Letters to the Unknown Soldier

There is a fantastic public memorial in the making, brainchild of Kate Pullinger and Neil Bartlett, a chance for anyone and everyone to write and send a letter or poem to the Unknown Soldier - Jagger's wonderful statue at Paddington Station - memorial to the GWR employees killed in the Great War. 
    All the pieces, from the well known and famous to the unknown, from school children to the elderly, are being published on the website and it will be there for everyone to access until 14th August. After that it will be archived by the British Library. Here's the link: http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/?skipenter

Some of the pieces are featured as they come in, and I was moved and delighted to have mine featured today, alongside a pice from Andy McNab, among others. 

Letter to an unknown soldier

Things you do not know:

When you leave, you will leave a child, growing. When night falls on the day you die, your officer will write two letters to two families, yours and his own. He will say to his mother that he has never had to write a letter like that. He has never knowingly lied before. He helped three of his men to bury what was left. He will ask does his mother think, under the circumstances, he did the right thing when he said ‘it was quick?’

Your wife and your mother will weep together in the kitchen, over a pot of tea. Your wife will smile through her tears and say, “At least, it was quick.” Your mother will shake her head and reach for your wife’s hand.

Your child, a girl, will be born early, on a hot June night, to the sound of the first bombs to fall on London from a fixed wing aircraft. Those bombs will hit the school in Upper North Street, and kill eighteen children, mostly between the ages of four and six years old.

You will be moved with infinite care and laid between men you never knew. Your wife and mother choose the words ‘Only son and beloved husband’ for your headstone. They mean to come and visit your grave when they can save the money. They never do.

*

Your daughter’s husband will be called up to fight in another war. He will leave her, pregnant with her second child, at home with your wife and mother. He will have reinforced the kitchen table with metal sheeting from the works, and they are used to sleeping underneath on a single mattress from the spare bed. Your eldest grandson, a boy of three, lies awake, listening to bombs falling on the streets. He loses his best friend.

Before their own house is hit, killing your wife and mother, your daughter and son are sent away to a farm in Wales. They never go back.

Your son in law will be killed at Cassino. Your daughter will not marry again. She helps out at your grandson’s school, then trains to become a teacher.

Your grandson becomes a teacher too, lecturing in sociology at Cardiff University, and he marries one of his students. They are pacifists. They do not approve of the wearing of red poppies on Remembrance Sunday but when their son, your great grandson, comes home from his school, aged five, with a poppy, they let him pin it to the wall chart – but only after an argument.

Your great grandson will find your photograph in a drawer, and will ask who you are. He is the first person to visit your grave, over eighty years after your death. He will become a military historian, and battlefield guide, keeping your memory alive and the memory of all those who fell with you. You don’t know this, but you’d be proud of him.

 http://www.1418now.org.uk/letter/vanessa-gebbie/

And here is the detail, from the website - get writing!

Why?

In a year jammed-full of WW1 commemoration our project invites everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think.  For us, it is important to move on from cenotaphs, poppies, and the familiar imagery we associate with the war memorials.

If you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we’ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say?

If you were able to send a personal message to one of the men who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write?

Who?

Thousands of people have already written to the unknown soldier, including schoolchildren, pensioners, students, nurses and members of the serving forces.  Letters have arrived from all over the United Kingdom and beyond. Many well-known writers have contributed as well, authors as diverse and distinguished as Stephen Fry, Malorie Blackman, Andrew Motion, Lee Child, Louise Welsh, and Kamila Shamsie.

When?

The website will remain open until 11 p.m. on the night of 4 August 2014, the centenary of the moment when Prime Minister Asquith announced to the House of Commons that Britain had joined the First World War.  Between now and then every letter that the soldier receives will be published here and made available for everyone to read.

Eventually all of the letters will be archived in the British Library where they will remain permanently accessible online.

Please add your voice. What you write will help provide a snapshot of what people in this country are thinking and feeling in this centenary year. Your letter will help us create a new kind of war memorial – one made entirely of words, and by everyone.

Neil Bartlett and Kate Pullinger

A workshop with a difference! Short stories with Retreat West at Emley Farmhouse

Last week, I scooted off to Thursley, a journey of some hour and a half, to find the venue for the short story workshop I was running for Retreat West. It isn't easy to find. No signposts, a hidden village, yet more 'no signposts', two helpful ladies in a 4WD,  a phonecall, and bingo, I found it!  Even more hidden, in a beautful valley, surrounded by slopes, fields, ancient pathways - and even a barn on stone mushrooms to keep out the rats! What a place. 
        This is Emley Farmhouse, a National Trust property cleverly chosen by Amanda Saint as the venue for a writers' retreat weekend. Amanda runs Retreat West - and she and her clients will take over interesting properties, matching them to the workshop content, where possible. This place was teeming with possibilities for short fiction - and when I looked at images available of the upstairs accommodation, and found this - well - what story would you place in this setting? Isn't it gorgeous!

Go on - half an hour - just write anything - you never know... I'd love to know if it inspires anyone!

