place?  How often do we own up to our excitement about our current project?  Could it be that the worst aspects of the effort start to dominate because we detach that effort from the founding enthusiasm?

Medal or Personal Best?

Over the summer I jotted down phrases that came up repeatedly from the athletes or their coaches, phrases that spoke of the effort born of enthusiasm. Some of these could be reframed and applied to the process of developing as a writer:

 ‘it’s about putting in the hours of training’

‘it all came together on the day’

‘I look to get the best from each individual’

‘that’s a new Personal Best’

‘I’ll review my speeds then make a plan for Rio’

‘it’s all about making steps to improve’

I was struck by the number of athletes who didn’t get a medal, even came last, but still had a smile on their face. Pitting themselves against the medal winners they’d produced a Personal Best. Taking part had got the best out of that individual. 

Each time you submit work – poem, short story or novel – you enter the race. The competitive world of publishing is altogether more chaotic and quixotic than the world of elite sports. But each submission is an opportunity to raise your game by giving that piece one more tweak to make it a Personal Best, at that time. The feedback may not be what you’d hoped for but from it, how can you make steps to improve the work?

It’s part of the writing process to follow through on rejection by reviewing and making a plan for the next submission. As one swimmer said, ‘I’ll review my speeds and make a plan for Rio.’ You have no chance of getting a medal if you don’t take the training seriously with your eye on the next race.  

The Art & The Graft

Achievements - in sport or in writing - begin with some natural aptitude plus vision and imagination. As Stephen Hawking put during the Paralympic Opening Ceremony,   "Look at the stars and not down at your feet. Be curious."  Curiosity, enthusiasm and a facility with words – the art – get a writing project off to a good start. Next comes the craft, or should I say graft. 

Jessica Ennis has a natural talent for the hurdling but less talent for throwing the javelin. To get her heptathlon gold medal meant putting in extra hours in on javelin training, breaking down the technique into stages, improving each so that ‘it all came together on the day.’

When a piece of writing isn’t working it’s the graft of re-drafting that brings success. You take the novel apart and put it back in a way so that it will all come together. Or, having tried it, you might decide that this particular ‘sport’ isn’t for you. It might be time to try a different genre. 

It’s all too easy to focus on the exhaustion and frustration of the writing process but watching the Olympics has reminded me how important it is to stay in touch with the enjoyment and enthusiasm that made me want to write in the first place.

If you’re struggling too much at the graft why not return to the authors who inspire you, or go back to an image or a character that made you want to start that project in the first place. In short – reconnect the effort to the vision, the enthusiasm, and declare it to yourself and others. 

What excited many of us over the summer was not simply the medal ceremonies but the stories behind each athlete – the process that led them either to a medal or Personal Best.

With writing you are in charge of what Personal Best means for you. As to the medals – I reckon if you’ve had something published by a reputable publisher – be it mainstream or small press, poetry, fiction or non-fiction – you are a medal winner. Congratulations! I’ll leave you to rank yourself gold, silver or bronze.

Meanwhile, if you've been inspired by the Olympics and Paralympics do leave a comment, I'd love to hear how it affected you. Let's keep that energy going ...

Sea Gazing

As often as I can I get away to the Suffolk coast to walk, swim and write. Nothing starts the writing day better than staring into the sea. I took this on my phone a couple of weeks ago. Of course, it's no substitute for the real thing, but when stuck in busy London playing this is a good way to clear the mind before plunging back into my characters's lives.

  

To Tweet or Not to Tweet?

Isn't Tweeting bad for writers? Just another way to procrastinate? Isn't it all simply inane, egotistical chatter?

Back in the early 1990s - that does sound a long time ago! - I was mainly writing about the visual arts, my novels, as yet, were unwritten. I attended a conference - something to do with critical writing in the arts - at which there was a session on this thing call The Internet. Someone said it had nothing to do with writing and, anyway, wasn't it just a purveyor of porn?

Less than ten years later, with my first novel about to come out and another on the way I found the Internet and email part of the writing life  - research, sending edits back and forth to publishers etc.Well, Twitter's been here a while now and I've been using it in a modest way for a couple of years. For me, I find it an incredibly useful way of picking up 'industry' information, chatting to other writers, finding out about books and events I might have missed. Of course you can waste a lot of time on it but, equally, you could spend all morning sharpening pencils.That's your choice.

I would urge every writer to at least consider Twitter and how it might work for them. The more working writers tweeting the stronger that community grows.

Scriptwriter Jason Arnopp has looked at Twitter from a writer's perspective and come up with his 10 Reasons Why Twitter is Great For Writers. It's an excellent list as he embeds tweeting into the writing life.

And where did I come across this article? Why, on Twitter, of course.