I arrived in time for a rather delicious lunch - Amanda cooks for her writers so they can focus all their time on their writing - which we had in one of the two dining rooms. We cleared the table and the food morphed into paper, pens, and words flowed. Four hours later - several cups of tea,  a plate of biccies - and many new pieces of writing had been filed away - new characters, storylines, settings, voices. 

Amanda kindly agreed to answer a few questions about her brilliant organisation:

Amanda Saint

Me: It was such a delight to spend a few hours working with your writers in Emley Farmhouse. It is old, rambling, has an indoor well and underfloor running water - such an inspirational place. How did you dream up this fabulous idea, a partnership with the National Trust?

Amanda: The partnership kind of happened by accident. My initial idea for running residential retreats was to tie in the venue with the author that I wanted to do the workshop. I'd just read The Lighthouse by Alison Moore, and loved it, and wanted her to be the first author I had running a workshop at the new retreats. I was told about a lighthouse that National Trust Holiday Cottages rented out close to where I lived so went and had a look at it - it was incredible and in a truly spectacular setting. So I booked it for October 2013 and from that developed a relationship with a lovely man who manages the National Trust holiday cottages for the South West, Chris Curtis, and we then worked together on a series of retreats for 2014 - one of which will be in the lighthouse again.

Me: How do you select a property to work in/stay in for your retreats with Retreat West? 

Amanda: Where possible I have tried to tie the venue in with what we'll be doing for the workshops. For example, later this year there is an Historical Fiction retreat in a former Victorian carding mill, with a workshop from historical novelist, Emma Darwin. Then there's a Women's Fiction retreat in a house built by a suffragette, with best-selling author in the genre, Rowan Coleman, delivering the workshop. It's not always possible to do this though, so my other criteria are that the property has a wow factor and is in a beautiful setting - like the farmhouse we've just been at for the Short Story retreat.

Me: Tell me a bit about how your retreats work.

Amanda: They last for three nights, usually over a weekend, and there is one half day workshop during that time, apart from at the Just Write retreat, where I'm sure you can guess what happens! The rest of the time is for writing, reading, relaxing, whatever people want to do really. We all get together for meals and I do all the cooking and clearing up so that the guests can focus on their writing. It's proved to make them very productive and lots of new work has been created at the ones I've run so far. There's lots of readings and discussions that go on too, which help people to solve problems they're having with a piece. 

Me: Should a writer have a project in mind when they come to you, or can they come with nothing - just needing space and time to reflect?

Amanda: Either or, really. I've noticed that what usually happens is they bring something with them that they're currently working on, novels, shorts, memoirs, and then new stuff gets created too - both in the workshops and outside of them. I bring along writing magazines and books, and my set of the wonderful Writing Maps created by Shaun Levin, which are filled with prompts and exercises to get the words flowing. All of the venues are in great walking country too and getting out walking usually means people come back with new ideas or existing story problems solved.

Me: Who else do you have coming to work with your writers, and where will they be working?

Amanda: As well as the ones detailed above, I'll be back at the lighthouse with a workshop from the Faber Academy's Head of Fiction, Richard Skinner. This will be focused on landscape and setting in fiction. There's also a Literary Fiction retreat at an old manor house that looks like a mini castle, where Alison Moore will be running the workshop. The Just Write retreat is at an old Exmoor farmhouse and although there is no workshop at this one, novelist and creative writing teacher, Sophie Duffy, is coming along and I know she'll be happy to share thoughts and ideas with other guests. 

Me: If they are interested (and how could they fail to be...) how do writers find out more?

Amanda: All of the retreats that are planned for this year can be found here: http://retreatwest.co.uk/retreats To keep up to date with new plans, writers can sign up for the newsletter on the site. There's also blog interviews with the authors where they talk about what will be happening in their workshops.

Me: Fantastic. Well, from what I saw, and having spoken to the writers who attended the Emley Farmhouse retreat and my workshop - this formula is very special, and very clever, and it works! Thanks for the invitation, Amanda, and thanks for giving us a little insight into Retreat West. May it go from strength to strength. 

  

In Pursuit of Narrative - 'That Dark Remembered Day', by Tom Vowler.

I may be a day late here - but I am delighted to welcome Tom Vowler to the blog again, this time to celebrate publication of his second novel, 'That Dark Remembered Day', which is a terrific and thought-provoking read, and published today by Headline. 

One family, one town, devastated by one tragic event.
Can you ever know what those closest to you are really capable of?
When Stephen gets a phone call to say his mother isn't well, he knows he must go to her straight away. But he dreads going back there. He has never been able to understand why his mother chose to stay in the town he grew up in, after everything that happened. One day's tragic events years before had left no one living there untouched.
Stephen's own dark memories are still poisoning his life, as well as his marriage. Perhaps now is the time to go back and confront the place and the people of his shattered childhood. But will he ever be able to understand the crime that punctured their lives so brutally? How can a community move on from such a terrible legacy?

Tom Vowler

 I was lucky enough to receive a pre-pub copy - and once started, it really is one of those bools that grabs you gently - and won't let you go until you finish it. A page-turner, beautifully written, with extraordinary descriptive passages acting as counterpoint to a compelling story. Don't take my word for it though - here's a review... 

" certainly the most engrossing and intriguing book I have read recently." http://novelheights.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/that-dark-remembered-day-tom-vowler/

I am an avid birdwatcher (who knew...? and peregrine falcons are among my favourite birds. I've just spent hours enjoying a webcam high on Norwich cathedral, watching young peregrines mustering the courage to leave the nest for the first time - a magical experience. And as a recurring motif throughout the novel happens to be peregrine falcons, lo! an extra layer of delight. Tom generously agreed to write a guest post talking about the influence of one particular book, and the genesis of his marvellous novel. 

Congrats Tom. Here's to 'That Dark Remembered Day'. May it fly high. And welcome to the blog. Over to you...

Nothing sustains us when we fall.

      J A Baker, The Peregrine

My ambition for That Dark Remembered Day, beyond goals concerning narrative, resonance of voice and compelling characterisation, was to achieve a greater sense of lyricism in the work, in particular to produce a part-meditation on aspects of fatherhood, war and landscape, specifically the natural world. In other words the book was to have a far less urgent plot to that of my first novel. This time tension was to be sustained, not from unfolding action alone, but via an initial declaration of a tragic event, the details of which are promised but held back until the book’s dénouement. Whilst not abandoning a conventional narrative arc entirely, my focus was increasingly drawn by language, by the book’s sense of enquiry, and how this more literary approach could affect the reader as the layers were peeled back. In short, I wanted to challenge the reader more. 

During the early part of composition I became increasingly influenced by J.A. Baker’s iconic non-fiction work, The Peregrine, with its remarkable use of language and paean to the natural world, in particular the eponymous bird of prey. What seduced me, aside from the extraordinary linguistic richness, was Baker’s often elegiac tone and how this alluded to the narrator’s own (often mournful) state of mind, despite his feelings being almost entirely absent in the text, other than a rich cataloguing of the observed day.  As Robert MacFarland says in the foreword, ‘The Peregrine is a book where nothing happens, again and again’, yet somehow Baker is able to maintain a sense of drama and intensity – pace, even – all the same. Indeed, the book achieves, if not a narrative arc, then a sort of melancholic fabled quality, as the reader follows Baker’s pursuit of two wintering peregrines one year (in fact the book is now known to be a condensed account of ten winters’ worth of entries posing as one). Here Baker reveals the emergence of his obsession:

She drifted idly; remote, inimical. She balanced in the wind, two thousand feet above, while the white cloud passed beyond her and went across the estuary to the south. Slowly her wings curved back. She slipped smoothly through the wind, as though she were moving forward on a wire. This mastery of the roaring wind, this majesty and noble power of flight, made me shout aloud and dance up and down with excitement. Now, I thought, I have seen the best of the peregrine; there will be no need to pursue it further; I shall never want to search for it again. I was wrong of course. Once can never have enough. 

By now I had my architecture for the novel: its structure, the characters, a sense of how it would all play out. But there was something missing, and it was reading Baker’s immersive, chimeric book that shone a light on my central character’s lack of emotional intensity. A returning war veteran, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, his horrific experiences have a terrible impact on the whole family, as each one tells their tale. But I was also keen to explore how this was experienced by the soldier himself. In giving him Baker’s obsession with the peregrine and affection for the natural world, I was able to employ a much closer narration, one that allows the reader an intimate insight into my character’s unhinging, which is mirrored in his pursuit of the falcon. 

And so a trio of fixations began to coalesce: Baker’s quest to observe the bird, my character’s mimicking of this, and my own fascination with The Peregrine, which I would tuck into with relish each evening by the fire. I wouldn’t go so far as to term my novel’s relationship with Baker’s book as intertextual, but it certainly owes it a huge debt. I had found my soldier’s voice.

Bio

Tom Vowler is a novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His debut collection, The Method, won the Scott Prize in 2010 and his novel What Lies Within received critical acclaim. He is co-editor of the literary journal Short Fiction and lectures in creative writing. That Dark Remembered Day is his second novel.

An honest interview

I'm delighted to have an interview up on Sharon Zinc's blog - what was interesting about this one, as with the last, is the complete freedom not to have to 'sell' anything, or myself!  The blessings of having taken time out. Author interviews are so often tempered by the need not to be absolutely truthful, aren't they?

Here are some quotes:

 Q: Is there a particular theme or message you’d like readers to take away from this book?

 A: No. Whatever they see.  Authorial Messages are like trying to float concrete in a feather boat.

and

Q: What would you say are the toughest things and the best things about being a writer?

A: Toughest: The writing world...
A: Best:    The writing world...

Why? The whole interview is here: 

http://sharonzink.com/thebookdiner/?p=263&preview=true

Now for something completely different...White Christmas - The Brat Pack Cover

I

I heard these guys singing at a recent event - and thought they were terrific. Suspect they won't be around long, as they are doing A Levels and will be off to the four winds, to university - so enjoy while you can.
        Many congrats, Bratpack, and good fortune whatever you end up doing!

The writing process...or something.

With thanks to Paul McVeigh for asking me to join in with this writers' stream of information. 

This is allegedly about my writing process. It is a sort of writers' chain blog, in which a writer reveals what they wish of their process, their work, and passes the baton to a few writers they admire. However, I came across this quote the other day, and thought it might be useful/relevant to preface my own post with these words, as, although they were written by a sculptor, they are arguably relevant to writers, too:

Reclining Figure, Moore.