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.

The Typewriter - Last & First

Much in the news recently about the closing down of the last ever factory that makes typewriters. Godrej and Boyce shut down production in Mumbai, India, at the end of April. Apparently, typewriters hung on in India when they had long since disappeared everywhere else.

For me, this information arrived at exactly the right moment. My sister had just asked me if I'd like to have my mother's typewriter.  Now ninety and long past tying, mum had dug out her portable Olivetti, bought in the 1960s, and offered it to my sister to. Clearly, mum didn't want to put it in the bin and hoped that Helen would use it.

'I don't want it do you?' Helen asked me. I wasn't sure. Keeping such a bulky, redundant object was at odds with my current need to de-clutter. It was only a few months ago that took my old iMac to re-cycling. But, as I opened the red case, the years dissolved.

Though it's keys are feathery with dust and the case smells of the damp garage it's been stored in for over 20 years, beneath that I catch a whiff of the inkiness of the ribbon, the rubberyness of the platen. Memories flood back: the postman delivering this magic object mum ordered from a small ad. in the newspaper; watching her unpack the parcel, set the machine up on the dining table; her fingers flying over the keys. How does she do that?

I loved writing stories. Could you really get them down so fast and see them in print, and by your own hand -  If only I could do that ...

 
Mum's typewriter. A little dusty but it still works...

Mum had bought the typewriter in order to brush up her pre-children speeds. Not long after it arrived she saw a postcard in the Newsagent's window - a writer wanted a typist to type up a novel manuscript.  She sat at the dining table, a pile of handwritten pages to the side of the machine and bashed away, excited that she'd be paid for doing this work at home.  I was excited at the thought that my mum was typing up all those words to make it become a book.

It didn't last.

The pile of paper disappeared. 'It's not suitable,' she said, 'I'm not typing that kind of thing.' She never spoke again of the novel manuscript and was wary of postcards in the Newsagent's window. I still wonder who, in our neighbourhood, had been writing a racy fiction?

It didn't put me off. I tapped and pecked away, frustrated that I had to watch the keys, when my mum's fingers seemed to know where each letter was. The way I typed was slower than hand-writing but I loved to see the printed letters form.

Later, home from college for the summer, I travelled to Manchester each day for two weeks to do a crash course in touch-typing. After that, no more watching the keys. Instead, I watched the words fly onto the paper and got my own portable typewriter as present for my twenty-first birthday. Once the Amstrad appeared, well, the rest is history. I'm writing this on my third, or is it my fourth, Mac.

Pre-Tippex - the typewriter rubber mum used, still tied to the string she fixed it to in the 1960s

Still wondering what to do about mum's Olivetti I Googled the word and find that Cormac McCarthy, until a couple of years ago, wrote everything on an Olivetti just like my mum's.  And twenty-five year old poet, Claire Askew, who collects typewriters, would love to own an Olivetti. 'Design Icon of the 1960s,' she calls it.

How can I not keep it?

It certainly can't go to the dump as my sister intended. I'll have to find room for it somewhere.

While it's a luxury for me to keep this Proustian object there are some writers who still need a typewriter as part of their process.

Has anyone told Paul Auster there'll be no more typewriters? For him the typewriter is essential he said in a Paris Review interview: 'Typing allows me to experience the book in a new way, to plunge into the flow of the narrative and feel how it functions as a whole. I call it, "reading with my fingers," and it's amazing how many errors your fingers will find that your eyes never noticed.' He famously bought up stocks of ribbons a few years ago. 'I'm living in fear that a day will come when there won't be any ribbons left to buy and I'll have to go digital and join the twenty-first century.'

Looks as if he'll have to go out and buy up a few vintage typewriters. I know his typewriter is an Olympia, subject of the book he did with artist Sam Messer. But if his Olympia ever lets him down I know where he can get an Olivetti in good working order.

Quote of The Week No 1

"Motivation follows action, not the other way round"

I found this in one of those what's-the-point-of-New-Year-Resolutions articles.

It's so true. And particularly in relation to writing.

After a break, it can be hard to get back into a novel you last looked at in December, or to find those notes you scribbled just before the snow came down - the notes that you were going to turn into a new short story. 

You've been thinking about it. You will get round to it soon ...  A part of your brain is waiting for the ideal day, the ideal conditions - a clear day with nothing else to do but write. It isn't going to happen.

What small action could you take to motivate you to start that project? The more resistance you have, the smaller the step ... Read through the last draft of Chapter 11 and jot down some notes for chapter 12? Too daunting? Why not at least get out the folder and put it on your desk?

Whatever you decide, make sure it involves action.

If you'd like to read the full article by Oliver Burkeman, from which I plucked the quote, it's here.