“It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases the tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of concepts evolved in terms of logic and words… the artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organises memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.” Henry Moore, 1898-1986.

I am tempering my self-exposure these days! Be warned. Besides, look at the poor woman's HEAD! Looks like an axe has taken away the frontal right lobe. So...to the four questions. 

 What am I working on?

Not a lot, to be honest. There is a novel sitting half done, or maybe more than half. A bit of a breech birth in progress, taking me and the attendant novel-doctors by surprise. They are all rushing about fetching forceps and scalpels, gas and air, mallets, ghastly looking needles and rolls of barbed wire. Not to mention the two padlocked empty cages, keys at the ready, one labelled ‘dangerous animal do not approach,’ the other with padded walls stinking of bleach. Did I mention it is a dual narrative effort...?

At the sight of those rolls of barbed wire, the mother-to-be has sunk into a faint, a deep sleep that will last a hundred years (or at least one...). Plus the fact that she is too occupied with other things to be writing much for the next year. Ten years at the coal face now, a few OK books out there, family calling...other priorities...:)

However, she will be keeping one eye slightly open, hoping to carry on with a series of poems written in collaboration with the terrific Caroline Davies - a collection due to be published (with a fair wind and all the gods willing) by Cinnamon Press in 2016. 

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I'm going to get difficult now. What an extraordinary question. To answer it correctly, I would have to have read every single work of fiction purporting to be literary, every single short story in that genre that has ever been written, every poem in the history of poetry that has ever dealt with loss, with conflict and with memory. 

More importantly - the question assumes that ‘my work’ - ie: everything I write - is exactly the same. The same, that is, in relation to all other work of the same genre. Get real, questioner - whoever set these things - no doubt someone sitting bored as hell in their study trying to work out the latest way to waste their time... How is The Coward’s Tale the same as the poetry collection, which must be the same as the  two collections of shorts, one of which is about conflict and the other which isn’t? Which are of course all the same as Ed’s Wife - a daft collection of illustrated flashes about a marriage of sorts. And exactly the same as a text book written by 26 people. Oh yes. Samey.

Aaagh. They are so different, I can’t even begin to put them in the same box. 

Let’s truncate the question. 

Q: How does my work differ? 

A: My work differs. Full stop. So I’m told. It is not for me to analyse.  

Why do I write what I do?

 Another extraordinary question - who on earth thinks up these things? Here is the only answer possible. 

Ans: Because I do not write that which I do not.  Patently. If I did write that which I don’t write, I would be quite amazing. I am not that, therefore I do not. See?

How does my writing process work?

Ah, now. Had the question been: ‘What is your writing process?’, I’d have been delighted to give a long, long, intelligent response to this one (even though it can be rather stultifying to do so) in the hopes that it might be useful to one or two aspiring writers who could say “Ah! Yes! I do that too! I am OK in this thing I do because SHE does it. Therefore...” and they would extrapolate and come to conclusions. Then they could blame me when it all went not right, sending round teams of heavies to drag me before whatever  writing establishment courts there may be, demanding retribution, and fines, and tweaking my nose. 

But happily I won’t have any nose-tweakings, because that question has not been asked!

So, to address the matter in hand. How does my writing process work? The very question, ladies and gentlemen, presupposes the thing WORKS! What if it doesn't? Therefore, may I respond with a few questions, even though that is awfully bad form? 

1. What is the mind? How does that work, precisely?
2. What is imagination? How does that work, precisely?
3. What is the will? What motivation? 
4. What is tenacity? How does that work, precisely? 
5. What is stubbornness, bloody-mindedness, and how do they work, precisely? 
6. How does a cow learn to refine its vocalisations to approximate the mezzo-soprano of, say, Frederica Von Stade? More meaningfully, how did Mozart write this? How? (For those who do not like opera much, skip the intro to 46 seconds in...) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7y3_SZqNi4) 

Seriously - There are no real answers, are there? We read. Read more. Become enamoured of this thing. We want to do it too, this thing called writing. We find a way to do it, and we do it, whether that means joining classes or struggling on our own, taught by the writing of others. There are many many different ways - some people will tell you that there are short cuts. Some will tell you there are not. They are both wrong. Both right.

Some people will dig into their psyche and reveal all the guts. Not pretty. I’ve done that plenty of times, all Googlable, I’m sure. So I won’t do that here, forgive me. 

Why? Because at the moment,  I think there is only one way of doing this thing. Yours. YOUR way. Your process. Including giving up for a whole year! Embrace your own process, and enjoy.

And now... the moment you have all been waiting for. Back to normality, to decent and lovely writer-types, who will be far more serious and generous than I. 

Salena GoddenSalena Godden has been described as ‘The doyenne of the spoken word scene’ (Ian McMillan, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb);  ‘The Mae West madam of the salon’ (The Sunday Times) and as ‘everything the Daily Mail is terrified of’ (Kerrang! Magazine). Her most recent book of poems 'Under the Pier' was published by Nasty Little Press in 2011. Her eagerly awaited literary memoir 'Springfield Road' was successfully crowd funded and will be published with Unbound Books in September 2014. Salena Godden tops the bill at literary events and festivals internationally. She can be heard on the BBC as a guest on Woman’s Hour, Click, From Fact To Fiction, The Verb and was a resident poet on R4's Saturday Live. She currently works alongside award-winning radio producer Rebecca Maxted. 'Try A Little Tenderness – The Lost Legacy of Little Miss Cornshucks' was aired  throughout May 2014. This follows the success of their last collaboration 'Stir it Up! - 50 Years of Writing Jamaica' also for BBC R4. 'Fishing In The Aftermath / Poems 1994-2014' marks twenty years of poetry and performance and will be published with Burning Eye Books in July 2014.

Julia Bohanna (although she might put her responses elsewhere, not sure...)
In 2013, Julia won the Bradt/Independent on Sunday Travel Writing Competition, was runner-up in The Bath Short Story Award and winner in The Yellow Room Short Story Competition. Her short story collection Ink Eyes was also shortlisted for Salt Publishing’s Scott Prize in 2012. Julia is currently Editor of Wolf Print (UK Wolf Conservation Trust’s magazine) and Columnist on The Inflectionist.
Publication credits include Mslexia, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, BBC Wildlife Magazine and The Simple Things. She has also contributed stories to several short story anthologies, including 100 Stories for Queensland and From Hell to Eternity. 

Cover for O Conto do Covarde - from Bertrand Brasil

I found this on Twitter - the Brazilian edition of The Coward's Tale, to be published later this year by Bertrand Brasil.

Stepping off the treadmill...

Golly, a whole month seems to have gone by. A momentous month in a lot of small ways.

Those who have been following my blog and the previous one, for a while will know that I discovered four sisters a few years ago - a joyous and poignant thing. And on Good Friday, a few little weeks ago now, one of them died. I’m still coming to terms with that - the loss of a sibling - a younger sibling - is a salutary thing, and can not help but make you reappraise your own life and what you are doing with it.

This year, as I said in the previous post, my esteemed other half has a specific job to do, which can be absolutely wonderful, but is also onerous for him. I don’t think it is good enough to disappear for weeks on end, as I’m used to doing, or indeed for my focus to be almost solely on my work, which it has been for a decade. So writing is, I’ve decided, going to take a back seat for the next year. 

I find it surprisingly easy to write that! Maybe it’s a good thing to happen, too. Novel no 2, is half there - and half not. The events of the last month or so led me to wonder why I’m chasing my tail worrying about it all, trying too hard to get this one right, and getting it wrong as a r esult. Mainly, I was responding to the expectation that once you’ve had one novel published, you have to do another. Quick!  Or critics nod sagely and say, “There you go, told you so.” Then you do another, because that’s what the  industry wants. But do I want to do that over and over? I’m really not sure.  Whatever, I certainly do not want to fall into the ‘bad second novel’ trap, just to get one out there. Put simply, I am stepping off the industry hamster wheel for a bit, to see what it feels like, and goodness it feels good a few days in!

I’m not forsaking the wider writing life altogether. Still running some very interesting workshops over the next few months, and look forward to putting my creative energies into those. The Word Factory, The Short Story Conference in Vienna among others - I’m looking forward to those with real pleasure - in the knowledge that I have the time and the peace to have fun planning those.  

Poetry, and the collaboration with Caroline Davies, a collection inspired by memorials and rolls of honour from WW1, is well under way. That causes no worry, just pleasure, as little pieces surface, are worked on, and add to the kaleidoscope. It can chug along as it needs to. And I can’t wait for a whole week in Ireland doing some learning - working with Bernard O’Donoghue later in the year. 

The realisation that I can step off the treadmill is wonderful. My lovely characters will breathe deeply, a sigh of relief, and can have a well-earned sleep for a stretch, and I can come back to them when it is right to do so.  They, and their maker, have nowt to prove to anyone - and if peeps think I do, well that’s their issue, not mine!

My other blog - The Sheriff's Wife

...before the Declaration

I have another blog - just for this year. It started on March 24th, and will finish on or near the same date next year. It is called The Sheriff's Wife, for fairly obvious reasons. Glad rags are often called for - see above - however, the Other Half has an official uniform, black velvet, silver buttons and a sword. Am suitably proud, keeping out of the way of the sword. Probably, not a lot of writing will get done in the next twelve months.

Thus far, posts cover the Declaration ceremony, a visit to Gatwick to learn about human trafficking, an interview with the esteemed Other Half, and a brilliant poem by Sarah Salway, commissioned by the High Sheriff of Kent.

Look! http://thesheriffswife.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/greening-garden-kent-poem-by-sarah.html

Sussex Poets

Delighted to have written this one a few years ago. Even more delighted that it won the Sussex Poets Competition, judged by John McCullough

Graffiti 

I will write my name with a lump of steam coal

on the side of a lorry parked up at a roadside caff.

Or with raw steel, pig iron, scraped on a fence

newly painted. Or fence-paint itself, stolen,

smeared on a sheet drying on a line,

flapping its pleas to the breeze.

Or in black earth churned to mud 

with water from the outside tap 

that rattles against the bricks. 

Or coded in the click of stilettos

tapping the night away on paving slabs,

like the stick of the blind man who catches

the voice of the marshalling yards carried on the wind,

and hears the clinking of a chain ferry.

Collage made by the Rottingdean Writers Group, who organised the competition

'The Farmyard' by Philip Bentall took second place, and third place was awarded to  'Everest' by Brian Fogarty. 

The winning poems can be read here, on the Brighton and Hove Arts Council website -  http://www.bh-arts.org.uk/2013-sussex-poets-competition

.

Dan Powell talks about writing to music - and his fab collection of short fictions, 'Looking Out Of Broken Windows'

A couple of weeks back, I met Dan Powell when we were both on a panel discussing short stories. I've heard so much about this guy's writing - and I couldn't resist buying his new collection, 'Looking Out Of Broken Windows' - just out from Salt. It really is great - but I won't do a blather here, not yet - because Dan's here himself, talking about something I could never do in a million years - writing to music. Welcome Dan!

Dan here - 

Many writers can’t write to music. Not so surprising. The act of writing requires concentration and music can be a distraction. Jonathon Franzen, unsurprisingly, takes his limiting of distraction seriously and writes using ‘noise-cancelling headphones that pipe "pink noise" – white noise at lower frequency’. You might expect musician and novelist Willy Vlautin would use music in his process, what with him being the frontman and songwriter of The Richmond Fontaine, whose ‘alt-country opera’ The High Country was a narrative and musical highlight of 2011, and the fact that he co-wrote an instrumental soundtrack to his second novel Northline. In fact, listening to music while writing causes Vlautin to daydream. In a recent interview he described once trying to write to a loop of instrumental music: ‘It was probably the most fun I ever had writing, but the poor novel was so damaged and beat up and off kilter that I pulled the plug on it after the first edit.’

For myself, I cannot imagine writing without music. My entire process is influenced and helped along by a various playlists set up on my laptop. The stories in Looking Out of Broken Windows were all written while listening to various instrumental artists and soundtracks. That’s the rule for me. The music mustn’t have words if I am to write to it. Other peoples words get in the way when I am in the act of writing. When writing in public I struggle to block out conversation which is why, if you ever see me writing in The Bookstop Cafe in Lincoln, I’ll have earbuds plugging my ears, pumping ambient and drone into my brain to drown out the chatting of the other customers. No offence intended.

The stories in Looking Out of Broken Windows, for me, were as much influenced by the music I was listening to as I wrote them as they were by the short stories I have read and loved and learnt something from. Anyone reading the acknowledgements of the collection will see that I thank Andy Othling of Lowercase Noises by name. Andy is a very talented guitarist who, in his own words, is ‘interested in playing as slow as possible.’ He is a generous guy, who gives freely of his expertise on his various websites and blogs, helping other musicians with the technical aspects of music production and promotion on the web. He very kindly allowed me to use his music on my book trailers and his particular brand of emotive, ambient guitar instrumentals is perfect for reading and writing to. Without the music of Lowercase Noises, many stories in my collection would not have appeared on the page in quite the same way. Other artists and bands that fill up my specially created AAA Writing Music genre tab in iTunes are, Oathless, Stars of The Lid (great for writing darker stuff to), William Basinski, Olafur Arnalds, Industries of the Blind, Hildur Gudnadottir, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Explosions in the Sky, and the daddy of them all, Brian Eno. They are all worth checking out if, like me, you need something to fill your ears and free your brain as you write.

Putting together the story collection itself was not unlike track listing an album or crafting a mix-tape back in the good old days before mp3s and playlists. I had to think about how each story fitted within the overall feel of the collection and how it influenced its neighbours. What is great about a short story collection is that the reader can dip in an out, picking on the stories whose titles spark an interest or whose first lines grab at the attention most. Kind of like how most of us experience music now, picking and mixing from our libraries and the various online stores or streaming services. To that end, I’ve put together the following Spotify playlist. It features key tracks from albums I listened to while writing the stories that make up Looking Out of Broken Windows. Think of it as an unofficial soundtrack to the collection. If you like what you hear, you might want to grab a copy and check out the stories these tracks helped onto the page. The list is here: http://danpowellfiction.co/2014/03/17/looking-out-of-broken-windows-soundtrack/

Music also influences my writing in another key way. Many ideas for stories come to me from song lyrics. Not so surprising this as prose writers have been pilfering from poetry for centuries. While I do read poetry and from time to time something leaps out that I have to ‘steal’ (in the T. S. Eliot sense), I listen to way more music as I race about taking my kids to school and getting myself to work. Quite often a lyric will stick in my head and evoke some feeling or idea that niggles at me until I am forced to write it down. Once it gets me that badly, hard enough to go from hearing the word to noting it dow,  chances are it will make it into a story. The latest song to do this to me is New Ceremony by Dry the River. I won't say which lyric it was that hit me as the story is currently on submission and the words ended up forming part of the title but the idea they suggested sat in my notebook for a year or more before I wrote something. Weirdly, though I didn’t listen to the song while I wrote the story and redrafted it, listening to the track now as I write this I'm amazed at how the tone of the track is somehow mirrored in the feel of my story. I find that a lot with the influence of music on my writing process, this stuff goes deep. The influence is not always conscious but it is always there. 

And here is Dan himself, reading a story for you: 

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Dan Powell is a prize winning author whose short fiction has appeared in the pages of Carve, Paraxis, Fleeting and The Best British Short Stories 2012. His debut collection of short fiction, Looking Out Of Broken Windows, was shortlisted for the Scott Prize in 2013 and is published by Salt. He procrastinates at danpowellfiction.com and on Twitter as @danpowfiction.

Dan is giving away a signed copy of Looking Out of Broken Windows to one reader of the blog tour; he will post to anywhere in the world. To enter the draw just leave a comment on this post or any of the other LOoBW blog tour posts appearing across the internet during March 2014 or Like the Looking Out of Broken Windows Facebook page for a chance to win.. The names of all commenters will be put in the hat for the draw which will take place on April 6th.

Notes on a book. Posthumous Stories by David Rose (Salt)

Posthumous Stories is a rich experience. A visual book certainly - filled with (literal) word-paintings. A book of sounds, music, and not. A book of detail, architectural, painterly, botanical, musical - it’s a treasure box in which strange obsessive narrators look up as you pass from their usually left-brained and controlling occupations, fix you with their disturbing gazes, then look away. 

     I read and re read with a sense of intrusion such as one gets when passing a door left ajar, hearing a snip of talk not intended. Or better - as when you can’t avoid overhearing a conversation held in lowered tones, on a train. Captive, intrigued, removed. A delicious intrusion - sense of glimpsing something special, by accident, wry smile playing. Disturbing, certainly. Deliciously. And surreal, I came across many descriptions of how the body responds to machine - car, van, bike...how they merge.

 I made notes on some of the stories as I went - so forgive the lack of carefully crafted review. Sometimes, notes is all that's needed. 

    

A Nice Bucket - 

Sensuality under the surface - in the music, the hints... in the lyrical voice of the apprentice asphalter, in the son’s descriptions of his late father’s reconstructed studio. a darkness, compelling and dual-natured. Goodbad, like so many scenarios in this book. Orwellesque. Magnetic. The asphalters might be doing any old repairing job - but no. Legitimate work, under supervision (even if the supervision is sporadic), and the job - laying speed humps. Slowing things down. A reminder that the best stories, and these really are some of the best, are only appreciated of you slow down, and let them work on you.
...had me thinking, isn’t this why I (we?) read? To enjoy, yes, but to empathise. Consider. Widen. Goodbad. Vicarious experience. To remind myself that beneath everything, everyone, runs such rivers? Not to forget that. Never to take at face value. Respect the possibilities. We are living in glorious metaphor. Perhaps. 

Private View 

The son of an artist is persuaded to write the commentary to a retrospective on his father’s work. Through memories, and almost despite himself, (this reluctance to engage with memory seems to surface now and again) he is almost compelled to do so, even though it takes him on a journey of deepening alienation.I’m struck by this description: “...sliced by black vertical straight lines, regularly spaced, but in each successive work, becoming closer and closer together. The experts talk of a homage to Mondrian or the creation of abstract perspective. I think they look like bars.”Oh OK  - now I’m getting the cover of Rose’s brilliant novel, Vault, also from Salt, and a novel I loved a while back. 

.. clever, aren't I?

Fracturing, isolation, miscommunication. Here, we are island folk. And some are more island than others. 

Flora

the big questions - including what exactly, is art? The issue encapsulated by the botanist narrator musing on having to destroy a fungus,  ‘I had to admit to a sneaking regard for the fungal growth – not only its persistence, but its own strange beauty, the subtlety of its opalescent colours, the intricacy of its structure. Are we right, I wondered, to divide Nature as we do?’

The Fall

oh and jokes... many over my head, I’m sure, which is evident -  but a giggle escaped me,  in a crowded train carriage appropriately enough, when I read this:  

“One of the Servants remarked that he thought Auden’s most inspired creation was the Fat Controller “   also this 

"I even used to call her Donna, because she was always è mobile.” 

Behind ‘The Fall’ there are echoes of not only Albert Camus, but also George Orwell at several points - a religious guerrilla group made up of Servants initially using art installations to make their point. Achieving the ‘exosoma’ ... 

but I’m afraid lost patience with The Fall. Form overtook story early on, and lost this reader with it.and is it my imagination, but does the futuristic cult-theme arrive again in Clean, with its Vision and Mission meetings, mention of service, and the Intendant? “freedom of spirit depends on freedom of space, freedom of land –”
Something about isolation.  ‘Above me there’s a mile of blue and beyond that an eternity of black, a furnace of ice.”

Echoes of Camus again in Viyborg - a novel - a dead pan outlining of a lyrically written novel - a wry  take on various scenes.

Mind you, what with these installations in fiction and the pieces desccribed throughout, I think I’d like to see Rose's visual art - if he does. Who knows.

The Fifth Beatle

The fab four becomes five, with the reminiscences of the unplanned extra in the iconic abbey road shot - I loved this one. And I didn’t understand one reviewer’s snip about Rose not writing women well. Yes, he does, just not many. Suspect that's what the reviewer meant, there aren’t many female main characters - and speaking as a writer who vastly prefers writing males than females - what’s wrong with that? 

Clean -

'the cause' raises its head again, Regional Intendant looms, and a ‘devotional’ meeting. 
Quotes: Life’s a bitch, but it’s all to plan.’ 

and 

“... below that, to the silken silt where there are no reflections, to the reality of the fish.” 

Rectilinear

I feel I ought to be listening to Mahler while reading this - the trouble is, my ears and eyes don’t multi-task. Bach - need to look up Chaconne. What a wealth of architectural detail here... and what a brilliant house - turning things on their heads - kitchen on the top floor, the south wall blank. 

“Holes for doors and windows are the destruction of form’ - Le Corbusier. I lived for a year within a mile or two of Firminy Vert -the  Le Corbusier development, near St Etienne. 

Moller (Muller) House, Prague

Church, Firminy Vert - by Le Corbusier

By the way, you can hear David Rose reading Rectilinear, here: https://soundcloud.com/user529052175/rectilinear?utm_source=soundcloud&utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=facebook

In Evening Soft Light

The unexplained shower of stones - the wife, novels, reading one page then becoming tired... rather Alice-in-Wonderlandish. Or Through-the-Looking-Glass-ish. One is right. 

Shuffle

A world where there are season tickets for brothels, meters tick in the bedrooms. A world where you douse your e-reader in appropriate perfume - segue into ‘correlating my relationships with my library by sniffing the books for perfume.’ Control, control. And the ghastly but compelling image of a man working out how many books he might read before he dies - a sort of literary actuarial computation.

Lector

Who would have the job of reading aloud the minutes of meetings of those in government...at whatever level? Reading to workers at a factory lunch break seems better, until you see the political agenda behind the choice of books. ‘The evening’s theme is the means and meaning of a transparent society....It involves us all. Open government requires openness of its citizenry. We all know the problems we face. Ignorance, poverty, bad manners.’... and then the lights go out...

Zimmerman

Description of a story - from the outside, as it is told/narrated. The opening goes like this:“The story begins with a man – we assume him to be Zimmerman – loading an accordion onto a cart, the cart being attached to a bicycle. He loads it carefully, with elastic straps through the handles and hooked to the cart. We gather later it is the last accordion in the country...”and Zimmerman has one of the most perfect endings of any story, anywhere. (Vast exaggeration, but try it. I’m right, aren’t I?)

Home

Terrific use of humour to relax the reader before the ambush. OK, I’ll enjoy, but am still ready for the ambush. “In home, my wife wear burka. They say to me, you Muslim? I say no, she most ugly woman.” 

“...find book, Kama Sutra. But is all dots. How you say it? Braille. I say in shop, is no good to me, is no pictures.” 

Ambush is good, too. :)

The Castle

The hand-made coffin maker, whose masterpieces are meant to echo the life of the deceased...and be buried before anyone’s had a proper chance to enjoy. 

 (Tis always disconcerting to find my name in a story, especially a Vanessa who plies her trade beneath the motto: ‘In constraint lies freedom...’ Yeah right. Even if this is an Oulipian tale, I have to fight against ‘but I never did that...’ which I guess Janes and Sues don’t get bothered by...) 

Loved this description of Eton, it seems rather appropriate:“...however much they try to shrug it off, self-assurance fits them like their handmade shirts. For all their little acts of bohemian defiance, their hands twitch in readiness for the reins...” 

However - and it’s a big however...I do wish there was no explanation of both this story and The Fall, earlier in the book. As Perec said, "The problem, when you see the constraint, is that you no longer see anything else.” Is it a mistake to actively draw the reader’s attention to the game? It was for this one. I see the contraption, the scaffolding, and it masks too much. 

M John Harrison, writing in The Guardian, found both The Castle and The Fall ‘tiring’. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/19/posthumous-stories-david-rose-review

...making it to the end, only to find that this particular end came along in an earlier story... and feeling a bit miffed.  

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But Harrison responds to the vast majority  of the pieces here, as I did, with pleasure, recognition, admiration.  “The best of Rose is fragile,” he says. “...retrospective, centred on the characters' recognition that something in life, be it a general condition or an absolutely specific moment, has evaded them.” 

Well, yes. 

 A kaleidoscope. That’s what this book is. And just as with a kaleidoscope, you will meet similar motifs in different stories - music, image, even strange recurring Orwellesque shadowy conductors of life - slightly autistic-seeming, detached, displaced characters, shifting, and tumbling. 
      If there is ever a book you can go back to, reread, assured that you will find something new, or something familiar seen from a new angle you missed last time round - this is it. Who knows. I might even set aside a couple of weekends, go somewhere very quiet, and read the Oulipan bits until they make sense, or I hit the bottle.

Here is a very interesting Q and A with the author, David Rose: http://www.neg-press.com/interview-david-rose/  He says at the end that he is no longer writing. If that is so, it's a huge loss to anyone who loves reading. 

His work is great. Posthumous Stories is one of the best reads in a long time - my non-understanding of a few pieces is my issue, not the book's!  Go read it. We could have such an interesting natter...